A TRUE STORY
By
day it was just your average house. Yet with the arrival of night it became
a focus of
terror and inexplicable events - it became the house that breathed
ectoplasm.
Located in a quiet street in Limerick city, the first oddity on record relates to a female visitor from out of the city who reported seeing giant rats on the roof of the house shortly after midnight on a calm summer evening in 1963. She said the rats had been the size of sheep.
“I told what I had seen to some gardai who were passing in their car,” the woman was reported as saying.
“They went up to the door of the house to investigate but instead of knocking on the door suddenly turned and went back to their car and told me they had to be leaving. They left me standing in the empty street,” local newspapers reported the woman as saying.
Five years after her frightening experience the house was being used as a rooming house. Newsmedianews tracked down one of the former tenants, Michael Sprutin.
Michael had moved into a top floor apartment in the house but moved out within just three weeks. His story is not for the féint of heart.
“I'd been sleeping one night when I woke up thinking I was having a nightmare. I could hear this strange noise, like somebody playing a rhythym on a washboard, like in the old jug bands.
“I'd woken up because I felt like I was slipping off the bed, that the bed was being tipped up and there was something waiting for me when I fell off.
“When I woke the noise became very loud and the bed was raised from the floor at a crazy angle and I saw fleeting visions in the room at the end of the bed - they looked like voodoo witch doctors, with slatted wooden masks obscuring their faces. It was terryfying,” said Mr Sprutin.
A photograph taken by Newsmedianews of the rear of the house shows nothing unusual except for the inaccessibly positioned washing line assumed to belong to the house at the end of the block.
The ectoplasm house is distinguishable by the no-parking bollards positioned on the roof after local people complained of tourists leaving their cars on the roof while looking at the house and wandering around the city for a few hours.
The ectoplasm was first seen by a man making his way home after a party at a local bar. The man was ejected from the local newspaper office the next day and was later threatened with being charged for causing a disturbance.
