Lullaby in the night at home of “haunted” little girl.
By Ronald Ricketts.
A mother claimed last night that her three-year-old daughter Carol is being haunted by a ghost. It makes Carol talk and talk, said the mother, 27-year-old Mrs Christine Adams. “Sometimes she has kept it up all night,” she added. “And she used words no child her age would know. It is as if aspirit takes over.” Mrs Adams said that the haunting started at their home at Imperial-road, Gillingham, Kent, a year ago. “Suddenly Carol began talking as if she was having a conversation with someone, but there was no one there,” she said. When this happens, said Mrs Adams, Carol is deathly white and glassy-eyed.
Mrs Adams and her husband Terry, a 35-year-old plumber, say they have heard bumps from empty rooms and sometimes a young girl singing a lullaby. Mr Adams said: “Whatever it is, it is almost one of the family.”
The couple have three sons. Another daughter, Tracey, was six when she was killed in a road accident eighteen months ago.
The Rev. Peter Hinchey, vicar of St. Augustine’s Church, Gillingham, said last night that he would visit the Adams family. He will also call on their next door neighbour, Mrs Marjorie English, 39, who says she has heard the singing and is “terrified.”
Carol with her mother, Mrs Christine Adams, who says: “Sometimes she talks all night.”
Daily Mirror, 11th November 1969.
‘Supernatural thing possesses my child – it may be her dead step sister.’
Little Carol ghost riddle: a clue.
A three-year-old girl, whose mother claims she is possessed by a spirit, may be haunted by the ghost of her dead step-sister. Carol Adams has been the victim of a series of eerie happenings for nearly a year. “I am convinced she is being taken over by some sort of supernatural presence,” says her mother, Mrs Christine Adams, 27, of Imperial Road, Gillingham.
Since terror struck the Adams’ old terraced house, light switches have clicked on and off, ash-trays have fallen from tables, furniture has moved by itself, firmly closed doors have flown open and rooms that were warm have become icy. But the most frightening of all was the transformation of Carol. She began to talk in her sleep. “She was holding a conversation with somebody else,” said Mrs Adams. “She was using words which no three-year-old could even know. Sometimes she used to answer herself, but in a different voice. We could hear somebody singing – it sounded like a lullaby – while she was talking at the same time. But when we went in there was nobody there.”
One theory put forward by Mrs Adams is that the house is occupied by the spirit of Tracey Cook, her daughter by a former marriage. She was killed in a road accident almost 18 months ago at the age of six. For this reason she will not leave the house, although her husband Terry, 34, a self-employed plumber, wants to move. “I want to make contact with the spirit to find out whose it is and until I get a satisfactory answer I will not consider the question of exorcism (driving the ghost away)”, Mrs Adams said. The Adams have called mediums, who have traced “undesirable influences.”
Before asking for claivoyant help Mr and Mrs Adams tried to fight the spirit by putting up a wooden cross in their living room. But it did not have the effect they intended. “Carol seemed to change,” said Mrs Adams. “When she went near the cross her face contorted. She would bunch her fingers up into claws and bare her teeth… it was frightening, it wasn’t [nice] at all. If you raised your hand to smack her there would be a bump in the front room and Carol would seem to wake up as if she was coming out of a trance.”
Next door neighbour, Mrs Marjorie English, is so frightened by the strange occurrences that she is moving as soon as possible. She said she still had vivid memories of the night she listened with the Adams to the noises coming from Carol’s room. Her 17-year-old son, Graham, and Mr Adams went into the room to find Carol bunched up inside a pillow case. they picked up the little girl and took her next door. When they returned a few minutes later the cot was neatly re-made and the discarded pillow-case was back on the pillow.
When Mrs Adams appeared on television on Tuesday Mr Tom Johannson, secretary of the Spiritualists’ Association of Great Britain, said Carol was a “natural psychic channel.” “I am quite convinced this child can see and hear her dead sister,” he said. “I also believe she is in no danger.”
The Rev. Peter Hinchey, Vicar of St Augustine’s, Gillingham, said he would call on Mrs Adams and offer his help.
Kent Messenger and Gravesend Telegraph, 14th November 1969.
Previously
Father dies without a penny of £1,100.
Eye damages arrive five years too late.
Mr Christopher Simmons was awarded £1,100 damages when he lost his eye. The first instalment, £33, has just been received by his daughter. The case was settled in the High Court 16 years ago. Mr Simmons (63) died five years ago without ever having received a penny. His daughter, Mrs Christine Adams, of Imperial Road, Gillingham, claims her father would have had to live to be 116 before he got all the money. At the present rate of progress, Mrs Adams, who is 27, will be 75 before the £839 still owing is finally paid off. So far, £261 has been paid, but legal fees swallowed up £228 of this, despite Mr Simmons having legal aid. The law decided Mr Simmons’ eye was worth £1,100, but he was not awarded costs, and these – £40 17s. 3. counsel’s fee and a solicitor’s bill of £187 2s 11d. – had to be taken out of the damages.
The High Court awarded him £1,100, but a county court decided the man responsible could only afford to pay off the damages at 30s. a month. The Law Society has now recovered the costs of the case, and Mrs Adams can now have the rest of her father’s money. But to make sure she gets these damages she may have to consult a solicitor and face more legal fees to get the balance of the £1,100. The £33 cheque arrived with a letter from the Law Society explaining that the legal costs had been deducted from the £261 so far paid. The letter said: “The matter is now at an end so far as the Law Society is concerned, and if you wish to continue with the recovery of the damages, you are at liberty to instruct your solicitor, and he would then be able to account to you with any further damages recovered. You will however, of course, be responsible for any further costs incurred related to the recovery of the damages outstanding.”
Mr Simmons was awarded the damages for “personal injuries” received when he was attacked by a nother man. Mr Simmons lost an eye and was off work for months, recalls Mrs Adams, who was only an 11-year-old girl when it happened. Her father never talked about the High Court case and she always assumed he had received the money. He received legal aid and she cannot understand how the costs came to be so high. Nor can she quite understand how the solicitors, Basset and Boucher, of High Street, Rochester, were apparently unaware of her father’s death until June this year.
“Dad’s life was ruined after he lost an eye,” she says. “He lived like a hermit after that. Nobody was more shocked than me to discover that he never had a penny of the £1,100 he was awarded. It is disgusting… the only people who seem to have profited at all are solicitors.” But she intends to try and collect the rest of the damages – without the help of solicitors. A spokesman at the Croydon headquarters of the Law Society, said this week the fact that Mr Simmons received absolutely no benefit from the money he was awarded was unfortunate, but “not unusual.”
Mr Simmons’ biggest disadvantage was in taking action against a man who was “not affluent.” Although Mr Simmons was granted legal aid to enable him to bring the action, no order was made for costs, and this meant legal costs had to be met from this sum – and costs take priority over damages. The spokesman said: “If damages are recoverable the Legal Aid Fund has a first charge on the moneys as they are recovered.” Mr Simmons’ solicitors, Basset and Boucher, had slowly recovered all the costs, which had been paid in over the last 16 years. The solicitors had only recently discovered their client had died, when it was found that enough money had been collected to meet the bill for legal costs. If Mr Simmons had lived he would now be benefitting from the award, explained the spokesman, and now his daughter would continue to benefit if she wished to do so. Without legal aid in the first place no money would have been recovered.
Kent Messenger and Gravesend Telegraph, 7th November 1969.