CREEPING DEATH

As requested, readers of this site have contributed stories featuring supernatural phenomena. 60 year old Jeff Anderson from Washington, County Durham, talked of his experiences.

The paranormal equates to something or some activity that is unknown now but is likely to be known and possibly understood in the future. So, a good example of paranormal activity would include ghost sightings and other spiritual activity of that nature.

It’s the stuff of sixth sense, which we are all aware of in situations when somebody is staring at us from behind, we look around and sure enough someone is. And vice-versa when we stare at someone suddenly they become aware of our stare.

I have over the last few years been equally fortunate and unfortunate to have been exposed to very real paranormal activity.

It was the very height of the Covid-19 pandemic I had been to Lidl one Saturday morning, nothing unusual there. Bonnie my German Shepherd was eagerly awaiting my return to the car. No sooner had I done so when quite inexplicably the car radio started playing and this despite being most definitely being switched off. I had the presence of mind to video the occurrence for future reference.

It sounded like Metallica playing but I wasn’t sure of the song. It turned out to be Creeping Death. I learned later it’s a song about the Biblical pass over featuring the Angel of Death. Creepy right?

On my weekly visit to my elderly parents house I explained to them the car radio occurrence and showed them the video I made that day. I felt someone somewhere was trying to communicate something.

In an instant a powerful gust of wind blew in through the upstairs front bedroom window, it came down the stairs twisting and turning and blew into the living room with such force that it actually blasted open the living room doors. It then turned back on itself and blew out of a small living room window. I mentioned it to my parents but they didn’t want to discuss it.

Unfortunately, my mother suffered a stroke a few year later. One afternoon I visited her in hospital with my Auntie. My mother occupied a room with three other stroke patients. There were just the six of us in the room on this occasion with no medical staff in attendance.

Of the four stroke patients three were asleep including my mam. The other patient was awake lying on her back, staring at the ceiling and occasionally crying out for her mother every few minutes or so, even though she was in her 70s herself. She was unaware of anything going on around her due to a possible dementia diagnosis.

The next thing it started raining mixed with hail and with such force and intensity I thought the window nearest to her might be blown in. After a short while things settled down.

However, the woman in the bed nearest the window was like someone possessed, she no longer cried out for her mother and was now fully aware. She turned her head and looked directly at me in the eye, diverting her gaze away from the ceiling. She even attempted to get out of bed at one point and come over to me. It was then I decided it was a goodtime to leave.

Sadly, my mother died a few months later. Two nights before her funeral I had left my bedroom window open only to be awoken at 3am by a strong gust of wind, so powerful it took every ounce of my physical strength to slam the window shut. Before I managed to close it the wind blasted me directly in the face, at which point an image of mother’s face unexpectedly appeared in my mind’s eye.

More revelations of supernatural phenomena will feature on this site. If you want to share your experience don’t hesitate to get in touch.

October 2025

THE FALLING ANGEL

As requested, readers of this site have contributed stories featuring supernatural phenomena. A regular reader from South Shields shares her experience.

My ghostly event, and I can call it an event, happened thirty years ago at my late husband’s private memorial service. This account of the super natural happening is not only true it’s also factual. There are still people alive who witnessed the spectacle to tell the tale. There were other remarkable incidents before and after my late husband’s death but I have chosen to share with your readers ‘The Falling Angel’ episode.

Before the service I had spent some hours at the local church arranging floral displays. Andrew, the Reverend, popped in to admire the colourful stage set. There were several pedestals of white roses amongst autumn foliage, all linked with strings of white simulated pearls. A complete stranger had run her fingers along the strings remarking they were many tears of love.

The Reverend had asked me why the central pedestal was standing empty. I let him know I was intending to place my late husband’s photograph on top of it. It was the last one taken of him only weeks ago when we were touring the eastern seaboard of Canada. However, the Reverend offered me an alternative to the pedestal.

Hours later, a congregation of about thirty people sat in church in total silence with their heads bowed as the coffin was respectfully placed in front of the altar draped with a purple velvet cloth.

The Reverend began the service of love by welcoming the rows of tearful mourners. Then he walked over and took the photograph of my late husband from me and placed it firmly on the brass eagle lectern. Tears filled my eyes as I looked at my late husband’s image smiling back at me, resting on the eagle’s outstretched wings. The romantic scene was complete.

As he started to speak something unexpected happened causing a murmuring from the congregation. The photo fell to the floor. The Reverend returned it to the stand. He continued his soliloquy but not for long as the photo fell from the stand again. Visibly shaken he returned it for a second time.

As he replaced it, he mumbled some inaudible words before turning towards the shocked mourners. Everyone watched as the photograph moved forward and crashed to the floor for a third time. The glass in the frame shattered.

The service of love came to an abrupt end. I felt a deep urge to walk across and rescue the mischievous culprits image announcing with a smile ‘My husband is determined that he doesn’t want to be put on a pedestal’.

More revelations of supernatural phenomena will feature on this site. If you want to share your experience don’t hesitate to get in touch.

October 2025

ART FOR ART’S SAKE in conversation with animator Sheila Graber

Meeting up with contributors to this site I’ve asked how they survive in the arts. Some talk of persistence and others simply being obsessed by it. I think to give yourself a good chance you’ve got to be prepared to work on it day in day out basically 24/7/365 days a year.

85 year old Sheila featured on this site in June 2018 where she talked about spending her life in art – so she was the perfect person to ask.

Surviving in the arts is for me going with the flow. I believe in my Mam’s saying ‘Every day in every way in everyday I’m getting better and better’ particularly when you are feeling crap or when things have gone wrong. In the arts you need this saying because there are times when things just don’t happen for you. Tempered with that my Dad used to say ‘worse things happen at sea’! So never, never, give up. Keep positive and keep going.

After attending Art College Sheila then went to Birmingham School for Training Art Teachers in 1961.

That was the best thing to happen to me. I was shown that everyone is an artist in their own way and it’s your job as an art teacher to bring it out. It’s about giving something positive to people in their lives.

I first taught art in comprehensive schools in South Shields and by 1970 I was divorced and had time to play so bought a super 8 cine camera. Play is very important plus having a messy room or studio where no one tidies up after you!

My first messy place was at home in South Shields working at a desk looking out onto our little garden. Later it was a studio in the Pilot Office overlooking the river Tyne. Then by the mid 70s I got a break in animation.

I was contacted by an agent for World TV who sold the short films I made globally. She later commissioned me to animate 10×10 minute ‘Just So Stories’. The actual process of animation can take a long time to produce minutes on video so the only way I could produce this was to give up teaching – which I did in 1980.

Sheila animating Frame by Frame for World TV and her Mam crocheting for a local shop – a true cottage industry.

Sheila also works with various charities, the last post features Anna Malia and North East Animal Rights, how did you get involved with them?

When I lived in Ireland I saw an incident, not to go into it here too much as it’s really upsetting, but there was a field of cows and a calf that broke free from the herd. It was about how it was dealt with by the farmer that really affected me. I thought if I get the chance I would do something for you – for that calf.

I heard a song by North East musician Jen Stevens, loved it, and thought that would really work with images. I asked Jen if I could use it and she said yes. We put it out and Anna Malia from North East Animal Rights got in touch and we took it from there.

Link to Jen Stevens song & video >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMDkdZ3TaEk

Sheila is currently working on a book about George McVay, a little known artist who lived from 1902-1967. Former Shields Gazette journalist Janis Blower is in the process of editing it.

George was a very good photographer which accounts for the very large detail in his pictures. His style of painting was very photographic. When I was 8 my mam bought a set of his prints that the Gazette had commissioned and I loved looking at them like kids look at ipads now. For a long time I done plasticene models of them.

All his life he drew some amazing illustrations of Shields and surrounding areas. Some people may recognise his black and white drawings, very clear, very precise everything from the old Town Hall to the piers, the river and the Groyne. In the book Janis Blower will be adding underneath a description and history of George’s picture.

In his early days I gather he worked at Readhead Shipyard, he was studying planning, design and engineering. His Dad was mayors secretary at South Shields Town Hall and was a good photographer. It’s thought he said to his son that he should work in the Town Hall and he eventually did, he was employed in the ratings department.

Out of the goodness of his heart he’s done drawings for presentations at the town hall. There are some amazing manuscripts, whatever was required he could do it even when people leave. He also done commissions for the Shields Gazette.

The Shields museum have some in their store. He has stuff in the Hancock and Discovery museum, Newcastle. He did a showing at the Laing Art Gallery and down in London but all track of that is lost. Unfortunately, nobody has given him the recognition that he deserves.

What I’ve found over the years is that he and I have followed parallel tracks. We have both done a lot of work for charity and both drawn the most popular buildings and views in Shields because we love the place.

To contact Sheila check out her official site at >>>

Products — SHEILA GRABER ART

Alikivi  July 2025

LISTEN TO YOUR HEART in conversation with Tyneside songwriter Rosie Anderson

Now living in South Shields, retired teacher Rosie Anderson still feels there is work to do and more stories to tell.

‘Sometimes I feel as though I’m just getting started. I sing whenever I can. This year my musical partner Adam Holden and I have played at The Watch House in Cullercoats, The White Room in Stanley and Cockermouth Festival which were all great. I’m determined not to just bow out because I’m getting older’.

‘I grew up in Wylam in the Tyne Valley, in a house full of music. Both my Grandparents played piano. My dad listened to The Beatles, both parents loved the theatre and musicals and they took me and my brother there – I still love all that’.

‘When I was a kid I told my parents I wanted to be a performer but they were worried I wouldn’t be able to afford a home like them, they wanted me to have a ‘proper’ job. They wouldn’t let me study performing arts so I trained as a teacher’.

‘My first job was in Benwell, Newcastle. Then I went to the Middle East where I spent 10 years teaching in Kuwait and Qatar, before returning to Newcastle. I taught at Walkergate Primary School where I would do all the music shows and drama productions. Loved doing the shows there, I never gave lyric sheets out to the kids, they learned by listening and singing the songs back’.

‘When I left teaching I saw an advert for facilitators for  Singing for the Brain with the Alzheimers Society. I really loved doing that. I did that for six years until covid hit. Singing on-line with people on the screen in front of you didn’t work really’.

‘People love stories in whatever form, be it a book, a film or a song. Some people write songs about being in love, and about their feelings. My songs are mostly about people and places. I find stories present themselves to me and I take them and turn them into a song’.

‘There are two songs that I have written that stand out for me. Sally Smiths Lament was written after my husband Chris and I worked on a film about soldiers from County Durham during World War One’.

‘Sally was the wife of miner Fred Smith, who featured in our film. They lived in a tiny terraced house and every day Fred and his sons needed a bath, a clean shirt, a clean bed and a dinner. The kids needed to get to school – how did she cope with all that, especially when Fred was away at war. I wanted to give Sally, and all the women like her, a voice.’

‘When I wrote it the song just seemed to be presented to me, her whole life. I got to sing it at a celebration in West Auckland and her family came to hear it – it was very moving. It travelled well and won three competitions – the Newcastle Folk Club, Rothbury Traditional Music Festival and first prize at Morpeth Gathering’.

‘I can’t just decide to sit down and write a song – some people do and I applaud them for the discipline but I have to wait until they come. Three things happened to me in my life that I put together in a song called Breakdown’.

‘When I was a kid I lived at Chapel House Estate in the west end of Newcastle. One night me, my mother and a friend went for a walk. This woman came out of her house in her dressing gown, she wasn’t in control of herself, didn’t know what time or day it was. I had never seen that behaviour in an adult before. Now I believe she was having a nervous breakdown’.

‘That always stayed in my head and another one was when I was living in Fenham. I went to the shops with my children who were only small then, and a woman came out of her house with a letter and asked if I would read it to her as she was confused and couldn’t understand it’.

‘Then about 30 years ago I went on a blind date in Newcastle with this very nice bloke. He said I need to tell you something before we go any further ‘When I was working in Canada I had a nervous breakdown in the car park of a Burger King’. It was hard to concentrate on anything else after that’.

‘But I remembered those incidents and those three individual people are lodged in my heart for their own traumas. They gave me that song’.

‘This year we went to Kjerringoy a former trading post in the Norwegian Arctic Circle, out in the middle of nowhere, it was beautiful. A family ran it in the 19th century and had 3000 fishermen working for them, catching and processing thousands of tons of cod’.

‘The father and husband died and the wife continued to run it single-handed for many years until she eventually remarried. I asked the locals if there was a song about her and there isn’t. So that’s my next song – Annalisa from Kjerringoy. Her story needs to be told’.

‘I’m also aware we need to start telling more stories about people and their lives and jobs today otherwise in 100 years time there will be no one singing about us!‘

‘What does music mean to me? It’s hard to describe it, it’s so deeply embedded, there’s no life without it. Music is at the core of my being, there is no day without singing and because I have grandchildren now I have a new audience! We sing folk songs and songs from musicals, they’re word perfect when they sing them back’.

‘Music gives such joy, when I was singing with the Alzheimers Society the collective joy and reminiscences of songs from the past and enjoying it together was just so valuable for the families’.

‘We had people who wouldn’t sing at all but liked being there and that was fine. Once, two women brought their mother to a session and she sat between them. She didn’t communicate at all, had her head down, closed off you know. But when we started singing a song, I can’t remember which one, she lifted her head up and actually got up and started moving around in the middle of the circle’.

‘One daughter got up and started dancing with her. When we got to the end of the song the daughter turned round and said to me ‘She’s just said my name for the first time in years’.

‘Music gets right in there (pointing at heart) we’ve got to keep it going and expose our youngest children and oldest adults to music because it really does reach parts that others can’t reach. It’s like hearing the heartbeat in your mother’s womb’.

‘As a child I wanted to do music, as an adult I taught it with kids then people with dementia, despite my age I’m still committed to what I always wanted to do. Women who’ve had careers and families can still chase their dreams’.

Alikivi   September  2024