We’ve fled our home to live in a caravan on the driveway after ‘ghosts’ left our family with scratch marks and bruises
A FAMILY say they have fled their house after “ghosts” left them with scratches and bruises.
They were so scared they initially moved into a caravan on their driveway in Middlesbrough before finding somewhere else to live.
Lauren Roth, 30, and her husband Stephen, along with two of their kids, Arabella, 4, and Caleb, 6, started renting their home in Acklam in November although they soon noticed strange goings on.
Lauren, an aesthetics practitioner, claims bruises on her legs appeared “out of nowhere” and lights turned themselves on and off randomly.
The final straw for the family came in the last weekend of June when her son woke up screaming in the middle of the night and they decided to leave the property.
Lauren described it as a “traumatising” ordeal which as forced her to call on paranormal investigators as well as a priest to discover what is going on.
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Lauren told Teesside Live: "Everything was alright until the back end of December. My son started sleepwalking and weird stuff started happening. I believe in all spiritual stuff anyway so I knew something wasn't right.
"It got to the point where my son was talking to somebody. They used to sleep all night with no problems at all. Things were getting moved around the house, [and] we'd seen something during the night.
"My son would wake up and he'd stand at the top of the stairs staring. One night I had a nightmare and I woke him up so he could come to the bathroom with me. When I got up to go to the toilet, I stepped my foot across onto the [floor] the light pinged on."
Other unexplained happenings that have occurred while they were living in the house, which Lauren thinks is around 60 years old, include her son saying there was “someone in my bedroom” and her daughter telling her she had seen a cat and waking up with “scratch marks”.
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Lauren said would get bruises on her legs “out of nowhere” while in the house which she couldn’t explain.
On the Saturday of the weekend in June, Lauren claims she suddenly got the feeling that "someone shoved something down the back of my throat."
She also said there were a few arguments between her and her husband, 24, and they both felt “frustrated”.
Things though came to a head on Sunday.
She said: "We were just chilling out and it got to 8pm and I put Caleb to bed. We were sat in the garden and then I heard him screaming and I wouldn't dare go in. I could hear him saying 'get off me!' and 'leave me alone!'"
Over the weekend, Lauren’s brother had been staying with them and, so as not to scare him, she said her son “just had a nightmare”.
But she added: "As soon as I said that, the bathroom light just turned off. That night, at 2am, we left home and went to my mam's in a taxi."
They have since called on the North East Paranormal Investigations team to try to find out what is going on.
The group set up a Facebook Live whilst at the Acklam home and captured video footage of the claimed paranormal activity.
Lauren said: "We came back around [to the house] and when I went in the kitchen, the fridge freezer had been left open. I was sat in the bathroom and the [paranormal team] were asking questions saying, 'was that you who left the fridge open that day?' Then the bathroom light turned off.
"She said 'if you want us to go and leave this property now, turn the light on.' And then it turned the light back on."
Cameras were set up around the house by the investigators, with one camera put in the back bedroom, where Lauren says “hairs stand up on end” when she goes in.
She said: "When she'd set the cameras up, we all walked out of the room to go downstairs to leave the property. When I walk out of the room, a few minutes later, someone turns the camera round to face out the window."
Now that the family have moved out, Lauren says “everything has stopped” and Caleb no longer sleepwalks.
She said: "I believed in it to a point. You see it in movies but you don't think it's going to happen to you.
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"We've literally had to get up and move. We had no other choice. I'd say it was very traumatising.
“My son is still wary, he daren't still go upstairs because he thinks that something is there still."
