With Halloween creeping up, we thought that we would share our very own Southend ghost story with you…
Ashburnham Insurance Services is named after the road on which our offices are situated in Southend-on-Sea, on the corner of Ashburnham Road and London Road.
Facing London Road, to our left we have Princes Street and to our right is Gordon Road. Which is where our Southend ghost story begins…
Gordon Road has a history of being haunted, with one house in particular that had over the many years developed a reputation as a haunted house. Previous owners would tell stories of how the temperature would dramatically drop on the landing and the back room of the home’s upstairs, leaving a sense of eeriness hanging in the atmosphere.
In 2004, a new family moved in. The father already knew that the house was said to be haunted. He himself had experienced this when he was a young boy, as the previous owner was a friend of the family’s and he used to visit often.
Years later, now with a family of his own, the same house that used to haunt him as a boy was playing tricks on him again. He heard the unsettling footsteps of someone walking around upstairs when he knew that he was home alone. Once, the footsteps even dared to descend the staircase and enter the room to touch his shoulder.
It was only when the man’s partner experienced something similar, hearing footsteps behind her entering the room, that she and her partner sought reassurance from her young daughter playing upstairs and called to her asking whether she had been downstairs. To which their child suggested that it must have been the “other little girl”. But what little girl? Her mother and father had no “other little girl”. The daughter was young and confused and hadn’t realised that there was anything out of the ordinary. The “other little girl” was obviously a regular sighting for her, and she even described the girl as being around ten years of age and blonde with a happy demeanour.
This happy, blonde little girl has been sighted on numerous occasions by previous residents of the house. In fact, this little girl has even been sighted on the next road over from Gordon Road, on our very own Ashburnham Road, playing in the hallways and laughing to herself as she did on Gordon Road. The two houses where the little girl has been seen are mere yards apart. The residents of the house on Ashburnham Road have also reported the dramatic drops in temperature along with the sensation as though someone were walking past them or watching them. Doors would sometimes lock or unlock themselves. A visitor to the house had even seen the apparition of the little girl briefly before she vanished in front of him.
Who this little girl is is still a mystery… The owners of the house have named her Frances, but no one knows who she is or why she’s there.