It Is Not Haunted I Tell You!!!

Two years ago, some friends of mine told me about some strange occurrences going on at their home in Essex and they kindly allowed me to do a write up about it.  They moved out of the property once their lease finished and that, it seemed, was the end of that.  Until yesterday, when I received a very sweet email:

“Hello Nicola,

You have an article on your site about (name of property removed).

I am the owner of (name of property removed).

Kieron and Melanie were only tenants of this property and did not have permission to allow you to publish this information.  I have never had any problem with ghosts in this property with tenants before or since.  I have lost potential tenancy’s (sic) now because of your article.

If you do not remove the information immediately I shall have no choice but to take legal proceedings against you.”

A somewhat unnecessarily aggressive email perhaps, but I’m not out to upset anyone or cause distress with the things I write about, so I agreed to pull the article.  Whether or not anyone actually decided not to lease the property due to my article is anyone’s guess.  I wouldn’t flatter myself with the notion that anything I write would have any bearing on what people decided to do, but hey ho…

However, whilst the Landlord was not happy about their property being mentioned, which is fair enough, most of the historical information on the property is already out there in the public domain.  The experiences that Kieron and Melanie had whilst in residence at the unnamable property should, I feel, still be available for others to read about.  So, without further ado, following is a pruned version of the original post, minus any place names that might cause Landlords to frown at me:

Behave Yourself!

Kieron and Melanie Savill run a successful paranormal events company in the UK called Paranormal Knights. They are also private investigators and researchers for the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP). They met as members of the resident paranormal team at Coalhouse Fort in East Tilbury, Essex back in 2007 and shortly afterwards moved in together at their current home. They live there alone. Well, sort of.

“I would often travel past the derelict property,” Kieron said.  “It fascinated me. This once beautiful building left to fall in to such a state was a shame. It had so much character even with the trees and overgrown wildlife that were now trying to consume it.”

The site was eventually bought by a company with the view to demolishing it and selling on the land but then a strange thing happened. The developers fell in love with the buildings and after various visits to the site the company decided that they would restore the buildings and turn them in to residential property.  The property was saved.

The developers lovingly restored the building and, when completed, named the property after the ghost of a Matron that was said to walk around the area at night.

“It seemed like a dream come true when we moved in to the house,” Kieron told me.  “Although very small, it was lovely. The silly thing is we never expected it to be haunted. Even with the name it had been given. It’s not the reason we decided to live there, we just loved the building. However, it wasn’t long before strange things started to happen.

“I guess the first major thing that happened was quite upsetting at the time, especially for my wife Melanie. We have these drinks coasters in the lounge. They are quite heavy, square, solid hardwood ones. When not in use they are always stacked up on a corner of the coffee table.  One night, Melanie came home to find the coasters all lined up standing on their ends around the coffee table like dominos. She was convinced at the time that I had done it, but I hadn’t.  It was upsetting as there were only two explanations: someone was letting themselves in our home when we weren’t there or it was paranormal. No one likes the thought of having a stranger in their home so I changed the locks and the alarm codes, but it kept happening.

“I like to think I’m a tidy person. Everything has its place. If Melanie leaves a pair of muddy shoes on the kitchen floor they will be placed neatly together.  It’s things like this that makes it obvious that something has happened. I mean, when you come home from the shops and one shoe is in the sink and the other in the lounge, it’s pretty obvious!

“For six months the activity gradually increased. Chairs were turned over, furniture and ornaments moved, even our clothes were thrown around the house.  Sometimes we would lie in bed at night listening to the magnetic shower door opening and closing in the bathroom and the cutlery draws rattling in the kitchen.  One weird thing was that we constantly woke up at 3.33am. Sometimes I woke up and sometimes it was Mel, but the clock always said 3.33am.  Even if I reset the clock it would happen again the following night.  If you do an internet search on this phenomena you discover some quite alarming theories!

Casper, Get Thee Gone From The End Of My Bed!

“One night I was awoken by Mel calling my name. But when I looked at her she wasn’t looking at me but was sitting up staring at the bottom of the bed. She kept asking what I was doing and would I come back to bed. After a couple of seconds of me watching her having a conversation with thin air I asked her what she was doing.  Her response was to scream with shock at finding me still in bed next to her.  She said that she had woken up and saw someone standing at the bottom of the bed. She just naturally assumed it was me. I do believe that she saw something that night because I was witnessing things too.  Moments later there was an almighty crash as things started to fly around the room.  That was quite a sleepless night!

“The things that we experienced and still experience at the house serve us well when we are investigating a case at someone’s home. In many cases we can relate to what they are going through and give help and advice. I think the clients feel happier that they are talking to people who have experienced paranormal activity and don’t think they are mad.

“After many months we became used to odd things happening from time to time in our home and we actually miss them when nothing happens for a long time.  We don’t feel scared or frightened living there; we are far too inquisitive about what’s happening.  Being involved in the paranormal community as we are, we know many psychic mediums. Many are or friends and visit us at our home.  All of them have told us that we have two spirits at the property. An old tramp and a young girl.  I don’t know if they are correct but, whatever it is, it’s part of the family!”

Nicola

What on earth is NaNoWriMo? Well, for those of you who have a great idea for a book but have been putting it off and putting it off, this is your chance to get on with it and GET IT DONE!

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month: http://www.nanowrimo.org) is exactly what it says on the tin. You write 1667 words a day ( which equates to 50,000 a month) for the whole of November (not as gruelling as it sounds oddly enough) and by the end of the month you have the basis of your novel to pick over and rewrite at your leisure – but at least a vast majority of the work is done! The idea is to just write. Don’t delete anything. If you hate something so much you can’t bear to look at it, rest assured that you can change it later – so if you wish you hadn’t made Aunt Fanny a nymphomaniac or you’ve given your pet dog the ability to make animals out of balloons and SO wish you hadn’t, you can sort it out during your rewriting sessions at a later date.

I’ve had an idea for a romantic comedy brewing away for a long time, and once my son arrived I thought it was an idea that was going to have to sit on the back burner for years to come because I just wasn’t going to have the time to do anything about it – but not so. Here we are, half way through November and I’ve written…31874 words so far. I write a little bit on the train of a morning whilst other commuters either stare over my shoulder to see what I’m doing (some of my best witticisms emerge like this because I make it a mission to see if I can squeeze at least one giggle out of someone reading what I write) and either finish my quota at lunch or when my lad’s gone to bed at night. It doesn’t take long for the word count to add up and it’s not taken over my life.

One thing I would say, it helps to have an idea of how the story is going to go before you start NaNoWriMo – I think if I’d just sat down and started rambling away without any idea of where the story was going, I’d have struggled a bit to keep it going.

The novel is going well so far, and I suspect it could well end up featuring on my Amazon Kindle page next year some time (once I’ve ripped it apart, sewn it back together and changed all the characters at least three times).

And yes, I couldn’t help myself: there is a small element of paranormalness in there somewhere – well, you wouldn’t want it any other way would you?

I’ll check in with you soon to let you know whether my novel’s got the better of me or if I managed to reach that golden 50,000 words finish line… wish me luck!

Nicola

Are You Just A Figment Of My Imagination?

I met up with some friends the other weekend and, while we were sitting there chatting over a nice cup of tea, the subject turned to ghosts (of course).  My friends used to run paranormal events at a location that will remain nameless.  They told me that, some time ago, they had decided to run a small experiment to see how much influence the power of suggestion had over people when it came to ghost hunting and all things spooky.  They invented a story about a spook called ‘Bob’, I think we shall call him, and mentioned in passing to various people that ‘Bob’ haunted a certain area of the venue.   For the record, there is no history for a ghost called Bob whatsoever, it was an experiment to see if ‘mediums’ and punters would start picking up on the suggestion of the imaginary ghost.  Well, it appears that visitors and, embarrassingly enough for any true psychics out there,  mediums did indeed start to pick up on ‘Bob the ghost’, which goes to show that people are, sadly, easily led and are eager to believe whatever they are told.  I understand that ‘Bob’ became quite a celebrity rather quickly.  It has been some time since my friends ran their tours at this property but apparently ‘Bob’ is still a hot favourite for visitors and mediums alike.

Here’s One I Made Earlier…

This incident reminds me of a similar experiment where a ‘ghost’ called Philip was created by a group of Canadian parapsychologists.  They made up a‘history’ for Philip and made such a good job of it that the ghost of Philip actually started to show signs of manifesting, such as moving tables across the room, sometimes without anyone from the group actually touching the table.  Further details can be found by clicking the link below:

CREATING PHILIP

Monks – They Were Scary Enough To Start With!

I have heard further stories of people who have created a ‘tulpas’ – a fictional character that is believed in so strongly that it takes on a physical form.  I have yet to try this but I’m considering creating a  Chippendale tulpas …

Here is a link on the ‘tulpas’ theory which makes for interesting reading – the Creating Philip story is also featured on this website.  I particularly liked this article and it’s well worth reading right the way through – perhaps what we see in day to day life is indeed not what we think – click on the link below:

CREATE YOUR OWN SCARY MONK

“Didn’t You Hear Me?  I Said WOOOO!!!”

So just how many hauntings are ‘real’?  Are some ghosts merely the products of powerful imaginations conjuring a different reality (got a bit ‘woo woo’ there, sorry)?  Perhaps stories that started out as just an exciting tale to scare people actually have taken on lives of their own because people now believe so strongly, as seen in the story of ‘Creating Philip’ and ‘Create your own scary monk’.   If so, perhaps ‘Bob’ and I need to have a little chat.

Nicola

weirdworld@hotmail.co.uk

©Nicola Kirk and www.nicolakirk.wordpress.com 2011

There have been some updates regarding the availability of my novels of late and I am delighted to announce that Tiennador and Skaran are now available for Kindles/ e-readers on Amazon and the rest of my novels will also be available on there shortly.

Thanks for your continued support!

Nicola Kirk

Apparently They Are Still Watching You…

Morning you lot,

I wrote a while back about the strange phenomenon of the ‘black-eyed children’ – strange beings with completely black eyes who fill the people they stalk with dread.  The link can be found here for those of you who fancy a refresh on the subject:

http://nicolakirk.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/who-are-the-black-eyed-children/

I happened to come across the following tale whilst perusing my favourite Phantoms and Monsters email update (you can subscribe to this great font of spooky info via their website: http://naturalplane.blogspot.com/) – they send you a daily email with the latest in the world of weird and wonderful stuff.  One of the links on their site took me to the following story, which I attach below.  Who are these strange people with black eyes and what do they want?:

“My husband, and our two-year-old son and I went to a used bookstore about two hours from our house in Tucson, Arizona this last Saturday (04/23/2011.) I followed my son as we walked back into the children’s area.

She’s Coming To Get You…

He rounded the corner to the aisle with the books. I saw a girl stand, not moving, a little ways down the aisle staring in our direction. Then my husband walked up to us. As he came closer, she did as well, following behind him.

My son ran off toward a table and my husband followed. The girl walked up and got right next to me within inches, almost touching. I started to feel extremely uneasy and moved away to where my husband and son stood at the table. They were both looking down at a Mickey Mouse doll which I tried to talk to my son about.

As I was looking down, I saw movement coming up behind me out of the corner of my eye. It was the girl. I noticed her clothing looked from about the 1960s and she looked very out of place. She was also overdressed with multiple coats on in a normal temperature environment.

She walked in a circling pattern, with her head down in a predatory way, the way a panther stalks its prey. As I stared at her while, she walked slowly. I distinctly remember she did not make a sound when she moved. Which now I am thinking was odd, because she had a lot of clothing on and a bag with her.

Her eyes were all black, no whites of her eyes, no pupils. She stared coldly, devoid of emotion, and you could feel the evil radiating off of her. I remember as I made eye contact with her, I had the very distinct feeling that she was not human. I had a feeling that she was something evil in a human shell.

I felt the most amount of terror and most threatened I have ever felt. I also felt like I was the food at the bottom of the food chain and I was her next meal. I definitely had a fight-or-flight response after I was able to pull my eyes away from hers. I remember thinking I had to get away and I had to protect my family.

I tugged on my husband’s shirt and grabbed my son and started to pull them away. My husband asked why; I said we need to just go. I remember thinking it was very important that she didn’t know we were leaving because we were afraid of her. We went to the other side of the store (if we were smart we would have left immediately).

My husband walked off to electronics and my son and I stood in front of a bookshelf full of board games. There was an aisle right behind us for magazines. Then I heard a man that was leaning down toward my son say in a very low tone, “I see you… she can’t hear you, but I can.”

I didn’t turn around; I was too scared. I grabbed my son and dashed away. I now believe he was one of the black-eyed people too and they were there together. I went to the car with my son and just felt this heaviness of evil that almost felt like it had stuck to me until I went to bed that night.”

(Ref: http://paranormal.about.com/od/demonsandexorcism/a/tales_11_05_08t.htm)

Please leave your thoughts and comments below…

Nicola

weirdworld@hotmail.co.uk

Drive Carefully: Because if you crash and burn, there’s nowhere left in Pluckley for you to haunt.

Pluckley… oh, Pluckley!  Surely this place has got to be the ghost hunter’s Valhalla.  Often reported as being the most haunted village in England, such is its reputation even the car show, Top Gear, felt the need to visit and spend the night there whilst finding out what it would be like to live in a car for 24 hours (you can view this encounter from 6:26 of the attached You Tube link – Richard Hammond being stalked by a pizza delivery guy has got to be worth a watch):

Will Top Gear Survive The Night In Pluckley?

So, what makes Pluckley such a scary place to live?  The number of ghosts terrorising the population varies, but the most popular ones are listed below:

• The spectre of the highwayman Robert Du Bois speared to a tree at Fright Corner (even though the tree is now gone);
• The pub “The Horse Inn” is haunted at night when you can hear the screams from inside of the lady of duke.
• A phantom coach and horses, allegedly manifesting in the vicinity of Maltman’s Hill;
• The ghost of a Gypsy woman who burned to death in her sleep;
• The black ghost of a miller haunting the ruins of a windmill near “The Pinnocks”;
• The hanging body of a schoolmaster in Dicky Buss’s Lane;
• A colonel who hanged himself in Park Wood;
• The screaming ghost of a man being smothered by a wall of clay at the brickworks;
• The Lady of Rose Court, who is said to have eaten poisoned berries in despair over a love triangle;
• The Phantom Monk of ”Greystones”, a house built in 1863. There is a suggestion he may have been the unrequited love object of the Lady of Rose Court;
• The White Lady of Dering, a young woman apparently buried inside 7 coffins and an oak sarcophagus who haunts the churchyard of St Nicholas’ Church – knocking has been heard coming from beneath the church at night – is the White Lady trying to escape from her coffins?;
• The Red Lady, reputedly an earlier member of the same ancient Dering Family who also haunts St Nicholas’. The legend of the Red and White Ladies seem to overlap. A third ghost has apparently also been reported in the same place.
• The Screaming Woods (Dering Wood), an area of forest outside of town supposedly haunted by the ghosts of many who became lost in the woods. It was given its name because you can supposedly still hear their screams from inside the forest at night.
• Three other buildings in the village are also said to be haunted.

(List of ghosts courtesy of Wikipedia)

Knocking Heard Coming From Beneath St Nicholas’ Church, Pluckley:

 Is The White Lady Trying To Escape From Her Numerous Coffins?

Quite a list, I’m sure you will agree!  The Dering Family star quite heavily in the history of Pluckley; they even have their own chapel in Pluckley’s Church of St. Nicholas and the ghosts of various women from the Dering family appear to find it impossible to leave the village and head off into the spiritual sunset.

A bit of logical thinking (something I am occasionally capable of if I’ve had enough chocolate) helps to dispel a couple of the ghost stories; take, for example, the mystery of the Screaming Woods.  Let’s not kid about here: the alleged screaming that can be heard at night is probably a fox.  When those little sods start barking of a night, it sounds like someone’s shut their fingers in a car door.  Sure, some die hard believers out there will frown at this explanation, but I remember the first time I heard a fox scream.  It was the early hours of the morning and the unearthly screeching I heard quite convinced me that a woman being murdered in our back garden.  But, as ever, people hear what they want to hear and logic be damned. 

Phantom Fare: Are you going my way?

Another story that popped up while I was nosing about was that of a taxi driver who picked up a fare on an ‘unnamed road’ in Pluckley village.  The man climbed into the back of the taxi but when the driver turned to ask where he wanted to go, the back seat was empty.  Alas, this story is the stuff of urban legends.  There are countless tales from all over the world reporting similar encounters.  Are there fleets of ghosts out there who fancy a quick ride around in the back of a taxi or a good Samaritan’s car, or is it just another urban myth created to keep the ghost hunters entertained?

If finding the time to head to Pluckley for a nose about proves to be hard to come by, you can always have a look at the following link, which takes you on a ‘walking tour’ of the village and regales you with interesting tales of what you might find there:

http://www.walksoflondon.co.uk/50/pluckley-englands-most-ha.shtml

Apparently the tour is about four miles long in total if you walk it, so take your oxygen tent…

Nicola

©Nicola Kirk and www.nicolakirk.wordpress.com 2011

Welcome To Our Haunted Village – Don’t Plan On Leaving Any Time Soon…

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything but, as I’m sure all new parents out there will agree, it’s rather hard to do anything when you have a newborn baby demanding constant room service day and night.  Can anyone remind me what sleep is, please?  Delighted as I am to be a new mummy, I have missed writing, so I’ll do my best to sit down every so often and write something vaguely entertaining…

So.  The other evening (between nappy changes and burping sessions) I saw a programme called Celebrity Ghost Stories (quite a good series, I’d recommend it) – I do my best to record anything spooky and sometimes I even get to watch what I’ve recorded.  The actor Daniel Stern (of Home Alone fame – you remember, he was the tall idiot burglar) made an appearance on the programme and talked about the time he visited England and encountered a haunted village.  The haunted village in question was Widecombe On The Moor which is located in the heart of Dartmoor National Park, Devon.  Daniel Stern said that, as newly weds, he and his wife had decided to honeymoon in England and during their travels they came across Widecombe On The Moor.  It appeared to be a quaint English village in the middle of nowhere so the Sterns decided to stop off and investigate.  They parked their hire car and went for a wander.

From the start, they felt there was something strange about the village.  It had a peculiar atmosphere and the couple felt ill at ease as they walked around.  The local residents were a peculiar bunch.  They shuffled around at a snail’s pace, refused to make any eye contact and for some reason they all seemed to be wearing black.  No one spoke a word – the village was deathly silent.  Daniel said they resembled a bunch of extras from ‘Night of the Living Dead’.  However, it appears that fortunately none of the residents tried to maul them ‘zombie style’.

The Sterns decided that it wasn’t in their best interests to linger and, unsure of directions to their hotel for the night, they reluctantly approached the figure of an old woman who was standing outside the church with her back to them.   They were feeling spooked anyway, so when the old woman turned on them and began to speak to them in a strange language, it didn’t improve matters.  The Sterns nervously stood their ground, politely listening while the old woman chattered away in an unknown tongue.  Trying to look the old woman in the eye proved to be difficult too seeing as her eyes were an eerie milky white.  The encounter with the old woman couldn’t finish quickly enough for the Sterns and it wasn’t long before they were hotfooting it back to their rental car.  They leapt in and raced out of the village but they didn’t get more than half a mile or so away when their tyre blew out.  They could still see the spire of the church in the near distance so help was technically but a short walk away, but they couldn’t bring themselves to return to the ‘village of the damned’ and instead chose to drive the ten or so miles on the rim to their hotel (I assume they managed to find their own way there seeing as they couldn’t understand the old woman outside the church).

Hotel Managers Get Creative:

“I know, Bob, let’s give the porn sites a rest and invent some ghost stories to freak out the guests!”

When they reached their hotel, they told their extraordinary tale to the hotel manager and he delighted in telling them that they had actually stopped off at a ‘haunted village’.  Chilling indeed.  The Sterns were informed that on 21st October 1638, there had been a great thunderstorm and the spire of the church (St. Pancras) had been hit by ball lightning, causing huge amounts of damage to the church, killing four people outright and injuring 60 others.  So had the Sterns unwittingly dropped in on a village of wandering souls desperately searching for eternal rest?

It is interesting how a bit of an odd day out gets people’s imaginations going.  When something a bit out of the ordinary happens, we love to assume something paranormal has happened.  It seems that a lot of us would rather believe that than rather than go to the effort of investigating things a bit further.

A ‘haunted village’ would suggest to me that the village has been long-deserted and if I were to visit it, I’d expect to find nothing but derelict remains of dwellings and the shell of the church. However, having had a little browse on the internet, I came across Widecombe On The Moor’s own website (http://www.widecombe-in-the-moor.com/ghost_town.php) which vehemently denies that its lovely village is a ghost village.  It also points out some errors in the Stern’s account and some possible explanations of what they experienced.

The Sterns allegedly reported that the church they saw had a spire, but the Widecombe On The Moor website states that St. Pancras doesn’t have a spire, but four pinnacles (are the Sterns sure they were in the right village?).  The website states that one of the pinnacles was struck by lightning causing it to crash through the roof of the church.  Four people were killed although a few more unfortunately died shortly after the event due to severe burns.  The fatalities were interred at the front of the church under two large granite slabs.

But what about the villagers’ strange behaviour?  Well, when someone dies in a close knit community such as Widecombe On The Moor, people within the village tend to pay their respects to the recently deceased, so it’s possible that the Sterns arrived on a day that someone had died and the mood of the village was somewhat muted and sombre and people chose to wear black out of respect.  I’m not sure they would appreciate their grief being described as similar to ’Night of the Living Dead’ though…

Yes, It’s Terrifying But It Can Be Explained!

Experiences like the Sterns, which can be explained without too much effort, often make me wonder just how many other stories could be pulled out of the supernatural bracket.  It pays to take people’s spooky stories with a large pinch of salt. Unless it’s your own personal experience, of course, because there’s no way that could ever be explained away so easily…

Nicola

©Nicola Kirk and www.nicolakirk.wordpress.com 2011

When it comes to imaginary friends, sometimes parents don’t always know best.

For a free copy, click Summerland.

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Nicola

©Nicola Kirk and www.nicolakirk.wordpress.com 2011