I Have Lived In So Many Haunted Houses.

I Have Lived In So Many Haunted Houses – MY: Witness Report: “Dear Deborah, it’s been a while since I first touched base with you, I thought I would share some of my experiences that your listeners may enjoy. As you know I enjoy your content and I'm ready to share my story with everyone.

Back in 1990 when I was seventeen, nearly eighteen years old, I moved into a shared house in a small rural town called Lewes, situated just outside the coastal town of Brighton in the south of England. The house had four floors to it; the basement floor had the kitchen and sitting room leading to the back door and a lane to the train station. The first floor had my small bedroom, two toilets and a bathroom with a hallway to the front door and staircase to the upper floors and a second set of stairs that passed my room. The second set of stairs led down to the basement. Then the second floor had two bedrooms and a second set of stairs up to a converted loft space which was converted to another bedroom. 

The house was filled with a mixed bunch of well-educated divorcees and middle class arty types, who didn’t have enough money to get their own place. I stood out as a young teenage girl, who was clearly into metal and heavy rock music, studying art and drama at the local college. I was working part time dancing for stag parties and I hung out with local Bikers etc. (I was actually a very nice young lady all be a bit rebellious and headstrong.)

So the property was very basic, filled with second hand furniture, there were no carpets down stairs, lots of wooden floor boards and creaky old stairs etc. I was the only person sleeping downstairs. There was nobody or nothing below me but our communal living space. I moved in late September, college had already started and this little room was perfect. It was at the back of the house above the back door with a view of the trees and a quiet country lane. Outside my window was a big honeysuckle plant and when I opened my window up I would get this lovely scent that would drift into my room in the evening. I was very happy living there. 

As I started to get to know the other people living in the property I became aware that they would normally socialize in the evening down stairs, with glasses of wine and a shared meal. Eventually I started to join them, gradually coming out of my shell a little more each time. When people were down in the communal area I could hear them moving the dining table chairs around and the sofa feet would scrape against the wooden floor boards. You could access the basement by some old creaky stairs that started directly outside my bedroom door. So I knew when people were going down stairs as I would hear them. Also there was a gravel yard from the back door that led to a small gate, leading out to the lane and you could hear people crunching up that gravel path to that door before coming in, from my room. 

One evening I had been working on a project for my art class and decided to go and make a coffee. I could hear the chairs moving around down stairs and I figured I’d have a chat with whomever was there while the kettle was boiling. I walked down the stairs calling out a ‘hi’ as I went to find no one there? I could have sworn someone would be there and I had not heard the back door go? Puzzled, I  made my coffee and went back to my room. A bit later on I could hear the same noises again and I went to investigate. Again there was no one there? 

Now the house I had grown up in had weird stuff going on all the time and I knew plenty in regard to ghostly activity. I was not impressed with the idea that I had moved into another haunted location. I tried not to dwell on it too much and I had a very busy social life so I wasn’t always there. As the months rolled on the activity became much more apparent and I started to question some of the other residents. None of them had any issues and had never noticed anything strange. They implied it was my overactive imagination and I felt pissed that they didn’t take me seriously. I started to have my friends stay over with me and one night there was a bunch of us camping out in my room when about ten to midnight we heard the stairs creaking outside my bedroom door but we had not heard anyone come down from the first floor or enter through the front door. 

We then heard the chairs moving around below us and we all decided to have a nose around to see what was going on. We crept down the stairs and noticed there were no lights on. Clearly no one was actually using the rooms and no one had left as the back door was locked. We tested the chairs to confirm the noise and a couple of my friends went upstairs to listen, they also confirmed that it was the same noise we could hear in my room. Eventually we all returned to my room and waited. It then happened again. We ran down stairs and switched on the light but still no one was there. 

We sat around for most of the night waiting to see if anything else would happen with us all being there but it was just quiet. None of my friend’s doubted me after that and I felt quite validated.  I stayed living in the house as I didn’t feel threatened by it and at some point I had a friend sleep there on the sofa for a few weeks, after he got kicked out of his parent’s home. He was into a Bonfire society that celebrated Bonfire night every year on the 5th November in a big way in Lewes each year. He had a Red Indian costume that he was preparing as part of the coming festival celebrations and he had been threading coloured beads to its beast plate, in his spare time. The costume was about 80% completed when one morning he called me down into the living room space and said “look what that ghost did!” I looked at his costume and all the beads had been taken off and re-threaded in a different pattern.. It would have taken weeks to do and I had seen it the night before. It was perfectly done but completely the wrong colour pattern than had been previously used. I was shocked and he moved out after that experience.

Things would get more active from Spring into Summer the following year and at one point, when I was very low in my mood, it drove me so mad that I was shouting at it! It was day time and the chairs downstairs were moving constantly. There was no one else in the house and I was in my room trying to sleep. The back door would open and shut but no gravel was moving or the gate closing. My window was wide open and I was fed up with the ‘Ghost’ trying to get my attention. It went on all day till I shouted at it and then left to go around to see a friend.  I came back the next day and all was quiet again.

Around this time I had started to date a local biker who lived on the other side of Lewes, on a farm. He was a lovely guy and rode an XS11000 chop that was his pride and joy. Eventually he took me back to meet the guys who lived with him and informed me that it wouldn’t be a good idea if I stayed overnight as their house was haunted too, but not in a nice way. I pushed them to explain more and they told me that several women were known to have hung themselves on the premises over time and that whenever girlfriends stayed over, it would cause a reaction. I visited the old farm house several times before staying overnight and I did not experience anything unexplained. I hated going to use their toilet down stairs though but I would push aside my fears and use it. The guy’s would often tell me to take the cat with me as he would hiss if the ghost was about. I never did this but some of the other visiting girlfriends did.

I had begun to think that the group were just telling a yarn to scare ‘us girls’ when we all had a strange experience one evening. I was going to stay over as it had got very icy outside and was a bit of a walk back to mine. The conversation went quiet when one of the Bikers told us to ‘shush!’ very abruptly. Then we heard a musical note being strummed from the old mandolin that was on the floor, next to the sofa. It played a couple of cords then went still. The cat that had been asleep on an armchair opposite suddenly sprung up and leapt out into the kitchen. We looked at each other and the conversation turned to stories about the Ghost.

One of the former Bikers, who had moved out, had been alone in the house one evening. This was when they had first moved in and had only been there a few months. He had been sitting on the sofa, watching the T.V. when he suddenly heard a door slam from the upper floors in the house.

Now the layout of this house was quite old fashioned. Everyone entered it from the yard and this led straight into the kitchen. To the left was a toilet and shower room area. (All the rooms were very dilapidated and almost unusable.) The kitchen led into the living room which was an oblong shape. Behind the wall on the right was the door to the stairs that led to the first floor bedrooms. To get to the second floor, you had to walk through the main bedroom to another door and a set of stairs to that floor/ loft bedroom.

The biker was convinced someone was in there and he grabbed a metal pole and legged it upstairs to see who was up there. He found no one in any of the rooms but as he left the loft room the door slammed shut behind him. The door in front of him opened and he then ran for his life. Again each door he exited through then slammed shut behind him! They eventually found him, at the end of the track that enters the farm property crouched down and frozen. He was in his boxer shorts, socks and t-shirt absolutely panicked and refusing to go back into the building without his mates. I was also told it was a freezing cold evening and there had been a small snow flurry outside but he still stayed out there until they had checked out the house and came to get him. 

Apparently a Vicar was called out to do an exorcism on the property. They had to remove all of their personal belongings from the house while this was performed. Comments were made about their choice of music and they were told not to bring the Led zeppelin & Ozzy Osbourne L.P. 's back into the building. (I don’t know if they did but I know it was unlikely that a Vicar would have performed an exorcism as this rite was part of the Catholic faith, perhaps they meant a ‘blessing’?)

I loved the story when they told it but I decided to stay anyway and eventually went up to bed with my boyfriend. Nothing untoward seemed to happen during the night but at breakfast we all noticed a picture that had been displayed on the wall the night before, had somehow been taken off the wall and placed against the fireplace, with its back to us. My boyfriend picked it up and we all gasped when he turned it round. The pictures were of four old fashioned post cards that were now in a completely different sequence to how they had originally been displayed. We looked at the back of the frame again and noted that the old tape had not been tampered with. This held the backboard to the frame and was clearly intact all the way around the frame. It was yellow and very old, as was the picture.

Again a few weeks went by and nothing else really seemed to be happening, then one afternoon the mandolin started up again and an old electric floor fire came on by its self. The dam thing was not even plugged in. The main bar started to glow and admit heat at the same time the mandolin strummed. We all got off the sofa and backed up away from the items, while trying to work out how the fire had come on. After a few intense minutes it had all calmed back down again and we decided a trip over to the Gardener’s Arms in Lewes was called for. Shortly after this my boyfriend moved in with me at my place.

A year or so later my boyfriend and I decided to move to North Cornwall. We moved back to my Mother’s house in Portslade, while we prepared for our move. This was the house I had grown up in and it had made me feel so uncomfortable as a child. It was a semi detached, three bedroom property just around the corner to Portslade train station. I had been an only child and I had never slept well in the house all my life. We had never moved and my parents had bought the property back in the mid sixties.

My room as a young child had been the smallest room. It had an airing cupboard in it and a sink. The window looks out onto the back and we had a good size garden. Outside my room was the landing with the loft hatch above. On the right was the second bedroom and I stayed in this when I was thirteen or fourteen years old up until I moved out. The landing was an ‘L’ shape leading up from the stairs. The Bathroom was directly above the front door downstairs, and my parent’s room was at the front, next to it directly above the old sitting room. As a child the sitting room had been used as a bedroom for my Granddad, my Mother’s Father. He lived with us following the death of my Grandmother in 1974. He passed away in 1975, in that room. After then my Dad knocked the dividing wall down so that the front, sitting room joined our living room. He then built a wooden extension on the back. Later my step-father replaced this with a brick & glass extension which included extending the kitchen. Downstairs was much bigger than the upstairs to this property as a result.

As a child I had been told by my Mother that both this house and the one joined to it, were both up for sale together. My parents looked at both. My Mother, who is sensitive and comes from a family on her maternal side, who were Clairvoyant and followers of the Spiritualist Church, said that the house had a very bad energy. There were locks on the ‘outside’ of the main bedroom and an empty coffin shaped box filled with women’s clothing, in the back garden, half buried in the overgrown grass.

My Mother chose our house and all seemed fine until a few months after we had moved in. My parents were sleeping in the little bedroom, the one I ended up with as a child, when one night they were woken up as things were levitating and vibrating in the room. Their bed shook hard for several seconds’ and a cup lifted up from the table. Then it all stopped, everything went silent and nothing else happened.

When my parents were decorating the property one day, there was a terrifying disembodied scream that was heard by them and my Mother’s parents, who were helping them. Everyone had been in different rooms and my Grandparents were downstairs. They all met on the lading just in time to hear a big bang sound that my Granddad thought sounded like a gun. None of them were responsible for the scream and the house next door was still empty.

My Mother told me that a couple of years later, her milkman told her that the previous owner of the house next door had been hanged for killing his wife. He had caught her with another man and shot her. He was apparently one of the last to be hung in that area and had been a nasty man. That’s why the house next door had been on the market for so long. When the neighbours moved in, she never told them the story.

I had an awful time sleeping in the little room. As soon as I left the cot and was given a bed, I would leave my room every night and sleep on the landing, outside my parent’s bedroom. It drove them mad and they put a lock on the outside of my door to try to keep me in there. This led to me waking up and feeling frozen with terror. I would not move and I would be sweating with fear, sure that something was standing over me. I became very sick around the age of four and had to go into Hospital for a few months. I remember feeling so at ease there and slept very well. I made a full recovery but remained a sickly child while I slept in that room.

It is also interesting that around this time, my Grandparents passed away. My maternal Grandmother passed away when I was about three or four, following several strokes. I don’t recall many memories of her but I was very close to my Granddad. He used to teach me boxing and feed me his bacon, every breakfast. I loved having him around. At this stage the living room and sitting room were separated still and there was no extension. My Granddad had the room at the front, down stairs and he passed away in there a year after his wife had died.

Even after the two rooms were opened up to make the living room, I always felt like he was close by. One family friend, who was a medium, told my Mother he would always be by her side. I believe he still is.

I recall around 1999, I had been visiting my Mother with my baby son and we were sitting in the living room watching him crawl around. He needed to be changed so I sat on the sofa and took out the things I needed to change him and knelt down on the floor with him. I took out his soother and put it up onto the sofa behind me, to keep it clean. After I finished changing him I turned to get the soother, to find it had gone. I searched everywhere and took off all the cushions and blankets, previously on the sofa during the search. My Mother looked too and after half an hour we just gave up! Frustrated, she left the room to put the kettle on, I put the cushions and blankets back on the sofa and went over to where my son was. We all walked back over to the sofa and were about to sit down when I noticed the soother sitting in the middle of the centre cushion. It was just exactly where I had left it. How did we miss it in our frantic search?

Another time I was helping to put some shopping away in the kitchen, when I turned around and noticed a loaf of bread was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor at the other end of the room, No one was near it. I hadn’t seen it move, it just went from the shopping bag over a sink to sitting on a floor the other side of me. The whole event was completely Nuts!

Getting back to 1991 my boyfriend and I were preparing to move to Tintagel, North Cornwall. We had moved in with my Mother and Step Father for a few months beforehand. Now I had a lovely friend back then, who went out with a guy who followed the ‘Left-hand’ path. My boyfriend was a member of the Bards, Ovates and Druids and I was studying Wicca. I was having a nap in my room (second bedroom) and my boyfriend was reading, when I suddenly woke up and could not move. I could not even speak! I could see out of the corner of my eye my boyfriend was on the floor reading and the curtain behind him was moving but there was no breeze. I felt really cold and I started to meditate using the white light method. After a few minutes the sensation of being paralysed seemed to wear off. 

I felt compelled to call my friend and I felt really worried about her. She was alone at her home and said that her boyfriend was having some serious issues with other Satanists. My boyfriend and I went over to her house and immediately felt some oppressive energy outside the home. We had only been there about twenty minutes when my friend told us that there was a big black cat (domestic,) sitting outside her patio door, just staring at her. My boyfriend tried to shoo it away, but it just kept growling and hissing at him. The cat then started to walk back and forth in the garden, never taking its gaze off of us.

We sat around and performed a protection meditation for an hour and eventually it disappeared and the energy seemed normal. We went to bed and all seemed well. When I returned home the next day my Mother told me she had a terrible night. There was a couple of cats screeching outside in the back garden most of the night and she had an awful nightmare of a big black cat with piercing red eyes, stalking her.

The reason my boyfriend and I were going to Cornwall was because we had made friends with some local witches, while on holiday there and we had decided to open up a ‘new age shop’ with them. We had become friends with them following a terrifying night where my boyfriend and I experienced some weird goings on. We were in our third day of our fortnight holiday, camping on a caravan site in Tintagel. We had ridden down on my boyfriend's motorbike and were travelling around Cornwall sightseeing. We found a museum in Boscastle that was dedicated to witchcraft and had spent the day there. We had met another couple of Bikers from Wolverhampton and found out they were staying in a B&B in Tintagel and we got chatting. 

We all made our way back to Tintagel where we met up with some locals and chatted about where we had been that day. They were very knowledgeable and gave us a lot of info on the area. My boyfriend and I went back to our tent and arranged to meet up with the Wolverhampton couple for some drinks in the Cornishman, later that evening. A storm rolled in and after our dinner at the ‘Cornishman’, we decided to have an early night. The storm was really bad as we left and as we walked back to our tent, I noticed a dark shadow sweep along down towards the trail to the old ruins. I had an ominous feeling and became hyper-vigilant. As we entered the caravan park I felt like something was following us and I was filled with dread! I told my boyfriend and we tried to do some meditation but I could not focus. 

After an hour I was desperate to use the local facilities and had to traipse across a field in the pitch dark and sheets of rain. As I left a fox made a terrible shriek that sounded God awful! I started to run and nearly wet myself because I was so afraid. At the shower block I entered the toilets but felt I could not shut the door. I sat on the toilet doing my business, just staring at the entrance. I thought I could hear growling but the wind was whipping up, I could have been mistaken. I ran back to the tent, as fast as I could and told my Boyfriend. He suggested we go back to the pub and collect ourselves.

It was about 10pm and still quite early. It was also late October so that’s why it was dark. As we walked back past the track towards the ruins, I felt really emotional and started to cry. When we got to the pub we ordered some stiff drinks and sat in a quiet area by the front door. Just then the couple from Wolverhampton came in. They looked really stressed but told us we looked like we had just seen a ghost! We told them our story and they said there had been rapping on the glass to their bedroom window. They looked at the window and saw what appeared to be a handprint on the ‘outside’ of the glass. That was why they had come back to the pub! We all felt really uncomfortable and I decided that we should go and see if we could locate the local couple we had all met earlier. They had told us where they lived and we all turned up on their doorstep, just after the pub shut. We explained what had gone on and we all sat around meditating on protection before returning to our beds. The local couple gave us Rose quartz to take back with us and I felt much better returning to our tent.

The following morning we unzipped the tent to see a real mess all around us. Another tent had been blown apart and all of the belongings were scattered across the field. Bins had been blown over and an old static caravan was damaged. Our tent and motorbike were completely undisturbed and we slept like a log. As we walked back into the village, an ambulance was coming back up the track from the old ruins. I heard a couple of locals walking their dogs found ‘another suicide’. When we met up with our Wolverhampton friends they too had slept really soundly and not experienced anything else that night.

The rest of the holiday was spent just in Tintagel and Boscastle after that. We moved there in 1992 and then experienced even more strange events. This time with Lights over the ‘Old Ruins’ on Tintagel head and we saw some strange green and red ‘orbs’, flying into our bedroom at night. Locals told us about UFOs they had seen out over the Atlantic Ocean and the strange lights seen on the ruins were a regular event. We must have seen them three or four times in the first year.

We stayed there for a couple of years, before finally returning to the Lewes area following family issues. My boyfriend and I split up in 1996 but all my strange adventures have just kept right on, year in, year out. I have experienced a string of incidents around my friend’s now ex boyfriend and made some intriguing discoveries as a result. I remain open to all kinds of phenomena and use my senses to guide me throughout my life. I have a reoccurring voice that talks to me, even argues with me, that has saved my life and even told me that someone was going to die. My partner and I experience synchronistic activity almost daily and he also has had lots of personal experiences in his life. We were even brought together by it."