About This Site ...

Based in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. We have for sometime felt strange unexplainable happenings within our home. After several months of having what we describe as spooky/ghostly activity, we thought it would be good to share our thoughts and collections with everyone else.

Where did it all start?

June 2006, we decided it was time to do something with our garden; it looked like a bombsite.  We had a massive tree in the garden that blocked all the light.  We took it upon our selves to chop the tree down.  It took weeks! All we had was a handsaw, so we had to do it branch by branch.  We managed to get all the side branches off; leaving the main tree stump and the main branch that grew up the middle (as the tree was about 30 ft high, this last branch was hard to reach, so the tree was left, looking very sad for itself for a while). At the same time we were putting in a fishpond, which was to the left of where the tree stood.  One evening, we were admiring the pond, and I noticed a bright light, which flashed in the sky, just above the house at the bottom of the garden.  I shouted to Steve to have a look, but he was too late to see anything.  As he turned around, I looked at him and saw three balls of light, which appeared to be bouncing behind his head. These three lights bounced 3 times and shot off towards the driveway.  With the balls being behind Steve’s head, once again he failed to see them.  I thought I was going mad!  I tried to explain to Steve what I had seen, but I’m not sure whether he believed me at the time.

During the summer of 2006, both Steve and myself had taken up stargazing, as the weather in June was beautiful. The nights were warm and calm, and the stars had always intrigued us (that’s another story!).  While we were sat outside we would both disappear into our own thoughts.  On one occasion we were sat around the garden table. As usual, everything was quiet, when I looked towards the house.  I saw a black figure walk past the first kitchen window, it then disappeared behind a wall, and then reappeared in front of the second kitchen window.  From my viewpoint, the figure then disappeared into the wall that joined onto our neighbours’ kitchen.  I sat for about 5 minutes thinking about what I had just seen.  Nobody else was in the house, both of the dogs were sat outside with us, who or what had just walked through my kitchen, and then disappeared through a wall into next doors kitchen?  I thought I was going mad.  After evaluating what I had seen, I had no explanation for it whatsoever.  The kitchen light had been off, but the living room light was on, and the connecting door was ajar, so the kitchen was dimly lit.  I didn’t know what to do or say, so I kept it to myself.  After about 5 minutes, Steve, who had been quiet, suddenly said “Stel, can I tell you something?” in a very serious way.  I said, “I know what you have just seen, because I saw it as well”.  Steve was sat at a different angle to myself, and saw it from a different perspective.  He had seen the figure walk from the garden, towards the back door; it then disappeared and reappeared in front of the kitchen window, exactly as I had seen it.  Steve didn’t see it disappear through the kitchen wall from where he was sitting.  Both of us had seen this figure, both of us had sat and contemplated as to what it was, both of us hadn’t got a clue as to what we had seen.  I felt that this figure was a male, although he didn’t seem to be very tall, it couldn’t have been over 5ft in height.  Steve had also sensed that it had been male, and that he was wearing a hat.  We discussed what we had seen but we couldn’t explain it, we analysed everything, from the lights inside, the lights outside, was it an insect?  A few nights later, sat in the garden once more, I had the feeling that Steve had something on his mind, I turned around and watched him for a few minutes, and he looked deep in thought and was somewhat troubled. After a while, I asked him if he was ok, and he then told me that he felt that he had had a conversation with an elderly gentleman, who was sat on the seat next to him, and that this gentleman was not happy that we had butchered the tree in the garden.  I asked him to describe the man, and he said that he was wearing a trilby hat, but he could only see half of the man’s face.  The other half had been in shadow.  He said that he felt that this man had intruded into his mind, although he couldn’t recall the exact conversation, he had the feeling that this man was not very happy with what we were doing in the garden!

House detectives

The following day, I asked a few neighbours about who had lived in our house previously, and we discovered that a man with a trilby hat had actually lived in the house adjoined to ours.  His name was Mr Marshall Watts, and he had the best garden in the street. 

Emily Wakefield was married to Bill Jones.  Mr Jones had been taken as a prisoner during the war, and after the war he was quite ill.  Returning at the end of the war, it wasn’t long before Mr Jones died, and Emily was left a widow, with their sons.  Mr Watts used to help Emily with the garden.  According to the neighbours, after pottering about, Mr Watts often joined Emily in the kitchen for a cup of tea and a chat.

During July/August of 2006, we went on holiday and on our return, we had a visit from a gentleman who used to live in our house.  He was one of Emily’s sons, Carl.  He told us that Mr Watts did look after Emily’s garden after her husbands’ death.  After Bill had died, Emily went on to marry Albert Smith, known to his friends as Ray.  Carl was Emily and Ray’s son.  He told us that Ray had planted the tree that was in our back garden when Ray had been born.  He went on to say that Mr Watts did look after the garden.  He recalled that Mr Watts had been blind in one eye, after an unfortunate accident with a firework. 

A few nights after the visit, we were getting ready for bed, as always, I went up first as Steve saw to the dogs.  On coming up the stairs, Steve told me that he had seen three white lights dancing around the landing light. 

On another occasion, I had been in the bathroom, and heard a metallic sounding voice that sounded my name twice.  I immediately thought that it was Steve in the bedroom, but he wasn’t even upstairs.  Peculiar unexplained things were going on in our house all the time.  On one occasion, both Steve and I were looking for something in the kitchen which we had put on the worktop.  We both looked around the kitchen and we couldn’t understand where it had gone, after a short discussion, we looked again, and there it was on the worktop, in the place that we thought we had originally put it.

Items mysteriously “fell” from off the top of the wardrobe and landed on Steve in bed. 

Towels unravelled themselves from the towel rail, even though they were evenly distributed over the rail.

The dogs chased mysterious black objects around the garden; they followed objects around the living room for minutes on end.  We used to think that they had spotted a fly or something, but when we followed their movements, there wasn’t any flying object to be seen.  We even thought that they were watching a spider run across the carpet at one time, but we still couldn’t see anything.

I was looking for my notebook one day, and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t where I usually kept it.  After a few minutes of going over my desk, the letter rack by my computer caught my eye, and to my amazement the notebook I was looking for, fell out of the rack and landed on the desktop straight in front of me.  I know that I did not put the notebook in the letter rack, and I know for sure that I did not knock the rack to make it fall out.  I just cannot explain what had just happened. 

Unexplained things were going on in our house, but we weren’t scared, we were intrigued.  We bought a digital camera, which could capture video clips in night vision.  The first time Steve used the camera, it was quite funny, he was doing an orb check in the back hallway, when I decided to check up on what he was doing.  He didn’t hear me coming as I had some music on in the living room, when I opened the door and stuck my head around the corner, he absolutely sh@t himself!  Steve then started to take night vision video clips in the bedroom at night.  That is when we started to capture the orbs that you can see on our calendar.  We can’t explain what, or even why, these orbs appear in our bedroom.  They do seem to emanate from a picture I have on the bedroom wall though. The picture is of my grandparents, both of whom have passed away.  I was very close to both of them, and in the past I had received a message from my Nan through a medium, saying that she was always with me.  I could go on for hours about the spiritual things that have happened to me through my life, who knows, one day they may all be recorded here on Haunted Homes!

We managed to saw the tree down to about 5ft, and that is how it stands today, unfortunately rain stopped play in the garden, and the garden project has been put on hold until the Spring of 2007.  Who knows, when we start the garden again, Mr Watts may come back to tell us what he thinks!

We operate this site with the highest amount of honesty and have no intention to mislead anyone. What we show here is what we capture. No tricks, no gimmicks.