Have YOU the guts to live in this house?
By Derek Agnew.
To let: Pleasant three-bedroom house. Older type but newly and tastefully decorated. All mod. con. Ample storage room incl. cellar. In quiet road close to all services. Council owned. Rent cheap.
How would you react to an advertisement like this if you were one of the 50,000 people in Birmingham waiting for a house? You would jump at the opportunity, wouldn’t you? Well there is such a house available. But before Birmingham’s housing officials actually offer it to prospective tenants, they should list these additional attractions: –
Tapping on the ceilings. Strange whisperings. Suffocating atmosphere. A white dog apparition. Previous tenants left hurriedly.
That is what is said to have been happening at 32, Coxwell-rd, Ladywood, where neighbours talk of little else but the strange events of the past month. But they are not indulging in idle gossip, as I found out when I went to Birmingham last week to investigate the case of the Coxwell-rd house. For a few streets away I found 31-year-old Frank Pell and his family staying with relatives and living in wretched surroundings rather than return to No. 32 – a house that Frank swears is haunted.
Frank, I should tell you, is an ex-paratrooper with 40 drops to his credit, most of them made during the war. At the end of May, after living with his wife and five children in a condemned house for two years, Frank came to the top of the housing list, he was given the key to 32, Coxwell-rd. Mrs Pell was overjoyed. “It had been newly decorated, was as clean as a new pin, and seemed the answer to our prayers,” she told me. “We sent for Father Fancis Etherington to bless it for us. He is our local Catholic priest.”
The week-end of its arrival, the Pell family was awakened by banging doors. On investigation Frank found nothing. Neither could he discover anything that would explain loud thuds from the ceiling above the kitchen, or strange smells “like garlic, turning to a smell of burning rubber.”
Now, Frank is a brave man. His war record proves that. And he struck me as a steady type too. So did his wife. They are normal, no-nonsense-about-us, working people. So they dismissed the happenings as “odd, but nothing to worry about.”
Then, during the second week of June, and three weeks after moving to Coxwell-rd, tragedy hit the Pells. They awoke one morning to find that their month-old baby had died during the night. She was sleeping in the same bed as her parents. “There wasn’t a mark on her,” Mrs Pell sobbed. “At the inquest Professor Webster said she was in perfect health but accidental death had come from suffocation. Yet it was a hot night and we had thrown back the bedclothes. If I rolled on her during my sleep there would surely have been bruises of some kind on so small a child.”
Still the family was not alarmed. The Pells buried their child, dried their tears, and prepared again to find happiness in their new home. But the ghost or poltergeist – if such it is – was not to leave the mourners to their sorrow. Every night, generally starting at 10.20, distinct taps came from the direction of the ceiling above the kitchen. They did not last long, but were distinctly heard by relatives and friends as well as by Mr and Mrs Pell.
Banging of doors, as if they were unfastened, went on at intervals in the small hours of the morning. The temperature of the bedroom above the kitchen changed almost hourly, and the strange smells continued in different parts of the house. An eerie whispering – “like someone talking close to a microphone” – was heard in the upstairs room.
Then, a few days after the baby’s death, four-year-old Alan said one evening: “Did baby go with the little white dog?” Frank and his wife turned pale. “What dog, Alan?” “Why, the little white dog who comes and sits on my bed sometimes. I saw him sitting on baby’s face the night baby left us.” Mrs Pell broke down. Her husband went at once to call the police. They searched the house from top to bottom and found nothing.
Father Etherington was sent for to exorcise the house. He came with a rosary and Holy Water. As he stood with Mr Joe Neale, a relative, in the upstairs room, he heard the tappings and whisperings. “I have done all that is possible,” he told worried Frank Pell later. “For your health and the health of the family you should leave the house. It is bad for you.”
But Frank decided to stick it out. “I’m frightened of no man – and until a few weeks ago I was frightened of no thing,” he told me grimly. “It was my home. I decided to fight back.” But two weeks ago Frank was shaving downstairs when he heard the whispering again – just behind him. I knew that only my wife was in the house. I rushed to the stairs to see if it was her. She was standing at the top of the stairs, mouth open as if screaming, but I could hear no sound. I started to clamber up the stairs. Then I stopped dead. There was a kind of invisible barrier I couldn’t break. I caught hold of the bannisters and heaved. Suddenly I broke through. At once I could hear my wife’s sobs and sccreams. She said the voices had been whispering to her as well.”
That night a broken-hearted family left Coxwell-road. The left on the spot – without packing a bag, without even making the beds. Frank’s niece, 22-year-old June Hadley, and her fiance, Dennis Savage, 23, have been to the house to get belongings for the Pells. But never again. For last Monday they heard the tappings for themselves.
With a “People” photographer I stayed in the house all night in an effort to solve the mystery. There were no whisperings or knockings, no little white dogs or invisible barriers. We solved one puzzle. We discovered a faint gas leak in one room. That could account for the smell of rubber. But though nothing untoward happened, we did confirm changes of temperature in the house, and a musty smell in certain rooms that mysteriously came and went.
Birmingham Council has asked for a full report on the house from its technical staff before reletting it. Surveyors will check drains, gas pipes, the cellar and attic in an effort to answer the questions posed by the Pell family. In the meantime, Mr and Mrs Pell are to be rehoused, along with their remaining four children, aged 6, 4, 2 and 12 months. For whatever the result of the council’s investigation, housing officials acknowledge that the Pells are genuinely convinced the house is haunted. Now it sands empty. Would YOU have the guts to take it?
The People, 17th July 1955.
Thuddings, eerie whisperings, but –
Five families queue to live with the ghost at No. 32.
Birmingham Corporation yesterday received five applications for the tenancy of a “haunted house” – and they expect many more this week. An official of the Corporation’s House Management Department said yesterday: “We shall re-let the house after necessary repairs have done. We shall have it thoroughly investigated by our technical staff first.”
Haunted? “We preserve a completely open mind about it.” The house, number 32, Coxwell Road, Ladywood, is in a row of terraced houses. Two weeks ago the tenants, Mr and Mrs Frank Pell, left after only four weeks in it. Mr Pell said yesterday: “We heard thuddings on the kitchen ceiling at night, like a 12lb hammer. There were strange smells – almost like garlic – and eerie whisperings.”
Three weeks after they moved in, the Pells’ month old baby was suffocated in her parents’ bed.
A few days later their four-year-old son Alan told about the “little white dog.” “It comes and sits on my bed sometimes,” he told his parents. “I saw him sitting on the baby’s face the night baby left us.”
The Pells have never had a dog. That night they left Coxwell Road to stay with friends. They have until midday today to return to the house – or surrender their tenacy. Frank Pell declared: “We will never go back.”
Last week four members of Birmingham Psychic Research Council spent a night in the house. They found nothing. They hope to be able to “test” the house again, because they cannot get over one strange coincidence. While clearing out the loft soon after she went to live in 32, Coxwell Road, Mrs Pell found a newspaper dated July 12, 1917 – and it was folded so that the headline gave this warning: “Watch your children”… One of their five children died in that house.
[photo as below] – No. 32 Coxwell Road, where they heard thuddings on the kitchen ceiling at night, and eerie whisperings.
Birmingham Daily Gazette, 19th July 1955.
Corporation refuses to allow ghost hunt in a council house.
Birmingham’s Housing Management Department does not believe in ghosts, Mr J.P. Macey, the city’s housing manager, said yesterday. It doesn’t believe in doors that open and close of their own accord, in whisperings from unseen mouths, or in little white dogs that just vanish. All these things are supposed to have happened in a council house, No. 32, Coxwell Road, Ladywood. A family moved out because of them.
But the Corporation has turned down a request by the South Staffordshire Metaphysical Society to carry out a ghost hunt at No. 32. To Mr Alfred Mills, president of the society, Mr Macey sent a reply, stating: “I have no reason to think there is any foundation for these stories which have been circulated about this dwelling.” A new tenant has moved in, says Mr Macey, and therefore the request cannot be granted.
The society became interested in the house after it heard what was reported to have happened to the last tenant, 31-year-old ex-paratrooper, Mr Frank Pell, and his family.
First, it was said, they heard thuds above the kitchen ceiling for which they could find no explanation. And there were strange smells of which neither they nor the Corporation could trace the cause. Three weeks after they had moved in their month-old baby girl, who was sleeping with them, died during the night.
Shortly after this Mr and Mrs Pell’s four-year-old son Alan asked if his sister had gone with “the little white dog.” He had seen it sitting on his sister’s face the night she died, he said, and he had seen it sitting on his bed, too. Despite intensive searches, no little white dog was found, although the boy was convinced he had seen it.
Then there were more tappings in the kitchen; whisperings about the house; doors would swing open and close; and the weird smells wafted round. The Pells left.
Now Mr Mills has written to Mr George Harris, the new occupier of No. 32, offering to carry out an independent research. Mr Harris, who lives there with his wife, Elsie, and their six children, said he, too, intends to turn down the ghost hunt offer. “We’ve seen and heard nothing peculiar since we moved in here,” he said. “It’s a nice house and we are happy. Ghosts? They’re all baloney.”
Birmingham Daily Gazette, 4th August 1955.