IS MY HOUSE REALLY HAUNTED?

When we moved into our current house in Northern Ireland we noticed that there were regular incidents when we heard noises. These were sounds like someone dropping old pennies from one hand to another or counting money. Wendy, my daughter would laughingly say "The money man's here again," and we all thought it odd.

Since I was working in Housing at the time, out of interest, I checked the housing records for the house and the first person who lived in it only lived here for one week, after which there was a long space where the house lay vacant. That really puzzled me. It was a brand new house just build and lying vacant. It was built at a time when there was a lot of redevelopment going on and whole streets of old sub-standard housing was being torn down. Why did the first tenant move out so suddenly? Why was there nobody living there for over a year when untenanted properties means a loss of revenue? Properties today are allocated very quickly and the turnover of tenants is quick.

Then neighbours told me that the last people before us only stayed in the house for around 6 months, which I had noticed from the records. This, they said, was odd because they got a professional decorator in and had the place decorated and suddenly up and went with no warning and no explanation. One day they were there, next they had gone. Curiouser and curiouser! The house was all newly decorated okay, except that they'd suddenly stopped with the back bedroom and not finished it. Lilac paint on the bottom half of the walls, pink paint on the top, but no border along where one should go. It struck me as a little girl's nursery or bedroom in the making and yes ... the last people had a baby girl. A Barbie border or something similar would've finished the room off, and the woodwork needed painted in there too. Why go to all that trouble and expense and suddenly move out, abandoning the nursery decorating? Why pay a decorator like you were staying for a long time and suddenly up sticks? Something had to have happened, yet none of the neighbours knew what. The young couple had started to dig over the soil in the front garden and appeared to have been trying to do something with that too, and when I moved in I had a lot of digging and levelling to do as by then the property had then lain for some months, again without tenants and weeds had grown up and litter had accumulated. Strange?

When my daughter moved in with us she heard the “money man” as often as I did, and around 9.30pm some nights she would feel somewhat asthmatic and would say things like "Sometimes I feel like somone is trying to choke me." While she was there I sometimes woke in the night hearing someone walking about on the wooden floor of the spare back bedroom, now my studio, and painted blue and un-girly. I'd get up to investigate and nobody was there. Then there were a few times when she and I were sitting in the living room and heard loud thuds like something had fallen over in there and I'd go to see what it was and was completely baffled as nothing was out of place. This happened at least twice in the year she stayed here, that I can recall. On the second occasion there was a smell of pipe tobacco in the room. We definately don't smoke a pipe folks, nor does the cat! I still smell pipe tobacco occasionally, the last time being a few days ago in the living room.

The incidents have lessened since my daughter got her own flat, but I have since found two old King George pennies lying on the floor in the back room. They weren't mine, nobody had visited that day to have dropped them there. My husband was at work and he never had owned old pennies, so where did these pre-decimalization coins come from? Odd?

I started looking into who the first person who lived here was, asking people who had lived in the area since the houses were built what they knew about him. I found out a few interesting things. It was a man who actually hung himself here in this house. He had worked in a Betting Shop and had been caught stealing money, was sacked, and Police were investigating. His wife left him taking the children, because of the shame. Police came a few times looking for him then went to see his family who reported having not seen him for a few days. They forcibly entered the house and he was found hanged, on the landing, rope danging from the rafters, having jumped through the loft opening to get a good drop. He had counted much of the stolen money out in piles and rolls of notes kept in £100's by elastic bands. The Inquest report said the estimated time of death was 9.30pm. People didn't want to live in this house due to the hanging, which was why it lay empty.

Over time, that was something which went out of people's minds, I guess, and two other families lived here between then and us moving in. A neighbour told me one always said the house was haunted and "doing his head in", turned to drink and moved out after a break-up with his partner.

The most recent piece of the jigsaw puzzle was when a friend of the last family who lived here told me that they left the house as there was "something not right about it." To cut a long story short, she said that they had begun to worry about the baby as she stopped breathing one night around 9.30pm and an ambulance had to come. "There's something weird about that house," she said further informing me that a young man from the previous family had moved out while his mother lived here because he woke up at nights feeling like the life was being squeezed out of him and having difficulty breathing. Choking. She said he believed that the house was haunted.

It turned out that I actually knew the boy’s stepfather. He had been a neighbour of mine at a previous house I lived in. I knew where he worked so went there and spoke to him about the house. He confirmed that Thomas hated living there and that there were times they heard noises which were unexplainable. They got two dogs as they tried rationalising some of what was going on there thinking a few incidents had been down to neighbourhood kids playing pranks. On two occasions their dogs vanished from the back yard and were found by the Dog Warden in a neighbouring town about 6 miles away. The young man, Thomas, still lived in the area. He had his own flat in the next street, so I also went and spoke to him. He confirmed that when he occupied the bedroom my daughter had slept in he too had been woken in the night feeling like he was being throttled. He said it only happened when he had gone to sleep early due to shift work and it was always around 9.30pm. He also smelt pipe tobacco in there at times when this was happening. Thomas never walks past the house on this side of the street, although the turn off onto his street is just two houses past mine.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" Want to come visit? How about midnight on Halloween?