During my time in England (which I previously mentioned in my post entitled, ‘A Little Dotty’), I lived in a gigantic, three-storey house. This house was mostly inhabited by a large number of teenage girls during the school terms. However, over the holidays, the house was somewhat akin to a ghost town – and equally as creepy.

In fact, there were usually only three souls haunting about during this time – myself, my friend and a young lady from Romania who was also taking a gap year. Of course, during the school term, we had our own private quarters on the second floor of the house, but all bets were off in the holidays.

One night during our first official holiday in England, my friend, our Romanian friend and I were sitting watching a movie in our pyjamas in our private lounge. We were roughly halfway through the movie, when I thought I heard a noise out on the landing.

I turned to my two friends and said, “Did you hear something?”

We all cocked our heads to listen, but we couldn’t hear anything unusual so we turned our attention back to the TV.

However, the sound soon came back again and I said to my friends, “There it is again; listen!”

Sure enough there was some sort of distant sound, but by the time we’d hit the mute button on the remote the sound had stopped again. We listened for a moment longer, but then we shrugged it off and turned our attention back to the movie.

When the sound returned for the third time, we instantly hit the mute button and listened attentively. This time the sound continued without ceasing.

“Is that a vacuum cleaner?” our Romanian friend asked, at last.

We all looked at each other with the same, obvious, perplexed thought in our minds. The house was empty, right; except for the three of us? And, no one besides us had the code to get in the front door, so there definitely couldn’t be anyone else in the house. Not to mention that those ghost stories, which we’d been told, were just stories after all. Of course, there was no need to panic. We were mature women. If we were hearing strange sounds in an essentially spooky house, then naturally there had to be a logical explanation.

Still, we got up rather cautiously and opened our lounge door onto the landing next to the stairs with a fair degree of trepidation. You can only imagine what went through our minds when we found a vacuum cleaner sitting right outside our door running its little heart out. We all froze to the spot, as we gazed at the possessed vacuum cleaner, which had positioned itself in the middle of the floor under a single spotlight in an otherwise dark corridor. There was no one in sight; not a whisper, or a hint or even a breath of another soul – just the vacuum cleaner doing its nut.

We were officially freaked out, as we all glanced at each other with enlarged eyes and startled looks on our faces.

“What on earth?” I said, feeling ill at ease.

“Okay, this is creepy,” my friend responded.

“Do you think one of the cleaners left it out?” I asked, groping for logical answers as we looked around.

“It’s possible, I suppose, but that doesn’t explain why it’s on,” my friend replied, somewhat apprehensively.

We had barely begun to discuss this bizarre phenomenon, which had our nerves on edge, when our Romanian friend suddenly started screaming at the top of her lungs. A dark, shadowy being had unexpectedly leapt up at us from out of the darkness and she was the first to notice its glowing eyes before we all started screaming blue murder – because naturally she was screaming, so we were screaming and, within seconds, everyone was completely hysterical as two spectres lunged towards us.

And then, as these terrifying beings emerged from the darkness and their forms and faces were illuminated by the light, we realized that it was only two of our male colleagues. Phew! What a relief!

Of course, the guys thought their practical joke was extremely funny and clever. And, after our hearts had stopped pounding in our chests, we had to admit that it was a pretty ingenious stunt. Although, I’m pretty sure I won’t ever look at a vacuum cleaner in quite the same way again. After all, you never know what could be lurking inside!

© 2017 Audrey Whyte   All Rights Reserved