Scott contacted me through Twitter after reading my blog. He admitted he had stories about strange events in his life. And it is only now that he is exploring the spiritual realm and wondering if there was some more to his experiences. Some kind of otherworldliness.
Here, in Scott’s words is the first of his stories.
So, in 1998 my job was asbestos removal. I worked all over the UK. In October 1998 the company that I had been working for were branching out of southeast England into Wales and the west and the Midlands. They opened a branch in Cardiff and a branch in Staffordshire.
I was single and in my early twenties, my two work friends that lived in South Wales were both married and worked away in the southeast most of the time. So, when the opportunity arose they both took up the position of working from the Cardiff office and I followed suit. The area in which they lived was around the Llanelli.
I was there in accommodation for a short while before I met a lady who would become my first wife.
To keep her anonymous I will name her as Julie. Julie was nine years older than me and had married her childhood sweetheart until a year previous to our meeting. She had two children, a boy of 13 and a girl aged 10. Julie and her first husband bought their house together when they married. The house they bought was the property that Julie’s first husband had grown up in, with his parents and three brothers. He was the second eldest of the four boys.
Once Julie and her first husband had split up, he moved on quite quickly and would eventually marry his new girlfriend around the same time that Julie and I got married. By this time we now had a son.
Fast forward as few years. Julie’s first husband had split from his second wife and was going out quite regularly around the local village and sometimes into Llanelli itself which was a few miles east of Burry Port where we lived. My wife had expressed her concerns to me about her first husband’s behaviour. She felt he was in a downward spiral, especially after meeting a particular woman whilst out one night in Llanelli. I shrugged it off as nothing, after all, no real crime ever happened around those parts. Not compared to where I had come from in the southeast of England.
It was in the early hours of Monday 9th August 2004 that things would change for my stepchildren and wife at the time. But it would also change for me.
I had been working away in Manchester for 11 days on and would have every other weekend off. I would return home on Friday evening then go back on Monday afternoon as I was working night shifts at the time.
That morning of August the 9th I had broken sleep as I tried to stay in night mode when home to keep my body clock in the same rhythm for when I went back to work.
It was around 5:30-6:00 am when I woke up with this sense of someone being in the house. By this time my stepchildren were 18 and 16 and my son was almost four. They were in the house and in theory, it could have been one of them. But this felt different, like an intruder, not someone just getting up to use the toilet or anything.
Then this thought just came into my head, unprompted, that it was Julie’s first husband. The sensation was so intense that I actually thought he going to come bursting through the bedroom door. I had one leg out of the bed and was overcome with adrenaline as I was convinced he was here in the house. Then as I lay there, in my mind’s eye, I could see him coming through the door over and over again for maybe 10-15 seconds. It felt so real. This strange image replaying over and over. With that I lay on my side with my back to my wife, all the while keeping my peripheral vision on the door. I watched as something walked past the end of the bed and then around to my wife’s side of the bed where she was asleep. It stayed there for maybe a few seconds and then was gone. All the while this was going on, I felt a comforted feeling, not one of fear. But I also had a feeling that I shouldn’t be there. Like I was the intruder in this moment rather than whoever or whatever this was.
I called out to my wife and she replied with a ‘yes’. I said ‘Oh nothing’, then just lay there.
Around 40 mins later there was a knock at the front door. It was my father-in-law. He came into the house, gathered us all in the lounge and told us that Julie’s first husband, my stepchildren’s dad, had been killed in a house fire the night before. Straight away my wife said that it must’ve been his new girlfriend. That she had set fire to his house. Obviously, there was a lot of tears and shock. My stepdaughter went to her paternal grandparent’s house almost straight away.
A few hours later she asked me to pick her up. I drove to the other side of the village to collect her. Once we got back to the house, I had trouble parking outside as it was a terraced house and parking could be quite tricky. I dropped her off outside and told her I was going to park the car up.
As soon as she closed the door, it smelt like someone had just lit a piece of paper in the car. Obviously, there was no way I was going to call her back to ask if she could smell burning. It was very weird and there was no source. It wasn’t a mechanical smell or exhaust fumes. The car was fine. It was that specific smell of burning paper.
As you can understand, I had to keep this whole story to myself for a number of years due to the sensitivity of it. I have told a few people but never in great detail.
It turned out that it was the girlfriend who had set the fire. They had not been together for long and their short relationship had been very volatile, involving an excess of alcohol. On the day of the fire, Scott’s wife’s ex was supposed to have met his new girlfriend’s parents for the first time. But he chose a day of drinking in Burry Port instead. The girlfriend was furious. She turned up at his house that evening and let herself in with a key. A huge argument ensued as the ex was very drunk and she left the house only to return later. While her boyfriend was fast asleep on the sofa she set it alight.
On leaving the house she phoned the fire brigade and gave the name of the road and not the house. They could find no evidence of a fire as it raged at the back of the house and thinking it a hoax, left the scene. The girlfriend returned and found it fully ablaze. Sadly her boyfriend died. After being arrested she lied to police but was still convicted of manslaughter and in time received a pitiful sentence. It seems violence is part of her nature as after an early release, she went on to stab a new boyfriend in Staffordshire where she had relocated to.
This is of course a tragic story of the murder of an innocent man, taken before his time should have been up. It does seem that unexpected and tragic deaths, particularly those at the hands of others, tend to be the ones where the energy is ripe for ghostly activity.
For me, this is a classic example of a visitation by the recently deceased. Many reports exist of loved ones returning either just before or just after their death, sending a sign they are still here before they move on. Science bods will of course find a way to explain this whole story and blame it on confusion after waking up and lucid dreams. But I’m not in the practice of proving and disproving. I feel Scott’s ex-wife was visited by her ex-husband on the night he died. Perhaps he was just coming to say goodbye.
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