The ghost room
By Terrence Oblong
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We moved into the house in the November. Up to this point we had rented, usually grotty flats, but Sarah’s new job in Cambridge meant we were earning enough to put down a deposit on an old house on the outskirts of town, next to a pub and surrounded by farmland. It wasn’t ideal, just one bedroom, but it was still our first home.
We celebrated our first night with a take-out curry, two bottles of wine and watching some movies on our new TV, taking great joy in every activity: our first meal in our new home, our first shower, and then to the bedroom, to christen our new bed.
The first night in a new place is always a strange experience, getting used to the noises, or the lack of noises, but right away I felt that something was wrong, we heard creaks and groans as if the very walls were trying to move away. Three times I got up in the night to look for the cause of the noises.
“It’s just an old house,” Sarah said, “get back to bed. It‘s the heating pipes cooling down or something.” I could find no cause of the noises and returned to bed, though I slept hardly at all.
The second night the noises recurred, and this time they were combined with a sound of clinking metal, as if someone were counting coins. I switched on the light to find the source of the noise. It seemed to be coming from the next room, so I got up and went to see.
It was only as I was turning the door handle that I realised we didn’t have a next room, that this door hadn’t actually been here when we went to bed. But it was too late to stop myself. The door opened. It was a dank, musty room, though too dark to see far inside. I could make out a desk to my right, from which the clinking of money seemed to be coming. There was no sign of any light switch so I went back and a torch from my bedside cabinet and returned to the room, this time with Sarah hovering over my shoulder.
I scanned the torch round the room. It was a similar size to our own, sparsely decorated, white walls, a bed and a desk and chair. As I swivelled the torch to the desk the chinking stopped.
“Don’t go in,” I heard Sarah say, and I remembered the ghost stories I had heard as a child, of people walking into mysterious rooms and never being seen again. But it was too late, as I’d already lunged forward into the room. I paused, one step into the room, fearing I don’t know what, but nothing happened. I scanned the torch round the room again, but it was empty.
I inspected the room carefully, touching the walls, the furniture, all solid, all seemingly real. I walked over to the desk, where the noise had come from. There was a pile of old coins, but they were silent. I started counting them out and the sound they made clicking on the wooden desk was certainly familiar, but there was no sign of anything mysterious, other than the room being there in the first place.
I could feel Sarah in the doorway behind me, saying nothing but shivering with fear. I took hold of her as I left and steered her away, closing the door behind me.
“I c-can’t live here,” she stammered softly, “this is too freaky. That room shouldn‘t be there.”
I said nothing, but we stayed up all night with the light on, staring at the door, Sarah squeezing me so tightly I couldn’t have slept if I‘d wanted to.
The next night we left the lights on as we went to bed and waited to see if the room appeared, which it did. It was silent this time though and we nearly drifted off to sleep, when we heard a noise to our right this time, a scrabbling noise like someone writing. We looked at the source of the noise and there, sure enough, was another door.
I grabbed my torch and opened the door. As before the noise stopped when I shone the torch on the source of it, another desk, this time covered with reams of paper. Sarah didn’t come near this time, not wanting to leave the safety of our bed, and I was free to explore in more detail, a simple room, a few dolls on the bed, the paper seemed to be some sort of girl’s diary.
We had had two sleepless nights, and though we had seen no sign of an actual ghosts, the appearance of the rooms had brought us both to the point of abandoning our house. The fact that the very walls around us were subject to the whim of ghostly appearances made us question the very safety and fabric of the whole house.
I had to find out about the history of the building. Through a combination of internet searches and the local library, I found that the house had indeed once had many more rooms, indeed it had been a veritable mansion, stretching onto the grounds of the farm behind us and the pub next door. But in 1903, a widow who had lost her entire family, eleven children and her husband, had all twelve of their rooms demolished, leaving just her room.
Over the next few weeks, all twelve of the rooms appeared one by one, twelve doorways leading off from our bedroom. In real dimensions they made no sense, the two rooms at the front of the house would have been in the middle of the main road, the rest stretching into neighbouring fields and houses. They didn’t even match the plans of the house, which I had seen in my research, but the rooms were real, solid, undeniable. At first they were only present at night, but they must have gained in confidence, as they began to appear in the daytime as well, to become permanent fixtures.
In daylight, the sheer abnormality of the rooms became apparent. The weather outside their windows bore no relation to the weather outside the rest of our house. On a fine sunny day the rooms might be shrouded in wet and grey, yet on the stormiest of days they might be filled with the brightest sunlight.
Though, as I say, no ghosts appeared, each of the rooms bore some token of their inhabitant, a book, a flute, a doll, some aspect of their existence returned, as if the deceased inhabitants were brought partly back to life through the rooms. We began to greet the rooms with less fear, intrigued taking over. Sarah started to join me in my exploration of the rooms, looking at the dolls, the diary, the frugal furnishings with genuine interest. We were stepping into history, back into the lives of people who died a hundred years ago.
Within a month we were no longer treating the rooms like invading ghouls, we accepted them for what they were, just rooms. It being a small house, we began to take advantage of the additional space now that the rooms had become a permanent feature. We used the first room for storage, the books that didn’t fit in our bookcase, paperwork we kept just in case, the junk you collect after a while. Nothing ‘spooky’ happened to our belongings, the rooms remained, permanent fixtures now, so we started to use them for other uses.
We converted the first room into an office space, with a computer desk in place of the original. We‘d always planned to have a computer room, but with Cambridge prices it had never seemed affordable. We had all twelve rooms wired up to the mains and the central heating, they may be ghost rooms but no need for them to remain cold and dark. An electrician friend did the necessary work for a bargain price cash-in-hand fee.
We converted two of the rooms into spare rooms. Living in Cambridge, we had more people inviting themselves down for the weekend than we’d ever had, friends we’d lost touch with suddenly decided they wanted to see us - usually coinciding with a concert, gig or theatre show. We kept the ‘tokens’ of the previous inhabitants, and most of the desks and tables, but introduced more modern and comfortable beds, decorated them a selection of Dulux colours.
At first, several of our friends were scared about spending the night in a room that wasn‘t really there, so we swapped rooms, letting them sleep in our bed and moving into the spare room ourselves. Eventually our friends got used to it, just as we had.
When Sarah lost her job in the austerity cuts, we couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage. We tried renting out one of the rooms, but though a few people came to look, they were freaked out by the unreal nature of the rooms. Even students were unwilling to rent a room that didn’t technically exist, even a philosophy student who engaged me in a long debate about how we couldn’t be sure the rest of the house existed either, and that even he might be a figment of my imagination. I was quite please he didn’t take the room actually.
The solution came from our friend Dave, who was staying over to see Jimmy Carr at the local theater. “Why not make an asset of the paranormal thing,” he said. “There are loads of Doctor Who fans out there, call yourself the Tardis B & B and charge a small fortune. They will absolutely love it.”
So that’s what we did. We decorated the rooms in the style of scenes from the TV series, Amy Pond’s bedroom, etc. and placed ads on Doctor Websites and magazines. We had a trickle of visitors at first, but their blogs all raved about the experience and within no time we were fully booked a year ahead.
Running the B&B is now a full time job, especially with the regular media work we do with Dr Who fanzines and ghost magazines and websites. We have even had a few celebrity guests stay over, David Tennant, Simon Pegg and two members of the Goldie Lookin’ Chain.
Sometimes people tell me I shouldn’t be exploiting the rooms in this way and warn me that no good can come of making money from the paranormal, but I say it can do no harm, all we’re doing is giving life to the old rooms.
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Hi Terrence Oblong, Another
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It's funny how something
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