These events took place in SE London, back in the 1980s.
A long time ago, when I was dating my ex-husband, he was living in a dingy basement flat that was so damp a previous tenant had actually nailed the wallpaper to the wall!
I was OK going there for the first couple of weeks, until I needed to go to the loo one lovely, sunny afternoon. I duly trotted upstairs to the (revolting) bathroom shared by all the tenants. So far, so good! Coming backdown I saw a man in a WWII ARP Wardens uniform looking out of the window at the back of the first floor of the house. For those who don't know what the ARP was, it was a group of very brave men and women who patrolled the streets at night (when most of the air raids took place) as Air Raid Precaution Wardens. Part of their job was to tell people whose blackout blinds/curtains were not totally lightproof to cover their windows (like Hodges in Dad's Army) and also to sound warnings and generally try to protect people when an air raid took place by getting them down into the public bomb shelters or into their own bomb shelters. This was all after doing a full day's work, as well!
Anyway, I digress. My ARP warden was standing and looking out of the window at two children and their parents (the father was wearing a Royal Navy uniform) playing with a ball in the back garden. He was totally focused on the little family and then started shouting and banging on the window, trying to get the family to the safety of the Anderson shelter in the garden (this was an upside down U shape with a hole underneath it big enough to take the residents of the house and was made from corrugated iron supported by wooden supports and covered over with earth, where families often grew vegetables!). The warden turned around and went to the top of the stairs and promptly vanished, but I did hear footsteps running down the stairs very fast. When I looked out of the window, to see if he'd made it to the back garden, the family had vanished, and all was quiet in the garden.
I saw them quite often after this and, of course, it piqued my interest about what had happened in the house. I went to the local library and into the local history department. There I found out that a bomb had landed on the house behind the house my ex was living in. The family had been killed by debris raining down on them and the subsequent fire. My ARP warden was also killed as he ran out of the house in an attempt to get the family into their air raid shelter. I found it very sad especially as the family in the garden were really enjoying their time together, possibly whilst the father was home on leave. I saw this played out three times in all and each time I felt tears welling up, knowing that all of them died - even now, remembering it after all this time, I still have tears in my eyes.
This house threw up another 'something' but to stop this becoming War & Peace, I'll write about it in another post.
Thank you for reading this, and I'm happy to answer questions about this haunting.
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