Happy Halloween

It’s Halloween! That time of the year when sales at Asda treble because of the need to purchase “Scream” costumes for 6 year old children, and pensioners stock up on several kg of shit sweets - to placate the hoards of little mutts scouring the streets after dark in order to satisfy their innate urge to climb another rung on the Diabetes ladder before little fat Elsie-May gets there first.

I digress.

A few Halloweens ago (7 in fact), I was sent to an empty property in the Hillside area above Rothbury to shoot a Dormer-bungalow. The house had apparently been occupied by an elderly person who had unfortunately fallen in the lounge, hit their head, and subsequently bled out and passed away on the floor. The deceased had remained undiscovered for some time before being found, and the house had been subsequently emptied without the carpets being removed. In today’s social climate, I’m actually amazed that the relatives had the body removed as it would have been way cheaper to just sell it untouched.

Now I have absolutely no belief in any old bollocks about hauntings etc, having photographed countless numbers of properties in which old folk have died, but upon letting myself in to this one, I was hit with a feeling that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up immediately. Maybe it was my imagination running riot, or maybe it was the sight of the huge body-shaped blood stain on the carpeted lounge floor, but something just wasn’t normal here.

I set up my camera and lighting as normal. It was a bit later in the day than I’d usually start a shoot, and the conditions were already grim outside so I had to use lengthy ambient exposures to make the place look acceptable. I was shooting into the lounge from a doorway, and every time I moved away from the doorway, the door would slowly swing shut - weird, but often encountered in houses where the doors are a bit off-balance.

The kitchen was where things took a turn. The door to the utility room would slam shut quite violently every time I moved away from it. There were no draughts or imbalances in the hinges - it would just shut every time. It was getting darker, and I was getting a bit freaked out, so I decided to talk to the house in order to try and communicate with whoever may have been lurking in the psychic afterlife thing.

Upstairs, the house opened up into some brighter rooms which were a modern addition to the property. There wasn’t the feeling of a presence in this space for whatever reason, so I got through the rest of the shoot without any weirdness. Maybe it was the talking? I finished the interiors, and sorted the somewhat tatty exteriors before the light disappeared. My post production involved heavy retouching to eliminate the blood stains

I’ve not sure who lives in the house nowadays, but I’ve always wondered if they had any weird stuff going on. The pictures seem normal enough anyway.