Clock shock puzzle for family.
How does a perfectly ordinary clock on a window sill come to be hanging upside down entangled in a lace curtain – when there is nobody in the house? That is what’s worrying Mrs Irene Slaymaker, of 54 Oakes Road, Bury St. Edmunds. Mrs Slaymaker (48) and her husband Ted were given the clock four years ago by their daughter as a wedding anniversary present. Until last year it sat on a sideboard in the sitting room of their two bedroomed council home. Then they decided to move the furniture round and the clock was put on a window sill in the same room.
After that strange things started to happen. Mrs Slaymaker came downstairs one morning to find the lace curtain had wrapped itself round the winder on the back of the clock and the clock was hanging from the curtain. She blamed it on her younger son, six year old David. But then it happened again – and again.
The crunch came when the Slaymakers were away over the Spring Bank Holiday weekend. When their other son, Lee, went into the house to feed the goldfish the clock was caught up in the curtains again. But there had been no-one there for two days.
Mrs Slaymaker says there are no draughts in the room – the door and all the windows are shut at night. And they have no pets, apart from the goldfish. Now she thinks the strange goings-on must be the work of a poltergeist. “People say why don’t you move the clock, but I don’t like to in case ‘it’ might like to throw it about or do something to it,” she said. “I am not frightened or anything – I am not a nervous type. But I don’t think I would like to stay here if it got any worse,” she added.
She said she never used to believe in ghosts, but now she is having second thoughts. “There doesn’t seem to be any other explanation,” she said. Mrs Slaymaker is wondering who to turn to for help – the council, the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, the police? But she thinks people will laugh at her. So if anyone can advise her how to deal with a poltergeist she would very much like to hear from them.
Mrs Slaymaker and her moving clock.
Bury Free Press, 13th June 1975.