THE CAGE: BRITAIN’S ANSWER TO THE AMITYVILLE HORROR

(As heard in the Weird Darkness episode, “The Cage”: https://weirddarkness.com/thecage/)

In a small village in England, there’s an old house that some people say is the most haunted house in all of Britain. This house is called The Cage, and it has a very spooky history. A long time ago, it was used as a jail where people thought to be witches were locked up. One of these people was a woman named Ursula Kemp, who was put in jail there in 1582 before she was killed for being a witch.

In the mid-2000s, a woman named Vanessa Mitchell bought this house. She had grown up in the village and came back after working in other countries. Vanessa didn’t know it when she bought the house, but she was about to experience many strange and scary things there. These experiences would change her life forever.

The Cage is in a village called St. Osyth. This village has many old houses around a monastery that was built about 900 years ago. The village has lots of spooky stories and mysteries of its own.

One story says the village was named after a princess named Osyth. The story goes that some bad guys cut off her head, but she picked it up and carried it to a place where nuns lived! Of course, this is just a made-up story, but it shows how the village likes spooky tales.

Another story says a fire-breathing dragon burned down the whole village in 1171. This probably didn’t really happen either. It might have been a big fire that people thought looked like a dragon, or maybe even a UFO that people back then didn’t understand!

But the thing the village is most famous for is witches. In 1582, 13 women in the village were put on trial for being witches. Two of these women were killed by hanging. One of them was Ursula Kemp.

Ursula Kemp lived in St. Osyth and helped women have babies. She also knew how to make medicines that could help people feel better when they were sick. Some people even said she could remove curses from people.

Today, we know that Ursula probably just knew a lot about plants and how to use them as medicine. She might have also been good at making people feel better just by talking to them. But back then, people didn’t understand these things. They thought she must be using magic.

Some people in the village started to say that Ursula was using her powers to hurt people instead of help them. They said she caused the deaths of a woman named Edna Stratton and two children, Joan Thurlow and Elizabeth Letherdale.

One woman, Grace Thurlow, said Ursula made her baby die because she couldn’t pay for Ursula’s help. Another woman, Alice Letherdale, said Ursula hurt her daughter because she wouldn’t sell her some sand.

Even Ursula’s own son, who was only 8 years old, said his mom kept spirits in the house and gave them beer and cake. The poor boy was probably just confused and scared.

A man named Justice Brian Darcy said Ursula admitted to all of these things, but no one else heard her say it. It’s possible that Ursula didn’t really say these things at all.

Ursula was put in jail in The Cage. Then she was taken to another town called Chelmsford, where she was killed by hanging. The Cage was used as a jail for a long time after that, until 1908.

Many years later, in 2005, Vanessa Mitchell bought The Cage. She knew it was an old jail, but she didn’t know about all the spooky things that had happened there. She had been away from the village for a long time, working in other places.

Vanessa felt like she was meant to buy this house. She didn’t feel scared when she saw it, even though there was a sign outside that told about its history.

What Vanessa didn’t know was that many people who had lived in the house before her had seen and heard very strange things. One couple said they saw books flying off shelves by themselves! Many people who rented the house were so scared that they moved out right away, even if they had to pay extra money to break their rental agreement.

As soon as Vanessa moved into the house, weird things started to happen. She would see doorknobs moving as if someone was trying to open the door, but no one was there. Things on shelves would move by themselves. Faucets would turn on when no one was near them. Sometimes, she would even see spots of blood appear in the hallway!

Even scarier, sometimes Vanessa felt like something was pulling her hair. Once, she even felt like something hit her in the back! One person who visited the house said it felt like something tried to push them down the stairs.

Vanessa’s friend Nicole moved in with her. Nicole worked at a local pub and had heard many stories about the house. One story was about a family whose son started a fire in his room because he thought he was possessed by a ghost!

On the day Nicole moved in, Vanessa saw something very strange. She was in the kitchen making tea when she heard footsteps behind her. When she turned around, instead of seeing Nicole, she saw a black fog floating through the door! Vanessa was so scared that she didn’t tell Nicole about it.

Vanessa and Nicole found other strange things in the house. When they were cleaning, they found thousands of maggots under an old rug. The house always felt very cold, even when it was hot outside. Sometimes they could smell pipe smoke or freshly baked bread, even though no one was smoking or baking.

One day, a 12-year-old boy named Freddie Young knocked on their door. He said his grandmother, who was a “white witch” (someone who uses magic to help people), told him he had to knock three times whenever he walked past the house. This was to show respect to the witches and keep away evil spirits. Later, Freddie told them he had seen an old woman looking out of one of the windows of the house!

At first, Vanessa and Nicole weren’t too worried about these strange things. But soon, they started to get scared.

The spooky events in the house started to get worse. Vanessa and Nicole would see tiny bright lights moving through the house. Their things would disappear and then show up in other rooms, as if someone had moved them as a joke. Sometimes, when they tried to walk into the house, it felt like they were trying to walk through jelly!

One Halloween, when Vanessa and Nicole were getting ready for a party, they heard a loud crash downstairs. When they went to look, they couldn’t see anything, but they both felt like something was there.

Other weird things kept happening. The volume on the TV would go up and down by itself. An old chain on one of the doors would swing back and forth on its own. They even heard the voices of children, which they thought might be the ghosts of children who were in the jail with their mothers long ago.

Vanessa and Nicole were so scared that they asked the local church leader, Reverend Martin Flowerdew, to come and bless the house. He told them that many people in St. Osyth had asked him to bless their houses because of ghosts. While he was there, they all saw the faucets in the bathroom turn on by themselves!

Vanessa’s boyfriend, Jay, moved into the house. One night, while they were watching TV in bed, a can of Coke suddenly flew off the bedside table and hit the wall! Jay and Vanessa were going to get married, but they broke up and Jay moved out.

Nicole’s boyfriend also moved in. At first, he said he didn’t believe in ghosts. But after a few months, he was too scared to be alone in the house. When Nicole got pregnant, they decided to move out.

Vanessa started sleepwalking, which she had never done before. She would always wake up in the same place, right under where someone who used to live in the house had killed themselves. When she woke up, she would hear voices telling her to kill herself. She felt like the house was trying to make her do bad things.

Vanessa started inviting more people to the house because she was scared to be alone. Once, when her friend Kirsty and Kirsty’s husband were there, they all saw drops of blood appear on the floor out of nowhere!

In the summer of 2007, Vanessa found out she was pregnant. She was happy about the baby, but she didn’t want to raise a child in such a scary house.

As her pregnancy went on, the strange things in the house got worse. Once, while Vanessa was looking in a mirror, she felt like two invisible hands pushed her so hard that she fell down. Another time, a plumber who was fixing the bathroom ran out of the house because he heard heavy footsteps.

Freddie Young, the boy who had knocked on the door before, came to visit again. He said his grandmother had put a spell on him to protect him from ghosts. Right after he said this, he heard a voice near his ear saying, “That won’t work here!” Another time when Freddie stayed overnight, he woke up and saw an old woman kneeling by him, touching his face and hair. He was so scared he couldn’t move or scream.

One of the strangest things Vanessa saw was a man who looked like he was floating across the room. She could only see him from the waist up. He was wearing old-fashioned clothes, and Vanessa thought he might be the ghost of one of the jailers who used to work at The Cage.

Vanessa’s son, Jesse, was born on Christmas Eve in 2007. Being a new mom and dealing with all the scary things in the house was very hard for Vanessa. She tried to stay in the newer part of the house as much as she could and didn’t take Jesse into the old jail part.

Even so, she would often wake up hearing footsteps on the stairs and the sound of someone trying to open the doors. She talked to her friends about what was happening, and they put her in touch with a police detective named Wendy who knew about ghosts.

When Wendy visited the house, she got a bad headache as soon as she walked in. She said it felt like someone was trying to crush her head, and like someone was watching her.

The scariest things that happened were the ones that involved Jesse. When Jesse was four months old, Vanessa saw a dark figure of a man looking into his crib while he slept. Around the same time, she caught what she thought was a picture of a “satanic goat” on her security camera. Once, after she put Jesse on the bed, something pushed him onto the floor. Luckily, he wasn’t hurt, but after that, Vanessa carried him with her everywhere she went.

Vanessa decided to move out of the house and try to sell it. While she was waiting for someone to buy it, she tried to rent it out to other people. Even when she was moving out, strange things happened. One of the men helping her move said he saw a strange woman in old clothes looking out one of the windows of the house.

Vanessa did manage to rent the house to a few people, but they always moved out after just a few months. One person who rented the house tried to get a psychic to come and get rid of the ghosts. But when the psychic arrived, she was too scared to even go inside the house! She said there was something very evil there. The person who rented the house moved out after only four months.

After all of this, Vanessa got in touch with a man named John Fraser who studies ghosts and haunted houses. She also started letting ghost hunting groups come to the house to look for ghosts.

John Fraser was one of many people who came to study the haunted house in St. Osyth. He said it was as scary as the famous Amityville Horror house in New York. But unlike the Amityville house, many different people had seen strange things at The Cage, not just the family who lived there.

When John first visited the house to talk to Vanessa, nothing strange happened. But he thought Vanessa was telling the truth about the things she had seen and experienced. He came with another ghost hunter named Rosie O’Carroll.

John and Rosie not only did their own research, but they also looked at what other people had experienced in the house. One ghost hunter got strange red marks on her legs while in the house. A doctor looked at the marks and said they were burns.

Vanessa was having money problems because of everything that had happened with the house. She decided to let companies use the house for “ghost hunts” where people could pay to come look for ghosts. This made the house famous, and it was on TV and in newspapers.

The more people who came to the house, the more ghost stories there were. A former police officer who came on one of these ghost tours said he took a picture of “four ghosts carrying a dead witch.”

The ghost tours were very popular, and many people said they saw or felt strange things in the house. This made people believe Vanessa’s stories even more. But some people said Vanessa was making it all up to get money.

John Fraser talked to more people who had been in the house, like Vanessa’s friend Nicole. Nicole told him about more strange things she had seen, like her bedroom door opening by itself and things disappearing.

Most of the ghosts people saw in the house weren’t old women who might have been witches. Many were men, and there were also the sounds of children. This made John think that there might be many different ghosts in the house, not just the ghosts of witches.

In January 2020, Vanessa finally sold the house. She said she actually lost money on the house and didn’t make any profit. She said she had learned “about being terrified of something you can’t do anything about.”

The person who bought the house knows all about the strange things that have happened there. But they say they don’t believe in ghosts. We don’t know if they have seen or heard anything strange since they moved in.

The Cage is not just a normal haunted house with a scary history. It has many of the same things that happen in “poltergeist” cases.

Some people think that the place where The Cage is built might be special in some way. Maybe it’s a place where ghosts or spirits can easily come into our world, like a door between our world and theirs. Unlike some haunted places, the strange things only seem to happen in the house or very close to it. Once people leave the house, nothing strange happens to them.

We don’t know if the person living in The Cage now has seen any ghosts or had any scary experiences. We also don’t know if people who are curious about ghosts will cause problems by trying to visit the house.