Hi, my name is Sean and this is what happened while my team and I were working at an abandoned house.
Not so long ago, two property developers, Alfie and Katie Young, contacted me to carry out some construction work on a vacant house they hoped to revamp and turn into a bed and breakfast.
The isolated property is called Barnaby Hall and is in a remote village. It is surrounded by tall trees and a road that is rarely used. It was once owned by Dr Jack Martin, who occupied it with his wife, Debra, and their two daughters, Ella and Eliza.
I did some research and I found out that Debra was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after she tried to stab her husband. She was subsequently diagnosed with GAD (generalised anxiety disorder). This affected the entire family, particularly Jack and Eliza. After Debra committed suicide, Jack turned to alcohol, as he found it hard to cope and Eliza was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and rarely spoke to anyone.
According to Katie: One night, Jack passed out drunk and left the kitchen stove on. This inevitably caused a fire that spread around the house. Nobody truly knows what happened next or who alerted the fire department. However, Ella McKellen (the sole owner of the property before selling it to Alfie and Katie, and the only living relative of her family) told Katie that when she came home on the night of the fire, she called out to her father and sister, but they did not respond. Subsequently, she overheard one of the firefighters telling someone that two bodies had been found in the living room.
Upon arriving at the house, it felt as if someone was watching me and my team, but there was no one around.
The interior of the house was expectedly marked by the fire. My teammates are called Abi, Chris and Ollie. While they set up in the kitchen, I had a look around. In the living room was a burnt photo frame perched on the fireplace. Inside was the picture of a miserable young girl with shoulder-length black hair. A crow suddenly appeared outside the window and made me jump. It peered into the room as if it was waiting to see someone.
As I approached the door, the crow began to peck at the window. No matter which room my team or I went in, we could hear that crow pecking every few minutes. I went into the kitchen and explained that something did not feel right, but my teammates did not react and Ollie called me a “scaredy-cat”. However, he later vanished without a trace, and although we searched for him, he was nowhere to be found. Chris later claimed that while working in one of the bedrooms, the door slammed shut and he could not open it, as it seemed to be locked. He said that while standing near the door, he saw smoke coming underneath and a girl appeared out of nowhere. From his description, it sounded like the same girl in the picture I saw earlier. He said that she had a red ribbon in her hair and was clutching at a teddy bear. She fiercely ran towards him and vanished while he had his eyes closed. Initially, I believed he was merely making up stories in an attempt to scare me, but later I saw the same girl in the cracked bathroom mirror. As I turned to face her, I only saw the bathtub, yet she continued to appear in the mirror for a few seconds longer. I asked Abi whether she had experienced anything and she said that she saw white smoke flowing in the hallway and heard someone crying out.
When Katie and Alfie visited the house, I told them that Ollie had gone missing, a bird was pecking on the window, and the things my team and I had experienced. They said that Ollie had merely abandoned his position, which my team and I refused to believe, and that we were letting our imaginations run wild. I told them that if we experienced anything else, we would walk. However, they did not take that lightly and warned us they would ruin our good name.
One afternoon, while Abi and I were working in one of the rooms, we felt the house shake and heard an enormous bang. When we asked Chris if he had caused it, he claimed not to know what we were talking about and said that he neither felt nor heard anything. This convinced me that the house was not safe to work in and I told them both that I was leaving. Abi also agreed to leave, but Chris said we should stay and continue working until the job was complete. I tried to persuade him to quit, but he would not. Therefore, I packed up the tools, put them in the van, rang Katie and told her that Abi and I were leaving, which she did not react well to, and threatened to ruin us again. I then drove away from the house and I did not return. I later found out that a similar thing happened to a team of investigators not long after the fire.
Abi and I continue to work together, but I do not know what became of Chris or Ollie.