Hawkey’s Hauntings.
Writer Raymond Hawkey had never believed in ghosts – until they moved into his eleventh-floor bachelor flat. Ghostly footsteps, voices, bangings and rattlings began plaguing him from the moment he started writing a story of the paranormal. And they did not stop until his book was finished. “I’m so relieved that it’s all over,” he said, looking pale and gaunt. “I must admit, I became very worried at one point, and my girlfriend refused to be in the flat alone.”
Raymond Hawkey had always been highly sceptical about ghostly happenings, even though he had helped to investigate hauntings and poltergeists when he worked for the Daily Express years ago. But his own experiences have convinced him that there is a paranormal side to life.
In the months he spent writing his book, objects vanished from the flat only to reappear hours later. Occasionally there was a strong smell of perfume and sometimes, cigar smoke. A muffled fist would sometimes keep up an incessant banging around the walls of his flat. And at other times, his collection of heavy-framed painting would be whisked off their hooks to lie undamaged on the floor. Now, he admitted, it all seemed rather unreal, sitting in his sun-drenched airy flat listening to his tape-recorded messages from the dead, and a recording he had made of violent rattlings which came from his bathroom cupboard one evening. They were the only evidence he had left of the months of haunting which had so unnerved him and his friends, who were often witnesses to the mysterious sounds.
It all began when he was trying to record a radio programme, and left the tape running while he answered his phone. When he played back the tape later, he heard a man’s voice interrupt the programme, calling for Raymond’s friend, Barbara. “That seemed to be the trigger for a whole series of curious things,” said Raymond, fidgeting nervously with his coffee cup. “One evening, Barbara called me up to the bathroom. Everything in the cabinet was rattling quite violently, but the cabinet itself was completely motionless. Then there were the voices. One of them spoke to me on the phone once when I was dialling a number. It just called my name three times, and that was it.”
As we sat listening to his recordings, the teaspoon in my saucer began to tinkle. Was it just vibration we wondered – or something more inexplicable? The room resounded to the sobbing of a woman, who gibbered in anguish before her voice trailed away on the tape in a protracted wail. “I want to talk to you,” intoned a man with a Yorkshire accent. Another voice said just one word: “Sanctify.”
Raymond admits there were times when he was scared. “I had a horror of coming back and finding the manuscript fluttering out of the window to disappear over Kensington, or that someone would get hurt on one of these occasions,” he said. “You don’t know where these things are going to stop. Barbara was positive that I was being haunted by earthbound spirits. One day we were trying to find a pair of slippers she had bought, and we just could not find them anywhere. By then, we were so used to objects disappearing and then materialising later that we decided to wait for them to turn up. We were sitting watching television when we both heard a ‘plop’ noise under the settee – and there were Barbara’s slippers. Needless to say, we had already hunted there for the slippers.”
Even friends had to bear the brunt of Raymond’s unearthly visitors. A television producer visiting him one evening had been quite unimpressed and cynical about his account of ghostly encounters. “Suddenly I heard a noise upstairs in my study, and when I went to investigate I found all the tape from my answering machine had spilled onto the floor. I came down and told her, but she dismissed it as a technical fault. At that moment, we heard the sound of running footsteps above come pounding down the stairs and scuffling around outside the door. My friend was absolutely petrified. As we sat there, we heard the footsteps turn and go back up the stairs, only to fade away.”
Since completing his book (“It,” publishers New English Library, £7.95) things have returned to normal. He’s just wondering whether they will start again, when he writes his next book.
Shirley Davenport.
Yorkshire Evening Post, 1st September 1983.