THE WORLD OF THE UNKNOWN: GHOSTS: PART 2 MATT CASH

29/10/2019

To celebrate the rerelease of Usbornes' World of the Unknown: Ghosts, Ginger Nuts of Horror has invited some of the UK's finest horror writers to tell us about their encounters with Ghosts. First published in 1977, this cult classic has been reissued for a new generation of ghost-hunters. This book is for anyone who has shivered at shadowy figures in the dark, heard strange sounds in the night, or felt the presence of a mysterious 'something' from the unknown.

Ghost stories are as old as recorded history and exist all over the world. Many of the different kinds of ghosts that are thought to haunt the Earth and their behaviour are described here. You will meet haunting spirits, screaming skulls, phantom ships, demon dogs, white ladies, gallows ghosts and many more.

This book also explains the techniques and equipment of ghost hunting and tells how lots of 'ghosts' have been exposed as fakes or explained away as natural events. Also included are some theories that attempt to explain the possible existence of ghosts.

With a brand new foreword by BAFTA-winning writer, comedian and actor Reece Shearsmith, otherwise the book remains unchanged from the original.

Today we welcome author Matt Cash to the site with his tales of two encounters of the spooky kind.

Matthew Cash, or Matty-Bob Cash as he is known to most,was born and raised in in Suffolk; which is the setting for his forthcoming full length novel Pinprick which is due for publication with Knightswatch Press in 2016.

He has always written stories since he first learnt to write and most, although not all, tend to slip into the many layered murky depths of the Horror genre.

His influences ranged from when he first started reading to Present day are, to name but a small select few; Roald Dahl, James Herbert, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Stephen Laws, and more recently he enjoys and has what he refers to as a 'major book-on' for Adam Nevill, F.R Tallis, Michael Bray, William Meikle and Iain Rob Wright (who featured Matty-Bob in his famous A-Z of Horror title M is For Matty-Bob, plus Matthew wrote his own version of events which was included as a bonus).

He is a father of two and a husband of one, he'd happily have more but he doesn't think his wife would be too happy

Check out Matthew's books on Amazon by clicking here

THE SNOWMAN: A TRUE STORY
This is a ghost story and also an explanation as to why I fucking hate The Snowman. His stupid floppy hat, his stupid scarf. Why would the damn thing, whose very existence depends on not reaching a temperature above freezing, need a bloody scarf? And the deformed bulbous tomato nose. That was the first thing that bugged me. Everyone knows that snowmen should have carrot noses.

The one in that Disney film, the one that all the kids went mad on last summer, he was a proper snowman.

Up until the age of seven, given the right weather conditions, if somebody were to have asked me if I wanted to build a snowman, I would have jumped, well not jumped, I was a fat kid. I would have visibly rippled at the prospect of constructing a frozen centurion to guard my garden. But since that one night in a cold dark December, I would have told potential builders of the things to fuck off!

The night was dark, as it generally is, but in the deepest depths of my home village in Suffolk, well about thirty minutes from a train station and a few pubs, it was deeper and darker. This was back in the idealistic days when we got the correct weather assigned to the right time of year. Global warming, technology and paedophiles hadn't yet been invented.
The 1980’s saw happy childhood Christmases, where Christmas was exciting and Slade and Wizzard were new to me.

My parents' house was a normal little three bedroomed semi-detached, structurally sound, red-bricked and amusingly called Ivy Villas. There was no ivy upon it, each of the houses on our hill was named after a lady and were built at the turn of the twentieth century. I was glad my parents never bought Fanny Villas.

Christmas back then was magical and something I've often tried but never been able to recreate since. Santa was real but called Father Christmas and a tree stood boldly in the corner of our living room, the bare trunk totally obscured by an avalanche of brightly wrapped presents.

Lights. Lights everywhere, multi-coloured miniature lanterns strung up around any available ceiling space, crisscrossing with strings of greetings cards raining glitter down on anyone who walked beneath.

We would have the traditional family Christmas, my mum, dad, big brother and three elder sisters who were at least twenty years older than me. The sisters were as diverse as each other, ranging from the youngest, all blonde and blue eyed, mummy's little good girl, to the wayward witchy looking oldest with her waist-length black hair and rebellious taste in men. The middle sister was a combination of the two but autistic, the mind of a child in the body of a twenty-something.

My big brother, the closest to me in age, was my idol and together with my niece, who was between our ages, we would conspire as we sat by the fire.

Goaded on by the cackling Witch Sister, the Good Sister and she would tell realistically simple ghost stories to frighten the three of us when not in earshot of our mother, The Boss, for their own amusement.

My brother would be indifferent and my niece would subtly mask the embarrassment of her mother, the Witch Sister by dressing and undressing her Sindy doll whilst staring doe-eyed at her shiny new Rick Astley LP.

But I was the youngest and extremely susceptible to tales of things that went bump in the night, especially when said stories were tweaked so their locations were in my immediate vicinity.

We had tales about how the Witch Sister was combing her hair in the large oval brown framed mirror that hung above the fireplace and how she saw a small boy behind her in old tattered clothing. He wept silently and asked for his Auntie Flo and had vanished before she turned round.

The strange apparition known as the Brown Man, a tall, dark haired man that appeared in sepia in a brown suit and peeped out from behind our living room door. It was rumoured he was my mother's father and the fact that his description corresponded with the old sepia photograph which sat on the mantelpiece, taken on his twenty-first birthday, only clinched the deal that this also was true, to me.

Ghostly whispers and visitations were rife in our house and each one was nowhere near as terrifying as the one they told me about Mary. The Middle Sister.

With a horror-loving mother and three crazy sisters, I grew up inadvertently catching glimpses of the classics of Hammer Horror and the like. One film I recall seeing parts of was that Stephen King one about the telekinetic prom queen.

Telekinesis, the power to move or manipulate objects using your mind.
"Don't upset Mary or she'll go Carrie on you," my sisters would threaten if me, my niece or brother played too loud or boisterous.

Mary was autistic and very independent to a certain extent, apart from her childlike behaviour. She could prepare her own cold meals, do various household chores to help our parents and had her own little paradise.

Mary's bedroom was at the back of the house, the most distant room, conjoined to my parents'. This is where she would spend the majority of her time, drawing, colouring or listening to music.

Some of you may think that we kept her in there out of the way, like a lunatic in an old Hammer Horror film, but she had free reign, could go wherever she pleased. One trait of Mary's was talking to herself. I guess it was the same as an imaginary friend, she would hold silly conversations with herself about the most random of subjects.

She would ask herself a question and respond in an alternative, slightly deeper voice.
"Mary?"
"What?" Sometimes she would answer herself impatiently, mimicking our mother when irate and her constant badgering.
"You going to sleep yet?"
"No. In a minute." And so on and so forth. As a bystander and juvenile I always found it amusing and endearing. I knew I had a 'special' sister and sometimes when I look back, I wonder whether she was the sanest of my trio of sisters.

Witch Sister crouched over us with a malicious glint in her eye as she relayed the time she woke up one morning when she had stayed over and lain in bed listening to Mary chattering away to herself from inside her bedroom. At first, she never paid her any mind and just tried to blot it out and kill a few more hours sleeping, but then she noticed something strange in Mary's usual doolally dialogue. There was only one voice.

The lower of her two voices was answering questions that were either not asked or unheard. Noticing a difference in Mary's usual behaviour, she got out of bed and opened the door separating my parents' bedroom from her's. The talking stopped at the squeak of the brass door knob and my sister saw that the room was empty. Then apparently a voice came from the corner of her room and as there was nobody in there, Witch Sister got on her broom and flew.

My puny little mind shrivelled up into an even smaller ball sitting by the fire that night as another instalment in the legend of Mary Willis went live.

Whether it was my sisters' scare tactics ensuring us kids behaved around Mary or not, this still left me traumatised. So petrified was I, that I was living under the same roof as some potential ghost -talking, telekinetic Michael fucking Myers clone, that I was scared to go near her for fear of being mentally thrown across the room and used as a human dartboard whilst unseen apparitions whispered in my ears.

It was bedtime and seeing I was suitably frightened, Witch Sister took my niece and went home and left. As I was the youngest, I was sent to bed first, with a mug of cocoa to give to Mary whilst I was up there.

I climbed up the creaky, thick-carpeted stairs, opened the door to my bedroom on the left and walked through the door on the right, leaving it open behind me.

As I walked across my parents' bedroom, cocoa in hand, the white-glossed door of Mary's bedroom seemed to breathe like the door in Hill House. I tried to keep calm, avoided looking at the full-length mirror in my mother's wardrobe in case a pale ghostly face stared mournfully at me, and concentrated on the Minnie Mouse mug of cocoa and completing my task. Get it over and done with as quickly as possible and run to the sanctuary of my bedroom, the only bloody room that hadn't been corrupted by my twisted sister's tales.

I kept telling myself that they were just trying to scare me, to make sure we kept the noise down and were good around Mary as she was prone to temper tantrums at the slightest thing. She was a loving sister and even though she was twenty-two years older than me, almost like my little sister.

The brass doorknob squeaked its distinctive squeak as I turned it and pushed the door open. Mary lay on her bed going through the wonderful pictures she had been drawing of her favourite Disney characters. I quickly put the mug of cocoa down on her bedside cabinet and moved to leave the room. In my haste, I didn't see the felt tip pen until I saw the mug slowly roll and topple over the edge of the cabinet.

Mary cried out and the power went off.

Thinking I was about to experience the wrath of Mary, I turned and fled, only to freeze in my tracks as something floated across my parents' room in the moonlight. The Snowman.

Hovering in the air, my He-Man pyjamas prolapsing from its arse like a weird kite tail, was my snowman pyjama case. It flew straight toward me on a gust of Arctic wind. I saw it so vividly, the black, coal lifeless eyes and the red bulbous, poisonous nose, the perpetually cheery face as it walked in the air towards me. Never had I witnessed anything so terrifying. I yelled and screamed and literally shat myself as it hit me full in the face and I cowered on the floor in my rapidly dampening tracksuit.

My father explained how the fallen cocoa over the plug socket had made the electricity go arse over tit, as pouring liquids into plug holes sometimes had that reaction. Mary had naturally been responding as a child, maybe anyone would upon seeing their eagerly awaited yummy beverage go tits up all over the floor.

But seeing as my mother and father swore blind that everyone else in the house was downstairs at the time, no one could explain The Snowman. My dreams were troubled for a while after that, did I have an autistic sister capable of telekinetic feats? Was it a case of poltergeist activity? That snowman pyjama case went straight into the collection for the village jumble sale and I never did wear the He-Man pyjamas again.

So that is why I fucking hate The Snowman.

GHOST

Daisy staring at ‘ghost’ taken without filter]

I've never truly believed in the supernatural but I've never truly disbelieved either. I've spent a lot of my adult life living in the place in which I still reside and have had to do a lot of growing up over those seventeen years.

Despite all the heartaches my home has seen it still feels like my safe place and haven and so far, nothing has taken that away from me and I hope this feeling never passes wherever I live.

I had a brief spell back in 2008 when I went majorly (for me) off the rails; I ended a year long relationship with somebody I should not have been with in the first place because I knew I didn't want to be with her and that if I continued seeing her I would, without a doubt, cheat on her, even before my first marriage ended that's something I've vowed I'll never do and I haven't.

I was single for the first time in what I would think of as my adult life, I was pretty much a kid when I met my first wife, and I was living alone. It was great. I lived on a diet of economy everything; ham sandwiches, crisps, water and beer. I had an okay job as assistant manager in the local branch of Ryman, bills were paid on time and the rest of the week was mine.

I drank too much and started noticing weird shit in my flat even when not drinking, especially when not drinking. I kept my mountain bike in the hallway and whenever I was in bed, I'd hear the bell on it ring, just once, at random times. I thought nothing on it, put it down to the metal or whatever the fuck it was made of reacting to a stray fart or something.
Another time I heard the sound of something heavy being dragged up my hallway, like two burglars had broken in and were attempting hernia by stealing my gargantuan television.

There had been nothing there and I put it down to sound carrying and it being one of the neighbours.

Then one night, mid-week, at least two days from any boozing, I woke in the night to see a little boy standing at the foot of my bed. He wasn't glowing or going 'wooooo' or doing anything particularly spooky, just stood there in front of the radiator in the dim light from the street lights coming in the window. I paid little attention to what he wore and it was kinda dark but I could see he appeared somewhat perplexed or sad and that he had longish, dark curly hair. As I said I lived alone at the time, I was a security conscious freak so the door would have been quadruple locked and I live on the eleventh floor.

My reaction still shocks me today as it was not what I would expect.

I sat up in bed, felt my face screw up with incredulous disbelief, the way it does when it sees something so insane it refuses to accept it's true and I let out a dry laugh and said, "fuck off!" Then I rolled over and went back to sleep. I put it down to being a nutter, I still do but what if?

Since then I've had children and read about the history of the ground where my home was built. Old tanneries, factories and workhouses covered this area one hundred years ago. My daughter, one night when I was alone with her in the kitchen, stared across from her highchair with a tearful expression, pointing at the window (eleven storeys up remember) and said, "Daddy, I don't like that little boy and girl standing there."

And now the cat Daisy, one out of four cats has been permanently obsessed with what is now my and my wife's bedroom ceiling, just over the spot where the little boy appeared a decade ago.

There is nothing there, none of the other cats or dog do anything and, yes phone the RSPCA now, if I hold Daisy up to the spot to see if she vanishes into some kind of vortex like in Poltergeist, she makes a noise exactly like a baby bird dying, claws the fuck out of me and hates me for ages.

But five minutes after that she'll be back staring at the same spot.

What if?

What if I pissed off a ghost?

What if this ghost spent decades building up ghost-energy, enough to communicate with the living, enough to communicate with someone who's not a natural psychic, more like psycho, a dyslexic ghost, enough to move a solid object like a bicycle bell, enough to conjure up a physical manifestation of itself to breach the boundaries between life and death, to prove once and for all that life goes on, to answer one of the most important questions ever, and I've told him to fuck off?

What if over these last ten years, eleven to be more precise, he's built up enough energy to make contact again?

What if?
What if he's stronger?
What if he's vengeful?
What if I tell him to fuck off, again?

Daisy, taken five hours later just three minutes prior to levitation, speaking in tongues and vanishing through the vortex into the spirit realm to meet MOGADON THE MEOW DESTROYERRRRR. Using CatKIttYfilters]