13
I’ll be the first to admit that when it came down to matters of the heart, I’ve sometimes made some bad choices. When the doctor told me that I was pregnant with my first child, I was just coming out of the tail end of a disastrous relationship. It had left me in a serious amount of debt, and most frightening of all, I was now even less capable of escaping my prison than I had been before.
My back was truly to the wall, and I now had no choice but to stay and face whatever this house had to throw at me. But if I had thought that things had been difficult before, now the fear and pressure had increased tenfold: this time, I was both alone and pregnant. I soon found out, as many pregnant women do, that the few friends who dropped by to visit me suddenly stopped coming around. After all, what young person wants to spend their nights at home with a cup of tea and an early bedtime, unless they absolutely have to?
Word had gotten out about the paranormal activity at the Cage. It’s reputation as a haunted house had already put most people off from coming over to visit, let alone staying over for the night. My dear friend Heather had been an exception, but she had very sadly passed away. I still grieved for her and missed her and longed for her company and support.
The last time that I had seen Heather was after her funeral. We were at her wake, which was being held in a pub. I happened to glance over at the Christmas tree that occupied one corner of the room, and there, smiling radiantly, was my darling Heather. She was smiling broadly, and looked so happy that it brought tears to my eyes. Not being in permanent pain made all the difference.
To make things even better, standing next to her was my brother Scottie, who had passed on years before. As was his habit, Scottie appeared totally calm, looking every bit as peaceful as Heather was enthusiastic. She and I had talked at great length before her passing, and I had promised her faithfully that my brother would be the first to meet her once she arrived on the other side. The fact that they had never met made no difference at all, so far as I was concerned, and I was overjoyed to see that Scottie had kept the promise on my behalf.
Now, much to my dismay, it was pretty much me, myself, and I, all alone for seven nights a week. I had never missed Heather more. My mood sank to an all-time low. I hated how trapped and lonely I felt, particularly as the fear of my own house never went away. I didn’t feel even remotely safe inside the Cage, either by day or by night; everything felt utterly helpless and hopeless, and I couldn’t see how I would ever be able to get myself out of this tangled web.
As the baby grew and my due date drew nearer and nearer, my fear grew as well. I started to have nightmares about trying to raise a new life inside this hellhole.
Thankfully, there was one ray of sunshine: my good friend Mikey O’Connell. Mikey was great comic relief and also provided a bit of very welcome company for me, on those occasions when he would pop round just to see how I was doing. I had known Mikey since I was eighteen, and he knew that the house had become a genuine danger to me and my unborn child. Rather than simply being the typical haunted house, he accepted the fact that the haunting of the Cage was something far darker and much more evil.
It was nothing short of miraculous that he still came over to visit me, considering the fact that Mikey had suffered his own physical attack inside the Cage. He was fixing the light at the very top of the stairs one day, just above the landing, which was so paranormally active. No sooner had he finished changing the bulb for the umpteenth time (it was constantly flashing on and off, or failing to light up at all) when he was suddenly shoved hard in the back by a strong pair of hands.
He fell head over heels down the stairs, landing in a crumpled heap at the bottom step. Thankfully he was unhurt, but he was very badly shaken. I couldn’t blame him: he was lucky not to have broken his neck.
On another separate occasion, Mikey had just finished replacing the bulb in the outside yard light, and had hung around out there for a while to chat with me. From out of the blue, the light suddenly exploded, blasting apart with such force that the glass from the lamp was blown clear across the enclosed yard. We threw our hands up to cover our eyes, instinctively turning away from the blast. It was a good thing we did, because both of us were showered with wickedly sharp broken shards of glass, some of which embedded themselves in the top of Mikey’s bald head.
We both knew with absolute certainty that the explosion was not down to bad workmanship or cheap materials. Mikey knew what he was doing and had purchased high quality bulbs. Once again, the Cage was wreaking havoc with electronics, and this time it had drawn blood.
My deep terror of the house reached an all-time high one morning in the upstairs bathroom that I had grown to fear and despise so much. It was around half past seven, and I was brushing my teeth before going to work. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. Suddenly, just as I was leaning forward over the sink, something smacked me violently across the buttocks.
This wasn’t a playful swat, which would have been scary enough, considering the fact that there was nobody but me inside the bathroom. No, this was an angry slap, and it was going to bruise. I was so shocked and hurt by the vicious blow that I screamed at the top of my lungs, spitting out a mouthful of toothpaste and splattering it across the mirror in front of me. My toothbrush flew high up into the air, landing in the basin with a clatter.
As had become my policy, I kept what had happened to myself, mostly due to the fear of being branded either a lunatic or a fantasist. Yet the physical attacks would grow more frequent and more severe, leading me to genuinely fear for my life.
Perhaps the most disturbing assault of all happened when I was standing at the top of the staircase, just outside my bedroom door. I was looking at myself in the full-length mirror that was mounted on the wall next to the landing, making sure I looked OK before heading to work.
What happened next took me completely by surprise. Two unseen hands slammed into me, pushing me violently to the ground. I fell sideways in the direction of the spare bedroom, and found myself lying on the floor, having fallen onto my side. For a moment I was frozen in shock, fear, and pain, but daren’t move. I was heavily pregnant and was worried about trying to get up, in case the baby was hurt—it wasn’t unthinkable that the stress might push me into early labor. And so I just lay there on the spare bedroom floor, utterly alone in the house, praying that my baby would be unhurt.
As the seconds became minutes, tears began rolling down my cheeks. Once they started coming, they simply wouldn’t stop, becoming choking sobs as the gravity of what had just happened to me sank in. What if I had fallen onto my belly instead of my side? The physical trauma could easily have caused an internal bleed that was potentially life-threatening to both my unborn child and to me.
“Just leave me alone!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, giving vent to months of bottled-up emotion. “It’s not fair! IT’S. NOT. FAIR!”
My outburst went on until I had no more energy left, no reserves of strength with which to fight back against my invisible tormentor. When it was finally over, I struggled to pull myself up off the floor, using the wall for leverage. As I slowly made my way downstairs, with the intention of sitting outside in the yard for a while, a temporary escape from the confines of the Cage, I had a horrifying realization: I could so very easily have been pushed in the opposite direction, which would have resulted in me being left helpless and seriously injured at the bottom of the stairs.
Vanessa on the stairs.
I was eight months pregnant when I finally had to admit that installing a new bathroom suite couldn’t be put off any longer. The current one had been on its last legs for the last twenty years by the looks of things, and as a new baby was to arrive soon, it needed to be taken care of.
I enlisted the help of my cousin Toby, who was a plumber, and when the new white suite arrived, Toby started work on removing the old bath, sink and toilet, and replacing it with the new ones. Fortunately I was on maternity leave, so when Toby arrived one morning, I took the opportunity to pop round and have a cup of tea with my mum Ruth, who lived just two minutes away at the other end of Coffin Alley.
After no more than an hour or so, I heard a frantic knocking at Mum’s front door. Being heavily pregnant and not so fast on my feet, I remained on the sofa and waited for Mum to answer the door. Within one second of the door being opened, a furious and red-faced Toby marched into the front room, and in a raised voice said, “I’m not going back into that house again alone! If you want me to finish the work you will have to come back with me now!”
Toby was clearly very distressed, which couldn’t be more out of character for him. He was a plumber by day and a doorman by night, and wasn’t prone to getting worked up. Precarious situations never fazed him. Obviously, that day was an exception. I told him to calm down, and tell exactly what had happened to stress him out so.
It transpired that when I had shouted upstairs to Toby, telling him that I was going out to my mum’s, he was already hard at work in the bathroom. He called back down to me, hollering that it was no problem, and that he would see me when I returned later.
A little while later, Toby heard me come back into the house, along with a friend. He said that he knew I wasn’t alone, as he could clearly hear two people talking downstairs. He couldn’t hear the specifics of the conversation and really wasn’t interested in listening, as he was on the floor removing the toilet, but he did shout down, “Ness, put the kettle on please!”
Minutes passed without a response, so Toby assumed that I had simply not heard him the first time. He could still hear general activity downstairs, so he called down once again for me to put the kettle on. Toby carried on with the job in hand and thought no more about it till around ten minutes later, when I still hadn’t responded to him, when he finally got up from the bathroom floor and leaned over the upstairs banister to call down for the third time.
After a few minutes, he heard footsteps in the downstairs lobby, followed by the black iron latch of the bottom staircase door snapping up. Finally, he thought to himself, I was bringing him a cup of tea at last! Toby heard footsteps on the stairs, walking out onto the ancient wooden floorboards on the landing.
Toby was lying down on the bathroom floor now and said, without getting up, “Thanks! Just leave it out there. I’ll get it in a second.” There was no reply, which he thought was unusual, so he called my name in an attempt to strike up a conversation. Yet again, there was no answer. In that second, Toby knew that something was very, very wrong, and he quickly got to his feet to stand in the bathroom doorway, looking out into the small upstairs hallway where he believed I would be standing.
To his utter consternation, there was nobody there at all. Toby’s mind raced, trying to make sense of where I had gone and just how I had managed to get down the stairs so quickly without making a sound. Failing to come up with an explanation, he finally decided to go downstairs and see if his cousin and the person she had been talking to were down there.
Toby searched the Cage high and low, stunned to find the house completely empty, with the door still bolted shut and absolutely nothing out of place. That’s when it finally dawned on him that I had never actually come back to the house in the first place, and neither had an intruder come in; he was all alone, and he had been from the moment I had left about an hour before.
So who was it that had been talking and had opened the staircase door and come up the stairs into the hall? Toby didn’t want to stick around any longer in that house alone to try and work out what had happened, so he literally ran out, jumped into his van, and drove over to his Auntie Ruth’s house, where he knew that he would find me.
Toby then expressed a sentiment that I had heard more than once before when he said, “I can’t fight what I can’t see!”
It had, he said, rendered him completely helpless. Over the next few days, Toby did reluctantly return to the house to finish the job—but only on the condition that I not leave the house under any circumstances, and that the staircase door would be open at all times so that he did not feel alone and isolated upstairs.
In a way the whole incident had brought me a certain amount of comfort—not because my younger, tough cousin had been scared halfway to death, but for the fact that again it showed that it was not completely personal. Whatever the reason for the haunting, it was willing to make itself known to others who had no connection to the house.