“Snarling” council house ghost terrifies city mother.
A terrified mother claimed today that her corporation home was haunted by a snarling ghost. And as she sat with her arms around one of her five children, 37-years-old Mrs Grace Shepherd, of 177, Corneville-road, Bucknall, said: “I want to get out of here as quickly as possible.”
Mrs Shepherd’s 38-years-old husband Frank, a long-distance lorry-driver and ex-regular soldier, was the first to notice supernatural “happenings.” “I was lying in bed about three weeks ago when I noticed a spark appear in a dressing table mirror,” he said today. “It grew larger and larger, into a moving blob, then slowly disappeared. Quite honestly, it scared me.”
But Mrs Shepherd was “absolutely petrified” by what she saw in the same mirror a week later – in daylight. She had gone into the bedroom to comfort her 10-months-old daughter Grace, who was crying. “Suddenly, something made me look into the mirror, and I saw the image of a monk, snarling at me. He was surrounded by bright light. His hand was reaching out and I just could not pull myself away. I could see every detail of him – his purple robe, grey beard, black monk’s cap and long hair.”
Mr and Mrs Shepherd moved out of the bedroom and carried their bed downstairs. But soon afterwards, Mrs Shepherd saw the monk again – at the top of the stairs. “I know it sounds stupid,” she said, “but since it happened I have walked the streets for hours at night, too afraid to sleep, even downstairs with the lights on and a bright fire. I have had to have medical treatment for my nerves. Normally I never get scared, but this has got me terrified. There is an evil presence in the house. Why it should come now, after we have lived here five years, I don’t know. But we can feel it.”
The Shepherd’s story is to be investigated tomorrow by Mr Gordon Higginson, Minister of Longton National Spiritualist Church and one of the Midlands’ leading psychic research experts. “It may be imagination,” he said today, “but Mr and Mrs Shepherd are so terrified it does not look like it.”
Said the City Housing Manager, Mr R.M. Burt: “We can hardly investigate anything we do not believe in. We are not contemplating giving the family a transfer.”
Staffordshire Sentinel, 30th October 1967.