208

The following story is an event which happened to my mother and her immediate family towards the end of the seventies when she was around six or seven years old. Please bear with me as this story is rather long. If anybody knows anything or has any information about it my mum's family and I would appreciate it.

At the time my mum lived at a house we refer to as '208'. I will not disclose the exact location, as I'm sure you will understand; but I will say that it was in Spondon, Derby. She lived there with her father, mother, and two brothers; one older and one younger.

It was around 1966 when my grandparents first moved into 208 (they would have been about 20 years of age then); and it was during their house warming party that one woman was leaving and had gone to retrieve her coat from the banister of the spiral staircase where she had placed it at the beginning of the party. As she did so, she looked up to see the body of a man slumped over the banister further up. This man was only seen once, and it was found that 208 was built on the site of the old hanging tree that was once there in Spondon.

As I said, after this there were no further sightings of this man, but it seemed that after this, a shrouded figure would appear in places when the members of the family would, for example, look in mirrors.

Let me describe to you a little about one or two of the rooms in 208. My mother's bedroom had an adjoining playroom, which is where the attic door was located. When my mum was telling me this, she explained that the attic door was one which had to small locks on either side and when these are unlocked, you could push up the attic door and slide it so it was up inside the attic. Several times the family would wake up to find the attic door had been pushed up, but they blamed it on the wind. Another time they discovered it was open, they saw that birds had gotten into the loft, and so they had a new, perhaps more logical explanation for the attic door being undone.

Because my grandmother hates birds in the house, my grandfather got two metal brackets and fixed the attic door shut so nothing could get up there. The night he did this, he slept in the playroom (which, as I mentioned, joined onto my mother's) and there were no problems, so he moved back to sleep with my grandmother. But the following morning, after he'd slept in his own bed, he discovered the door had been pushed (or pulled) back up so it was in the attic with the brackets still attached.

At this point, the family called in a man, a medium of some sort, who went up into the loft with a black book. My grandfather could hear him chanting in a foreign language, which I assume to be have been Latin but I'm not sure. Eventually the medium returned from the attic looking white faced. He told my grandfather that they would have no more trouble with the spirit. This was true.

My grandfather only saw the medium once more. Well twice I suppose. The first was in the local pub. On this occasion the medium refused to acknowledge my grandfather at all and would not speak. The second was when the news came that the medium had been admitted to hospital and my grandfather had gone to visit him. It was then that the medium had told my granddad "It's in me; I haven't got the strength to get rid of it." The medium was later discharged from hospital; the nurses believed him to have some form of mental illness. But shortly after, the medium died from what I believe to be unknown circumstances as he was crossing a bridge somewhere in Derby. It appears the spirit was finally at rest after it'd claimed a life.

Thank you so much for reading this story. If anybody has any information about the medium, 208, the old hanging tree, or even who the spirit may have been then my family and I would be very appreciative.

Thank you again for taking your time to read this.