5
On a bright, sunny afternoon during my first summer living inside the Cage, my cousin Kirstine kindly came over to help me out with some paperwork and other chores around the house. Kirstine was a year older than me, extremely organized, and with far more spare time on her hands than me. In fact, she would often visit the Cage in order to help out with various things.
I soon fell into the habit of leaving a key under the doormat so Kirstine could let herself in. That’s exactly what Kirstine did on this particular day, but there was no way she could possibly have known that something was about to happen that would change the way she viewed the Cage … forever.
Kirstine happened to be in the kitchen, pottering around and doing nothing in particular, when she suddenly found herself feeling uneasy. When I asked her about it later, she would describe it as a feeling of icy coldness—she had experienced similar feelings before inside the Cage. But what she felt this day was somehow different: stranger and more intense. Kirstine still remembers the incident vividly: she was standing next to the kitchen sink, looking out of the window toward Coffin Alley. Her back was turned to the prison room, and her mind wasn’t occupied with much of anything when suddenly she felt several small thuds hitting her back in rapid succession, accompanied by the noise of something dropping to the kitchen floor multiple times.
Puzzled, and more than a little scared (Kirstine was fully aware that she was all alone in the house), she whirled around to face her attacker. Nobody was standing there. The kitchen and prison room were both completely deserted. Nothing was out of place except that there on the floor by her feet were six small packets of sugar—like the ones that you get from fast food restaurants.
Kirstine knew with one hundred percent certainty that the sugar sachets had been sitting on the kitchen countertop next to the sugar bowl when she arrived earlier that day, and there was no way that they could have possibly flown over to her all by themselves. Looking around, she wracked her brains to find a rational explanation for what had happened, but she finally came up short. There were no windows open anywhere inside the Cage, and there was very little wind outside to have blown the sugar across the room in any case. Besides, there were various pieces of paper—letters, bills, and the envelopes they had arrived in—scattered around here and there, and none of them had been disturbed at all.
Although she was aware of the Cage’s reputation for being “a little bit spooky,” Kirstine had always felt fairly comfortable there, even when she was on her own. But all of that changed on that day. She never looked at the old prison in quite the same way ever again. Somebody had been trying to send her a message, and although throwing packets of sugar wasn’t likely to cause her any real harm, the implication could have been taken in one of several ways. Whichever spirit had done it may have been simply trying to draw attention to itself; it might have been feeling playful; its motives may have been far less friendly.
She would never know for sure. But one thing was for certain: so far as Kirstine was concerned, the Cage had now become a place of fear, and she would never feel comfortable alone there ever again.
The first few weeks that Vanessa and Nicole spent living inside the Cage were far from terrifying, but it’s fair to say that things were getting progressively weirder. Perhaps the most confirming thing was a pervasive maggot and fly infestation that had struck unexpectedly. Suddenly it seemed that the verminous creatures were everywhere, and the girls had their hands full trying to keep them from overrunning the house.
Out of consideration for Nicole’s illness, Vanessa hadn’t mentioned her kitchen encounter with the male shadow figure—but she kept her eyes and ears open, and she was quietly taking note of every strange occurrence inside her new home. It soon grew to be quite the list.
Lots of their personal items (far too many to be just coincidence) seemingly disappeared into thin air, before turning up in the most unusual of places. At first, she and Nicole shrugged uneasily and simply put it down to the sheer disorganization of the house; their things still weren’t fully unpacked yet, after all, but deep down, Vanessa knew that it was something far more sinister than that.
A tap in the upstairs bathroom developed a habit of turning itself on and running cold water long after it had been turned off. Once or twice might be written off as simple forgetfulness, but after the third time, Vanessa and Nicole became almost paranoid about turning the taps off after every use. It made no difference: they would go back to their bedrooms or head downstairs and after a while the sound of running water would be heard from above their heads. It soon reached the point where the girls woke up first thing in the morning to find the tap blasting out gallons of water into the sink. To make matters worse, the water supply inside the Cage was metered, and the girls were billed for every single drop that was used. It wasn’t long before their utility bills reached near astronomical proportions.
To add insult to injury, electrical appliances inside the Cage also seemed to have a life of their own. For example, the volume control on the TV liked to turn itself up and down at random; the kettle would switch itself on and heat up to the boil, whether there was water inside it or not; and the CD player began to blast out the greatest hits of the band Oasis, operating without human intervention at all hours of the day and night.
By now the girls were beginning to accept the fact that their new home was undeniably haunted. After all, what other explanation was there? Potentially bad wiring and plumbing could only be stretched so far and explain so much. Yet they gradually came to terms with the ghostly activity that was fast becoming the new status quo inside the Cage.
They had no idea that things were going to get much, much worse.
Summer gave way to autumn, and before Nicole and I knew it, October had arrived. The paranormal activity around the house was now constant and was steadily getting worse, growing stronger and more intrusive with every passing day.
Each morning that Nicole and I woke up, the house would feel just that little bit colder. The old single-glazed sash windows provided little in the way of protection from the chilly English weather. The giant trees that had grown in the priory land opposite the Cage for hundreds of years were beginning to slowly lose their brown and orange leaves, and it would not be long until the spiky, twisted branches were fully exposed and the feeling of impending winter engulfed the village.
The atmosphere inside the Cage seemed to be changing along with the seasons; I wasn’t quite sure what the house was going to throw at me next, but I was absolutely convinced that the worst was still to come. The afternoons were starting to draw in, and it was already dark by the time four o’clock came around. There was a constant smell of burning wood and coal in the air, drifting up from the many chimneys in the village, and the fog regularly rolled in from the sea. Nicole and I felt as though we were living in a Stephen King novel or a Hammer horror movie—it was surreal, to say the least.
My work hours had been reduced due to the end of the working summer season, which meant that I was spending a lot more time in the house than I ever had before. That, in turn, meant that I was getting to know the Cage’s distinct personality in an entirely different way.
The mornings were dark, the afternoons were dark, and there were only limited hours of daylight to be taken advantage of. The summer sun was long since gone, and it had taken the last of the die-hard holiday makers along with it. St Osyth was left at peace once again, free from the endless tourist traffic and the hordes of strangers that liked milling around our little village.
Also gone was the background noise from the late night drinkers who liked to hang out at the tables outside The King’s Arms pub next door. We had found the sound to be an annoyance when we first moved in, but now that peace and quiet had descended, Nicole and I both missed the laughter and chatter. It had been reassuring, a welcome touch of normality and comfort just a few yards outside of the Cage. The celebrations reminded us that even though we were stuck living in a haunted house, normal life was still going on out there—it was business as usual for the pub regulars, at least. They weren’t living in a state of fear, which the two of us were finding to be a constant companion once darkness fell.
Every morning when I got out of bed (usually around half-past seven), my first job before anything else was to light the log-burning fire in the front room and attempt to warm the Cage up a little. It would then fall to Nicole to keep the fire going during the daytime, when I was at work, to make sure that the place was still heated when night fell.
For as long as I live, I will never forget something that happened in that very first week of October when temperatures plummeted down toward freezing.
I came downstairs early one morning, yawning and rubbing the sleep from my eyes, with the intent of fetching the wood and coal from the yard and getting the fire going. Still wearing my dressing gown, I went into the front room to prepare the fire. My heart sank when I saw that the TV, CD player, my laptop, and every single one of the lights downstairs had been switched on sometime during the night.
As strange as it may sound, this wasn’t such an unusual occurrence in the Cage; it had happened before several times. But this time, things were different … and not in a good way.
I was standing there, looking around the front room and getting ready to start switching off the electrical devices, when I heard it—right in my ear, as clear as day, there came a low, deep, disembodied growl. For just an instant, my first thought was that it was some type of animal. After a couple of heartbeats had passed, I realized that explanation was plainly ridiculous. I couldn’t see anyone or anything else in the room, let alone standing right next to my head. The noise was so close to my ear that it would have been totally impossible for me not to have seen the cause.
There was something unnatural about the sound. While it may have been short, it felt malicious—pure evil. It certainly put the fear of God into me, I can tell you that. I started to tremble, looking all around me for a rational explanation … and finding nothing.
I usually pinpoint that morning as the moment when everything changed for the worse. Whatever it was that had been haunting the house had chosen to take a step forward, making me aware of its existence in no uncertain terms. By allowing me to hear its voice, and to feel its dark, spine-chilling malevolence, I got the strong impression that it wanted me to be afraid of it. The growl had sounded beast-like, inhuman, and I can’t help but think that this was a calculated move on the part of the entity, an attempt to frighten me as much as it possibly could.
Sadly it was a tactic that worked. In the aftermath of the growl, I felt physically sick, temporarily overcome with raw fear. This couldn’t be written off as mischievous or playful, unlike the taps being turned on and the electrical devices appearing to have a mind of their own; this was something far more sinister and downright threatening.
Even my encounter with the shadow figure in the kitchen hadn’t terrified me to this extent. For the first time since we had moved in to the Cage, I was forced to reluctantly conclude that at least one of its resident spirits wanted to harm me.
Our first night inside the Cage was fairly uneventful. Stephen and I would be alone for the evening, with the remainder of our team joining us the following morning. Before they arrived, we wanted to lay some of the groundwork for the rest of the week.
Gathering baseline measurements is a key part of any serious paranormal investigation. As investigators, we try to measure as many atmospheric components as we reasonably can, which depends upon the type and quality of the equipment that we have, the number of observers available to us on the team, and the amount of square footage that has to be covered. We felt blessed by the fact that the Cage was a relatively small place; the four of us could cover most of it with ease.
Measuring the strength of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) within the house is a must. While there is no definitively proven link between high (or low, for that matter) EMF levels and paranormal activity, many researchers have theorized that strong electromagnetic fields may act as a power source, fueling some of the phenomena that we hope to capture during our investigation. Others have found bizarre and seemingly inexplicable EMF spikes at haunted locations, and have subsequently advanced the idea that this may indicate the presence of an invisible entity of some kind.
EMFs can be found all around us these days. Television sets, microwaves, refrigerators, freezers, lights, computers … you name it; if it uses electricity, then it will generate an electromagnetic field. Some are stronger than others. The human body even generates its own electromagnetic field—if you’ve ever had a doctor perform an EKG on you, then you’ve seen a visual representation of the part of that field that controls your heartbeat.
As paranormal investigators, we have tools to measure these fields. Before kicking off an investigation properly, it is necessary to establish a baseline of those levels. Generally, we’ll mark the levels on a floor plan of the property in question. That’s exactly what we did in the Cage. There were no surprises; the building wasn’t that electrically active, other than the lights and the surveillance camera setup. Stephen and I made sure to set our phones and tablets to airplane mode, making sure that they wouldn’t transmit or receive any cellular signals. We’ve seen incoming texts set off EMF meters before, momentarily throwing us off track while we waste time trying to locate something that isn’t remotely paranormal in nature.
Unsurprisingly, temperatures throughout the Cage were uniformly cold. Many people have remarked on the fact that it always seemed to feel colder inside the Cage than it did outside, no matter the weather. I made a point of measuring the ambient temperature outside, and found it to be several degrees colder outdoors—which was exactly as it should be, considering that it was a typically chill English February. But I did find it intriguing that people seemed to feel permanently cold inside the old prison, no matter what time of year it was. Was this a purely psychological phenomenon, attributable to the power of suggestion, or was there something inexplicable at work? Cold spots and drafts are par for the course at haunted locations, and they would be something that we’d need to keep a watchful eye out for while investigating the Cage.
Apart from the EVP that we had both recorded on the upstairs landing, nothing of note happened to us on our first night. Cranking up the electric heaters to their maximum setting, Stephen and I settled into comfortable spots in the front room. I chose the couch, stretching out my legs and throwing a blanket over them. My priestly friend preferred an old armchair that was located between the fireplace and the front window.
I’m not sure which one of us fell asleep first, but it wasn’t long before the jet lag began to take its toll. Far from being frightening or sinister, we found the atmosphere inside the living room to be friendly and welcoming.
We had chosen to nap in the living room that first night because Vanessa and her friends had experienced a number of paranormal events in there, including the growl that had frightened her so badly, and we were hopeful that the same thing might happen to us.
Neither of us realized at the time that it was destined to be our first, and more importantly our last, undisturbed night spent inside the Cage.