by Don Kwikshot

Created on: April 17, 2008   Last Updated: April 18, 2008

The Old Man, the Bath and the Stick

The problems started soon after we moved in to an old Edwardian house in Claremont in 1979. I would go to bed at the end of the evening, read for a while, and then turn out the light. Then the noises would begin; the start was always the sound of the bath water running away, whether or not there were other people in the house, and certainly when I knew that no-one was in the bath. There would be the sound of the bathroom door being unlocked and opened (it was never closed), and then the footsteps would leave the bathroom and make their way slowly down the passage, with the clump of a walking stick, all the way to the music room, where they would disappear.

At first I tried to ignore all this, putting it aside as just imagination, sometimes fear of being in an empty house alone, sometimes deliberately not hearing it. This went on every third or fourth night for a couple of months and would, in itself, not have been so worrying but for what it became. The second phase of the phenomenon began with the unexplained switching on of lights, only in my bedroom. I would be fast asleep in the middle of the night and, suddenly, the overhead light (which was only accessible from the door and not from either of the beds) would be turned on. At first I dismissed this as a peculiarity of the electrical installation of the house, but when it had happened several times I had to accept that there was some other force at work.

Finally one night, about three in the morning, when we were both asleep, my friend sleeping in the room across the passage rushed into my room and woke me up; he was in a terrible state, grey with fear, and claimed that he had been awoken by the feel of a cold hand brushing lightly across his face. I was able to calm him and to write the experience off as a nightmare, but it continued to happen from time to time.
When this state of affairs reached its height, with occurrences on an almost nightly basis, I decided to ask for help.

A friend of mine claimed to be psychic and to have had experience with similar situations; he offered to come over and establish for us what was wrong in the house; it was his opinion that the ghost (for that was what I clearly thought it was) was troubled by one of the two of us, and he wanted to know which one. He duly came over one evening, explored the whole house carefully, and ended up in the music room at the far southern end. He called us in separately and asked us to hide a personal article

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