The strange case of the startled prefab. dwellers.
Haunted granges and enchanted cottages are out of fashion, or maybe the housing shortage has hit the astral world. Now “things that go bump in the night” are turning a prosaic little prefab into a house of dread. For four years Mr Percy Moss, 32, ex-Serviceman, had his name on Bristol Housing Department’s waiting list before they picked out No. 51, Langley-crescent, Ashton Vale Estate, for him and his wife Mabel, 26.
“We hadn’t been in our prefab for more than three days,” said Mr Moss, “when we started to hear noises at night. It was a loud, bumping noise under the floorboards and it went on every night. At first we thought it was rats, and the sanitary people put down poison, but it didn’t make any difference. Eventually, my wife got so scared that she would not sleep there and I had to take her to her father’s home, three miles away, every night.”
Mr Moss agreed to swap prefabs with Mr Robert Armstrong, who lives at the Innes Court Estate. The housing department, who had not given permission for the exchange, have ordered the two families back to their original prefabs. “But nothing will make us go back to the prefab,” Mr Moss said last night.
Daily Mirror, 26th March 1947.