I've been bored at work recently and read a lot of the stories here. Some of them seem to be written by kids practising their writing, which is cool but this is not the place. I can assure you that what follows happened for real.
In the mid 1990's my mother bought an old Victorian railway station house in the south of England. The station was still functioning but as the area was so secluded trains rarely stopped there and mostly just passed through. The building itself was typically Victorian, with a very creepy tower attached that looked like something right out of a horror film.
I stayed there most weekends and straightaway felt very uneasy and had trouble sleeping in my room, as there was no TV to turn on for comfort. The only TV was in the living room, so each night after everyone had gone to bed I would trundle downstairs to the living room with my duvet to watch TV.
The living room had 3 large bay windows that could be opened directly onto the station platform. This wasn't as bad as it sounds as there were few people using the station and my mother had put up both net and thick dark curtains, but she was still very worried about someone breaking in through these windows and it was a house rule to always lock the heavy door that separated the living room from the rest of the house.
The first time I went down to watch TV I was quite scared about being downstairs alone, I went to the kitchen first to get a drink and felt very uneasy. I quickly went to the living room and turned the TV and a couple of lamps on. Straight away I felt better and began to relax watching the TV. I awoke some time later after hearing a loud thud. The room was in complete darkness with the lamps and TV off, I was frozen in fear for some unknown reason so I stayed still and silent and waited. After some time I managed to summon the courage to turn on the lamp. Everything was fine, except the TV being turned off at the mains and the door being closed (I had made a point to leave the door open thinking it would be fine as I was in the room.) I turned the handle and it was locked - I began to at first panic, and then became angry thinking that either my sister had decided to play a trick on me or my step dad had decided to make a point about me leaving the door open. I looked around the room thinking what I could do without waking up the whole house and moved towards the window, thinking about climbing out and walking around the front when I saw the key on the mantle piece. I had no idea how it got there but I quickly grabbed it, opened the door and ran upstairs to my bedroom.
The next day I shrugged this off and tried to forget about it but it still played heavily on my mind, and as the night came I felt uneasy again. I went to bed at the same time as the rest of the family this time but neither my sister nor I could sleep so we went downstairs together to watch TV.
I had the key in my pocket and opened the door fully and dragged a very heavy old sewing machine in front of the door, much to my sister's bemusement (I hadn't told her about the previous night). She asked what I was doing and I told her what happened. Her face dropped and she told me that last night she was woken up with someone viciously pulling her hair, to the point where some hair had been pulled out. We turned on the lamps and TV and tried to not think about it. After awhile we both started to relax, she became sleepy and went up to bed and I stayed to watch TV.
I awoke later in darkness like before. The TV and lamps were out; I reached and turned on the lamp straight away. The door was closed again. I felt a pang of fear, there was no way my sister would have the strength to move it and it was so noisy to move I would hear it anyway. I checked for the key in my pocket and it was there. I moved towards the door with my heart thumping and tried the handle - it was locked. I unlocked the door and slowly walked into the hall, I was looking straight ahead with the kitchen to my immediate right. Instinctively I was afraid to look into the kitchen and then I heard heavy sustained growl from there. Feeling very afraid I walked towards the stairs. The sewing machine was in the middle of the hall. I ignored it and went upstairs to my bedroom where I stayed awake until the sun rose.
After this incident all was quiet for a while. I stopped going downstairs to watch TV and instead resorted to stealing brandy to sleep while I bugged my mum to get a TV for my room. I did hear that one morning my mother went downstairs and tried to unlock the door to the living room but couldn't budge the door, she called for my step dad to help who finally got it open and they found the same sewing machine dragged behind the door blocking it.
A few years later there had not been much more activity than the incidents described, except that when I woke in the morning the curtains would be open after I closed them at night. My mother had decided to decorate the tower room, so that it could be used as a guest room.
The tower, which I described at the start of the story, was separated from the rest of the house by a small staircase. The main stairs led up to a small landing and then the stairs split with one set going to the bedrooms and the other going a room below the tower, which also housed the bathroom. No one liked the tower part of the house, and I felt more uneasy here than anywhere else. I would only use the bathroom with the door open.
When we began to redecorate the room below the tower, we steamed the old wallpaper off the wall and found lots of very old markings on the walls. They were made with a pencil so most had faded so that you could barely see them, but from what you could see they seemed to be drawings of faces. Some were grotesque, others were beautiful but they were all very strange. We also pulled up the old carpet and found deep grooves in the floorboards. Some of the most badly damaged boards had to be replaced, and when we removed them we found an old scroll tied with ribbon hidden in the floor. It was too deep to reach by hand so my step dad tried to grab it using coal tongs, but it disintegrated when he grabbed it so we never knew what it said.
The tower itself could only be reached by a wooden staircase leading from the room below to a trap door. It was a strange space, completely impractical as a room so it was never used, even for storage, as it was too difficult to get anything through the trap door. After the redecorating, strange dragging noises were often heard from there by the family including myself. One morning I went up into the tower with my step dad to investigate and we couldn't believe our eyes, the entire floor was filled with dead flies. It was as if a plague of flies had entered the tower and the whole swarm had died there. He was quite disturbed and told me that the previous owners had warned him that they had a priest to exorcise the property to no avail.
Some weeks later my mother bought my sister a kitten. It was full of energy and inquisitive as most kittens are, and would tear around the house only to sleep with my sister at night. It would sometimes play in the tower part of the house only to bolt out of there to find my sister.
One night I had to get up to use the toilet. By this time I refused to use the toilet in the tower part of the house and would go all the way downstairs. On my way downstairs I saw the kitten crouching on its stomach in the doorway to the tower room. I called it, and it looked at me but was frozen in what seemed to be a very unnatural position as if something was forcing it down. I quickly jumped and grabbed him and took to my room. He was rigid in the same position for a few seconds then slowly relaxed. The poor thing then wet himself while his fur stood on end and he slowly dug his claws deeply into my arm, clearly out of fear. I woke my sister and we found that 4 of his front teeth and his tail was broken. The next day he would not come into the house and would try to escape when forced. My mother had to give him away soon after.
After this, both my mother and step dad took things more seriously and things escalated drastically. My mother actually asked us to not visit her for a while as things were so bad. One of my aunts, and my step dads mother had both stayed over in the converted tower room and both claimed to have been attacked during the night. My step dad was terrified after seeing something he would not talk about in his bedroom. My mother usually a sceptic also started to experience things.
She told us that she was in the bath in the tower part bathroom when there was a power cut. She got out of the bath, put a towel on and went to check on the fuse. It was pitch black when she opened the door from the bathroom into the tower room and when she entered it, she heard and felt a heavy thud as is if something had dropped from the trapdoor onto the floor. Terrified she tried to flee the room, but crashed into a wall that shouldn't have been there. She said that she was feeling her way down the wall in the darkness and the layout of the room was different. She eventually got out and they decided to move soon after.
On the last night before we moved the family was very uneasy. Both my sister and I both had TV's in our rooms by now so we went to bed with our TV's on and my mother told us to keep our door's open. After a short while my sister screamed. We all ran to her room to see sparks shooting out of the back of her TV. We turned it off and agreed that she could sleep in my room with me. When we were in my room the exact same thing started to happen to my TV until it blew up. We stayed up until daybreak then had to move house in the morning with no sleep. We were all glad to go.
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