Body Under The Sandstone Slab

This isn't my story, but one my mother has brought up now and then, an experience of her own.

I'm very interested in all things paranormal and supernatural, an interest I share with my mother, but we are both sceptics - my mother more than me, definitely! - and this story had come up from time to time but she had never gone into full detail.

It actually only came up again a week or so ago when a good friend of my mother was visiting our house. I don't remember how but we got talking about ghosts. I suddenly remembered the story about the body under the sandstone slab, and asked my mother about it then. My mother's friend got excited and said something about how her jewellery always went missing - I didn't realise until then that she had been my mother's flatmate at the time.

During the early 80's, my mother and her friend had been living in a terrace house near Sydney, which appeared on street directories in 1860 but could have been there even earlier. It hadn't been done up and made fully modern, and that's probably why my mother was so interested in it (the house we live in now was built in 1902, and the house her friend lives in was built even earlier). She told me that the house didn't so much have a scary, unwelcome feel, but that it just felt like "psychic things were happening in there". It apparently felt like there were other people there sometimes, maybe only one person or maybe a group, but you were never alone.

Now, it was only my mother and her friend in the house. Each of them had their own bathroom, and my mother's friend had a dish in her bathroom which she kept her rings and earrings in. Every night before she went to bed she would take off all the jewellery she was wearing and put it in the dish. It was ingrained habit; she never put her jewellery anywhere else, no matter how tired ("or drunk!") she was.

After they had been living there for a while, however, things started to go missing from the dish. At first it was chalked up to her being forgetful or distracted and placing the rings on the table in her room or somewhere else like that, but they claimed that they would "turn the house upside down looking for them" and never find what they had been looking for. And then, the next day, or the next week, or the next month, the missing item (s) would appear back in the dish, exactly where they were supposed to be. This never stopped happening but gradually both my mother and her friend got used to it and came to accept it, despite how annoying it could be.

Now for the part of the story I was familiar with. In the living area there was a fireplace, and in front of the fireplace was a heavy sandstone slab, about a foot wide, three long, and deep enough that the floorboards had been built around it.

For months it seemed ordinary, just another part of the house. But then my mother, a strong sceptic, had started having feelings around that area. She was struggling to find a way to describe it but when I said "Just a weird feeling?" she agreed and continued with the story.

She said she started to have dreams about the slab. She said she was convinced that there was something wrong with it, but she wasn't sure what. And then one day she had a dream that there was a body buried under it. I asked her if it felt factual or if she got any feeling from the dream, or any hints that the person had been murdered or anything like that, but she just shrugged and said it was just there, just fact. That she just knew there was a human body underneath the sandstone slab in front of the fireplace and that was that.

Of course, they also heard footsteps, and voices, and sound that could not be explained. The feelings of another presence never went away. But they got on with their lives and if anything more happened, I don't know about it. They never investigated at all, not the slab nor the house's history. I wished they had, because I'm very interested in it myself, but I guess this is all I will know about the house with the body under the sandstone slab.