The man who told me this story said that it was entirely true. I asked around, spoke to his friends and workmates, dug into official records and came to the unsettling conclusion that he hadn’t made the whole thing up. In fact, I figured out that there was only one point about which he’d been deliberately evasive. I’ll tell you what he told me - as nearly in his own words as I can remember them:

‘I worked for a demolition company and was part of a gang that was pulling down a row of old houses in {Name of town in England ommitted}. They were very old houses and the people who’d lived in them had been evicted, kicked out and moved into pokey high-rise flats (apartments); so we all knew that there would be good pickings left behind for us. Demolition gangs are like magpies, they take anything that’s got any value - even copper pipes and lead roof tiles if they can get away with it and there’s an unwritten rule that any item of property that’s got a good resale price belongs to the one that finds it and lays claim to it.

Well, we spent a long time pulling those houses apart; they were well put together, builders were craftsmen in the days when those little two storey houses got put up and they didn’t ever expect anybody to want to take their work down again, so they built things to last and they designed places to be lived in too - with backyards big enough to hold maybe a few chickens and a pig and what’s more, at the top of the stairs in every one of them houses, stuck in a beam on the upstairs landing, was a big ‘Pig Hook’ for when the poor pig got the chop for Christmas dinner or whatever. Of course, there was also the little matter of the gang taking longer than usual because so many things worth pinching had been found - old coins, tin toys (now worth a few bob), even brass bedsteads. The last residents had been pushed out so quickly and put into such tiny little ratholes by the local council that they’d left lots of stuff behind out of sheer disgust or just lack of space at their new places to move it all into.

One fellow on the gang, a friend of mine, hadn’t found much and he started poking around the houses during tea breaks and lunch hours whilst the others weren’t there, in the hope of getting in first with some discovery or other. In almost the last house on the terrace he finally found something interesting. All those houses had a little cupboard under their stairs; the house he was searching through had a cupboard all right, but it was boarded up. Not just boarded up, but covered up, camouflaged so well that it was actually hidden; so well hidden that the whole gang had worked in the house, searching, wrecking and trashing as they went through it and nobody had really noticed that this was the only house in the street which didn’t apparently have a cupboard under the stairs.

He needed a big crowbar and a sledgehammer to break into the cupboard; it wasn’t easy, but he was young and fit and he was kept at it by the thought of what might be in there. He’d heard stories about family heirlooms being hidden away and forgotten about and he wondered if he’d come across a hoard of valuables which would keep him in beer money for a little while. His workmates came to see what all the noise was about and they watched, without offering to give him a hand, as he bashed and pulled at the barrier. Some of them had pulled his leg about giving up his tea-breaks to go scratting around the houses and I suppose they were hoping that the cupboard would have nothing in it.

When the door was broken open, he looked inside and in the darkened space saw a small table. On the table was a large book, it was open and next to that stood a brass candlestick. He was a bit disappointed at first; the men outside were going to laugh at him for building up a sweat in return for more or less nothing. But, when somebody passed a torch in to him, he realised that he’d found an extremely old family Bible. Its pages were edged in faded goldleaf, its thick leather cover and spine were luxuriously tooled and decorated and inside there was a complete, hand-written record of the family that the Bible had belonged to. Generations of births, marriages and deaths had been carefully entered by different hands over a period of nearly 270-odd years. The last entry, recording the death of a son of the family, had been made about fifty years previously.

The Bible was undoubtedly the best find of the whole job; nobody else had found anything that came close to matching it and of course, no-one was going to suggest looking around for the its real owner. He squeezed out through the remains of the cupboard door to show the others what he had and then it happened.

What happened? - well, every bit of light in that house was snuffed out; yes, just that, snuffed out like a candle. The whole house went as black as pitch. No-one could see as much as their hands in front of their faces and they were frightened, I mean couldn’t care how stupid they looked terrified. Grown men they were, but they scuttled out of that place like scared five year olds, pushing and shoving and shouting at each other as if their lives depended on getting out. They all felt daft when they did get out and they were standing in the street in the bright afternoon sunlight; none of them wanted to admit that they had sensed something awful back there in the dark, something horrible - so horrible that they couldn’t put it into words without looking soft.

The man who’d found the Bible still had it in his hands and out there in the street their moment of panic seemed stupid and unmanly. A younger man who suggested putting the Bible back in the house was laughed at and called a ‘nancy boy’ by the others, so that ended any discussion about what was going to happen to it. The Bible went back to the workman’s home and he decided that he was going to sell it to a dealer as quickly as possible because he definitely didn’t want to hold on to it for long.

That night he spent hours studying the hand-written entries; he was facinated, it was almost like a novel, full of little remarks about people who were long gone and there were even a few little snapshots next to entries from the late Victorian period onwards, so he could put faces to the names. The sudden loss of light in the house had spooked him at the time, but he was well over it by the time he curled up in bed that night with his wife.

The way he told it to the priest and then to the doctors who saw him afterwards, something...some thing?...came in the night; it came into their bedroom and hung over them. Both he and his wife were horribly scared and not even able to turn on a light, that’s to say turn on a light that would do them any good, because neither the bedside lamps or the ceiling light in their bedroom made any impression on the darkness - it was just like a black blanket covering everything; so thick that they almost thought they could feel it pressing against them.

The blackness did go away after a while; they hurriedly dressed and got out of the house quick and then went down to his in-laws to finish the night. The next night exactly the same thing happened again; only this time the blackness lasted a lot longer and the feeling of some presence in the dark around them was a heck of a lot stronger too. His wife gave him an ultimatum; she told him to get rid of the Bible, to put it back where he’d found it or to throw it away - anything as long as it was out of the house!

He sought out the family who’d occupied the house; they were easy to find - the council had moved them a few streets away from the now half-demolished place where they used to live. They knew about the Bible, but they’d never actually seen it; though their family had been in the house for perhaps ninety years, the little cupboard had been walled up for over half that period and they’d known that it was best to leave it exactly where it was.

They told him that the last entry in their Family Bible referred to a young man who suffered from some form of mental illness. One hot Summer day he went berserk, attacked one of his sisters and then locked himself in the house alone. Before anyone could force entry and whilst his parents, siblings and babbling concerned neighbours were bashing on the front door or peering in through the lace-shrouded windows of the front parlour (the ‘best room’ as they called it in those days), he used his belt to hang himself from the pig hook above the staircase. Right away after his suicide the haunting started. The house would be as black as pitch in broad daylight and his family were scared out of their minds. Finally, they called in the local priest; he blessed the house and put the Family Bible in the cupboard under the stairs; right below the place where the young man hanged himself. A candle was lit and a prayer or two were said and the cupboard was sealed. The haunting stopped after that.

The workman took the Bible back to the house and put it back in the cupboard; he just left it there. The problem was, though, that he’d sort of been touched by what had happened and by the thing, the ghost or whatever it was. Maybe he was bothered by the thought that somebody else was going to come along and find the Bible; then it would all start up again. Did he do the right thing just getting it off his back and leaving it for somebody else to stumble over? I suppose you could say that he had a sort of nervous breakdown, he was off work for months and he never did go back to working on demolition gangs either.’

As you have seen, it’s a story which is not easy to believe or to take at face value. I checked out the details of the tale: The street my informant described did exist (only by then it was full of new, modern houses), the high-rise flats where the real owners of the Family Bible were moved to was only a few streets distant (though nobody there knew the name of the family or what had become of them, they were linked to their old address by entries in the town directories). The priest who’d performed the rites and closed up the Bible in the cupboard was mentioned on two monuments in the parish church and the present incumbent, an elderly man, remembered him well. I wanted to track down the priests and doctors who had supposedly counselled the workman, but I had little information to go on.

Towards the end of my research I learned something that my informant hadn’t told me. A man who’d worked with him off and on for a number of years (sometimes for different employers), took me to one side and asked: “Did you know that ___ spent some time in a mental hospital? He cracked up and had to be put away; the way I heard it, he went barmy and thought that the Devil was in his bedroom at night, the Devil or a ghost. Anyway, you’ve got to take anything he says with a pinch of salt because he’s still on medication”.

Looking back, I suppose that I should have guessed that the teller of the tale was really talking about himself, relating something that happened to him (he knew too many details to be telling me about it second-hand), I should have realised that the ‘friend’ or ‘workmate’ he spoke about was his way of distancing himself from events which were perhaps too painful to speak about in any other way.