Our most haunted.
By Christina McKenna.
Shop-owner Anne thought she was going mad. An understandable reaction to the impossible, the bizarre. On a chill November morning in 1992, she’d left home at the usual hour for the short drive to Larne. A creature of habit, Anne prided herself on the fact that she’d arrive at the shop at exactly the same time each and every morning, six days a week. Having let herself in, she’d deposit her bag and car keys on a little table in the back room, hang up her coat, check the till, and ensure everything was “in its proper place” before opening the shop.
The key word here is “routine.” Anne went through the same motions each and every time. That’s why on that particular morning, when she returned to the back room to retrieve her handbag and found it missing, she was genuinely baffled. “I looked everywhere and so did Rita, my assistant, when she arrived in, but it was as if it had vanished into thin air. It was only when Rita looked up at the shelves behind the counter that the mystery was solved. There was the handbag.” Was someone playing tricks? No, not someone, as Anne would later discover, but something. The handbag incident would mark the beginning of an extraordinary chain of events in the little jewellery shop. Innocuous and “playful” to begin with – pieces of jewellery going missing, only to turn up days later in the most unusual places – things took a more sinister turn when the business began to suffer.
“People would leave in items to get engraved (Anne’s son David, an engraver, worked in the back room) then, when they would call to collect them, we wouldn’t be able to find them. It made us look sloppy and inefficient. A watch, say, might be left in the out tray and the minute I’d turn my back, it was gone, nowhere to be seen. There was no logical explanation.”
After several frustrating weeks of this, the poltergeist shifted up a gear. The back room became the focus. Knocking and banging would start up on the walls, particularly when customers were present. Anne would answer their quizzical looks by pretending the builders were in. Things reached crisis point when David came under attack at his engraving table. One morning, the “presence” went berserk and began pitching boxes from the stacked shelves right before his eyes. He was hit by several and no longer felt safe in the room.
Anne is, by nature, an unflappable lady. But now she felt that not only was her livelihood being threatened, her very beliefs were being tested. “I was getting angry and that wasn’t like me. I’d pray. We all did. It would leave for about a month then suddenly come back, as bad as ever. It was as if it was taunting us. We were at a complete loss.”
Help finally came in the shape of valiant Canon William Lendrum. He celebrated a Eucharist in the back room. Yet the ghost that had haunted the little shop for so long was not going without a fight. “Canon Lendrum was physically exhausted afterwards,” Anne recalls. “The atmosphere during the Eucharist was very frightening. It was ice cold and the knocking and banging got worse. It’s something I’ll never forget.” That deliverance was worth it, however. Since that dark evening back in 1992, Anne’s noisy ghost has never showed up again. A miracle was wrought. A soul found rest. A family was set free.
Belfast Telegraph