I think that the chances are slim that anyone who reads this will believe a word of it, but here goes. This is, as far as I can tell, a true story, and was told to our family by a close, but rather old and possibly senile, friend a few years ago.
It all started some years after she was married and had a couple of toddler children. She didn't want any more so her and her husband didn't sleep together and had separate beds in the same bedroom. The other bedroom had the kids in it and also the water boiler for the block of flats that they lived in, making it a nice cosy room during the cold winter months in which our story begins.
They also had a kitchen in their two-storey flat, a sitting room complete with ten-ton valve powered wireless and a room which they didn't use much, unless they had guests, and which was all decorated in grey. Not really to my tastes, but they liked it and thought it the height of fashion.
It was, as I say, winter, and that made it rather surprising when our friend woke
up one night freezing cold with all the blankets thrown off her bed and completely
naked. Both she and her husband (let's call them Claire and Jack, to make
it easier) thought that she must be doing it in her sleep and that maybe
she should watch her diet, or something. This kept on happening, however, until
the two of them decided that the only way to stop it was to get a double bed so
that if she moved during the night, it would wake him up.
All that happened, however, was that both of them woke up naked...
While this was going on, Claire discovered that things kept on going missing that she normally wouldn't lose. People lose keys and things all the time, but she also lost makeup mirrors and other larger items that aren't easily misplaced.
Up until then, however, everything could be explained by normal means. Then one night Jack had to go out for the evening and Claire asked him to move their heavy wireless next to the fire so that she could sit and listen to it without waking the children until she went to bed. This wireless was too heavy for her to move herself so, when she went to bed, she just left it next to the fire.
The next morning, Jack asked how she had moved the wireless back into its original position on her own as Jack had been too tired to move it himself on returning after Claire had gone to bed.
Things continued to disappear from around the house and then, a couple of days after she lost some lipstick, they discovered their spare room had been covered with the stuff. All the grey walls, carpet and ceiling had been scrawled over with lipstick. The older of the two children was given the blame, even though he had no stains on him and there was no way for him to have reached the ceiling. Nevertheless, he was given a rather vicious spanking by his father.
Things carried on getting worse until one morning, Jack got up and went down to the kitchen. A few moments later he shouted up the stairs for Claire to lock the kids in their room and not to come down.
She locked the children's door, but then carefully went down the stairs herself to see what the problem was. She was just about to step onto the kitchen floor with her bare feet when her husband screamed at her across the room not to move. It was then that she noticed that the kitchen lino was covered with a thin layer of ground glass - every single square inch.
She put some shoes on and together they cleaned up the mess, but when they came to look at their glass collection, they could not find a single piece missing. Also, neither they nor the people living in the flats above and below them had heard any smashing glass during the night, it seemed just to have appeared from thin air.
Claire was a rather superstitious person and had thought for some time that there
was some supernatural force at work. Her husband was convinced that there was some
logical explanation so she, worked up by Jack's disbelieving attitude and worried
that these ghostly events were becoming more dangerous, shouted out one day when
she was alone:
"I know what you are! Do your worst!"
Later that evening, when the kids had gone to bed, Jack and Claire were enjoying a quiet evening. Without any warning, however, there came a tremendous explosion from the kids bedroom, which contained the gas-powered boiler. The two of them charged up the stairs to see if they could do anything to save their children, but discovered that there was nothing wrong and that the children had merely been woken by the same explosion that had disturbed their parents.
There then came a furious knocking on their front door. Nervously they opened it and found most of the other residents of the block of flats standing there. Both those living above and below Jack and Claire's flat had heard the explosion coming from their flat, and knowing that their's held the boiler they had been as worried and Jack and Claire had - and also as puzzled by the lack of any cause for the noise.
Then, however, one person looked out of the window into the gardens just below. Sitting in the garden there was a shed which was burning furiously with several pieces of shattered, flaming wood, scattered around it.
This was too much for Claire, and she talked her husband into getting a priest to come and exorcise the house. The priest came, did his work, and the problems stopped.
The family moved on after a time and lived an unusual life. Then, after several years, things started going inexplicably missing again. When the cover to a gramophone record (a big thing, not easily misplaced) went missing, however, Claire immediately called in another priest to exorcise their new house.
Things stopped happening again until a couple of days before my family were told this story some forty years later. It seems that the box for a video cassette had gone missing. This, again, is something that you would not think would go missing easily. Claire was getting rather worried that the problems were starting again, but we all tried to calm her fears.
Much to her relief the video box turned up a couple of days later and that is the
last we've heard of this story.
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