Broad Street

Ayear after getting married my husband and I decided to buy another house as we were currently living in my first house, which was a two up two down cottage. We sold my house in January of that year and we had to be out of it by March. The house that we wanted to buy was taking a long time to go through, due to various problems, so we had to find somewhere to live.

We moved back in with my parents who live in the same village but it isn't practical to move back home with a husband and two cats as we found out. We spoke to the estate agents who very kindly offered to help us. There was a house in the neighbouring city of Ely which they were having trouble selling. They said that they would ask the seller if we could rent it on a month-by-month basis.

They got back to us to say that would not be a problem as long as we produced our marriage certificate as the owner was very Christian and would not have people living in sin in his property.

So we left most of our belongings in my parents' garage and moved into this small house with our two cats.

The house was built onto the side of a Hall house, it was again a two up two down property. The stairs were in the main living room. We had put our sofa under the stairs looking into the living room.

Not long after we had moved in I noticed that when sitting on the sofa you could feel a rush of air like someone had walked briskly passed you. I thought nothing more of it until I noticed that both cats were fixated with the stairs and they would sit at the bottom of the stairs looking up, if you got their attention they would quickly go back to staring up the stairs. This disconcerted me but I didn't say anything to my husband in case he thought I was going mad.

My husband was working for a nursery at the time and as it was Spring it was their busiest time which meant he was working very long hours leaving the house at seven in the morning and not getting back until ten at night.

The bathroom was at the top of the stairs and one night whilst I was there on my own I was sitting on the toilet when I became aware of the most oppressive feeling. I felt that there was a presence there and it wasn't very happy.

No really knowing what to do I explained to whatever it was that I sensed it was there and I didn't want to see it and I was sorry that we were in its space but it was only for a little while and could it please leave us alone. The atmosphere started to dissipate and although shaken by the experience I still didn't tell my husband about it in case he scoffed at me.

A few weeks after that experience I came down with bronchitis and I was off work. I had been to the doctors and was given some antibiotics to which I had an allergic reaction. I had to quickly get to the doctors as I was going into anaphylactic shock my friend managed to get me to the doctors on time where they gave me adrenalin and anti-histamines.

Dave rushed back from work to be with me and we went back to the house. That night he slept on the sofa bed downstairs as I was breathing heavily and snoring from the bronchitis.

In the early hours of the morning he came upstairs absolutely white as a sheet with a cold sweat all over his body. I calmed him down and asked him what was wrong. He said that he had been having a vivid dream where something was trying to take him back in time through his life. He had just got to the point where he was going back into the womb when he managed to wake himself up. He felt that if he had carried on dreaming he would have died and that something was trying to take over him.

I explained to him the feelings I had been having about the place and he said he had noticed them too but didn't say anything as he didn't want to frighten me.

We only had one more experience in that house before we left and moved into our present house. I was having a bath and Dave was sat in the bathroom with me, as I didn't like being there on my own, when the book I was reading was knocked out of my hands into the bath. You could see it was knocked out of my hands rather than me dropping it.

Thinking back on it we wonder if we manifested something in the house due to the amount of stress we were under in terms of buying a new property etc. It turns out that the wall under the stairs used to be a passage that connected to the Hall house, and the property we were staying in was the servants' quarters. The house was around when Cromwell and his men were in Ely and we wonder if someone's life was taken before their time was due.

I guess we shall never really know but five years later that house is still on the market I guess people can just sense the atmosphere when they walk in.