It was the middle of the night in April 2020, and everything was “perfectly quiet”, says Mandy Dean. She lives alone in a two-bedroom flat in the north of England and doesn’t tend to go to sleep until around 2am. She was in bed, reading, when suddenly it sounded as if a heavy weight had been dropped on the bedside cabinet beside her. “I jumped out of bed, legged it out of the bedroom, and slept in the living room with the light on,” says Dean. “This happened three nights in a row, and on the fourth night, it was the same sort of noise, but it wasn’t at the side of the bed – it was in the wall right behind me.” She adds: “I’m going to sound crazy, but I know I’m not.”
After those four nights, the noises stopped for a couple of weeks, then started up again. Dean did everything she could to find an explanation. The flat below her was empty, but she asked another neighbour and he couldn’t explain it. She checked the heating, the pipes. “You think: ‘Am I actually hearing it?’ Maybe I’m getting a bit stir-crazy. Because of lockdown, my daughters couldn’t come to see if they heard it as well.”
