My Paranormal Experiences Living in the Old Workhouse

 

I was always interested in the paranormal growing up and loved hearing about the spooky and frightening experiences that happened to my mother and sister, who were both very perceptible to them. I reached my early twenties with nothing happening to me and figured that I was just one of those people that just was never in the right place at the right time. This all changed when I moved into my second flat.

I had just started a better-paid job and was looking for a larger flat when my dad found one to rent in what was our town's old workhouse. I didn’t even think of the historic connections at first, I just loved the look of the place, as it had a Victorian vibe to it, with high ceilings and dark oak beams. It was on the top floor so it had nice views out of the windows as well. The Andover workhouse was a place that had a scandalous history, I knew that much from the dozen or so visits I had made to the Andover museum. The inmates were so starving at one point that they began to eat the marrow from the bones that they had to grind and crush as part of their daily work. This made national headlines across England and inspired Charles Dickens to incorporate it in his novel, ‘Oliver Twist’.

I moved into the flat in the summer of 2017 and took a few days to unpack everything, I got no strange vibes or weird feelings. Everything was just normal. I worked as a dental nurse full time so was away from the flat for four and a half days every week, returning to it after work for dinner and either chilling at weekends, on my own, or entertaining friends. After the weekend, I went back to work as usual and it was when I got home that I noticed something strange. I had a DVD rack with DVDs in by my television, and I had stacked them all alphabetically so I could find a movie or a series quickly. When I came home from work that first Monday I walked into the living room/dining room area to find my DVD’s scattered all over the floor. They hadn’t just fallen, they had somehow been fired out of the DVD rack. For some reason, because I wasn’t used to strange things happening to me, I sort of wrote it off. I thought that maybe I hadn’t stacked them properly, and maybe there was some kind of vibration from the flat below me. I still don’t think this scientifically explains what I clearly saw. I put the DVDs back and carried on with my evening.

The next event was a few days later. I was watching tv in the evening after dinner and I heard the kitchen tap turn on full blast. The kitchen taps, or faucets, in this flat, were levers rather than twist taps. I walked into the kitchen thinking that there must be a problem with the plumbing and cursing my luck that this would happen only a few days after moving in. When I looked at the sink I was very confused as the tap lever was clearly up. I had not touched the tap since I had washed up the dishes earlier in the evening. I started to feel a bit freaked out at this.

I was talking to my sister about those two events over the course of the next few days, and she is very interested in supernatural stuff like I mentioned before, she said she would do some research and find out exactly what my flat was in the original building, as the old blueprints would still be available. She discovered that it was the ‘men's casual ward’ which meant in simple terms that men could come to the workhouse, do a day's work for some food and somewhere to sleep, and then be allowed to move on, so they weren’t prisoners as such. I was filled with so much relief instantly. This almost underlined my gut feeling that these incidents were on the side of mischievous and I convinced myself that they were not in any way done to cause me fear and alarm. The main reason I wanted to comfort myself with this thought is I loved the flat so much and I couldn't leave it. Once I finished the phone call I said out loud, “I will respect you, if you respect me.”

I would experience a period of days where nothing would happen and life just carried on as normal, occasionally, I would hear footsteps down the corridor or I would hear the odd door creak and objects would shift around the flat sometimes. I smoked at the time and I often found my cigarettes put in strange places, in kitchen cupboards and on the top shelves so I would have to get a stool to reach them. I told myself it was the type of stupid thing you might do to wind up a friend. My sister and mum mentioned doing a Ouija board to try and gather more information about the spirit or spirits, but I shied away from this. I knew at the moment that the spirits were good-natured, and didn’t want to risk making things worse.

An illustration of a typical men's casual ward

I started to notice the energy in the flat would come and go, and when it would get almost electric, the craziest stuff would happen, this was all the more frequent when I had girl friends over at the weekends. I had a gathering of about six of us one night and I was recounting the strange things that I had experienced and was trying to convince them that I wasn't scared. As I was talking two rolls of wrapping paper fell over and rolled a metre or so across the floor towards us very slowly. Safe to say everybody freaked out a bit and I had to try and kind of calm them down and say I probably had just not stacked them very well. After everyone had left I tried to recreate what had happened by pushing the rolls of wrapping paper over and checking to see if I could make them do the same thing again. I couldn’t.

I had a female co-worker over one evening and was recounting the story of the kitchen sink tap turning on full blast when, as we were talking, the tap did the exact same thing again. It turned on full blast. She completely freaked out. I said to her as calmly as I could that I needed her to come with me into the kitchen so she could see that the tap lever was in the upright position and this was not just water making its way through, or a problem with the tap. I eventually convinced her and she came with me into the kitchen and watched while I turned the lever back off and the water stopped. We were both lost for words. She didn’t stay long after that, but I couldn’t help marveling at the irony of this. I had already come to the conclusion, somehow, that there were plural male spirits in the flat, I don't know I just knew. This also explained to me why whenever my fiance at the time would come over and stay for a week or so, he experienced nothing at all and probably thought I was losing my mind. It became obvious that the spirits enjoyed female company and messing around with us.

I began to talk to them occasionally and I always maintained what our pact was, that I would treat them with respect and they would allow me to cohabit with them.

The craziest incident, in my opinion, happened after work on a Friday. I worked for a privately owned dental practice that let us go at 1 p.m. on a Friday with a full day's pay. I used this extra time to do my cleaning so I could relax for the rest of the weekend. It was in the winter time and the dark evenings were in full swing. I was in the middle of cleaning the kitchen when I really needed to use the toilet, my toilet was down the long corridor right next to the front door. I left the kitchen, had a wee, and as I came back in the kitchen I stopped still in my tracks. Every cupboard and drawer in the kitchen was open. I was absolutely frozen. Every hair on my head and neck stood on end, and I could feel the static in the room. I had kind of normalised these odd things happening, but that was undoubtedly an epic moment and I’m sure the peak of their combined energy. I slept with the light on that night.

Odd small events would still happen over the course of the next few months. A notebook that was very precious to me disappeared and after I nearly took the whole bookcase apart trying to find it, it appeared on its own miraculously one Sunday afternoon with a thud on the floor. I don’t know to this day, where it went or how it got there.

I found myself one afternoon at work, while on a break with some colleagues, proceeding to talk about the spirits in a way that was non-respectful. When I got home I found my new magnetic whiteboard I had bought for my fridge across the room in pieces. It had hit the opposite counter with such force that the thing was broken beyond repair. I immediately swore out loud, before realising pretty quickly that I had not shown them due respect that day.

I wasn’t on any real friendly terms with my neighbours, just the occasional head nod in the stairwell as we walked past each other. There was a couple that lived opposite me on the top floor, however, that I did speak to. The woman was especially kind and quite spiritual in her own way. I found out afterward that this was an incredibly abusive and toxic relationship and I am happy to say that she found her way out, is now divorced, and living her best life. I digress… She happened to knock one morning and we got chatting in the upper stairwell over tea, I asked her delicately whether she had experienced any strange or supernatural events in her flat. She looked at me wide-eyed and said that she and her husband were both terrorized by an entity that was 'evil'. It was destructive to their objects, and she said it caused them both bad nightmares and scratch marks on her and her husband. She also said that they felt strong sensations of fear and dread. Mainly because of this, they had been looking at other flats to move to, as the stress of it all was causing them both to fight. I said I was sorry to hear this and that I had experiences of my own too, but mine were of a lighter nature. 

The day after that conversation I was being dropped off by my mother in the car park outside the building. I got out of the car said goodbye to my mum and entered the stairwell with my key. Now the door to this stairwell is weighted so that as soon as you let it go, it goes to close on its own quite quickly. I went up the first flight of steps and when I looked out over the rail I realised that the door wasn’t closing, I stopped and looked at it and then it began to open on its own. Now I had just been outside and there was no wind that evening at all, but the lights in the stairway began to flicker at this exact same time, and I was overcome with an incredibly strong surge of fear that something was going to follow me up the steps. I have never gone up the stairs and opened my own door faster in my life. I locked the door fast behind me.

The last memorable incident that I recall took place about six months before I left to move in with a close friend. I was finding the flat a bit more of a financial drain than I thought it would be and was struggling to make ends meet each month. I was in my bedroom on the bed and had just had a nasty argument with my ex-fiance, this was the first time I had considered breaking off the engagement. I was crying quite profusely and was deeply upset. I felt very alone and didn’t feel like talking to anyone about it because, generally speaking, I had a sneaking suspicion my friends and family would have just said that I should trust my gut and just end the engagement. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shadowy figure for about five seconds on the threshold of my bedroom. I immediately stopped crying and felt eerily calm. It almost felt like something or someone was checking in on me and perhaps making sure that I was okay. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female, I just knew it was a shadowy human shape that quickly went away after I looked at it. I wasn’t wearing makeup so it wasn’t as if I had a chunk of mascara caught in my eyelash or anything. I also considered that maybe my emotional state was causing me to imagine things, but with everything else that had happened in the flat prior to this, it was just too much of a coincidence.

Things really settled down after that, and I then moved. I said goodbye to the entities when I left and told them to 'be good.'. The weird thing is I still have occasional moments when I think of them. It’s not like I think of them fondly, as such, but I had a complex connection with them. I have lived in three different places since that flat, the last two times with friends and now with my current boyfriend and I have moved across England from the south to the north. At times I have experienced, still, when alone someone calling my name in the style of the person I live with. This happened twice with my best friend, once when I was in a hotel alone in Scarborough and once here in North Yorkshire. The voice imitates the person I am living with so convincingly, that every time I fall for it. I can't help but think 'Very funny' sarcastically when I realise that again I have been tricked. Call me crazy, but a part of me really wants it to be those restless spirits from the casual ward checking in on their old flatmate and reminding me of the pact. Even hundreds of miles away it still feels comforting rather than scary.