The Shadow on the Stairs, Fuller’s Slade

Our story tonight marks a quiet milestone.

I’ve worked in data and analytics for a long time, and it’s second nature to me that for pretty much every situation, there’s a spreadsheet. So, it’s probably no surprise that I’ve been keeping careful count of how close I’m getting to my goal: a ghost in every grid square.

And as of this post, we’re officially one-fifth of the way there.

Yes — this is the twenty-second square that contains either one of my original investigations, or a story so generously shared by someone else. Post by post, the Redways are surrendering their secrets.

There’s still a long road ahead — 112 squares in total, and only 22 complete — but we’re getting there, and I know there are so many stories still to hear. We’ll get there, together.

Jadee shared two stories with me, and her first takes us to Fullers Slade — one of Milton Keynes’ earliest estates, where sharp-angled redbrick terraces rise with sci-fi starkness along the edge of Galley Hill. She grew up in one of the tall, three-storey houses on Woolmans, a street tucked behind the playing fields and stitched into the slope of the land. You can still see traces of the city’s original idealism here — generous green spaces, dense planting, and the soft hush of the Redway winding between it all.

But in amongst those optimistic design principles, something stranger crept in.

“I was only very young but would speak to a boy on the stairs,” Jadee told me.

“My parents thought I was the weirdest kid.”

Not an imaginary friend. Not someone she invented. Just… a boy. Always there. Always silent. A presence she accepted without question, the way children often do.

Inside Jadee’s house, other oddities stirred. Orbs of light floated through her bedroom. Shadows pooled in corners that should have been empty.

The houses along Woolmans still look striking today. All stacked floors and sharp geometry — a maze of blind corners and quiet stairwells. Over time, the estate has worn a little at the edges, but it holds a strange, raw kind of beauty. Especially around the hill.

Right in the middle, a pair of grassy mounds rise unexpectedly from the earth — smooth, steep, and crowned by whispering trees. On a sunny May morning, they were almost picturesque. I couldn’t help imagining that there was something slumbering deep inside. There’s something about them — the shape, the stillness — that feels as though one day, whatever it is might wake up, stretch and emerge.

I clambered up to the top of the nearest mound, sat cross legged on the top, and read Jadee’s story again there, looking around me at the houses. Of course, I don’t know which one was her family home growing up, but it’s easy to imagine a child standing halfway up those steps of any of them, pausing, sensing someone nearby who shouldn’t be there.

Years later, in a different part of the city, Jadee experienced something similar and possibly linked. A new home. A very different kind of haunting. You can read that part of the story here.

For now, we leave her as a child in Fullers Slade — standing on those stairs, talking to someone no one else could see.

Because sometimes, what we meet in childhood never truly leaves us.

Sometimes, it just waits.

Thank-you to Jadee for trusting me with your story, and thank YOU for reading!
If you have a story of your own to share, I’d really love to hear it.