The Fatslayer Chronicles

Well I think its official – my neighbours aren’t going mad and we ARE living next door to Spook Central!

K and I went for drinks to our neighbours’ house, alert for any signs of otherworldly activity. The cat did look like it had alopecia and the wife was as jittery as the husband - though not as skinny - but there wasn’t blood running down the walls or blobs of ectoplasm materialising out of the ether, so I just figured they’d both been hitting the bottle a bit too much and indulging in some mass hysteria or shared hallucination.

For the first hour we had a couple of glasses of wine and tried to make light conversation – which isn’t easy when your hosts look as jumpy as frogs on a hotplate  – and then all hell broke loose. One minute the cat was snoozing calmly on the radiator, and the next moment it leaped ten feet in the air and started hissing at the blank wall with all its remaining fur standing on end, for no fucking reason whatsoever. It was going demented in front of a blank wall, just like the dog in the Poltergeist movie. Very creepy.

Then the lights flickered and dimmed and the CD player turned itself off. Then the temperature suddenly plummeted like a stone. Finally the ceiling lights started to sway from side to side, (as if they were being swung on by invisible imps or something! Heh heh).

It was truly a weird experience.

K’s jaw dropped and his eyes were like saucers – he’s a Most Haunted fan, so he was primed to believe ANYTHING – but even though I was trying to be The Sceptical One, I have to admit I was pretty damn impressed.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was a paranormal experience, but it was pretty freaky. And it could explain why, in the 13 years we’ve been living in our house, the house next door has been bought and sold 6 times. Hell, we thought it was just because we were crap neighbours!

K is convinced our neighbours’ house is haunted and, by extension, our house too, because originally the houses were part of one bigger one which was simply divided into two sometime in the 1800s. Parts of our house date back to 1590. Witches were burned in and around the village right up to the mid 1600s - spooky, huh? - and if the village records are correct the house opposite ours was the location for one of the local trials. Although our village is now tiny, it used to be much bigger, and had its own Great Hall, cottage hospital and almshouses. We live in one of the converted almshouses.

K has been telling me for years that he keeps seeing an elderly woman in the kitchen (which would have been part of the old kitchen scullery in the original house) washing cotton sheets in a big copper drum filled with boiling water, but I keep telling him this is just wishful thinking and that if he wants me to do more housework he should stop dropping hints and just tell me straight! Bloody hell, maybe he really has been seeing old Ma Reilly or someone similar. Luckily he tells me she’s nice and friendly, quite the grandmotherly type, and nothing to be alarmed about. I just hope it IS bed linen she’s got bubbling away in the cauldron, not some noxious brew made of eye of newt and tongue of bat.

We could have our very own resident ghost, and I’m just too insensitive, non-spiritual and dense to see her. K, on the other hand, has a history of ghost sightings – his parents used to own a hotel which was considered one of the most haunted old coaching inns in England, and they regularly had guests leave in the middle of the night because they’d been scared witless by the ghostly shenanigans. This is nothing new for him, and he pretty much takes it in his stride.

For me, this is all pretty unprecedented. Not scary as such, but certainly a little on the weird side. I’m definitely intrigued and curious.

I’ll let you know if my spiritual side has been kick-started by the trip next door, and if I start to lose shed-loads of weight as a result of paranormal interference. If being haunted is truly effective as a weight-loss method I could turn the house into a bed-and-breakfast guesthouse, and tout for guests at weight watcher meetings!

Our neighbours have decided for the sake of their health (and that of their kitty) to put their house up for sale, so if anyone wants to move to East Anglia and live in a bona fide haunted cottage let me know, and I’ll send you the details.