Fear & Loathing in Carshalton

Spectral Encounters #2

I recently told you a spooky story about a pencil. Well now I’ll tell you a story of my own ...

I grew up in an historic little town called Carshalton, Surrey, England. On the left is how my uncle painted it in 1951, and on the right is a photo I took in December of 2022.

So I haven’t mis-remembered anything, I have a cassette from 1991, recorded by my Marvel UK colleague who wanted to utilise some of my childhood experiences for a horror comic he was writing.

So if you ever think... hang on a minute, I read this in a comic. I didn’t get the story from a comic... the comic got it from me. The author gave the cassette back to me recently. That’s his writing. ... yeah, thanks, John Tomlinson!

Here are a couple of panels from the graphic novel referencing some of the stuff that happened to me as a kid, notably The Frighten Lady. I was happy to get a mention in the credits too. The cover is by Simon ‘Biz’ Bisley, and the strip art is by Gary Erskine.

The following quote by Hughes Mearns, always resonated with me.

Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, oh how I wish he’d go away.

So, this is my brother Martin and I reading comics in the back garden of our house. The house that I’m going to tell you about.

To my young mind, our small, terraced house in the suburbs was a nightmarish place, with strange people gliding in and out of my reality. Before I was old enough to form a sentence I would point at times to the empty corner of the room and go, ugh... ugh... ugh, and as I got older I would point to the same corner of the room and whisper “frighten lady... frighten lady” to my parents.

From outside, the house was unassuming, but living there was accompanied by a constant feeling of unease, as though my whole family’s existence was being scrutinized, day in, day out.

The feeling of being watched became even more apparent when at the age of six, I awoke in the middle of the night to see a strange figure standing next to my brother’s bed, just staring at me. The odd clothing he was wearing, especially the Fez he wore on his head made me believe that this was the Sandman that my Mum had told me visits at night, to put sand in children’s eyes. I squeezed Bobby, my teddy bear tight and went under the bedsheets, praying he’d go away. I even pinched my leg to be sure I wasn’t dreaming.

I wasn’t.

That’s Bobby.

After a short while I peeked out from under the sheets again, and he was still there... just looking. Another dive under, and this time a much longer wait to thankfully find him gone, but in his place a kind of swirling mist above my brother’s bed.

That was the last time I saw ‘Mr Sandman’, but there were other events. One night a couple of years later, I spotted a circular white door shape made of mist suspended between the beds. I whispered to my brother... “Martin, can you see that?” He said, “what, that white thing?” I said “yeah, what do you think it is?”. We tried to determine if it was light coming in from outside, but light doesn’t just hang suspended in mid-air, so we knew it wasn’t normal.

Martin whispered “what should we do?” I said, I thought we should go downstairs and tell Nan, because that night our grandma was looking after us. Now, at the age of eight I was quite wicked to my younger brother, and to satisfy my own morbid sense of curiosity, I managed to convince him that he should step through it... to see what would happen.

Watching him tentatively put his foot, and then his whole self through this thing was like something Dreamworks could have cooked up. But it wasn't a movie and we didn't imagine it. Thankfully nothing adverse happened but we legged it downstairs to tell our Nan, and by the time we went back upstairs to show her, it was gone.

Nan’s house on the right, overlooking our garden. I took this with my first camera.

Our Nan who lived in the house next door, and was certainly not one to believe in nonsense, told us she’d awoken early one summer morning to see a woman in a large crinoline dress gliding up her garden path and disappearing into the wall. It was only once we’d moved house many years later that she told us it wasn’t in her garden at all, but in ours, she just hadn’t wanted to alarm us. She also mentioned that since we’d moved, her new neighbors had kept her awake one night with the screams and crying of their young boy. When she inquired the next day if everything was alright, the mother said, “oh, it was just Rupert, he said he woke up and saw a man standing in his bedroom”.

I’m not going to relay all of the occurrences, because there are far too many, but one particular event petrified my parents. My Mum and Dad had both woken suddenly one night with a sense of dread at the sound of something slowly making its way down the hallway towards their bedroom. Neither of them wanted to wake the other for fear of making a sound, but they were actually both awake. Suddenly I shouted out from my bedroom, and they both leapt out of bed and turned the light on. There was nothing there. After they’d got me water, or whatever I’d said I needed, they turned the lights off and waited. This time it came back down the hallway and into their bedroom, and right across to the airing cupboard. They turned the light on, but there was nothing to be seen.

A few years ago, I covertly filmed my Dad talking about this event with my iPad. He also mentioned my ‘Frighten Lady’ murmurings. I later owned up to recording him unawares, and he was happy to let me use it… so here it is.

I believe there is a very thin partition between the places we know and those we can't always see, but every now and again there is a sharing of the same space. All of these experiences became a source of inspiration for my Alternity art project. I realised I’d been affected by that house for years, in my photography and in my dreams, in fact to this very day when I dream, I still live in that house. There seems to be no escape.

Summer’s End - 2002

It was only when I began to merge a couple of my own photos together to form ‘Summer’s End’, that I realized it perfectly represented two of my experiences in that house. One, was the glowing white thing between the beds, but another that still haunts me is from a repetitive nightmare of a woman sweeping through the frosted glass of our bedroom door, hovering in front of me and throwing out her hands to gesticulate something very, very important. I could see her expression, I could watch her mouth, but there was no sound. Just this awful sense of urgency, and I could not figure out what the F@#%! she was trying to tell me. This went on for months.

Alternity images © 2024 Steve Cook

I’ve also noticed in retrospect that a lot of the images I’ve produced for Alternity, feature that same shape, that same doorway or portal, as you can see here. I didn’t notice this until I started to prepare a presentation a couple of years ago... I could be reading too much into it, but it is kinda weird!

It didn’t end there because my good friend, Strictly Kev, aka DJ Food was mixing soundtracks for a Halloween compilation and utilized John’s cassette tape of me recalling my nightmares and strange events. It begins with the soundbite: “When my parents went away, I always slept with the windows open. Because I was more scared of what was in the house, than what could get in from outside”.

This became a CD, but to celebrate all things ghoulish here’s the mix courtesy of DJ Food (@strictly) vs. Death Waltz Originals.

Here’s the blurb from Soundcloud: Death Waltz @deathwaltzrecs have been grave digging the best horror soundtracks since 2011. From Goblin to John Carpenter, Fabio Frizzi to Angelo Badalamenti, they have been bringing you the most blood curdling, spine tingling, scary as f**k music out there. Get out the ouija board, turn off the lights, and get spooked.

Actually… DON’T get the ouija board out under any circumstances!!!

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As a continuation of this story, in February of 1974, four boys, (one of whom was me), unearthed a skeleton of a woman caught up in the roots of a tree in the old Convent opposite our house.

I’ve written about this in a previous post, but living on, or directly opposite an ancient plague pit or medieval cemetery may well explain a few things. Not to mention the grey lady and ghosts at the Convent, seen in the article below.

The County Post Times Herald, March 1st 1974.

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I posted about our little Convent adventure a while ago, but I’ve just updated the article with some old photos and newspaper clippings I recently discovered. You can read all about the Black Death Theory here, and form your own conclusion…

With thanks to John Tomlinson and DJ Food.