‘My poltergeist isn’t frightening, he’s just a nuisance sometimes.’
Ghost stories do not scare one Peacehaven resident who lives in a haunted house and is quite at home with her poltergeist. When the ornaments move around the room and the doors open and shut on their own it’s just part of the daily grind.
The grandmother – who doesn’t want to be named – said: “It’s quite a friendly ghost really. Sometimes I think he is just playing games with me. When I moved here about four years ago I went out into the garden and the patio doors locked. It is quite impossible for it to happen by accident because you have to pull a lever upwards to lock it. That happened twice. And after that the ornaments would move around. I would come into the room and find they had been rearranged and once they were all turned round backwards.
“I actually saw a vase slowly come off the mantelpiece and land on the floor. It was moved very carefully so it wouldn’t break. If something goes missing it always turns up where I’ve already looked. I lost a key once and I removed everything from the table and then went to look upstairs. When I came down again it was on the table.
“I’ve actually seen the figure of an old man in my kitchen. He was solid and looked like a gardener. But when I went up to him he disappeared. My grandson saw the man one day but didn’t realise he was a ghost. He told me the man had come to see me.
“He goes through phases and at the moment he likes to open and shut the cabinet doors in the kitchen at 5am in the morning. The dogs used to go mad when he first started doing all these things but now they don’t even bother to get up and see what is going on. I stay in bed now when he starts in the kitchen. It’s not frightening he’s just a nuisance sometimes. I thought it was better not to have the house exorcised because it could make things even worse.”
Sussex Express 29th October 1993.