WHAT’S YOUR H TRYING TO TELL

Not everyone gets a warm, welcoming feeling when they walk in their front door. Novelist Stacey Halls, whose own first flat gave her the creeps, meets the ‘house healers’ clearing people’s homes of negative energies and spooky vibes

The first home I ever bought was a mistake. I knew it from the minute we arrived as first-time homeowners with hundreds of bags and boxes piled in the street behind us. On paper, the flat in Southeast London was just what my husband and I wanted: two bedrooms, high ceilings and a large garden. But in the chaos of moving day, a niggling thought that we’d got it wrong just wouldn’t leave me alone.

Damp appeared in places that didn’t make sense, and I always felt cold there. One winter evening, when I was home alone, a standing lamp in the corner of the living room suddenly started to shudder violently, shaking and ringing like a bell. My husband raised an eyebrow when I told him; friends offered up the bus route on our road as an explanation. It didn’t feel like a haunting, just a physical manifestation of the gloom that had settled in our rooms.

I never wanted to be alone in the house, and stayed with friends if my husband was away. Home should be a place of sanctuary, yet it felt like a stranger’s house, like a relationship I didn’t want to be in. I developed TMJ, a painful jaw condition, from grinding my teeth. I spent as little time as possible at home, and wrote my second novel from the local library.

I pined for our previous rental, where we lived for six years, and in which I felt totally comfortable. I combed Rightmove on a daily basis, looking at what we could have, should have bought, and spent as little time at home as possible. Unable to afford the stamp duty on somewhere else, we stuck it out for two years before putting it on the market. I am aware how nauseatingly privileged that sounds, to ‘not like’ the house I was lucky enough to be able to buy. But not feeling at home in my own home was a hard feeling to ignore.

I’ve always been sensitive to the energy of old homes, attuned to their moods and histories. I grew up in a new-build, but ever since I was a child, historic buildings have fascinated me, and I’ve felt as though I connected with them in some way.

On the same road as my childhood home was a former workhouse, a colossal Victorian relic that had been home to more than 300 inmates. I would play in the gardens, but never went too close to the building. It seemed such a melancholy place, as though it was carrying the weight of the world in its bricks.

A ten-minute walk from my parents’ house is a small museum in a former mill owner’s home where there is a drawing room I’ve never been able to go inside