A Belgian Haunting

In late summer 2014 we rented a large five storey 1920s town house on the northern coast of Belgium for a two week family holiday. Our party consisted of me, my wife and youngest daughter, with my eldest daughter, who is living in Antwerp at the moment, joining us when we got there. My in-laws, who live in France, came and stayed for a few days too. The house was very spacious and quiet with three flights of stairs running from the basement garage, via a utility room and the street entrance up to the living room and kitchen, with two more flights up to the top bedrooms.

On the first night our two daughters, fourteen and twenty years old, said the third bedroom on the top floor felt ‘spooky’ and decided to share the second bedroom instead.

One evening, while we were all in the living room, my wife, Cheryl, heard footsteps running up the wooden staircase. She put it down to noisy neighbours at first, but we never heard any other sounds that may have come from them over the next two weeks. In fact, it was noticeable how quiet the house was.

A couple of evenings later, while having dinner, there was a huge crash, which sounded like it came from the lower floors of the house. We all jumped up, ran down the stairs and searched around for a fallen bookcase, a toppled ornament, an exploded bulb or anything that could explain the noise. We found nothing. The next day Cheryl found the doors of a large wardrobe in the laundry room were open. This struck her as very strange as she had looked in the wardrobe the day before and had noticed how stiff the doors were and how they blocked the entrance to the laundry room when they were open. In fact she had struggled to close them again and had to push hard to close them firmly tight. Now, however, there they were, wide open again.

On the last night we had packed ready for our journey home in the morning, everyone else had gone to bed and I sat alone in the silent living room looking at some photos I had taken on my iPhone. I became aware of a sound coming from the stairs of quiet footsteps and objects being moved about. ‘Is somebody still up and packing?’ I thought. Just as I was getting up to investigate my daughter called down from her bedroom upstairs, thinking it was me or Cheryl who was ‘creeping about’ as she put it. It was neither of us.

As we drove home and recounted our stories to each other the strangeness of the events became apparent. We came to the conclusion that we had had another guest in our holiday home who we hadn't invited ourselves.