A freaky Friday read to satisfy Halloween week appetites
Does your home have a resident ghost? Mine does, come meet them
I was 10 when I asked my parents if the local vicar could exorcise me. For years I’d been terrorised in my sleep by an aggressive spectre. I knew where the vicar lived, in the ivy-covered house on the hill as you entered our Somerset village. I begged her to invite him over. My mother frowned at this request, taking a long draw on her Silk Cut before huffing out laughter and smoke, “oh Emily, you are funny”.
But it wasn’t very funny to me, a small girl being thrown around her bedroom by a ‘man’ with bony hands and invisible face. The nightmares got so bad I began setting a midnight alarm to wake me from them.
I don’t remember exactly when they started, but my father later told me he’d let me watch Poltergeist from behind the sofa one night instead of carrying me back to bed. Mother never did entertain that exorcism. And the nightmares eventually dissolved. But to this day I cannot watch horror movies or listen to stories of the supernatural. I sleep easily now and have no desire to reawaken the beast.
Which perhaps makes me an unlikely candidate for the story I’m about to share… A story involving my young son, some unsettling coincidences, and perhaps a frisson of liminality.
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In 2019 I moved back to Somerset after a twenty-year hiatus. I grew up not far from Frome, back when people had never heard of it. It was a place that made and then broke me. I escaped to go travelling aged 19, swearing never to move back.
But between then and now I partied (a lot), accrued a husband and two small children, and suddenly the cleaner air, bigger houses, and lack of access to 24-hour clubs gained increasing appeal. But I wasn’t leaving London without a fight.
I took to looking at houses with the full force of reluctance, striding around potential new homes with disdain, pointing out everything that wasn’t right.
Then came Arden House.
On paper it had so much ‘wrong’ with it – no parking, a leaky extension and ceilings scarred with broken plaster. But it also had an energy that made my bones feel as though they could finally rest. We knew it was the home we were supposed to have.
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Arden House is a narrow Georgian townhouse perched on the eastern edge of Bath. It has 12 sash windows and equal number original fireplaces offsetting its damp wonky walls with warmth and light.
We moved in the heatwave of July 2019, when my son was three and my daughter just three weeks old. Emerging from our sticky car on move-in day we walked around our empty house, footsteps echoing on wooden floors and noted how it was both the same and entirely different to how we had remembered it from the final viewing.
On our kitchen worktop the previous owners had left us a thick folder on the property crammed full of historical documents, photographs and newspaper cuttings archived over the years by inhabitants. We leafed through it absent mindedly before an interruption of boxes and beds from London. I must have stashed it away in a draw, as that’s where I would return to it a year from now.
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The first few months at Arden House felt like a holiday. I was on maternity leave and summer’s top note of sunshine made exploring the area joyful. So to the house itself. As we slowly unpacked our previous life into its new corners, we got to know the house’s many qualities and quirks.
Among the discoveries we made were a pretty linen cupboard we’d not noticed when viewing; door handles that refused to cooperate before suddenly gliding open; a bricked-up doorway that once must have once led to another room; iron meat hooks protruding from the ceiling in the larder. My husband even found a gravestone hidden in undergrowth outside. But as old houses go, it gave no reason for us to feel scared.
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Fast forward three months, it’s October and my son and I are taking a bath together. It’s something we often did when he was small, to connect without interruption from the baby. Our bath time conversations were always brilliant in their ability to glide between the sublime ‘what happens when we die’ and the ridiculous ‘who would win a fight, this rubber duck or that elephant?’.
This particular night we were talking about our old flat in London.
“Do you miss it?” I ask him, bubble bath going off like fireworks around us.
“I miss our roof bit”, he says turning his lips down, referring to the small (and dangerous) slice of outside space we’d had.
“And what do you like most about our new house?” I venture.
He wiggles his head in thought, “I like the garden. Daddy says we can get a treehouse for my birthday”.
Buoyed by how engaged he seems I followed up with, “and is there anything you don’t like about living here?”.
He’d recently begun waking up at night and wanting to sleep with us having never previously liked co-sleeping. I’d wondered if this might be opportunity for him to offload how annoying he found his new sibling.
“Well,” he pauses, looking directly at me:
“I don’t like those two mens very much”.
“Two mens?” I repeat back at him, adding a lilt at the end with trepidation.
“Yes, those two mens. They keep coming in my room at night and playing with my toys”.
“Oh”, I said, slowing my voice right down.
“And have you spoken to them”?
“A bit” he shrugs.
“And do you know their names?”
“Sidney and Godfrey” he replies without missing so much as a beat.
December. Almost Christmas. We had invited our neighbours round for festive drinks.
“Come upstairs and see my room”, my son begs of Vicky our neighbour and new friend. As I pass snacks and relight candles they disappear upstairs. A few minutes pass before Max comes tripping back down. Vicky arriving a few minutes behind him.
I notice her trying to catch my eye as I top up glasses.
“Erm”, she shifts about seeming agitated. “Has Max ever mentioned ‘some people’ upstairs to you?”
We narrow eyes, each of us trying to gauge if the other is thinking the same thing.
“He asked me to shut the door”, she continues, “so we could play without ‘the people on the landing coming in’”.
“Yes”, I say, wondering how much to tell her – that he won’t now go upstairs alone, that he wakes at night in cold sweats, that I’ve heard him talking in his room telling somebody to give him back his train.
Vicky seemed unsettled in that slightly thrilled way, when something doesn’t make sense, but you know it to be true.
“The house feels good,” we had reassured each other that night, pressing our backs against the warm stone walls and nodding.
The next day she leaves some sage on the garden wall for me with a note that read, ‘just in case’.
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January. The baby is six months now and we have begun weaning.
I strap her chunky thighs into the highchair where she faces our kitchen table, looking out toward the larder. The larder is where we store our food on ramshackle shelves that threaten to fall at any time. As a space it’s not been touched in years – its original iron meat hooks remain suspended from the ceiling and the wall crumbles away at slightest touch.
The baby loves food, happily huffing down everything we scatter on her plate. But she seems to love something else equally. As I move around the kitchen fetching water or cloths to wipe up smashed strawberry pieces, she cocks her head and smiles, often waving at ‘someone’ just beyond the kitchen door.
So many times, I’ve turned to make a cup of tea only to flip back around and find her laughing and pointing at something – something at the bottom of the stairs, something in the larder.
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By February my son gets visibly distressed unless we accompany him upstairs. I ask gently him about Sidney and Godfrey, but he now finds the line of questioning annoying, telling me firmly that, “they’ve gone now”.
Later that month I am invited to Vicky’s home for return drinks. We sit cradling sloe gin by her fire, and I tell Vicky what he’d said – that Sidney and Godfrey seemed to be ‘gone now’.
“Oh, that’s interesting…”, she says, her voice quavering a little. “I didn’t want to mention it at the time, but after we went upstairs that time at Christmas, I lingered on the landing. I could sense something there”.
“Hello,” she’d said to our seemingly empty landing. “This is a good family; they’ll look after the house. You can stay if you want, but you’re also fine to go now”.
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That was the last time we spoke of Sidney and Godfrey.
My son’s sleeping patterns began to improve, and I didn’t want to bring them up time and again for fear of upsetting him.
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Then later that summer, I was organising the kitchen when I came across that archive at the back of a drawer, the same place I’d thrust it a year earlier.
With both kids in bed, I decided to have a proper look through. The information it holds is quite fascinating.
I learn that Arden House began life as a family home before later becoming a Boarding School around 1860 and later again a cottage house for orphans. In 1911 fifteen children lived at Arden House sleeping together in a dormitory on the third floor, the same space we now sleep as a family. The cottage house was run by a single Barbadian woman named Alice. A newspaper cutting from that time tells me she was a ‘kindly woman’ who let the children have a spoonful of something sweet from the same larder we now store our food in if they were feeling sad. It quickly became known as the treacle cupboard.
I recall my daughter’s interest in the cupboard and feel my skin prick to attention.
Intrigued, I forage further into the file.
I learn that the house gained Listed status in the 1980s. Too late to protect it from the owner who, in 1977, sold one of three reception rooms to the Post Office next door as a flying freehold. The doorway to this room remains bricked up still. It’s the only place in the house where the energy feels ‘off’ – as if the house is missing a limb.
I read on.
Toward the back of the folder are a stack of ownership contracts, they begin handwritten in quill ink and end in print as they get closer to today. The documents have faded over the years making them hard to decipher, but not impossible – Blanche Edith Bonce, Mr Henry Dingle, Mrs Rosemary Ann Brown.
I scan each ancient document, running my finger over the names of all these Arden House owners, imagining them having lived here, stoking the fire, sweeping down the staircases. And then my breath catches in my throat, and I hurriedly retrace what I’ve just read once, twice, three times for certainty. I look at my husband who’s been watching TV the whole time, glance back at the paperwork, and ask him to pause what he is watching. “You’re not going to believe this” I tell him, hairs rising across my back. “Guess who once lived here…”
Sidney Starr and Godfrey Adolphus.
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I am a firm believer in science. My own experience with a ‘poltergeist’ tells me that even when a presence feels real it is often still entirely imagined. We create the stories we want to believe. My son after all never suggested the men he saw were ghosts. My daughter only laughed at ‘the treacle cupboard’, we’ve filled in the rest. But I do reserve space for spirituality, and I think there’s much we cannot know.
Our 200-year-old house has had more life experiences than I can begin to fathom, so it doesn’t seem impossible for the dust of some footprints to remain still perhaps. I feel certain this house called us to it, we were supposed to live here.
For anyone interested to hear more about Sidney and Godfrey, there is more to this story than ends there. If you’re interested to know more, do let me know in the comment section.
More Sidney and Godfrey tales please, I think of them often.
Obsessed with Sid and Godfrey. Pls share more!