The ticking ‘ghost’ that drove young couple out.
By Mark Thomas.
The ticking of a clock began to irritate a young housewife as she decorated her bathroom – because there was no clock in the room. And during the last couple of weeks the noise began to follow her everywhere in the house, while her husband watched helplessly and the family guard dog cowered in the kitchen. Even an exorcist could not put an end to their ordeal, and now their fear has become so great that they have moved out, and the wife, Ellen Seaman, aged 20, refuses to go back.
Sitting in the living room of the house, in Calgarth Road, Huyton, husband Patrick Seaman, aged 23, said: “We were so happy here. We have been married for less than a year and this was our first home, so we were determined to make a go of it. Both of us are out of work, but I have used all our spare cash to try to do the place up and make it good. But now this thing, whatever it is, is just driving us out. It only begins late at night, and only when my wife is here. It moves around the room and sometimes hides its presence behind the clock. If you take the clock away, or stop the clock, the ticking remains, in the same spot.
“And it isn’t just on the walls. The sound sometimes comes from inside the chairs. Our dog, rebel, is a good housedog, but he hides in the kitchen when it happens. Afterwards we began to associate other things that have happened here with the same problem. We have had five television sets and a radiogram, all of which blew up. Lights in the house sometimes went on and off of their own accord. We didn’t think that there was anything unnatural about it, because until now we never really believed in things like that.”
Mrs Seaman said: “I won’t go back into that house again now. I was absolutely petrified when this began to happen. The strangest thing of all is that if you try to talk to the noise, or ask it what it wants, it goes quiet for a moment, as though it is listening to you.”
An exorcist visited the house. But afterwards things grew worse, if anything. The couple returned to the house to find the coffee table overturned, pictures off the walls and statues smashed. Household items like knives, forks and tea-pot lids have started to disappear, and one morning the couple got up to find Mrs Seaman’s underslip sstretched out across a couch in a downstairs room. It had been packed away the previous night. But never was there any sign of a break-in.
Now the couple are staying with Mrs Seaman’s parents in nearby Saxby Road, but they can’t stay there after the weekend. Meanwhile, the area housing manager, Mr Harold Lewtas, is taking their problem seriously. “We are checking into the past history of the house to see if there is anything that might point to a haunting,” he said. “And a technical officer will check everything out if there is something like beetles which might account for the noises. We will check everything out very carefully, and if we can’t solve the problem we will look at the possibility of rehousing the couple.”
Mr and Mrs Seaman outside the house in Calgarth Road.
Liverpool Echo, 21st July 1977.