Experiences In The Leamington Spa Area

When I was about 17 I was living with my foster family.

My Foster Dad had gone to Russia, so his daughter, Trish, was looking after my foster siblings and his children. Someone came up with the idea that we would go camping, so we ended up driving to somewhere near a village called Tysoe. I haven't been able to find where we went since, but I recall it was on a disused WW2 airfield. Off to one side was a large wooded area, and someone said it was close to where the battle of Edgehill had occurred during the civil war.

Jeni, my Foster sister, and I went exploring the woods and found what looked like some kind of camp, it was all wood bent into a sort of hut with a chair inside and outside a burnt out fire. There was weird symbols made and hung around the area out of sticks. It felt really eerie and bizarre.

Later that night we were all in our tents and we could all hear people talking very quietly and it wasn't us. When we came out to look, there was what appeared to be silhouettes of people standing inside the woods, not moving but just standing there and talking all together quietly in such a way it felt very menacing. Whatever it was frightened us all enough to quickly pack up and leave half our stuff behind. In the car on the way back we were all freaked out and didn't want to sleep on our own so everyone slept in the front room together.

Years later, I had moved back to Leamington after being elsewhere and was sharing a house with a female friend. My ex and I were asleep and my housemate was out for the night. I woke up to the sound of what I thought was the front door, but then her dog went mental and so I knew it couldn't be her.

Something told me to run and hold the bedroom door shut and I could hear something outside the door and my housemate's dog going mental. We had boxes stacked up in the hall and it sounded like it was knocking stuff. My ex grabbed the metal pole of the vacuum cleaner and opened the door, and the dog went off chasing whoever it was into the living room. I was convinced we were being burgled and was just about to call 999 when my ex shouted out "There is no one here?" But the dog kept barking and growling in the direction of the corner of the room.

She stopped eventually and that was that, we just presumed she had gone a bit nuts. However the house had a really horrible feel to it, and I hated being there on my own after that and other weird things happened.

A few months later, I was looking after a lady in the care home I worked at and we were talking about her wedding. I asked the usual questions and she told me how on the morning of her wedding she was so happy to get married if only to be able to leave her parents house. I asked why and she said it was extremely haunted and she had never gone back after her marriage because of it.

I asked her where it was and she said Russell Terrace. I said "Oh I live on Russell Terrace!"

As it turned out, the house I lived in had been her parents' house, except nowadays it was converted into apartments. The corner the dog had been barking and growling at was where a doorway once was leading into the hallway of the original house.

When I went home I checked by pulling out the sofa and noticed that the skirting boards didn't match and so I could see that at some point a door had been blocked off. What really frightened me was that the lady I cared for said before her parents lived in the house someone with interest in Satanism had lived there. He was connected to Alistair Crowley who comes from Leamington Spa.

The lady had told me that her parents had sealed off the basement because of whatever happened in the house. I never knew the house had a basement, but sure enough when I went outside I could see little metal grates low down and also signs that whatever windows had once been there had been bricked up and concreted to conceal them. Not long after this, black mold grew up the inside walls and upon speaking to the landlord we found out that the cause was the location of the house to the river Leam and the basement being flooded by the high water table, causing rising damp. Because the entrance to the basement was sealed off water had sat for years and caused structural damage to the house. We left soon after, however I don't think whatever was there stayed there. Maybe I can share that another time.

The house was renovated, but interestingly enough they never chose to restore the basement. Russell Terrace would earn a good income from converting the basement into additional flats but the owner decided to keep it sealed.