Haunted House.
Weird experience of tenants.
Cats vanish in thin air.
Stories of weird happenings in a Manchester house were told to a “Press and Journal” representative last night. Amazing happenings which the tenants allege have taken place during the past eighteen months in a Chorlton-on-Medlock (Manchester) house were related to the “Press and Journal” last night by a man and his wife who are still unperturbed by events which might well be calculated to unnerve the strongest.
As the living quarters in which the strange events have been noted are connected with a business, the tenant and his wife are anxious that their identity should not be revealed, but they appear to believe all the things related. We are not spiritualists, they told the “Press and Journal,” and are not inclined to look on the happenings as supernatural – there must be an explanation, but it is difficult to find out what it is.
First we noted that a locked door from the cellar rattled unaccountably on occasions, and we could find no reason for it. Then one day the cat suddenly jumped up from its sleep on the hearthrug, made a cry of terror, and darted round and round the table before bolting for the yard. Later we found it absolutely cowed in a shed. About the same time, said the husband, I was in a room upstairs which I use for my work when I heard the cry of a kitten beside me. I looked round three times. The first and second times I saw nothing, then from the middle of the floor a thin column of bluish coloured smoke moved slowly across the room and disappeared through the window.
Some time after, he said, my wife heard a cat’s cry of agony beside her in an upstairs room and saw a cat move to the fireplace and disappear as into thin air. And it was no ordinary cat, said his wife, becaus eI could see through it.
On one occasion a big bump against a set of drawers was noted by a child of eight, and last night she told with great simplicity how “It was a very big bump, but there was nothing there. It was on the chest of drawers.”
On another occasion the wife was talking to a man who claims to be a spiritualist medium at the shop door, when he exclaimed, “I don’t want to scare you, but there is someone standing behind you. It is a woman.”
Neither of the people believes in spiritualism, yet they told the “Press and Journal” last night that at times there seemed to be another presence in the house, and there was a perceptible difference in the atmosphere when it departed. The wife on one occasion was attracted from her housework to look at the window, and there saw a bedraggled boy aged about nine. I was just wondering, Now, who can that be? when it disappeared into the air, she added.
I am waiting to see if there are any developments in the near future before revealing the whereabouts of my house, the tenant said, and then I shall get someone in who professes to understand these things. As it is, we are completely baffled and can offer no explanation.
Aberdeen Press and Journal, 28th August 1929.