4
Before Vanessa was able to leave that night, Stephen stopped her and asked her how she came to encounter the spirits of the Cage in the first place.
“I’m happy to tell you, Stephen, but not in there. Shall we go over to the pub?”
“Sure, but no alcohol for us,” the priest said. “We never touch a drop during an investigation. Standard protocol.”
The three of us went over to The King’s Arms and found a table that was situated well away from the windows that looked over toward the Cage. Over soft drinks, Vanessa began to tell us exactly what had led to her owning a haunted witches’ prison—and how, finally, the ghosts had driven her out.
I first moved into the Cage with one of my childhood friends, Nicole Kirtley, on a warm spring bank holiday in 2004. We were both excited at the prospect of a fun, new lease on life together. I can still remember that day as if it were only yesterday, because the sense of pride and satisfaction I felt when I woke up that morning was so overwhelming. I was beyond excited, practically giddy at the prospect of moving into my dream home.
I had no idea at the time that it would turn out to be an absolute nightmare.
St Osyth Village, and especially Colchester Road where the Cage is situated, still holds the very best of childhood memories for me. The area feels warm, safe, and familiar; along that same road, more or less in the middle and directly opposite the Priory Deer Park, is the house that I grew up in.
It’s fair to say that I did have some knowledge of the Cage’s dark and tragic history prior to buying it. I had walked past the place many times, and had practically memorized the words written on the plaque mounted on the red brick outer walls that identifies it as being an ancient prison for those accused of witchcraft.
Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I have to admit that I was blind to what that really meant. I was fixated on the fact that the Cage represented a new home and a fresh start, and I regret to say now that I spared little time to think about the evil that the house would have been witness to during its lifetime … and the possible consequences.
I wasn’t too surprised when I saw the For Sale sign posted up outside the Cage. After all, nobody seemed to own the place for very long; the place would change hands over and over again, and even the number of temporary tenants, such as renters, would have a really high turnover. It was almost as if nobody could stand living inside the place for very long. This had happened for as long as I could remember, and I would find out the reason why soon enough.
Nevertheless, I wanted it, and I was lucky enough to get it. A lot of things had to come together in order for me to become the latest owner of the Cage, but I finally found myself standing outside the back door and accepting the keys from the estate agent. Turning that key in the lock and opening the door for the first time, all I could feel was excitement and anticipation; after all, this was my dream home—something I’d wanted all my life.
It wouldn’t be long before I would start to dread walking through that door, terrified of what the night ahead of me would bring. But on that first day I was full of optimism. Even the ever so slightly musty smell couldn’t put me off. Nicole and I were grinning from ear to ear as we carted in all of our stuff and began to unpack. Little did we know …
“Well, that was quite the story,” I remarked as Stephen and I let ourselves back into the Cage. We had just waved Vanessa off. Her tale had been nothing short of incredible, one of the darkest and most fascinating accounts of an active and intelligent haunting that either of us had ever heard of. “Bloody hell, but it’s cold.”
“No wonder she seemed glad to get away,” Stephen commented.
The first order of business was to get some heat going. Stephen plugged in the electric heaters, spacing them out at either end of the front room and cranking their temperature setting up to the max. I went through into the kitchen, my whole body shivering, and began to make some hot tea.
The kitchen directly adjoined the Cage itself, which was a fairly small brick building that was somewhere around the size of most people’s guest room. All of the other rooms, including the entire upstairs floor, had been added on to the Cage many years after it was built sometime during the sixteenth century.
Relatively small and compact, the kitchen had enough room for a fridge and sink, along with a few cupboards and shelves. It would not have looked out of place in any fairly modern house.
The dining area and kitchen.
As I searched around and found a couple of cups, setting them down on the countertop, my eyes drifted over to the big plasma screen TV that was mounted on the kitchen wall. Used by Vanessa’s tenant, Micky, to keep an eye on the goings-on throughout the house, it displayed the feeds from multiple security cameras that had been placed in each room (except the bathrooms, of course). Everything seemed to be quiet for now. Nothing stirred within the Cage, apart from a shower of tiny dust particles that danced across the screen from time to time when an air current disturbed them.
“The heaters are up and running.” Stephen wandered into the kitchen and looked around. “So this is where it all started for Vanessa, huh?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “This is where she first realized that the Cage was haunted. And just like us, she was standing right here, making a cup of tea … ”
We’d unpacked the essentials first, which included a brand-new electric kettle. It was just coming to the boil. I was leaning against the kitchen countertop when it happened, still lost in a daydream and trying to get used to the idea that I actually owned the Cage.
Dropping a teabag into each of the cups, I carefully poured in the hot water and stood there, waiting patiently for the tea to steep. I could see out into Coffin Alley, which was quiet and peaceful.
When I heard the footsteps behind me, I naturally assumed that it was Nicole. After all, why wouldn’t I? She was the only other person inside the house, as far as I knew.
“You’re just in time,” I called out cheerfully, reaching for the milk. “The tea’s made.”
When there was no response, I thought it was kind of odd. Turning around slowly, I fully expected to see Nicole creeping up on me, trying to be stealthy and give me a good scare. But it wasn’t Nicole at all, and what I actually saw almost gave me a heart attack.
The figure that stood right behind me was tall and absolutely black. It had no identifiable features of any kind; in fact, it looked as though a child had taken a black crayon or marker and scribbled a big human-shaped dark outline in the middle of thin air somehow. The edges were blurred, not clearly defined at all.
I couldn’t say for certain, but I got the impression that the shadow figure was a man, not a woman. It was very robust in size and build, standing a good six feet tall, broad in the shoulders with long, solid legs.
I couldn’t move a muscle, and neither could I speak; I was so shocked and stunned at what I saw that the old clichés about time standing still proved true. I really could feel my heart pounding away in my chest, fast and hard, while my mouth went as dry as cotton. Every instinct was screaming at me to run, to get out of there, but I couldn’t move a muscle. My feet were rooted to the spot, and just like the rest of my body, they flatly refused to obey the commands that were coming furiously from my brain.
Besides, a deeper, quieter voice inside me reasoned, where are you going to go? That thing is standing between you and the only way out of here …
Was this real—was it really happening, or could it be all just a part of my daydream? I wanted to pinch myself to make absolutely sure, but deep down I was absolutely certain that this was real. I could make out every detail on the wall behind the shadow figure, the scuff marks left by our feet on the kitchen tiles … this was no hallucination.
I don’t know how long we stood there facing each other, just looking at one another. The shadow man didn’t have any eyes, but I knew somehow that he was staring me down, like a predator hungrily eyeing its prey. There wasn’t much I could do but stare back. Time passed. It can’t have been more than a few minutes, because Nicole was still pottering about the place, but to me it seemed like an eternity had gone by.
My body had broken out in a cold sweat. I was absolutely terrified. How on Earth was something like this happening to me in my own kitchen, of all places, in broad daylight?
Without uttering a word or making even the smallest sound, the shadow man suddenly turned and began to move off in the direction of the front room. As he moved, he began to slowly fade away, until by the time he had reached the doorway connecting the Cage to the front room, he had completely disappeared into thin air.
I let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. My head felt light and dizzy, and I brought a hand up to massage my temple. At least my body was doing its job again. Concerned that I might faint, I reluctantly turned round and clutched at the countertop for support. Looking through the kitchen window, I caught sight of Nicole, still breezily unloading boxes of our stuff from the back of the car. It couldn’t possibly have been Nicole’s footsteps that I had heard coming from behind me in the kitchen. She had been outside all this time.
Fortunately for her, Nicole was blissfully unaware that we were sharing our new home with at least one uninvited guest … the shadow man.
As we sat by the fire, drinking tea and talking, I gave some serious thought to telling Nicole about my experience in the kitchen. Ultimately, I decided against it; she had been diagnosed with cancer and was scheduled to have surgery in order to remove a large tumor. The Cage was supposed to be a place of rest and recuperation for her, and telling her that it was haunted wasn’t exactly going to provide her with peace of mind.
Deciding it was best not to tell her for now, I pushed the frightening experience out of my mind that first evening. We talked and laughed as good friends do, and then slept side by side on inflatable air mattresses in the master bedroom. Nicole was asleep long before I was. I lay awake into the small hours of the morning that first night, reliving my encounter with the shadow man in nauseating detail.
Who was he? What did he want? And most importantly of all, did he mean us any harm? There were no answers forthcoming that night, but it didn’t stop me from tensing up every time a shadow seemed to move.
That was my welcome to the Cage.
Some full-bodied apparitions are every bit as solid as you or I, to the point where they will even touch the living on occasion. It isn’t unusual for the person encountering them to mistake them for a flesh-and-blood person, interacting with them without even the slightest suspicion that they are in fact talking to a ghost. But such encounters are relatively rare. Ask any paranormal investigator about shadow figures, on the other hand, and they’ll tell you that they are actually fairly common.
Over the course of my own career, I have encountered shadow figures in locations as diverse as an old hospital, a sanatorium, a railway station, a country and western roadhouse, far too many private residences to mention, and even an Italian restaurant, of all places. The shadow man or woman seems to be ubiquitous.
Sometimes the shadow figures act as though they are completely unaware of the presence of the eyewitness that is watching them, simply going about their business without reacting to the living human being who catches sight of them. But others seem to be fully aware that they are being watched, and may even interact with the eyewitness if it suits their purpose. Vanessa’s shadow man was of the second type; we can infer this because he stopped in his tracks and seemed to watch Vanessa, engaging her in some type of staring contest, before seeming to grow bored and taking his leave. Those aren’t the actions of a residual type of haunt (a sort of natural recording)—the fact that the figure was aware of Vanessa’s existence and acknowledged it suggests that the first spirit she encountered inside the Cage was all too intelligent.
And it wasn’t it alone.
The shadow man wasn’t the only strange thing that happened to me in the kitchen—far from it. During the working week, my routine was always the same: as soon as I came home from my sales job, I would head straight to the kitchen to make a cup of refreshing tea.
Walking into the kitchen after work one evening, I headed for the sink to fill up the kettle. What I saw on top of the kitchen unit caught my interest, though: it looked like a sheet of typed A4 paper. Curiously, I picked it up and scanned its contents—and nearly dropped it, so great was my surprise.
This wasn’t just any old piece of paper. This was a death certificate—the death certificate of a man who had, until fairly recently, owned the Cage.
To make matters worse, he had died in here, taking his own life by hanging himself from a beam at the top of the staircase a year before Nicole and I had moved in.
I hadn’t known the poor man personally, but my heart went out to him. Suicide is always a tragic thing, and I felt nothing but sympathy for whatever torment and suffering had pushed him to such desperate lengths. While I had known about the man’s death before I had purchased the Cage (word gets around in a village as small as St Osyth), I hadn’t let it influence my decision on whether or not to buy the place. After all, he and I hadn’t known each other or had any kind of personal connection.
Yet now, reading the contents of his death certificate line by line, it suddenly did seem personal to me. It revealed such details as the exact date of his death and the specific manner of his death. What really felt peculiar, however, was the fact that Nicole and I had been living in the Cage for several weeks now, and knew pretty much where everything was. So how was it that the death certificate had suddenly turned up on top of the kitchen unit after all this time—a year after the poor man’s death?
I examined the document a little more closely. It was in pristine condition; there wasn’t a fold, crease, or a mark anywhere on it. The death certificate couldn’t have looked any fresher if it had just emerged from a laser printer. To tell you the truth, I found it more than a little unnerving. My brain was searching for a logical explanation and grasped at the first unlikely straw it found: perhaps Nicole had found it somewhere inside the Cage and had left it out for me to read. But wouldn’t she have left me a note, explaining just that?
An hour later I got my answer when she walked through the door and came into the kitchen. She took the death certificate from me, scanned it, and shook her head. No, Nicole told me, she had never seen it before in her life. To make matters even more complicated, I had purchased the Cage from a couple who had, in turn, bought it from the widow of the deceased. What were the odds that the death certificate had been inside the house ever since then, and that all of us had failed to spot it?
That was when we both started to get scared. The only other explanation we could come up with was that somebody was trying to frighten or intimidate us, which meant that they must have broken in. Together we searched the Cage from top to bottom, checking every door and window. They were all secure and undamaged; we found no signs of a break-in at all.
Not really expecting to find anything out, I showed the death certificate to a few of the locals that I knew. None of them had any explanation either. Although I kept my suspicions to myself, I began to suspect that this might be a message or a sign of some sort, possibly from the deceased owner himself. Was he trying to tell me that he was still there in the Cage?
The man’s wife had understandably sold the Cage as soon as she could and moved out, relieved to be rid of the place and its unhappy association with the death of her husband. What she said she couldn’t understand, I was to learn years later, was why “some people were claiming that my husband’s death certificate was found in the Cage? Only one copy of it was ever made, and the coroner sent that directly to me.”
I have no reason to disbelieve her, but as far as I’m concerned, that only deepens the mystery. If the single copy was sent to the man’s widow, how could one have possibly turned up in the kitchen inside the Cage? To this day I don’t have an answer. But I will tell you this … it was definitely a sign of things to come.