Haunted Cottage

I grew up in a 200 years old cottage in South Gloucestershire, South West England. My parents spent 4 years (1981-1985) renovating the cottage to a livable state as it had been empty for a few years, the last resident had been an old lady.

The original house had only two upstairs rooms, both were bedrooms in which you had to pass through one to get to the other. My dad added a bathroom and another bedroom to the rear of the house. He also added a landing so each room could be accessed separately.

Strange things started to happen once we moved in. My parents had one of the bedrooms at the front of the house, the other was the spare room for guests and I had the new bedroom to the rear of the house.

In the mid 1980's my grandparent's had come down from Yorkshire with my aunt who was living in America at the time. My grandparents stayed in the spare bedroom and my aunt stayed with me on the bottom of my bunk bed.

After everyone had gone to bed, my aunt awoke to the sound of my bedroom door opening. My door was the typical old cottage style with a latch, where you have to press down on the outside of the door and a lever on the inner side goes up allowing you to then push the door open.

The door opened and then slowly closed. My aunt called out 'hello is anyone there?' Without reply, she put it down to a draft and went back to sleep. A while later she awoke to the bed violently shaking, naturally she thought it was me playing games and she asked me to stop. Realizing that I was fast asleep she then called out 'whoever you are just stop it'. This then stopped the bed from shaking. I am not sure if she slept after this but I know it was many years before she would talk about it.

Several years later in the 1990's she came to visit us again. I had since got one of the bigger bedrooms at the front of the house and my aunt reluctantly had to use my old bedroom which had since become the spare room. She awoke in the middle of the night to find a lady in a bonnet at the bottom of her bed staring at her. I have never heard what else happened.