Victorian terraces in Walthamstow, London. Photo / Getty Images
Buying a weathered Victorian terrace should have represented a fresh start, but instead it became a living nightmare.
I was asleep when it happened. I was always asleep when my house tried to frighten me. My 4-year-old daughter, Jasmine, shook me awake. “The radio’s talking,” she whispered, clutching Bunny, the toy rabbit that hadn’t left her side since the divorce. “Very loud.”
No, I knew the radio couldn’t be on at 5.23am; I hadn’t touched it in days. But sure enough, when I crept downstairs, clutching the hammer I keep for “emergencies”, there it was, glowing on the mantelpiece, playing Mis-Shapes by Pulp into the empty darkness. No alarms were set, no one was in the room, and yet, just then, I swear I felt a breath on the back of my neck.
They say: buy the ugliest house on the nicest street, do it up and reap the rewards. But what if the house you threw everything into turned out to be as ugly on the inside as on the outside? What would you do if you saw shadows where there shouldn’t be? If slugs started to fall from the ceiling? If you constantly felt something eerie following you around?
What would you do if you then found out that a notorious murderer had once called that house their home? Your home.
I can tell you because it happened to me.
I bought this house in 2021, 18 months after a painful divorce. I was desperate. I needed a place where I could heal and Jasmine could grow – a place made of bricks that wouldn’t blow away.
It wasn’t perfect, but it ticked more boxes than it crossed – a two-up, two-down in Walthamstow, north-east London. Still, on a street lined with Victorian terraces, mine seemed to cower between its nicer neighbours. It had that reworked, weathered look of a house that had taken its share of beatings over the years.
And yet, despite its scars and foibles, I decided that I would love this house; it represented a new future for both me and Jasmine. Its past never crossed my mind.
“You’ve got to get rid of this carpet, Matthew,” said my brother Nick a few weeks after I’d moved in. “It’s disgusting.”
He was right. At first it stuck to the floor like a stubborn child. But after some persuasion from Nick’s hammer, it grudgingly gave way. Beneath, inch by inch, an amorphous patch of black began to bleed out across the floorboards. There were holes in places. Some of the boards appeared chewed up, deformed and peppered with flecks of white and grey.
Then it dawned on us. “There’s been a fire here,” said Nick, more grimly this time. “A big one. You think someone fell asleep in bed with a cigarette?”
A Freedom of Information request would later reveal that the fire brigade had visited my street 20 times in the past 20 years. A quarter of those visits were to one address: mine. Two “deliberate” house fires and three “malicious” hoax calls – all in 2008.
So when I asked Jackie – a neighbour who had lived on the street for decades – she remembered. “Oh, we used to call yours ‘the fire house’,” she said from her front step. “I remember the man who lived there. I don’t know if he set the fires, but I do remember him standing outside your house just watching it burn, calm as you like.”
Then she added: “Of course, he’s in prison now. For raping all those women. He murdered one in the playground by the leisure centre. The papers called him the E17 Night Stalker.”
Aman Vyas was 24 when he landed in London from India in late 2007. He found work at a dry cleaner’s and started seeing a woman his own age. To neighbours, he was quiet, unremarkable. But he was hiding a terrible secret.
Between March and May 2009, he would leave his home late at night and prowl the streets, hunting for lone women. He attacked four in total – in a graveyard, an alleyway, and in one victim’s own flat. Then, at 1am on May 30, 2009, he spotted Michelle Samaraweera in the Somerfield convenience store not far from my house. She had popped in to buy snacks for friends she was entertaining at home.
Nobody but Vyas knows exactly what happened next. Her body was found in the children’s playground – where I have often played with my daughter – shortly after sunrise. She had been raped and strangled.
Vyas had no intention of facing justice. He fled to India after seeing his face on Crimewatch, and then to New Zealand, where he started a family, before he was caught trying to board a flight from New Delhi in 2011. Still, it took another eight years of diplomatic wrangling for the E17 Night Stalker to be extradited for trial in a British court.
“He showed no remorse throughout his trial, took no responsibility,” DI Shaleena Sheikh, one of the lead detectives in the case, told me. “Rather than admit it, he put those poor women, the ones still alive, through the ordeal of reliving what he did to them in court. I don’t use the word ‘evil’ lightly, but in his case, I think it’s justified. He is every woman’s worst nightmare.”
After a four-week trial in August 2020, a jury at Croydon Crown Court found Vyas guilty of the rape and murder of Michelle Samaraweera, and the violent rapes of three other women. He was sentenced to a minimum of 37 years in British prison. That’s his home now.
In public, I told people about the fires and the floorboards and the children’s playground around the corner, and about Michelle. But privately, the story was turning parasitic. It became an unwanted squatter in my brain, claiming rights over my thoughts: about the lives he ruined, the grim connection we now had. And while I don’t think he committed any crime inside the house, it is where he came home, where he washed, cooked and slept. Where he dreamt, if he dreamt. It was, to me, like the house became an accomplice to unspeakable horror.
And that’s when the nightmares began. Night after night, I dreamt that the house was on fire. Jasmine was screaming; I was pinned to the bed as flames licked the walls, blistered photographs, turned plants to ash. I became convinced I would die in my sleep.
It was soon after that when strange things began to happen. First the radio. Then the shower started turning itself on at night, warm and gushing. The doorbell would ring at 3am with nobody there. On one occasion, a slug infestation grew so bad that they fell from the ceiling while I watched TV. I began to hear distinct sounds coming from upstairs, too: slamming doors, measured footsteps on the stairs, the creak of heavy furniture being dragged across a floor. One dark night, I awoke to find a 10p piece spinning on my chest of drawers.
I told myself it must all have a rational explanation. Ghosts don’t exist.
But somewhere, deep down, a jagged sense of unease was taking root. I found myself peering into dark recesses at night or holding my breath before turning on a bathroom light for fear of what might be standing behind me in the mirror. I had become a grown man afraid of the dark.
Logic told me it was just the stress, the accumulated weight of massive change – the divorce, the meals for one, the empty spaces where a wife used to be. I tried to breathe new life into the place. I painted the living room pink, hung bright yellow curtains, borrowed my new girlfriend Jody’s old sofabed to hide the emptiness.
And yet the more I put in, the emptier it felt – like pouring water into a bath with no plug. No matter what I did, it didn’t feel as if the house belonged to us. It was, I was beginning to feel, like we belonged to it.
Soon a new thought crawled in: am I just unhappy in this house? Or is the house making me unhappy?
I set out on a journey to find out. In my memoir, Hearth of Darkness, I write about my experiences in the house and what they could mean. What if the terrible man who once lived here – a man of such lascivious emotional intensity that it drove him to murder – had left something behind; if not a black energy then a molecular residue that had soaked into the walls like smoke? One that I was now breathing in.
“On an intuitive level, I’ll buy that,” says Prof Noam Sobel, the head of neurobiology at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. “We are constantly releasing chemicals into the air around us that produce both hormonal and behavioural changes in other humans. And most of us have no idea how much this can affect us. For instance, we have found a molecule in women’s tears that, when sniffed, reduces male aggression by 43.7%.”
The science of this phenomenon is the study of “emotional residue”, which explores the possibility that our feelings leave invisible traces, imprinting themselves on the spaces we inhabit. “People can ‘catch’ emotions just from smelling someone’s scent – fear, sadness, even intense joy,” agrees Dutch olfactory neurobiologist professor Jasper de Groot. “And those emotions – those molecules – can linger.”
But 12 years is a long time; maybe chemistry can only take you so far. What if my dark feelings were caused by something harder to bottle? Some researchers talk about “place memory” – information or energy impressed on matter by strong emotion or trauma. “I think a lot of these experiences can be explained by living minds interacting with other living minds, or information,” says professor Christine Simmonds-Moore, a British parapsychologist at the University of West Georgia in the United States. She studies, among other things, psychometry – the idea that objects retain traces of their owners. In one experiment, her team tested whether people could tell which of two identical rings had been worn by someone else. “We’re finding some people do seem able to know,” she tells me.
Could I simply be tuned, however faintly, to the past echoes of a violent mind? Maybe the house was a receiver, and I was the antenna.
But that didn’t explain the phantom radio, the shower and the doorbell. It didn’t explain the coin.
“Poltergeists are not ghosts,” says Dr Jason Bray, the dean of Llandaff Cathedral in Wales and one of the Anglican church’s most senior deliverance ministers (read: exorcist). “In my experience, poltergeist activity is always caused by somebody alive and present who is usually undergoing some kind of trauma or stress. Frustration builds until the mind or body can’t contain it any longer, and then, like lightning in a thunderstorm, that energy bursts out into the world.”
So maybe the house wasn’t haunted at all. Rather, it was me. Haunted by my own past, and by the past of this house, perhaps my anxiety took on a life of its own, turning the building into a mirror for my inner turmoil – my Freudian id gone rogue.
“It’s entirely possible you did those things with your mind,” says Dr Dean Radin, the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, whose latest book, The Science of Magic, distils four decades of research into the role consciousness plays in creating our physical reality. “What I do in the laboratory is ask, ‘Do mind and matter interact at all, in any way?’” he says. “And we have substantial evidence suggesting they do. Not only that, but these interactions aren’t necessarily confined to the present moment. Could intense emotions or experiences, like the horrific person who lived in your home, leave some kind of subtle trace on the environment – a kind of ‘echo’ that your own unconscious mind might be picking up on and influencing the environment in unexpected ways? I think it’s worth exploring.”
Now, even when it’s cold and the moon is out, I’ll still tell you I don’t believe in ghosts. But I do believe in the brain’s woeful inadequacies when it comes to processing the world around us. Like children peering through a keyhole, we only see what our limited senses allow us to, while the rest – a sprawling universe of wonders and terrors – lies just beyond our grasp, in darkness and in silence.
I may never fully understand what caused those things to happen in my house. What I can say is that there was a haunting here, something mean and insidious that was dragging me towards darkness. Whether it was something physical, indistinct or just an unexpected plot twist in a narrative I was building, the E17 Night Stalker’s memory stalked this place.
And while I can’t erase it from the house completely, if it does still linger, I can try to overwrite it.
So, a year after I moved in, I launched my own exorcism of sweat and dust. I renovated the house while building new memories with Jasmine. I researched every other past resident of the house – the people living here when Queen Victoria died, when the world wars broke out, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I also visited the nice family who live where serial killer Dennis Nilsen murdered 12 young men in the early 1980s to see how they found peace in a property with a horrific past.
Today, I can finally say that the house feels settled. And so do I. Strange things still happen occasionally. But now, when a shadow shifts in the corner of my eye, a door slams or I feel a shiver on a stair, I remember that I am lucky to own a home at all. Then I check the locks, turn out the lights and go back to bed.
I don’t know what story Vyas tells himself about this house from his jail cell in the north of England, if any. But here in Walthamstow, I’m choosing our story – mine and Jasmine’s – in a house that may one day tell a story about us.
Sarah Knapton, The Daily Telegraph Science Editor, and Science Correspondent, Joe Pinkstone, examine supernatural experiences in their weekly column Inexplicable. Here, the duo give their vedict on Matt’s experiences living in the house of the Night Stalker.
Inexplicable has received a number of stories of possibly haunted homes, with radios, clocks and showers all featuring, so Matt is certainly not alone in his experience. However, living in the past home of a vicious criminal does add another level of menace to this particular saga.
The fact that the house was in a state of some disrepair may explain some oddities. Matt writes that he purchased the house not longer after a painful divorce, and the emotional and mental struggles in one’s personal life must also be taken into account when examining these experiences – as well as the lack of sleep from nightmares and probable paranoia following Jackie’s Vyas-sized bombshell. Matt’s own research in the theory of emotional residue and the realisation that he may have been his own poltergeist may also hold some answers too.
But to wake up to “we want your homes, we want your lives” playing in the early hours of a home that once belonged to a notorious criminal is enough to unsettle the most stoic among us.
The house may itself be haunted, but, as Matt writes, it is perhaps more likely the spectre of Vyas and the Walthamstow home’s fiery past haunted his own consciousness.
Verdict: Explicable
Hearth of Darkness: If Your Home Had a Dark Past, Would You Want to Know? by Matt Blake (Elliott & Thompson) will be published later this year.