BBC Radio’s Danny Robins speaks to a woman who spent two years terrorised by a ‘poltergeist’ in her student digs. But was it actually trying to help her?
I’ve got horses, cats, dogs, sheep, goats, emus, ducks, geese, rabbits, guinea pigs…” Patti Keane pauses for a moment, then continues – “parrots, seagulls, African frogs…” It’s fair to say Patti likes animals. In fact, she’s turned her house in rural Wales into a sanctuary, but before you think this column’s gone all furry and cute, a word of warning… Patti’s ghost story is one of the most shocking I’ve heard.
It’s no overstatement to say she stared potential death in the face. It started when she was in her late teens. Patti moved to Farnham in Surrey to attend art college. She and two friends found a flat to rent in a building called Tanfield House, a former coaching inn, now a dilapidated student digs. Before long, Patti’s friend Jenny said she felt depressed in her room and Patti agreed to swap.
“How do you feel about that decision now?” I ask. A darkness crosses Patti’s face.
“I’ve regretted it for most of my life”.
Soon after Patti moved rooms, the noises started. Scratching and rustling, innocuous at first, but then, they seemed to follow her around. The noises spread to other parts of the house, no longer subtle, but actual banging. She became aware of a constant sense of presence. “It was as tangible as your eyes meeting somebody across a crowded bar. I had a recognition that something was watching me…”
So much of this happened when Patti was alone in the flat. It’s hard to pin down the credibility of a ghost story without other witnesses, but, during my investigation, I get a message from Patti’s old boyfriend, nicknamed ‘Hog’, recounting an experience he had at Tanfield House, one morning when he was alone there. Suddenly, from the corridor, he heard thunderous banging!
“It sounded like fighting, the thuds of bodies against walls.” But, as Hog opened the bedroom door to investigate – it stopped, only to restart, even louder, as soon as he went back into the bedroom! “It was like people running down the corridor, pummelling the doors.” Unsettled, Hog escaped, never to return.
The noises finally took their toll on Patti and she couldn’t take it anymore. One night, in her final year at college, she ran out to confront whatever this invisible entity was that had caused her so much suffering over the two years she’d lived at Tanfield House.
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She found herself face to face not with a poltergeist, but with a very human threat – two men armed with baseball bats who had broken in to try and attack a girl who had moved into the flat just earlier that day. She was the ex-girlfriend of one of the men and they were there to wreak a violent revenge, but Patti, pumped up and ready to confront a ghost, fought them instead. While they succeeded in injuring the other girl, Patti did just enough to scare them off.
Now, as Patti looks back many years later, she sees whatever that presence in her room was in a different light. “I felt that it empowered me, and at that moment, I was feeding off it.”
For me, eeriest of all are the similarities between this real physical encounter and what Patti’s boyfriend Hog experienced – the sounds of people fighting, the thuds of bodies against walls and pummelled doors. Can we contemplate that there really was a presence in Tanfield House and that, instead of tormenting Patti, it was actually trying to warn her of the impending danger?
This article was first published in the April 2022 of BBC History Revealed
Find out more
From ghostly phantoms to UFOs, The Battersea Poltergeist’s Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of paranormal encounters on his BBC Radio 4 podcast Uncanny. Episodes available now on BBC Sounds
