EII021 - "Tim and Fire"

Write-up by Eerie Investigations, 7th January 2006.

Eerie Investigations were recently contacted by a man and his family who experienced a variety of disturbing phenomena over a period of months. In order to protect their daughter, they have requested to remain anonymous, but have generously allowed us to post their experiences online. To preserve their anonymity, their names and locations have been removed, some paraphrasing has been done, and the name of one of the entities has been changed.

Myself, my partner, and her 3-year old daughter live in a middle-floor flat in <removed>. About 6 months ago our little girl started talking about 2 people "Tim" and "Fire". She had never really been exposed to anything relating to fire (we have no fireplace, and as she was so young we hadn't taken her to or even talked about bonfires) and so we thought it odd that she called it "fire".

She would point out where "Fire" was standing and told us that he had told her to open the window and "fly, fly away" It was the middle of the night when she first told us this by coming into our bedroom and waking us up. It was quite bizarre, but we thought "kids have imaginary friends" and so as the days passed and she continued talking about, and then more worryingly talking TO, "Tim" and "Fire" we just let it pass and did not encourage her.

These two characters faded out over time as even stranger things started to occur and all three of us were more consumed with a seemingly mischievous and eventually malevolent spirit which entered the flat.

The first instance of anything happening to anyone else was shortly afterwards. My partner felt upset one night and crying in bed while I was asleep. There was no particular reason, she just felt low and to this day cannot explain why. From the foot of the bed she heard her name called by a distinctively male voice. She shrugged it off twice, but after the third time she was positive that there was somebody mere feet away calling her name. She didn't sleep that night and vows that what she heard was not her subconcious.

Only a few days later, she was lying on the couch, I had again gone to bed as I had to go to work early the next day. She began to hear footsteps walking across the living room carpet, followed by a volley of whispers in her ear. This exact same thing occured the next night, but this time it instead happened to her sister who was staying at our flat. Until this time we had not spoken to her sister about any of the activities.

The next incident was, in my opinion, the second most significant of the whole affair. At approximately 12:30am on a Friday night/Saturday morning I was chatting to my partner's other sister via my webcam in an Internet chatroom. Our daughter was fast asleep and my partner was sitting on the couch. I had the camera pointed towards myself and the hallway behind me, when on the camera screen window I suddenly saw a white face which moved from one side of the hall to the other and then an outline of a body bending over appeared under the face as it made fluid movements and then disappeared. It seemed to me like it was a mature female figure, and frankly it scared the life out of me. As I began to type to her sister to say what I'd seen she typed "Who was that woman behind you just then? I think you have ghosts" which confirmed to me exactly what I had seen.

From this point on there wasn't a night when something didn't happen. Doors would shut by themselves, voices called from our girl's room when she was fast asleep, we and a creepy cobweb-like feeling in certain places of the flat coinciding with drafts of cold air from unfathomable directions.

Things finally reached a head when one night we put our girl to bed and suddenly saw her physically shake in front of us - however this wasn't any kind of convulsion, parts of her head and torso were almost levitated from the bed.

We grabbed her, wrapped a coat around her and ran over to spend the night with her aunt - of course we left the webcam running whenever we left the house but caught nothing. The following evening we all came back home and everything was fine - seemingly too quiet after all that had been happening.

For about a week nothing happened, but we were still talking about all of the phenomena and occasionally there was obvious fear in me or my partner.

This continued until one night, when we were going through our usual routine of putting our girl to bed and getting dinner for ourselves before putting a film on to watch. About half an hour into the film our girl came running into the living room more upset than we'd ever seen her, and frantic with panic.

She had red marks - adult finger size - all over her body, even on her face and on her back, legs, arms and torso. I thought this must be a rash, as finger marks would show up white, but as we were trying to calm her down the marks began to disappear and vanish.

I can't see any medical explanation in the journals for this. We decided that since whatever it was now seemed to feel it had the right to physically assault our daughter that it was time to leave. And so we again wrapped her up and took her to her aunts.

After a few hours, I returned to the flat feeling angry, and although being scared I also felt that whatever did this was now more frightened of me than I was ot it, and I decided to spend the night alone with it.

I left our girl's bedroom light on. Actually I turned most of the lights on, for comfort, and I began to challenge whatever was there to show itself. I called it a coward, telling it that it knew we would get rid of it for good and saying that it wasn't welcome. Several things began to happen after this. The television in our daughters room turned itself on when I was in the lounge, I went in and turned it off and left the room - only to hear it turn back on. This happened 3 or 4 times. This was followed by a series of moans, the last of which came right into my left ear and made me jump out of my skin. I would have said it was a man and, although a cliched phrase, it was the most haunting thing I'd ever heard. Even stranger was that I could almost feel a breath on my face as it happened.

I stood my ground and continued to challenge the entity, and by now I wasn't as frightened. On several occassions I ignored the odd noises and just sat waiting for more. Strangely, when my partner and daughter returned the next day, they both said they were not scared of anything and we all agreed that we should just go back to our everyday routine and ignore it.

Nothing has happened to our little girl since. She has forgotten about "Tim" and "Fire" and she doesn't remember the nights we took her out of there.

My partner, who was visibly shaken by some of the events, has admitted when out of the flat of being scared at home sometimes and even hearing the noises on the carpet since that night. I too have heard this since, but we both have ignored it or been completely dismissive and downright rude to whatever was in the flat.

Nothing has happened now for about 6 months. We know there is something there, it feels like there isn't - we don't get coldspots or hear anything anymore - but in the back of our minds we are aware, and ready for if it starts again.