An Ickenham Haunting: The House on Woodstock Drive

We lived at my grandfather's house over the summer of 1985, a hot summer full of isolation, computer games and comics. In early September we moved to Northwood, where the air base my Dad was posted to was located. We were only there for a month or so (they were demolishing the house) and in October (the 8th if I remember correctly - I don't know why I would remember though) we moved to 33 Woodstock Drive in the leafy London suburbia of Ickenham.
It was another air force owned house, fairly large, as it had four bedrooms, and a not inconsiderable garden. I was pleased with my room, at the front of the house, the largest room I had had for a while.
We settled in, started school (Forres Academy was paradise compared to Abbotsfield Comprehensive), made friends, found new interests, most notably music with myself, noisy thrash metal and the then burgeoning hardcore punk crossover scene. My adolescence, those hallowed teenage years had began in earnest.
My interest in the paranormnal had not subsided though. I think by this time I knew that my fascination with ghost stories would be with me for life. I even roped in a new friend to go ghost hunting with me over Ickenham Marsh one October day, so some things never changed.
I can't remember when I first realised that there was something, well, wrong, with Woodstock Drive, or our house there anyway. Perhaps I was so used to the fantasy world that I had created in childhood, that, at first, I didn't really notice very much out of the ordinary. It is hard to remember how Woodstock's Drive narrative started. possibly because it seemed to increase in intensity over the years. I certainly remember the first year or so there. Objects vanishing and appearing where I hadn't put them. A comb I had put on the windowsill then dissappearing only to turn up days later by the door. Of course, it was probably me, those ramshackle and forgetful teenage years. As for the noises in the attic? Well, even I put them down to the house settling. A very noisy house settling though. Sounded like someone was flinging boxes around up there. My sister used to complain of hearing sounds in the walls. My parents said they were probably spiders, which, rather than reassuring my sister, led her into a new domestic arachnophobia. The footsteps we heard upstairs at night, when all the family were in the living room, had to be next door of course.
Gradually though, I became aware of a certain presence the house seemed to have. It always seemed full of gloomy shadows, and far too large. All that weight of emptiness. Sometimes I would become irrationally afraid of my room. I would hate being upstairs on my own. I didn't like being in the house on my own even during the day. One week, when I was off ill from school, I kept hearing noises - bangs, the sounds of things being thrown.
Of course, all of this is subjective, as most ghost stories are. Scientists are, if in any way interested at all, eager to disprove hauntings, and parapsychologists are obsessed with evidence; electromagnetic fluctuations, temperature drops, cold spots, but no one seems that interested in the subjective viewpoint in haunted locales. This is what fascinates me the most, that part of a ghost story that is universal in human experience, cutting across time, culture, histories, wars...
Both my sister and myself frequently experienced a curious phenomena, that of being alone in a room with our backs to the door, then 'feeling' someone walk in. I would think it was a family member, and turn around, only to find there was no-one there.
There were things that were less subjective though. Our dog barking up the stairs at the same time every day (about 11 in the morning) for no discernable reason. One time, going through that teenage phase of eating my dinner in my room, I heard somebody run across the landing from outside my door, clatter noisily down the stairs, open the front door and run up the garden path. I looked out of my window. No-one there. I shrugged and continued eating my dinner. My Mum opened my door. She seemed shocked that I was there. The rest of the family, eating their dinner in the living room, had heard the same as me. It was never explained. My mum is still convinced it was me to this day.
Of course, there were other things to occupy my time as well as these mysterious events; puberty, girls, bullying at school, music, GCSEs, A-Levels, and the strangeness of the house tended to fade a little into the background.
When I was 18, there was a night I shall never forget as long as I live. It was April of 1990, and my family were away. I had three friends over this night, who, because I am still in contact with two of them, I shall refer to as A, B and C. It started when we were in the living room that evening. For some reason, we were all engaged in quite a heated debate about war and conscription. I began to shiver uncontrollably. I remember my teeth chattering, as if I was back in the freezing winters of Kinloss. A. noticed this, asked me what was wrong. I told him I didn't know. I kept getting a strange image in my head, of the garden, and in the garden, a figure. I have a very vague image of this figure, of a cloak wrapped around an emaciated body. Approaching the house. 'It feels like somethings coming' I said. I was expecting ridicule, but A. said that the other night, he had a feeling of overwhelming evil coming from the hallway, (he had stayed over on and off during the week). I had been asleep, and he had felt the urge to protect himself, with a cross I think. (A. was, and still is, a Christian, and ended up becoming a priest).
Obviously we began to talk excitedly about what was occurring. It started off as something quite fun, but the mood quickly darkened. This was helped along by the electricity failing for a few seconds, then coming on again. Plunged suddenly into darkness, we were dizzied and lost. Was something actually happening? This continued through the night.
Uneasiness turned to terror, and we began to feel imprisoned in the living room. A. suggested that we bless the house. We improvised with some tap water, and under A's direction, blessed the water, and moved into the rest of the house (for the record, I am no Christian, though might have considered myself one back then. A perfectly valid spiritual choice, but one that is certainly not for me).
Anyway, we moved through each room, flicking 'holy water' as we went. A. said a few quick prayers in each room. Downstairs wasn't too bad, though I remember the dining room feeling cold and desolate. A deep spiritual vacuum, an unfriendly emptiness, seemingly watchful.
We moved upstairs. A's idea of blessing the house no doubt increased our hysteria. It probably would have been better if we had turned the television on and watched a film. We were caught in it though, lulled into an hysteric compliance with our own imaginations. Almost hypnotic. Perhaps this explains why upstairs felt so dreadfully wrong, an experience which I can only liken to a low dosage tab of LSD, the feeling that things were about to tip off into something rreally strange (though how strange do you want though? - Four 18 year olds blessing a house they thought was under attack by a malevolent force!) We went through all the rooms - my bedroom was bad. I thought, for some reason, that because it was so untidy, that whatever was in the house with us would use the chaos there to make itself stronger. The spare room was awful too (images of a grey child, crumbling away in the bed) but this was nothing compared to the bathroom.
It seemed immense, as if it wasn't a small bathroom in a suburban semi-detached, but something vast and impersonal, a nightmare bathroom. When I think back to what we all felt in there, I find that even trying to put it into words nullifies it. Reading Danielewski's masterpiece 'House of Leaves', a ghost story (perhaps) of a house with an internally, impossibly shifting architecture, captures the feeling far better than I do.
We all fought down panic, and returned to the living room, where we all elected to stay for the night. The lights kept failing on us.
B. and C. fell asleep, leaving A. and myself awake until dawn, talking about school, girls, anything really. There was an odd crackling noise outside the living room window, the sound of static on an untuned television set. At some point, A said 'do you hear that?'. I said yes, and we continued talking.
Sleep was a long time coming that night.
The next day we swapped swapped thoughts. It was interesting to note the parallels; none of us could stand the thought of mirrors, and we had all, independently of each other, refused to look in any around the house. As we had all fell asleep, we all experienced unsettling images. I can't remember what A's was, but B. said he kept getting images of a 'dark man' and would say no more, C. said that he had images of a 'woman with evil eyes'. For myself, I kept seeing images of stereotyped demons, no doubt informed by my interest in horror films and Doctor Who.
Looking back on those events from a distance of 20 years is interesting. I am almost certain that this was some exercise in mass hysteria, and that if we had put the television on, the night would have been far less eventful than it was. We hypnotised ourselves with the use of ritual and ceremony, let our imaginations run riot, fed by our then anxieties; school ending, a difficult adolesence. Fertile ingredients for a feast of hysteria. A similar thing occurred with Derren Brown's seance on Channel 4 a few years ago, if I remember rightly. A shared hallucination, an infectious and fortunateky temporary psychosis perhaps. I think a similar thing happens with the use of Ouija boards - a device that Derren Brown used in his show.
The next night A. and B. stayed over. We watched the television, -nothing happened- We probably should have done this on the previous night. We were careful not to talk about anything even vaguely related to the supernatural though.
The day afterwards, A. had gone to work. It was early afternoon, one of those grey, fecund spring days. B. and myself were preparing to leave, to walk into the nearby town of Uxbridge. 'Look' said B. He showed me his hand. There seemed to be the imprints of two teeth marks in the skin between his thumb and forefinger. Probably scratches, but we still fairly tight with tension from the events of that week.
We hurriedly left the house, panic clawing at us, and all those seeming thousands of empty rooms and landings and bathrooms, with their layers and layers of silence, and deep brooding shadows, seeming to darken ever deeper.

Things calmed down after that. We left school and got on with our lives. C. moved away, and we gradually lost contact with A. (I have only renewed contact with them over the last year). B. and myself remained friends until I left the area in 1994, to head down to Southampton to study illustration when I was 22, and I gradually lost contact with him too.
I wonder where he is, and if he remembers that hysterical, fascinating night?

I find myself dreaming of that house more and more often recently. Sometimes it is haunted, and sometimes not. I find that I am to be living there again, or that I have found a key to go back in again. It is often early autumn, and, for some reason, always seems to be sunset. The streets are full of apple trees and bushes, and when I wake, I find these dreams oddly comforting.

I am almost done with Woodstock Drive now, the only place I have lived in to consider haunted. I have far too much of a sceptical nature to ever claim that any of what I have written above is anything other than my own extremely overactive imagination. I like that uncertainty though. Everything can be explained away. Electricity does fail, and people do get hysterical, and humanity is well known for believing in absurd things. The noises in the attic were probably the house settling, distorted by memory, the dogs were probably barking at a passing lorry, and the footsteps down the landing. Just one of those things.
But.
There was one other thing. It was a small thing, mundane really, almost boring. It is the only thing in my life that I cannot explain away. The one thing that means I can never, ever entirely give in to materialism.
It was a couple of years later. I think I must have been 20 or so. I was sat in my room on a chair, playing the guitar, It was evening, I remember this. I was quite happy playing my guitar. I happened to look up, and my eyes rested on a box of paints across the other side of the room. It lifted into the air, only a few inches, flipped itself over -a somersault- and landed back down again with a clatter.
I looked at this impossible movement, shrugged and thought 'that's interesting' and continued playing the guitar. My nonchalant reaction was probably the strangest thing of all.

Sometimes, when the world seems a mundane, bleak place, and behind every mystery, an explanation that takes away that mystery, I think of that impossibly flipping box of paints.
Sometimes, I find that's enough to remind me that the world is a far, far stranger place than we sometimes give it credence for.
And maybe not everything can be explained away.