Season 03 Episode 03: Under the Asphalt (Rerun)

Season three, episode three, Under the Asphalt. That night, Zoe was restless, lying in bed with her boyfriend's stand fast asleep beside her. She had noticed a strange, diffuse light that appeared to be emanating from just inside the bedroom window. Nudging Stan awake, she gestured toward the far end of the room. Seeing it now too, he sat up, trying

to comprehend what he was looking at. Before he had time to think, Zoe was already up and flicking on the main light, nervously looking about the room, before turning it off again. With the room shrouded once more in darkness, the peculiar light appeared to have gone. Must have been something from outside, said Stan as he rolled on to his side and closed his eyes. Zoey rubbed her arms, suddenly feeling a little cold, and moved over to the window.

Peering down through the curtains to the quiet street below, she could see the soft sodium glow of a street light illuminating the pavement on the far side of the road. That must have been it, she thought. She pulled the curtains tighter and got back into bed. Before she could get comfortable, however, she saw once again that the strange light had returned. Stan whispered Zoe. He opened his eyes for a moment before turning away again on to his side.

I told you it's just something from outside, but Stan said Zoe. It's moving. Stan paused before turning to look at Zoe and then towards the end of the room. What at first seemed like a light was more like a misty white shadow now, and it was moving away from the window and further into the room. Stan's hands gripped tighter on the covers. The pair froze as the amorphous shadow of light continued to move around the room

before stopping at the end of the bed. Stan shot under the covers in terror, but Zoe couldn't take her eyes off it, she reached out her hand, drawing closer and closer until she was near enough to touch it, and then as quickly as it had appeared, it vanished. You're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard mc lean smith. The following morning, Zoey and Stan weren't quite sure what, if anything, they had seen. An embarrassed Stan left early for work, leaving a perplexed Zoe to explain the events

to her housemate Rosemary. The two of them lived together in Flat number twenty four of Frankombe House, a five story red bricked council housing block built in the late nineteen thirties. It was located on the corner of frankom Street and Deptford Church Street in southeast London, forming part

of the area's Crossfield Estate. The estate had been built over a ten year period as part of a major regeneration drive to improve housing in the local area, but had itself in recent times come under threat of demolition. In early nineteen seventy three, builders had moved in to widen the adjacent road, and now the council were considering the partial removal of some of the housing blocks on

the estate. To make way for it. It was shortly after builders moved in that Zoe's peculiar experience had taken place that morning. However, recounting the story to Rosemary, she couldn't help but feel a little bit stupid. Most likely, as Stan had suggested, it really was just a trick of the light. Twenty one year old Zoe had moved into the flat the previous year, shortly after giving birth

to her baby, Natalie. The pair shared the apartment with the twenty eight year old Rosemary and three year old daughters Donna and Jennifer, and her seven year old son Mark. Though neither was particularly superstitious, with their young children also living in the flat with them, they could be forgiven a slight sense of apprehension at the thought of something

strange happening inside their home. They had soon forgotten the incident, however, until a few weeks later, when Zoe, who worked as a nurse, returned to the flat after a long shift to find a putrid smell filling the apartment. She had come across that smell before at work. It was the smell of rotting flesh. Rosemary had recently adopted a puppy. Perhaps it had brought something into the flat, thought Zoe, yet despite scouring the place from top to bottom, she

found no obvious source. When Rosemary returned with the children later that day, they spent the evening pulling back furniture and disinfecting the pro even spraying air freshener everywhere, but it was to no avail. Nothing could shake it. The following day, the stench persisted. Being Saturday, the families took the opportunity to get out for the day, hoping the odour would dissipate by the time they had got back. Returning later that evening, they were somewhat disappointed to find

it still very much lingering. Zoe took little convincing to stay at stands for the night, leaving the others to deal with it alone. Doing their best to ignore it, the family would eventually bed down for the night and find some sleep. It was sometime around one a m. When Rosemary awoke with a start. The room was pitch black, but as her eyes slowly adjusted, she could just make out the figure of a man standing at the foot

of her bed, watching her. Assuming it to be her boyfriend Lloyd, who had mentioned possibly heading over that night, Rosemary watched in silence as the figure turned and walked straight out at the bedroom without saying a word. Lloyd whispered Rosemary into the night, but there was no reply. Feeling suddenly unsure, she stepped from the bed and peered into the darkness of the corridor, looking down to the

far end. Although the living room door was closed, she could see the room's light was on, softly shining out from under the door. Lloyd she whispered again, but still there was no response. After checking to make sure that there was no one in the kitchen, Rosemary cautiously made her way toward the living room, stopping outside the door, she could just make out an airy, scratching sound coming from within. Slowly she opened the door, but there was

nobody inside the room. The sound, she now realized, had been coming from the record player, which had inexplicably been turned on. She watched for a moment, mesmerized by the empty table as it spun round and round, listening to the scratch of the needle as it dragged against the empty plate. With a rising sense of panic, she hurried to check on the children in the other rooms and found them all sound asleep, with no sign of an

intruder or Lloyd, for that matter, anywhere. Finally making her way to the front door, Rosemary double checked the locks, finding them just as she had left them earlier that night. Now thoroughly spooted, Rosemary switched off the living room light and returned to bed. After eventually getting back to sleep, she was woken just before seven by an unexpected brightness, surprised to find her bedroom light had been switched on. In fact, as she would discover soon after, every light

in the house had been turned on again. There was no sign of anybody else other than her children, who were still sound asleep in their beds. A few hours later, while helping her daughters get dressed, Rosemarie went to the spare room to get clean clothes. She opened the door and let out a stifled cry. The room had been completely smashed up. The bed had been stripped and the

mattress tossed to the bottom of the room. All her children's clothes had been wrenched from their drawers and scattered across the floor, And in the middle of the room sat a small rocking horse, which until that morning had been perched high on top of the wardrobe. Then she spotted something else lying on the floor, a golliwog doll of her daughter's, its head torn off and the stuffing

ripped out of it. Although quite popular with many white families at the time, the dolls designed in the image of a black face minstrel have since been broadly recognized as racist and offensive depictions of black men. All other dolls in the room had been left curiously untouched. There was something else too. The window was wide open. However, as Rosemary looked down at the sheer drop two flights below, it was clear that nobody could have climbed in or

out of it. Later that day, having confirmed that her boyfriend Lloyd had been nowhere near the flat, a deeply shaken Rosemary, accompanied by her three small children, made her way up the road to Saint Paul's Church. Terrified that she was going mad, She relayed the events to Canon David Diamond, who listened with patience and concern to her story. Though he wasn't free to see the flat for himself, he gave her a crucifix to install in the apartment.

A short time later, Rosemary returned home, joined by friends and neighbours Linda and the aptly named Missus mystery. Stepping into the damaged bedroom, Mystery was immediately gripped by a profoundly unsettling sensation. Blood drained from her face and the hares rose on the back of her neck. Certain that whatever had been here was violently angry. Together, the friends cleaned up the room and placed the crucifix on the wall at Linda's suggestion, The nervous Rosemary also scattered garlic

throughout the room to ward off any evil spirits. That night, with Lloyd staying over this time, Rosemary slept soundly with no repeat of the previous night's disturbances. The next day, Priest Diamond arrived and, sensing something of an unquiet spirit, he offered up a solemn requiem Mass, also known as the Mass for the Dead. The Mass, as the Catholic Rosemary knew well, was usually given at funerals in an effort to bring rest to the souls of the deceased.

But Rosemary was confused. Why would he need to say it in her apartment, she asked, As Diamond explained this wasn't the first time he had given the Mass at frankm House. In fact, he had been hearing reports for some time that the place was haunted. As it would transpire, there had been another building here before the council knocked it down to build the estate. It was a church demolished in the nineteen thirties, and Frankom House had been

built right on top of its cemetery. Perhaps the recent building work had disturbed something in the soil, but Rosemary shouldn't worry, said Diamond. The spirits wouldn't be bothering her now, and he was right for a short time at least. Hattie Smith and husband Jim had lived at Number sixteen for twenty seven years when they accepted the council's offer to move out as part of their redevelopment plans for the US area, and they couldn't have been happier for

the opportunity. All six of their children had at some point grown up in the frankem House flat, and all had strange stories to tell. The family had always kept it to themselves, not ever quite sure of what they had experienced, but also concerned with what others might think. Hattie had often sensed a presence when alone in the apartment, and at times had even felt something touching her or pulling at her clothes. Lights would frequently turn off and

on of their own accord. Hattie's daughter Shirley saw shadows moving about the flat and heard odd noises late at night, as if furniture was being moved around, only to find the next morning that nothing had been touched. Another daughter, Sylvia, had spent an entire night staring with horror at her bedroom door as the handle moved up and down the door,

seemingly being opened and shut by something unseen. One time, a neighbor late one evening thought she caught sight of Hattie's husband, Jim, standing at one of the windows just inside their apartment. Only the flat had been empty at the time. The strange events seemed to have abated until that final year before they moved and the workmen moved

into the area. It was late one Tuesday night when Hattie returned home from playing bingo, with Jim away for work and the children having left home many years before. Hattie was completely alone when she put a pile of dirty washing in the bath to soak overnight before retiring to bed. The next morning, she was woken at seven thirty a m. By the sound of fast running water racing into the bathroom. She found it gushing out of the tap. With the tub almost full, Hattie hurriedly turned

it off and looked down at the water. It was the strangest thing. At the very bottom were her clothes soaking in a layer of dark, dirty water, but then on top an entirely other layer, completely clear. Whatever it was, it was back a few weeks later, Hattie was cleaning the bathroom when the door suddenly closed behind her. Turning to pull it open, she found it had stuck fast, as if it had been locked from the outside. Hattie called out to Jim for help, pulling furiously at the handle.

Looking down, she screamed in terror at the sight of a hand sticking out from under the door. Jim arrived moments later, opening the door with ease. It had been unlocked the whole time the Smiths left their apartment in February of nineteen seventy four. It was around the same time that Hattie's friend and neighbor, Beatrice Goringe, first experienced her own peculiar happenings. Beatrice lived next door at Number seventeen, and things had never been quite the same since her

husband died the year before. It started with the knocking, short quiet taps that seemed to come from within the walls. Then other sounds were heard, like something being dragged across the floor. One night, early in the new year, the fifty six year old Beatrice had just said good bye to her daughter, who had come to visit, when she turned back into the flat and noticed the bath from

door swinging closed. She called out, but received no reply, hearing only voices coming from the radio in the living room. Tiptoeing down toward the bathroom, she felt the temperature drop suddenly. She pushed open the bathroom door, but found nobody inside. Now feeling very cold, she listened with alarm as the volume on the radio in the other room was suddenly turned down. Hello, she said, but again there was no reply.

Moving slowly into the living room, she headed to the radio and turned the dial back up, but the volume wouldn't shift. When Beatrice stepped out of the room a moment later, the radio blared out at full volume. Rushing back in, she wrenched the cord from the wall and stood for a moment in the silence. That night, Beatrice awoke in the dim light of the late evening to find what appeared to be the faint outline of a

figure standing at the end of her bed. Too terrified to move, Beatrice waited until morning before packing a bag and racing to her mother's, where she would spend the night For the next few weeks. Friends suggested the figure she had seen was her recently deceased husband, but she insisted it wasn't. Her husband had been quite short, but this figure was something else, entirely tall and oddly shaped. Back inside number twenty four. A few nights later, Rosemary

was woken by the sound of the baby crying. With Zoe out for the evening, she was just getting up to see to her when she heard the cry of leave me alone coming from her daughter's bedroom, but when she entered, there was no one there except for Donna and her sister Jennifer. I'm frightened, said Donna, as her mother tried to comfort her. For the next few days, the family are plagued by doors in the property that

continually open and close on their own. When a friend hears of the latest events, she convinces Rosemary and Zoe to try out a wigi board in an attempt to communicate with whatever is haunting their home. One night in early March, with the children fast asleep. Rosemary, Zoe, and her boyfriend Stan sit themselves around the kitchen table, having crudely constructed their own numbers and lettering, and placed them in a circle around a glass. With their fingers on

the vessel. Rosemary asks quietly if anybody is there. Slowly, the glass begins to move, stopping next to the word yes. Are you a good or bad? Spirit cuts in Zoe. Rosemary gasps as the glass makes its way across the table, first to the letter B, then to the A, and finally to the D. Cut it out stand, says zoey. But I'm not doing anything, he says. To prove it, he takes his finger from the glass and asks a

question that neither of the others could possibly know. What's the first initial of my brother's name, he says, with a deep breath. Slowly, again, the glass begins to move, sliding across to the letter J. Zoe looks to Stan, whose face has already gone white. Another session ends with the glass repeatedly spelling out goodbye and shooting off the table into Rosemary's lap. One evening, after a particularly fraught session, Zoe was too scared to sleep alone and spent the

night with Rosemary. The following morning, she returned to her room to find it completely trashed, with everything from the top of her dresser swept onto the floor, including a crucifix, bottles of perfume, and her nurse's book. The chair in her room had been moved next to the book, as if someone had just recently been sitting in it. Zoe moved out the following month. Shortly before Zoe left, a local journalist caught wind of the strange events taking place

at Frankom House. A series of short articles printed in the Southeast London Mercury in turn caught the attention of Society of Psychical Research member Hugh Pincott, who promptly made arrangements to speak with some of the residents. Pincott found Rosemary and her family deeply traumatized by the recent events. However, despite holding a number of further seances together with Rosemary and Zoe, Pincott was unable to gleam any substantial information

about what exactly had been taking place. One night, soon after Rosemary is woken by her daughter Donna's screams, there had been a tall man with a large beard standing at the back of her room, she said between sobs as her mother looked on aghast. Not long after, the building works taking place around the property finally came to an end, and so too did the strange occurrences within

the walls of Frankom House. Despite everything that had happened, the seemed no trace of the apparent haunting that had taken place at the property, except for one thing. When Hugh Pincott eventually managed to track down Hattie Smith, she was keen to finally be able to share her experiences. Taking a picture from a family photo album, she passed

it to mister Pincott. It had been taken by one of her grandchildren, a portrait of Hattie and one of her daughters standing side by side, and there in the background, to the left of the door stood the dark, shadowy shape of a tall figure lurking just behind them. In twenty fifteen, the Population Reference Bureau estimated that since the appearance of modern Homo sapiens sometime around fifty thousand BCE, just over a hundred billion of us have lived and

died on this planet. London, like all major cities of the world, has buried its fair view. Considering that humans have lived in the area for over five thousand years. It's a wonder that there is any space there at all that doesn't somewhere adjacent or directly below it contain

remnants of those who have come before us. And considering the frequency with which even those who are still living here will be ripped from their communities and involuntarily resettled as if they were mere ghosts themselves, perhaps we should not worry or feign surprise when we find bones amid the foundations. In some ways, it is strange to think for those lucky enough to have a place to call their own, or a piece of land, perhaps, how desperately we cling to the notion that it is ours, the

thought of its being invaded the ultimate violation. But this ownership, of course, can only ever be a legal fiction, a reality only as long as there are enough people to believe it. So, in truth, land belongs to no one. The idea that ghosts remain attached to the land long after their bodies have gone has also always seemed problematic to me, much like the question played out to wonderful and mournful effect in David Lowry's two thousand seventeen film

A Ghost Story. I Find myself wondering just where would these ghosts go when the earth is swallowed by the massive giant Our sun is destined to become. It too fated to die and perhaps one day vanish from existence.

But perhaps one way or another, as long as it and people are here to keep it so, the land will always be haunted, something of it, always to be trespassed upon, or, in the words of the poet Philip Frenaut, thou stranger, that shalt come this way, no fraud upon the dead to commit, observe the swelling turf, and say they do not lie, but here they sit. Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard mc lean smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are

also produced by me Richard mc lean smith. Unexplained. The book and audio book is now available to buy world wide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, water Stones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation

of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast, attatatatatas