The New House
Lisa Stone

The temperature in the living room drops and a strange feeling comes over Jasmine as she enters her new home for the first time. She ignores it and continues on viewing the property. This is the beginning of the nightmare. Lisa Stone’s eighth thriller with a difference, a fast paced narrative that is 74,000 words. 

Jasmine feels the drop in temperature again when she returns for a second viewing with her husband, Mark, and their two children, Leah and Isabel. They have to be out of their flat in a month and the house, 13 Dark Lane, is exactly what they are looking for. They offer the asking price and it is accepted.

While they are moving in Freya, James, and their daughter Madison who owned the house before them, fled. They are renting for a while so they don’t make the same mistake again. They had lived at 13 Dark Lane for only 18 months and nothing would make them return.

Isabel sees the ghost first, a woman dressed in a grey jersey and green trousers. Isabel is distraught. Jasmine reassures her it’s because she’s become unsettled by the move, nothing more. They were in the old flat for ten years. The girls have never lived anywhere else.

Isabel sees the ghost again and then other strange things start to happen. Twenty or more crows fly into their loft space and commit mass suicide; hundreds of wasps swarm out of a bunch of flower their neighbours given them. But more worryingly Mark cuts his hand while unpacking and it won’t heal. It keeps opening up. Added to which the garden dies repeatedly despite them planting and watering it regularly.

Jasmine opens the door one day to Father Tim Ashridge. He says he is an exorcist and helped their previous occupants when they experienced unexplained happenings. He says a prayer for them and blesses the house. Poppy, their neighbour, visits and lets slip about the strange happens their predecessors experienced.

Isabel’s teachers asks to see Jasmine at the end of school one afternoon. She tells her that Isabel has been talking to other children in her class about a ghost that lives in their new house. One girl is too frightened to sleep in her bedroom. Jasmine says that Isabel can be fanciful at times and promises to talk to her.

The haunting continues during the school summer holiday. Angela, the sister of Selina, who died in the house before their predecessor, visits and gives the girls a collection of dolls. Only when Jasmine starts to develop large marks similar to those Poppy, Selina, and the dolls, have does she phone the estate agent to put their property on the market. As they drive away for the last time after only eighteen months in the house they see the outline of the woman dressed in a grey top and green trousers. She is the next occupier’s problem now.