The events described are alleged to have taken place between 2007 and 2009 and involved a number of individuals living in the area. In this account, names have been changed and actual addresses have been concealed. According to the author, two major British Newspapers began investigating the disturbances, though no report made it into their pages. The report begins in April 2008.
I’d just moved into a new shared house in Stockwell. I was studying biomedical sciences at King’s College and this was the first time I had rented. I’d been in halls of residence before this and lived at home before that, so I was really excited to have my own house, which I was going to be sharing with four of my new best friends. The house was a big old Victorian town house. It had three floors and a basement area, which had been converted into a kitchen and sitting area. When we moved-in everything was amazing at first. We’d have loads of friends over every night. We had a cool roof terrace, which we’d use for BBQs and a massive, sitting room to chill out in. We became a proper party house.
One thing had troubled us all from the start. When we moved in we found loads of abandoned items belonging to a previous resident called Dave Thomas. At first it was nothing major. We’d find unopened letters stuffed in draws or hidden at the back of cupboards for example. The volume of letters was weird, we found dozens, all addressed to the same person, but we didn’t worry too much about it. However, that all changed one day when a radiator in the sitting room fell away from the wall revealing a number of items that had been hidden from sight. We found a tattered passport and wallet (with money and credit cards in it). The wallet, passport and everything else belonged to Dave. Intrigued and slightly weirded-out by this, we decided to hunt out some of the letters (which hadn’t been chucked out yet) and read them. This is where things got really odd. Amongst the bills and junk mail were letters from Dave’s family and employers asking him to make contact. One letter, from Dave’s brother, read: “It’s been two months since we last spoke. We are getting very worried that you’re not answering your phone to us or letting us see you when we call round. What’s wrong? What have we done? Nothing is worth cutting off your family”.
You know the saying “ignorance is bliss”, well I didn’t really understand what was meant by that, that is until I heard what had happened to the mysterious Dave Thomas. According to the local corner shop owner, Dave had lived at the house between 2005 and 2007. He worked in central London as a translator and had been a popular member of the local community. He lived with three friends, all of whom worked for the same media company. In January 2007, Dave’s landlord instructed some redevelopments to happen at the property. The old cellar space was remodelled to become the kitchen and the old kitchen was removed, along with its walls, to create an extra large sitting room. Shortly after the work had proceeded, Dave and his fellow housemates began to claim that the house was haunted. They reported seeing objects move in front of them, as well hot and cold spots and strange overwhelming smells. Dave responded to the paranormal activity particularly badly. He became irritable and strange, shutting himself off in his room for days and weeks at a time. He also developed a frightful temper and would erupt at his housemates over minor issues.
Dave’s housemates, from whom he had become isolated, where keen to move out, but decided to take a holiday together just to get away from the house in the interim. Whilst they were away, Dave left the house in the dead of night, wandered through the streets of London barefoot and eventually ended-up near Vauxhall Bridge, where he took a pair of scissors from his pocket and began hacking at his throat.. The subsequent coroner’s enquiry found Dave had taken his own life, after a period of mental illness.
It is sickening to think of someone going through what Dave went through. It’s creepy and eerie to think the whole morbid episode started in my house. It’s even worse when you realise that house still contains personal affects belonging to the deceased. When I heard the story, at first I found it hard to believe, but it was confirmed as being true by loads of other locals at different times. Obviously we got rid of Dave’s possessions immediately, bundling them together with the letters and returning them to the address on his brother’s letter. We included a covering note saying we had found the items at the house and wanted to return them.
Had it just been Dave that had been effected, this story wouldn’t be so chilling, but that wasn’t the case. Over the course of the next week, more information emerged regarding the strange activity. At the same time that Dave’s tragic sager was unfolding, two neighbours also started to behave in a strange and erratic way. The first, a 68 year-old Portuguese woman, lived in the adjacent property to Dave’s. Her sister had become so disturbed by the inexplicable and lunatic behaviour of her younger sibling that she called in the Catholic Church (on the recommendations of her family G.P.!). Although it is entirely unsubstantiated, it was claimed the Church performed a full exorcism on the individual, complete with crucifixes, holy water and priests chanting “the power of Christ compels you”. The sisters moved out of the property weeks later.
The other victim was a man in his 20s, who lived opposite Dave in a maisonette. He was the son of a prominent politician and it was his ordeal that attracted the attention of the national newspapers. Nothing made it onto the pages of the interested newspapers. It was rumoured that the guy’s dad was a friend of Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson and that they had ensured the story was buried. The young man’s girlfriend had called the emergency services several times in response to his bizarre and aggressive behaviour. Eventually he attempted to attack his girlfriend with a claw hammer and was subsequently detained and committed, ending-up at a secure mental institution in North London. Stories circulated in which it was claimed the young man had attributed his behaviour to being under the control of a mysterious entity. He allegedly stated that he had been regularly visited in the early mornings by a ghost called “Sid” and that Sid had hold of him at all times and was capable of causing his death at any moment.
Me and my housemates were totally freaked out from what we learned. I can’t overstate how much stories like this will change the way you relate to your neighbourhood and your “home”. Although we had not personally experienced any paranormal activity, the house had become strangely oppressive and we all felt our behaviour and moods altering. We wanted to move out as soon as possible, but we were limited by the lack of a deposit for a new place. We had to face the grim reality that we’d probably need to stay put for at least another 2 months.
I was fortunate. My parent’s lived in Guildford, which is close to London. I ended up spending most of my time back home, away from the house. My flatmate Kelly wasn’t in such a fortunate position. She worked locally at a pub and her family home was miles away in Lincoln. She couldn’t move away like me, so she had to stay put, surrounded by the terror, hostility and oppression of the house. The fear in the house was palpable. You could cut the atmosphere. I would get goose bumps and chills all the time I was there and feel hypersensitive, like I was always being watched over. I couldn’t sleep at nights and found myself becoming nocturnal whenever I stayed at the property for more than a few days in a row. On occasions, I would feel like there was someone or something stood right up against me. It was only a sense, but it was powerful and overwhelming and left me feeling constantly vulnerable and occasionally violated. I am not sure whether it was these feelings that eventually did for Kelly, but in April 2010, when she was staying at the house alone, she threw herself off the top of our house, jumping from the roof terrace we had used for BBQs on to the pavement below.
Thank God, Kelly survived. She broke both her legs, every rib, one arm and her collar bone, but had no serious, life threatening or long-term injuries. She made a full recovery. Kelly claimed not to remember the sequence of events that led her to the roof that night, recalling only having taken a bath earlier the same evening then resting on her bed because of a sudden headache. This was the final straw for us. We packed-up and moved out within a couple of days of Kelly’s accident. However, it wasn’t quite case closed. When we finally got to speak to the landlord (who was an ex-pat, living in Spain), he told us that he had personally witnessed paranormal activity at the house, but refused to accept that this was connected to the mayhem being wrought on the street and the its residents. He had lived at the property himself in the 1980s. He first noticed that something was amiss when his pet dog began behaving strangely. Never timid before, the 3-year-old collie blankly refused to go into certain rooms. Months into their time at the house, the landlord’s girlfriend at the time had woken several times in the early morning to see a figure stood at the end of their bed. A medium was brought in, who advised the landlord to move out as soon as possible, but she refused to divulge any information on the spirit she claimed to have detected. Shortly after this, the landlord quit the property and began renting it out.
Roz, one of my now ex-housemates, was studying history at UCL. She decided to research the street and property, in a bid to work out what he had all just experienced and perhaps find a reason for the malevolence that seemingly inhibited this area of Stockwell. She discovered that the street had been built in 1842, under the management of Sir Sidney Wainwright, an architect and property developer. Sir Sidney was a self-made man, with a tyrannical personality. He had passed away on site, during the construction of the houses. We also discovered that the street had had a total of 39 suicides during its 166 year history (as of 2008) as well as 6 murders (including one triple murder – wife and two daughters – in 1872). I had never believed in curses or ghosts or possessions before my experiences in Stockwell, but now I know that I was living alongside some dark force and that this force was powerful enough to control people. People need to be aware that forces don’t have to be physical to pose a serious physical threat. Call me superstitious, but 39 suicides and 6 murders seems a bit too high for a street with just 24 houses.
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