--I was asked to elaborate on my experiences in Mortlake; hope I don't bore the rest of you too much I might add that a lot of these experiences still give me the willies, so forgive me if I gibber and waffle. Oh, standard notice : this really happened to me.

My family moved to Chertsy Court, Mortlake in 1975. I was five years old then and was a pretty normal kid as far as I can tell. The flat was on the ground floor, with a balcony that I used to climb up into, so that I could get in through a window if I was locked out.

Soon after we moved I started having nightmares, and the strange thing is that they were room specific. In my bedroom (that I shared with my sister) I would dream about hands coming out of the walls, trying to grab me. One was an old lady's hand with a black lace, fingerless glove on it. I remember the glove so well because I'd never seen anything like it when I was five.

In my parents bedroom was the worst place. I would have nightmares that a thing that lived in our footstool (of all things!) was trying to make me do *bad* things to my family. If I resisted it, which to my knowledge I always did, it would leave the footstool and enter my head - torturing me from inside.

I'd never have these dreams if I was in the wrong room, so I used to sneak into the living room and sleep on the sofa (a habit I still find hard to break) We had a few mild problems in the house ... things moving around of their own accord, cold spots and smells. My mother told me that she was aware that an old woman used to sit on the end of her bed. Mum didn't seem to mind, but it bothered me a lot. That was when I started to change. I used to be pretty 'normal' as I said, but I got more and more morbid and more attracted to the supernatural, no matter how much it scared me.

When I was nine we moved to the other side of Chertsy Court, because the council was renovating the flats (they're pretty old). It was a ground floor one too and by this time I was aware that quite a lot of people in Chertsy Court were having problems of a peculiar nature

At first I thought that the radiators and new windows and fresh paint had sorted things out. It hadn't, it just changed the problem. I started seeing animals made out of shadow. Cats mostly, that I would let out and step aside for, thinking they were one of ours. As soon as they hit the doorway they would vanish as though they had gone through a magic portal - then I'd look round and see our cats were both in. In the hallway, by the light of the streetlamps, I would see the hall floor seething with what looked like rodents made out of shadows. My parents used to be real worried 'cos I wet the bed - I was just too scared to walk through the mice and rats to the bathroom. Both me and my sister had the same repeating dream that bodies wrapped in sheets were floating up out of the floor. A year or two after we left Chertsy Court I realised these were winding sheets. Things would still move about occasionally and I started sneaking out at night to walk in the cemetary across the road. One time I was trying to open a window to climb in the house when I saw my sister looking straight out at me, her face was all messed up and evil-looking. She wasn't even in the house and after nearly braining myself on the balcony ledge after falling off the window ledge, I kinda convinced myself it had been my own reflection.

The absolute worst thing that happened was when I woke up one night. There was no sound at all, but things were flying around the room and I could feel a hot wind blowing. My sister was sitting up in bed with an evil face and laughing without a sound. I could see her hair flying about in the wind. Every five seconds or so, I would get the impression that I was buried in sand with just one arm sticking out. It was severely wierd. The duvet just melted away like bath bubbles when I tried to touch it, so I grabbed my blanket and legged it to the sofa. I kinda convinced myself that I'd been hallucinating or something.

When I found out later that Mortlake was an old plague pit, I wasn't vastly surprised. I keep meaning to go back there and find out what's happening now, and fill in my history on the area. If I come up with anything interesting I'll let you know.

Maybe I'm just 'disturbed' I don't know. I haven't been the same since. I have nightmares all the time and can't get over my fascination with death. I did talk to my Dad about it recently and he reckons he saw the shadow cats too, so I'm not completely bonkers (unless it's hereditary. :-))