Creepy Story 2.

Ideally, you need to read Creepy Story 1 before reading this one. Unless you’re one of those people who can pick up serials half way through, in which case...

The next house was a doddle after Eaveswood Road. Maybe it helped that it was newer, didn’t have a piece of ancient woodland a mere hundred feet away, and wasn’t built on land once owned by a mediaeval monastery. Then again, what did I say about the haunting being mine, not the house’s?

I took up somnambulism at the second house. Nothing supernatural about that, of course, but it was a bit creepy waking up one morning to find the light on, the wardrobe door open, and me wearing a clean shirt. The house did, however, have one interesting little trick up its sleeve.

The entrance to the loft was in the ceiling at the top of the stairs. It was a heavy metal plate that rested firmly on recesses in the ceiling joists, and was situated in front of the two doors that led into the toilet and bathroom respectively.

It had an disconcerting habit of removing itself. One of us would go upstairs and report that the loft cover was resting half inside the loft. Guess what my mother put it down to. Yup, ‘an airlock.’ Now, as I understand it, the only way an airlock could have been responsible was if a vacuum had somehow been created inside the loft. That doesn’t seem very likely, since roofs are designed to allow free passage of air for ventilation purposes. And even if it had, and the greater air pressure in the landing area below been sufficient to lift a heavy metal plate, I still don’t see how the plate could have moved a good twelve inches to one side.

So, one day – I think I was around the age of puberty at the time, which might have had a bearing on the matter – I went upstairs to visit the loo. My mother was downstairs washing the dishes and my father was out at work. It had become customary to glance at the loft cover every time I went upstairs, and that day was no exception. It was firmly in place, flush with the ceiling.

I can’t have been in the loo for more than thirty seconds, and I remember that I could hear the clatter of dishes and my mother singing in the kitchen below the whole time. I also remember that it was a moderately warm day in summer, and that there was no wind. When I came out, the cover was lying even further into the loft than usual. Three quarters of the loft entrance was open.

I thought about the ‘airlock’ theory again, and it didn’t make sense. And then I realised something else. There had been no noise. How does a heavy metal plate get lifted out of position and deposited about eighteen inches away without making a noise – by an airlock?

I’ll tell three stories from my teen years in the next one. Two concern things that other people saw and I didn’t, and the third concerns a light on a wall that defies explanation. We all saw that one.