I never sleep in a bed with a chair at the end of it anymore. That’s where I first saw the ghost of Watson street.
A few years ago, whilst enjoying a gap year in Australia I stayed in a haunted flat in Watson Street off the Bondi Road for a while. Anyone who stayed in the flat around that time acknowledges it was haunted. Even the guys sensed the presence, heard the banging on the floor and felt his icy grip at night time.
The flat was on the top floor of an old building. The small two-bed had been decorated nicely by my friends who were leasing it and opened the doors to many other backpackers passing through during their tenancy there.
Below is a Google Map Streetview of the building – the flat is the balcony on the top right.
When I moved into the flat for a few weeks after travelling up and down the East Coast of Australia, my bed was a mattress on the floor at the end of a double bed shared by two female friends A and H. They were the two who had leased the flat from a letting agent and sub let it to other Irish backpackers to make the rent more affordable.
When three people hear things go bump in the one night
One night, I woke up coughing in my sleep, sat straight up in the bed, thought I saw a figure sitting on the chair at the end of the bed and said ‘oh shit’, followed quickly by ‘sorry’ as I was conscious that I may have woken A who had to get up early for work. She later said that it sounded as if I was being choked, not a simple cough. I thought little of it until I heard about M and J’s experience in the next room the same night.
M had a dream she was at a wedding and that there was a man there who wasn’t supposed to be there and he was sitting on a chair. Meanwhile, her boyfriend J, a guy who wouldn’t easily be scared, had dealt with a terrifying experience at night. He woke up to feel an icy presence in the room, he attempted to squeeze M’s hand for comfort and realised no matter how much he tried to he wasn’t able to make contact with her, though she was lying beside him in the bed, it was like there was a presence there. He felt the presence was choking him and ‘wanted’ his girlfriend and eventually submitted to it and said to himself ‘go on take her then’. The presence went away.
Separately, these three experiences are nothing, together, happening in the one night they are significant. A few weeks later a friend, N, who slept on my mattress said ‘the ghost got me’. She woke up to feel a pressure pushing against her feet as if pushing her head closer to the wall.
There are other stories I don’t know the details of experienced by others – guys – who lived there after I did.
When things go bump in the day
Aside from those freaky night time experiences, the ghost’s presence was felt practically every day in the form of large heavy steps across the sitting room floor. As you can see from Google Streetview the apartment was just around the corner from the busy Bondi Road. But the steps didn’t correspond with the sound of traffic – light or heavy – from either Watson Street or Bondi Road.
I spent a lot of my time in that flat lying on the couch, reading books, on my own while everyone else was out working. One day I couldn’t bear it anymore and just ran out into the sunshine and didn’t go home till the others were in from work.
Ghost employed by an estate agent
The funny thing about it all was that although A and H, the two people on the lease and the only two people the letting agents thought were living there, never felt threatened by the ghost. H would always acknowledge his presence nowadays when we talk about that haunted flat but she would refer to him in ‘aw he was grand, he meant no harm’ way.
It was a strange, strange time. I can still see him clearly in my mind’s eye. A big, tall heavy man, bearded, dark hair. Others have a similar image of him. I’m not sure where this image has come from, if it’s just something our brains manifested to explain the threatening atmosphere we lived in.
To be honest, I thought at times we were all overreacting until I heard about the guys experiencing it too.
And that’s why I’m reluctant to sleep in a bed with a chair at the foot of it. In case a ghost reappears…
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