by G L Davies
I’ve had a few girlfriends, last one I was with for two years but she got a job in a hotel in Portsmouth and we tried the long distance thing but it didn’t really work, it was so expensive to travel down to see her and she came back about once a month and then she met someone up there, some French guy and that was that. I have some good mates here and we go to the pubs a lot and I like to play Call of Duty on my games console. I hope to get into the army; I think I would be good at that. There were adverts on T.V and I thought that could be good, I could learn a trade and see the world, meet girls, get into shape but Mum is worried about places like Afghanistan and Iraq and places like that. I tell her I wouldn’t be sent there but she won’t listen and she worries. One of her friend’s sons was killed in Afghanistan by an Afghanistan policeman who was supposed to be on our side, as her only son I don’t think she can bear to think about me out in a place like that. She is very protective.
When I was about four or five, Mum got us a council house just off town; Dad had done a runner when I was just a baby so it was just us two. Nan was about a lot too, I get on really well with Nan, she is mad as a box of snakes but a kind woman. She loves all of this haunting stuff, she tells us not to worry but she’s not the one that has to live with it all the time.
I remember this one time when I was about ten and something weird had happened in the night and Mum was really freaked out. Something had happened, I’m not entirely sure; it might have been the first time the ghost had touched her. Mum is crying on the phone to Nan and Nan comes over and she’s so relaxed about it saying that we had a spirit and that it was trying to communicate and show that it meant no harm and Mum was screaming that it had touched her. Nan lit some incense and blessed the house with prayers and chanting, she often does that, she blesses houses all the time, she blessed one in Haverfordwest a few years back and the people were livid with her saying she had made it worse not better. That’s Nan though, barking mad.
When I was growing up in the house I can’t remember really anything happening till then. I remember once lying in bed watching T.V. My bedroom door was open and I could smell a really bad smell, like shit. I thought Jeeze, the toilet is blocked or something. It was an overpowering sickly shitty smell and I sat up in my bed and there at the top of the stairs on the landing I swore I saw a man’s head, like he was lying on the top of the stairs so just his head was peeping over the top step and it startled me and I let out a yelp and he vanished and the smell vanished in a blink of an eye. I remember that day really vividly the man’s head looked all dirty, like it was covered in soot, like a chimney sweep and his hair was matted over his eyes and forehead and he looked to have a big black beard covered in like a grease or liquid and then it just went. He looked and smelt like a man that lived in a sewer. I was nervous to go down stairs and I stood in my bedroom door and I must have shouted for mum a million times and she came up the stairs to see if I was O.K and she asked what was wrong and I told her and she just gave me a hug and said it was O.K and that it was just her and I in the house and my mind was probably playing tricks on me. Looking back she wasn’t that convincing. I told an ex-girlfriend about it once and she said it could have been a dog or a pet apart from we didn’t have any pets, we never have.
When I told Nan she didn’t like that story, she said to ignore it and that it wouldn’t come back and not to tell Mum and that sometimes there were nasty spirits that looked and smelled awful and they were there to frightened us and make us weak so they could play tricks on us and make us sad and depressed. I wonder what Nan thought it was?
Nothing really happened for years as far as I know, not until when I was about sixteen and that was a truly awful, night. I still wake up now in the middle of the night thinking about it and it scares me so much. I’m not afraid to admit that.
Beginnings
Lisa: Tyler told you about the man at the top of the stairs? I never told him about this as he believes that it all began when he was about sixteen even though strange things had been happening in between. I always tried to hide as much as I could from him. There were things that I tried really hard to dismiss or explain to him but we will get to that later. I had to protect him from what was happening. A ten year old will not be able to comprehend all this and it could mess his head up for life, I’m surprised he is as normal as he is after everything we have been through.
When Tyler was about eight, I got a job at the place where I work now, I was so thrilled as it was not far from where we lived at the time and the hours were good in that I could drop Tyler off in at school, work and pick him up at three and on the odd nights that I needed to work late then Mum would pick him up and they would have tea and Tyler loves his Nan and she loves him so it would be good for them both. It was good to be independent again, don’t get me wrong I loved watching Tyler growing up and it is so precious to see your children as much as you can when they were young, but it was nice to get out, meet new people and earn a wage. I think a lot of women out there can relate to that.
About two years after getting the job, It was a Friday night and I finished at eight, I picked up Tyler’s from Mums, I didn’t stay as I was tired, it had been a long shift and I wanted a hot bath and tea and to watch some television. Mum had fed Tyler and he was already in his pyjamas and we went home.
We got in and the house was dark, I turned on the hall light and Tyler was tried, just holding onto me. I led him upstairs and put him into bed, kissed him good night and then I ran a bath. I had a lovely bath and when I was drying myself I realized I had come on my period. I’m pretty regular but I am heavy. At this time I wasn’t on the pill or any contraception as there no one in my life, there hadn’t been since Ian, one man and one baby! The doctor had said that I did have a slight iron deficiency but nothing that some greens in the diet wouldn’t help at this stage. I used a tampon as I normally would and put on my dressing gown and went downstairs. I know this seems detailed but it will all make sense in a bit. You asked that I give you as much detail as possible, so that we can get back into the moment.
I made some noodles, made a cup of tea, ate, smoked and watched some T.V. At around ten p.m. I heard Tyler up on the landing, so I got up, put the landing light on from the hallway switch at the bottom of the stairs and went up and Tyler’s door was open and he was asleep in his bed with his night light on next to him. Even at ten he loved his night light. I thought I must have imagined it or maybe mistook a noise next door for a noise in our house, we live in a detached house next to an elderly couple, sometimes you can hear them doing things, moving furniture or something, rare but you can hear them. I go back down stairs and at the bottom of the stairs I felt a chill, like I had walked through a cold draught. I went back into the living room and sat back down on the sofa and again I hear footsteps on the landing. I turned the volume on the T.V right down and listened and clearly you could hear something on the landing. Like someone walking across it and opening the bathroom door and putting on the bathroom light. It had to be Tyler so I got up put on the landing light again and headed up the stairs. As I went up the stairs I walked through this draught again, like it was moving up the stairs with me. I remember my arms and legs were covered in goose bumps and my neck hairs were standing on end, I got upstairs and again Tyler was in bed and I quietly went into his room and he was fast asleep. The bathroom door was shut and I opened the door to double check the light was off in there.
When you are tired you imagine some strange things and when you’re a woman living on your own with your ten year old son you can worry about burglars and intruders. I always keep a hammer next to my bed in case someone breaks in during the night and sadly in this area there have been quite a number of burglaries over the years.
I went back down stairs, this time the cold spot was not there and I double checked that the front door and the back door were locked. The house is comprised of two floors. The front door leads to a hallway that leads to a small kitchen. To the right as you come in is a flight of stairs tha
t leads to the landing with the bathroom straight ahead, two larger bedrooms to your left and a small box room opposite the bathroom. Leading off the hallway is a living room that faces the street and a back dining room that faces the garden. The garden is only small but it was big enough to have a washing line and a slide for Tyler when he was little. I was never one for gardening but I’d mow the lawn a couple of times in the summer and sit out there with Mum and have a beer. The elderly people next door were nice enough and they grew their own food and now and again the old man would hand me some spuds, tomatoes or spring onions. Once he gave us some rhubarb and I had no clue what to with that, I gave it to mum who made Rhubarb and ginger jam.
So back to that night and the house is secure and I’m tired, I go up to bed but before I go into my bedroom I go for a wee and brush my teeth and I’m sat there brushing them and I feel this overpowering nervousness, I have a ball in my stomach, a feeling of dread that someone is watching me, that if I open the bathroom door that someone will be stood there in the dark. I can’t explain how I got the feeling; perhaps it was just anxiety from hearing all the noises upstairs and there being nothing there. It took a lot to open that bathroom door I can tell you. I opened it up and nothing, just the light from my room from across the landing. I pop my head into to see that Tyler is still sound asleep, and he is. I go into my room and close my door. I close the door tight as sometimes I use toys on myself and I don’t want Tyler to see or hear me, now that would scar the lad besides I was single and a woman has needs. No woman should feel ashamed of pleasuring herself and it’s safer than just going out and bringing random men into your home. I don’t like that but I didn’t masturbate this night as I was tired and on my period and I just went to bed. I normally wear a small blue night dress and I definitely did that night, I won’t forget that night for as long as I live. I liked the blue night dress, it was comfortable, and I didn’t sweat as much in it.
I woke at 2:40 a.m., that was the time on my clock radio and I don’t know why I woke but I was just wide awake. My bedroom is painted blue but it was just an orange colour from where the outside street light was peering through my curtains, Just streaks of orange light across the room. I lay there and listened and nothing. I thought that perhaps Tyler had been up in the night and had flushed the toilet or something. I lay there and heard nothing and tried to get back to sleep, as I was dozing, I heard my bedroom door click like someone had just closed it. I jumped up and turned on the light and looked at the door and it was closed tight. I got up and opened the door and there was nothing on the landing just the pale light from the night light from Tyler’s room and the light flooding in from behind me, my shadow actually made me jump. My heart was pounding in my ears.
As I left my room and stepped on the landing I was engulfed in a massive cold chill, absolutely freezing, from head to foot and as if it were in the core of my being, I dashed into Tyler’s room, I was really scared. He was asleep and I thought I must have had a bad dream or misheard something natural in the house like the boiler or the house just settling. I often heard things in the attic and my mind was just playing tricks as it does when you’re tired. You can actually scare yourself, you can convince yourself that something is there, you can give yourself the chills and goose bumps if you let yourself go with the fear. Most of us have done it at some stage. I remember once being on an overnight school trip, we had been talking about ghosts and in particular the Black Nun, which was said to haunt the dormitory’s there and in the night I had to go to the loo, and because we had been scaring each other I was shitting myself thinking of crossing that landing to use the loo and that the Black Nun would get me and that was how I felt on this night. I was simply scaring myself.
I was tired and I went back into my room and had to cover my mouth to stifle a scream. Where I had pushed the duvet off me in my panic to get the light on, the white sheets were stained with my blood, but not just a patch of blood but a long trailing handprint from the middle of the sheets all the way down to the bottom of the bed. You could clearing identify a hand, a big hand like a man’s, five longs fingers spread apart with trails of my blood all the way down like someone had put their fingers inside me and wiped my menstrual blood all the way down the sheets.
I quickly checked myself and the tampon was still in and there was not a mark on me not a speckle on my underwear or my night dress. Nothing but these long bloody finger marks all the way to the bottom of the bed. I panicked and I ripped the sheets from the bed, ran downstairs sobbing and flung them into the washing machine. I know I should have kept them, taken a photo or something, called the police but can you imagine how it feels to see that in your bed? The sheets had been washed and were like new when I put them on the bed. How can you explain it? My tampon was still in place, my underwear was still on, I hadn’t been raped, that I could tell. There was no one in the house. I couldn’t let my baby boy see this. What would you do? Who would you tell?
I washed those sheets and I sat in the kitchen smoking and crying. I was in such a state. I didn’t dare go back to bed that night and I just lay on the settee with the TV on waiting for the dawn. Those long bloody smear marks chill me to this day. I knew then there was something in this house, something non-human, a ghost or something, it had been watching and following me around the house all night. I knew it was there, just knew it and as soon as I was asleep it snuck into the room with me and it had put itself inside me and I had been violated.
Haunting
Lisa takes a deep drag on her cigarette and looks briefly away from me as if she is ashamed of what she has told me. Few people outside her inner circle have been privy to this disturbing account. She knows now she has committed herself to divulge the atrocity that has been forced upon her. However, perhaps like you have after reading that, I have my doubts. I probe further asking could it have been possible that it was a person in the house or perhaps she had done it herself in a slumbering sleep like trance. Sleepwalkers exhibit the most unusual behaviour and great study and research has been conducted into this, documenting and recording some extraordinary extracurricular nocturnal activity. Lisa’s eyes flash with anger and she scolds me, reminds me that I have not had to live in this house, she is the one who has been victim of this transgression, and she is the one that has been violated. I apologise for seeming somewhat conventional in my thinking but it is from necessity, I have to look at this from every angle and examine every detail. She calms, understanding the nature of my inquisitiveness and I have to remind myself that this woman has been the victim of abuse for perhaps decades. I focus her back on the events leading to the first full on metaphysical contravention, which took place six years after the first infraction. In this section I have merged interviews from both Lisa and Tyler in a chronological order so you can get a clearer understanding of the abnormal and uncompressible events that took place.
Lisa: I understand your doubts about the night with the finger marks. I do, but I didn’t do it, no one else was in the house and if some sick bastard out there thinks somehow my ten year old son was responsible then they can fuck off. There was something in that house that night, it was following me around, it was spying on me and I panicked and washed the sheets. I called Mum in the morning and she took it as naturally as if I had spilt some milk. She said not to worry that it hadn’t harmed Tyler or me and that she would pop over and sort it after she had finished at her arts and crafts class. I was furious, I was crying on the phone. What am I to do? Call the police? Dial 999 and say a ghost put its fingers in my vagina while I was on my period and rubbed them all over the bed sheets? They would have taken Tyler from me and locked me up in a loony bin. I was scared.
Tyler: I remember that day, Mum was on the phone crying and I didn’t know then what it was about. I can’t remember anything about that night, Mum told me in later years and it just made me so sick, so angry but worse was yet to come. It got real bad.
Lisa: Mum came over in the afternoon and she gave me a hug and she went into
the Kitchen and made us a cuppa. I admit I felt better for her being there, I told her what happened. Tyler was in his room playing on his computer games so I told her everything. Mum said it would be O.K. and said she would bless the house and it won’t happen again and off she went blessing the house. She had incense sticks and candles and she chanted away. She then opened all the windows and said a hushed prayer and she said to me it was all good and that Tyler and I would be happy now nothing would harm us, nothing would bother us and just to move on and forget about it. I was still scared that night, I slept with the light on and nothing happened, nor the next night or the night after that, in fact nothing happened for years.