My Haunted Childhood

Witness: T.C.
Location: Norfolk England, UK
Date of Encounter: Ongoing

The house we lived in was in Long Stratton, Norfolk. My bedroom was extremely cold and depressing, even though I was very young I knew there was something wrong. I could hear things moving in my room and on several occasions remember struggling with something that was trying to push my eyes in. My parents put it down to my imagination and refused to accept that the house was haunted. Until one day my mum said she and my dad laid in bed listening to me bouncing a ball off the wall for ages and heard the light switch snapping on and off continually. The noises were not made by me, I had no ball, and I was too scared to even get out of bed. My mum said she tried to come into my room but the door was locked. I never locked my door. I was terribly upset by these events, which happened many times. My dad agreed to spend a night in my room to see for himself what the fuss was about but nothing happened.

There were low voices or whispers of people talking among themselves in my room. Sometimes I felt a poke or a prod. This went on for many years and although I was frightened beyond words, I do not believe that this was a harmful presence. Although my parents did not believe in anything paranormal going on, my mum experienced some things. She was alone in the house and standing at the kitchen sink washing the dishes when something barged right into her and nearly knocked her off her feet. On another occasion when she was alone, she heard someone in my brother's bedroom clearing his throat and coughing, she said it sounded just like an old man, but as soon as she opened the door it stopped and there was nobody inside the room.

Often we would hear someone walking around upstairs when all five of us were downstairs together in the same room. My dad would be the first to point out the noise even though he said it was "all in our imagination." My mum and I once sat and watched the door handle turn and rattle for no apparent reason. Once I was redecorating the house and I had some ceiling tiles to fix on to the ceiling. Everything was going well until I got to the light fitting in the middle, I could not get the piece of tile to fit no matter how I tried. My brothers and even my mum had a go at fixing it in place, but none of us could. In the end we just gave up and left it. We had our lunch and on returning my mum had a huge smile on her face. She looked at me and said something like, "Oh you managed to fix it after all," which I had not, but there it was, all neatly trimmed to size and perfectly positioned in place.

My brother was alone in his bedroom polishing his shoes when somebody sat down beside him and started talking to him, he was frozen with fear. I used to come home from school at lunchtime as I lived opposite the school. And on one occasion I came home to find my parents running around frantically trying to put out a fire in the outhouse, only there was no fire. There was thick, choking smoke billowing from the scullery entrance but no fire. My dad ran next door to see if they had a fire, but there was none. After a short while the smoke cleared and we looked to see what had caused the fire, but there was absolutely no trace of a fire. Once, a lid unscrewed itself from a jar of marmalade and skitted across the kitchen. Then there was the chocolate. My mum was at home alone cleaning and just doing the housework as usual, when she came upon squares of chocolate placed in strange locations throughout the house. This went on for several days, and would you believe, she actually ate them as she came across them? Well, what would you have done!?