‘Ghost that drove my husband from home’.
Mother tells of strange goings-on.
A young mother is blaming her broken marriage on an “evil” ghost which she claims haunts her council house. Mrs June Peel says her husband left home soon after her husband left home soon after they moved into the house in Fourth Avenue, Gillingham. “I blame the ghost for what happened. When we came to look the place over I did not want to take it, there was an unhappy atmosphere,” she said. Since her husband left there have been several unexplained incidents, many witnessed by two friends. The haunting started with banging and rattling noises and reached a peak two weeks ago when rooms were ransacked, an apparition seen and a knife flew at Mrs Peel apparently unassisted.
Mrs Peel said she had seen a man in his fifties standing on the stairs. He is well built, bald and wears glasses. Only the top half of his body can be seen and he is wearing a smock. The man has also been seen by Mrs Tina Harber, a neighbour and friend. She said: “He looked quite ordinary. I didn’t stick around after seeing him.” The ghost has been heard by Mrs Peel and Mr and Mrs Harber walking down the stairs and banging about in the attic.
He also unlocks doors, pulls bedcovers off, rearranges furniture and ornaments and moves the curtains, said Mrs Peel. A few weeks ago Mrs Peel said she and her baby son were in bed when the coveres were lifted off them. Mrs Peel said: “I was frightened, I can’t stand much more of this.”
She said she came down one morning to discover a hole had been dug in the living room wall with a carving fork. When all this began Mrs Peel said she tried to rid her home of the ghost by hanging crosses in the house, but the haunting continued. The first time Tina and Tony Harber witnessed the strange goings-on was when Mrs Peel called them to the house late one night. Mrs Harber said: “I heard a banging noise from upstairs and thought at first it was June’s baby rocking the cot.” Mr Harber went into the attic to investigate the noise but found only a set of footprints in the dust. Mrs Harber said: “the footprints weren’t on the beams, they were in between. If anyone had stood on that they would have gone through.”
It was as they were leaving that Mrs Harber and Mrs Peel saw the man standing on the stairs. The police were called in and at first thought a prowler was on the loose. An inspector, who did not want to be named, said when he and Sergeant Christopher Mould went into the house ornaments were strewn on the floor. Both Mrs Peel and Mrs Harber said the ornaments were in their normal places when they left the house earlier. The inspector said: “I do not disbelieve the woman when she says what she has seen. I did not see or hear anything.”
A psychic ghost-hunter, a Methodist Minister and a Vicar were also called in by Mrs Peel, but none of them have been able to throw any light on what has happened. Canon Donald Mills vicaar of St Barnabas, Gillingham, said: “I have been to the house but have seen nothing untoward. I have told Mrs Peel that if she is troubled again I will gladly exorcise the house. I have done many in this parish.”
Mrs Peel thought at first the haunting was connected with the deaths of previous tenants. One committed suicide in the attic and the other died a lonely recluse. But when the apparition was described to neighbours who knew the former tenant they said it was not him. Mrs Peel has now asked Gillingham council to move her to another house.
Kent Evening Post, 12th October 1978.