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Writer's pictureStacia Briggs

RAF Feltwell: “I realised I was reaching out towards the black shape from my bed…”

The following story of a haunted room at RAF Feltwell was told in April 2023 on a website which has itself been a ghost since 2011. The hauntedrafbases.wordpres.com website has only one entry, and it is about Norfolk’s Feltwell station, used in both World Wars and in the Cold War before becoming a housing estate for the American Air Force: the post was written more than 12 years ago.



Underneath the entry are an assortment of creepy stories from those who experienced something unexplained while working on the Feltwell base. But it is the post from an author called Clint, which is the most disturbing…and the most recent.


“I was stationed at Lakenheath from 1992 to 1995 and I lived in the dormitories on Feltwell for those three years. My room was HAUNTED,” he writes.


“There’s a lot of things I’d like to say were my imagination, but there’s a few things that would go on that defied explanation.”


Clint had a room to himself, having reached a high enough rank to warrant his own private quarters: it was a good-sized room with windows on two sides and the peace and quiet that came with not sharing walls with anyone else.


“The downside was that at night, the room took on a completely different air. There was that sense that you’re not alone. An alertness to something ‘being there’,” he wrote.


“The first thing that started to happen is that my bed would shake. It would just start shaking as soon as I got into bed. I would try to ignore it. That was always my way of dealing with the things that went on in that room.” Clint tried to replicate the shaking during the day, fidgeting his feet or moving around in the bunk bed to see if he was subconsciously causing the movement.


“The bed, however,” he wrote, “would shake as if someone had grabbed the frame from the end and would shake it back and forth. I couldn’t manage it myself, no matter how exaggerated I got. It did that off and on for the entire three years. It would just shake back and forth.”


What followed was even more disturbing.


Clint writes: “In the dark I would get the very strong sense that someone was right next to my face. It was that feeling of closeness you get when something is right in front of you. Most of the time it wasn’t there, but then some nights it was quite palpable. There was something there menacing me in the dark.


Clint started having terrible nightmares

“As things ramped up, there were the nightmares. Intense nightmares. Highly personal ones that would key in on specific fears and phobias. I would always wake in a start from them.


“It could’ve just been me but I had never had dreams like that before and haven’t had them in the last 30 years since. They were different. I still remember a couple they were so bad.


“There was a more realistic and intense sense to them than my typical dreams have ever been. After that, the dark spots started showing up.


“I had the bigger room at the end of the hall. Since I didn’t have a roommate, I had arranged the room to have a living room set up for entertaining. My room was the hangout for all of my friends since it was a bigger size than most.


“I had made a wall with my wardrobes and mini fridge and it separated my bed on the other side. I say all of this so that you may get the full picture. The light switch was by the door. I would turn my light off and walk around the wall to get to my bed. Basically, the routine was that I would turn the light out and then walk around and get settled into bed.


“This was the setup for the one, two, three punch it started to hit me with almost every night. First, the bed starts to shake and sometimes there’s something in my face. Eventually, I reached a point where it was my new normal and I’d fall asleep. I’d have these terrible nightmares and wake with a start.


“That’s when I would see the black spots. They were these black shapes darker than the dark. Absolutely unmistakable and not something you could chalk up to being anything normal.


“It would always be floating in the little passageway to my bed, or floating just within view from around the corner. They were frightening, but never really did anything but hang there.


“The worst experience with them was when one night I had a nightmare that my grandmother had passed away and had come to say goodbye. I awoke, but it was in one of those confusing disorienting dream-like states where I came to realise I was reaching out of my bed towards the black shape and trying to hug it.


Clint reached towards a black shape thinking it was his grandmother...

“Then I realised what I was doing and recoiled in horror. It may have just me being crazy, but again, that’s not the sort of thing I have ever experienced before or since. It felt cruel.”


Clint’s last encounter with whatever spectral roommate he was sharing his quarters with was genuinely terrifying. One night, he was lying on the bottom bunk of his bed awake, with his wall of wardrobes on one side, the wall on the other and the top bunk above him.


“It was like being in a nook,” he writes, “confined. I’m laying there, awake, and I notice the mattress beneath me start to heave. Again, my default defence was to not ever acknowledge anything. So I kept laying there.


“The mattress started to heave up beneath and then go back down. It did this a few times, getting fuller beneath me each time. It was pitch black and I remember opening my eyes as wide as I could to feel that they were, in fact, open and I was, in fact, awake.


“I remember distinctly thinking to myself, this is actually happening. It was like laying on the stomach of someone breathing deeply.


“Then finally, the mattress completely filled the small of my back and lifted me up on this big hump, arching me backwards. It heaved up and then paused, then there was an audible exhale and a wind blew past my ear like someone exhaling deeply.


“This I couldn’t ignore! I shot out of bed and assumed a ridiculous karate pose and slowly crept around my wardrobe wall in complete darkness. I was so terrified. I moved around to the switch and flipped on the lights.


“I immediately got dressed and went to the dayroom. I didn’t return until it was well after daylight. I remember being so afraid to go back to bed in that room. I slept with the lights on for days, and only barely dozed.


“I remember being so exhausted. But what do you do? Go complain to my 1st Sergeant that my room is haunted and I’m too afraid to live in it anymore? Fortunately, it felt perfectly fine during the day. So I dealt with it.”

The entrance gates to RAF Feltwell. CREDIT: Google maps

It was at this point that Clint remembered something: before he had the ‘haunted’ room, his bedroom had been across the hall. “The guy that had it before me also had it to himself,” he writes, “I remember he always, always, had music on. 24/7. It wasn’t blaring party music, it was just loud enough you could hear it in the hall outside his room. I remember thinking to myself, how does he sleep like that?


“I can tell you how, now. It’s exactly what I was doing. Lights and music on all the time. I never told my friends. We never talked about how spooky the dorm was. I remember hearing a hushed conversation between guys once, but it just wasn’t ever something we’d discuss. Too young probably, didn’t want to appear weak.


“Whatever the case, it was something I was living with at night. Finally, I can tell you that reach a point where you accept it. I wasn’t being harmed. It wasn’t throwing things around the room or wailing at night. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I turned off the music. I turned off the lights and I went to bed.


“Immediately, my freaking mattress started to heave! I am not making this up! It started all over again. I was so tired. I couldn’t take it anymore. I spun around to face my bed and shouted, ‘knock it off!’. Then I punched it as hard as I could. I rolled back over and went to sleep. It never did it again.


“There was still the bed shaking, which after a while just kind of rocked me to sleep. The dreams and the spots here and there. All of that was nothing at that point.


“When it came time for me to PCS [to leave Feltwell, Permanent Change of Station], I refused to talk about it in the room. If any of my friends started to talk about it, I’d immediately change the subject. I was so afraid that whatever this was would follow me. I thought maybe I could trick it or something, catch it off guard.


“It was only when the packers came that ‘the room’ knew I was leaving soon. After that, I transferred back the States and I have never experienced anything like those things since.”


Just what WAS in that room with Clint? And is it still there…?

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