PLAGUE PIT HORROR Evil entity fed off my fear
We ignored the man’s warning. Now we were paying for it...
The bedrooms were painted in weird shades of blue and purple and the dreary brown colour in the lounge was awful. There was even a creepy coffinshaped storage unit in the room. But the dodgy decor didn’t seem to put off my mum, Angie.
‘I really like it!’ she grinned, as I pulled a face in disgust.
But what did a 10-year-old like me know?
Mum agreed to take the threebed council terrace set in the middle of an estate in Norfolk, saying it would be perfect for me and my little sisters Gemma, then eight, and three-year-old Natasha.
Sitting on the sofa, she began sorting out the paperwork with the current tenant so they could exchange houses.
‘The house is haunted, you know,’ he blurted, suddenly.
He described how one night he’d come downstairs to find the living room glowing with an eerie green light.
‘He’s been watching too many horror films,’ I thought, glancing at spooky videos stacked on the shelves.
‘What a strange man,’ Mum giggled, as we got in the car.
‘As if the house is haunted. And the horrible unit that looks like a coffin has got to go. There’s no way I can live with that!’
So Mum’s taste in décor wasn’t so bad, after all!
A couple of weeks after we’d moved in, we started finding our toys scattered all over the floor. One of the china clowns Gemma collected turned up behind a bed in her and Natasha’s room with its head and arm smashed.
Other weird stuff started happening. Although the house had double glazing and central heating, it was always freezing cold. And Mum’s car keys and purse would go missing.
‘I wish you girls would stop hiding my things,’ she’d tell me and Gemma.
‘It’s not us,’ we’d chorus. Things got even more freaky when I woke with a jolt one night to find my bed vibrating, as if someone was shaking it. Then I noticed dark, shadowy shapes floating across the room. My heart racing with terror, I dived under the blankets, praying for it to stop.
Soon it was happening every night. I’d even hear voices whispering next to my bed and footsteps in my room.
‘Don’t worry, it’s just your imagination,’ Mum soothed when I told her about the nocturnal spooky happenings.
But I knew it was more than that. The man had been right. There was something in the house – and it wasn’t natural.
Then one evening Gemma, Natasha and I were lying on my bed watching TV while Mum chatted to her friend Tina in the living room. Suddenly, they charged through my door.
‘Is Kimmy in here with you?’ Tina asked, looking worried. ‘We can hear her whining.’
Kimmy was Tina’s terrier. ‘No,’ I replied, puzzled.
Mum and Tina rushed to Tina’s flat in a nearby block. When I heard them come back, I went down to the living room.
‘We found Kimmy shut in a cupboard shaking and whimpering,’ Mum told me. ‘There’s no way she could have got in there on her own.’
Whatever was in our house had gone into Tina’s, too. But it seemed to be focusing its unwelcome attention on us…
Not long afterwards, Gemma, Natasha and I were watching a video in their bedroom while Mum, Tina and Mum’s other friend Mike had drinks in the living room.
A chill ran down my spine as the video started pausing,
I noticed dark, shadowy shapes
rewinding and fast forwarding all by itself. Then the window started banging and rattling.
Gemma and Natasha were sobbing with fear. I tried to comfort them, even though I was petrified too. Finally, the video started playing normally.
The following morning, Mum and Tina were chatting in the kitchen. When I told them what had happened, they glanced uneasily at each other.
‘Mike went to check on you girls last night,’ Mum told me gently. ‘But he came back saying something was stopping him coming up the stairs. He was as white as a sheet.’
I’d known for ages something wasn’t right about the house, and now it seemed Mum thought so too.
‘The previous tenant was right. The house is definitely haunted,’ she admitted.
Things got worse. I’d be washing up when I felt a presence creep up behind me and growl in my ear. Or in bed I’d feel cold, ghostly hands touching my arms and legs.
‘I’m sure this house is built on a grave,’ Mum was always shuddering.
Then one day we were in the living room with Tina when she pointed to the gold carriage clock on top of the TV.
‘Angie, the clock just stopped,’ she said.
Instantaneously, I felt icy fingers yank the top of my left arm so hard I stumbled, nearly toppling over.
‘Something just grabbed me!’ I screamed, jumping on Mum.
Mum pulled up my sleeve and saw a massive red handprint stretched right around my arm.
‘It’s burning,’ I sobbed. ‘That’s it,’ Mum fumed.
‘I’m getting in touch with the church to see if someone can help us.’
A few days later a priest came round. He went into every room in the house.
‘I can feel a really bad presence in the house,’ he told Mum gravely. ‘It’s targeting the children to get to you. Then it’s feeding from your fear.’
The priest walked round the house saying prayers, making the sign of the cross and sprinkling holy water. But although things calmed down for a week or two, it wasn’t long before the creepy activity started up again.
I left my TV on at night to try to drown out the spectral voices in my bedroom. Soon I was so exhausted, I’d fall asleep in class. I became withdrawn and depressed, scared of my own shadow.
‘I was woken up last night by the makeup and perfume on my dressing table rattling,’ Mum told me one morning, looking shocked. ‘Natasha was in bed with me and I felt her being lifted up, so I clutched her to my chest and screamed at the ghost to leave us alone.’
The entity trying to grab Natasha was taking things to a whole new level of nastiness.
‘Mum, we’ve got to get out of here,’ I said.
‘We’ll find somewhere else to live,’ Mum promised.
Thankfully we moved house soon afterwards.
Aged 16, I moved into a place of my own. But my experiences left me desperate to find out more about the supernatural. So a few years later, when Mum’s friend, Jill, invited me to a paranormal investigation at a haunted hotel, I went.
In 2019,
I started my own amateur paranormal investigation group Pushing Boundaries Paranormal UK.
Just recently, I researched the area where our haunted house stood and was shocked to discover people who died of the Black Death in the 1600s were buried in mass graves there. Mum had been right, the house was built on a grave.
There’s no way what was lurking in that house was once human though. I think the nasty entity was created out of the bad energy of the burial site and the previous owners probably did a Ouija board there, letting it in. Then, hungry for fear and depression, it tormented us and grew stronger from our terror.
We’re lucky we escaped when we did. Otherwise, who knows what it would have done to us.
Gemma and Natasha were too young to remember much about what happened in the house. But I’ll never forget it. The two years we lived there were two years of hell.
I became scared of my own shadow