Victoria's Trilogy....
These three tales were sent to us by a young lady named Victoria Price.
She would be happy to hear from anyone with similar experiences: just
e-mail and we'll pass your messages on
The Watchful Spirit

Let me take you back to 1989 when I was in primary school, living with my parents and my older brother and sister. As long as I can remember my family seem to always have paranormal activity going on in whatever house we are living which seems to follow us to the next house. Thank the lord this was to be the last house, or so I thought!
It all started when I was at school one day and I was playing with the younger year school group. I saw what looked like the end of a very long black cape go past the classroom window. As far as I knew I was the only one who saw this. Thinking nothing of it, I never mentioned it. The strange thing was, after my experience I saw the end of the cape a few more times but only at school. Then I saw the black cape again as I was walking down an old railway track.
Starting to get a bit scared, I decided to tell my mum. She said not to worry about it, but anyhow she would keep an eye out. A few weeks went past and I started to forget about it until one night I was in my room. I had a little black and white TV on a seat by my bedroom door. The TV had little knobs that you had turn to get to each channel. I must've been sitting in front of it for about 5 minutes trying to find a channel, which was strange because I had never had trouble finding a channel before. Then my brother came and stood in the doorway and started chatting to me. I wasn't really looking at him just talking to him but at the same time trying to sort out my TV. Then when I did look at him (as my brother describes) I went as white as a sheet and had a terrified look on my face. What I was looking at was a black figure. No face: just a figure covered from head to toe in black. It was terrifying and just behind my brother's shoulder. I screamed at the top of my lungs and as you can imagine scared the hell out of my brother. As I screamed, the black figure seemed to move into my sister's bedroom. My brother didn't believe in ghosts until that night. I can't remember much more, but I was only 9.

A few weeks passed and I was having a sleepover at my house with two of my friends. My friend Amy and I were on my bed having a really good laugh and my friend Nicola was sat at the bottom of my bed talking to us with her back to my open bedroom door. Suddenly I saw the black figure in the doorway looking right at me. Even though it had no face, I knew it was looking at me. As I screamed it disappeared again, as if screaming at it was scaring it in some way.

Not much more was said about it as not many people would have believed a 9-year-old girl being haunted by a black figure but talking to my mum about it seemed to help. My mum suggested that it was trying to get my attention or just looking out for me as it didn't seem to want to hurt me but I really didn't like it either way....

After that a few more little things happened: one night I got into bed with my door open and went to sleep. I woke up feeling the end of my duvet being lifted up to reveal my feet. Being frozen with fear I lay still and felt the same thing a few more times. Even though this was the type of trick my brother would have pulled, I knew that he couldn't've done this because even the slightest movement would have made the floorboards creak as the house dates back to the 17th century. All I remember after that was waking up the next morning feeling so glad that it was morning. On my 16th birthday I had a friend staying over. That night when I was in the bathroom I heard her talking to someone. I left the bathroom and walked into my bedroom expecting to find someone else with her but all I saw was her looking quiet shaken. When she calmed down she said she saw a black figure walking out of the bathroom and across the landing. As she thought it was me, she started talking, but when I didn't walk into the bedroom she went out onto the landing to see where I was.

After that night any one of my friends who stayed the night always saw something when they were left on their own. Who knows? It may have been the black figure checking up on them! When I turned 18 I was with a friend of mine in their house and one of their neighbours walked in. As the neighbour and I got talking he asked me where I was from and I mentioned my parent's house. He then asked me if I had heard of the ghost that use to haunt the house and which seemed to look after the children that were there before we moved in!

Being sort of relieved that it wasn't just me going mad and that the ghost was real I said "No I have not" he then told me that before my house was a pub it was a monastery and that the black figure that haunted the house was in fact a monk...
The Old Couple.....A

When I was young, I lived with my parents and brother and sister in a small council house that had never seemed to have any sort of paranormal activity. Every summer we would go on holiday with our caravan and very best friends. That year was no different. It was the summer and we headed to Cornwall We were gone for a fortnight and all had a really fantastic time.

When we came back everything seemed fine, until a few days later my mum ran into an old friend of her's in our village shop. They were very pleased to see each other and her friend asked my mum where she was living now. My mum told her she was living in the same house as before in Cheverly. The woman then asked if my mum had people staying at our house while we had gone on holiday. My mum was a little worried and asked why. Her friend then said not more then a week ago she had called to see my mum, not knowing we had gone away. She said that an old lady had answered the door and said there was no Sue or Pete (my mum and dad) living at that address.....

As soon as my mum got home she questioned our neighbours, who had been feeding our animals while we were away, and asked if they had seen anything or heard anything. They told my mum that a few times they had gone round the house and there had been an empty milk bottle on the front door step. Then another day they found the front door had been left open, but as they could see that nothing in the house had been moved or taken, they just put it down to their clumsiness and that they had forgotten to lock the front door.

A week then passed and more stories started to come to light. A few people said they had seen a caravan parked in our drive and then a few more people had seen an elderly couple going in and out of our house. Neighbours just thought we had people staying at our house while we were away looking after the place. The funny thing was only half the street had seen anything the other half said they saw nothing. My mum and dad were so worried about all these stories that they called out the police. As the police did their investigations they also found that it was only 50% who reported seeing something, but it was still too many of the same stories for it to be a hoax.

As nothing had happened to us directly yet, we tried to get on with things until an almost normal Sunday evening, when we were all sat in the front room watching the 'Antiques Road Show' My mum started to notice a very strong smell of bleach. This ended up getting so strong that she felt it burning the inside of her nose. The really strange thing was, none of us could smell anything at all. Then I remember feeling really cold sat next to an open log fire and then a coat hanger hanging on the birdcage that was suspended from the ceiling started to swing really violently which made our bird go mad. This is all I can remember of that night. Not long after this happened, my sister was having a bath. With the rest of the family in the garden, she was starting to get out when she heard some very heavy breathing and dragging feet coming towards the bathroom. As the sound got louder she started to get very scared and ran out of the bathroom without stopping. As she ran onto the landing she knocked into someone or something and heard it fall against the wall but she didn't stop to look back. When they all went back to look they didn't find anything only what looked like a pattern on the carpet of something dragging their feet........ As for the elderly couple, nothing was found out about them and they were never seen again......

It all starts again!

So it all started when I was five: now, 20 years later, nothing has changed! My family still has to live with the paranormal.....

I now live with my husband and two children in a very nice small house not more then 5 miles from where I lived with my parents, brother and sister. I have lived in this house now for more then two and a half years and it seemed ghost or spirit free until about 3 months ago when things started to happen. As you may have read from my previous encounters, we always seem to experience the paranormal around our family, and yes before you start to wonder about the authenticity of these stories, they are real.

The first encounter was investigated by the police authorities and was snatched up by a national newspaper. After this it has just continued. My mother is or was very ill and was taken to a local hospital about three years ago. When they could not help her, she was then moved to a hospital towards the south east of England. Unfortunately this was no good for my mother either, so then she was moved to another hospital up in Liverpool. After my mother left there house my father told me that the ghostly movements, sightings and sounds was slowly fading. He said they were happy, that they seemed to have settled. This I could not understand but left it at that. In June this year my father declared his love for my mother's best friend, moved in with her and asked for a divorce from my mother, still stuck in hospital and still very ill.

Now as I mentioned at the beginning of this story, I have been experiencing strange things in my house for the past few months: not just me, but also my husband. We first started seeing a figure walking up and down the stairs in the hallway of the house. From where we sit in our front room you can see onto the stairs. We would be watching TV and see a figure out of the corners of our eyes. This could have been our imagination and as a sceptic, I like to see things right in front of me rather then start to think silly things were happening in my house. Stuart, my husband went upstairs to get the dirty clothes from the landing. He told me that as he was leaning over to reach the clothes he was startled by the sight of legs walking quickly past him. When he came down stairs he was white and couldn't believe what he thought he had seen. Anxious to believe him I walked upstairs to check on the children, to see if it could have been either them, but they were sound asleep in their beds. Our floor boards creak so if one of them had of been on the landing it would've made a noise.

After that more things started to happen. I was singing to myself in my front room and a box that my little girl had made me at school fell from the shelf and all of its contents came out. Again, this could have been anything but this wasn't the first time that this happened. I had just come home from work and I started the fill the kettle up for a coffee when a bottle from the top kitchen cupboard fell and hit the dirty plates. As I went to see what had fallen, I noticed that the cupboard door was open. Now in our house we always make a point of shutting the doors as we have cats. I had not even got myself a cup and the door was open.

About a week later I was brushing my teeth in the upstairs bathroom and a jug I use to bath the cats fell and hit the toilet seat with great force. I tried to imitate it by dropping the plastic jug again but could not achieve the loudness of the sound it had made on its own. Also that week I had my best friend over for a coffee on evening. Meg was sitting by my fish tank and I was over by the computer at the other end of the room, reading my e-mails when my phone hit the floor. I was near Meg but I know she would not have done as she hates anything to do with ghosts. So far there had been lots of things falling and not enough evidence to show me there was something in my house until Boxing Day morning.

For Christmas this year, as a stocking filler we bought my 4 year old son a batman clock with a batman style pendulum from Woolworths. Half way through the day I knocked it off the living room table and it hit the floor. The pendulum didn't work after that. I felt so bad for my son as he had really loved that clock. My husband took it apart and tried everything he could to get this thing to work. The clock part worked fine. Stuart took it up to our bedroom and put it on his bedside table. Feeling really bad for my son I sat there for a while trying to get it to work, to click like it had before I broke it, but nothing. Every time I tried to get it to move it got stuck one side so I gave up. Stuart and I went to bed that night so tired and so ready for sleep. We must have been tired as I don't remember my head hitting the pillow. I was woken up by a clicking noise at about 3am and without thinking told Stuart to put the bloody clock away as the ticking was really loud. He woke with the noise too and put his finger on the ticking pendulum to stop it from moving as this had worked when the clock had been working that day. He took his finger from it and it continued to move. Now we were scared as the clock was well and truly broken, so he put the clock away in one of his bedside drawers. I'm not kidding when I say I wanted to leave the house when I realized what was going on, but Stuart cuddled up to me and we went back to sleep. The next day I went upstairs to see if it was working again but when I pulled the clock out of the drawer it was that same as it had been when I tried to fix it. It just didn't work. A few days ago Stuart went upstairs to fetch some dirty washing from our room and as he went in, before he turned on the light he heard the ticking noise again, and he tells me the pendulum was ticking. I then went upstairs to see for myself but as I entered the room it was no longer ticking. I don't know what's going on in my house, do you? I phoned my mum to ask her what she thought and she said as my dad has moved out of the house that they lived in, it has moved on to me. So does this mean it will get livelier? I don't know, but what I do know is, what happened in my parents' house was not something anyone should have to live with. I really hope it doesn't get as bad as that.