Voices in the Wardrobe

My family, on my dad's side, has always had a history of seeing ghosts I suppose. Both me and my dad have had paranormal experiences, and my grandpa supposedly also had them. I personally haven't seen anything for around 4 years but I still get weird feelings about places.

The story I am going to tell is one my dad told me from his childhood; he doesn't like to talk about much and so I'm sorry for some of the sketchy details. My dad's family used to live in a very old and large house in England which has sadly now been torn down. When my dad was a kid they used to drive up and see his relatives all the time; the house had also been my grandpa's childhood home.

When they visited, my dad would always be put in the smallest guestroom which had been my grandpa's room when he was a kid. When my dad was sleeping in there my grandpa used to refuse to even enter the room for any reason and generally used to avoid that part of the house. Later my dad found out that he had had similar experiences to those my dad had but, being a very straight and Victorian kind of father, he felt it would be kind of stupid and weak for him to make a fuss about his kid sleeping in there, it's just the kind of man he was.

However my dad always had an irrational fear of the room, similar to the feelings I have had about some of the places we have lived. In particular he was terrified of the heavy oak wardrobe that stood at the bottom of his bed. The reason for his fear is that he used to hear voices coming out of the wardrobe when he was tucked up in bed at night. He said that it used to start with just a few voices at first and as it grew later there would be more and more until it sounded like there were about twenty people in the cupboard. He told me that what scared him the most was that the voices all knew his name and that they were all begging him to let them out of the wardrobe, just for a minute. He had the impression that they were watching him and when he moved towards the wardrobe they'd get more clamorous. However nobody else in the house was ever disturbed.

The wardrobe was in between the bed and the door so he couldn't get out of the room. He used to sometimes hear knocking and thudding noises on the inside of the wardrobe and was too terrified to call his parents as he knew they'd be angry.

Eventually he'd fall asleep from exhaustion but, luckily, the voices or any paranormal occurrence only seemed to happen during the night so he wasn't too scared of the room during the day, apart from the creepy feeling it gave him.

However one day he was sent up to the room to get a coat or something and as he walked passed the wardrobe to get to the chair the door swung open by itself and something came rushing out at him. My dad was never able to say what it was but apparently it moved around the room very quickly and screamed his name in a human voice. My dad was scared to death (as you would be!) and ran out of the room. I don't know of it ever happened again.

As I said the house was eventually sold and torn down and there are flats built on the site. Unfortunately I was never able to visit the place or find out much of the history of it, although I know that my family had links with silver mines in India.