Prayers for ‘ghost’ family.
Prayers will be said in Tain today after a family claimed they were driven out of their home by supernatural happenings. Church of Scotland minister Susan Brown, who on Tuesday became the first woman moderator of the presbytery of Sutherland, will pray with Kevin and Jill Richardson and their tow-year-old daughter Nicole. The Richardsons were forced to move out of the Highland Council-owned house at 3a Tower Street because Nicole had become so scared of figures she kept seeing in her bedroom. They are now in a new home where Nicole is sleeping soundly, but the little girl still becomes very agitated if they drive past their old house.
Mrs Richardson, 22, said: “We had been in the house for two years. It is a lovely place but we had no choice but to leave. Nicole would wake up screaming hysterically and shouting ‘man, man, man.’ Eventually when we were visiting my mother’s house she said to us: ‘No want to go home, no want to go home. Bad house – don’t like it.’ We asked her what she was seeing and she vividly described an apparition of a man with a dog walking through the walls and trying to get into bed with her. We took her to the doctor and he told us that she is not old enough to make things up. He said that staying in the house was damaging her health and the best thing that we could do would be to move out.”
Yesterday Mrs Brown said: “I am going to say some prayers. It will be the first time that I have been involved in a situation such as thing. I have been talking to the family about their experiences and I feel that this would be an appropriate thing to do.”
Highland Council has already found a new occupier for the house in Tower Street.
Aberdeen Press and Journal, 27th May 1999.