by Victoria Price
This story happened in 'Cheavely' near 'Newbery' about 21 years ago when I was about five years old. It IS a TRUE story.
When I was a young I lived with my parents and brother and sister in a small four bedroom council house that had never seemed to have any sort of paranormal activity before. Every summer we would go on holiday with our caravan and very best friends and their caravan.
This year was no different. It was the summer and we had all left our house with friends in tow and headed to "Cornwall."
We were gone for two weeks. We 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 hers in the 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 Cheavely. The woman then asked if my mum she had people staying at her house while we had all gone on holiday? My mum was a little worried and asked, "Why?" Her friend then said not more than a week ago, she had called to see my mum not knowing we had gone on holiday. 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 then 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 on another day they had found the front door had been left open, but as they could see, nothing in the house had been moved or taken - they just put it down to their clumsiness and that they forgot to lock the door.
A week then passed and a few more little 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 really worried about all these stories, so they called out the police. As the police did there investigations they also found that it was 50/50 with only 50% 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 Roadshow,' 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 cooled, so I sat next to an open log fire; and then a coat hanger hanging on the bird cage that was hanging 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 and 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 there feet.
As for the elderly couple, nothing was found out about them and they were never seen again, that I am aware of.
To this day the families that move into that house don't seem to live there for longer than a year now (or so I've been told). Thank you for taking the time to read my story. I would like it to become an Urban Legend one day, you never know. All I can say is that this experience will never leave me and I'll never forget it even though I was only five. Our local newspaper found out about our haunting, and they wanted to get the full story from my parents. This story has now been published twice as it has become a very well known ghost story for the area.