Hotel Hauntings

When I was between the ages of 7 and 8 my mother left my father and we all moved into a hotel which was a short bus ride away from our old flat. I'm now 23 and have always and still live in Clapham, London. The hotel was called The Parkside Hotel in Clapham Common but it's since been demolished to make way for apartments- we lived there for just over a year. A lot of odd things happened in that place but it was only recently that I learned that it was haunted since it was such an old building with such an old layout.

There was my mother, myself, my sister and three brothers along with my grandmother who didn't speak a word of English. At the time there was only 5 of us (there's 7 now) and I was child number 4 of 5. My mum has always pretty much been a single parent as my dad is a lousy father so she worked full-time so we'd often be left alone with my grandmother to take care of us and us of her.

So there was this one occasion where my sister and I needed to shower and being sisters and only having one year between us (she's older) we've always been very close and would do everything together and showering was no exception! So anyway, my mum was at work that day so my sister and I decided that we needed to shower and went to the bathroom which was just across the hall from our room.

We went in and closed the door and started to run the water for the shower. Whilst we were waiting for the water to warm up we stood there facing each other having a conversation about nothing in particular with our towels thrust over our shoulders. It's important to say here that we were stood just talking and not moving much, certainly no fast or sudden movements to explain what happened next. Very suddenly and out of the corner of our eyes we BOTH saw a dark grey shadow dart so fast across the wall that it made a very loud 'whoosh' sound.

We were both immediately silenced; we looked over at the wall, looked at each other, screamed and ran out of the bathroom screaming at the top of our lungs. My poor grandma didn't understand why we were screaming since she couldn't speak English, she thought we'd been hurt, bless her. She went to check out the bathroom but found nothing so we ended up having a wash with a bucket in our carpeted room since we refused to go back in there until our mum came back from work.

She did come back and she took her bible into the bathroom and said a prayer so nothing ever happened in that room again to us.

However in our bedroom which was pretty much a bedsit as it had a kitchen and three beds; one double and two singles. My mother slept in the double with myself and my sister, we'd always fight to be in the middle because I always felt a presence on my other side which I hated feeling. And my grandmother and baby brother who was 5 at the time slept in the two singles. Anyway my mum would always complain of hearing noises in the night though it was usually one of two noises; a baby crawling around and making gurgling noises or like a pig or hog type animal snorting really low on the ground.

My mother is Catholic so she has always slept with a bible beside her bed so whenever she'd hear these noises she'd open her bible to any page and just leave it opened on the ground and the sounds would just stop! They never gave us any reason to be afraid but my mother was never frightened as she is from a village in West Africa where she has experienced many supernatural things; seen ghosts, heard their voices and even seen doppelgangers. She loves to speak about these experiences so if anyone would like to hear them I could get her and my dad to write them down and I could post them here.

Thank you for reading my story, I hope it doesn't sound too lame! I'd just like to say that everything I have written here is 100% true and I welcome any comments or questions.