i'm drunk and feeling nostalgic, so here's a short little creepy story from my youth. it's about my mother's godmother and her husband, who we'll call aunt and uncle B, and who openly identified as g*psies, since they were of romanian traveller descent

aunt's parents settled about half an hour out from a big town in the south of england, out in the hills. i dont know if they built or bought it, but my aunt inherited from them this pretty large detached house with a (comparatively) massive garden

as a kid we were expected to go there every thursday as some sort of family obligation. i liked it, my aunt cooked really nice chips and she had a VCR with these six tom+jerry tapes that me and my sibling watched and rewatched and loved. but there was always something wrong.

the house was cold; poorly insulated. we only ever spent time in two rooms: the kitchen and the living room. there were 5 other rooms in the house that we were told not to go into, and a bathroom up the stairs down a long, cold corridor past aunt's spoon collection.

i hated going to the bathroom because going to it meant going past all the rooms i wasn't meant to go into, and those rooms were... bad. i snuck into them sometimes to look, and they just felt very, very wrong. they made me scared, and not just because i was breaking the rules.

i think i'm pretty good at rationalising certain Bad Vibes. there was a hallway in my house that i hated, and my mum hated, and the psychic my mum invited to the house also hated. in retrospect, it was a thin hallway with a low ceiling and bad lights - it was just claustrophobic

but that entire house gave me Bad Vibes i can't explain. i was young, and maybe it was just cold and drafty and i had an overactive imagination, but nothing brings chills to my spine like memories of that old house and that long, terrifying hallway to the bathroom.

as i said before, my aunt and uncle B identified as g*psies. they were superstitious and socially very conservative. at christmas, me and my sibling would write our santa wishlists on paper which we'd throw into their fire, and aunt would use some powder to make the fire green.

my mum was mildly superstitious as well (hence the psychic i mentioned), and since my dad never came to aunt's house, it was just superstition all around, so they were quite strict about where i could go in the house and in the garden. i didn't learn why until later.

they were extremely fussy about the garden in particular. it was segmented into two areas, one huge area behind the house with trees, flowers and greenhouses - and another to the side of the house, a small square 10x10m patch that was very overgrown and unkempt.

that little side area didn't have anything in it except ivy-coated walls and an overgrown stump in the center. not a tree stump, mind you - some rock thing. imagine a wine cork sticking into the ground, but made out of rock and covered in moss, ivy and a couple nettles.

i went into that side area once just to explore, thought it was boring, then went back out to play in the main garden area. when i brought up the side area to my aunt i was harshly chastised and told never to go there again.

i didn't have any reason to go there after that, so i didn't. in hindsight, it fascinates me that the two forbidden rooms i was most scared of were the ones that shared a wall with that little square part of the garden. the other rooms don't stand out as much in my memory at all.

i only learned about why i was so harshly chastised for going into that part of the garden when i was about 13. i was at aunt's place for an anniversary party or something like that, and i overheard uncle B talking about why they didn't take care of the square side garden.

i very vividly remember him standing there with two other distant relatives of mine, saying "many years ago, i was standing in the entry and i saw an apparition standing in the grass."
uncle b was the less superstitious one, but he was visibly shaken recalling the memory.

i remember thinking that was super cool, but at around that time my mum was getting sick of aunt's open misogyny and we stopped going to her house, so i never got to indulge my curiosity about that garden corner.

a few years ago, uncle B died. aunt was devastated and alone, and her son didn't want to move into the house, so she ended up selling it. when my mum informed me, that was when she told me it was the place where the last witches in our county were hanged.

that little side garden with the stone cork - that was a foundation for a gallows. my mum wasn't certain how old the house was, but she said her and aunt had theorised it was previously a jailhouse.

my mum had become much less superstitious over the years, growing out of the religious beliefs my nan forced on her and acknowledging the magic green fire my aunt had created as just a chemical reaction.
but she fully believed that house was cursed.

i think i do too.
it's being demolished, from what i know, replaced with a few terraced properties. i don't know what's happening with the side garden and the stone cork.
that house haunts me in the truest sense of the word. it's my go-to for truly unexplainable Bad Vibes.

i wonder why that family chose to settle there. some kind of gatekeeping, perhaps? it's my understanding that, during the witch hunts, foreign travellers would absolutely have been victims of scapegoat hangings. maybe they thought they were reclaiming something historic there.

i was never much aware of their beliefs or practices beyond aunt's conservative social ideas and their adamant denial of my curiosity, and in a way that makes this even more mysterious. i'll never know what they really thought about those rooms and that area of the garden.

that concludes this thread which i did instead of writing my book hahaaa. just a cool thing i'm nostalgic for - i miss how ancient so many things in the south were. everything up here is post-industrial revolution. gimme that haunted shit fam