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Netherfield, Nottinghamshire (1993)

 Family flee from ‘house of frights’.

A mother and her two young children are refusing to go back to their home after a Hallowe’en fright. Susan Bishop and the children fled from the house on Sunday and have refused to set foot in it again. “I would sooner kill myself than return there with my kids,” she said.

The first scare at the house in Hodgkinson Street, Netherfield, happened on Saturday night when Mrs Bishop’s sister Elaine Palin, 33, of Worrall Avenue, Arnold, and some friends came to stay. Mrs Bishop and Mrs Palin said they were startled awake at around midnight by loud knocking from the attic above. The noise centred on a corner of the bedroom. “Then we heard the loudest steps gradually speeding up, running across the attic. Susan was so scared that she jumped out of bed and ran downstairs to fetch her kids,” said Mrs Palin. Mrs Palin said she couldn’t move because she was petrified “by an evil presence.”

She said: “I heard it drop through the ceiling and it thudded on to the floor by the window. I looked towards the window and I could hear it walking towards me. Everything slowed down as if in slow motion and it seemed to last forever. There were loud bangs at the foot of the bed. It was as if it wanted to look at me. I could sense it was a powerful force.” Susan found her screaming hysterically in bed. She said the “presence” seemed to have moved from the room, but the scratching and banging could still be heard in the attic. During the incident, cupboards had been moved and doors opened and closed, they said.

Adam Leatherland, 16, of Worrall Avenue, Arnold, was sleeping downstairs at the time. “I had never heard anything like it. We had to get out of the house because the noise became too much,” he said. The following night they all slept downstairs but the banging started up again. Lightbulbs blew upstairs and this time everyone fled out into the street.

When they finally plucked up the courage to return on Tuesday they said they found the house was “freezing cold” and there was a stench. Mrs Bishop, who has approached her local vicar for advice, said: “I am not going back in that house – no way. I would take a scruffy old house from the council rather than go back in there again.”

Howard Wilkinson, a local investigator of unexplained phenomena, said the occurrences were not untypical of the sort of things reported and normally associated with poltergeist activity.

Nottingham Evening Post, 6th November 1993.