Ghosts terrorise little Jane, 8.
‘Nightmare is driving us from our home.’
An eight-year-old North Hampshire girl claims she is being terrorised by two ghosts. And the spectres are threatening to drive the girl’s family from their council home, says her mother, Mrs Rose Male. Quiet-spoken Jane says: “I’m the only one who can see the ghosts. One of them has a bird and I hate him. He shouts at me and says he will follow me everywhere.”
And experts have told the family the frightening experiences are the work of a poltergeist which thrives off Jane’s energy. Mrs Male fled from the house once after a morning of terror during which, she claims, her vacuum cleaner was flung across the room. She says she has almost reached breaking point because of the mysterious disturbances which seem linked to little Jane. “I have had about as much as I can stand,” said Mrs Male in the lounge of the family’s smartly furnished house at 13 St Mary’s Road, Hartley Wintney. “I’ve asked the council for a move but they seem to treat it as a joke.”
Her husband Wilf, a carpenter, tries not to let the unexplained happenings frighten him. But Mrs Male says she is petrified by the sound of footsteps in empty rooms, doors being slammed for no apparent reason, cups being hurled by an unseen hand and even curtains being left piled on the floor with no one in the house. “None of us believed in ghosts or anything like that until this started happening.
Jane, who has a 12-year-old brother Simon, claims to regularly see two ghosts – both men and dressed in black. Mr and Mrs Male have nicknamed them “Fred” in a bid to make the atmosphere less scary. But Jane – who first saw one of the ghosts at the age of four – is now so terrified that she stays up at night with her parents and sleeps in their bedroom. She moved in with them after her bed had been lifted inches into the air one night and shaken violently as she lay screaming on top.
Mr Male once called in a vicar, but his prayers only seemed to make things worse and according to Mrs Male the ghosts went berserk after a medium had visited the house. Recently a ghost hunter told them that one of the “men” was a robber called Richard Doyle who in the late 1800s buried his loot on the site where their three bedroom house now stands.
Mr Malcolm Arlott, press officer for Hart District Council, said the council was aware of the problem which the family were apparently experiencing. He said the council might give sympathetic consideration to a transfer application, provided it was supported by a letter from a child psychologist or a clergyman involved with the family. “We must have some evidence that whatever is happening there is affecting their health,” he said.
Haunted little Jane Male, 8, and her mother Rose.
Reading Evening Post, 7th January 1980.