True Spooky Tales - Catherine Cavendish

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This is the second in my True Spooky Tales brought to you from published authors (first one from Julia Kavan here: http://www.susanroebuck.com/2013/03/true-spooky-tales-julia-kavan.html).

Today I'm welcoming Catherine Cavendish who is rapidly becoming the Queen of Paranormal author. I've read all of her books and she has a lovely distinctive voice which is easy to read and downright enjoyable. Here's her true tale of spook: 

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Most Haunted’s Missed Location

We live in a haunted building. A VERY haunted building.

Now, the cynics among you may scoff and sneer and my husband would probably have joined you – until he and I moved here.

Julia Kavan has written about her eerie experience in Wales recently and, coincidentally (or is it?), our building is in Wales too. Maybe the proud and patriotic Welsh love their country so much they don’t want to leave it!

In our case, we live most of the week in a flat in an interesting and rambling 250 year old building on the side of a hill.  As a result of its sloping location, several reconfigurations and extensive remodelling over the years, it is quite a complicated structure with lots of short flights of stairs. Most of it is a social club, with bars and a snooker room

My paranormal horror novella, The Demons of Cambian Street, is set in this building – complete with the spooky walk-in cupboard in the top floor.

We hadn’t long been resident in our flat when odd little things started to happen. Late one night, we were upstairs and I was talking to my husband at the bedroom door when we both heard a loud sigh, right behind me. A shiver ran the length of my spine as we compared notes, found we had heard the same thing and couldn’t think of one logical explanation for it. No sounds, apart from the odd car travelling up the street, permeated in from outside. There was no one else in the flat, apart from my cat. She is not noted for emitting loud sighs.

Then other things happened. Lights would be on when we returned from a few days away, even though we had left in daylight. One strange day, we returned to find not only the living room light on, but the TV as well. This was an old fashioned set, requiring you to adjust the screen’s aspect ratio from its default setting of 4:3 to 16:9, using the remote control, which we always did. However, as I walked into the living room, I saw the TV was set at 4:3. Proof, if proof was needed, that we hadn’t left it switched on.

On more than one occasion, my husband has experienced footsteps that came up to – but stopped at – the bathroom door when he was in there. Recently, he was  upstairs when a female voice said “Hello,”. He thought it was me, but I was downstairs busily typing away as usual.

On occasion, there’s an element of the mischievous. Daft things disappear, never to be seen again. We’re still missing a potato masher!

Mostly, it’s fine. Really. Whoever/whatever is causing this is benevolent and seems to be cat-friendly!

This is more than can be said for whatever is haunting the snooker room. The atmosphere is so heavy in there at times, some members of staff have refused to go in there alone to tidy and lock up. Playing cards have been thrown all over the floor when there was no one there, chalk has been moved and freezing cold spots have been reported.

Then one early morning, something was caught on CCTV.

My husband – an habitual early riser – got up at six one morning, came down to our kitchen, which shares a wall with the gents’ toilet next to the snooker room. He heard it flush. Thinking it a little early for the cleaners, he went into our living room, peered through the window and saw the light on through the frosted glass. It was unusually early for the cleaners, but he concluded it must be them. After all, if it had been an intruder, they would have triggered the alarm.

But something niggled at him.

When the club opened, he went down and checked the CCTV footage. There are cameras all over the club and any intruder in or around the snooker room would definitely have been picked up. At around seven-thirty, there were the cleaners arriving for work. And then, as he scrolled back, he checked the snooker room camera for footage at the time he had heard the noise.

It was dark at six a.m. Vehicles passing outside sent flashes of light into the room. But then, at precisely the same time he had seen the light and heard the flush, a patch of white mist shot across the screen. It was the talk of the club for days, as person after person (including me) examined the footage. Each of us posed the same question, “Are you sure it’s not a car?”

But, you see, it couldn’t have been. The white mist didn’t shoot into the room, from the windows which are situated on the left hand side. It shot across it, from right to left. It was already in the room.

And there was no one there.

We did consider contacting Yvette Fielding for UK’s Most Haunted, but, sadly, that series has finished. For those of you nostalgic for the famous Fielding scream, here it is. I’m quite sure it would have echoed down the corridors of our building if they’d ever made it here.

http://youtu.be/Ne7NdQ6m-MQ

The Second Wife is available from:

Amazon.com

Amazon.ca  

Amazon.co.uk
Omnilit 

Barnes and Noble

Kobo 

You can interact with Cat here:

www.catherinecavendish.com
https://www.facebook.com/CatherineCavendish
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4961171.Catherine_Cavendish
https://twitter.com/cat_cavendish
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109439758903132910470/posts