A Glimpse of the Ghostly: C. M. Saunders

The Black Beacon Book of Ghosts will send shivers up your spine this Halloween. The Kindle version is already available for pre-order at just $1.99 instead of $3.99 and you can add the anthology to your Goodreads "want to read" list today. The anthology will be officially released on the 11th of October 2024. To get you in the mood and give you a little insight into the workings of their minds, our contributing authors are sharing their own haunting experiences with you. Read on, if you're not fainthearted!

The Locked Cabinet - C. M. Saunders

People often ask me why this is. Of all the things I could write about, why choose to write about zombies, ghouls, mysteries, and things that go bump in the night? I think a lot of horror writers struggle to give a satisfactory answer, but for me it’s very simple. It’s because I grew up with a poltergeist.

I was born in a small ex-mining village in the south Wales coalfields called New Tredegar. It is perhaps most famous for being the site of a pit disaster in 1875 that killed 22 people, and after the pit closed a century or so later, fell into a state of decline. We lived in the same terraced house all my life and I was lucky enough to have a reasonably happy and normal childhood. My mother collected little china figurines, and by the time I was nine or ten years, she had amassed hundreds of them, which she kept in glass-fronted cabinets. One day, she asked my sister and me which one of us had been playing with them, patiently explaining that some of the figurines were very old and delicate and were not to be treated like toys. This confused my sister and me, because she was in her mid-teens by then and more into boys and rock music, while I had never been one for playing with dolls. We brushed it off, and each blamed the other was responsible. This happened regularly, until eventually our mother put locks on some of the cabinets.

That should’ve been the end of the matter, but it wasn’t. Because the figures kept moving. Even with the cabinet doors locked.

One of them completely disappeared, only to turn up on the floor later.

This was just the tip of the iceberg. Things would go missing and turn up somewhere else, or household items would be moved around. The kitchen cupboards would often be found hanging open, and several times taps would be found left on. I clearly remember coming home from a family shopping trip to find an ornamental horse and cart which we kept on the mantelpiece lying on its side. There is no way this could have happened naturally because it was a big, heavy, chunky object that would need to be physically tipped over while we were out.

After we’d been living with what I now know to be poltergeist activity for a couple of years, it suddenly stopped.

But the story isn’t quite over.

My aunt lived next door with her son who was then seven or eight years old. One day, I saw her in the garden, and she looked awful—tired, drawn, haggard. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me about some of the weird things that had been happening in her house, and they sounded a lot like some of the things that had been happening in ours.

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