Most “true” horror stories begin with a few bumps in the night and spooky noises, before building up to some suitably nasty apparitions – and, if you’re particularly unlucky, a spot of demonic possession. But in this week’s episode of the Channel 4 anthology series True Horror, the docu-drama’s reconstruction of a “real-life haunting” took a bizarre – and unusually physical – turn.
Mother and professional medium Sam Bennetts, who appears in the show, joined with the programme-makers to recount a terrifying event that she claims happened to her daughter Meemi-Rose, back in 2001. Meemi-Rose, a toddler at the time, was reportedly approached by the ghost of her deceased paternal grandfather – and then pulled into (and through) a solid wall.
Bennetts, she says, was downstairs with a friend when it happened. She believed Meemi-Rose had gone upstairs to retrieve a toy – but was disturbed by “a deafening, piercing scream”. She ran upstairs and was horrified to find her daughter missing before spotting, in the skirting board next to her bed, something that looked like “two tiny soles of a pair of children’s shoes – the same size as Meemi-Roses’s shoes”.
“The two little shoes called to me, and my gut instinct told me to grab hold and pull,” Bennetts would later write in her autobiographical e-book Clairvoyant or Crazy?, which recounts her various experiences with the paranormal. “Slowly, but surely, the soft pink skin of two legs emerged, followed by the entire body of my daughter!”
Afterwards, her daughter’s eyes had turned black, the whites swallowed up by darkness. The little girl, who was shaking with fear, slowly calmed down, and her colouring returned to normal.
It sounds incredible – but Bennetts, who says she understands why people might find her tale hard to swallow, is adamant that it all happened, just as shown in the TV series (apart from the fact that, in the show, Bennetts – played by Katie Jarvis – smashes down the wall, rather than just pulling her daughter through it).
What’s more? She believes she has ample evidence that the entity responsible for the attempted kidnap was the ghost of her father-in-law, Jim.
Jim, or Jimmy, had died in 1992, almost a decade before the events outlined above. Before his death, he reportedly used to joke that, when he passed away, he would live on “in the wall”. It wasn’t, however, until she nearly lost baby daughter Sigourni, an older sister of Meemi-Rose’s, that Bennetts began to suspect that her father-in-law’s spirit might be lingering in our world with sinister intent. Sigoiurni, while still a baby, was rushed to hospital with breathing problems.
Doctors told her frantic parents, Bennetts and husband Jason, to prepare for the worst. Around this time, while waiting at the hospital, both began seeing visions of Jim – and, when they telephoned Jason’s mother, Jim’s widow, she had chilling news to impart. “Jimmy came to me in my sleep,” she said (according to Bennetts’s book). “He said he was lonely and that he had come to take one of the children back with him.”
After witnessing Sam and Jason’s distress, Jim had apparently changed his mind – and, from that moment, Sigourni began to recover. “I felt badly that he’d been lonely and wanted company, but how dare he think he could take my daughter?” Bennetts wrote.
For a while, things seemed to quieten down. But the incident with Meemi-Rose, the mother believes, was a second attempt, on the part of Jim, to steal away one of her children. After the encounter, her daughter would speak about an elderly man luring her into the wall with sweets – and would later identify her grandfather, via a photograph, as the person she’d seen.
It’s tempting to react with scoffing disbelief, or at least raise an internal eyebrow. It’s also arguably impossible to give much credence to the recollections of Meemi-Rose, given her remarkably young age at the time (how many tangible memories, after all, does anyone have from when they were two?). But director Rob Savage, who made the episode and spent time with the Bennetts family, says that, while he can’t comment directly on the wall incident, he’s certain Sam herself is sincere.
A mother of seven, Bennetts has had a tough life, losing multiple pregnancies. In late 2009 she would also suffer the trauma of a stillborn daughter, Pixi, while in 2012 she would suffer a second loss, of son Kydd, a baby “born too early”. It’s clear that the tragedies had a profound effect on the mother and her family, inspiring Bennetts to publish her book and share her experiences – and her belief in a largely unseen world of ghosts and spirits. She now works as a professional medium, offering clairvoyant services and readings, and has appeared on the Channel Five show Celebrity Ghost Hunter.
“As a horror director, I am very sceptical of everything I hear – I've seen almost every horror movie under the sun, and most ‘true’ ghost stories barely amount to more than a bunch of B-movie cliches. But every so often I hear a story that I just can't shake,” Savage, who is currently turning his acclaimed 2016 horror short Dawn of the Deaf into a feature film, told The Telegraph. “After speaking with Sam, her family and the people involved, I am convinced that they went through a traumatic, unexplainable experience. Whether that is supernatural or psychological, nobody can ever know, but within a few minutes of conversation I felt very strongly that Sam and her family were authentic.”
He was, he says, immediately attracted to the Bennetts and their story. “Ghosts aside, there's a powerful, relatable story about family and grief at the centre of Sam Bennetts's experience. The heart of the episode is a mother fighting for her children and striving towards the life she's always wanted.”
The episode itself, he says, offers a largely accurate reflection of the family’s ordeal. “It was important to everyone who worked on the show that we remained faithful to the testimony of the people involved, and while it's impossible to say for sure what really happened, we worked hard to stay true to the spirit (pun not intended) of what these people went through.
"I became very friendly with the Bennetts family, and recorded hours of off-camera interviews before writing the script. I borrowed their home videos as reference for our own VHS sections, and had Sam on speed-dial to answer even the smallest questions I'd have about the events.”
When we caught up with Bennetts, to get her take on the Channel 4 drama, she happily agreed that the TV show gets most things right, give or take a few details. But she was also keen to stress that, for her, the events it shows are just a small part of her experiences with the supernatural. “What you see is only a little bit. It’s my life,” she says. “There are lots of spirits [in my house]. Not just my father-in-law.” She believes working as a medium, travelling the country to take part in seances and readings, may have attracted the ghosts to her home.
The incident with Meemi-Rose and the wall, however, remains her most frightening supernatural experience to date. The physicality of it – the sucking of a person into a solid object – is apparently a comparatively rare phenomenon, even among those who have experienced hauntings. It also, initially, made Bennett determined to move: “When what happened happened, I wanted out of that house immediately. My body was shaking.” Later, however, she decided she wouldn’t be forced out. “It’s my home.”
Seemingly self-aware and down-to-earth, Bennetts openly admits that she’s questioned her own sanity at times, especially when it comes to the psychic readings she does: “I still question where does it come from? I’m hearing things…. Am I crazy? Have I lost the plot?”.
But she says that testimony from other witnesses, confirming the things she’s seen and heard, and validation from those who respond to her seances, have kept her convinced. Yvonne, depicted in the episode, and other friends – including self-professed-sceptics – all claim to have seen, heard or felt things in her home. Even Savage admits to experiencing some unsettling feelings while researching the show.
“When I visited Sam's house, and saw the room in which her child Meemi was supposedly pulled through the wall, I definitely felt a chill up my spine,” he says. I'm still very much on-the-fence about the paranormal, but I made sure to not close my mind to anything while researching. I even joined a spiritualist church for some of the production, and took part in a dozen seances. Nobody made contact with me, but it was fascinating engaging with that community.”
That said, he believes it’s best to approach the episode and the True Horror series in an open-minded way, enjoying it for what it is rather than quibbling over its absolute veracity.
“Ultimately, True Horror is more of a horror movie than a documentary, in that our aim is to scare the audience rather than provide counter-balance and scientific inquiry. Imagine True Horror as a scary story told around the campfire and you will enjoy it much more than if you go in expecting answers...”
True Horror is on Channel 4, 10pm, Thursdays
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