Guest Post: Footsteps on the Stairs

Creepy Memories of my Haunted Childhood Home

By Tylluan Penry

The house where I grew up was haunted. It also was dark, cold, and some rum things must have happened there, judging by the number of airgun pellets embedded in the doors and the great knife stuffed up one of the bedroom chimneys. My mother, whose perception was dodgy at the best of times, declared it a wonderful house, full of laughter, and said that her own father had moved into it and out again on the same day. That should have warned her, but apparently it didn’t.

Still, by the time she died (my mother almost made it to a hundred, which surprised me, as I thought she was going to live to be three hundred and six just to annoy everyone) a lot more horrible things had happened there. If it was haunted back in the 1950’s, I dread to think what it must be like now. I wouldn’t go into that house now, not for a king’s ransom.

Haunting wise, as a child, I hated going to the toilet in the middle of the night because of the footsteps. These always began halfway down the attic stairs, continuing along the landing then halfway down the next set of stairs towards the downstairs hall. There they stopped.

‘You probably heard the people next door,’ said my mother, when I told her.

Not unless they had a pogo stick, Mum.

‘You’re just looking for attention,’ she said, when I screamed because I’d seen a ghost in the doorway of my brother’s bedroom one day. I was only about eight.

She didn’t admit, until years later, that the same ghost regularly appeared to one of my brothers in exactly the same place and dressed in the same clothes. (That was the room where the knife was found in the chimney.)

When it all got too much, even for her, she claimed we had somehow ‘driven’ the laughter out of the house.

It was never there, Mum. Trust me. Not a chuckle, not a giggle, just remorseless darkness.

However, it was my father who finally made me realise I wasn’t going mad. One day he cautiously asked me if I’d ever heard footsteps on the landing.

When I said I had, he looked relieved, telling me, ‘So have I. Last night. They started halfway down the attic stairs, came along the landing…’

I waited for him to say they’d gone halfway down the stairs into the hall but he didn’t. ‘And then, next thing I knew, they put the bloody light out in the toilet!’

Mum told my Dad it must have been the people next door but he wasn’t impressed.

‘Then they must have had bloody long arms to reach through the letter box and up the stairs to the toilet.’

‘Why doesn’t she listen, dad?’ I asked.

He shrugged, looking mystified. ‘Well… you know your mother.’

He was right. We did.

And some of us fervently wished we didn’t.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tylluan Penry is a pagan solitary witch who has devoted much of her life to teaching about the Craft. She was born and brought up in a family of witches (on her mother’s side) although all they ever did was hex. It was a horror story in its own right! When she managed to leave this tradition (and her family, though it wasn’t easy) she moved on to develop her own solitary path which she called ‘Seeking the Green.’ Over the years she has developed this further and written about many topics including Ice Age spirituality, the Anglo-Saxons, knot magic and magic on the breath.

She is married, has a large family, including grandchildren, dogs, and lives in a rather ramshackle home with an overgrown garden, together with ghosts, spirits and the Gentle Folk. There is a huge cemetery opposite her home which ought to be scary but is actually very serene and peaceful. She has always loved writing, and wrote her first (very) short story when she was six, soon progressing to full length stories. She has now written almost thirty books, both fiction and non-fiction. Most of them can be found at The Wolfenhowle Press.

Some of her fiction is on Kindle under the name T P Penry. Her chapter in the anthology, Among the Headstones is based firmly in Wales, with a smattering of golf balls, gravestones and the Highway Code. She has always believed that creepy stories need a good pinch of humour in order to work well (at least, in her experience.)

Tylluan also has a YouTube Channel, with over two hundred videos about solitary witchcraft.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book, edited by Rayne Hall, presents twenty-seven of the finest - and creepiest - graveyard tales with stories by established writers, classic authors and fresh voices.

Here you'll find Gothic ghost stories by Robert Ellis, Lee Murray, Greg Chapman, Morgan Pryce, Rayne Hall, Guy de Maupassant, Myk Pilgrim, Zachary Ashford, Amelia Edwards, Nina Wibowo, Krystal Garrett, Tylluan Penry, Ambrose Bierce, Cinderella Lo, Nikki Tait, Arthur Conan Doyle, Priscilla Bettis, Kyla Ward, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul D Dail, Cameron Trost, Pamela Turner, William Meikle and Lord Dunsany who thrill with their eerie, macabre and sometimes quirky visions.

You'll visit graveyards in Britain, Indonesia, Russia, China, Italy, Bulgaria, Thailand, USA, Australia, South Africa and Japan, and you can marvel at the burial customs of other cultures.

Now let's open the gate - can you hear it creak on its hinges? - and enter the realm of the dead. Listen to the wind rustling the yew, the grating of footsteps on gravel, the hoo-hoo-hoo of the collared dove. Run your fingers across the tombstones to feel their lichen-rough sandstone or smooth cool marble. Inhale the scents of decaying lilies and freshly dug earth.

But be careful. Someone may be watching your every movement... They may be right behind you. Purchase Link: mybook.to/Headstones

The ebook is available for pre-order from Amazon at the special offer price of 99 cents until 31 January 2022. (After that date, the price will go up.) A paperback is about to be published.