A ‘Ghost’ Gives Family The Shivers.
By Marion Jenkins.
A family thought they were imagining things that went bump in the night. But then more and more weird things started happening in the Rochester house. Mandy Goble and her mother Mrs Barbara Lewis began to wonder if there was a ghost. A hot water tap turned itself on upstairs when 21-year-old Mandy was in the kitchen. She said: “I saw the glow in the gas heater. I had just had a bath and suddenly heard and saw the water heater come on. I had to go upstairs to turn the tap off. I saw hot water rushing into the bath.”
Mrs Lewis, 53, has also had odd experiences. At 4 am one morning she was getting ready for an early shift at CAV factory, Rochester, at the house in Longley Road when she heard someone trying to open the back door. She thought they were burglars and shouted at them to go away. But heard no footseps leaving the yard.
Mandy, who has a baby son, James, and her mother believe that the terraced house has been haunted by a man who committed suicide nearby.
But the member of the family most affected has been the reigning Miss Medway, Mrs Annabelle Chamberlain – Mrs Lewis’s daughter from Strood. Annabelle and Mandy were sitting in the lounge one day when everything went icy cold and the record player switched on and began to play an old record on the turntable that had not been played for years. “To switch it on you have to lift the lid, but no one went near it. And goodness knows how the record got there,” said Mandy.
The crux came when Annabelle went to see her mother one evening. She began screaming and shouting. “I had never seen anything like it,” said Mrs Lewis. “And never want to again. It was as if Annabelle wasn’t really there. Like she was miles away. She was holding a pen and, as if it went by itself, she wrote ‘Sorry’ on a piece of paper.”
Mrs Lewis and Mandy hope that their seven week ordeal is now over since the incident with Annabelle. A priest has been to see them to bless the house at Mrs Lewis’s request. Mandy refuses to sleep in a back bedroom of the house because one night she went cold and felt the blankets being pulled up over her. “I wanted to scream out loud but I couldn’t. It was as if something was stopping me. I came up in big goosepimples and now I sleep with my mother and James in the front bedroom,” she said.
Kent Evening Post, 11th November 1976.