Don’t Go Near the Water…

Cautionary tales to protect children are a cross-cultural phenomenon. From stepping over pavement cracks to prevent an immediate attack of the ursidae variety or the immediate shattering of your own mother’s spine to the cannibalistic ‘Basket Woman’ of Native American Folklore who will hit you in the head with a stick and boil you should you dare to venture out past bedtime; the use of fear to quell rebellion in children is universal.

Some might argue that this oral tradition has been lost; that a more appropriate story for today’s generation is the one about that kid who used so many hashtags, they disappeared into their own ego. It is entirely possible that in today’s society the lure of the outdoors, the wild places of the world is not as prevalent as it was years ago, that children are aware of the very real and present dangers facing them, that the trolls, ogres and goblins have been relegated back behind the trees of time.

Is this really true? We’ve seen with the tulpa phenomena that is Slenderman, that storytelling has moved with the times…whether there is a cautionary sentiment or indeed, a moral of sorts remains to be seen, especially in light the tragic case of the attempted murder case in 2014 in which the lurking malevolence of ‘the internet’ was widely blamed. I am not in a position to comment either way, what is significant here is that stories are being told, stories which wield a degree of power.

Cautionary folktales and their monsters have always held a particular fascination for me. As a child, rivers, woods and ponds held wildlife rather than the dark creatures of myth. In the mid 1980s,  stranger danger was a much more relevant story than being snatched by an ogre.  When the huge television on its metal legs was wheeled out into the assembly hall of my primary school, it was the pylons and substations with the terrifying ‘jumping’ electricity

As well as getting your plimsolls caught in train lines!!

People older than I will no doubt recall Donald Pleasance’s mellifluous voiceover  in the 1973 rather Eldritch public information video ‘Lonely Water ‘

a film that still stays with many to this day. What is interesting about this is in contrast to the gritty realism of its contemporaries, it instead purveys an air of mysticism about water…

In doing some research for a current novel, I came across the Inuit story of Qalupalik; a cautionary tale that tells of a green skinned, long-haired and fearsome water spirit that prays on disobedient children. You can watch an animated version of the story here.

Almost serendipitously, I was listening to a radio programme about folkloric tales from my own neck of the woods (North East England) and came across an almost identical creature by the name Peg Powler, a ‘river hag’ (The differentiation from a witch must be noticed here) a type of spirit with green skin, long hair and sinewy arms that pulls naughty children into the River Tees. The similarity of this Teesside demon to the Inuit Qalupalik is striking. What’s more, Peg Powler and Qalupalik are not limited to places north…

In Lancashire, lurking beneath the stagnant waters of ponds, there is a creature known as Jinny Greenteeth (in Cheshire and Shropshire she is known as Ginny, Jeanie, Jenny and, perhaps significantly Peg O’Nell)

This old woman who lurks in the waters of stagnant ponds also has green skin, long hair and arms; her modus operandi again, is to reach and snatch the disobedient young from the waters’ edge. A few Jinny Greenteeth stories are cautionary tales aimed at children don’t clean their teeth (which is a bit rich to be fair!)

Crossing the divide between Lancashire and into Yorkshire, there is the Grindylow; again, a long-armed, green creature that dwells in bogs and lakes and drags in children who stray too close to the waters’ edge.

I most certainly not in a position to be able to explain the link between these regional amphibious horrors, nor less to explain  this idea of creatures, specifically female, that guard water. What I can do, however, is marvel at what seems to be a worldwide trend. There are, however some slight variations on a theme:

The Scottish ‘Maighdean Vaine’ or ‘Green Lady’ a blood-drinking water-seductress is seen as both malevolent or benevolent, more often than not though, a mischievous friend and companion to children who encounter her.

Nigeria has ‘Mommy-water’, a bereaved spirit wailing from beneath the waters of canals and lakes for her lost child. ‘Mommy-water’, like her western and Arctic contemporaries will reach out and pull you down if you get too close.  The Jamaican ‘River-Mumma’ who guards the source of rivers is  rather less predatory, instead, a more mermaid or siren type creature that sits combing her hair in the river and lures her victims to join her beneath the waves.

Scandinavian Näcken and German Nix or Nixie (There are variations of the spelling) are, again, siren-like water nymphs who lure their pray (mostly women and children) with song and music played on their fiddles.

It is in Slavic folklore that these seductive water-spirits are perhaps revered as much as they are feared. The Rusalka, water demons that vary in descriptions from naked maidens to hairy creatures are often seen as the spirits of murdered girls or suicides. They are also sometimes seen as spinners of fate and even had their own festival . ‘Rusalka Week’ or ‘Green Week’  in early June was the time when Rusalka rose from their watery depths and swing on the branches of the willow and birch trees; to swim during this time would be your death. To banish these spirits, there are variations of ritualistic fertility offerings that banish the Rusalka back below the waters from whence they came. In Belarus, an elaborate ceremony was performed; eggs were left at the foot of a birch tree, with wreaths woven into its branches and women swore eternal friendship to each other to weather the fickleness of men and prevent more suicides which would, in turn, create more Rusalka. Sometimes these trees, seen as symbols of femininity were hurled into the lakes to warn the Rusalka to leave the men alone.

There are of course, hundreds more variants of predatory water-entities in folklore across the world as well as aquatic deities (some of which are male) but there is not enough room to include all of them here. I have merely touched on what is clearly a very ancient and spiritual

Our world is around 70% water, a great percentage of our own being is water; our physicality and mind is affected, like the seas, by the pull of the moon. Much of what lies beneath the seas that surround us, has never been seen by human eyes. It has been suggested that the Celts and pre-Celtic aborigines were water-worshippers; a plethora of water-cults prevailed through Europe. Born of the seas, we evolved to sever our bind to water and perhaps, as we and our beliefs evolved, we look back over our shoulders at this ancient mother of ours with a certain trepidation.

As well we might.

“I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind-of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.”

HP Lovecraft – Dagon

The Vampire Rabbit of Amen Corner

There’s nothing more galvanising to the intrigue than a local idiosyncrasy, a mystery. This particular mystery leers down, eldritch, grotesque and unashamedly real. Cast in stone, tenebrous in essence, red in tooth and claw (in this case, literally); its purpose shrouded to the aeons of time.

No one knows why, perched, bold as Poe’s raven, above the ornate doorway of the buildings that snake around the rear of the ancient Cathedral of Saint Nicholas, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne known as Amen Corner, hangs the snarling gargoyle of a monstrous, fanged rabbit.

The building where the rabbit resides is, in comparison to the Cathedral, relatively new; currently officers of solicitors, built in 1901, yet the site itself dates back to the Roman era and was known as Pons Aelius, the fort that guarded the first crossing of the river Tyne. The oldest surviving fragment of the cathedral  it frames, dates back to 1175.

Before the son of William the Conqueror built the castle keep, Amen Corner was a Saxon cemetery; before becoming a burial ground for Newcastle’s elite until the 18th century. These days, the headstones are mostly gone, the remaining few built into the surrounding wall and paths.

I used to work in a restaurant down Newcastle’s quayside, five minutes walk from Amen corner and in the summer, I would spend the fleeting hours before my shift started reading books beneath the trees of the small cemetery. During those dappled afternoons, I was always aware of the presence of the rabbit, from its perch on the doorway ten meters or so behind me.

I would occasionally skirt the alley at the edge of the cemetery and stare up at it, gaze at those bulging, furious eyes and savage teeth, wondering…’what are you? Why are you here?’

Unfortunately there’s no answer to that question; not a conclusive one anyway. One of the theories is that the rabbit was created by the architect (William H Wood 1889-1939) as a tribute, or to mock  Sir George Hare Philipson, professor of medicine at Durham University and a physician at Newcastle Royal Infirmary.

However, older photos show that the creature’s ears were originally shorter; giving the creature a more rabbit-y appearance until the late 1980s when they were extended and became more ‘hare’ like.

Wood, the architect of the building also founded University of Durham Masonic lodge; I am by no means a scholar of Masonic iconography, however, it is possible for a link to be construed:

Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead, (fertility in the pre-Dynastic period) is an important deity in Freemasonry;  often depicted with black skin (just like the rabbit) or a shroud. In the Masonic system, the symbol of the hare represents Osiris and has been adopted as the symbol of light, or the ‘moral illumination’.

The symbol of the hare appears again in Anglo- Saxon mythology (remember Amen corner is a former Saxon cemetery); in the form the shape-shifter Ostara, another fertility deity who took the form of a hare beneath the full moon. (In Native American folklore, Manabozho, another shape-shifter is known as ‘The Great Hare’)

The symbol meaning ‘hare’ is the Egyptian  hieroglyphic of open eyes. Interestingly, the Hebrew word for Hare (arnebet) is compounded using nabat – ‘to see’ (Portal, 1990, Les Symbols des Egyptiens, 69).  Osiris has been equated with Ra, a single god self-fertilising  creation deity  (according to the Book of the Dead)

“It is Osiris. Others, however, say that his name is Ra, and that the god who dwelleth in Amentet is the phallus of Ra, wherewith he had union with himself.”

This idea of self-fertilisation is also attributed to Amen who was fused with Ra to create a solar creator god Amen-Ra.

The vampire rabbit stares with open eyes over ‘Amen Corner’ – coincidence or tenuous link?

However, the association between the hare and the Egyptian deities could just be a massive mistake; the link is thought to be a 19th century error in Egyptologists understanding of ancient Egyptian epithets (IE. Hare- wn, with Osiris Wennefer, a high priest of Osiris who carries the same epithet –wn which alludes to the power of Osiris but is not related, semantically to the animal.)

 If indeed, Wood was paying tribute to Masonic divinity;  a wide-eyed is as good a symbol as any (presumably before this error was discovered)but that begs one more question about the rabbit…why the fangs…the claws?

One explanation could be the creative way in which Christianity likes to demonise the belief of others – the pagan celebration of Ostara, (Ēostre in Northumbrian dialect) the spring equinox where eggs (a symbol of fertility) were given as gifts, presided over by the hare goddess Ostara – was changed to ‘Easter’ and the myth perpetuated that rabbits and hares were to be feared. However, according to some, the entire Ostara and rabbit connection is just a myth perpetuated by modern pagans…

So really, there’s nothing we can conclude for certain about the vampire rabbit of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. A tenuous tribute, a Masonic mistake or a two-fingered salute to the Cathedral and its clergy whose procession would end around this side of the building?

Or maybe William H Wood just fancied sticking a vampire rabbit on a doorway?

Books of 2014

In no particular order, the following books published in 2014 are the ones that have moved me, excited me or inspired me in some way. The stand-outs amongst many, so I make apologies for the following notable exceptions (as those authors are going to be desperately upset they didn’t make an arbitrary list on a nobody’s blog.)

‘The Ice Palace‘ Tarjei Vesaas (1963), ‘Niceville‘ Carsten Stroud (2012) ‘The Silence of the Sea‘, Yrsa Sigurdadottir (2011) ‘Under the Skin‘  Michael Faber (2000) and everything by Gillian Flynn (including the magnificent screenplay of ‘Gone Girl’.

Should my opinion on books mean anything whatsoever to you (why it would is anyone’s guess), please read on…

The Troop – Nick Cutter

When Stephen King recommends a book, it’s hard for a fan of horror not to be intrigued. I have to also say that without King’s recommendation, I would never have heard of this, so saturated the horror market has become by tired zombie stories and ‘erotic’ vampire novels. Cutter’s story of a scout troop abandoned on an island with something terrible is pleasantly original without being wary of a b-movie style ‘scare’.  The Troop is one of those stories you find yourself drawn instantly into its midst; the characterisation is rich and the guts and gore don’t feel gratuitous or unnecessary. I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of what happens to Cutter’s scout troop; but those looking for a contemporary and fresh voice in the genre couldn’t do much better than this.

There have been comparisons drawn with Lord of the Flies and whilst The Troop shares some of the themes of Golding (boys abandoned on an island, power struggles in a group dynamic), this is where the comparison ends. The Troop, as is described by Stephen King is old-school style horror and unashamedly so.

What sets The Troop apart from its contemporaries, however, is its strength in characterisation. When you care about the characters in a book; the implausibility of their situation matters less than how they deal with it. I found myself easily immersed in this novel; allowing myself ‘one more chapter’ before I stopped, as tea remained uncooked and washing remained unfolded. That’s got to be a good sign!

Broken Monsters – Lauren Beukes

What can I say? This could possibly be my favourite book of 2014. Lauren Beukes, author of ‘The Shining Girls’, a best-selling crime-noir about a time-shifting serial killer (Dr. Who with an story worth following?) but with Broken Monsters, Beukes takes us to a whole new level of gritty reality. In the exhaust-clogged, shell of Detroit City, Detective Gabriella Versado is called to the scene of  what the police are calling ‘Bambi’, a dead boy whose top half has been fused to the hind quarters of a fawn. This is just the beginning of Versado’s terrible pursuit of a serial killer who believes they can find the thin place between the worlds in the realisation of their dream; carving their victims into hideous parodies of underground art.

Much of the narrative is told through the online world form; Reddit posts, Tumblr, text and social media. It’s an ultra-smart and contemporary way to portray not only the younger generation, but the huge part streaming news and social media plays in our lives that Beukes pulls off with aplomb. If traditionally told stories is your thing, I don’t expect this novel will appeal.

Beukes pulls no punches and there is gore and grimness aplenty but splatterpunk this aint. This is a dark tale told with no glamour yet ultimately one of the most exciting crime publications of 2014. Beukes’ sparse use of the paranormal will, no doubt polarise the opinions of those who like their crime noir ‘pure’, however, this side of the story is sparse, lending just enough to accentuate an already gloomy premise.

The plot itself is an intelligent crime story that’s intrigue does not abate. Reading Broken Monsters, I found myself having to put it down as I was enjoying it that much and didn’t want it to end too quickly.

The Girl With All the Gifts – MR Carey

If there’s a theme in contemporary fiction that’s been done to death; done so much to death that its bloated corpse is palpably shuddering with every half-hearted thud of a spade blade on its shattered coffin lid, it’s the zombie apocalypse. Even the idea of ‘zombies’ as ruthless and predatory ‘infected’ rather than the shambling figure of Haitian folklore is a weary cliché we’ve all seen a million times.

By all accounts, therefore, The Girl with all the Gifts should be one to avoided like the plague (see what I did there?) but making an assumption like that (which I very nearly did) is a big mistake to make.

M.R. Carey’s 2014 novel, though dealing with the last survivors of a global pandemic, a deadly fungal virus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis –that’s the one that makes ants climb to the top of plants to be eaten by predators, as if you didn’t know!) which turns humans to flesh-eating ‘hungries’, feels fresh, despite itself.

In fact, the concept in essence is remarkably similar to the equally enthralling game, Naughty Dog’s 2013 ‘The Last of Us’. Coincidence? To be honest, it really doesn’t matter and to be fair, this genre has limited options.

The Girl with all the Gifts’ style is immediately accessible and grasps the reader from the start with cold, dead fingers. Rather than extensive exposition and philosophising on the end of the world as we know it; Carey’s narrative  fluctuates between just a few characters – Melanie, a small girl who spends her days (when she is not muzzled and restrained) at school; Melanie’s teacher, Miss Justineau; Sergeant Parks and scientist Caroline Caldwell. It is the relationship between these four that drives the novel forward. Melanie and Miss Justinaeu’s pseudo parent-daughter dynamic is instantly relatable and in such tragic circumstances establishes itself as the heart of the novel from the beginning. The two others by contrast represent the ‘establishment’; they that dehumanise the ‘infected’ and think nothing of destroying them or indeed locking up 10 year old children for scientific research into a cure.

This is a human story rather than a ‘zombie’ one as such. While the scientist would like to literally delve inside Melanie’s brains, the teacher recognises her as a person in her own right. This tension as the four of them escape from Sergeant Parks’ base that the ‘hungries’ have overrun is the crux of the story and such strongly established characterization carries the reader all the way to the superbly bleak ending.

Bird Box – Josh Malerman

Another fresh voice in the horror genre, Bird Box tells a highly original tale of the end of days; something has happened in the world, people are boarding up their windows, people are wearing blindfolds, people are killing themselves, killing each other.

They have all seen something.

When Malorie’s sister looks out of the window and kills herself, Malorie is alone. Pregnant and desperate, she answers an ad in a newspaper; sanctuary.

The strength of this story is it is largely told in the dark; the characters wear blindfolds at all times; their skin becomes sallow, their only sight is the gloom of the inside of the house. Malerman never makes this darkness seem clunky or awkward; in fact, the tension created by the inability of the characters to see is this story’s strength. The reader is desperate to know what could possibly be out there, yet at the same time you desperately don’t. More often than not, the things that scare us the most are the things we cannot see; an homage to Lovecraft’s idea of sights that are simply too much for the frailty of the human mind.

And there emerges the question of whether an already warped mind can be immune to the terror.

This atmosphere in Bird Box is palpable from beginning to end and that’s before you even consider its originality in terms of story. I found myself having to take breathers from this novel, such was the tension and that’s in no way a criticism. Tension, atmosphere and originality; all welcome elements of a triumphant horror novel.

Horror has never been a ‘cool’ genre but Bird Box is undoubtedly that slick kid with the leather jacket and the brylcreem who you want to offer a light, even though you don’t smoke. There’s a lot to be said for having the brevity to leave the reader to imagine what is too horrible to even imagine and believe me, there’s no ‘Night of the Demon’-esque let down here.

The end of days is a recurrent theme in much dark fiction and a tired one at that. With Bird Box, Josh Malerman managed to make it cool again.

Books on Tyne Festival

I am pleased to announce I shall be doing a reading of my short horror story ‘Ellie Hill’ as part of this year’s literary festival ‘Books on Tyne‘, which has a huge series of events including discussions and workshops including appearances by north east based authors and publishers. If you live in the area and have an interest in literature or writing, this is really worth checking out.

The loose theme of the festival is ‘on the edge’ and I am personally very excited to be attending a crime writing discussion with not only Ann Cleeves and Mari Hannah, but one of my favourite authors Yrsa Sigurðardóttir.

My story will appear in an anthology published collaboratively by Iron Press, Red Squirrel Press and Tyne Bridge Publishing which resulted from a workshop with several up and coming North East authors, led by the inimitable Peter Mortimer. Tickets to the reading are available here.

The title of the anthology is ‘Short not Sweet’.

A bit like this blog post.

The House on Beaumont Grove: The End.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

What the priest must have thought when three half-dressed and hysterical teenage girls, with bare feet, tangled hair and makeup streaming down their faces came clattering into Beaumont Grove Polish Orthodox church as the congregation filed out after Sunday mass is anyone’s guess.

By Sunday morning, the regular occupants of Wynwood house had left early; Carla, Marney and Rose remained.

“I don’t pray.” Rose said.

“Me neither.”

The ding of the telephone handset still resonated from when Marney had put it down. She looked to the others, back and forth.

“My grandma’s a medium,” She said, frowning. “She knows what to do.”

The others looked at their feet. Chipped toenail polish. The stained, threadbare carpet beneath.

“She said we have to. If anything happens, we have to pray.”

Rose tried not to think of the flame that flickered from beneath the grill this morning when she was looking for matches. The banging that had kept them up in the night.

They all knew about the window and the bed.

“Come on, we’ll start in here.”

Marney pushed open the door of one of the downstairs bedrooms, the ones that no one ever used.

“Our father,” She began, staring pointedly at the others. “Who art in heaven…”

Carla and Rose joined in, their voices tiny.

A stench rent the air; thick and foul like something had rotted, something had died.

“Hallowed be thy name…”

The girls traversed the ground floor of Wynwood house, holding hands as they chanted. One bedroom, then the next and back into the hall. The stink followed them.

Carla and Rose’s voice petered out, they stopped dead, neither would go any further.

“I’ll say it then!” Marney snapped.

She continued with the prayer. Rose and Carla could feel the air thickening, that terrible buzzing tension curled into the house like fog.

I don’t think it’s a ghost.” Rose’s voice was a whisper. “I think the house is alive…we’ve agitated it…”

Tears began streaming down her face; her breathing getting faster.

“Stop it.” Marney said; the blessings forgotten. “Rose..please stop…please stop crying!”

“It hates us, it hates us!”

In answer to Rose’s wails, both bedroom doors slammed shut.

Screaming now, Carla and Marney pulled Rose fromthe house and out into the morning sun that poured over Beaumont Grove.

“The church, the church!” Marney was screaming.

It wasn’t far away. Five doors down.

Whatever the priest thought of what Carla, Marney and Rose told him about what had happened at Wynwood House, whatever he thought of them, stumbling into this holy place shambling into his solace like drunks or addict; he and his translator agreed to visit Wynwood house at 3pm that day.

 

I got round an hour or so after he’d left. Only Carla remained.

“It seems…calm…” I said.

“Yeah.”

It did as well; the tension that filled the place to the point that we had become accustomed to it seemed to have gone.

“What’s this?”

A postcard-shaped piece of cardboard was blue-tacced to the downstairs bedroom door.

“Oh, that’s the virgin Mary.” Carla said, leading me up the stairs. “The priest put them on every door; he gave us this as well…”

We passed the attic staircase door (closed for once) and Carla pointed to a plastic bottle filled to the brim with water in the middle of the living room floor.

“What’s that?”

“Holy water.”

“Oh.”

It was a crumpled old water bottle. It didn’t look very holy to me.

There was not one of us who was remotely religious in Wynwood house, save for one or two half-hearted claims to paganism. It was only Marney who seemed to have any real connection to Christianity. We had noticed lately she had begun to wear a small cross around her neck.

“Won’t all this…” I said, peering into the bucket. The water didn’t look any different. “Won’t this just…annoy it?”

“One way to find out.” Carla plunged her hand into the holy water and flicked her fingers at the living room wall.

The power of Christ compels you.

I followed suit.

My memories from this point on are fuzzy; fog clouds the remaining events but suffice to say there wasn’t many. Summer was nearly over and most of those who had stayed at Wynwood house had decided not to come back. Carla and I’s relationship was at its end , aside from in the house, we were spending less and less time together; she was due to start college soon, I was going back to school.

I do remember flicking that water; I still feel it on my hands. I remember the tension that filled the air of the house whilst we were doing it. I also remember how we decided to stop when it got too much.

Then there’s a blank.

Nothing.

It’s a strange place to end; but this is all I have. My memories are not strong enough to shine through the fug of time. I have one lingering recollection of Carla and I packing up her stuff into bags and suitcases. The house was empty, the presence…gone.

What I do know is that I didn’t experience any more activity at Wynwood house. I was spending the majority of my time back at my parents’ place and I can safely assume that that day packing was our last in Wynwood house, the only tension in the air was between me and Carla.

 

In the aftermath of these few weeks, which were actually only a few weeks, but felt significantly longer; the core of us who stayed on Beaumont Grove went our separate ways. It seemed a natural process; jobs, school, college. We’d see each other now and again in the clubs and pubs but that core, that family had dissipated. A few of us remained close, a few of us are still close to this day; but those I have spoken to in writing this account find it hard to remember the events at Wynwood house and it’s not a subject we ever discuss. Like Carla was the guardian of the house, I feel that in some ways, I am the guardian of its legacy. Over the years I have attempted to dramatise what happened to us that summer; turn those events into a story….but it’s never felt right somehow. I guess this is where I finally put Wynwood house to rest.

I’d like to thank those who remembered and took the time to send me their accounts of what happened to them that summer. The majority of them, I am no longer in contact with and something tells me they would not welcome a message out of the blue from someone they don’t know any longer, reminding them of that summer. To them, I extend my gratitude for being my friends long ago.

Conclusion.

                There is no doubt in my mind of what I saw in Wynwood house that summer. One other who experienced what I would say was the most significant event (the window opening and the fingers under the bed), would also look you in the eye and swear it was true.

At the time and immediately afterward; a few of us believed that Wynwood house was haunted. Perhaps there was something dormant in there, a spirit, a ghost, that we had agitated. Perhaps there wasn’t.

As time has passed, however, I personally am less inclined to believe that is the case.

Personally, I don’t know enough about parapsychology to back up and create a concrete theory as to what happened, but I have my own idea.

As I alluded to in the first part of this account; there were other things going on as well as the normal teenage angst and the kind of dramas you would expect in a rickety old student house filled with adolescents.

There were people staying there who were doing battle with their own inner demons. And losing.

Without going into too much detail, for the sake of those people, what I will say was there was a high amount of psychological torment within the group of us that stayed in Wynwood house. This manifested itself physically as well as internally. It was a hard time. Some of us fight those demons still.

My view is that the occurrences in the house were, as some spiritual researchers, psychologists and other academics have speculated upon,  was some form of Psychokenisis. I believe it was caused by us, the people who lived there for that time and it left when we left. If there was something there before us in that house, I couldn’t say. I feel that the blessing of the priest and the holy water that seemed to ‘calm’ the house was coincidental. I think it made those in the house feel reassured rather than cast divine intervention of some sort.

Early research into Poltergeist activity by Cesare Lombroso points to the presence of teenage girls during instances of poltergeist activity. He called this ‘nerve force’ – a sort of exterior manifestation of the surge of hormones of the unconscious teenage mind.  Carl Jung reported strange occurrences that surrounded a cousin, a girl who began going into trances during puberty, notably a table breaking in two and a breadknife inside a cupboard shattering into several pieces. Jung used the term ‘exteriorization phenomenon’ to describe these forces.

Psychical researcher Harry Price, in his book Poltergeists over England takes a slightly different view       “Poltergeists are able, by laws yet unknown to our physicists, to extract energy from living persons, often from the young, and usually from girl adolescents…”

Although Price’s view on Poltergeists is that they are entities unto themselves, he too links them to adolescents.

 

Like I say, I have no concrete theory. All I know is what I and the others saw.

I am interested in the opinions of others. Specifically, you.

Now Wynwood house has been laid bare, I’d invite you, the reader to speculate on what you think happened. Perhaps you think it was just hysterical teenagers seeing things? Perhaps you think Wynwood house is or was  haunted? Feel free to ask me any questions you may have. There are some things such as the whereabouts of the place and personal details of the people that I don’t feel comfortable going into. I can answer from my personal experiences of what I remember and I am genuinely interested in the conclusions you draw on the events from that summer.

 

Thank you for reading this far and I hope you have enjoyed it or else been suitably spooked.

Happy Halloween.

MJ Wesolowski

31st October 2014.

100 Words of Horror

A quick interlude from the paranormal, but no less Halloweeny

Dailynightmare have just published their anthology: ’22 More Quick Shivers’ – 22 tales of horror, each one of them 100 words that re-tells a real-life nightmare submitted to the website.

This anthology includes my story ‘Victim’ based on this nightmare and you can buy the paper copy here or else the significantly cheaper pdf here.

The House on Beaumont Grove: Part 3

Part 1

Part 2

i.

As is alluded to in one of the most fascinating and concise studies of paranormal activity, Guy Lyon Playfair’s ‘This House is Haunted’ and echoed in the equally engaging ‘The South Shields Poltergeist’ by Michael J Hallowell & Darren W Ritson, occurrences experienced in Enfield, South Shields and Wynwood house have little consideration for a linear sense of story. After the initial manifestations; doors opening and closing, objects moving, cold spots etc, the shock wears off, the constant, almost child-like repetition of the phenomena becomes almost tiresome before it simply stops with no discernable reason.

Wynwood house’s peculiarities, like those in Enfield and South Shields, were a constant while there were people in the house; the nightly clatterings on the attic stairs along with lingering odours that would come and go in the unused downstairs bedrooms, the un-closable door, the cold and the flies became accepted by everyone; they had never really been discussed, not until that night, the night we decided to confront it.

Marney had told the story of Jonno’s coat. Then the hanged man. We had felt it growing around us as we talked.

“Fuck off Steve.” Said Ross.

He got to his feet.

“Go on. Do one.”

There was a collective gasp.

Ross was my best friend; he had been with me the very first night Carla had brought us here. This act of defiant bravery was not out of character.

“Don’t…”

Carla sat up. The rest of us huddled closer together on the floor, eyes wide.

Ross ignored her.

“Go on!” He gestured toward the living room door and the rest of us followed him with our gaze.

“Ross, stop it.”

Carla was on her feet now. A terrible, taught feeling had spread itself through the room. The air felt charged, crackling with unseen electricity.

“Come on, Ross…”

“Sit down mate…”

The others could feel it too. The room seemed to hum. I knew a little about the paranormal, being pretty enthusiastic about ghosts and the like as a young lad and at that moment something clicked into place.

“Ross…come on…” Carla put out her hands to him.

“No, no! I know what I’m doing…”

One of the theories is that poltergeist activity tends to focus on a certain person; more often than not, a teenage girl.

“Get out! Get out!”

I felt a sudden twinge of emasculation; Carla was my girlfriend and here I was, sat on the floor, doing nothing to help her, nothing.

I made to get to my feet when suddenly the strangest sensation I have ever experiencedin my entire life filled me. Just like that.  To this day, I have never felt anything like it, nor anything remotely similar. I will happily swear on anything deemed appropriate that, although I had probably drank some alcohol that night, I was nowhere even close to being drunk; nor had I taken any drugs.

It was like two hands; two huge, cold hands had inserted themselves into my chest. There was no pain, just a solid sensation of them suddenly being there when previously they had not. I could not feel their fingers as such, just a sensation of being held.

From the inside.

“Oh shit…” Ross, Carla and the rest turned to me.

Those terrible hands began to clench.

“Help!” I couldn’t breathe; I was suffocating. Panic whirled inside. Things were crawling down the walls.

“Stop it!” Ross’ voice boomed around the room. “Get off him!”

A few more agonising seconds before slowly, very slowly, the hands unclenched and were gone. Just as they had arrived.

The memories of the rest of that night are fuzzy. What I do remember is that whenever me, Ross or Carla walked up the main staircase from the ground to the first floor, we were pushed or shoved back.

It was deeply unpleasant and unsettling. Most of the regular visitors to Beaumont Grove did not return after that night. Me, Ross and Carla, however, did.

And the worst was yet to come.

ii.

“I’m going for a walk.”

This time we were drunk. Really drunk.

Three of us.

Carla, Ross and me in the living room of Wynwood house. Van Dando and Baloo the bear staring at us. We mixed lager, cider and blackcurrant cordial to make Snakebite & Black. Everyone else had gone out to the club.

Ross staggered from the room. We heard him thudding against the walls on his way to the toilet.

The following recollections are fragments from that night. There was a lot more going on that concerned our emotional state at that time rather than any strange things in the house, but I have omitted them and will reflect on that in the conclusion. For now; there are two vivid, discernable memories that are, to this day, as clear as they were then.

“Where is she?”

After a few hours of flouncing away from each other, tears and rage; Ross and I stood in the living room, blinking at each other as if we’d emerged into sudden daylight.

“I dunno…”

We thundered down the stairs and tried the front bedrooms first; all empty. Cold. The kitchen was empty too, save for the flies. I don’t remember if we checked the back door, that yard with the faces in the wall.

“Carla? Where are you?”

Back up the stairs and the toilet door was open. We checked anyway, two more bedrooms and the living room, nothing.

“One, two…THREE”

Our feet slammed into the wood and the door burst open.

“That’s not….possible.”

We stood, shivering at the top of the attic stairs. The little room, the cell, was empty.

It had been locked.

From the inside.

“Carla!” Back down the stairs, opening doors and snapping on the lights. There was real panic then, real adult panic; huge and overwhelming. We were two terrified boys rattling around the belly of Wynwood house.

There she was. Curled up on one of the beds in one the rooms where we had already looked.

There was nothing to say. Neither Ross or I could find the words. Exhausted, the three of us clambered into the bed. Flies thudded against the pane. Again and again.

“I’ll find us a cigarette.”

I had a pack in my jacket. In the front room.

As soon as my hand touched the door handle there was a thud from the window, as if it had been hit from the other side.

I whipped around.

The windows in Wynwood house were all the same; they all opened a third from the top with a metal arm punctuated with holes that clipped onto a metal peg.

Ross, Carla and I watched in horror as the arm of the closed window lifted itself off the peg, swang open once, twice and latched itself back closed.

It was the most terrifying thing I have ever seen in my life.

We were screaming, scrabbling at the door, desperate to get out of there. It was impossible to even comprehend what we had just seen. We thundered through the house into one of the back bedrooms and dived beneath the covers, Carla between us, holding tight to each others’ hands.

We lay there on our backs in shocked silence for  I don’t know how long, we couldn’t speak. My mind was a mess, hurtling through countless scenarios, explanations, searching for a logical explanation for what we’d just seen. It was impossible for wind to have lifted the latch off that window, open it, close it not once but twice before latching it closed again.

Impossible.

Somehow, somehow as the time dragged itself by and our shivering subsided, I began to calm down.  Maybe we’d imagined it, a collective hallucination. Just drunk teenagers making stuff up.

No.

Please no.

I could feel something beneath me. As if something was drumming its fingers on my back.

Something with fingers so long it could penetrate a mattress.

“Can anyone else feel that?” My whisper hung in the air like smoke.

“A kind of pushing?” Said Ross from the other side of Carla.

“Lets get the fuck out of here.”

We spent the rest of the night downstairs in the freezing kitchen with the stink, the striplight and the flies. Waited for the others to get back from the club.

They spilled into Wynwood house full of booze and warmth and chat.

After we told them what had happened that night, they cobbled together more taxi money and left. Their bubble burst.

Soon we would be all gone; our friendships and comradery shattered by that house. Many of us would never see each other again after that summer.

Wynwood house took its toll.

There would be one final chapter to its sorry story.

The House on Beaumont Grove: Part 2

For the sake of objectivity, I need to bring to light the fact that some of the regular occupants of Wynwood house did not experience any of the phenomena that occurred that summer. At least two whom I have contacted whilst writing this account have confirmed that they neither saw anything, nor felt anything for the duration of their stay in Wynwood house.

Neither of these people, however, denied at any point what the rest of us saw, nor have they attempted to provide an alternative to what happened; their view is simple. It didn’t happen to them.

The House on Beaumont Grove Part 2

(Part 1 is here)

i.

“Shit. I need my coat.”

“For fuck’s sake man!”

“I’ll be one minute, it’s in the kitchen.”

The taxi driver rolled his eyes as Jonno jumped from the car and dashed up the path and back into Wynwood house.

The enthusiasm from the other two in the passenger seats dulled slightly as they watched Jonno rattling through his keys at the front door; one hand over his head in a futile attempt to protect his precious hair from the rain.

“The big ponce!”

“The meter’s still going, girls.” The taxi driver said, unsmiling.

“What’s he doing in there?”

Less than a minute later Jonno, still carrying the faint musty odour of the house on his leather jacket jumped back into the car.

“OK,” he said, panting. “Let’s go.”

The car pulled off and purred down Beaumont Grove toward town.

“What were you doing in there, Jonno?” Marney prodded him through the back of the seat with her knee.

The windows of the cab were steaming up as twin headlights cut through the rain.

“Getting my coat, keep your wig on!”

There was a pause.

“Why were you upstairs then?” Liz continued the interrogation.

“Eh?

“Your coat was it the kitchen. You left it hanging on the chair, I saw it!”

“Yeah, so?” Jonno was getting more and more confused.

“So why were you upstairs? He kept the meter running you know!”

It was the taxi driver’s turn to roll his eyes.

“I wasn’t!”

“Jonno man!”

Jonno turned around to glared at them.

“I wasn’t! I went in, grabbed my coat, came back. I didn’t even have time to go upstairs.”

Liz and Marney looked at each other.

“I saw you too.” Marney said.

Her voice was quiet now, the fervour of earlier as the three had passed a bottle of cheap wine in the upstairs living room was replaced by a sudden uncertainty.

“We saw the light go on Jonno; we even saw you moving up there…back and forth behind the window.”

“Where?”

Marney and Liz look at each other for a moment. Liz speaks.

“The living room…and… the attic.”

Neither Marney, Liz or Jonno told anyone about this strange little incident for weeks. None of them knew why, it just seemed too weird.

Like they had imagined it.

It was like when Rose spent her first night at Wynwood house. She didn’t want to tell either.

A party. Carla had been drunk, staggering about, on and on about the walls moving in and out like the peeling plasterboard was the inside of a lung; but the place felt familiar to Rose; even with the flies, the stink and the cold. One of the younger ones, she was a latecomer to Beaumont Grove, but it didn’t matter. The place swallowed her like it had done everyone else. Like she belonged.

People flitted from room to room as teenagers do; up and down the stairs; in this strange house that wasn’t quite theirs. Rose found herself in one of the downstairs bedrooms while the party thrummed from above.

“Hiya…” the door hissed open and a name froze on Rose’s lips.

No one there.

Into the other bedroom and a shape lying on the bed’s bare mattress.

“There you are.”

Rose snapped on the light.

Nothing.

No one.

Just a cluster of those black flies bobbing against the window where a streetlamp peered in with its single orange eye.

She spent the night in the attic, woken early by the thump of feet in the rooms, up and down the stairs. Back and forth. She found herself staring from the kitchen window into that back yard with the faces in the wall. There was more than just faces. Twin arches. One of the faces gazing into the arch. A knife. A skull.

“You awake?”

Rose jumped. Held in a scream.

Carla stood in the doorway.

“Finally,” she says. “I’ve been listening to people moving round for ages. When I looked…there was no one there…”

“Me too.”

ii.

“We didn’t imagine it, we both saw him didn’t we?”

“Yep.”

“And I literally just went in the kitchen, grabbed my coat, came out.”

Jonno had lost his grin. His eyes were wide, scared. He was one of the oldest of us and he wasn’t bullshitting.

The ten of us; the core were sat in the living room in a loose circle. We were snuggled in blankets and sleeping bags. Whatever we did with the heating in Wynwood house, it was never warm. We passed around cigarettes, took half-hearted swigs from a crumpled bottle of cider. No one was in the mood for getting hammered tonight. We had started talking instead.

“Has anyone else seen anything?”

I looked around. The flies, the cold, that damn attic door that stood, wide in the hall behind the living room. It just hadn’t clicked; we were young, we had other priorities. The house’s little quirks, if anything, were endearing. It gave the place edge. It was different.

Like us.

“Remember the hanged man?” Carla’s turn to speak up.

“Don’t…”

Marney covered her ears. Carla ignored her and pointed to the light bulb that cast a feeble light into the living room.

“Look.” She said.

The rest of us huddled a bit closer. We were quiet. The Eels ‘Beautiful Freak’ trundled from a cassette player in the corner.

We looked to the ceiling as one. The errant twist of tinsel that once clung to the wire was gone.

“The other night, me and Marney were chilling in here.” Carla said. “It was bad enough with him looking at us.” She jutted her thumb to the far wall where a poster of Evan Dando stared out mournfully. A rare remnant of the house’s student occupants. The opposite wall, by contrast, had been painted with huge, elaborate Disney characters.

Children and adults.

“It’s like his eyes follow you round.” Marney said.

We nod.

“Anyway,” Carla goes on. Centre stage. “we’re just chilling when we notice the shadow on the ceiling from that light. It wasn’t moving but it…it just sort of became a silhouette of a hanged man…and it was like….someone was in here with us.”

“It was horrible.”

The irony was utterly lost on us; with our white faces, funereal dress and silver jewellery encrusted with skulls.

Suddenly there was a thump from the attic staircase and we all jumped.

“Fuck off Steve!” Carla shouted.

No one laughed.

It was the first time we had all acknowledged it being there with us. All together.

And as we were  about to find out; wasn’t going to take such words  lightly.

The House on Beaumont Grove: Part 1.

This is a true story. I have not dramatised nor embellished any of the things that I saw and experienced that summer in the mid 1990s.

I have, however,  omitted certain events that do not bear direct relevance to the phenomena and I have changed all names of people and places for the sake of privacy.

Whether you believe it or not is up to you.

 

I have my own theories about why what happened, happened, that I shall discuss in the concluding part of this story and you are welcome to discuss this and speculate yourself. I have no finite ‘explanation’ of the phenomena at Beaumont Grove and no clear hypothesis to explain it.

I only know what I saw.

 

The House on Beaumont Grove.

A true ghost story

Part 1.

 

i.

The first thing you noticed was the flies.

The flies were the first thing anyone noticed when they stepped behind the walls of ‘Wynwood House’, a three storey Edwardian terrace which looked just like all the other Edwardian terraces on Beaumont Grove.

The swollen, black bluebottles buzzed listlessly against the window panes and hummed around the strip light in the kitchen. When you went to sleep in the bedrooms, you could hear them brushing against the insides of the curtains like little breaths.

Wynwood house was home to five students during term time; all boys

“It’s a student house.” we said , almost as if we were trying to excuse the place’s idiosyncrasies.

the living room on the second floor.

The flies.

And the door that never stayed shut.

After the first week, no one said “It’s a student house.” anymore.

“It’s a ghost.” We said instead.

“It’s the ghost….it’s Steve. Steve the ghost.”

At first we said it with  a smile.

The students were home for summer and during their absence, we filled that empty, damaged place with our empty damaged selves.

Wynwood house became a sanctuary for us, a sort of flop-house. None of us officially lived there; we didn’t pay bills and we came and went as we pleased.  There were nine or ten who regularly slept there a few days on and off, returning to our parents’ houses to eat proper food or wash our ragged black clothes. We were of similar age; fifteen our youngest, seventeen our oldest; our parents didn’t understand us and the ‘normal’ kids at school called us ‘freaks’.

With our black nail polish, white faces and sooty smudged eyes, we had one hobnail boot entrenched in childhood and the other poised over the swamp of adult life.

Music, drink, cigarettes were the only things that mattered that summer; but we would come to find what mattered most of all was that we had each other.

We never knew how much that would mean to us by the end.

I don’t think I ever knew how, but my girlfriend at the time; Carla, knew the students who lived in Wynwood house and it was she who had negotiated our stay there when they went home for summer.

Carla’ was Wynwood House’s unofficial guardian; its gatekeeper. It was Carla who brought me there for the first time.

The club kicked out at 2am. In our leather trousers and smudged make-up; we staggered through the streets, linked arms,  plumes of cigarette smoke over our shoulders, the uneven pavements that glistened with fallen rain beneath our boots; past the rows of dark windows like a hundred sleeping eyes.

Half way up Beaumont Grove, to Wynwood house.

The flies were the first thing I noticed; in that kitchen, beneath the jaundiced yellow of the strip light. There were already a few other people there; sat on the floor, perched against tables, slouched in doorways. I didn’t know any of them, recognised familiar pale faces from the dance floors; we shuffled out feet and dropped our eyes.

Wynwood house had brought us together.

“Look at these.”

We were outside in the back yard; dawn peering at us as our fingers reached out but didn’t dare to touch. Grey faces in the wall; eyes and cheeks and mouths between the bricks. Affixed to the wall with rough, hasty concrete, as if whoever had stuck them there was in a great rush.

“They’re weird…” Someone said.

To look at them too long would send a strange, whirling sensation through your head as if you were falling.

We went back inside, but you could still feel their eyes.

That night all of us slept in the living room on the second floor; we drank neat vodka in the dark and curled like a nest of grubs together in a mound of sleeping bags and cushions.

ii.

I awoke in the little bedroom on the top floor. The attic room. At the top of a flight of stairs and a landing , it was the size of a cell. One tiny window in the sloped ceiling that would only open an inch or so. I could hear the sounds of people coming from downstairs so I pulled on my clothes and clattered past the landing. A closed access panel at its base that opened onto what was presumably the eaves triggered a fleeting memory from last night to float up from my mind.

Carla’s voice.

“I don’t like that…it creeps me out.”

I turned and continued down. The door at the bottom of the stairs was wide open and through it I could see one of the others propped up on the sofa in the living room, reading a comic.

“Alright?” I didn’t know her name.

She looked up. Grinned. Her eyeliner was still immaculate.

“Yeah, sleep well?”

I had.

Still too young to experience the ferocity of a true  hangover, I was still surprised how spritely I felt considering how much vodka we’d drunk. I had a vague recollection of the attic ceiling spinning.

“I didn’t.” The girl on the sofa said.

“Oh?”

“Bloody thing chucking stuff down the stairs all night.” She nodded at the open door behind me.

“What do you mean? I wasn’t…I…”

“Not you…Steve.”

“Steve?”

“The ghost.”

“Oh.”

I looked back at the open door. There was nothing there. I closed the it behind me and went downstairs to the freezing kitchen with the flies to see if I could find a cigarette.

When I came back up, the attic door was wide open again.

I thought of that little landing and Carla’s voice.

                It creeps me out.

As the weeks passed; each of us would absently close that door in passing, only to find it open again. That was the first of Wynwood house’s little idiosyncrasies.

Steve the ghost.

That stubborn little attic door. It’s safe to say we admired its defiance.

By the end it was the last thing we would remember about that place.

The House on Beaumont Grove : a true ghost story…coming soon…

For a summer, back in the mid 1990s, I lived in a haunted house.

Really.

Some of us, in retrospect, agreed that the thing that drove three of the girls into the street in their pyjamas one morning, in tears to the local church was a poltergeist rather than an actual haunting; we were never entirely certain. None of us are, to this day.

There were things in that house that we all saw, which none of us can explain.

All of this is true.

What I saw was real and so frightening I will never, ever forget it.

I will change the names of those involved and the name of the location; apart from that, I will be as truthful to what happened as I can.

Nothing will be exaggerated in terms of what we saw that summer.

Halloween is coming.

My story is too.

Stay tuned.