Hi, listeners, it's your host, Tanya. There's a new podcast I
think you'll like, and I'm gonna tell you about it. It's called ghost
Story. Journalist Tristan Redman is going where no son in law should ever go,
deep into his wife's family history, digging up the cold case of his
wife's murdered great grandmother and asking questions no one in the family wants answered.
Oh, and did I mention that he's looking into whether the murderer was actually
his wife's great grandfather, the beloved family patriarch. Well, this all started
with a ghost, that's right, a ghost. Growing up, Weird things
would happen in Tristan's bedroom, objects moving around with no explanation, lights switching
themselves on and off, But ultimately he shrugged all of this off until a
couple years ago, when he discovered that every subsequent occupant of his old room
was convinced they'd experienced inexplicable things in there too. From Wondery and Pineapple Street
Studios comes ghost Story, a podcast about family secrets, overwhelming coincidence, and
the strange things that come back to haunt us. I'm about to play a
clip from ghost Story. Follow a Ghost story on the Wondery app or wherever
you get your podcasts. I want to tell you his story. Well,
it's really three stories all wrap around each other. It's a ghost story,
it's a murder mystery, and it's a family drama, by which I mean
it's about my wife's family, her family's history. And there's a chance they'll
disown me for doing this. If you come out with a piece that says
he was a murderer, then I will be sorry that we ever said we
would contribute to it. But before we get into any of that, let's
start at the beginning with the thing that set all of this in motion.
When I was sixteen, back in the nineties, my family moved to an
old Victorian house in London on a street called Queen's Road. I slept in
a bedroom tucked into the creaky top floor, and weird things would happen out
there. I'd wake up and objects would have moved across the room, specifically
this one vase. When I go to bed, it'd be on the mantelpiece,
and then in the morning i'd find it on the desk. I'd put
it back, and the next morning I'd find it somewhere else. Lights would
flash on and off on their own, and I'd get this uncomfortable, cold
feeling whenever I was alone in the house. It freaked me out at the
time, but the truth is I didn't really think much of it. I
was a teenager. I had other things on my mind. Every now and
then, I'd ask my sister she was messing with me, but she always
swore she wasn't. I grew up, left home and became a journalist for
Al Dazeerra. I covered things like French labor strikes in the war in Ukraine.
I don't believe in ghosts, so when my family moved out of the
house on Queen's Road, I completely forgot about the weird stuff that happened in
there until that is a few years ago a man reached out an old neighbor
of ours with a story about that very room. I mean, it's quite
a story. His name is Charles Perinelli's and he knows everything about this neighborhood.
You could say he's a bit of a gossip, but you probably shouldn't.
Slander us gives completely the wrong impression. Anyway, this is what he
told me. Charles was walking around my old neighborhood one day, going door
to door collecting donations for the local museum. I was there rattling at and
definitely not gossiping. Well, I mean, it was just Surnsay is still
there, and surn Say has moved out, and they've had a divorce and
all that sort of business. Eventually he gets to my old house and knocks
on the door. A woman answers she's the mother of the house. After
chatting for a bit, she invites him inside and she tells him a story
unlike anything he's ever heard before. The story goes Americans swans up with a
hallo, and here's what she tells him. One day, the woman is
at home in my old house. She looks out of the window and she
sees a man standing on the driveway. So the mother of the house opens
the door. It's someone who used to live in the house, an American
man who'd lived there with his wife and two children. The American says to
her, I'm so sorry to bother you, but I just have to know,
do you still have that ghost in the top bedroom? Straight like that?
What? The American man proceeds to tell her the things his family experienced
on the top floor. It makes her go completely white, because this isn't
the first time she's heard of something going on up there, she just never
believed it before. Has struck a chord. Since the daughter had always insisted
that there was a ghost in her bedroom which would manifests itself on occasions and
sit on her bed. The woman's daughter, starting when she was around ten,
began complaining about a ghost visiting her room at night, specifically the ghost
of a faithless woman. She said to me, oh, yes, my
daughter told me about some goings on, some sort of faceless woman who comes
and sits on my bed, and she said, I always batted them away
on the basis that we don't believe in that sort of thing. So I
rang your father and he said that was Tristram's room. So I imagine he
phoned you and the cat was out of the bag. I promise you,
and I hope you believe me that I don't normally find myself having conversations like
this or even entertaining these sorts of ideas. But it's kind of weird,
right. You now have three completely unconnected families who have had some sort of
strange, inexplicable experience on the top floor of that house. I think it's
wonderful. It was definitely intriguing, but it probably wouldn't have been anything more
than a story i'd tell my friends in the pub. Except I couldn't stop
thinking about this faceless woman because there's another coincidence, something I hadn't thought about
in years. So I guess Christ and I had just started going out,
and they invited my parents around to his house to come and say hi.
I first learned about it where my wife Kate and I had just started dating
about twenty years ago. My family still lived in the house on Queen's Road,
the one with the supposed ghost, and Kate was staying with us,
and my granddad was in London, so they invited him over to She was
very close to her grandfather, so my folks asked if he join us.
So Granddad arrived. He's got nice rosy cheeks. Granddad, like all the
men in my family, he wore a berry every day to keep his bald
head warm. And then my granddad walked into the house and before he said
anything else, he said, my mother was murdered in the house next door.
And I don't think we had ever put two and two together between where
Chris lived and this big murder that happened in the family. To be clear,
I'd never heard about this murder before. In fact, Kate didn't know
a lot about it either, just that her great grandmother had been killed decades
before. She had no idea that it happened here. Neither of us had
any clue at the time that my new girlfriend's family had any connection to this
neighborhood, let alone the house next door. But the details of the murder
make the coincidence even stranger, because just next door to my house, the
house supposedly haunted my faceless woman, Kate's great grandmother was killed by two gunshots
to the face. Binge all episodes of ghost Story ad free right now by
joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.