New Years / Ghost Stories
31.12.24 - 01.01.25 (with thanks to C.J. Beadle)
When I was little, my dad always wanted to ‘let the New Year in’. He said this was done as follows; before midnight somebody would grab a lump of coal from the bin next to the fire, take it outside and wait. Once the clock hit midnight, the person would knock on the door and hand the coal over the doorstep to whoever answered. This was ‘letting the New Year in’.
I had no idea what this meant at the time, all I knew was that it terrified me. I remember begging (or wanting to beg - fantasy and memory tend to blur after so many years) my dad not to do it, consumed by an all encompassing terror spouting from the freezing notion of not knowing what was going on. Perhaps partly because a year felt like such a long time, but mostly because it felt as though I was completely out of control. I was at the mercy of tradition, of something beyond my knowing. I barely even knew what coal was, let alone its semiotics.
I did (and still do) have some form of mountainous, deep-seated horror when it came to what I perceived as the ‘paranormal’. Growing up I lived in a very old house in Middlesbrough, apparently built in the 1600s. It was made of sandstone. It had no back garden but one at the front, all concrete patio and sections of soil where great quantities of plants sprung from. The garden was honestly like a jungle, especially to someone that small. The house sat in an L shape, with the other two sides squared by garden walls and a gate leading out into the neighbourhood. Looking into the garden through the gate you could see the garage (never used for cars, more a glorified potting shed for my dad’s horticultural obsessions) below a set of windows behind which sat my parents’ bedroom. Separating the two was a sign my dad painted with the house’s name on it; Seven Woodgarth.
Seven Woodgarth was the first place of methodist worship in the north of England. My dad seemed very proud of this fact, even though he’s not a methodist. I don’t even think he’s religious, not in any traditional sense anyway. This fact always sort of freaked me out - religion, another unknown - because it meant that so many people had lived here before us. What had they done here? What had happened in my bedroom before I was in it?
My bedroom used to be two, but at some point the people who lived there before us knocked the wall separating the two down to make it one room. This meant I had a lot of space to mess around in, to make my Lego tableaus and to eat McDonalds on the floor with my friends in, and it also made up for the lack of kick-about space in the garden. Weirdly enough though, I never spent a lot of time in my room as a child. This is because Seven Woodgarth made me feel extremely uncomfortable to be in.
The downstairs was just about doable for me, but even so I was still on edge all the time. I didn’t like to sit anywhere at the dinner table which gave me a view of another room, in case I saw something move. I didn’t like to be left alone if my dad needed to go out to the bins in case something came and got me while he was gone. I didn’t even particularly like playing outside alone, because then I could see the upstairs windows. I always felt like I was being watched, but I most certainly didn’t look up to check.
My dad used to sing a rhyme to me as we climbed the stairs for bed; “Up the apples and pears, to beep-bo land”. At the top of the stairs was the door to the bathroom, and to the right of that was the door to my bedroom. Adjacent to the stairwell was the landing, which led to a storage cupboard. To the right was the door to another flight of stairs (which led to a small office, bathroom and living area - my dad would later rent this out to a lodger called Keith, which somehow made things less scary), to the left my parents’ dressing room. Past that was their bedroom, the one above the garage.
I hated how far my bedroom was from my parents’. I felt as if on an island. I have a scene burned into my memory; I can’t have been very old at all, because there was still a baby gate on my door to stop me from getting out. I was upset for some reason or another, I really wanted my mum. So I banged on my wall, bang, bang, bang, screaming “MUMMY, MUMMY” and crying all the while. Then I climbed out of bed and stood at the gate of my bedroom prison, glaring at the storage cupboard at the end of the landing. “MUMMY, MUMMY!!”. I must have been horrified by something.
Another scene, from when I was a little older; my mum puts me to bed, and I cover my entire body and head in duvet. I only leave room for air to get in through a tiny hole about where my nose is. If I can see light coming into my cocoon (I always slept with a bedside light on) then I am not covered enough. This is to protect me from anything that might want to scare or harm me - my logic was that if nothing can see me then I don’t exist to it, therefore nothing will come to get me. As I’m trying to fall asleep, I hear a sliding and then a THUMP next to my head. I freeze. And then I start calling: “Muuuum… mum?”. She comes upstairs, and I see that the calendar on my wall has fallen down and landed on my bedside table, sort of still hanging just lopsided, rested against the wall. She reassures me - I think my dad is there too, but maybe he comes up later. I get back into my cocoon and try to go back to sleep.
Not even half an hour later and another slip, the sound only paper on wall can make. This is I think what gives me my first ever panic attack - I am inconsolable. “MAAAAM, MAAAAAM!!”. A huge (close to life size) TARDIS poster has just fallen off my wall, and I feel as though my life is over. They must have found me, I am being haunted. I can’t remember how I got to sleep after that.
This is basically how I felt about the upstairs of Seven Woodgarth, compounded by an anecdote that my dad told me when I was a child that has stuck with me ever since:
“Your mum bought me a cross and chain, which I never took off. One morning I had a bath and towel dried myself, but as I left the bathroom the cross trickled down my stomach. I caught it, but when I looked neither the chain nor the ring on the cross were damaged. The cross had somehow detached from the chain, which was an impossibility. I was quite shocked by this and told your mum I couldn't wear it again. She replaced the chain and I have worn it constantly since without a repeat of this strange occurrence.
Before I was born, nana Lawson had looked after her siblings since their mum had died. One evening she made dinner for her brothers and they all sat around the huge table in the middle of the room. As they began to eat, the light (a large chandelier over the table) went out. Assuming the bulb had blown, uncle Harry stood on a chair to replace it. He discovered that there was no old bulb there! He put the new one in and turned on the light. It was then they discovered the old bulb had flown diagonally and landed in uncle Chris's (my namesakes) dinner! He was killed that night riding his motorbike to work.
When I was around 7, I was staying at nana Lawsons' - your aunty Janice and a couple of other people were there that evening. We heard an almighty crash from the front bedroom and all rushed up to see what had caused it. We found the mirror from above the fireplace face down in the middle of the room. The picture hook was still in the wall and the mirror chain was intact. When we lifted up the mirror, the glass was in hundreds of pieces, but all in perfect place. About 2 hours later uncle Alf came around to let us know that aunty Meg (nana's sister) had died 2 hours before.
Take what you will from these events. Portents of doom or death? Who knows, but they were all very strange experiences.”
Despite my terror, I was fascinated by the paranormal. I would watch ‘Most Haunted’ on TV and then again on YouTube, even if whilst I was watching it I felt as though someone was looming over my shoulder, perhaps even watching it with me. I would listen intently to any ghost stories my parents told me (the house they lived in before Seven Woodgarth was most definitely haunted, but that’s a story for another time), especially the ones centred around the circles my dad would hold with his first wife’s father, who was a spirit medium. He still has tape recordings of them, although I’m still too scared to listen in case something is opened up by my hearing them. I was also enamoured by my dad’s experiences with meditation - his recountings of conversations with his spirit guide (RedFeather) and his visions into past lives in ancient Egypt (where he was a scribe). Although it scared the living daylights out of me, I had a deep hunger to know everything about it, to understand it fully; to know.
This New Year’s Eve I did not pass any coal through any front doors - I sat in my friend’s room drinking a beer and watching Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and Bob Dylan videos on YouTube. The day itself still, however, undoubtedly made me uncomfortable. I rang my dad at around 2am on January 1st, which for him was still still only around 5pm on December 31st. We talked for a good few hours about this writing, and about our experiences in Seven Woodgarth and beyond, and what we managed to distill the feeling down to was one of express un-comfort. That is exactly how I felt in that house; uncomfortable. I haven’t felt that way in any other house since - I’ve been scared (my first year uni accommodation, with the hallway light that turned on and off whenever it wished to), but never that feeling of total stomach-curdle.
My dad also used the word oppressive - he said that some houses you enter have entirely different atmospheres, as if you are breathing a different air. My most recent experience of this phenomena was not in a house, but in a park. One day, in late September, I had nothing to do. It was around 5pm, so I grabbed my bike and cycled to a convenience store to buy some form of picnic dinner: bread, plastic-y cheese, something resembling ham and a cream-filled croissant for dessert. I then made my way to Itake Green Space in Nisshin, a large park 20 minutes from my dorm which houses a large bamboo forest and a lake surrounded by lovely green trees. As I got there it was just getting towards twilight; the sun was setting, and there was most certainly nobody else around. I wanted to eat my dinner by the lake, looking out onto the water and the trees surrounding it. As I drew near, however, I heard somebody playing a flute. This didn’t immediately disconcert me, but eventually did once I went into the forest looking for the source of the sound and was struck by a sense of the unreal physics happening around me. I would take a few steps towards the sound and it would grow louder, but then another few steps in the same direction and it would quieten again. Nothing seemed right. The complete isolation heightened my senses, and the wind started to sound strange. Did I even really know where I was? I hurriedly walked back to the lake and tried to eat my sandwich in calm, but was struck by that oppressiveness - I felt as though I wasn’t supposed to be there, and if I stayed any longer something bad would happen. I threw the rest of my dinner back into the plastic bag it came in, hopped on my bike and cycled as fast as I could out of the forest, all the while talking myself down from the terror. I haven’t been back since.
I hadn’t connected that event with how I felt as a child until the phone call I had with my dad on NYE; after an hour and a half of talking about these things, I could start to feel myself slipping back into the mindset I had at Seven Woodgarth. I didn’t want to move from my bed, and I didn’t know how I was going to be able to sleep that night. I kept looking over at my desk and imagining a cup being thrown across the room, or my chair starting to spin on its own. On top of this, every time I recounted an anecdote I would get the urge to cry - I started to shake, I could no longer control my emotions. I was a bit of a mess.
Even whilst typing this, I have almost constantly been on the verge of tears. One escapes every now and again, and I have to remind myself that everything is okay. This has always been the case; whenever I express my feelings around the ‘paranormal’ (a word I rue the use of, mainly for its social dilution by the very TV shows I would watch as a child), this un-knowing, my eyes start to water and I get a lump in my throat. I remember recounting these stories to my school friends and finding it very difficult not to cry in front of them, not out of terror but out of some deep-seated emotion associated with the subject. Another unexplainable. Another unknown.
I do also, however, think that this terror comes most intensely when I am alone. I was alone in the forest, and I was most terrified in Seven Woodgarth when I was alone. I was completely calm in my first year flat when there where friends around, but as soon as I had to spend the night there by myself my guard was immediately raised.
I visited a shrine with a friend when I first came to Japan, well after dark. If I was alone I would have been petrified - I wouldn’t have gone - but with him by my side I felt almost giddy with excitement. When he got scared, I would want to push on deeper. Why is this?
I even hosted a party at Seven Woodgarth once, when I was around 18. There were maybe 10 people there, all close friends, and the only time I ever felt even a little bit scared was when I had to go and check up on the one who was vomiting, alone, in the third floor bathroom. Traversing those rooms even as an adult made me want to cry, until I found another person to accompany me. I suppose it comes from a fear of being helpless, of being at the mercy of the unknown.
Luckily, I feel none of this fear in my current accommodation. I am very comfortable in my room here. Even after the phone call with my dad, at 4am on New Year’s Day I still managed to fall asleep without pulling the covers up over my head. Here, the atmosphere is normal.
Touch wood.
If you have any ghost stories or comments on the phenomena described above, then please let me know. I want to get to the bottom of this. Substack can often feel like a hell scape so I try not to engage with the social aspect of it too much, but I love it nonetheless for being a place where I can publish a piece as badly and hurriedly written as this without worrying about how people will receive it. There is not gravity to what I publish here, like a public diary of sorts.
And, of course, happy New Year.