Hangman’s Hill

I’m still in the Halloween mood especially as a good friend of mine brought some homemade carrot cake cupcakes, a la Halloween-style round (yum), so I thought I would write about some spooky/ghost stories that I know. Hangman’s Hill is a place in Epping Forest but it’s not officially called that. It’s an urban myth and it’s amazing how these things spread throughout the young adult world. So let me take you back to the earlier 90s when times where free and easy and I had a huge bunch of friends. There was about four cars loads of us and we would all leave the local pub and drive to High Beach in Epping about 20 mins away. Hangman’s Hill is opposite a church in the forest so it’s spooky at night anyway. So basically it’s a fork in the road that if you turn your car engine off and take your feet off the pedals then the car rolls up the hill as if the hangman is pulling the car towards him. It’s actually an optical illusion because the car is rolling downhill but it really does feel like it is going uphill. And at night it can be bloody scary, as is walking around a church graveyard at night with a load of friends all trying to scare each other!

A couple of the ghost stories that have heard from friends always happen in old houses. Cats won’t go in to a particular room and dogs somehow getting in to another room that there is no way the dog could open the door. One of my friends had a ghost of the old lady who lived in their old farmhouse. They would keept the curtains closed in a certain room and by the time she got home one curtain would be open. My friend also awoke one night to see an old lady at the end of the bed. And she didn’t even have an old lady living in her house! Odd things like objects flying off walls and coins falling from the ceiling are some other stories I have heard. Even in my first house which was an old Victorian two-bed villa, friends said it felt haunted upstairs. Luckily enough I’m not very receptive to spooky going-ons but once, not long ago in our current home, I thought I saw an old man outside in the garden one night. Of course no one was there and considering I was in the house on my own at the time I didn’t feel scared… so maybe it was a ghost or my guardian angel.