18. jandalofdoom

So, this is how my grandmother tells the story.

It was 1933 and she was thirteen, living in the middle of Manchester, England. One night she got out of bed to go to the bathroom, and as she wandered through past the staircase, she saw her aunty standing at the top looking out the window.

Curious she trotted upstairs and stood next to see what she was looking at, but only saw the back garden and the alleyway out the back. She turned to ask her aunty what she was looking at only to see a nebulous, faceless figure staring back down at her. The figure then reached out her hands and gripped my young grandmother’s face. The next thing my grandmother remembers is her older brother (about 27) running down the hall towards them, picking her up and carrying her into the nearest room.

She then spent the next week in and out of consciousness, eventually recovering, but now without a sense of smell.

Her family insist it was all a hallucination caused by a severe case of influenza, which is probably true, but my grandmother said she never felt safe in that house ever again. She moved to New Zealand about 10 years later and only ever returned to England, and that house, once before she died.