The Lost Souls of Newmains

‘Newmains is probably best known for one of the worst E. coli breakouts ever.’ Charlie tells me when I ask him where he is from.

An interesting claim to fame for this small 19th-century village, far up the island in North Lanarkshire and a bit of a trek from my usual stomping ground of Wiltshire. However, as you may know, I am always up for hearing a new ghostly tale, wherever in the world it may occur. So, when Charlie contacted me and offered to tell me about his experience living in a haunted house with his family, I was keen to hear more. It was only a bit further on through this process that Charlie’s lovely fiancée Erin felt ready to share her side of the story too.

I arranged a chat on a Friday with Charlie while he was on his lunch break from work. I should first point out that Charlie works as a laboratory manager in the pharmaceutical industry. Erin is also a scientist. This is important because I generally find people with scientific backgrounds make very credible witnesses. They do not take things at face value and will look for logical explanations in situations where more fanciful types, like me, will jump to conclusions!

Charlie explained that during the Covid lockdown, it became incredibly clear to him that their house was just too small, with his two teenage sons sharing a room and Erin having to work from their bedroom.

Erin told me. “Moving house was such a smooth process for us. Luckily everything happened in a timely fashion and went off without a hitch. We giggled about why people find moving such a stressful process because ours was just so easy. On our first night in, we laughed and hugged, overjoyed at the new, wonderful home we had found.

Everyone was enjoying unpacking in their own spaces and after a few days off work, I was back at it, having set up my desk as a first priority. It was lovely to finally have an office space and have everything I needed at my fingertips.”

Their youngest son Christopher, who was only five then, chose a bedroom on the upper floor next to his mum and dad. The two other boys, Ben and Lucas, took rooms on the ground floor. Part of the original cottage or bhothan (the Gaelic name for a cottage) is Victorian, built around 1850, it is thought. It had been extended upwards and outwards at the rear.

Settling in

Not long after the family moved in, they noticed the bathroom light seemed faulty. Charlie said. ‘It dimmed, it flickered, it popped back in. I just assumed it was a loose connection.’ But, with boxes still to unpack and the general hubbub of moving house, Charlie mentally put it on a list of things to do.

Erin said. “The only problem in the house seemed to be a faulty bathroom light. Sometimes while sitting in the bath or brushing your teeth, the lighting was like being in a disco. Fade in, fade out, on fully, complete darkness. It could vary. We changed the bulbs. They popped. We changed them again. Then the same thing happened with one of the sets of lights in the kitchen. Charlie and I talked about whether the old part of the house had some old wiring in it somewhere and maybe this was something to consider looking into soon.”

Whilst this bit of the story didn’t come out until much further down the line, something strange happened to Charlie’s sister on the day they moved in. She was wearing a pendant around her neck. She had gone to the bathroom and washed her hands when she noticed her pendant emitting a glow. She gave it a bit of a tap and assumed it was some sort of shaft of light hitting it and wrote it off as one of those JOTT (just one of those things) moments. But it stuck in her mind because, of course, her pendant was glowing. You wouldn’t naturally jump to paranormal conclusions if that happened. Now Clare is not so sure.

Around a month later, Erin says she started to get the ‘heebie-jeebies,’ as Charlie called it. And one night in particular, Erin felt more unsettled than usual. Here she describes the events of that night:

“In bed, I was feeling particularly freaked out. Something just wasn’t feeling right. I went to sleep with earplugs in, as I do every night. My family are loud! I woke with a jump to the sound of ticking. It sounded like a clock. I still had my earplugs in. It was a sound in my head, maybe something I was dreaming about before I woke up. I took out my earplugs, and it was still there. Charlie was now in bed too and was reading something on his phone. ‘Can you hear that ticking?’ I asked. ‘Nope.’ He said. I got up to listen closer, to figure out where it might be coming from, with Charlie telling me I was being silly and to come back to bed. We still had some boxes of unpacked things in our room and the ticking was coming from inside one of them. I opened the box and it was full of clothes. Close to the bottom sat a small travel clock, happily keeping time. I let out a bit of a gasp. Charlie asked what was wrong and I told him what it was. I turned around to show him the clock, to ask if he could hear it ticking and instead let out a scream. The door was wide open. Now clocks in boxes and open doors are not high on the list of all-time scary things. I will admit. But, in this instance, they scared me because the clock had been sat on my old desk when I packed up the things for my new office. Sure, it could have been misplaced whilst packing, but the loud ticking? Why hadn’t I heard it before that night? 

This might be a time to mention that ‘stuff’ has happened to me throughout my life that I have brushed off but always failed to explain. From shadowy strangers in hallways that aren’t there to creepy skin-crawling whispers breathed into my ear. Many things I cannot explain.

One incident of ‘stuff’ was the movement of this very travel clock. I had always suspected some sort of unseen friend used to move this travel clock around my room like it was a game. To me, that this clock was involved again felt like a sign.

The open door, it was closed. I know this because I made a point of jamming it shut. The doors upstairs are heavily glossed and need a good bum shove to close them. Plus, they squeak and creak upon opening and closing. Here was the door hanging open, without a pull, without any sort of squeak and creak. It felt like someone else had seen me receive my sign. I didn’t sleep much that night and I kept the light on.”

Charlie said of this event. “What happened sent Erin into a panic that night. Things were starting to get a little creepy.”

Erin told me it seemed to be that night when the activity started to ramp up. She often began to feel a little hand on her hip at night. Erin would turn in bed and there was no one there. She didn’t feel too scared of this but did acknowledge this feeling was completely different to the feeling on the night of the clock and door incident. Whilst Erin was reluctant to say she thought they had a ghost in the house as such, she felt like if they did, there were, in fact, two.

Christopher was witness to the following strange event. Again, using Erin’s own words:

“One evening, I was trying to get Christopher to bed early and we sat reading a book. From my peripheral vision, I saw something move to the right side of the book, shortly followed by the noise of a bouncing ball on the left side of the room. Christopher saw and heard it too. We wondered what it could be. Parker, our dog, was asleep on the rug on the floor. He cast a lazy eye up and then lay back down. We called to my oldest son Ben, as he was the only other person in the house that night and he was downstairs. I got up to look for the ball that we had heard and couldn’t find any sign of one. Christopher proclaimed as I pulled out a cabinet to see if it was behind there. ‘Mummy, that box just moved.’  It was a small gold box, bizarrely shaped like a coffin, just lying on the floor. Parker, now awake, was giving it a good sniff. I said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s moving because Parker is sniffing it.’ Christopher replied. ‘No, Mummy. Parker is sniffing it because it moved.’

He was adamant it moved before Parker went over to it. It spooked the little boy enough that he wanted to sleep with his mummy and daddy that night.

The family got on with living at a chaotic time of year when the summer school term comes to an end. They didn’t notice anything significant again until one summer evening. Ben and Erin were the only ones at home and Ben asked Erin why his dad was still upstairs walking around. No one was up there, and Ben explained he had heard the footsteps before when no one was home as his room was below Christophers. He hadn’t really put two and two together at the time and just assumed it was one of the family. 

Around this time, the light bulb began to flicker and pop in the living room.

It was another day, in the middle of the night, that Charlie heard someone call out ‘Christopher.’ It wasn’t his other two sons. The voice sounded very young. Charlie questioned whether it was part of a dream and described that feeling as the hinterland between sleep and consciousness. Did he hear a voice call out? Given everything else, Charlie felt it was entirely possible that it wasn’t a dream state audio.

Another event Charlie recalls is that of some missing dolls. Christopher sometimes had trouble sleeping and he had some Guatemalan worry dolls. These tiny little handmade dolls are used to tell your worries to before you sleep. Place them under your pillow and your fears will go away and you won’t have bad dreams. Or so the story goes.

They knew Christopher had used his worry dolls since living at the new house but no one had actually noticed them missing. When they went to move a load of boxes into a small storage space in the eves, they found them—sitting on top of a box in the storage space. It was an inaccessible area that had not been opened since the day they moved in. How did those little dolls get in that cupboard?

Christopher was by now not enjoying his new room and was very unsettled. He told his parents, ‘the bad Caspers keep putting things behind my back when I’m asleep.’ This was the first time Christopher had voiced what was happening in his room as a possible haunting.

Erin was feeling very nervous and said she knew something was happening. Not knowing what they were dealing with was scaring her. They both decided it was time to seek help. It just so happened that Charlie worked with a lovely lady called Julia and she was a member of the Scottish Ghost Hunting Society. Charlie had been going to work and telling Julia about the events in the house and she became increasingly interested. Julia agreed to come along with the team medium to see if they could help in any way and find out more about what was going on.

Four team members came to the cottage one night when Christopher had been sent off for a sleepover. Julia, Charlie’s work friend, was an investigator with the two other ladies. David was the medium. Charlie was keen to point out that the group took no money whatsoever. He felt they were genuine and that the investigation was legitimate and not a con.

Again, Erin picks up the story.

“The group walked around the whole house before settling on Christopher’s room, which David picked up the most energy from. From the start, David told us he felt a presence in the house. Not a bad one, but he could sense something there. As they went up to the top floor, David commented, ‘It’s like breathing soup in here.’ I mentioned to David it had been quite an active week with our ‘friends’, so Christopher had slept in our bed while I slept in his room. David was shocked. He said he would have struggled to sleep in a room with so much energy.

The team came armed with the standard paranormal investigators kit, including cat balls and a white noise machine. They spent some time upstairs and Lucas, our middle son, was keen to join them. David said that although under 18’s aren’t allowed to be a part of his spiritual nights, it was our house and we already lived there with these spirits, so it was our choice. We allowed Lucas to join.”

Maybe it was Lucas’s presence, but they managed to catch some intelligent responses to questions through the white noise speaker. Parker had followed Lucas into the room and clear as day, it said, ‘Dog out.’

Lucas asked, ‘Who is here?’ The answer. ‘Parker.’

‘Who else is here?’

‘Erin’

Whether or not you think using our modern-day tech actually is communicating with spirits or some other sort of realm is real or not, it is tough to discount it when you get such intelligent responses.

David continued to use his psychic skills to communicate with the being in the house, and he said he could sense two. Harry was a man who had been a groundskeeper. He was there with his son Bob, who was four years old. They had both died of consumption and were still in the house waiting for their mother and wife to pass. Essentially, they didn’t realise she would have died many years before and was no longer there herself.

David told them the child spirit was particularly taken by Christopher because he wanted to befriend him. Being a mum myself, that little bit of information made me so sad. To think of a little child spirit wishing to befriend this little boy in the world of the living. Erin agreed with me and said she actually felt brokenhearted at having pushed this spirit child away because she was scared of him. She was worried it would have confused him.

Erin tells us, in her own words, what happened next.

“At this point, I decided to go upstairs and see what was going on. As I entered the room, some of the cat toys lit up. David told me. ‘Someone is pleased to see you.’

I had the opportunity to talk to them both and I cried at their story when David filled me in. He asked if there was anything I wanted to know and I wanted to know about the bouncing ball.

‘Was that you?’ I asked Bob.

The response was. ‘Aye am a rascal.’ We all laughed. 

David had no clue about this story. I went on to tell him about the box. Constantly on the lookout for anything that I might consider, and being scientifically minded, I set up my own test. Two boxes, one standard box shape from Christopher’s room and the other the small, gold coffin-shaped box. I placed a cat ball in each and asked Bob to light the one he moved. I don’t have to tell you which one started to glow!

There was only one cat ball that hadn’t been lit up now. It sat inside a doll house placed on Christopher’s bed. I asked Bob to light it for me and Harry said no. When I asked if I should move the house from the bed, Harry responded, ‘aye’ then ‘floor’. The second it touched the floor, there was a disco in the doll’s house.

As I walked back towards the room door, all the cat balls lit up behind me. Bob was right at my heel. David felt Bob was attached to me and saw me as a mother figure. We all knew the right thing was to bring this family back together.

David had managed to reach a woman on the other side who he felt was linked to Bob and Harry. We tried asking Bob and Harry for her name, but the responses weren’t clear. I then felt another voice inside of me that was not my own. It said ‘Laura’. I can’t explain ‘feeling a voice’ but I asked.

‘Is it Laura?’ and a firm ‘aye’ was returned from Harry. At this point, I said my goodbyes to Bob and Harry, and we all left the room to let David do his thing.”

David spent time alone with the three spirits, convincing them to move on. He was there for half an hour or so. Something unusual happened to David that he reported ‘has never happened to me before.’

He usually sees bright white light when he works with the world of spirit to help lost souls move on. That night he witnessed something he had never ‘seen’ before, the most beautiful and peaceful golden light flooding his mind’s eye. He wasn’t sure if it was because Bob was such a young child or that he seemed to be so happy, to have had his relationship with Erin be recognised and also to be going home to his mummy. He said it was a wonderful experience.

Once David told them the rooms had been cleared, Charlie reported the whole family felt the place was different. It felt different and even smelt different. It felt normal!

Charlie then reminded me of his thoughts on the whole experience. He is a scientist. He looks for rational explanations based on facts, statistics and data. When he puts together every piece of evidence of their haunting, for want of a better word, Charlie cannot find any other explanation than they had ghosts in their house. He can find no scientific reason for the events, no matter how much he thinks about them.

It turns out Erin has had many other experiences in the past, but she has always kept it to herself, so  in her words, ‘other people don’t think I am going a bit mad.’

Erin even said to me. “If I was telling this story to a stranger, I’d start with ‘You won’t believe me, I wouldn’t believe me, but I was there, and it happened.’”

And as it turns out, David feels Erin might be a sensitive, which is why Harry and Bob were able to start communicating with her. It seems Christopher may also have that skill.

Charlie then said there was a certain level of synchronicity regarding how they ended up with the house. Six months after the experience had finished, Charlie bumped into someone he knew pretty well at a wedding. This friend had lived in the house as a child. It had belonged to his aunt, but since the friend was raised by his aunt, he had spent time there. The friend asked Charlie how he was getting on and Charlie told him the story.

The friend told Charlie that he and his wife had not had any experiences in the house whatsoever. Charlie concluded it was the sensitive energy of Erin and Christopher that allowed the two spirits to come forwards.

As the story begins to come to an end, Charlie told me one of the things that blew him away was Christopher’s reaction to the house and his bedroom when he returned from his sleepover the night after the investigation.

He just walked into his bedroom as if nothing had ever been a problem. He never again questioned going into his room or staying there again after that. For Charlie, the sudden change in his behaviour, and remember, Christopher had absolutely no knowledge of the investigation the night before, signalled that something drastic had changed in the house that night. What it was, Charlie said, is still a mystery to him.

Charlie’s sister Clare was chatting the whole situation through with him with her friend Michelle, who said something afterwards that also made Charlie sit up. Christopher had told his Aunty that he didn’t like the ‘bad Caspers.’ He told her they would come and get his toys out at night and put them under his back in his bed.

Now Christopher has some sort of juvenile lung weakness, which means he needs an inhaler to help with his breathing if he gets a cold. He had been struggling a bit just before they moved into the house and he had been coughing more than usual at night time. Michelle explained that in nursing homes (she worked in one), they would sit the residents up at night to help them with their breathing. Erin Googled this and found it was a later treatment for TB. Patients had been encouraged to sit up and move around rather than lie down, which had previously been done.

Erin mentioned that finding out about this threw her massively. She said it made her think differently about one of her previous experiences with a spirit which she’d always written off as a hallucination during sickness. Erin called him ‘the man with the pillow.’ It seems she had always thought he was trying to smother her and that’s why she was struggling to breathe with her illness. But after hearing this, Erin was left wondering if he was, in fact, trying to help.

It’s speculation, but the family felt the spirits were placing the toys behind Christopher’s back when he was coughing to encourage him to sit up or move around. And don’t forget, the same was probably done to them since they had died of the lung condition tuberculosis. Charlie said it was one of the things that nearly knocked him off his seat.

“When you think about it as a whole, it all makes so much sense and yet, it’s not something that is truly within the realms of our understanding. At least at present!”

My Research

I will admit to being the most amateur of sleuths when digging into a person’s or property’s history. But we all have to start somewhere and I thought this case was as good as any.

Charlie wasn’t entirely sure but thought other dwellings were built on the land before their house was constructed. The names were likely to have been completely different and the date that came up in the investigation was before 1850, so it could be past residents who lived there were registered under a different address.

The census results, as well as birth and death registrations, were sketchy. I could find no corresponding names but since the records appear incomplete, it doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

Newmains appears to be a Victorian-built town, expanded after the expansion of the area’s steel,  iron and coal works. This was the main reason people lived there. However, there could be older roots to the area and it would have been an area where monks moving from the Holy places of Scotland, including Iona, Lindisfarne and Casa Alba, passed through.

A trackway through a field to the North of Newmains is considered a Roman road. Little evidence exists of Roman settlement in the village but the Romans were certainly known to have been in the area.

While Newmains may have played a part in some of the ancient and seminal events of Scottish history, I can’t find much information. Most records exist from around 1850 onwards.

Certainly, life in this community during the industrial revolution would have been hard and dangerous. Many people died from work-related injuries and illnesses caused by their employment. Harsh working conditions would cause early deaths. Dying from lung diseases such as consumption (Tuberculosis), lung cancer, black lung and COPD was not unusual.

And so, you would almost expect the families who used to reside in this little Scottish cottage to have met such a difficult end. The ghosts the medium communicated with told him they died of consumption, otherwise known as tuberculosis. It seems plausible.

Since the medium had been communicating with three spirits, which he said were Harry, Bob and Laura, I thought it was worth checking births and deaths in Newmains to see if I could find a match. It was a long shot because the census records for that area are very sketchy. I tried to find the house but it was likely called a different name back then and again, there weren’t many entries to see anyway.

It may or may not be part of the story, but I was told there had been a building opposite Charlie’s house. The building had been a pastoral centre for the church and, before that, some sort of retreat for the Diocese of Motherwell. An old photo of the building makes it look reasonably modern but I guess there could have been a convent there before that, as Charlie thinks it may have been. There had been an explosion in 2017, sadly killing one man, and the land was currently derelict.

It is entirely possible that the local convent would care for the sick and dying. Nuns quite often ran tuberculosis hospitals. Maybe the spirits of the house were from just across the road? Perhaps they had passed on that land some time ago and Erin and Christopher had attracted them to the house? I just wanted to put that out there as a theory!

Charlie’s Thoughts

Even now, a year or two on, Charlie still struggles to understand everything that has happened. They have spent time piecing together all the little experiences and forming a paranormal puzzle.

Charlie said he wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it all for himself. Erin took many weeks to recover from the events. It had traumatised her. But ultimately, they were relieved. Relieved it is all over and relieved that the spirits have moved into the light and are now at peace.

Isn’t this whole story an incredible one? It’s not often you stumble upon a ghostly tale with so many elements. All finely knitted together. And from such a brilliant and credible set of witnesses. I’m not sure about you, but I’m also glad about how the story ended. Isn’t it nice to have a happy end to a ghostly tale?

With Thanks

My biggest thanks go to Charlie, who got in touch with me and offered to take time out of his daily life and tell me this story. And to Erin, for allowing me to help her tell her side of the story too. My best wishes go to the rest of the family, including Parker, for a peaceful and happy future in their home.

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