A sailor’s wife found their new flat in Devon distinctly creepy. She was convinced it was haunted. Then one day the ghost touched her.
By Richard Holland
In October, 1954, a sailor and his family took over a self-contained flat at the top of a house in Plymouth. Almost as soon as they had moved in, the sailor’s wife felt there was something uncanny about the innermost of the two rooms which comprised the flat.
‘I felt there was something unseen but very real there,’ she recalled.
Her husband, who made light of her fears, was often away, as sailors are, leaving the woman alone in the flat with her young children. As a result, she became more and more unnerved by the unpleasant atmosphere in the flat. Then one day she felt a very real presence – a tug at her skirt and a hand on her shoulder. She was so upset by this that she asked her husband to get compassionate leave from his ship so that he could stay with her, but perhaps not surprisingly, this was not granted. Instead the frightened woman asked a friend to stay with her. She told her nothing of the haunting. One night the sailor’s wife was awoken by a cry of terror from her friend. She found her in a state of real distress. She said that she had felt a hand upon her shoulder and a tug at her nightdress.
With an ally to back her up and now certain that her fears were not down to her imagination, the sailor’s wife was able to prevail upon her husband again with more confidence. It so happened that the rooms below the flat had become vacant and the sailor agreed to move his household downstairs. Unfortunately, these rooms proved just as haunted as those above. The invisible hand continued to land upon her shoulder and tug at her dress. Her children also felt oppressed by the atmosphere of the place. Even the family cat was affected – it would ‘burst into the room with its fur bristling, snarling and spitting as if it had been frightened out of its life’, the woman recalled.
The haunting came to an end after the woman got in touch with her local church, who called in Father N B Hansen to bless the house. Father Hansen experienced nothing supernatural himself, but was convinced by the testimony he heard. No explanation for the haunting ever came to light either. The only clue was that the sailor’s family and a married couple who were also staying in the house all heard a disembodied voice call out: ‘Betty! Betty!’ But no one knew who Betty could be. Was it her spirit who attempted to literally grab the attention of the women in the house, or were the tugs at skirts and nightdresses echoes of ill-treatment suffered by Betty? We can only guess.
[SOURCE: 'Haunted Houses' by Joseph Braddock (1956), pp 77-9]
© Richard Holland 2008
