'We felt pure fear after moving into haunted house'

Almost immediately after a mother moved her three children into a 300-year-old home, she claims sightings of a dark figure began to plague the family.

Caroline de Gier also said decorations jumped off the walls and she heard whispers and scraping noises over several years while living in a house in an area reportedly known to be haunted.

She moved into the Grade-II listed property near Bruton, Somerset, in 2016, a few years before actor Benedict Cumberbatch lived there.

But the family soon experienced "pure fear" after spotting the figure in their rooms as they slept, Caroline said.

Long-standing local resident Oliver Dowding backed up the claim by saying he knew "plenty of houses in the village" that had been haunted over the years.

However, associate professor of psychology and inclusion at the University of Bristol Dr Nilu Ahmed said the phenomena could have been triggered by stressful events in the family's life, including a recent divorce.

Caroline said things started to go wrong almost as soon as they moved into the house, which was built in the 1700s and was part of an estate belonging to a former Earl.

"My younger daughter Isobel had a lot of problems - she was little, just 11," she told the BBC Sounds series The Other Side.

"The first thing that happened was when she saw this woman standing in her bedroom doorway.

"She shouted at her sister Imke, whose bedroom is across the landing, 'what are you doing in my bedroom? Why are you in my bedroom?'."

But Imke, who was 13 at the time, was in her own room all along and said: "When's someone's having that visceral a reaction and it's just pure fear, you know that something is really not right."

Caroline's youngest child Zam, who was nine when they moved into the home, said he had also seen a woman in his bedroom.

"When she walked through him, he said 'she would take my breath away'," Caroline said.

"He said 'all the happiness in the world went away when she was there and she doesn't look at me in a nice way, I think she doesn't want me in there'."

Dowding, whose father first rented the estate in 1954, before buying the property when the last Earl died in 1968, said although he had never been aware the house might be haunted, he believed the de Giers were telling the truth.

"I have no doubt that this sort of thing goes on all the time.

"There is one house in this village, and one in the next, that is haunted, but mostly the spirits are benign and you have to learn to live with the feet stomping by the bed, or in the case of one of Caroline's children, when they're throwing things across the room.

"Although that's fairly extreme," he said.

Dowding said he was also questioned once by Cumberbatch, who lived briefly in the house about four years ago.

"He asked me, 'is there any haunting or spiritual activity in the house?'.

"I just brushed it off as I was keen not to prejudice him," he added.

Ahmed said the family had undergone two very stressful events before they lived in The Aviaries - divorce and moving house - which could have affected their perception, although she did not deny the truth of their experience.

"It sounds genuinely terrifying and this is something that feels real to the family; it's something that they've lived with and it certainly has transformed them.

"I'm not sure I would see it as a haunting. I think there are lots of things that could be happening," she said.

"Even if you move house for a happy reason, it's very, very stressful on the brain and body, and they are trying to make sense of that.

"If somebody's had something that's quite negative on top of that, it touches on and almost triggers that negative energy and feelings that they're trying to escape from.

"It then becomes something that we call emotional contagion - this begins to transfer from one member of the family to another, without people even realising that this is what's happening," she said.

The de Giers are no longer living at the Georgian home but before they moved out they were in for one final shock.

Caroline was told by Dowding that a distant relative called Marnie had lived at the house until the 1980s with her daughter.

"He said Marnie's daughter was also called Isobel, spelt with an 'o'.

"She was shut in [my daughter's] room. They wouldn't let her out. She was allowed to go to church but she never got married.

"I just couldn't believe it," she added.

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