One summer in the early 1970s, I’d travelled ahead of my family to work in the bar of the Old Head Hotel in County Mayo, which is where we holidayed each year.
Along with several girls working as maids, waitresses or front of house, I was billeted in what was known as The Annexe, a converted stable behind the kitchen.
These days, Health & Safety would call it uninhabitable, but our excitement at being away from home and hitching into the local dances each night went a long way towards helping us ignore the damp and mould.
What we encountered that year, though, has remained with us to this day — and the five of us, who still meet up in Mayo in summer, often talk about it.
The Annexe had a room that had been locked up for years, but that summer it had been opened up and redecorated for a girl called Ann.
One night on returning from the local hop, three or four of us heard noises of furniture being pulled around and loud voices. But Ann was the only person there, and when we went into her room she was fast asleep.
From then on, strange happenings that we couldn’t understand occurred regularly.
Ann always left her clock on her locker, but would wake up and find it had moved to her dressing table.
One day, she woke up and found the leg of her pyjamas was burnt.
It wasn’t just night-time activity either. I could enter the building and hear voices during the day — but there was no one there.
Talking to my friend Maureen recently, who was one of the girls working with me that summer and also staying in The Annexe, she recalled going back one afternoon to wash her hair. ‘I had to run out of the place because it was so shockingly noisy, with furniture being pulled across the room,’ she told me.
Soon after, Ann swapped rooms to a bedroom in the hotel. She thought it was us who were playing tricks on her and moving her clothes around — though none of us ever did.
I was then given Ann’s room, and can distinctly remember waking up and finding cups that I’d left in one place had moved to another. And I remember a rank smell of damp that I have never smelt anywhere else.
Maureen also recalled visiting a local lady who’d worked there before us.
‘She was very upset when she heard that room had been opened up,’ she told me. ‘She was very keen it should be locked up again and very alarmed when we told her about the burnt pyjamas.’
I lasted a week in the room before I, too, asked to be moved into the hotel. That was the only summer
The Annexe was lived in.
Were we suggestible? Did we believe in poltergeists?
I think it would be fair to say that none of us had ever thought or dreamt we would experience these strange events, and our open-mindedness today is entirely based on our inexplicable experience — and the fact that we are certain it happened
Story of Tamasin Day-Lewis
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