I don’t believe in ghosts but I have three in the baby’s bedroom

When conducting the initial research into families with paranormal activity, it quickly appeared that many people believed they had a problem but didn’t want to talk about it openly. This was mainly due to the fear of ridicule.

Chopsy Baby editor Jen Smith, shares her story of paranormal activity affecting her family.

Even today, I find it very difficult to admit to people that we have problems with ghosts. It sounds like madness.

When the dead started pestering my family in our new home nearly two years ago, I didn’t believe it. I totally blocked out it was happening.

It started as sudden glimpses of a something, not just by myself, but three other people independently of each other. Then came the voices, the crashing around during the middle of the night and clothes being pulled out of wardrobes and thrown around the room.

The house felt oppressive, with an angry feeling coming from one particular room. The feeling of always being watched from a certain point in the house. The strange lights and orbs that used to appear and were seen by several people.

One evening, a friend rushed from the house. The next day, she phoned to tell me she had seen a man stood in the doorway of my son’s room. He was quite tall and imposing and had his arms crossed.

Curtains were shaken violently during the night, mobiles spun around without a draft.

My eldest child was too frightened to go into his bedroom because of ‘the man and the window’. He kept trying to tell me about the monster and the man. Always with the window at the centre of it, but because he was only two-years-old his vocabulary wasn’t well enough developed.

Something really strange was going on in the child’s bedroom. It got to the point where other people were too afraid to come into the house because of what they had experienced.

On one occasion, I was chased from room to room, by something invisible who didn’t like the birthday party balloons – according to what my son was told by the invisible something.

Despite it being a hot day, with the windows closed, a wind raged around the house. It followed me from room to room. It was ice cold and the wind was so violent my hair was blowing around my face.

I tried to ignore it. I tried to be positive and put on a DVD to watch with my child. But the more I ignored it the stronger it got. “Don’t be scared mummy,” my son told me. “The lady just feels sad.”

“What lady?” I ask. “The one standing next to you. The lady is sad about the balloons.” I couldn’t see the lady, but I bloody well knew she was there. 

On more than one occasion, I grabbed the children, leapt into a taxi and left the place, once for weeks. 

I couldn’t leave the house. I was stuck with it. I was stuck in Amityville because I had a long tenancy agreement with no dead person get out clause. 

I went to the doctor, but there was nothing wrong with me. Try the Church, he recommended. I had my eyes tested nothing wrong with them. I fully expected them to find a brain tumour. But they didn’t.

I felt like I was losing my mind. The only thing stopping me thinking I was insane was the other people who had seen things too. I phoned the council for help. I didn’t know what help I needed, but I needed something. Maybe they could come out with a dead person detector. “I don’t understand what the problem is,” a lady said down the phone. “What kind of strange things are going on?”

“Well, some people may call it a ghost, but I don’t believe in ghosts,” I told her. “Oh right, we don’t have a department that deals with that. Try the Church?”

The more it was ignored, the worse it became. But for 18 months I wouldn’t believe it was actually happening in my own home. This only happens in other people’s houses. I looked for obvious causes – problem electrics, personal health, eye problems, damp, drafts, I left no stone unturned for a plausible explanation.

I went into the room and told it that I respected this was probably their house at one time, but we lived here now and we would have to compromise.

As time went on, I would storm into the room – during the daylight only and tell it where to go.

My son wouldn’t sleep in his bedroom and to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t sleep in there either.  I still won’t now.

I spent hours on the internet researching EMF fields, orbs, air currents, hysteria, anything that could reasonably explain what was going on. There appears to be two schools of thought. The first is that spirits exists, the second is that spirits don’t exist. There is no real way to prove either school of thought.

In the end, a friend recommended I talk to a friend of theirs. She was a medium who may be able to help. It was someone they had known since they were a child. Though it was not a service she would normally do, she would help a friend out.

The day the medium came I made sure the house was child free. I felt stupid fully expecting her to stand in the bedroom and tell me I was mad.

As it turned out, I didn’t have one spirit in the bedroom but three. Typical, you go your entire life without a ghost then three turn up at once. Apparently, the man who had owned the house had died in this room many years ago– a hit. I already knew this after talking  to the neighbours who told me he had died about twenty years before, but his wife had continued to live in the house. When the house was bought and rebuilt by the landlord, the man became very angry. But, he was particularly angry about what the landlord had done to the windows in this particular room.

Whilst this man was so angry and scaring my son so much, two relatives of the child came back from the spirit world to stay in the house and make sure we were all safe.

Apparently, they were elderly but the man used to love playing with the child whilst his wife kept telling him off saying they were scaring the mum.

The medium claimed to help the man pass over, but that relatives would still pop back to make sure everything was OK.

Being a fairly cynical person who refused to believe this kind of stuff, I was forced to admit she did get details correct and that after she had left the house the anger had gone too.

The angry man has definitely gone for good. If it’s true that he was here, I feel a bit sorry for him. But 18 months of living with the dead leaves an impact on your health. It’s a violation of your home and it never feels the same again.

 The house is different, but the relatives do tend to pop in and out when they fancy a visit.

There is an element of having to live with it. Sometimes they play games and even jump out and shout boo at my son. But sometimes they can be reassuring. And I think that sometimes dead people get it wrong too. They try to be helpful by reassuring you there is someone there, but just end up scaring you.

I should have realised sooner this event was likely to happen. One of my children is very empathic. Even at a young age he is fully capable of tuning into what people are feeling and sensing. I remember the way when he was first talking he used to tell me how sad the people were. People who weren’t there. I remember being on the ss Great Britain once. We were on a deck entirely alone but he would smile and wave at nobody.

It seems once you have accidentally tapped into the dead, it’s quite hard to get rid of them.

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