You Have To Come With Me, Conniburrow

Tonight’s story started with a chance encounter in a familiar place. I walk round Lodge Lake twice, maybe three times a week, and have done for the last year and a half. I go that way more often than ever these days—it’s the route I take to Precedent House, and I’m documenting its slow transition from abandoned relic to demolition site.

It’s so familiar that most of the time, I’m on autopilot: AirPods in, music on, walking fast.

That Saturday, though, something interrupted the pattern. I saw a couple coming out of a house I must have passed a hundred times. This time, I stopped. Recognition hit with a jolt—hey, I know you! A colleague from a long time ago, and her husband. We used to work together at the OU and she’d long since moved on, but it was genuinely lovely to see her again.

They were heading out for the evening, so we walked together for a bit. We chatted about life after the OU, and I shared that I was leaving too. Naturally, that led to the inevitable question: “So, what are you going to be doing?”

And that’s how we got onto ghosts. These days, sooner or later, it’s always ghosts.

I mentioned the blog and how it feels like everyone I talk to has a story to share. She laughed, nudged John, and said, “You should tell her yours.”

We stopped in the middle of the pavement and there in the golden light of a perfect May evening, he laid it all out for me. And though he told it with a calm, even voice, the story he shared made my skin crawl.

A content note before we get going: John’s experience contains references to cancer and the loss of a family member.

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This all happened in Conniburrow, back in 1981. The house was new then, a 1979 vintage. John was 21.

On the night when it happened, he was alone, asleep in bed.

Suddenly, he woke in panic: something was grabbing his ankles. Shaking him. Hard.

He could feel fingers—long, strong, distinct—wrapped around his shins, as though trying to drag him from the edge of sleep, or worse, pull him out of bed entirely.

At first, groggy and terrified, he thought he must be dreaming. But there was no comforting blur of unreality and none of the confusion he would normally feel waking in the small hours. He had the sharp, lucid knowledge of something wrong in the room.

And then he saw it.

A tall, thin figure stood at the foot of his bed. Cloaked. Hooded. Faceless. Holding him fast.

Then, slowly, deliberately, it released its death-grip to raise one thin arm and point past him, gesturing towards the far end of the house.

In that moment, a deep plummeting dread overcame him—a hollow drop of the heart that came with a wordless understanding of what the figure was trying to tell him.

You have to come with me.

And inside the turmoil of his terrified mind, he screamed his visceral response: I’m not ready!

He did the only thing he could. He yanked the covers over his head like a frightened child, heart pounding. He lay frozen, ears straining, breath shallow.

Blinded by the covers and too afraid to even peek out, he eventually found he could force himself to reach out. Hand trembling, he groped for the radio on his bedside table. He felt a desperate need to hear voices, to replace the weighted silence that filled the room with something familiar, something human. He switched it on and clung to that distant lifeline of voices until morning finally came.

I’d like to just pause here, and think about how endlessly long that night must have felt for John, tuned in to the whispers of strangers in the blanket-shrouded darkness. Too scared to check whether the presence was still there, too scared to fall asleep in case those hands closed around his shins again, or worse — what if this time, it went for his throat?

But the night did pass, and eventually the sun rose. And at least for John, that was the end of that nightmare because the figure never returned. He never experienced any of it — the grip, the shaking, that frightful presence — ever again.

However, the memory stayed. Buried deep, but still sharp. As he told me this, we were standing in full sunshine, and it was a beautiful evening — soft air, birdsong, and the faint scent of the lake beyond. I thought that was the end, and honestly, I’d have been happy to leave it there. I could have gone home, and written it all up as one of those eerie, one-off encounters. Another square complete.

But then he went on.

And as the rest of the story unfolded, the warmth seemed to vanish. It might as well have been December.

For several years, John lived alone in that same house, until eventually, his grandmother needed to move in. She hadn’t been well and one afternoon, he passed by her room—the one at the end of the house. (The one the figure had pointed to.)

She was sitting up in bed, smiling and talking.

But apart from her, the room was empty.

She was animated, completely engaged as though greeting a dear friend. John, struck by the strangeness of it all, didn’t interrupt. He stepped away before she noticed him, unsure what he’d seen, and somehow unwilling to ask.

Maybe the words just wouldn’t come. Maybe some part of him already knew what the answer would be.

John lowered his voice when he told me that not long afterwards, his grandmother had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and needed urgent surgery. He looked away when he told me how she died during the operation.

It was only after she died that he realised what he’d witnessed—when he remembered the direction the figure had pointed, and began to wonder whether his grandmother had been speaking to her own version of the same dark presence that had once stood at the foot of his bed.

Whether she had received a summoning of her own.

And whether, for her, she already knew that her time to go was drawing near.

I’d never been to Conniburrow before I went along to take these pictures. It’s one of the earliest neighbourhoods in Milton Keynes, a grid square from the late 70s. Neat brick houses. Plenty of parks and green space. All designed to feel safe, contained and modern.

There’s a big park right in the middle with the charming name of Friendship Park. The theme is brought home with lots of benches for sitting and chatting, and several of these pieces of exercise equipment in stylised human form. I amused myself photographing them, trying to shift my perspective to get a suitably spooky angle but it was no good, the morning was just too damned bright and cheerful. I found myself wishing it was autumn: I could just imagine how it would feel to come across these on a dank November morning, all sharp angles and ominous arms looming out of the fog. You’ll just have to make do with black and white 🙂

John eventually left Conniburrow and moved out to Great Holm—to the very house he had just left on that beautiful Saturday evening when our paths crossed by chance.

Great Holm is nicer, he thinks. Quieter. Less haunted, he joked.

(I didn’t mention that I’ve already written about the playground just around the corner—where ghost children are said to play after dark. But I did give him a flyer, so maybe he’s seen it by now!)

John hid from the terrifying figure at the end of his bed.

He wasn’t ready, he didn’t want to follow where the dark figure was pointing. I don’t blame him.

Later tonight, when you switch off the light, climb under your duvet and settle down to sleep…

Don’t look too closely towards the foot of the bed.

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