Licensed to CHILL
I loved babysitting my grandson at my daughter’s pub – but who was watching me?
Sensing someone behind me, I blinked my eyes open in the half-light. ‘That you, Leanne?’ I asked, turning to look.
It was Spring 2017 and I was spending the night on the sofa in the flat above the pub my daughter ran with her fiancé, George: The Harp in Bridgnorth, Shropshire. I’d been looking after their baby, Benjamin, while they worked behind the bar downstairs.
Now I’d woken to find the room freezing, and I had a strong sense that I wasn’t alone.
To my surprise, there was no one there, but a moment later, the door shifted ajar and I heard footsteps moving away down the hall.
In the morning I asked Leanne if she’d ever noticed anything in the living room, admitting I’d felt an odd sort of heaviness in the atmosphere since the first time I’d visited. ‘No,’ Leanne replied. ‘Although, when Benjamin was a couple of weeks old, I did have a weird dream, which was so real I woke in a panic.’
Apparently, in the dream, Leanne had seen a man in a tall black hat bending over Benjamin’s cot, frightening the life out of her.
I couldn’t see any similarity to my experience, but afterwards, I’d often sense the same female presence in the living room when I babysat or hear the same unexplained footsteps.
I learnt to ignore it. Until one day when I felt the woman again and at the same moment Benjamin, then 10 months, pointed behind the sofa as if he could see something – or someone.
‘What can you see? Tell Nanny,’ I said, voice trembling.
But Benjamin just shook his head and buried his face in my chest.
‘I’m looking after my grandson, please leave him alone,’ I said out loud, as firmly as I could.
A moment later Benjamin drew his head back, and his eyes seemed to follow something across the room and out the door... before I heard footsteps in the hall again.
Oddly, I never sensed the woman after that. But by now things were happening downstairs too.
One night, George and the pub’s cleaner watched a customer in a waistcoat and flat cap walk into the pub after hours.
‘We’re closed,’ George said apologetically, only for the man to vanish!
A few times other staff complained of glasses moving and even smashing by themselves.
Benjamin was about 15 months old when Leanne arranged a psychic night in the pub and, without any prompting, the psychic confirmed there was a man in a flat cap who hung out in the bar, along with another presence who wasn’t happy with how the place looked now – that was who’d been knocking the glasses over!
Most eerily of all, the psychic also reckoned she’d seen a blonde woman in the flat upstairs.
‘She looks after the hotel – and approves of you,’ she told me.
Was this the woman I’d felt?
It was a relief when Leanne and George decided to give up the pub. Nowadays I’m still happy to babysit Benjamin, but it’s nice to know there’s no one watching me do it!