This spooky story will give you the creeps – and there’s a postscript
Graphic artist, writer and creator of the brilliant Scarfolk, Richard Litter, shared a thread of some weird things that happened in and around his childhood home and it’ll give you food for thought. Maybe don’t read it if you’re of a nervous disposition.
Thread: A 1970s 'ghost story'. I am now a sceptic and an atheist, but I present the events as I experienced them at the time. I'm not making any claims about the nature of the phenomena and I have my own rational theories. pic.twitter.com/9YlPkT5eVQ
— Richard Littler (@richard_littler) August 22, 2018
Between 1971 and 1976, I lived with my family in a house, newly built in 1969, in Radcliffe, near Bolton, Manchester. The house backed on to scrubland, which was once mined for coal. Old maps show disused mine shafts and a railway line. pic.twitter.com/9auWrlm0hj
— Richard Littler (@richard_littler) August 22, 2018
Unusual things started happening right away. Before I was born, my parents, who were the house’s first owners, encountered a huge rat on the stairs and heard noises at night. Exterminators placed traps and poison but both were left untouched. The rat was never seen again. pic.twitter.com/N4Jg0K9YG6
— Richard Littler (@richard_littler) August 22, 2018
Some of my earliest memories are of a ‘presence’ in the house other than my family, which unsettled me. I’m told that our cat also responded to empty space as if it were a person. Others also said there was an ‘odd feeling’. pic.twitter.com/0N6cNdtnXY
— Richard Littler (@richard_littler) August 22, 2018
One night my mother awoke one night because she heard a noise downstairs. Standing at the top of the stairs she encountered a static ball of light in the hallway. She shouted at it to ‘go away’ and it shot into the kitchen and disappeared.
— Richard Littler (@richard_littler) August 22, 2018
Around the same time, a neighbour, a police dog handler, was walking his dog behind the house. Out of the blue, the dog ‘panicked’; it cowered, whimpering and refused to take another step. The policeman admitted that his dog’s uncharacteristic reaction had completely unnerved him pic.twitter.com/eH1GHcKFs7
— Richard Littler (@richard_littler) August 22, 2018
When we eventually moved out of the house, my mother was drinking from a can of coke which, inexplicably, suddenly shot vertically out of her hand and spun around in the air before falling to the ground.
— Richard Littler (@richard_littler) August 22, 2018
As I say, I have rational explanations for all of these occurrences, but collectively they have become family lore. Remembering them still sends a little shiver down my spine.
— Richard Littler (@richard_littler) August 22, 2018
People have postulated many theories over the years: A ghost/poltergeist; some kind of strange environmental condition created by the pylons & mined land that caused hallucinations; even alien abduction (somebody once offered to hypnotically regress me!)
— Richard Littler (@richard_littler) August 22, 2018
A few people have asked me for my own theories. I believe my nighttime experience was probably sleep paralysis, which can induce intense hypnopompic/hypnagogic hallucinations. I can’t comment on some of the other incidents or their collectivity because I don’t have enough info.
— Richard Littler (@richard_littler) August 23, 2018
