Poltergeist Plagues Family Home

SPOOKY goings-on at a Hendon house are scaring the living daylights out of a mum and her six children.

Marie Williams believes that spirits are haunting her home, trashing rooms, causing sulphurous smells, opening and closing curtains, throwing objects around and even scratching her.

Paranormal experts have all recorded unexplained activity in the Victorian home, in Toward Road, but say the spirits are too strong for them to remove.

Marie, 34, is now pleading for help or else she feels she will be forced to move house.

In the past year, the incidents have escalated from hearing footsteps when no one is around to items going missing and objects the family have never seen before, such as Victorian trinkets, being thrown in the house.

At its worst, mucky water from a unknown source has run down the bannister and people’s ankles have been grabbed by a mystery source, while Marie has been locked in the kitchen and was scratched down the neck.

She said: “It started about six weeks after we moved in. I was up a pair of ladders hanging some curtains at the landing window and I heard someone walking up the stairs.

“I looked down and there was no one there. Then I heard someone come up next to the ladders. It was like they turned round on the carpet and ran back down.”

Over the months the incidents have escalated and Marie and her children have seen two different girls in the house as well as a man.

Marie said: “The gentleman always appears in the hallway. When I first saw him, I thought ‘did I see that or am I just tired.’ But I’ve seen him again and again. He looks like a normal person, like a man in a shirt and trousers. He’s not ghostly white or anything but it’s like looking at a shadowy version of a normal person.”

Before Marie moved into the three-storey house it had been empty for a year but she chose it because it had enough rooms to accommodate her and her children – Callum, 15, Kaitlin, 13, Cameron, nine, twins Hannah and Charlotte, six and Harvey, 18 months.

The mum has looked into moving but can’t find any houses of that size for a reasonable rent. Instead she hopes an expert may read this article and be able to help rid her home of the ghosts.

The situation has become so bad that Marie, who is carer for Harvey who has chronic lung disease, has been physically attacked.

She said: “I was walking on the landing as I’d been upstairs to get Harvey a blanket and I felt this almighty burning, sharp sensation. When I looked in the mirror there was a large, raised scratch. I was so shocked because it’s the first time I’d been physically touched by them.”

She added: “It seems to have got worse in the past couple of weeks. There’s been dirty brown water running down the bannisters and it’s come from nowhere, there’s no leaks.

“I don’t get much sleep and it’s hard to convince your children they’re safe when they see things.

“Kaitlin has seen a girl with long dark hair in her mirror in her bedroom and Callum has seen a girl in the mirror downstairs and shadows disappear into walls. They’re terrified and don’t want to go upstairs on their own.”

Paranormal investigators who have visited the house believe it may be haunted by Jinn, supernatural creatures from Arabic folklore and have given Marie a copy of the Koran in a bid to placate the spirits. But all attempts so far have failed to cleanse the house.

“I have cleansed houses before, but this is beyond my powers. We need someone who can come in and tell us what it is so we can get rid of it for this mum and her kids so they can stay in their house.”

l Anyone who thinks they can help the family can contact katy.wheeler@northeast-press.co.uk

I see that there are lots of skeptics in the audience. I just want to relate what happened to me many years ago when I was a volunteer guide at the Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia. Another man and I told the visitors what had transpired during the Civil War in the Old Stone House: soldiers taken there for medical treatment had suffered greatly and some had died.

Very late one Sunday afternoon as I was by myself closing up the Old Stone House I distinctly heard footsteps on the second floor. At first I thought that some tourist had sneaked up there and I went up to investigate. But there was no one there. Which gave a case of the chills and I quickly did all I had to do and got the hell out of there.

Later I checked with other guides and some told me that they, too, had heard footsteps on that second floor and found no one there.

Yeah, I think a place can be haunted.

Maybe 4 or 5 years ago I was experiencing a lot of weird “assaults” on myself during the night or early morning. It started pretty small, where I would hear shouts in the left or right ear jolting me from sleep. Other times I would be getting up, and I would hear someone call my name from downstairs. I’d look down, but, of course, I was alone in my home. I ignored this, assuming it was just figments of my imagination.

As time past, the morning incidents began to increase in severity. One time I woke up feeling someone’s hand on my chest, which I assumed to be a family member, but when I opened my eyes the hand removed itself and there was no one there. Other times I would feel my blanket yanked off of me, or hands touching my legs or stroking my hair. Each time the phenomena would stop the moment I opened my eyes. I ignored all of this and honestly didn’t think all that much about it. I just assumed it was a trick of the brain that was a result of fatigue. It also would always happen during the moments when I was just waking up or falling asleep, so it was reasonable to think it was just all in my head.

One morning I began having a weird dream. In the dream I was lying face down on a stone slab. The entire area was filled with a horrible green fog. Eventually, in the dream, I could see a man circling around me. I couldn’t see him clearly, more like just his shadow in the smog, but he was dancing and chanting as he circled me. At his feet was a very large snake which instantly caused me to be terrified. He started to kick the snake, and then slapping it, and then finally picking it up and dropping it, as he circled around me. Finally the snake escaped from him and headed towards me. It circled around to my blind spot and suddenly struck me on my left arm.

I woke up, of course, in a fright, only to discover a bigger fright. I felt an intense pressure on my left arm that was both pressing my arm into the bed and making the point of contact around my arm utterly numb. The rest of my arm had feeling except for that part being squeezed. Above me I could hear this hissing/growl that was (and still is) unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was growling just above me, though coming from a source just a little to the left. The sound had substance and I could literally feel it. It was not a sound originating from my own head.

I could move my entire body, but I was so terrified that I refrained from struggling too much. I told myself over and over again that it was just my imagination. A trick of the brain caused by just waking up from that nightmare. After what seemed a few minutes, I began to try to speak to myself in order to snap out of it. I started to say “I must not fear,” but I was so afraid that I was only mumbling the words out. When I finally came to the last word “f-f-f-f-ear”, something snapped inside me and I suddenly blurted out, quite out of nowhere, “The Lord is my shield!” clearly and loudly. After I said that, my arm was released and the growl/hiss was gone.

For maybe another year or two nothing like that happened again. All of the weird voices or touches also ended, and my nights and mornings were peaceful again. Eventually I did have one last encounter. On this occasion, I got licked, and felt the warm wet lick on my cheek before throwing my arms up. I had woken up to feel someone hovering over me with their arm on my chest pressing down. I assumed it was my niece or nephew trying to torment me. Usually, at that age, when my brother came to visit he would let himself in and the kids would rush over to my (usually) sleeping form and begin to kick and jump on me. Since I didn’t want to be roped into playing with them and just wanted to sleep more, my custom was just to ignore the abuse. This time I thought that maybe this was a new tactic to force an acknowledgment out of me. When the presence, (and I could feel a heat from it) came closer and licked me, I finally decided they had gone too far and reached out my arms to throw them off. When I finally opened my eyes, though, I was totally alone in the house. I prayed after that, and since that time nothing like that has ever happened again.

I don’t know if any of this was actually supernatural. I know that there is such a thing as lucid dreaming, where you can feel and touch things in the dream as if they were real. One cannot underestimate the power of the mind to delude itself. It seemed to me to be real phenomena, but maybe your average schizophrenic experiences something worse than that on a daily basis. The experiences increased my faith, which makes me think that they were likely not demonic, since their work was so obviously counterproductive to their goals.

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