Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Cold Comfort Farm had something nasty in the woodshed, Roy and Judy Page have something nasty in their garage. STACIA BRIGGS spent the night of Friday 13 hearing ghost stories in Thorpe Marriott.

RAISED on a diet of Hollywood haunted houses with their imposing wrought iron gates, grim facades and cobweb curtains, it’s difficult not to be disappointed as I pull up outside Judy and Roy Page’s three-bedroom home in Thorpe Marriott.

Situated in the middle of a cul de sac, it looks much like neighbouring properties, a cheerful red brick house that was built in the 1980s and in which Judy, and later Roy, have lived for almost 10 years.

But this is a house that conceals a sinister secret — an unwelcome house guest who refuses to let his hosts rest in peace. Judy and Roy’s house is haunted.

“I’m a logical man. I want to work out just what has been causing the problems in our house. I want to believe that there is an answer, something that can make sense of it all,” said Roy, a DJ.

Judy, a training administrator at the East Anglian Ambulance Service, adds: “I didn’t used to believe in the supernatural. Not until the supernatural came to live in my house, that is.”

The couple’s problems began, they believe, after a night out to see a clairvoyant.

“Judy said ‘it’s a night out, isn’t it?’. I told her it was a load of old rubbish and that I had no interest in it. But, in the end, I agreed to go.
Big mistake,” said Roy.

“I was picked out of the audience. The clairvoyant told me things that no one could know. She said ‘don’t worry about putting your father’s name on his grave; he isn’t there any more because he’s with your mum’.
She described my parents and told me my mum’s name.

Video footage of Ben the dog being disturbed by something.

“Then she said ‘about six months ago there was a death in the family.
I’m getting the name George’. George was my uncle — not a blood relative — and he could be quite a nasty piece of work. He once threatened to cut the neighbours up into tiny pieces with an axe.”

Roy added that his uncle had terrorised his family, giving his wife regular beatings and had been a drinking acquaintance of the Kray twins in London’s East End.

“If he’d been given the chance to come back from the dead and cause more problems for the living, I know he’d have taken it,” said Roy.

“As soon as we came home and I walked through the door, it felt wrong.
I felt as if something had come back with me. I couldn’t shake off the feeling.”

Shortly after the clairvoyant’s revelations, a terrible smell began to seep into the couple’s bedroom. Sinisterly, the smell worsened when the couple rowed.

“Imagine a dead cat that’s been rotting in your garden for months.
Imagine putting your nose right up to it. That’s the smell,” said Roy.

“Of course I assumed that something had died in the room — a rat or a mouse. Over the next few months we did everything. I checked under the furniture, under the floorboards, in the attic, in the bathroom — I did everything.

“We redecorated from scratch. New carpet, new paint job, new furniture, everything. The smell stayed. It only came at night and it was far worse at the threshold of the room than anywhere else. Sometimes it would be there, sometimes it wouldn’t.”

In addition to the smell, strange tappings, shufflings and bangings could be heard at night while the couple were in bed.

“It was like someone drumming their fingernails on a surface. It would start on my husband’s side of the bed and move to above the television.
Then things started to move,” said Judy.

“We’ve got an adjoining door from the hallway to the garage and one night Roy had been in there and when he came out he found he couldn’t close the door. He said he could feel a force behind it that wasn’t letting him shut it.

“I was screaming ‘shut the door! Shut the door!’ and he was saying ‘I’m pulling it! I can’t!’. The door was shaking — I was absolutely terrified.”

The strain of living with an uninvited guest began to take its toll on the couple.

“I thought I was going mad. There were days when I just wanted to pack my bags and leave because the house didn’t feel like mine anymore. I was scared to go to sleep at night, frightened to believe what was happening,” said Judy.

“My daughters (Louise, 28 and Nicola, 25) said they felt uneasy in the house. Nicola said she’d woken up and thought she’d seen a figure standing at the bottom of the bed. Another friend refused to stay in our house because he thought he’d seen someone looking at him through the mirror.

“I was always on edge, always waiting for something to happen.”

Duvets would be pulled from the bed in the middle of the night, objects would go missing, the family dog, Ben, refused to enter the bedroom and the ghastly smell continued to mysteriously appear and disappear. It was time to take action.

While researching the subject on the internet, Judy and Roy found Paranormal Dimensions, a team from Great Yarmouth which investigates suspected hauntings and attempts to offer logical explanations as to possible causes.

Julie Fellowes and Mel Dunkley from Paranormal Dimensions spent the night at the Page’s house on May 1. Photographer Steve Adams and I watched the videoed results in the couple’s front room.

A battery of static cameras placed upstairs and a roving camcorder were linked to televisions and video recorders downstairs, allowing the Pages and the team to watch what happened throughout the night.

On film, a series of darting white lights are clearly visible, as is the reaction of Ben to an unseen creature that roused him from his slumber at the top of the stairs.

A diary of events charts the following: 12.48am, footsteps heard in the bedroom. 1.13am, Judy feels something touching her ear. 2.16am, Julie feels a touch on her arm. Additionally, the team saw shadows moving across the stairs, heard doors banging, objects rattling and experienced a drop in temperature without any recorded change on the positioned thermometers.

Shortly after the visit from the ghostbusters, Roy contacted Anglia Television, which was advertising for people with ghostly problems to get in touch for a forthcoming series.

A film crew recently visited the house, bringing with them a medium called Lizzie Falcolner who — despite knowing nothing about the couple, their house or the problems they had been experiencing — immediately pinpointed the problem areas in the home and offered the name “George” as the possible spectral culprit.

“As soon as she came in she said she could sense the spirit activity. She said straight away that there was something nasty in the garage, and that whatever it was, it moved about,” said Judy.

The medium also said she saw the garage door handle move and that she could see shadowy figures moving at the top of the stairs. Despite the fact that there was no breeze in the house, the crew clearly saw Lizzie’s hair flutter as if someone had passed her in a hurry — at the same time, the medium said she had felt someone breathing in her ear.

“It was kind of reassuring to hear someone else tell us what we already knew, but on the other hand it didn’t really make me feel much better because the TV cameras could pack up and leave, but we still had to keep living in our house,” said Judy.

“It’s made me very weary. It’s been going on for so long now that I’ve almost got used to it. I like where I live and I don’t want to move — even if we did move, what’s to say that this thing won’t come with us?”

To illustrate this point, Roy tells me about the time the couple went to stay with Judy’s sister, who lives in a rambling 16th century house which, although old, does not appear to have a resident ghost.

“We’d sat up for ages talking about what was happening to us and it had been a good night. We were away from our problems and we were having a good laugh,” he said. “At about 3am we went to bed and then it started. A knocking on the wall. At first I thought someone was playing a joke on us, then I realised everyone was asleep.

“I started the old business — I was used to it by then — of checking under the furniture, seeing where the pipes were, looking at the central heating, that kind of thing. Nothing. I went back to bed and the knocking started again. A knock, a silence, a knock. From 3am until 8am.

“It makes you wonder if whatever is in our house could have followed us. That’s not a nice thought.”

Judy adds: “We’re even thinking of having the house exorcised to see if that will get rid of whatever it is that’s giving us all the problems.

“Other people often say that they don’t mind sharing their house with a ghost, that the ghost is almost a friendly presence.

“Ours doesn’t feel like that. Ours feels evil. Things have got slightly better since Parnormal Dimensions came in, but you’re always waiting for something else to happen. I just want it to stop, once and for all.”