If you’ve ever been to my house you’ve probably been regaled with the story of Mr. Ackroyd.
Mr Ackroyd and his wife lived at Kirkfield before we moved there in 1983.
Mr Ackroyd passed away sometime around 1980, we think, apparently he had a heart attack in the front garden of the property. And ever since we have lived there he has been the resident ghost…
We don’t know much about the house previous to the Ackroyds living there, other than it was built in 1910 as a Doctors surgery and we assume Mr Ackroyd and his wife lived there from the 50’s – 60’s until he died.
We did have a diary of sorts that belonged to him, it was a huge black book, similar to a registry book and he had written descriptive sentences inside for loads of different words. Kind of like a dictionary. My Dad thinks he used it as a reference book for writing poetry.
I guess we’ll never know. Plus we have no idea where the book is, it seems to have vanished…
I’m not sure why it has taken us so long to do some paranormal investigation in to my Dad’s house. It’s always been somewhere with lots of activity and many people have admitted to me that the house always gave them the creeps.
I’ve never felt scared as such in that house. It’s my childhood home and I adore it. I know there is nothing there that wants to harm me but I’ve definitely always felt a presence there and you certainly get the feeling that you’re being watched.
I thought I would include some general photos of the house and the rooms in which we investigated. It’s not a scary looking house, it’s not macabre or eerie and unfortunately my photos have not unearthed any freaky looking faces or ghostly apparitions, at least not that I can see. Please do let me know if you spot anything!
There are so many stories about this house that to this day I have no explanation for. The spirits, ghosts, whatever you want to refer to them as, are definitely mischievous ones. Well at least one of them is.
Things have gone missing, never to be seen again, objects moved without explanation, footsteps across the rooms above, talking, whispering, people’s names been called when there is nobody else in the house. I could go on.
My favourite story is that of our family dog, Sheba, a gorgeous German Shepherd. We’d had Sheba since I was a baby, she was my protector and we all adored her. Sadly she passed away when I was 8 or 9. We weren’t going to get another dog but of course you don’t always stick with that decision. Anyway fast forward a few months and we welcomed Maddy in to the home, another German Shepherd.
It was a Saturday afternoon, my Dad was sitting on the sofa in the living room looking out of the window when he was joined by Maddy, she sat alongside him and he said hello to her as you do. He then heard my Mum in the utility room telling Maddy to get out of the cats food bowls… He turned to Maddy and said ‘Your Mum’s going mad, she’s talking to a cat thinking it’s you’. At this point he got up and wandered in to the utility room only to greeted by the actual real Maddy in there with my Mum. It was at this point he realised he’d been talking to the ghost of our beloved Sheba.
The hallway and stairs has always been a hive of activity. As I previously mentioned, the house was a doctor’s surgery and the hallway would have been the reception area for the patients with the living room being the waiting room. You can often hear murmurs of conversation, as though there is a room full of people and it’s impossible to focus on what’s being said by anyone. As well as the talking it would seem that someone has taken a dislike to where things are placed.
My Dad and step-Mum were watching television in the living room one evening when they heard a loud bang on the staircase, at this point there was no carpet on the stairs as they were having some work done on the house. Also on the stairs were some long pieces of heavy wood, pushed against the wall, going length ways up the staircase. My Dad automatically assumed it was a cat and went to see what the bloody hell was going on. he investigated, no cat, no nothing. (I feel I should point out that is many years later and there are no dogs residing here anymore) He went through to check with my Nana (the house has an extension, where my Nana lived) and to see if the cat was there, he was fast asleep in front of the fire. My Dad returned to the living room still none the wiser.
Ten minutes later they heard the bang again. Off he goes to investigate, only this time he finds that the big heavy pieces of timber have been pushed across the stairs and some pieces of coral from a vase on a shelf further up the staircase have been neatly placed on and around the wood. The vase had not moved, it was not tipped over and nothing else had moved from the shelf. I’m sure someone had an explanation for doing this, maybe they just don’t like coral or they just wanted to say hello. Either way it is weird and it also coincided with the week of my Dad removing the old fireplace from the dining room. I think he might have p***ed someone off…and they were just letting him know that they’re still there.
There’s lots of these little stories kicking about, such as the light bulb that removed itself from a lamp, the corkscrew that went missing within the space of 10 seconds, a glow worm toy that fell down the side of my bed and mysteriously vanished almost immediately, unexplained bumps, thuds, banging. Hearing people talking in other rooms when there’s nobody else in the house, hearing footsteps across the floorboards, the smell of cigar smoke even though nobody in the house has ever smoked cigars in there since we moved in. The list goes on.
As we feel we have been visited by spirits of some description we thought it was about time we did some further investigation. I am adding the full footage from the evening, please be aware that we are doing this for our own curiosity, we won’t ever be faking things for entertainment. Unfortunately the extent of the activity we witnessed was things that can’t be caught on tape, such as sudden feelings of cold, someone tickling your face and of course I will never forget the sensation of a child whom I can’t see, sitting on my foot for at least ten minutes. It was pretty amazing and I do feel quite honoured that this child chose my foot to sit on and I do hope that in some way I made him feel better. Here’s our images and video footage of the evening, if you’re expecting “Paranormal Activity” or “The Exorcist” then you’ll be severely disappointed but what you do get is some amateur paranormal investigators enjoying communicating with some friendly ghosts. Enjoy!
These are the images taken throughout the evening. If you see anything that we’ve missed please let me know.
I don’t know why it has taken us 39 years to finally do some sort of investigation but it has certainly been interesting. Okay so we didn’t manage to capture unequivocal proof that there are ghosts residing here, what we did do, hopefully, is open up a way to communicate with whoever may be here and next time they might be a little less afraid of us and we can show you guys some more awesome things.
Thank you ever so much 🙂
Made A Hames Out Of It 