Hey, friends. Welcome back. So this week we were working on something that I was pretty excited about, but then the story fell apart at the very last minute. It's a fluid environment, and sometimes stories just don't work out. So this week we're going to dip into the archives and bring you a classic episode from 2022 one one that's a personal favorite of mine. It's the story of a woman who bought and moved into a building that was once a medieval prison. And it was used to hold accused witches all the way back in the 1600s. The story is set in the UK and I won't go much further and spoil it, but things get a little supernatural. And for subscribers, you've got a brand new episode waiting. And it's also a dark one. It's a case that's currently unfolding in Philadelphia where a man has been arrested for stealing over 100 skeletal remains from various cemeteries. I'm speaking with a police officer who is investigating the whole thing, and he'll explain the motivations and what he's seen. And I gotta say, it's a. It's a fascinating case. Anyway, for now, sit back and enjoy this classic episode. I bought a haunted witch's prison. Hey, I'm Julian Morgans, and you're listening to what It Was like, the show that asks people who have lived through big dramatic events what it was like. Lots of countries in Europe conducted witch hunts. England, Germany, Holland, France, Italy, Switzerland. They all went through phases of accusing people of witchcraft and murdering them. So 110,000 people in total were tried for witchcraft over the late Middle Ages. That's across Europe. And of that number, maybe 60,000 of them were executed. And of course, you don't need me to point out that these people were completely innocent women. And the whole thing was stupid and utterly tragic. But anyway, that's just a bit of backstory, bit of context. Our story today takes place in England. This is the county of Essex, which in the late 16th century tried hundreds of people for witchcraft. They got pretty enthusiastic about witch hunts. And actually, just as an interesting aside, I'd like to point out that Salem, you know, the infamous town with all the witch trials, the Salem witch trials. So Salem is in the American county of Essex, and this county was largely founded by colonists who had actually grown up in England. They'd grown up in the English county of Essex, and they'd traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, and they'd taken all of their crazy beliefs with them to North America, where they had started new colonies, but just with their old, old ideas. Anyway, back to the uk. Our story happens in a little village called St. Osith. And records show that in 1582, a total of 14 women were convicted of witchcraft in this town. And the first of these was a woman named Ursula Kemp. Now, according to evidence, Ursula was a poor midwife, and she'd fallen out with another lady in the town, and she was accused of killing this woman's child. And then she was thrown into the local prison. She was trialed, found guilty and then she was hanged. And now this is, this is really where the story takes a sidestep. Because actually in this, in this interview today, we're not really talking about witches or not really. What we're doing is talking about this building, this prison that housed so many people accused of witchcraft. The locals in St Osith, they call it the cage. And it was in service for hundreds of years, all through these witch trials and then into the modern era when it finally became a residential home and was put up for sale. And in 2004, a woman named Vanessa Mitchell decided to buy it. And that's where our story starts. Vanessa is going to tell us about her experience of moving into the cage. And look, I'm just going to flag it. This is a ghost story. I don't know how you feel about ghosts. And look, you know, honestly, I don't know how I feel about ghosts, but. But I think this might be just one of those stories where you change your mind or. I don't know, at least I did. Like at the start of this interview, I was thinking, there's got to be a logical explanation. But, yeah, I've got to admit, by the end I was kind of like, well, I don't know, maybe there is a logical explanation, but I sure as hell wouldn't ever stay in this house. So, look, here's the interview. And you know what? I'm tipping that by the end of this conversation, you'll have decided that you wouldn't stay in this house either. Thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome to the show.
Vanessa Mitchell (13:50)
It was the first day something felt a bit off. I was. I was in the kitchen and Nicole was getting in boxes to and back from the car and we both were. And I was just making a cup of tea. I said to her, john, a cup of tea. I knocked on the. And I could see her going back and forward from the kitchen window because the kitchen window looks out to Coffin Coffin Path and. And the King's Arms are pub next door. So it's. It's got a good view. And she was going back and forward and I was busy in doing something in the kitchen and just thought she'd come in, but I saw something behind me. You know, if you see something in your peripheral vision. And I thought. And then. And I heard something and I said, oh, you know, you tease here. You tease it. Thought she was behind me and turned around and she wasn't. There was no one behind me. But there was a huge black mass shape, figure just. I say walking, it's not walking, it's like gliding slowly by behind me and. And it was thick black and I felt it, it was negative and I felt it straight away and I literally thought, Jesus, what? You know, hold on a minute. There could be something. I could be in trouble here. And I knew them really. Oh, well, I thought. I thought then, oh, hold on a minute. I didn't panic, I didn't. But I just thought, yeah, yeah, you have to kind of keep. Keep an eye on this, you know? You know, it's like, oh, yeah, that's how I felt.
Vanessa Mitchell (15:35)
Well, I, I genuinely. And it's, it's, it does sound stupid. It sounds, seems stupid to me now, but I genuinely thought that something like a haunting like the Amityville or something where it ruins people's lives and changes people's lives and runs them out of a house was, was for movies. I'm like, yeah, it doesn't happen like that. I mean, I know that green sludge doesn't come out the walls and stuff like that, and I know a lot of it is poetic license, but to be honest, for the most part, I never had heard, apart from the Amity of haunting. Really. Had, hadn't really heard. I mean, don't forget we're talking about 20 odd years ago. So there was no Internet and there was no. And all you saw was what was on tv. Yeah, but I didn't think, I don't think I thought or realized that hauntings like that existed in the really real. In the really real world. I thought it was the movies. I thought there was something to it. But I thought, well, it can't be that bad. You know, I just didn't, I just didn't. I don't know why. I just thought that some, some of that was made up. And in my, in my case, it turned out probably worse than some of the, the stuff I've seen on movies. So. But no, if you'd have told me that that could have happened to me or in that house, I would have said, don't be ridiculous.
Vanessa Mitchell (17:14)
Yeah, he doesn't believe a thing. He would, you know, his, his opinion on stuff like that is if you saw a ghost, he'd say, right, well, what happened was there was an earthquake in China and it moved over and the. Something in the atmosphere happened that came down and caused a. You know, he, he would try and explain it. He does not believe. And, and I've said to him many times, I said, dad, even when I was a little girl, did you think I was lying? And he said, no. He said, I just. And I said to him, do you still think I'm. He said, I said, do you think I am lying now? He said, no. He said, I know you're not lying because you're not a liar. He said, but I cannot conceive of it, so I cannot admit it because I cannot even in my brain understand it to be real. So to me, I can't believe it. He said, but I know you're not, not lying. But my mum, she was a lot more open to it and open to the possibilities that there's something else. Because of course there is.
Interviewer (Julian Morgans) (18:10)
Yeah. I mean, I've got to admit that I probably fall somewhere around where your dad is from a, from a kind of belief perspective. I've never seen a ghost. I'd love to see a ghost just because I think it'd be really, it'd be like, wow, whoa, that's crazy, look at that. But you know, just I've, I've never seen, I've never had any kind of experience that has felt to me abnormal, let alone supernatural. I, I, and I, and I, I'm inclined to sort of fall on this side of like, well, there's gotta be a rational, scientific, measurable, tangible explana. But I think this is also why I'm curious about your story. Because like your dad, he's like, I know you, I know you're not like making this, this up. It's, I'm, I'm believing there's too much.
Vanessa Mitchell (20:43)
The. It built up in there? It was. It was constant. It started with things like. I mean, we had the open fireplace, you know, log burn, fire and the, you know, fire brushes and everything. They would swing back and forward, Doors would open and shut. Things would go missing. Cupboards would open, taps, running, Cattle going on and off the. The steps. In them days, it was stereo. We had a stereo turntable that would, you know, just general stuff like that, which was like. Really? And then sometimes you think, oh, well, I. I forgot. I must have put that there. Or, you know, all the usual ration, you know, you know, trying to make sense of it all.
Vanessa Mitchell (21:33)
And then you just stop doing that because you just think, now, hold on a minute. I'm not deranged. I'm actually a completely normal human. And this stuff is happening. And, you know, Nicole said the same, like, this stuff is really happening. So I suppose starting off, but it wasn't that. It was also a feeling in the house. The feeling in the house started changing and I think I noticed it a lot more. I don't think Nicole's particularly sensitive. Not like I am and. But Nicole's quite. Quite a wimp. And mostly scare her. I mean, like even like a spider or something blow into a brown paper bag. Because she has panic attacks about this or she used to. About silly things. And so I think I probably noticed more than she did. Well, I did. And I knew. It's. It's a feeling you can't. You can't make up. It's like your sixth sense. It's just there and you feel it. And even if it's a sunny day and the doors open and it's you know, my day off work and you just feel that thing or see that mass come in and feel that energy. That's not you because you've been on the piss the night before or you've just had a beer or something. You know, it's you sitting there during the day, a stone cold sober. And I've said to a lot of people, actually even people, a lot of people say, well, you must have had a drink or people must have had a drink or whatever. And I've spoken to lots of people who've had these experiences and they've said even with a drink you don't hallucinate, you don't see ghosts, you don't see the door open and slamming. So again, for skeptics, that's something else I would say. But yeah, that, that feeling even during the day, in the summer, you can't make that up. It's an energy feeling that you feel and it's, you know, it's, and it's, and it's strong and you can, you can really feel that.
Vanessa Mitchell (23:47)
I didn't really do any digging into the house's history. We'd found some old photographs and things like that. I don't know if they were from the cage from years before. All the research that I did. I found out, to be honest, a few years after I left the cage. So I didn't know. All I knew when I moved in there really was the, the last owners from the last 20 odd years. It wasn't until after I'd left the cage that I actually got the deeds to the house. Because the gentleman that killed himself, his wife, she'd kept all the deeds when she'd sold onto someone else. And then I was an expert buyer. The people that I brought off only lived in there for about six months. And so a lot of the information I had, which was years and years after I left the house and she gave me the deeds and my sister is a historian and I couldn't read these deeds. You know, it's all the old calligraphy and parchment writing and everything. And my sister looked through all of them and she said, she said, face this, this doesn't make sense. She said it and I'm like, what, what? Tell me what, you know, what they saying. And the deeds for 300 years, over 300 years, nobody's ever owned that house for longer than three years. Three years is maximum. Most people were four months or a few weeks or a year. And she said, that is, she said, but don't you realize in those days there was no estate agents? You know, hundreds of years ago you didn't buy and sell houses like that. This was, this was a small house, this wasn't a grand house or you know, and, and houses just didn't change ownership like that. She said, my sister said you would keep a house within the family for generation after generation after generation. And she said as a historian, she's never seen an example like it where that house was continuously up for sale. And I'm actually, well, I was, it transpired to be. I think I have the first or the second longest owner of the house since it was built hundreds of years ago. I mean one man brought it for 150 pound English pounds and sold it for a hundred pounds. Now you think £50 then was £50,000 now or probably more. Probably a lot more.
Vanessa Mitchell (26:48)
So yeah, it, I, I started then seeing full blown ghosts in the house. Me one day it was, it was in the afternoon and I was just sitting there watching tv. It was my day off and the back door was open because it was a nice hot day. And I just, just caught my eye this man. And he had long black scraggy hair. He had quite a, like a tanned face. He had deep laughter lines. I remember seeing the, I remember thinking he had these kind of deep laughter lines but remember thinking it was quite weird because he, he appeared to me quite young but his skin looked older, if you know what I mean. He had lovely eyes and he, I could only see him from the waist up. And he was just literally staring at me and just looking at me through the beams. He was, he was in the hall and I was in the front room. It was broad daylight and he was there for definitely over a minute. And he was just as if time had got trapped somehow. An eclipse of time or something. But he was there and I, and, and he was staring at me and I'm convinced he could see me and, and I could see him. And then he just slowly, he just slowly disappeared. But I didn't feel scared with him at all. He felt nice. I didn't feel any type of way scared about him. He was fascinating. And I was looking at him thinking, oh my God. And I even remember, you know, like I say, I just remember the laughter lines. But he was, this is going to sound ridiculous or crazy, but it's not. But he, he was, he had, he had a good looking face. He wasn't like, oh, he's a handsome man. He was. Yeah, I know that sounds a bit weird.
Vanessa Mitchell (30:52)
Well, I mean, it's called, it's called stone tape theory. They, they believe that, you know, the energy and the emotions of somebody while they were alive in prints and implants itself into surfaces like brick or, you know, wood, and the atmosphere, and it replays itself. So that would be the scientific explanation for that. But on the other hand, you know, the dead can. So. So, for example, you know, like you'd have the woman that ran across the road on that anniversary every night of the year in her wedding dress and got run over. And then it replays itself over and over and over on that anniversary every year, every night at the same time, every bit of that road.
Vanessa Mitchell (31:36)
So that would be something like you're saying time getting trapped in imprinting and playing over and over, like stand tape theory. But then say your nan coming back to visit you or a ghost. That's. That, that happens in real time. That's a, that's something that is, is physically active and that, you know, it. It's, you know, essentially a spirit that is coming back and living in your house or visiting your house and, and you can communicate with. And they do Understand you. They're not, you know, floating sheets in the wind. They've got thought process, and they can do things, and they can touch things, and they can move things, and they can decide what they want to do, which makes it quite scary because you can't fight a ghost. You know, what can you do if you have a haunting like that? What can you do? Call the police. They can't do anything. What can you do?
Vanessa Mitchell (32:31)
Yeah, I called the vicar. Yeah. I had to. I am. And he came and he came. He came round and we looked at the whole house first. So he went in every room and he said, what's the issue? And I said, well, that ghost I just told you about, I named him Jack. So I. This is not long after I'd seen Jack, because Jack was around for quite a while, actually, and I couldn't get rid of him. And he was around for a while, and so I had to include him as part of the house. So I said to Nicole, right, listen, we've just got a fellow we're living with at the moment. You're probably not gonna be able to see him, but. And I thought, oh, God, but he can't. You know, he can't. He can't stay here all the time. You know, Had.
Vanessa Mitchell (34:00)
Yeah. Absolutely minute. And then the whole room just was literally almost filled. And I. And then I. So I've looked over at Nicole really slowly because Nicole's not saying anything, and I don't even know what she's doing or looking at because I'm just focused on what's happening. And I looked over slowly, and she's the same as Me, she's just sitting up with her head looking up to the ceiling. And I said, nicole, are you. I said something like, what are you looking at? Or what you see in. And she'd said, if you're seeing the same as me, why is this room full of millions of stars? It was, it was a conversation like that. I've said, what are you looking at? I watch it. And she said, I am seeing in this room. She said, are you seeing exactly the same as I'm seeing? And you know, if. If it's like millions of stars, this room, then yeah, I'm seeing it too. And we both. She was on one sofa, I was on another, and we both just watched and then they just started popping out, fading bit by bit, but then they were gone. And then we went, oh my God. Did you. What was that? We both saw it. It wasn't dark. It was a summer's evening. It was warm outside. We both saw exactly the same thing. Exactly the same time that happened. We weren't hallucinating, we weren't on medicate. You know, there was nothing. What a skeptic would say, right, well, well, you know, there was nothing like that.
Vanessa Mitchell (39:52)
Yeah, well, I decided that I didn't tell Nicole a lot because she was bloody scared of everything. So I tried to keep as much of it and to be honest I didn't want her to move out because I thought she knows the extent of it, she's going to move out and leave me here. And I didn't want that to happen. So I kept a lot from her. But yeah, so I got the vicar and he had a look, he looked in all the rooms and he came downstairs and we're having a chat. He was sitting on the sofa. I was telling him what was happening and explained explaining it to him and he said to me that he had been a vicar for x amount of 20, 30 years, however long it was. And he said that until he had the parish in St Osith he'd never been approached by people to come and do exorcisms or house cleansing in the houses. And he said, I can tell you now, he said when I came to this parish, he said I have had people asking me every single month in private can you come to my house? There's something very. And he said he'd never had it anywhere in else he said, but he did and so he was used to doing this. So he explained to me and quite a few were up my road. So he'd explained to me that look, I wasn't deranged because there was a lot of other people that needed help in the village as well. And so he was he, and he got it. He, he believed in a lot of vicars I don't think would given it the time of day, but he did. So he was telling me all this downstairs and then he said, okay, let's get started. So I put his robe on the holy water went back upstairs and all the taps of full blown running upstairs in the bathroom and we'd only been up there 15 minutes beforehand and I said to him, look, I see, I've told you, I've told you this is one of the things. And he said, yeah, he said I can feel something here. He said, I can definitely, he said, he said, you've got a problem. He said that this feeling isn't right. And he said if you need any more help, let me know. And I waited weeks and weeks and the house was still the same, nothing much had changed, although I didn't see Jack anymore. So I think he'd managed to pass Jack over. But when I did go to contact him again, he'd left the parish and.
Vanessa Mitchell (44:23)
I. I think, yeah, that was the weirdest thing. That was one of the. So my. Again, one of my best friends, Kirsty, she's. She runs the. The cancer ward in our town. So she's a. Essentially she's a blood. She's a blood nurse and her fiance was. Fiance at the time. They've been married now over 20 years, but he was Sergeant Major and he was on leave from. I think it was Iraq. I think he was. I think it was Iraq at the time. He went to Afghanistan straight after, but I think it was. At the time it was Iraq. And so they. They came round and they walked through the hall bit and on the whole bit, there was laminate flooring at the time and then there was the front room of carpet. So they've walked through the hall. I mean, Neil's huge. He's a big fella. His job at the time was to process a Taliban. So you can imagine this guy isn't scared of anything. This is a big man. Walk through to the kitchen, put the kettle on, made a cup of tea, come back. So what does that take eight to 10 minutes to do that? Sat on the sofa, then Neil said, verse, what's all that blood over there? When I'm thinking, well, there can't be any blood. You've just. You just walked past there and if there was blood, one, you'd have noticed it and two, there'd be all footprints in it. And three, well, there's no blood anyway, you know, because there isn't any blood. So, yeah, I didn't kind of take him very seriously and carried on talking to Kirsty. But then he got up and then he walked over to this part of the room and he got his finger in this blood and he said, look at this, what's this? So of course me and Kirsty have gone over there and Kirsty's a blood nurse. She knows what blood looks like. She knows what blood looks like, she knows what it smells like. Her life works around human blood and. Or, you know, and she, she knows the texture of blood. She said, it's blood. And we're like, well, hold on a minute. So Neil's Focusing. Right. So what must have happened is he's thinking, a window's open, a cat's jumped in that's injured, or a bir flown in that's injured. They've bled. While we were making a cup of tea, they've. They've bled on the thing. Where's the injured animal? Where's this? And no injured animal. So there's no windows open. And I remember him, he was. Got his hands along the ceilings, feeling them all. Is there a leak? Is there. There's someone upstairs. You know, just anything. Just. Just trying to find an expert. I mean, and. And he couldn't. And. And there wasn't an explanation because it wasn't there 10 minutes earlier. It was not there 10 minutes earlier.
Vanessa Mitchell (49:12)
Well, it was, it got worse and worse. I, I, I, I ended up living in dusty upstairs bedroom. I didn't use any of the rest of the house at all by this point. By the end. I mean, I can't see talk you through three hours of stuff that happened. It's too much to say in one interview. But by the end I was living in one room. So I put, everything was upstairs and then, by then I'd, I'd had a, my son Jesse. So I was a single parent in the house. And so everything, we never sat downstairs at all. So upstairs in my room I had his baby bouncer and the bottles. Everything I needed, nothing was. So I come in, I'd pick him up, I'd get him from work. Pick him up from the child minders. Yeah, pick him up first, get, you know, get him from work and we'd go straight up the stairs and we'd stay in, in the room the entire time. I didn't use any, I didn't use the kitchen, I didn't cook any dinners. I didn't do anything. Just, just lived in that room. But towards the end, because I thought to myself, the only thing I can, the only thing I thought that I could do was if I make myself as small as possible, if I try and make myself as unseen as possible in this house by not using the rest of the house, maybe I might, it'll be a bit better. Maybe it might, it will just be a bit safer. It never made any difference. But that, that's what I did at the time. I didn't, I didn't know what else to do.
Interviewer (Julian Morgans) (50:56)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And then at the same time, I, I think. I think this is something about this story that I find pretty moving is that, you know, the, like the global financial crisis was happening. Like people were losing their jobs around you. You're a single mom. All of a sudden you. You lost your tenant, essentially. So you're paying for this house, you're paying for this mortgage by yourself. Talk to me about the, like, the financial stress of, like. Never mind the haunting, but the financial stress must have been terrible.
Vanessa Mitchell (51:26)
Yeah. I mean, when, when I was in the. When I was in the house, the mortgage rates had literally doubled overnight. It was that crisis. And, and mine had. Because I wasn't on a fixed. I wasn't on a fixed rate. And then even after I left the house, the, you know, I had to leave my. I ended up leaving the house and I. But I still had to pay for a house that I wasn't living in. And that is, you know, again, still single parent. And you just have to work harder and have nothing and just, and, and just earn enough just to. Just to pay for this house you can't even live in, which was. Was your dream home in your dream location. And turned out so horrific in the end that it was either going to be you or the house. You know, I had no choice. I had to leave. I had to get me and my baby to safety, and that's what I did. So I just walked out of there one day. But yeah, of course, the finance, financial implications were horrific, terrible. Like any human that has to pay for that, that needs to pay out more than they're earning.
Vanessa Mitchell (52:46)
You know, the, the. I remember that the one time he sticks out, I had no more. More clothes left for work, ironed, and I couldn't take the iron upstairs because it wouldn't fit, the ironing board wouldn't fit. And I remember thinking, I need to iron some clothes to work. So I thought, right, I'm just gonna iron three things, you know, a blouse, a skirt, and a jacket. Or whatever. And I just remember thinking, right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be two minutes. I'm gonna be two minutes. Because the whole. The rest of the time I would never, ever go anywhere without taking Jesse, my son, with me. He was always with me. If I went one room, I'd make sure he, he was with me because I knew the house wasn't safe. And I got into a good routine of that and that didn't bother me. But just this one day, he was upstairs asleep in the cot. And I remember thinking, oh, I just don't want to wake him up. So I'm thinking, it'll take me two minutes. I run downstairs quickly. So I went downstairs and the ironing board was in the prison room. And so on the floor of the prison room was Jude's toys, Jesse's toy, toy boxes and toys. And he had some of those little, you know, Thomas the Tank engines where, you know, you turn them on and then they go off and play the music and do things. And so I remember going downstairs, setting up the ironing board in the prison room. And within minutes, four or five of Jude's toys just came from the corners of the rooms and just started going off by theirself. These Thomas tankings, three Thompson tank engines going around the feet of the. I, you know, of the ironing board and the toy started making a noise and I just. Oh. And that actually doesn't sound much on itself, but when you think about all the other things that happened, it was, it was that to me. Now I look back at that, and if that happened to me now, I don't think I'd been as terrified. But the point is, so much had happened leading up to this. It was just like, for God's sake, I've only popped downstairs, I've only just come downstairs. I never even come downstairs. And now I have just for three minutes just to do something quickly. And I can't even do that without something happening. So I remember turning off the iron let. Opening the door, because it's an old. You had to open this wooden door to get up the stairs. These like creaky little low stairs. And as I've done that to get upstairs to get back to Jesse, there's a man standing at the top of the stairs. And he had on brown trousers, brown color, and a whitish color shirt. And he's standing at the top of the stairs and. But of course, he wasn't solid. He was more see throughy and, and I, and I, you know, it just. And that was Just one example of me popping downstairs when I hadn't done and just, you know, bloody terrified, you know, don't forget I'm downstairs, my son's upstairs. And in between me and my son that there's a man standing at the top of the stairs now. Yeah, the guy who hung himself in the house. He hung himself at the top of the stairs. Was that significant? I don't know. It's not like they say, right? My name's so and so and I'm here for so and so reasons. A lot of his guesswork. I'm not a medium, I'm not a psychic. I can't communicate them with. With them like that. I've just always seen them. So you just, I don't know, you just. Just becomes impossible.
Vanessa Mitchell (57:19)
One of the worst things include, you know, that he was involved in was I could hear someone coming up the stairs. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Loud. I'm like, oh, no. Oh no, no, no. And my, my bedroom door, the old fashioned latches, the raw iron latches. And to get in my bedroom, you have to up the latch and walk in and someone was standing outside and I could, I could hear it. I knew all the doors were locked. Nobody had broken in, you know, please God, please let it be human because I got half A chance with the human. You know, I used to wish it was a burglar. And the latch went up and down and then got faster and faster and faster as it smashing against itself. And this is like saying like two o' clock in the morning. I am absolutely terrified. I can't jump out the window because my only option is at this point to jump out the window with a baby through the glass. Or I come and confront, open this door. Or I stay in the bed with my heart literally cracking open, my ribs beating out of my chest out of pure fear. What do you do? I've got a little baby there. You know what you do? You just stay there and it's absolutely terrifying. I, I, I, you know, some people say, oh, we should have gone to confront it. Really, when you wouldn't have confronted it, especially with a baby. Just stay there and, and get underneath the covers and please, God, go away, go away, go away. Our father, who are, you know, you do whatever you can.
Vanessa Mitchell (59:49)
Sitting or sitting, crouching over, like in a ball a lot of the time, crying a lot of the time. And just opposite the beam where he was, where he hung. And it started happening quite a lot. I never, I must have slept, walked there because I certainly wouldn't have done it off my own back. I certainly would never left that room. I'd never left that room. And I certainly wouldn't have gone into that part of the house. I wouldn't have done it. I think it was something, whatever was in the energy of the house leading me there. I honestly think that a bit, because by then the House had taken over so much of my brain and life so much that it, I, I knew I was completely defenseless at that point. I knew by then that I felt like my life just went to like a flatline. I couldn't. It, it, I, I had no fight left for anything at all. Everything was gone. I couldn't, I couldn't work properly. My, my work life was affected hugely. I was depressed beyond. It just, it just something really bad in that house is dark and negative and just got me. Just got me. I understand it more now because now you could actually turn on the TV and watch about this stuff. But don't forget back in my day, you couldn't. There wasn't really, there isn't Discovery plus and all these channels you can see so many programs now. So I never had the experience of any of that. You know, to watch those shows, to at least know how to try and deal with it. I, I just didn't know nowadays if it happened I'd have that sorted very quickly, I feel. But of course back then there's nothing, there's nothing I could do. I didn't know what to do.
Vanessa Mitchell (62:40)
Yeah. That, that was just the final thing. But there'd been so, so much leading up to that. I mean, I'm talking three years of constant activity. And then. And then my friend Kerry said to me, actually, she said, look, she was living in Colchester, a town, you know, like 20 minutes away from me, and she said, look, I've got spare room, John. I come and move in. And I'm like, yes. So I literally packed my stuff and left. I was gone within, like, two days. So I left my house, my home in my village, which was near my job, to move literally the other side of Colchester, which took me an hour to and from work at least every day they're back there, back to rent a room off her, you know, to live with her. And I had to leave my house. But that was a lot better than staying in the house. But the minute I got a chance to go, I went, just. Just got out of there quick.
Vanessa Mitchell (63:44)
I don't know, I. I look back at it, I mean, people did believe me, but I think towards. Towards the last year and that towards the end, I think I was so buried by it. But. Oh, I. I don't even think I. I told anyone how bad it got. I mean, I suppose I must have done. I don't really know, but I know, I know that I changed so much in my own brain that I don't think. I don't think I went to anyone and said. Because I'm sure if I'd have gone to my mum and said, mum, Mum, please help me, please help me, please help me. Do whatever you can. I need to get out this house because my mental health, because I'm going to top myself in this house because this house is so bad. I'm telling you, I'm terrified. I don't think I ever said that because if I begged my mother, she would have helped me, so my dad, they would have done. I look back now and. Or a friend would have, if I'd have said, you know, I really, really need help. And I. And I couldn't have said it because I would have got help, but. But I know by then my own brain and my own life was so affected. It was like I was kind of a zombie human anyway. I wasn't even in my own brain, anyway. I wasn't even properly. Vanessa. Yeah, I wasn't because. Because of what the house had done and because what was happening every day for years, day in, day out, just bit by a bit, you know, tapping, scratching away, get getting and affecting me like that.
Vanessa Mitchell (65:12)
That point towards the end? I, I thought if I don't leave here, this is going to be me or the house. Yeah. And that's again when you think I can't, I can't be. Because I'm actually a very normal person. I'm, you know, I'm, you know, I. There wasn't anything ever in my past or in my mental health that ever would have even made me think anything like that apart from that house. And I think that's when I knew. I rang my uncle one night and I said to him, jam, I'm. I'm in trouble here because I feel like, I feel like this type of way. And he said, right, I'm coming up and I'm coming up. And it was the next day actually that Kerry said to me, right, come and move in with me. And I look back now how I felt then and I get, I understand why the man that lived there a few, you know, six months before me killed himself in there. I get it. And you know what, if he'd have lived somewhere else, I don't think he'd have done it. I don't think. Because if you can imagine if you're living somewhere like it's constantly kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself. If you can imagine living like that and then.
Vanessa Mitchell (66:23)
Sometimes you'd hear and sometimes it would just the, just the energy wrapped around you. This dark thing that was in that house, that energy that evil, bad, you know, I, I really believe that he, he wouldn't have, I, I don't think he'd have killed himself if he'd have lived somewhere else or if he'd have moved out. And I think all the other people that had, you know, left that house, fleet, that house over 300 years when, when they shouldn't have had to leave. I think, I think they were, I think there was something in it. They were feeling some kind of way the same as well that they knew that it was bad. They had to get out. They had to get out because it wasn't just me. This is talking about 300 years worth it. We have scientific fact and proof that 300 years worth of residents of that house have had to leave it?
