Ghost with a stoop.
Family of five terrorised.
Hasty retreat.
Mistaken for a burglar!
A family of five have been driven from their home at Cheadle, near Manchester, by the strange behaviour of a ghost, and nothing will induce them to go back except the desire to collect their furniture and belongings. When a Sunday Mercury reporter saw the family, Mrs Curzon, a widow, her two sons and two daughters, to-day they made no bones about their terror. “We are not imaginative people,” said Mrs Curzon, “but the happenings in this house during the past three years have been sufficient to drive many people out of their minds.”
Mrs Curzon’s face clouded when she related how first she saw the apparition which has grown worse as time went on. “First of all there were strange noises,” she said, “like a rustling in a built-in cupboard in one of the bedrooms. Then a tall, stooping man would appear, his features shrouded in an eerie light, and he fleated about the room.”
Until this week the apparition had only appeared to individual members of the family, who had all kept it from the others. The last straw was when the ghost appeared in the bedroom of George, aged 16, the youngest member of the family. He thought at first it was a burglar, but he says that as a phophorescent light grew brighter and moved round the room he was terror-stricken and shouted out.
The family doctor and local minister have witnessed the same manifestations and advised the family to leave. Three members of a spiritualist church have held a seance in the house and declare the spirit to be that of a man who once lived in the house and who appears to be attempting to find the whereabouts of his relatives.
They declare that it is not a malignant spirit, but that has not prevented Mrs Curzon and the family from beating a hasty retreat into rooms until they can find another house.
Birmingham Weekly Mercury, 5th March 1933.