The strange story of a haunted flat.
A terrified mother tells of two weird years with a ghost.
Mrs Rose Begley, who did not wish to be identified by a photograph, opens the door of her flat to the Mercury… something she would not have done normally. So terrified is she of the strange presence that she usually spends her days with her mother at her home in Ponesfield Road. “It is horrifying, I cannot live with it any more,” she says.
A priest may be called in to exorcise a Lichfield home which it is claimed is haunted by the ghost of a man who committed suicide. The man plunged to his death from the top of a seven storey block of flats in Bloomfield Crescent 12 years ago. Since then strange and sinister things have happened at Boswell House. A terrified mother told the “Mercury” yesterday, that for two years her life had been “sheer hell.”
“I have been petrified by the weird and inexplicable happenings at my flat,” said 18-year-old Mrs Rose Begley. Now the matter is being investigated by Lichfield District Council housing officials. Mr John Thompson, Director of Housing and Public Health, said he would arrange for Mrs Begley to be interviewed. “I cannot say at this stage if there is a solution, but we will do all we can to help this young mother.”
Mrs Begley claims locked doors at the flat open and shut, and kitchen drawers fly out, spilling knives and forks over the floor. Dirty linen is flung around rooms and there are continual bangings and footstep sounds in the middle of the night. Jewellery also vanishes for weeks at a time and then reappears, claims Mrs Begley.
“I have watched a saucepan float off the draining board in the kitchen and spin round in the centre of the living room floor. It is horrifying and I cannot live with it any more.” Her two-year-old son Steven has also experienced unexplained feelings, and wakes up in bed at night crying, says Mrs Begley. “When I go into his room he is sitting up in bed staring into the darkness. He knows something is there,” she said.
A local priest has been asked to carry out an exorcism of the ghost. A heartbroken Mrs Begley said the exorcism was her only way of getting rid of the ghost.
Ten years ago a young boy delivering newspapers claims to have seen a ghost-like figure fall from the flats. The “Mercury” traced him to his home at Collins Hill, Lichfield. Freddie Higgs, now 21, said he was with a group of friends when they saw the ghost. They ran home “petrified” with one boy being so frightened, he stumbled and broke his arm. Mrs Florence Higgs said: “When my son came home I thought something terrible had happened. He was shaking and seemed very frightened.” She added: “I am not surprised to hear what is going on at Boswell House because there have been so many stories of it being haunted.”
Lichfield Mercury, 7th March 1975.