Living Nightmare

The evil dead stalked my dreams until I was too scared to sleep Teresa Andrews, 59, from Harrow, Middlesex.

- Monica Cafferky

As a child, my mum filled my head with ghost stories. She believed in the afterlife and even had a strange paranormal experience in Portobello Market, London when she saw her own dead mother.

‘My mum, your gran, tapped me on the shoulder one busy Saturday afternoon and said, ‘You’ve wasted your life,” she told me when I was 12 years old.

My mum was then 35 years old and her own mother, Margaret, had been dead for over 10 years. She’d died from tuberculosis.

‘Your gran was as solid as you are now,’ Mum said as I listened, eyes wide. ‘After Gran had delivered her withering message, she walked away into the crowd and vanished.’

‘No!’ I breathed, shocked. ‘Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?’

Mum shook her head firmly. ‘It’s completely true,’ she told me.

After that, the afterlife seemed normal to me. You could even say that I was brought up on stories about the spirit world.

My mum and her sister, my Aunty May*, were fascinated by the spirit world too. The two of them were forever playing on an ouija board in the living room at our home – probably trying to contact Gran though Mum never admitted it!

Spirit board

One night, Mum, me and Aunty May were at our neighbor Jane*’s house, and we were bored. This was before Netflix – it was the 1970s and there were only three TV channels!

‘I know, why don’t we do an ouija board?’ suggested my mum Rose, then 45 years old.

Everyone nodded in agreement, including me. I was 15 years old and I couldn’t see what harm could come from playing with the board - after all, I had watched my mum and Aunty May do it dozens of times before that day.