In April nineteen ninety nine. An auction room in Birmingham is packed with people. Tim Chiltern waits unexpectantly for the lot he wants to bid on. At the back of the room, a television camera crew were setting up. Tim wonders what on earth they're doing there. A man in his mid forties with graying hair, Tim had become despondent
with a stressful career as a management consultant. Having quit his job and determined to stay out of the corporate world, he was looking for some other way to make a living. He loved small period buildings so decided to try and find one he could fix up. But after six months of looking for one in London, he hit a dead end. What he wanted was something stone built with a south
facing garden, at least two bedrooms and a workshop. Then Tim came across Lot sixty, a two hundred year old former stonemason's residence called Lowe's Cottage near Birmingham in England. The description in the catalog included a ground floor sitting room, first floor kitchen, lobby, dining room and a bathroom. There were three bedrooms on the second floor and a large garden with two brick built workshops. It was everything he
was looking for. Set in the small Derbyshire village of Upper Maybury in rural northern England, Lowe's Cottage was very much a fixer upper, but Tim was up for the challenge. The day before the auction, Tim Chiltern arrived in Derbyshire and met with the selling agent to view the cottage. As the agent drove him there, Tim couldn't help noticing that some of the names along the way seemed a
little macabre, like Hanging Bridge and gallows Tree Lane. The house itself was named after a nearby iron age, burial Mount, according to the agent. Then finally they were there. Lowe's Cottage was located on the edge of the picturesque village, and when it came into view, Tim was delighted with it. It was almost too good to be true. He thought that such a character ful old property would come up for auction. Things only got better when he took a
look inside. It was a little garishly decorated, but nothing a few licks of paint wouldn't fix. The delightful views of the Peak District hills from the kitchen window only added to the charm, only one thing had seemed slightly off. The agent asked him not to make a video of the interior of the cottage. In any case, Tim was sold, he would make a bid on it The following day. At the auction house, Tim notices a strange buzz go
around the room as Lot sixty is called. The bidding goes quickly, and within minutes, Tim Chiltern is the new owner of Lowe's Cottage. As he leaves the auction room, still glowing with pleasure at his success, Chiltern is steered into an ante room where the television crew and a pack of journalists quickly descend on him. Tim barely has time to think before a microphone is thrust into his face. So says a voice from somewhere, what does it feel like to be the new owner of the most haunted
cottage in England? You're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard mc lean smith. Despite a few misgivings in light of the ghostly revelation, Tim Chiltern soon moved into Lowe's cottage. On arrival, his collie dog, Scion, was uneasy entering the house and found it hard to settle over the next few days, lights apparently switched on and off by themselves, the temperature in certain rooms would suddenly drop for no
obvious reason, and the TV repeatedly turned itself on. At night, Tim heard a gentle rustling sound coming from somewhere, and the landing light often refused to turn on. Even weirder, his flashlight that he checked was working every day, mysteriously failed to work whenever the lights gave out. Generally, Tim felt fine in the house, except for the ground floor stairs, where he later said something felt very off. It was as if the house had a mind of its own
and was capable of changing moods. In time, his neighbours brought him up to speed on the cottage's considerable reputation according to local law. In the eighteen sixties, Lowe's Cottage had been home to a milkmaid named Elaine Harry and her boyfriend, Joseph Phillips. Elaine was employed by a local farmer who was rumored to have taken a fancy to her. When Elaine spurned his advances, the farmer strangled her in a fit of jealous rage, then buried her in the
basement of what was now Tim's cottage. In another version, Elaine was locked in the cellar and left to die of thirst. When her boyfriend Joseph found out about what had happened, he was said to have hung himself in a fit of despair, right over the spot where his beloved had died. The history of the cottage after that is hazy, but in recent decades it had been owned by the same family. The only surviving members were two sisters,
Susan Melbourne and Sondra Podmore. It had been their childhood residence and they returned to live there when their father passed away around nineteen seventy. Then in nineteen ninety three they put the cottage up for sale. By then the property was in a dilapidated state and in need of considerable renovation, but it was quickly snapped up by a young, fresh faced couple, a nurse named Josie Smith and her husband Andrew, who was a builder. Together they moved in
with their three children. Andrew began work immediately on the house, while Josie juggled her nursing with looking after the children. The couple were hoping to fix the house up then flip it quickly for a hefty profit. But not long after they moved in, they began to feel uncomfortable. Both Josie and Andrew were utterly convinced that there was something
else living in the house with them. It was a few weeks after moving in that Josie first noticed the unusual cold spots that emerged in random places on hot days. Not long after, the couple apparently observed the strange haziness in the air for the first time. The peculiar mist was described as being about the size of a person and was even said to move around the house. Andrew claimed that one time he tried to walk through it, only to find it resisted him, as though it were
made of some entirely different substance. He said it smelt like rotting flesh. Josie is said to have woken up with the distinct feeling that something was pressing against the bed, making it difficult for her to breathe. A friend who belonged to a spiritualist church arrived one morning to try and clear the air for them. With a bowl of water and a wooden cross, they moved through the house,
sprinkling the rooms with water while reciting a prayer. According to Andrew, it did nothing but provoke a foul stench that made every one feel ill. Josie later told a TV documentary crew sent to investigate the house that a short time later she witnessed a figure she described as wearing a gathered blouse tucked into a floor length skirt. The figure walked across a room and disappeared into a wall.
After conducting some research on the history of the house, the documentary team discovered that it was built by a local stonemason called William Frith in the early eighteen hundreds. Local church records showed that at least two of his children had died there, Lucy at the age of eighteen
and William at age eight. The smiths persisted with renovating the cottage, but even when there weren't ghostly sightings, electrical appliances would often break down, and household items apparently disappeared, only to reappear later in the most obvious places. On occasion, there were sudden, strange temperature drops in one part of these and water would suddenly appear and begin trickling down
the walls. When a plumber was called in, they found no apparent cause, and there weren't even water pipes in the walls where the water had inexplicably appeared. On another night, for once, everything seemed calm in the cottage. The Smiths put their three children to bed, then a couple of hours later, went to bed themselves. A few hours later, according to Josie, she felt something cold touch her beneath
her night dress. Then all of a sudden she was struggling to breathe, feeling as though someone had stuffed a cotton rag into her mouth and put their hands around her neck as she struggled and flailed her legs against her husband, Andrew woke up with a start to find his wife clutching at her neck, struggling and thrashing as though she were being throttled. It only stopped when I shouted no. Josie said. They were so spooped that they
immediately woke up the children and fled the property. On returning to the cottage a few days later, the Smiths finally decided to seek help. Josie and Andrew turned to their local church for help. Thankfully, the Church of England had an exorcism committee, with a designated team in every diocese to deal with the kind of disturbances they were experiencing. A few weeks later, Reverend Peter Mockford, the vicar of Blurton, a small parish near Stoke on Trent, arrived at the property.
He began by interviewing the smiths about what exactly had happened. Mockford was keen to assess the story's veracity and interviewed the couple separately to see if their stories aligned. Much to his surprise, they did. Then he turned his attention to the cottage itself. Mockford reported noticing a pungent odor that seemed to follow him around, as well as a war that appeared to weep with a trickling dampness when
he placed his hand on it. When he later performed a blessing on the house, the smith said that it seemed to them that the entire cottage got visibly brighter and the atmosphere felt suddenly lighter, but the effects were short lived. After only one quiet night, the creeping presence returned with a vengeance. The usual sudden pockets of cold air weeping walls, and the strange mist was said to return, and a tape player began turning itself on. It would
only stop when it was unplugged from the wall. Then their immersion heater blew up. Reverend Mockford returned three more times, but despite seemingly bringing an end to the disturbances on each occasion, the Smiths said the ghostly effects always returned. During his last effort, the Smiths and the reverend gathered in the living room to begin another exorcism. As the minister started his prayers, Josie and Andrew played tapes of
religious music to accompany him. No sooner had they started, a floorboard was said to have begun creaking loudly upstairs. This was followed by a rushing sensation that apparently came at the side of their heads, along with a feeling that smoke was spiraling up their noses. The couple claimed they tried other solutions, including consulting other religious practitioners, so
called spirit mediums and paranormal experts. One such group was a combined team from the Tame Side and Oldham Paranormal Research Association and members of Manchester's Aerial Phenomena Investigation Team. The group arrived late one afternoon, but what they described was a small, gloomy cottage with dampness filling the air. They also began by interviewing Josie and Andrew again. After finding the couple credible, the team conducted a quick tour
of the house and garden but found nothing unusual. As night fell, they set up video cameras downstairs and upstairs, equipped with voice activated audio recorders, as well as passive infrared detectors and temperature monit. Then they began their watch. It was around midnight that the Smiths went to bed. As they slept, the investigation team inspected the walls but found no evidence of the strange water said to spontaneously
weep from certain spots. They checked their equipment every hour, but detected no unusual temperature readings, bad odors, strange sights or sounds. At five am, some of the team headed into the cellar, where they quickly spotted beads of water on a back wall. When they wiped them away, the beads came straight back. However, the team concluded that this was simply caused by the warmer damp cellar air condensing
on the cold surface of the wall. It was just after seven when the Smiths got up and came downstairs. Josie was disappointed to learn that the team hadn't found anything, telling them that perhaps the ghosts had stayed away to make them look stupid. But what the team had found and didn't mention then was a large pile of letters and newspaper cuttings that the Smiths had collected lying on
the dining room table. It included dozens of letters from newspapers, magazines, and TV producers or offering to pay the Smiths handsomely for their story. As it turned out, having invested so much in renovating the property, the Smiths were struggling to meet their mortgage payments. Though their initial claims that the house was haunted might have been genuine, it was clear that much of what they sae set had most likely been made up in an effort to help pay for
it all. Far from attracting buyers, however, unsurprisingly, all the talk of ghosts trying to strangle them in their beds had the complete opposite effect. Having bought the house for around forty thousand pounds, the property's valuation had sunk to only twenty five thousand. Left with no option, the Smiths tried to refinance the mortgage on the home, but the bank turned down their request. At their wits end. The couple then did something radical. They sued the previous owners
for failing to disclose that their house was haunted. The sellers, sisters, Sandra Podmore and Sandra Melbourne, both asserted that they had never in over twenty years of living at the property, experienced anything out of the ordinary. In response, they countersued the Smiths for a sum of three and a half thousand pounds, an outstanding amount they were still owed for
the property. There was an unusual case, the first lawsuit in England regarding the claimed existence of supernatural forces since the Middle Ages. It was going to be very difficult to prove. At Darby County Court in January nineteen ninety nine, Judge Peter Stretton sat down to rule on the case, despite being unfamiliar with court procedures. Andrew Smith represented himself and his wife at the hearing. Both he and Josie
described the various events they had experienced. Then they called on Reverend Mockford, who'd performed the banishment prayers, to give evidence. The vicar told the court that in his opinion, there really was paranormal activity at Lowe's cottage, but Judge Stretton
wasn't convinced. The Smith's case wasn't helped when Thomas Dillon, the council for the former owners, got the smith to admit they'd read about similar hauntings in the novel The Amateurville Horror, implying that the Smiths had used this to help them make things up. Dylan also claimed that the couple had a record of running away from their financial problems. Mister Smith, he said, had been declared bankrupt after a failed business partnership and had five previous county court judgments
against him for his part. In his final statement, Andrew Smith told the court, There's simply no way I would put my family through all this just for three and a half thousand pounds. In the end, Judge Stretton dismissed the claims of ghosts, stinking mists, and weeping walls as hysteria and lies, refusing to believe that the house was haunted.
He ruled in favor of the former owners and ordered the Smiths to pay the outstanding amount owed on Lowe's Cottage to the sisters, along with a thousand pounds interest and legal costs of twelve thousand pounds plunged into negative equity. The family were forced to vacate the property and were
later rehoused by Staffordshire Council in a nearby town. Then, in nineteen ninety nine, after a few months to let the press coverage die down, the cottage was put up for auction when it was snapped up by one Tim Chiltern. Chiltern was a deeply spiritual man who for a while had considered training to become a church minister. As time went by, he and his colleague Scion seemed to make peace with the house. The unexplained incidents dwindled, until finally
he claimed they ceased altogether. Tim spent a happy four years at the cottage before renting it out. In late January of two thousand and five, the Sheffield Paranormal Investigators, a group for people who believed in psychic phenomena, decided to spend a night at the cottage. According to their reports, it was an eventful one. The six person team, which included self described mediums and parapsychologists, arrived at the cottage
a little before ten pm. They were met by Tim Chiltern, who showed them round the house and filled them in on some of its history. When he left. The investigators split into two teams. In Team one were Mick, Brenda and Richard, while in Team two were Mikey Gaz and Steve. Team one was soon reporting strange readings on their e m F meter, designed to measure electromagnetic force in a downstairs room used as an office. The meter swung too wildly they set for the low amount of electrical wiring
present in the room. When they switched on their video camera, they claimed then to see orbs in the view finder. Richard described sensing a boy of around thirteen, as well as a woman of around sixty with gray hair arranged in a French platte wearing a high collared dress. Brenda said she saw several small children dressed in pinafores, while at the same time experiencing strange fluctuations in air temperature.
Around eleven p m, Team one moved to the main bedroom, where, like Josie Smith had described, Brenda claimed to feel something pushing down on her face and neck as she sat on the edge of the bed while the EMF meter continued to fluctuate wildly. None of the Sheffield paranormal investigators saw the strange stinking mist, but claimed to sense a number of other presences at the property, including a young boy from the seventeen hundreds and a violently angry man
from the early nineteen hundreds. Sadly, however, none of this was caught on camera. To this day, Tim Chiltern stands by everything he claimed took place at the cottage while he lived there. As he described it in one article in twenty twenty one, it felt almost if Lowe's Cottage had a personality and was testing him in some way. Looking back on it all now, however, he has nothing
but fondness for the place. A few weeks before the auction, Tim's father encouraged him to buy the property, believing it could be the answer to getting his life back on track. A short time after that, he died. Unexpectedly, Lowe's Hall proved to be the first of many period properties that Tim would go on to redevelop in what has turned out to be a long and fruitful second life, just
as his father had seemingly prophesied. This episode was written by Diane and Hope Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music are also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
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