Margaret (name changed) had quite an open mind about the supernatural after seeing the ghost of an old lady when she was a child of 6. She happened to glance down stairs one day and saw the woman at the foot of the stairs looking up. She thinks it was the kindly old lady who was the former owner of the house. But her experiences with the paranormal haven't all been so straightforward. When she was working at the Nunthorpe Hall Old People's Home she had a terrifying incident. The building is ancient, dating back to the 1400s and has a chequered history involving black magic.
Margaret had been hearing reports of strange goings on since she began working there in 1992. Staff members claimed to have seen apparitions of an old woman and a nun, both of which promptly vanished. They claimed to have heard unexplainable noises, and this always seemed to occur every Tuesday night. One nurse claimed she heard a banging sound coming from inside a locked office that had no one inside. So intense was the pound the door seemed to be billowing out with the impact, or as she described it, 'The door looked like it was breathing.'
Margaret took it all with a pinch of salt until one Tuesday she witnessed an event first hand. She had gone to bed about midnight, retiring to her room which was situated at the back of the old gothic building. She was rudely awakened from her slumber when two other female members of staff burst into her room in uncontrollable panic. Her immediate thought was to scold the pair until she heard what they were hearing. 'It was like a thousand hammers banging on wood echoing throughout the entire building', says Margaret, 'It was unimaginably loud.' Seizing the phone next to her bed she tried to ring the Police thinking intruders had broken and were wrecking the place. The phone simply wouldn't work. The three scared women quickly decided to try the phone downstairs in Margaret's office. As they ran out into the hall they heard what sounded like an army running up the stairs but there was no one to be seen. Then came the sound of a horde of people scampering about in the attic above their heads, but there simply couldn't have been anyone up there because it was locked and out of bounds. There are old fashioned small rooms in the attic but they were never used. Then, as suddenly as it had started it stopped. All was silent again. Margaret finally got in touch with the Police and they came and checked the place for intruders. They found no signs of a break in, in fact one Officer quipped it must have been ghosts.
Soon after this Margaret left the old people's home and even today, the mere thought of returning turns her blood ice cold.
