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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.
The Second Wife is available from:
You can
interact with Cat here:
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
