17
A few days after I encountered the apparition that was watching my son sleep in his crib, I sat down for a frank discussion with my friend, Kerry. When I poured out my heart about our nightmarish situation, she was sympathetic and immediately offered Jesse and I a new home.
Kerry lived in Colchester, right next to the castle in a lovely three-bedroomed house with a garden. Jesse and I would have a room each, and there was the added luxury of a garden for Jesse to have a paddling pool. Kerry lived alone, and had been one of my best friends for many years, so it was the perfect solution for us both. We wasted no time in making plans for the move, and over the next few days I made regular trips in the car to transfer my belongings to our new home. Kerry would come home from her job as a dental nurse and place all of my things away in my new room to make way for the next lot of boxes to arrive.
The morning of the move soon arrived, and I can hardly convey my joy and relief at the fact that our long-awaited escape was finally at hand. My cousin Kirstine and Nicole came to help me, and Mikey pitched in with his van to help move the heavy furniture, so I was well on my way to beating a hasty retreat from my living hell.
Kirstine was brave enough to go upstairs alone to continue packing up my belongings while Nicole and I were doing likewise downstairs. After a while Kirstine came downstairs and announced that the majority of the work was done, so we all felt justified in taking a break for a cup of tea. We gathered in the front room for a little down time and began to chat about nothing in particular.
From somewhere directly above our heads there came a loud thud, then another, and another. There was nobody upstairs. The three of us girls were the only living people inside the Cage, which made it feel all the more sinister.
The three of us got up from where we were sitting and all ran in the direction of the kitchen, practically clinging to one another. The noise upstairs grew louder and changed position, thuds coming from different parts of the ceiling. We listened fearfully, unwilling to go upstairs and confront what we knew had to be a spirit.
That’s when we heard an all-too familiar sound, one that I had heard many times before. Somebody was coming down the stairs, banging and thumping on every step. This was a man, by the sound of things, and a big one at that. He also didn’t sound very happy with us.
It was then that Mikey burst through the door like a knight in shining armor, walking into the front room only to be instantly mobbed by three terrified girls. We ran to him like scared children, talking over one another as we competed to tell him what had happened. Mikey listened for a moment, and when we finally gave him the chance to speak; he said that he had arrived just two or three minutes ago and had parked the van outside and had happened to look up toward the bedroom window as he got out.
In that window Mikey had very clearly seen a man and was able to describe not only his facial features but also the top half of his body. The man struck him as being menacing, with piercing, evil-looking eyes. Mikey added that the man’s hair was tied back and slick, but with grease and dirt (rather than the neat and oily slickness of the contemporary apparition that had driven me out of the house). The man wore old-fashioned clothes of a brownish color and was as solid as any human being.
Mikey was visibly shaken when he related what he had seen, and he said that he knew without a shadow of a doubt that the man he was looking at was a ghost. When he finished speaking, all four of us strained our ears. The footsteps on the staircase had stopped. Silence had descended on the Cage once more, and we weren’t going to waste it.
We packed up the rest of my belongings with great speed. In our haste we left behind stuff I would have absolutely taken under normal circumstances. I had very deliberately made sure I left behind anything that had been tainted by the spirits of the Cage, such as Jesse’s toy train engines, which remain there to this day. I didn’t want to risk bringing back any spirit attachments with us when we moved into our new home.
Mikey, Nicole, and Kirstine walked out of the door first. I went last, and in one final defiant act, I closed the door securely behind me, taking one last look inside the house through the small panes of glass in the door window. This had become a habit before entering the Cage when I came home from work, and I always took just a little reassurance when I found that there were no shadow figures to be seen.
This time, things were different.
Right there in the front room, as though he wanted to see me off for the very last time, was a shadow man: A seven foot tall, dark, blurry mass was moving slowly across the room, seeming to taunt me with the fact that he had won and I had lost. He had driven me out, and now the Cage was all his …
Jesse and I settled easily into our new house and life with Kerry. The relief of living in a safe house was palpable, and I underwent a noticeable change in mood. I felt as if a huge black cloud had been lifted from my shoulders. The depression that had gripped me dissipated almost immediately after we left the Cage. Now I could truly live again, as opposed to simply surviving each passing day under the most horrendous of circumstances.
So many things had changed for the better with our escape from that cursed house, but there was still the problem of what to do with the Cage. Being a single parent, I was living on just my own wage, and making ends meet for Jesse and I was hard enough, but now there was extra rent to pay in addition to the mortgage on the Cage. This state of affairs couldn’t continue for long before I would be bankrupted.
As luck would have it, I was approached by a former coworker named Sharon, who asked if she could rent the Cage from me. Sharon was fully aware of the building’s recent suicide history, and I also filled her in on the details of the haunting.
“I’ll rent it to you,” I told Sharon very seriously, “but on your own head be it.”
Sharon wasn’t fazed by the reputation of the Cage, and moved in shortly afterward. A few months into the new tenancy, I received a panicked phone call at work. It was from Sharon, who was in a terrible state. She claimed that she had been attacked the night before whilst she was lying in bed, and that this was the last straw.
“Vanessa, you have to do something!” she insisted.
After talking to Sharon at length that day, I found out that some strange incidents had taken place since Sharon and her teenage son had moved into the Cage. Cushions were thrown across the front room; the electrical mayhem that I knew so well had continued to plague Sharon; doors would open and close themselves, slamming whenever they felt like it; and her Staffordshire terrier dog had been behaving oddly ever since she moved in.
I had paid for the electrical wiring to be checked and certified before Sharon and her son moved in, as the law requires when a property is rented out. The phone call had been provoked when Sharon was held down in her bed at night by something that she couldn’t see, but she felt two heavy knees digging into her chest with great force. She tried to call out to her son in the next room for help, but due to the force on her chest she wasn’t able to draw breath. Sharon had felt utterly defenseless, and it frankly scared the wits out of her. I knew exactly how she felt.
She was right: I had no choice but to engage the help of a medium. The haunting was never going to simply just go away, and there was no point in pretending otherwise, especially with the safety of my tenants at risk. This time Sharon had escaped relatively unscathed … but who was to say that she would be so lucky next time? At some point somebody was going to sustain a serious injury inside the Cage, and I just couldn’t let that happen.
One morning after I had just dropped Jesse off at the nursery, I was approached by a woman in the street that I had never met before. The woman introduced herself as Mandie Ward. Mandie said she also lived in St Osyth and asked, “Are you the same Vanessa that owns the Cage?”
I replied that I was, but with a certain amount of hesitation, as I really didn’t know who this lady was, or why she would want to know about my connection with St Osyth’s most notorious haunted house.
The lady proceeded to tell me about an alarming experience she had had just a few weeks before while driving past the Cage one morning. Mandie remembered the time exactly: 10:10 am. She was on her way to her nursing shift and was running a little late—normally, she would drive past the Cage at 10:00 am.
As she turned onto Colchester Road from the village crossroads, Mandie had a clear view of the Cage. Something unusual caught her eye—something in the top bedroom window.
Mandie emphasized that she regularly passed the house each day and had never noticed anything particularly unusual before. But this morning she caught sight of a bizarre figure, and she was so surprised by its appearance that she slowed right down to a snail’s pace in order to get a better look. Mandie said that she saw, as plain as day, a strange woman standing there, clearly visible from the waist up, looking out of the master bedroom window.
The woman was old, in Mandie’s estimation, somewhere in her seventies or eighties. She had very thin hair that was straggling down the sides of her face, with a face that was so thin and hollowed out that it was almost skeletal. She appeared to be wearing some type of night dress, one that was both very worn and old fashioned.
I had heard of this lady many times before. She was always seen in the same place, looking out of my old bedroom window, but I had never seen the lady herself. Mandie’s description was very detailed, and tracked with the other eyewitness accounts.
“Vanessa, I work with the dying. I’ve seen many corpses, those of the patients that I look after, and I can tell you that’s exactly what she looked like … a corpse.”
Days later when I was at work, a customer came in that happened to be a member of a nearby spiritualist church. He told me of a lady named Kelly Bebbington, who he said was renowned as a clearer of dark energy and earthbound spirits. She sounded like the type of person who may be able to help, and I felt that it was certainly worth giving her a try.
That afternoon, I called her. Kelly introduced herself and told me of the ability she had possessed from childhood to see, hear, and communicate with the dead, and the skills she had developed in dealing with the paranormal.
Kelly told me that she specialized in the mitigation of dark energy, demonic entities, troubled and hostile spirits, and the lifting of curses. Kelly made me feel very comfortable talking about the house, and for the first time I was willing to open up and tell somebody the entirety of what had been going on over the past three years, and the depths to which it had affected me personally.
Kelly agreed to take on the case, but warned me that there were no guarantees. I was also impressed that she didn’t ask for a fee or any kind of publicity. She simply wanted to help.
By the time Kelly came to the Cage in person a few weeks later, Sharon and her son had packed up and left. Their tenancy in the house had ended abruptly, which is a long-running tradition with the old prison. I met Kelly and her husband Steve on a chilly evening outside The King’s Arms and showed them into my empty, troubled house.
Inside it was dark and still. I was still terrified of the house, and I was unwilling to cross the threshold again; I waited outside in the evening drizzle while Kelly and Steve walked through the house and soaked up the atmosphere. Steve did not have her specialized skills, but was a sensitive and helped provide protection during some of the more extreme cases Kelly encountered.
Kelly took a large crystal pendulum inside, along with a crucifix on a chain and several other artifacts that would aid her in communicating with the spirits. Unfortunately, that evening there was no electricity in the house, so Kelly and Steve went in practically blind. Time passed slowly for me as I paced up and down outside, nervous and fretful about what was happening inside.
After about an hour or so, Kelly and Steve emerged from the house looking somewhat pale and worn. Kelly clutched the remains of the beautiful crystal pendulum that she had taken in whole, but was now shattered into pieces. She told me that it had been ripped out of her hand by a hostile entity in the prison room itself and smashed into pieces on the hard floor. Kelly had gone from room to room trying to communicate with the spirits in the house and encountered (as she had suspected from the outset) bad and negative energy, or what she would call “demons.”
Kelly’s psychic connection with the house had started on the day of the first phone call and grew in strength from then on; it became stronger in the car on the way to the house, so Kelly knew what to expect when she did finally step foot inside the medieval prison.
From the yard outside, I could faintly hear that Kelly was speaking in Latin and saying words that I didn’t understand. Watching through the windows, I noted that time was taken in every part of each room, as Kelly made sure that no spot was missed or overlooked. Kelly’s very first words to me when she emerged were, “You are very strong to have survived in there for that long—you must be very protected by spirit.”
Kelly explained that the energy in the house was some of the darkest she had ever come across, that it was putrid with negative and destructive energy, and that it would not be an easy task to restore peace or normality to the house, if indeed it was possible at all—which, after their first experience, Kelly and Steve very much doubted that it would be. Hundreds of years of sorrow, grief, injustice, and death had seeped into the fiber of the very fabric of the house, and that, along with the many energies haunting there, would be an insurmountable task for anyone to take on.
She went on to tell me that inside the Cage a number of spirits were grounded, trapped here on the earth plane—confined within the ancient prison walls. There were also spirits that came in visitation, meaning they had free will to come and go, and also hostile, angry spirits that had the capability to harm and cause physical and mental damage to people. (That aligned with Stephen’s assessment of the place when he later investigated as part of Richard’s team.)
She also told me that there were demonic entities in the house whose sole purpose was to cause harm and destruction in any way that they could. They had no conscience whatsoever. That night, Kelly had set the wheels in motion to begin the cleansing attempt, and in doing so she had called upon guides and angels in order to come and, as she put it, “wash down your walls,” starting a process that would be both lengthy and unpredictable.
After several weeks of the Cage being uninhabited, the financial strain of paying the mortgage and rent reared its head again, and the house was once again rented out. Needless to say, its streak of chasing out new tenants continued unbroken, and within just four months it was empty and abandoned once more. This time I didn’t know the details leading up to the second tenants’ disappearance, as they were handled by an agency, but let’s just say that I wasn’t surprised in the least. But what was unusual this time around was that the tenants had left behind most of their belongings. It looked very much as though they had simply run out of the door without looking back.