There’s a ghost in my house!
Alkrington grandmother Mrs Margaret Barlow did not stand a ghost of a chance when things started to go bump in the night. Only weeks after she moved into her new home in The Moss, strange happenings have so terrified her that she is demanding to be rehoused.
“It started on 31 March. At first I thought it was burglars. Things started to go missing, just small things – one day a Hoover, the next a kettle. We have had the police here every day for a week. Then something started stripping the beds and piling the blankets in a heap on the floor. I remade the beds and minutes later it happened again. At first we though ti was the children, then someone coming through the rafters, but the roofs are sealed – the police went up and examined them – and the children denied doing anything. It cannot be them because it happens when we are all downstairs. It’s a ghost,” she said.
Over the Easter weekend 60-year-old Mrs Barlow’s ghost moved downstairs and started wrecking the front room. “If it were burglars they would just throw things about and break things. As it is the furniture is piled into the centre of the room and nothing is broken. It is as if something were going round in circles. Just to make sure no one was getting in a neighbour from our old house in Davidson Drive sealed the windows on Monday. It was the worst thing we ever did. Since then there have been continual bangs on the roof, on walls and on the ceiling. I just cannot take any more. It is driving me mad.”
The centre of attention seems to be Mrs Barlow’s 15-year-old grandson, Paul Carrington. He lives in Lorton Close, Langley, but whenever he visits his grandmother things seem to get worse. “It seems to follow him,” said Mrs Barlow. “There are bumps, bangs and rattlings when he is not here, but every time he goes upstairs, even to the toilet, the ghost starts hammering on the ceiling. It is like someone banging with a broom handle.”
Mrs Barlow swapped houses six weeks ago because her daughter needed a bigger house. There had been no problems before the move. Mr Alan Taylor, the neighbour who sealed Mrs Barlow’s windows, was walking about 300 yards away from the house one night when loud bangs brought him running. “They were really loud even from all that distance. It is all turning Margaret into a nervous wreck. Ihave also been there when the bed has been stripped.”
A Catholic priest has twice blessed the house, but to no avail and the force, whatever it may be, seems to make a particular point of disturbing Mrs Barlow’s holy water. Now, she is demanding an exorcism to rid the house of its poltergeist. “The priest has to get permission to carry out an exorcism – but I wish he would hurry up,” she said.
Middleton Housing Office inspectors went round to the house yesterday to see if there were any structural problems which could cause the noises.
Middleton Guardian, 15th April 1983.