The following is provided for your consideration. Everything you are about to read is taken first hand from unedited transcriptions of actual interviews. Names have been redacted or omitted out of respect and for the protection of persons involved.
Case 2: Tiffany -United Kingdom, 1967
Where shall I begin?
At the very first instance you can remember.
I suppose that would be when we first moved into the house. The year was 1966. I was perhaps eight or nine years old. My brother was about eleven or twelve if I remember correctly. It was a Victorian manor house in the English countryside just outside of Leeds.
I should say before we go further into this story that I have very little actual recollection of this period. It is something that has occupied and haunted all of my adult life. I’m almost fifty now and all I’ve been able to piece together is fragments of memories and what my family has been able to tell me. My brother remembered slightly better than I, but he claimed to have blocked most of it out. I can’t say that I blame him. If what I’ve been able to learn about what happened to us is true, I may have blocked it out as well. The mind of an eight year old little girl is a confused bundle of knots as it is. I can’t imagine a child having to cope with what I’m about to tell you.
I remember the circumstances of our moving in to that place better than I do the house itself. Perhaps because of the unusual nature of the agreement my parents made with the owner of the house. He had acquired it at auction for a reasonable sum. The owner aimed to add a few rooms and sell it as a hotel. But as it happened, he would tell my parents, the project didn’t pan out the way he’d wanted and so was looking to wash his hands of the entire enterprise.
He was willing to sell the house at a ridiculously low cost as long as my parents promised to uphold a single condition: that the portrait of Tiffany be left hanging in one of the upstairs bedrooms. The room that would become my bedroom. My parents of course acknowledged that this was a bizarre request, but the offer was far too good to pass up. The portrait was of a little girl around my age at the time. It was taken some time around the turn of the century, my parents guessed. She had black hair and these beady black eyes that I can still see now as if it were right in front of me. Like a crow’s eyes.
I can’t remember much about that time as I’ve said, but whenever I think of that portrait hanging in my old bedroom to this day I get this impending sense of dread. As if something bad is about to happen. It gives me the chills just thinking of it now. After all these years, the name Tiffany still makes me uncomfortable.
For a while, according to my mother, everything in the house was normal. Kind neighbors, good neighborhood. Quiet, for the most part. Then, out of nowhere, about six months after we moved in, it began.
My mother first encountered Tiffany one afternoon while she was alone in the house. While in the kitchen which faced the stairs, she kept hearing what sounded like footsteps coming from children’s shoes running along the hallway above her. Of course, there was no one else at home. My mother is an incredibly strong willed woman. Not one to complain about anything, even the slightest problem. At first she was able to ignore it, but eventually the tension in the house became too much and she took on a job during the day. She would claim it was because of the boredom, but you could see the truth on her face. She was terrified, truly terrified. I couldn’t see it at the time, but thinking back, I know that look she would carry on her face when something unexplained would happen. I know it, because I’ve seen it many times on the features I would inherit from her. This went on for weeks, she told me, until someone else experienced something too. It could have been happening before this, but I have no source for that.
It was my brother. He claims to have seen a shadow in his room one night. At first while he lay in the darkness, he thought he was looking at me. He soon found that it was not. Whoever it had been just stood there watching him for a time until my brother worked up the courage to call out my name. He said the figure would at first just stare at him, a black figure against the greater blackness of his room. He said it would remain until he reached out to touch it. Then the figure would dissolve back into the dark, like a figment of an overactive imagination. Other times he would just feel the eyes. Those beady, black eyes. Watching him from somewhere in the darkness of his bedroom.
My mother first heard of this from him when on the way to school my brother asked how I was able to get out of my wheelchair at night and walk about. I suppose I should have mentioned that I’m disabled before.
It’s alright. Go on.
Right. Eventually Tiffany’s visits at night could no longer be explained by children’s imagination running wild or nightmares. It happened when my brother told my father one night that he wanted the light left on because in the dark he could see me walking around outside of his window. Not believing him, my father switched off the light and went to the windowsill to investigate. What he saw there, I would have to drag out of him years later. Little shoe marks along the latticework that ran alongside the house. The flowers in the planters had been trodden on by what looked like some hapless toddler. Mind you, my brother’s bedroom, and mine for that matter across the hall was on the second floor.
I was very matter of fact when my parents confronted me about what was happening at night. Apparently I told them with all the blissful exactness that comes from an eight year old with the correct answer to a puzzle. It was Tiffany. This had been the first time my parents had heard that name. When they asked who Tiffany was, I reportedly pointed to the portrait.
The previous owner had said nothing about the portrait in my bedroom besides that it should never be moved, taken down, or even covered up for any reason. There was no way I could have known that was the girl’s name, or that she had once lived in that house, but I did. It took some careful probing but eventually I explained that “Tiffany told me.”
I went on to add without hesitation or the slightest hint of embellishment that Tiffany was the girl who lived in the picture frame. Sometimes she would come out and play. But other times, Tiffany was angry. She would make noise and tell me scary things.
My mother, already on the edge from her own experiences in the house, could bear to hear no more when I asked about REDACTED. You understand, there was no way I could have known about my parents’ first born child. I even described him – a boy around my age with suspenders, a duck on his shirt, and a blue face.
REDACTED had died of asphyxiation in his sleep. A toy horse and string had wrapped itself around his throat in the night. It had nearly destroyed my mother and father, and hearing that brought up a lot of bad memories.
It was for that reason that my parents elected to take down the portrait and try to forget about the whole thing. My mother said that she hoped taking the thing away would make all of what was happening to us go away, too. She was gravely mistaken. But I don’t blame her. Given all that had happened, it certainly must have seemed like things couldn’t possibly get worse.
But they did.
It began almost immediately, practically a year to the day we moved in. At night, the sound of a woman crying her eyes out so loudly sometimes it would wake the neighbors. We would often have the police show up to investigate, and leave not knowing what to make of it. Some were visibly shaken. I remember that scared me terribly, seeing that; a police officer so obviously frightened and unable to help. Unable to protect us.
The best anyone could offer as an explanation were some kind of animals roosting in the attic. Animals who shrieked and cried out like a woman in labour. Sometimes so violently it was like someone being murdered.
I remember quite clearly one afternoon sitting on the top of the stairs in my chair, and all of a sudden I was falling, hitting steps on the way down, breaking bones, as if someone had pushed me. Our caregiver witnessed the whole thing and quit on the spot. I wish I could remember more clearly, but the only detail that I can recall with certainty was that it had been Tiffany. I’m not sure how I was so positive, but I was, and still am. That same old feeling had washed over me in that moment. That same old feeling of anxiety which would follow her wherever she went, like a cloud when she was near.
After my accident, things got even worse. It felt like the house was filled with multiple presences, even when one was home alone. My brother and I would wake up screaming and hysterical with nightmares on the nights that the sobbing didn’t keep us awake. We would find photographs in the house that had been years old suddenly changed, or including things that weren’t originally there.
For example, there was a family portrait taken shortly after I was born that hung in the main hall. One night my mother found all of our eyes had become shrunken and black, like the eyes of a bird.
Another was a photo of my brother and I at the shore that my father kept in his office. All of a sudden it included the black figure of a little girl standing between us wearing a dress that looked like it belonged in the 19th century, despite being waist-deep in the surf. My mother and father refused to confirm whether or not it was Tiffany, but I knew the truth. She was behind all of this. The evidence was as clear as that photograph.
The instance that stands out to me was the night my parents came home to find the babysitter, a local girl from down the lane, sitting with my brother and I on the front steps. When questioned, the sitter just said, “She said to get out.” And left without being paid. They found all the furniture in the house pushed up against the doors and windows. Impossibly heavy appliances like the refrigerator dragged clear across the house to block the side door, despite the babysitter being alone with us.
There were dozens of occurrences like that. The instance that finally caused my parents to put the house up for sale happened late in the winter of 1967. I had woken my parents screaming as I had many times before. Only this time, my mother said later, I looked as if I’d been awake for hours. And indeed, I had.
Apparently I told my mother that REDACTED was showing me the blue-face game, and that he was scary. The next morning they found a toy horse and string wrapped in my blankets.
We sold the house to a young couple from Wales in 1968. My mother and father replaced the portrait of Tiffany and screwed the door to the frame, choosing not to tell them about it. Warning them about Tiffany would only have resulted in curiosity, and of course they wouldn’t buy the house. My parents hoped to bury it forever in that room. I only hope for the sake of that couple and only God knows how many others, that they succeeded.
Did you ever see Tiffany again?
Well. There are times when I lay alone at night, and if I listen carefully enough, I can hear her whispering awful things to me. I get that old familiar feeling, as I have now, and I just know that Tiffany is there. She told me in 2000 when and where my parents were going to be killed in an auto wreck. She was the first to tell me in 2008 how my brother committed suicide. But, yes. Sometimes I can see her. The black figure juxtaposed against the greater blackness of the dark. The eyes, watching me. Like crow’s eyes.
I’m sorry, can we stop now?
[End of Recording]
Submitted September 18, 2016 at 07:36AM by TheTruthInstitute http://ift.tt/2cSDxSu nosleep
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