Creepy Story 1.

We moved to Eaveswood Road when I was fourteen months old and stayed there for ten years. It was a typical British semi-detached. The living room was at the front of the house and had two doors: one in the side wall that opened from the hall, and another in the back wall that led to the dining room.

There was no central heating, just a coal fire in the living room, and so during the winter both doors were kept firmly shut to retain the heat. They each had a drop handle, the sort that has to be pressed downwards to release the spring-loaded catch. They were both modern handles and perfectly firm, certainly not the sort that could fall under their own weight. Young as I was, I checked several times.

So how do you explain this? Many times during my childhood there, we would all be sitting in the living room at night when someone’s eye would be alerted to the fact that the handle on the hall door was dropping. The door would open just wide enough to let a person through, and then shut again. We got into the habit of turning to look at the dining room door. Sure enough – every time – there was a delay of about half a minute before that handle would drop and the door would open.

I was a very nervous child, and the door incidents didn’t help. My mother seemed a bit unnerved, too, but she pretended to make light of it. ‘It’s only Charlie,’ she would say. It hardly helped. Charlie was simply the name she gave to whatever was opening the damn door. She told me not to worry, explaining that it was only an airlock. I later learned that ‘an airlock’ was her favourite explanation for everything that was inexplicable. When I became old enough to understand how airlocks worked, I knew it didn’t fit the facts. I still don’t know what does.

But that wasn’t quite all. I used to lie in bed some nights, wondering what the strange swishing noise was that sounded like somebody brushing a hand over the wallpaper. I decided on one occasion that it was some sort of acoustic effect caused by the trees in the wood at the back of the house, but then the wind got up and rustled the leaves. The sound was completely different. There seemed to be no relationship between the two.

When I was about ten, Gillian came to stay for a week. Gillian was the daughter of a friend of my mother’s who lived in London. She was three or four year older than me. One day we were alone in the house, she in her bedroom and I in the living room. She came down and asked

‘Have you just been upstairs?’

‘No, why?’

She said she’d distinctly heard footsteps climb the stairs, walk around the landing, and then go into one of the bedrooms. I wasn’t surprised; I’d heard them often enough myself. I’ve heard lots of shrinking boards and knockings in water pipes too, and they don’t sound anything like those footsteps did.

When I was eleven we left that house and moved to a newer one. Although I was sad to leave the only house I’d ever really known as home, I was glad to be getting away from the hauntings, or whatever they were. The relief proved to be premature, because the next house had its own little interesting trick waiting to be played. It was then that I began to suspect that maybe it wasn’t the place that was haunted, but me.