Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

When I was around 5 years old I moved with my mother and father to a small bungalow located in a semi-rural West Yorkshire farming village. We understood that the previous home owner was an old lady who owned a black cat. The local shop keeper had found the old lady passed away in her chair in the living room after nobody in the area had seen her for quite a few days.

The bungalow was a small 2 bed, 1 bath with an attic. After a couple of years we got the money together to convert the attic into a large upstairs bedroom. We had a staircase put in which went through the original bedroom (belonging to the old lady) and then her old bedroom became our new dining room. Nothing really happened at all in the house and I always remember it being a warm, happy place.

After having a lot of trouble at a new school with bullying, I remember getting quite depressed and becoming quite drawn in with myself. Strange things started to happen at this time. Under the staircase we had put in it was a gap big enough to fit the piano. I used to sit practicing in an afternoon after school when my Mum was at work and my dad was in bed (he worked nights at the time).

I remember one day playing the piano and all of a sudden feeling what I can only describe as pressure (or tunnel) black force bending over the side of the banister and down over my head into my back. I was that petrified I ran from the house and sat in the garden until my mum got home from work. On other occasions we would be sat as a family in the living room after tea in an evening and all of a sudden we’d hear crash, bang and pots clattering from the kitchen next door. Obviously we would all get up to investigate to find plates, knives, forks, spoons all laid out across the kitchen floor. This happened on several occasions. We would also have the distinct smell of ‘old ladies’ perfume drift into the living room. It would be that strong we would all notice it and even have to open the windows on occasions.

The amount of times we all saw on different occasions the dark shape of what looked like a cat run across the floor and into other rooms is endless. It really started to get freaky when I reached about 20 years old.
My Mum and Dad were staying in the attic room and I was downstairs in one of the original bedrooms. My Mum awoke one morning at 6.30am. She heard my dads car pull onto the driveway (he was returning home from his nightshift) She heard the car door close, the cat meow, the car alarm go on. Then she listened as he walked down the drive at the side of the house, unlock the front door, turn of the partial outer house alarm and go into the kitchen, the kettle boil and the radio switch on. She drifted back to sleep and her alarm went off at 7.30am. As she switched off her alarm she heard my Dad whistling downstairs and walk into the bathroom and shut the door. She remembers thinking to herself, why the bloody hell is he going in the bathroom now as I have to get up and get ready! Anyway she gets up, walks down the stairs and the first thing she does as always is open the dining room curtains which lead out to the driveway. As she does this and looks, my dads car isn’t even on the driveway, the cat is still sat waiting there for him……Mum walked into the hallway and the alarm is switched off, the kettle is warm and the grill had been switched on.

Apparently, my dad had been asked at the last minute to stay for a meeting at work so had never come home at his usual time. It was like something had filled in for him whilst he wasn’t there! The knocking started around this time too. All of the internal doors in our house used to be kept open on a night apart from my bedroom which I closed. My mum did this incase anything ever happened with dad and she couldn’t hear the front door. One Sunday morning I woke up early to 4 loud clear knocks on my bedroom door. I was extremely irritated thinking it was my dad with one of his practical jokes. I shouted ‘what??!!’ and no reply. I got up around 11am to  my dad making bacon butties in the kitchen, walked in and asked him if he thought he was funny knocking on my door in the early hours. He looked puzzled and said he’d just got up. From that day on the knocking used to occur between 2 and 6 times per week, often more than once during the night. I convinced myself that I was dreaming each time when it woke me up. My dad always had a rational explanation for everything but he asked me one afternoon if Id heard anything the night before. I hadn’t as it happened. He wouldn’t tell me at first why but then they admitted that my mum had woken in the middle of the night to 4 loud clear knocks coming from a downstairs door. Her immediate fear was that dad had been in some kind of driving accident at work and it was the front door. She soon realized it was my bedroom door. She sat and listened for over 5 minutes until it stopped. She described it the exact same way Id heard it too. Knock, knock, knock, knock….pause….then another 4 knocks, over and over. The final night I heard this I was wide awake and listened to it twice with my head under the covers. I knew then this was definitely real. I was petrified and just managed to say please go away, please go away over and over and it stopped, just like that. That was the last time I ever heard the knocking at that house.

I moved out and got my first flat a few months later. Now 8 years on since I moved out and not one more spooky experience has happened in that bungalow.

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