0.5 Prologue - The Horrible Haunting of Primrose Lane

0.5 Prologue – The Horrible Haunting of Primrose Lane

Show Notes for Prologue Episode

The Ghosts of Primrose Lane, GLossop

In this first episode, we visit Scaredy Cat’s childhood home on Primrose Lane in Glossop, which seems to have been teeming with ghosts. Learn more about how the podcast came into being and our host’s obsession with the occult. Give it a listen!

Listen to the Primrose Lane Prologue EPisode

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Photos from the Temple Newsam Ghost Hunt

Full Gallery for Primrose Lane & Glossop

Longdendale Lights

In this POdcast, we mentioned...

Transcript - Prologue Episode 0.5: Primrose Lane, Glossop

Hello, my spooky bitches. And welcome to the prologue episode of the Scaredy Cat Skeptic podcast. I’m Emily Dewsnap, all round sceptic and full time wuss. And this episode I’ll be taking you on a journey of ghosts, ghouls and weird-ass wormy things. So strap in for that one.

I know that having a prologue episode to a podcast probably sounds a bit pretentious, but I just thought it would be a good idea to start the series with a bit of background information. Mostly, I’ll be visiting haunted places and trying to see if I spot anything spooky. But the haunted place I want to visit in this instance, even if it’s just metaphorically for the minute, is the house I grew up in, and new people live there now, so I can’t just rock up and demand to know if they’ve seen anything weird.

So this will be a slightly shorter episode, but will kind of explain where this fascination with the occult, a thing in which I do not believe, logically, I might add, has come from.

So going forward, the podcast will always start with a bit of history around whichever place we’re investigating or whatever activity I’m participating in. Since this episode is set in Glossop in the High Peak, I’m just going to touch on a few spooky points about Glossop and surrounding areas because oh, my word, are there stories of ghosts and monsters from that top tip of Derbyshire that make your toes curl. I don’t have time to do them all right now, or we would be here all day. There are that many.

A Brief Overview of Glossop

So Glossop is a smallish town in the northwest of England. It’s roughly 13 miles from Manchester and about 20 miles from Sheffield, and kind of on the thoroughfare between the two. It’s nestled in a valley at the end of a long, winding country road called the Snake Pass, which leads from Glossop to Ladybower Reservoir. Which is famous for being the location in which the Dam Busters trained. Ladybower has its own history, including a ghost town below the water. So I’ll be doing an episode on that at some point, too.
This is the problem with Glossop.

Despite being a relatively unknown place, it has tendrils that reach out to other fascinating locations, like Longndale, famous for the Longdendale lights and the remains of a crashed World War II plane, which is amazing, actually. I’ve walked up there a few times. You can actually go and take parts of the plane away, which seems crazy. It feels like it should be something that’s protected. So I don’t know if that’s something you can still do, but certainly ten years ago, you were still able to do that anyway.

The Ghost of a WWII Aeroplane

And then there are regular reports of an aeroplane crashing down when no such crash exists. Well. Not in this day and age anyway. The location of the reported plane crashes just so always happen to be in the same location as the WWII plane wreckage. And you’ve got to admit that is spooky. Even I find that weird and spooky. I don’t I don’t know what is going on there. Or the Longdondale lights, nobody really knows what they are either, but I’m going to do a whole episode on that as well.

There used to be a webcam that you could go on and you could watch these lights. You could physically go and see these lights. There’s loads of videos on YouTube. I’ll see if I can find some and post them into the show notes. These are worthy of episodes in their own right. So I’ll be going back and covering those and visiting those places and talking to people about their experiences in those places as well.

Glossop’s Claims to Fame

But for now, back to Glossop. Gossop’s claims to fame are the writer Hilary Mantel and the fabulous designer Vivienne Westwood. And a couple of rather spicy murderers that have come from places very nearby. You might have heard of the angel of Death, Harold Shipman. He was from Hyde and also a “lovely man”, according to my grandmother on the odd occasion he was her locum. Nice.

And you may also know of the child killing duo Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Those two were a heinous pair comparable to Fred and Rose West. So if you don’t know anything about them, it’s definitely worth checking them out. If you’re interested in murder. Ian and Myra buried their victims on Saddleworth Moor, a place with… it’s just this distinctly desolate feel to it.

You may also know Glossop, or the district known as Hadfield, rather, which is a small neighbouring town. And you might know that for the League of Gentlemen, it’s a weird little place with a weird little history, honestly.

Glossop sits between three ley lines the British Latitudinal, the Northwest and the Northern.

It could explain some of the spooky happenings. I’m not 100% sure what Ley lines are. I think that they connect several historic artefacts in the UK.

It’s also absolutely steeped in history. It’s got a Bronze Age burial site, there’s the remains of a Roman castle and several prehistoric ruins.

Glossop as a Mill Town

In the twelve hundreds, Glossop became a successful mill town because it was the ideal conditions for wool. It’s on the west side of the Pennines, which, if you don’t know, is incredibly damp. Manchester rains a lot.

And actually, the house I grew up in – that would have been a mill house. That’s what it would have been initially. That’s why it was built. It was part of a tiny terrace of houses that had been converted from their original state as mill houses. And actually, I didn’t realise this, but there was a mill right at the end of Primrose Lane, which is the lane I grew up on.

It must have been demolished years before my parents moved into that house in the 70s. They never mentioned it, and I found a photograph of it online. I was like that… that’s the mill. And this photograph, for some reason, it just sends chills right through me. I don’t know if it’s because it’s a view I know so well, but there’s just this huge building in the middle of this view that left no trace. I’m going to post this picture on the show notes. You can have a look at it.

Primrose Lane Hasn't Changed much

But honestly, other than the massive mill building, nothing much has changed on Primrose Lane. The same long, flat front steps that people would be out sweeping and cleaning at the weekend.

And it’s a wide road which is now suffering from double park cars and lorries that thunder past the breakneck speeds. And those lorries shake the foundations of the house every time they drive past, which could explain some of the spooky happenings from the house, except that we lived there so long that we got used to it. So the house would shake and I’d have friends over and they’d be like, oh, my God, what is that? And I’d be like, what is what? And I wouldn’t have even noticed, but the house would have shaken from side to side as the lorries were going past.

But, yeah, you can see the house I grew up in on this image. It doesn’t look like very much. It isn’t very much, it’s tiny. And I do wonder how the new owners are getting on. Poor suckers, and not just because of the distinctly spooky atmosphere of the place, but because a river runs through the back garden. And like I said, the Mancunian side of the Pennines is damp, which means that it is just the dampest place on the planet, that house.

The House On Primrose Lane is Not What it Seems

A river in the back garden and a spooky atmosphere just makes it sound very grand. But it really isn’t an impressive place and you can see that from the picture. It’s like a tiny two up, two down, and the walls are so damp that they bow outwards.

And I remember once drawing our kitchen for art class back in the day and I ended up having an argument with my art teacher because he said, “Walls don’t do that”. And I was like: “they do – ask my mum.” So we did ask her at Parents evening and she confirmed that they really did curve outwards in your face, Mr Parker!

So, yeah, so the outer wall that you can see on this photograph, it was bare stone on the inside because plaster wouldn’t stick to it. And when we did try to have it plastered, it just came off in clumps. It was dark and it was dingy and I was sick all the time. It sounds a bit dickensian. Right? Well, it kind of was in a way. The river would sometimes break its banks and flood this filthy water up to the back door and that was our main way in and out of the house. Without spooky happenings, it’s already quite creepy, so I don’t know if that just bled into everything that we did, this sort of damp, dark… house with power cuts as well. We had power cuts, so that probably didn’t help, you know.

The Walls at Primrose Lane Run Red

And then as a kid, I remember the walls running with water because it was damp and it was often red, like flipping Amityville horror. And I think it’s because of the rust on the pipes. I obviously don’t think that literal blood was running down the walls. It wasn’t that thick, it was thinner than that and a bit orangey. But, yeah, creepy. That was my mum’s explanation at the time. She was always like, no, it’s just the rust from the pipes coming off as the water’s running down. And I asked her about it when I saw her and she was a bit vague, but she said: “Oh, yeah, I remember that. That was weird. Probably nothing to worry about.” Which is worrying.

As well as feeling like a dingy house of horrors already, I also had several spooky experiences
in that house and I cannot to this day explain them. And so did my mum. My mum had some as well. But sadly, the recording I took of her telling me about a scary experience she had had in that house didn’t work. And by “didn’t work,” I mean I forgot to hit record. Ahem.

Scaredy Cat is Skeptical

Basically what I’m trying to do here in a very roundabout way, is explain why the podcast came about and why my stance on things is the way it is. And it’s not called the Scaredy Cat Skeptic for no reason. I am a militant sceptic in all respects. I don’t take anything at face value. If someone comes to me with news of any description, I need, like, three other news sources to claim that that same thing is true. But even like, when I see that story confirmed over and over, I’m still on the fence about everything until we all know more. Until we’re all like, absolutely sure that that is the thing that happened and that is the thing that is the truth.

So when someone says they’ve had a spooky experience, I do believe I believe that people have experiences all the time, and I believe that they have these experiences that they feel are supernatural or paranormal. And I don’t think rational explanation makes those experiences any less spooky. But I can’t just accept ghosts as the reason. I just can’t. I don’t believe that the soul is separate from the body. I think we’re just really sloppy computers with hormones. So how can I possibly believe in ghosts? And yet in the middle of the night, when I’ve been awoken by a noise, my brain is immediately like: “Shit, we’ve got a poltergeist!” Because that’s what any grown ass woman would think, isn’t it?

But Freely Admits to a Flaw in the Logic

But then there are things that I’ve seen with my own beady little eyes as well. Things I’ve heard and felt too. I can say trick of the light until I’m blue in the face, but some of these things just don’t seem to want to be shoehorned into that category. I’m not going to list everything here. I’ll talk about the experiences that I’ve had when

they become relevant on different podcasts. But I am going to talk about a couple of things that happened on Primrose Lane. And I’m going to tell you what my mum told me on the day I actually forgot to record.

Finally, ghost Stories. That’s why you’re here.

TIMESTAMP: 00:10:42

The Ghost on the Landing at Primrose Lane

Scaredy Cat is Scared

My first feeling that something was wrong in that house was when I was very young, so I probably would have been about six-ish. And I was quite a precocious child. I was quite grown up for my age and my mum used to say things to me like, “Oh, you were born 40” and stuff like that. I was quite a serious kid, not prone to making things up. But I was all always scared of ghosts as a kid and I’d follow my mum around holding onto her skirt. But not downstairs. I wasn’t scared of being downstairs, but upstairs terrified me.

Eventually, both parents sat me down and explained that if there were ghosts in the house, they, two fully grown adults, would be too scared to live there and that I needed to get a grip. They didn’t actually say that bit, but I grasped the gist of it. Even at that tender age. I knew what they were saying. But I was still scared. And it was the landing. I was convinced that there was a little girl looking at me while I slept, to the point where one summer I started building a little fort out of my duvet to hide myself from the eyes of this invisible ghost that watched me. And I know it was summer because the weather was scorching hot and I was boiling.

My mum came in one night and asked if I wanted to pull the covers down, but I refused because the little ghost girl could see me and she didn’t like me. She didn’t like me, like, not one bit. But I didn’t tell my mum that, I just kept doing it. I just kept pulling the covers up around me in a little fort.

Could the Little Girl at Primrose Lane Be the Ghost of a Mill Worker?

So the house in Primrose, like I said, it is tiny and it would have served as a home to three or four families before my parents moved in. And the room upstairs had been split into a double bedroom, a box room and a bathroom. But before then it was just one semicircle mezzanine around the staircase and where the bathroom was would have been where the kids slept.

The toilet and the coal shed were in outhouses outside the back door and they were still there when we lived there. The coal shed we used for the purpose for which it was intended, because we didn’t get central heating until the 90s and relied on an open fire and several dodgy oil heaters. But the outside toilet was used for my dad’s fishing tackle. And a fridge for his casters. Occasionally the electricity would go out. So we still had plenty of power cuts in the 80s. Thanks, Maggie. And suddenly there’d just be like big fat blue bottles everywhere.

I’ve actually done a floor plan of the house to give you an idea of where things were happening. And you can see it in the show notes. And I’ll put it on the socials as well.

Scaredy Cat’s Mum’s Tale - More From the Landing

So you’ve got to imagine that I’m my mum now, but I can’t really do her voice because she has a broader accent than I do, so it will sound much like me speaking. Apologies for cocking up on episode one.
This is my mum speaking now, by the way, through the medium of me. Spooky.

“Well, it was strange. I was at the bottom of the stairs putting my makeup on in the mirror, over the sideboard. And out of nowhere I heard little feet running along the landing upstairs. You would have been about ten, I think. And I thought, well, that’s strange. I thought Em was in the living room. And as I looked at the stairs, I saw a shape flicker across the top and go into the bathroom. Just like a flash of white, like steam or a cloud. And I thought: If Em’s not upstairs, I’m in shit here. So I called your name and from the living room you shouted: Yeah?
And I was really shaken up. And to this day, I don’t know what it was.”

And at this point (this is me speaking now). At this point, I said: “I remember it. I remember because you looked scared when I came to see what you wanted. You just look really shell shocked and you kept saying it was nothing.”

The Problem with Memories

And I do remember. There are some really vivid memories of that house that linger in the back of my mind, especially the ones where something bad happened, like just general stuff, not just spookiness, but they’re really vivid. And I appreciate that every time you remember something, you’re not really remembering the thing, but the last time you remembered that thing, which is why we’re all such unreliable narrators.

But to the best of my ability, I’ll always be careful to only give you the details you need to make up your own mind with no embellishments, no suggestive language and no fabrications. But, I mean… that’s creepy innit?

So we had a conversation about what it could have been that my mum had seen.

After that, I suggested death watch beetles because there was a time when my mum found this massive beetle on the landing. I remember her freaking out about it. And I believe a mating call for a death watch beetle involves… these creepy crawlies will tap their backs, so if they’re in the house, they’ll tap their backs against the floorboards, one after the other. And that can sound like the tapping of feet just because it’s rhythmic. But honestly, she seemed so unconvinced when I said that and then she did qualify it with: “Well, it was strange. But I don’t believe in ghosts, so it must have just been a trick of the light.”

But like a trick of the light with feet, though.

A Strange Corroboration at Primrose Lane

It feels strange that the two places I had experiences in that house were in the same two places associated with that spooky tale my mum was telling. So the landing story isn’t really a ghost story and I know that. It’s kind of the tale of a kid who’s scared of the unknown. And I don’t know what started the thought process behind the little girl on the landing. I never saw her. It was just a feeling. If I think hard enough, I can still remember the feeling of fear. And I did become less fearful as I got older, but I could never shake the feeling that she was still there watching me. Like right up until we left that house in the year 2000.

It probably didn’t help that I watched The Exorcist as a kid and and it scared the living shit out of me. Honestly, to this day I can’t watch it. And I love old horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives and the Omen. I love old horror films, but I can’t watch The Exorcist. I’ve seen the exorcist 2. Not the exorcist. The thought still gives me the heebie-jeebies. That and Watership Down, because that shit is scary as f***.

So it’s kind of understandable that a kid would be scared by an imaginary ghost. It kind of explains why I might have seen something on the landing. Although I do think I saw The Exorcist at around somewhere between eight and ten and this was before then. I don’t know why it came about at all.

The Thing in the Bathroom

TIMESTAMP: 00:17:04

But the bathroom is another tale altogether. So, from about the age of eight I would get up at the crack of dawn. And we’re talking like 5am, even in winter. And I didn’t have any reason to. I just like being up early. I always saw the morning as my time and not just getting ready for school time. So I basically did the miracle morning before it was a thing. Not saying Hal Elrod owes me money, but you know…

Anyway, on this particular morning, it was the middle of winter. Like January or February. I got up early. I got dressed. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. And my parents were either asleep or my mum was asleep. My dad was on nights. I can’t remember whether he was there or not. And it doesn’t really matter.

The Thing isn't in a Rush

Either way. I was the only one up and I knew I would be the only one up for a while and that was going to be on my own for a little bit.

So I went into the bathroom. I turned on the bathroom light and I went to the mirror. Just as I was about to brush my teeth, I saw a big white thing rise up behind me in the mirror. And every time I think about it, the hairs on the back of my arm stand on end. I saw this thing but I couldn’t see where it was coming from… out of the end of the bath or out of the toilet. I had a feeling it was out of the bath. I don’t really know. I couldn’t really see because I was too short to see the floor. I could only see, like, the top of this thing’s back, and it kind of curved up and arched and then began to leave the room.

And I remember watching it for what seemed like a really long time reflected in the mirror. I could only see, like, this small section of its back as it slunk off because I wasn’t tall enough to see anything else. And I was rooted to the spot, so I didn’t want to stand on my tiptoes and try to see more. And there was this slithery noise, like something rubbing along at the edge of an enamel bath. And I could see its skin, like, undulating. It was, like, very pale, like white with a slight grey pinkish tinge. And it had the texture of worm skin.

Finally the Apparition Leaves

And I remember thinking that if it knew that I’d seen it, I’d be in trouble and that something really bad was going to happen.

And it went on and just went on for ages and ages. And I was watching this thing, like, the back of this thing just leaving the room, and I didn’t know when it was going to end. But then eventually, it did leave and there was, like this final flick of the tail. And then there was this blast of cold air and I just didn’t move. And I didn’t turn around for a very long time. And I never told anyone because I was scared of what would happen if I did. Because I knew that if the thing knew I’d seen it, I’d be in trouble because I knew it was in the house and it would know.

But What Was the Thing in the Bathroom at Primrose Lane?

Here’s the thing, though. I wasn’t asleep, so I wasn’t dreaming. I was awake. I was getting ready for school. And after that, I didn’t go back to bed or anything that could write it over the night terror. I just brushed my teeth, gathered my thoughts, brushed my teeth, went downstairs and finished getting ready for school. But the memory of it, the thing in the bathroom, has continued to stump me my entire life. I’ve had a slight fear of bathrooms ever since. And like I said, I’m nearly 40 and still always a little bit spooked by bathrooms.

Although the situation was probably not helped by a particularly spooky episode around the twist and all you elder millennials from the UK will know what I’m talking about.

And then I once got really excited when I came across a book by one of my favourite authors, Bram Stoker. I’ve always had an interest in the macabre, so I was fascinated by vampires long before it was fashionable, long before Twilight or anything like that. And, yeah, if my mom ever said, “Draw me a picture,” I’d just draw a graveyard, so she’d then have to take the picture of the new picture of the graveyard that I’d given her and put it with the rest of the graveyards on the wall. So I was always very spooky like that.

My Love of Bram Stoker Is Eternal

But I finally read Dracula when I was about ten and I read it every year, every Halloween for about five years. So I’ve read it a few times, seen the films over and over. Absolutely love Bram Stoker.

I think his writings are just really sumptuous and Gothic. But then I found this book called The Lair of the Great White Worm, and I thought, that’s what it was. That’s what it was! And quickly, I was very disappointed, because the book wasn’t about a big white worm, it was about the oversexualisation of popular culture. So not a mythical giant white worm.

The only thing that I can see that’s similar in any of the reports anywhere is the lambton worm. But, like, Glossop is a long way from Tyne and Wear, and I just don’t… I just don’t know. I don’t think it’s that.

So I told my mom for the very first time when I saw her, the failed recording day. And then I explained why I never told her and she was a bit taken aback. It’s a weird story. And after more discussion, we agreed that we definitely didn’t believe in ghosts, but that it was quite strange, which seems to be the story of my life, really.

Voices from Beyond the Grave

TIMESTAMP: 00:22:02

And then my last story from Primrose Lane is a short one, you’ll be pleased to know, but both my parents worked when I was a kid. My dad was on continental shifts, which is why I didn’t know whether he was in or not when the worm thing happened. But, yeah, because they worked so much and such strange hours, my grandma and granddad brought me up and they’d often have a friend over for tea. And that’s dinner to anyone who lives below Sheffield in the UK or anyone overseas, because we have breakfast, dinner and tea, not breakfast, lunch and dinner in the north of England.

But anyway, they’d sometimes have this friend over. I think he was my granddad’s cousin and his name was Joe. And I absolutely adored him, you know, in that way that young people latch on to old people. So when Joe died, I was about ten, and I was really upset. It was one day, shortly after Joe’s death, and I was in the living room at Primrose Lane and I was just sitting mulling things over. Life and death. The kind of thing a budding young Goth will think about. And feeling sad. I remember feeling very, very sad.

And then I heard someone… I heard a man say my name. And it was slow and it was drawn out. And I just sat there frozen to the spot while it went on. And it went on like the worm for a long time. It was like Eeemmmmmiiiiillllllyyyyyy. It was longer than that. I ran out of breath. Was not prepared for that. So there was a strange stillness in the air and a heat that I found really oddly disconcerting.

Warm Breath and a Heavy Whisper

Like breath on skin when somebody whispers into your ear. Maybe it’s just my brain overheating, thinking about it. Maybe that’s what all of these things boil down to. Anyway, more than the warmth of these experiences, I get this gust of cold air when they’re over. Every single time one of these things has happened, it’s this hot and cold feeling. So when this voice had stopped saying my name and the the air had turned cold, so I knew it was over, I remember staying put for a moment and then just springing into action and running outside screaming for my dad. And he was in the shed.

I remember it vividly and he was pretty scathing about it. He’s not a religious man, although he was brought up Catholic. I just remember him being really dismissive and feeling scared and dismissed, even if it was like a figment of my imagination. And knew that I’d heard something and it scared me so much, I’d gone running outside. and it’s not like I mean… I know I followed my mum around for about a year, but once they told me to stop, I stopped. And I was on my own a lot. I’m an only child, so it’s not like I was constantly being scared by nothing. So something had triggered me. And then when you think about it, even if it was a figment of my imagination, that’s weird timing, isn’t it? Right after Joe had died.

We'd Love to Know if the Current Residents at Primrose Lane Have Seen Anything

So, yeah, I did try ringing Primrose Lane, but it just didn’t go through. So they probably don’t have a landline anymore. I mean, who does in 2023?

I am very cautious about going over to strangers and going, have you seen the ghost? Because I don’t want them to think that I’m nuts, but I also don’t want to scare them if they do believe in that sort of stuff. That’s a personal thing to ask. Did you know your own house is haunted?

I don’t know how my dad feels about ghosts. Like I said, he was brought up Catholic, but he’s about as militant an atheist as I am. And really, the two things go hand in hand, don’t they? If you believe in spirits, in a spirit realm, you have to have a religion, right? Even if it doesn’t fit into any of the organised religions. Belief in a spirit is, by its own definition, a religion.

Scaredy Cat skeptic Take

So what do you guys reckon? I think some things to note that both of the things I saw or heard were long and drawn out, so not a flash in the corner of my eye. It wasn’t like a momentary trick of the light. I was very much awake while both these things were happening. I’ve never had psychosis and I’m not schizophrenic. I am very creative, I always have been and I do have ADHD, but I’ve never been given to making things up unless it’s for a piece of art or fiction writing. Those are things that are meant to be made up and I’m very honest about that: this is a piece of fiction. Writing. I’ve never really been particularly deceptive, and especially as a child, I was a really kind of precocious, serious kid.

As I’m sure you’re all aware by now, I am not a believer in the supernatural. So what could it have been? Weird brain burps? I’ve had more spooky things happen to me since then, so maybe my brain just occasionally gets confused, but I’d like an actual scientific explanation. So if anyone has one, let me know. On the other hand, I’d like to know if there is any spooky history around white worms that come out of the bath and whether clairaudience is a thing people believe in.

What Do the Paranormal People Think?

So I spoke to a friend of the podcast and paranormal consultant, Sammy McEwan, about this. She’s a believer in all things supernatural and she explained that in her belief, we are surrounded by energy and light all the time.

With the spirits of our ancestors and loved ones, as well as other beings that are drawn to our negative energy, all around. And I don’t want to put words into her mouth and I’m hoping that Sammy will be a regular guest on the podcast so she can explain herself much better.

But she seems to be of the belief that the worm was a manifestation of the unhappiness that would have no doubt been a part of the grim lives of the people who lived in that house.

When it was all on one mezzanine floor when they worked in the factory[sic]. She also said that some spirits are cheeky and move things around, so it could potentially have been one of those things fucking with me.

I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m not religious at all as I think of hammered home, but I do find those things hard to wrap my head around. In future episodes, I’ll be speaking to people about their experiences and asking what they think they’ve seen, but then I’ll be adding my thoughts onto the end. For this episode, though, it’s hard. These are things I’ve seen and I remember distinctly, so I can try to tell myself a logical explanation, but none of them quite fit what happened. Because I know what I saw and I know what I heard.

It’s Easy to Be Sceptical When It’s Happening to Someone Else

And then if someone else had told me these stories and I had distance from them, I’d say that the little girl on the landing was just a dark, imaginary friend of sorts, born of a hyperactive imagination, a history of night terrors, and a particularly dark and creepy little house. Because it was. I’m sure it’s been renovated, but it was a dark, creepy, damp little house. And I know that there’s a direct correlation between long, thin rooms and spooky experiences because our lizard brain feels trapped. It’s like a psychological phenomenon.

So by their very nature, the rooms at Primrose Lane were long and thin with steps in strange places, because it was a remnant of the mezzanine.

The girl on the landing is the least convincing of my experiences, honestly. But when you couple it with my mum’s story of feet on the landing and something flashing across the top of the stairs, it gives it a bit more credence. And there are now two people who don’t believe in ghosts with similar tales. There’s like almost… like a corroboration there. And then if someone else had told me the story of the big white worm, I would write it off as a night terror.

Night Terrors, Sleep Paralysis and EHS

I have always suffered from sleep issues. In fact, last night I woke up at 3 am. Because I watched too many horror films yesterday and couldn’t go back to sleep. When I do sleep, I have terrible nightmares and night terrors. I get sleep paralysis, false awakenings, exploding head syndrome… you name it, I get all of it. I’ve worked very hard to be able to lucid dream, but it doesn’t always work. However, I do have a track record of night terrors that is undeniable and that could have contributed in some way, even though I was awake. I know I was awake.

For anyone that doesn’t know, night terrors differ from nightmares in that they happen while you’re awake. So shortly after waking up, you see nightmarish things in the room with you. Often this is accompanied by sleep paralysis, which means you are powerless to do anything as these horrific things unfold in front of you. These often manifest to me as a bedroom door opening and knowing something horrible is on the other side, or small feet walking on the bed like a cat, but bigger.

And once when I slept on the sofa in my current place of residence, I saw a weird man shaped thing dressed entirely under white linen with a white linen mask with burnt out eyes and a drawn on red mouth. It was horrible. It looked like a joker. He had like a white linen jester type hat on and he was standing with his arms outstretched in the darkest part of the room and wobbling slowly towards me. It was terrifying.

The Incident at Primrose Lane was no Dream

However, due to working on the lucid dreaming, I’m usually aware that these aren’t real. Still really scary.

But deep down, I know that the light in the room is wrong. The feeling I have is not normal and that I just need to tell my body to wake up. And I’ve been able to do that for a long time because I’ve always had these sleep disorders. A horrible feeling lingers with me all day afterwards when I’ve had one of these night terrors or nightmares. But I’ve never tried to pass any of these experiences off as real occurrences. Like white linen man. Very creepy.

Revisiting the Worm in the Bathroom

The worm at Primrose Lane – if it was a night terror, it was a delayed reaction. I was already fully dressed in my school uniform when I saw it. Night terrors happen in those first moments after waking before your brain’s woken up, really. So I reject that as an explanation. I don’t think it was a night terror. Trick of the light, maybe, but a long one. Like I said, these aren’t flickers. I watched that thing slither off for a long time. It was huge. It wasn’t a flicker in the corner of my eye. I’ve never suffered from delusions or hallucinations or anything like that.

The Ghostly Voice in the Living Room

And then there was the voice, so it was clear as day. It was long and drawn out again. If it was someone else telling me the story, I would think that it was the trick of a grieving mind, and a very young one at that. It. But I can’t see it that way. I heard it again. It was too long and drawn out for it to just have been like a noise that I misunderstood or misheard as my name. If it had been winter, I could maybe have accepted that it was the wind whistling down the chimney, because it did make some strange spooky noises if the wind got up. But I remember it being a really warm and still day. It was an unusually warm and still day.

The thing is, it’s really easy to write off someone else’s experiences as fabrications or brain burps and see it from a scientific or psychological perspective. Except that when it’s your own experiences, it’s really hard to apply the same logic because there’s something inside that’s fighting it. I know that what I saw was so impactful that it stayed with me my whole life. Whatever it was.

What do You Think?

I’ve rambled on about me for long enough. Let me have it. Answers on a postcard. What do you think? All opinions are welcome. Just remember to be respectful of each other. We shall tolerate no dickishness. I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in with other people’s stories and some real life ghost hunting for future episodes.

So watch this space. If you have a story or a place you think we should visit, UK only for now, drop us a line. You can find us at scaredycatsceptic.co.uk.

And don’t forget that skeptic is spelt. S-K-E-P-T-I-C for the international bods.

We’re also on all the socials. Unfortunately, scaredycatskeptic was too long. So we’re at @scaredyskeptic on Twitter.

We are @scaredycatskeptic everywhere else. Insta, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube. We’re even on flipping LinkedIn. Don’t forget to like and subscribe and all that good stuff. And I look forward to sharing more spooky tales with you all.

Happy, hauntings!

Addendum

Hello, it’s me again. Speaking to you from some time in the not too distant future. This is the correction police here. I have a few things that I need to correct from this episode. You might have already picked up on them.

Firstly, I talked about Manchester being damp and that being great conditions for wool and that’s not the case. The mills were primarily cotton mills in Manchester and Glossop, not wool mills as I stated. I get this the wrong way around a lot, because I live in Yorkshire now and it was all woollen mills over here. We even used to have sheep grazing on the rooves of buildings. Check it out – it’s true. It’s fascinating. So, apologies for that error.

It was a mere slip of the tongue.

Bram Stoker and Some Surprising Synergies

The other thing is, and this is more interesting, I think. The Lair of the Great White Worm – Bram Stoker’s book that I spoke about. So I bought that book from a crappy little bookshop in Manchester Arndale Centre in the late 90s. They sold strange publications of books at knockdown prices. So you could get classics for about 20p, but the pages were all uneven and roughly cut and the bindings were a bit bizarre. When I started reading it, this book that I’d bought – The Lair of the Great White Worm, way back when, it appeared to be a collection of essays on the oversexualisation of popular culture. And I was really disappointed, because I was hoping it was going to be something that would make sense of the worm that I’d seen in the bathroom.

But it wasn’t. And especially since I find Dracula to be an extremely sensual book and back in those days, we had to dig around in bushes for second hand porn mags – you couldn’t just go online and open an incognito tab. So we got creative and books were a big part of that. Don’t even get me started on Tipping the Velvet! So reading that Bram Stoker was actually a bit of a prude was both surprising and a bit disappointing. Dracula being one of my favourite novels of all time. And not just because it’s a bit sexy.

The Wrong Jacket

But the book cover of the book I bought clearly said The Lair of the Great White Worm by Bram Stoker, but I’m assuming that this particular book was being sold off cheap, because whatever it was had been bound with the wrong cover. Not because that was the actual book. I no longer have the book – it was lost in a house move many moons ago.

However, I’m adding this note because I decided that I’d download The Lair of the Great White Worm by Bram Stoker to my kindle and give it another read. Because when I read it the last time, you know, I would have been a teenager. But on downloading it, I realised that the book was not a collection of essays like I’d owned previously, but a novel about The Lambton Worm, which I mentioned in the episode. And the synchronicity of it made me stop in my tracks. But then I reminded myself that I’m the sceptic and that you can’t read too much into a bad binding from 30 years ago.

So then I did some digging online. And some more synchronicities came to my attention. The Lair of the Great White Worm is often touted as one of the worst novels in history. I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t comment. But I am going to read it. But what I did notice is the titles of some of Bram Stoker’s other novels. And, I’m not going to lie, I immediately texted my Mum going: “This is so weird.”

Works of Bram Stoker that I Haven't Read

Bram Stoker wrote a book called The Primrose Path. The road I grew up on was Primrose Lane. He also wrote a book called The Snake’s Pass. Glossop sits at the end of the Snake Pass and I’ve had an obsession with that road since I was a child. It’s actually not far from the house I grew up in and it’s this weird, strange, winding road with a very odd, mystical feel to it.

And, of course, he wrote Dracula, which is my second favourite novel of all time. And as I’m writing the notes for this right now, the theme from the 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula has just come on my headphones – it’s playing “The Beginning.”

So Dracula was born after Stoker visited Whitby in Yorkshire, not far from where I live now. He saw Whitby Abbey, a favourite among goths, myself included, and was spellbound by its stunning gothic appearance. And that is the abbey that Dracula comes to stay in after he reaches the shore in the Demeter.

There’s another strange synchronicity as well. Nothing to do with Bram Stoker, but I googled Harold Shipman, because I also mentioned in the podcast. He was an angel of death from one of the surrounding areas to Glossop, like I said. His wife was called Primrose.

While all of this is most probably coincidence, it did give me pause as things seemed to click, one after another, into a strange pattern.

A Future Episode

But the reason I’m saying all this, is because friend of the podcast, Sammi McEwan, has agreed to record an episode about synchronicities with me.

She’s got some amazing insights into Angel Numbers and patterns. Stuff I’ve never even heard of. So keep your eyes peeled for that coming out in the next few months.

That’s it really. That’s it for apologies this time.

Do feel free to let me know if I get facts wrong. I’m a human being, I will no doubt make errors along the way. I’m also a bellend, so I’m occasionally going to say something really daft.

And please bear with us. I’m aware that this particular episode was a bit bitty. The rest pf the episodes have more structure. And we are learning. We’re on a steep learning curve as to how to make the sound quality better and we’re getting to know what you want us to offer you as listeners, so please just bear with us and drop us a line if you have any ideas, and yeah… thanks very much for listening.

See you next time!

Your Thoughts

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