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ELEVEN NEW GHOST STORIES
David Paul Nixon
Published by DPN Books at Smashwords
Copyright David Paul Nixon 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication man be reproduced for any purpose – excluding brief excerpts for review purposes – without the prior written permission of the author.
Cover design by Marie Bussiere
For my father
With thanks to the Velkys and Mrs Goddard
for their time, encouragement and patience;
to Mr Donaghy for his web skills;
and to Ms Bussiere for the cover.
For exclusive content and audio stories, visit
www.newghoststories.com
Contents
INTRODUCTION
A RHYTHM OF SIX
KNOCK DOWN GINGER
THE BLACK CLOCK
WHEN IT RAINS…
THE STORM WALKER
CAT LADY
IN A BOX
THE CALL OF THE SEA
ON THE SHOULDER
BENJAMIN WENT TO THE WELL
WRONG NUMBER
INTRODUCTION
Do I believe in ghosts?
A few years ago that wouldn’t have been a difficult question: A resounding “no” would have sprung from my lips with barely a moment’s thought. I love a good ghost story; I even watch some of those ropey documentaries on the less-respectable TV channels. But a believer – I most certainly was not.
Now things are more complicated…
My strange journey started almost three years ago. I was on the London South Bank, having just seen a Hitchcock classic at the cinema, and was killing time before returning to see a screening of The Innocents – the classic cinematic ghost story. By luck and coincidence as I walked out in front of Charing Cross station I crossed paths with an old school friend, someone I had not seen in years.
We took the chance to catch up and settled down in a nearby pub. I explained that I had a few hours before the film started and I ended up telling him the plot, as he had not seen it, though he was apparently a fan of horror.
At some point, as we started to trade our favourite scary tales, he said to me that he knew someone who had experienced the real thing. A relative who had actually seen a real ghost and had a real story to tell. Naturally, I was sceptical; I knew people who had seen ghosts, but these were always stories that had taken place during their childhood and lacked credibility, transformed as they were into fascinating anecdotes, ripened for ear-catching conversation. Yet he was insistent, and if I wanted I could hear the story straight from the horse’s mouth.
After a few pints, this became something of a gauntlet thrown down and I felt obliged to pick it up. A few weeks later I found myself in an unfamiliar part of suburban London going to visit a man who, as it turned out, was firstly, not expecting to see us, and secondly, didn’t want to tell us the story.
If this seems like a humorous situation, I can state quite categorically that it wasn’t. He really didn’t want to tell it. He was afraid we might laugh, that we might scoff. This was something quite serious to him; something he didn’t like to talk about. Unfortunately, this made it all the more fascinating to hear. I’d only really accepted the invitation out of kindness, now I really couldn’t wait to hear what the man had to say.
We managed to persuade him after a while; swore that we weren’t about to laugh at him or mock him, that we really just wanted to hear what he had to say. He didn’t want just to tell us the story though; he wanted to prove it! Prove that he wasn’t making it up. There was this contradiction within him; a wanting to be believed but also a fear of being laughed at.
So we listened intently. What struck me about his story, and what caused me to really embark on the journey that led to me starting this book, is just how affected he seemed to be by what he had experienced. It seems like an obvious thing to point out doesn’t it? But when you hear a ghost story, you always take it as a roller-coaster ride. Some frights and some chills, a bit of fun and a bit of a scare. You don’t really take it seriously.
Yet, when I heard this story, I was taken aback by how serious it really was. It wasn’t a bit of fluff told in low-light with a sense of relish. This was a defining moment in this man’s life, and not a good one; a painful one.
I found the urge to tell his story almost irresistible. He was uncomfortable with the idea at first, but slowly I was able to talk him around. This was his chance to put his side of the story across, to present what had been a great tragedy in his life, without judgement, for others to discover. For him to just tell it like it is – people could either then take it or leave it.
And that’s how I decided to approach the idea; I sat down with him and a microphone and just let him tell it, recording every word. This was useful for several reasons, not just for capturing his words but also it allowed me to scrutinise them. Though I found nothing suspicious about him or his story, I nevertheless wished to be certain that he was telling the truth, at least as far as he knew it.
I could detect no great diversions from the story he had told me before, no signs of great exaggerations or flexible facts. And as for his evidence… Let’s be clear that this did not amount to categorical proof of supernatural occurrences, but it did establish a certain number of facts, dates, locations; proof that certain events had happened, even if their cause could not be concluded.
Having heard his story again, I felt even more strongly that he was sincere, that he was no great fantasist or exhibitionist. And for his part, it seemed that we had in some way helped him to get these matters off his chest, given him some small sense of catharsis.
And this is where my journey started. As I sat at home transcribing his words, I wondered who else out there had a real ghost story; a story that preyed on their mind that they had perhaps kept hidden, reluctant to tell their friends or family for fear of ridicule or worse.
I took small steps at first, just a mere few blog posts and forum entries. The early response was overwhelming – a mixed blessing to say the least. I had given out an open invitation for any joker, loon and nutcase to vie for attention. I was bombarded with the ridiculous, the stupid and the mundane; everything from tales of creaking doors and gates to the attacks of full-grown bogeymen.
But I stuck with it. My first storyteller confessed to have spoken to a few others online about his experiences and said he knew of a few he felt were serious, sensible people like him who had experienced something out of the ordinary, but also feared ridicule or the attentions of the over-enthusiastic amateur ghost-hunter.
Some of these became my first subjects and gave me confidence that the whole project was worth undertaking and worth the work.
It has not been easy picking through the heavy correspondence, trying to separate the honest voices from the dishonest ones. I have come dangerously close to being fooled and wasted a great deal of time chasing people who it turned out could not be relied upon; who if not lying outright, were being obviously very liberal with the truth.
I have applied some technique to my recording of the stories that follow in this collection. I can’t say that I have been very scientific; I have tried simply to approach each case with my best judgement. I have asked for every story to be told twice, sometimes on paper, ideally at least once on tape, so that I could compare and examine their words, searching for any reason to doubt them.
I have required some kind of evidence as the minimum criteria for any sustained contact with anyone claiming to have a story to tell. This evidence could be anything from receipts to train tickets, emails, photographs; just small things to ascertain dates, locations, anything to tie down certain facts and to
deter tellers of fiction. In some cases I may have refused to speak to people with honest stories because they lacked any items of proof. I sincerely apologise if I have offended anyone, but this has been a difficult process with many a trap to fall into. I have simply had to be ruthless.
What I present here are 11 stories from amongst the many hundreds I have heard and attempted to investigate. These 11 stories represent what, as far as I can tell, are the most truthful accounts amongst those I have heard.
Truth is a slippery thing and upon reading these stories you will undoubtedly feel this also. There are extraordinary things written within these pages; things I could not believe. Things that go beyond what goes bump in the night…
You may be sceptical; you would be foolish not to be. Yet in each case I have done my best to probe each subject, question them and challenge them. They have remained firm in their convictions, backed up much of what they have said and proved themselves within a certain reasonable doubt to be rational, sane people.
You will probably come to doubt this. And this in turn will be revealing; what these stories may say about the tellers, if they are not true, is almost as fascinating as the possibility of them being entirely factual.
What follows then are the edited transcripts of interviews or the written accounts of 11 subjects, printed here with as much fidelity as possible. I have avoided editing them unless absolutely necessary. I have removed any interruptions or any great diversions from the story, but only with great reluctance. I have striven to offer the complete testimony of each subject as authentically as possible.
Ensuring the confidentiality of each subject has been paramount to me throughout this whole project. Certain names or locations may have been changed or simply omitted to help protect their confidentiality. The people who tell these stories did so at great personal risk and I am extremely grateful that they have put their trust in me.
It is possible with the tool of the internet to investigate, to form hypotheses and to put great effort into tracking down these individuals. In one case the teller of the story will be so easy to ascertain that masking it was virtually pointless. Yet I saw no reason to offer them any different assurances than any other subject. Nevertheless, I must ask and implore you to leave these people alone and not to attempt to uncover their identities. Frankly, they have been through enough.
What these stories tell us about the supernatural, about life and death, the universe… I cannot say. This project has made me simultaneously both more sceptical and more of a believer. Sceptical because of all the countless hours wasted listening to lies and dross and delusional behaviour. But in these stories there are 11 people who speak with a genuine pain. Their stories cannot so easily be explained away.
Does that mean I believe in ghosts? I think until I see one face-to-face, I will always be a sceptic. But do I believe there are things that exist in this world that defy explanation and our understanding?
You bet I do…
A RHYTHM OF SIX
He was excited at first. After all, he’d just made his name – and a fairly substantial amount of money – selling a script about ghost stories to a producer. Now the flat he’d used the money to buy apparently had a ghostly apparition of its own.
Well, not so much an apparition; more a noise. I felt certain he was talking crap. He told me it made a tapping noise. As someone who lives in an old Victorian tenement with piping more than a hundred years old, I wasn’t buying it; just turning on the central heating was like unleashing a symphony of slow spoon players. The incessant clicks and clacks could go on all night.
It was then that he moved his coffee cup and tapped out a rhythm: tap t-t-t-tap tap. That’s the noise it would make. It could happen at any time, day or night, coming from somewhere in the flat. “The rhythm of six” he called it. Always the same, never different. It would come from somewhere far away, never near where he was. And as soon as he went looking for it, it would stop.
I didn’t believe him, and he knew I wouldn’t. So he invited me over to come and see for myself. I was a little sceptical, not just because I didn’t believe him, but because I thought that this might be some pretext for him to try something.
We had been close friends once, but then, after quite a long time of us being friends, he had got drunk and announced his “love” for me. It was quite definitely not what I wanted to hear. I’d never really thought of him as someone I’d want to go out with. I was seeing someone when we became friends, and I was seeing someone when he suddenly said he was in love with me.
I suppose I’d always found him a bit too much work. He was fun to spend time with, to talk to, but he could get pretty clingy. He barely let his last girlfriend out of the house – he liked your undivided attention because he wasn’t very confident. And if you ignored him or didn’t pay enough attention to him, he could get a bit sulky and offish.
I’d known worse, gone out with worse, but he never really seemed my type. I’d enjoyed spending time with him, we were decent friends – I thought. He’d made a bad lunge for me, and held on too tightly and a bit too long when I told him to let go. It wasn’t a side to him that I’d seen before, and I didn’t like it.
We didn’t talk for a long time after that. And it was only when we started living nearby again, about a year ago, that we patched things up. Things were good between us, but he didn’t have many friends in the area, so I saw him quite a lot, and knew he wanted a little more from me. It was a bit obvious.
I went along with it any way, I thought we had to get past this awkwardness – and I did genuinely like him; we’d had good times. A nice inexpensive night in with him and his DVD collection actually seemed nice, as long as he didn’t try anything.
Anyway, we got take-out – pizza and chips – and put on some movies, a mixture of the good and bad. But not with the sound on loud – he didn’t want me to miss it if we heard the tapping. I really didn’t give a toss about it, and just went on eating and drinking and talking.
We were half way through taking the piss out of Keanu Reeves in Point Break when he suddenly cried: “There it is!”
“What?”
“The tapping.” He grabbed the remote and stopped the movie.
“Did you hear it?”
I had the feeling I might have heard a knock or something, but I didn’t want to over-play its significance. But Craig was adamant I had heard the ghost.
“It could’ve just been the pipes.”
“It’s June, the heating’s off and none of the taps are on.”
I wasn’t buying it, but I could see that this was no joke. He honestly believed something was going on. He was getting all worked up; what mysteries could his home be hiding? Who had lived here before? What had happened to them? What kind of restless spirit lived here?
It was a bit sad how quickly the sceptic had become a convert. He’d started to really believe the kind of things he was writing about. I teased him about it; he admitted his imagination was running away with him, but he promised me that there was something, and that he wasn’t just making it up. I told him he should contact that fool on the telly, the one who goes into people’s homes to talk to the dead. He laughed at the suggestion – at least he hadn’t become a complete believer.
We finished watching Christopher Lee in The Devil Rides Out at about half-past midnight and there was still no sound from the so-called ghost.
It was then that he said I should stay the night – it almost always made some noise in the night time. Considering our past, this was something I did not really want to do.
But it was tipping it down outside – typical British summer weather. The thought of staying made me a bit uncomfortable, but the lazy part of me was already thinking: it’s wet, it’s a bit of a walk, you’re pretty drunk and you can’t afford a taxi. Besides, it was probably safer to stay here than go out into the streets this late when clearly plastered.
He sensed doubt on my part, so he said, “I’m not going to try anything; I’ll put
up the fold-up bed in the library, you can lock the door if you want to.”
So I consented and he set up the bed for me. His library was in the small second bedroom. As he put the bed up, I couldn’t help notice just how much stuff he had based around the occult. Books about witchcraft, hauntings, pagans; all the classic ghost story authors: M.R.James, Poe, Le Fanu, Stoker… and suspicious things by sinister folk like Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey. I didn’t believe in any of this stuff, but to be surrounded by so many tomes about nasty things was a little bit unsettling. It also made me wonder whether he’d fallen under their spell just a little, and had started to be swept up by it after all.
I didn’t sleep well, but I put that down to the booze. I phased in and out; hard to know how long I was sleeping. I woke myself up properly and tried again. I ended up reading DVD sleeves in the moonlight. There was probably every Hammer Horror known to man, multiple versions of The Amityville Horror – even that movie they banned after the Jamie Bulger murder (bootleg of course).
I got up after a while to get some water. I moved in the dark to the kitchen and put on the light after a little searching. I grabbed a glass and turned on the cold water tap. The water was massively over-pressured and it spat out with a thump, hitting the bottom of my glass with enough force to splash onto my t-shirt. I turned it off quickly, swearing loudly, before wiping myself down with a tea towel – Craig had warned me about the tap earlier.
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