When Mike Covell’s young daughter asked one evening: ‘Where’s the old lady who sings to me?’, his blood ran cold.
There was no elderly woman in their house on Severn Street in Hull. It was just Mike, his wife, three-year-old Bradley and two-year-old daughter Alyssa.
‘We moved onto Severn Street in 2007,’ Mike, a writer and history expert, tells Metro. ‘I was born on this street and my parents still lived there, we wanted to move closer to them.
‘One morning my son woke up and told me there was a man standing at his door with a bit of wood in his hand. A few nights later he woke up again, this time screaming. I ran into his room and leaned in to give him a hug. As I did, my son whispered “he’s behind you.” I turned around and there was no-one there. Meanwhile, my daughter was adamant there was an old lady who sang to her in the house.’
The Covell home on Severn Street is in the east of Hull, nestled in a quiet residential area just a stone’s throw away from a busy main road. The tree-lined street full of 20th-century terraced houses seemed unassuming enough when Mike moved in.
The self-confessed history buff, who runs Amazing Hull Tours, decided to research his house after Bradley and Alyssa’s strange experiences. Could something have happened there which led to his children’s experiences with ghosts, he wondered? Was the house be haunted?
A few weeks after moving in, the dad-of-two went to his city’s archives and started to search for his street name and number. One article from the Hull Times newspaper soon caught his eye.
“Murder on Severn Street” the piece’s headline proclaimed. Mike read on, and discovered that on April 1, 1945, a former owner of his home, 49-year-old Emily Garbutt, had been bludgeoned to death with an axe by her lodger of 15 years, 69-year-old Fred Watson.
‘I kept going through the articles,’ Mike recalls. ‘Basically, Emily was at home in a rocking chair – in the room I’m speaking from now – when Watson came back from work. He grabbed an axe, put it through her head six times then dragged her body into a room at the back of the property. He switched on the gas and took a rusty knife to try and end his own life. Neighbours heard the noise and called the police, who kicked down the door and took Watson to hospital.’
Watson was arrested and found guilty of Emily’s murder. Deemed to be insane, the 69-year-old was spared from execution. Instead, he was sent to De la Pole Hospital, a former psychiatric unit in Hull. There, he killed himself.
Reeling from his discoveries, Mike hastily printed the articles off and dashed home to tell his wife about the dark history to their new home.
‘She was as shocked as I was,’ Mike says. ‘But then she said “where was Emily’s husband?” I went back to the archives and started to look for him.
‘We assumed because Hull had been so badly bombed during World War Two that he’d died in the Blitz. But it turned out Emily’s husband, a dockworker called Ernest, had left home in 1929 and was never seen alive again. His body was found in the Humber and it appeared he’d been beaten up. At his inquest, there was an open verdict as they had no idea if it was a murder, a suicide or an accident.
‘So within days, we’d found out our house was linked to Emily’s murder, Ernest’s suspicious death and Watson’s suicide.’
Shaken, Mike reached out to his local church to see if they could perform an exorcism. Although already a believer in the paranormal before his children started to experience ghostly goings-ons, he had never experienced a situation quite like this. Mike was passed on to the Diocese of York who dispatched Father Phil Lamb to the scene.
However, Mike explains, the exorcism was nothing like the movies, where a dour and pale priest usually turns up in extravagant black robes with a crucifix.
‘He looked like [former singer of The Jam] Paul Weller,’ Mike laughs. ‘He didn’t look like a priest at all. He turned up in Adidas trainers, jeans and a leather jacket. He was a really quirky guy.
‘Father Phil Lamb turned up at the house and said “don’t tell me anything,” then walked to the bottom of the staircase, bowed his eyes, held out his hands and closed his eyes. There was silence for about ten minutes.
‘Then he said “there’s a man at the top of the stairs who wants to kill you and your kids. I think I swore and said something like “okay, well he can go.” Then Father Phil Lamb told me “there’s also a little old lady. She is protective, she loves the house and your family.
‘I said “if she’s happy, she can stay.”’
Father Phil Lamb then blessed Mike’s house. He said the Lord’s Prayer in every room, marked each doorway with a cross of Holy Water – on the top of the doorframe and on each side of the doorframe – then made a cross in the air while he spread holy water.
Since then, it’s been a far more peaceful existence for the Covell family. Occasionally, their cat Gizmo will freeze and stare at a wall, but Mike admits the pet is a ‘bit dozy’ so this could be unrelated to any haunted happenings.
In one notable incident, back in 2015, Mike thinks a spirit made a return at his house. ‘I was on a Facebook Live showing viewers around the house and explaining how the murder of Emily happened,’ he explains.
‘At 9.05pm, around the time Fred killed her, the Internet shut-off. The Wi-Fi hub is actually in the room where she was killed. When I re-started it and got back on Facebook live, some viewers with headphones were convinced they’d heard growling. I can’t understand what that was.’
Now and again, Mike and his family also catch a strange whiff of a lavender scent, the type of fragrance an old woman might use. They believe it’s the spirit of Emily still padding around the house. Mike says the scent is noticed at ‘times of celebration,’ like at his children’s birthday parties. On the anniversary of Emily’s death each year, the family light a candle to remember her.
Despite the spooky comings and goings, Mike says he has no qualms about living in a ‘murder house.’
However, he does occasionally wonder if fate, or the spirit of Emily herself, led him to buy the property.
Before Mike moved to Severn Street, he was told by a doctor he had a critical heart condition and might not have long left to live. Until then, Mike had worked a ‘really boring’ job in retail management.
As a result of the health warning [the heart condition resolved itself and Mike is today healthy] he quit his job and embraced his passion for history instead, which led to a full-time career. By the time he moved into the ‘murder house’ on Severn Street, the dad-of-two was a seasoned history expert who could turn his hand to any archive system.
‘Some people say, “did you choose the house or did the house choose you?”’ Mike says. ‘Maybe I was chosen to tell its story. After all, how many other people would have gone to the dusty archives and tried to find out what happened? It really is strange.’
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