Wails of the unexpected… from the Lingwood family who know all about things that go bump in the night! Ugh! Aaargh!
The Lingwood household from Lichfield hasn’t a ghost of a chance of forgetting Hallowe’en this weekend. For on Sunday night at their home in Spring Road, members of the spirited family will be bracing themselves for an extra creepy dose of those things which go bump in the night. The house, built in the early 1960s, looks quite an innocent residence, but what dark secret does it hold in its grounds?
Last week 35-year-old Mr Chris Lingwood, an insurance company manager, was digging in the garden preparing for an extension to the house when he came across foundations to some remains of a bricked-up cellar – containing? Yes, you’ve guessed it… bones! The grim discovery brought memories flooding back of a series of spine-tingling events two years ago. And the strange happenings which followed over the next few weeks have baffled the Lingwoods to this day.
“We definitely had a little visitor in th ehouse and it proved most mischievous .Things started to be hurled about and furniture moved, but it always seemed to happen near the children’s bedtime. It was a little bit spooky and unnerving for all of us,” said Mr Lingwood.
“One evening my daughter Tracy, then aged about 12, was hit on the head by a book which just flew across the room.”
Peace was restored to the house when Mr Lingwood covered up the ground again [sic], but now is someone or something poised to return? Mr Lingwood, a Londoner, wants to investigate the history of the site in Spring road. He is uncertain of the date of the cottages whcih were demolished to make way for his house, but from the evidence of the hand-made bricks he has dug up, he is convinced they must have been a century old at least. One chilling fact the Lingwoods have learned is that a child died in mysterious circumstances in one of the cottages years ago. Who knows, except that there are more things in heaven and earth….
And as Mr Lingwood admits, the bricked-up cellar does have shades of Vincent Price. Sweet dreams on Sunday, especially if you live anywhere near Spring Road, Lichfield.
Lichfield Mercury, 29th October 1982.