Ghost drives out seven in terror.
A family of seven say they have been driven out of their council-house by a ghost. They were so terrified after two weeks of mysterious happenings that they demanded a move from the four-bedroomed home. Their pleas were answered. After visiting the house in the Teams district of Gateshead, council housing officials moved the family into a nearby flat in time for Christmas.
The family, who did not want to be identified, said they were so afraid after the sighting of “a figure in grey,” that they called in a spiritualist and a Roman Catholic priest to bless the house and exorcise the ghost. Several years ago a woman was found dead in the bathroom and the family believe it could be her ghost. The spiritualist was convinced that there was a ghost in the house and said the woman who was found had committed suicide.
The first the family knew about the spirit was when the 18-year-old daughter went upstairs and at the head of the stairs saw “a grey figure dressed in a long cloak with a light shining round it.” Since then curtains have moved for no reason, light shades have begun swinging about and on one occasion the kitchen suddenly went cold and dim. The ghost was spotted in the late afternoon, the time, it is said, when the dead woman usually returned from work. The family said most of the incidents occurred about 4.15 p.m. except for one occasion when a paper Christmas bell suspended from the ceiling started spinning wildly at midnight.
“I jumped up and pulled it from the ceiling,” said the householder. “We had to get out. It was harming my wife’s health and she had to go to the doctor because of what she saw,” said the 46-year-old householder, a foreman ganger.
Mr Jim Underwood, Gateshead Housing Manager, visited the house and said “The family were all distressed. It was not my concern whether the house was haunted or not. They believed it, so they were going to have an unhappy Christmas. That is why I moved them out. I don’t think anyone else will have any bother. The majority of people don’t take this sort of thing seriously. We will be trying to relet the house.”
Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 30th December 1971.
Ghost gives up the house.
The ghost of Amberley Street, Gateshead, has finally been laid to rest. No longer does the haloed grey apparition send tingles of fear up the spines of the tenants at No. 42. At one time, lampshades danced madly for no reason, curtains would open, and things went bump in the night. An 18-year-old girl was confronted on the stairs late one night by the grey figure of an old woman, surrounded by a blinding white light, and a family of seven had to be rehoused two years ago, after suffering months of supernatural happenings. Mediums and priests were called in to exorcise the spirit.
But this month, the third anniversary of the ghost’s first appearance, the new tenants of the haunted house pronounced it finally laid. “We heard a lot about the ghost before we moved in but it has never bothered us and seems to have disappeared,” said Mrs Kathleen Brady, who lives in the house with her husband Tom, brother-in-law Dick, and her three children, Michael, Mary and Peter. “We are not really frightened by the thought of it, although it obviously scared the wits out of the family who were here when it kept appearing.” Not even the two younger children, 11-year-old MAry and Peter, aged nine, seem impressed by the reputation of the ghost, which once made the house famous in Gateshead.
The medium who was called in, identified the apparition as the ghost of a woman who had committed suicide in the bathroom of the house some years ago. The final straw for the family who hadto be moved came a few nights before Christmas when all the ornaments on their Christmas tree started spinning wildly. They called the council officials – and were in a new house the following day.
Newcastle Journal, 25th July 1974.