An Ordeal In London

My best friend K and her husband D purchased their dream home in 2014 near London. Ever since then they had been urging me to visit them. This July, after months of procrastination, I finally planned a one and a half month vacation in Europe with a fortnight break in London.

D was waiting for me at the airport and greeted me with a HUGE grin and a bear hug when he saw me. When I reached the house, it was already close to 11pm but what with the twilight and all the lights switched on in the house, it looked lovely, brilliant and inviting. The house itself was a semi detached occupying the corner plot in a nice quiet neighborhood.

I was given the best bedroom upstairs (overlooking the garden) and on my first night, I was asleep within 5 minutes, exhausted after all the traveling.

Little did I know that that would be the only night I would be sleeping blissfully.

It started on the second night...

I had gone to bed by 11. Next thing I know was me screaming hoarsely with my eyes fixed at the darkest corner of the room, and me only half awake. The funny thing was the room wasn't even dark as the street light fell on the ceiling and made everything slightly mellow. K and D had rushed into the room looking concerned (they were still up) and I was totally embarrassed by the whole episode. I apologized and said I had a nightmare and we all laughed it off.

But I still know what I had seen: an elderly lady in a white long sleeved ruffled dress, opening the door, walking into the room and bending over me with eyes wide open.

Since that night for as long as I stayed there, every night before going off to sleep I would say a prayer and then surround myself in pure white light that would protect me from any negative energy. I also spoke to the room saying that I was just visiting for a couple of weeks. That my friends, who were the owners of the house, had invited me as their guest, and I would be leaving after 2 weeks. I repeated this 2-3 times speaking slowly and sincerely. I didn't see anything in the room at night after that.

And since then, and for as long as I stayed there I would feel very uncomfortable on the landing just outside the door, but quite okay inside the room. The feelings of someone watching me intensified whenever I was on the landing as well as just inside the room by the door. Even going to the bathroom at night was an ordeal. This was right next to my room but whenever I stepped out of my room, the feelings of someone watching me always intensified. I started carrying a flashlight with me to the toilet at night to avoid the dark.

3rd night onward, every night I would hear heavy footsteps pacing the living room downstairs, crossing the hall and pounding up the stairs, stopping on the landing at my door and then retracing. This would start as soon as everyone was asleep and would go on until 3/3:30 am. At first I thought they were the noises of the house settling down. But the footsteps and the pounding up and down the stairs were absolutely unmistakable.

The first time I heard the noises, I thought someone had broken into the house. I even got up trying not to make any noise (but failing hopelessly, of course), went out to the landing but everything was absolutely still. Then I came back to my room, went up to the window, looked out to the garden to spot anything out of the ordinary, and the noises started again. It was only on my fifth or sixth night that I realized what the sounds really were. Throughout these noises, my friends would be sleeping soundly.

It was my second week in the house. I decided to take a break from sightseeing and spend a lazy day just relaxing. K invited me to go to High Street with her for window shopping and I declined (I was that tired!) So she left me alone for an hour or so and I was quite happy to be on my own. It was a lovely day - sunny, cool, and breezy, with not a cloud in the sky. I was lying on the sofa in the living room, totally relaxed and enjoying it, with not a worry in my head, still a little bit woozy, when I thought of getting my phone from my room and calling my Mom.

I got up, went down the narrow hall, and reached the stairs and had just put my foot on the first step, when out of the blues it HIT me - waves and waves and waves of absolute white hot anger just flowing down the stairs. I was totally unprepared for what happened and I felt overwhelmed and quite unable to fight it. Though I could see the landing and all the bedroom doors there was no one standing up there. However, even if my eyes couldn't see anybody, I could still "see" the person in my mind.

An elderly lady, wearing a white ruffled gown, standing on the landing just outside my bedroom door, just standing there with eyes wide open and unleashing her anger at me.

At first, I hesitated, with my foot on the first stair and my hand on the banister, thinking it was my overactive imagination. So I started climbing the stairs and the anger trebled. Also, it felt as if the lady in white had actually advanced a couple of feet closer to me. I felt utter terror like I had never felt before. It was a bone chilling, mind numbing and body paralyzing dread that just engulfed me.

I gave up. Whether it was my imagination or it was real, I realized I was totally vulnerable and shouldn't chance it. Even with the day time and all that brilliant sunshine, this was still an unfamiliar territory for me.

I went back to the living room, turned the TV's volume on high, and started counting the seconds for my friend's return. And she did within 30 minutes and I was so relieved. As soon as K and her daughter arrived, I felt I could go upstairs and get my phone. Crossing the landing, I couldn't feel the lady in white, however, that little area still crackled with residue energy that gave me a migraine when I crossed it. It was then that I noticed the opening hatch to the crawl space on the ceiling. It was just outside my room. I had "seen" her standing just below it on the landing.

This could be the reason why I would feel so uncomfortable everyday on the landing just outside my room but not on the landings outside the other bedrooms. It was the opening to the crawl space above and "something" that was living in it. I made sure I was never alone in the house again.

One evening, I was brushing my teeth in the downstairs bathroom just across the living room. Out of nowhere my hackles rose and a cold shiver ran down my spine. I felt crowded and that if I looked into the mirror, I would definitely see someone standing at my back: male, around 6 ft, wearing a brown suit and a bowler hat. I was so uncomfortable about anything I might see in the mirror that I just shut my eyes and left the bathroom, came back after 5 minutes to finish my business. The bathroom felt as empty as it looked.

I have another minor incident to share. This was not scary but still mystifying. It was around 9 am and I was getting ready to go out. My lipstick was on the bed and as I sat down, the bed dipped and the lipstick rolled down the bed, hit the floor and rolled under the bed (I heard the sounds clearly on the wooden floor). I sighed, got up, looked under the bed and... No lipstick. I got a flashlight, searched the whole bedroom floor and... Still no lipstick. D saw me crawling on the floor and joined me in the search. After a few minutes he told me that there was no lipstick anywhere. I gave it up, slightly annoyed as it was an expensive one, but didn't look for it any more.

The story doesn't end here. 2 months later when D was visiting me, he gave me a box saying it was a surprise. I open it and there it was: my lipstick! Apparently, they found it on the bed rails, while vacuuming the mattress. This rail was opposite to the one where the lipstick fell. And no way could it have ended there.

This is what I had experienced. I cannot confirm that I had seen anything. Even the one where I first saw the lady in white bending over me in bed can be attributed to hallucination/ sleep paralysis. But what I cannot deny are the feelings. I am an empath and even without trying I can normally sense the feelings of people, places and animals in general. And what I had sensed over there was that, at least one former owner of the house is not happy with the current ownership of the house. The anger that I felt was not for me specifically. It felt as if it was for everyone living in the house.

My friend K loves to sleep. She can fall asleep anytime and anywhere, and can sleep for 20 hours a day! But after buying this house, she suffers from insomnia and is depressed most of the time and gets irritated easily. Maybe it is not related, but I remember that when I was living in a haunted apartment in the U.S. (narrated in the story "A Bizarre Haunting") I became an insomniac which was cured within a month once I moved.

This is quite a long story but I really needed to write it all down at one go instead of breaking it up into pieces. While writing this story, I started sensing all those feelings that I had endured and within a split second in my mind I was back standing at the foot of the stairs shrouded in bone chilling terror. And I know I did not imagine any of those...