I Took My Daughter to the Haunted Holiday Camp I Grew Up In…and We Couldn’t Get Out Fast Enough

This blog was first published on NationalWorld as an article. Click here to read it.

On a Friday during the summer holidays, I took my 14-year-old daughter on a drive around the Isle of Wight. A bit of father-daughter bonding.

She was glued to her phone, grunting occasionally to confirm she was still alive. We had Deli with us too, our four-year-old German Shepherd. Sweet-natured, bombproof, friendly to everyone. The kind of dog that floats through life calm and tail-wagging.

Deli our GSD

​We pulled into the car park of Isle of Wight Pearl, and I stopped walking.

The holiday camp as it looked when I was a boy. My bedroom was in the far-right corner, where I first saw the silhouette that would haunt my memories.

Over 35 years ago, when I was eight years old, my family moved into what was then Chilton Chine Holiday Camp, a run-down cliff-top resort just outside Brighstone.

It had once been lively. Rows of wooden chalets, a ballroom, a games room, even a grand staircase from when it was a private home in the 1930s. But when we arrived in the early 80s, it was being refurbished by a millionaire who had hired my mum and her new husband to manage the place.

We lived in the main building, on the right-hand side upstairs. The place was amazing in the summer when it was full of happy holiday makers.

But come winter it was isolated and bleak. Think The Shining, but on a cliff. Empty corridors, dark corners, creaky floorboards. Long stretches of nothing but sea wind and silence.

I didn’t come from a happy home. My mother’s husband was a drinker and gambler with a temper. I was often left to myself, which led me to reading and, years later, after two decades in frontline policing, to writing. But those childhood years were soaked in something darker.

I remember waking at night and seeing a silhouette in my room, of what I thought was my mother standing by my bed with her arm folded. I’d whisper, “Thanks for checking on me.” Years later she admitted she’d never come into my room at night.

We’d also hear bumps and bangs all over the place in winter, when it should have been empty. The odd snatched voice too. Sometimes a sneeze.

We moved out after five years and I forgot all about it.

But when we walked into the building that day, me, my teenager, and our dog, those feelings came rushing back.

Deli started pulling hard on the lead. She never does that. She’s a trotter. A sniffer. A gentle people-meeter. But in that place she was tense, whining, refusing to sit still. Isabella went to the toilet at the base of the old grand staircase where sound of a child sneezing is often heard, and Deli started circling, tail low, whining. She normally sits and waits. She hated Isabella being out of sight.

We sat outside with some food and Deli calmed down, but when we walked toward the old children’s play area, now just broken concrete, she tensed up again. That part of the site always felt off when I was a kid too. We avoided it in winter.

We tried going back inside to warm up. Deli went rigid. Again. She wouldn't settle. My shoulders were tight now. That old heaviness had crept back in. Like something was watching us. I couldn’t shake it.

One of the staff fussed Deli and told me she'd recently been bitten by a dog that had seemed calm, until it got inside the building.

Later that evening, back home, I started digging. I found stories on the Isle of Wight Pearl’s website about the hauntings and specifically, the silhouette of a man in what was my bedroom.

The site also mentioned the corridor. I knew exactly which one they meant. It was upstairs and connected our bedrooms to what was the bathroom. It was long and dark and curved to the right. I’d be too terrified to walk along it. Our dogs back then wouldn’t even go upstairs.

I used to beg them. They wouldn’t budge.

Just to satisfy my curiosity, I called the landline. And get this, I remembered the number from 35 years ago. It’s still the same.

I spoke to Lizzie, the manager, who’s worked there for 19 years. She confirmed it: my old bedroom was the office where that silhouette of a man had been seen.

The office has since been moved. But the corridor? Still there. And she told me most of the staff still refuse to walk down it. We talked about the sneezing girl, and the voices and bangs and Lizzie said how spooky it can be when they lock up at night.

“Sometimes when I’m outside in the early mornings and look up at the building, I see a silhouette of a man at the office window,” she told me.

“I’ve also heard old-style music and laughing, as if in the holiday camp heyday, plus a little girl sneezing in the toilets.”

Lizzie did offer to walk me around so I could revisit the back areas and my old bedroom if I wanted to pop back over.

I thought I’d jump at the chance. But honestly? I couldn’t do it.

Isle of Wight Pearl is an amazing place. The shop and café are beautifully done, the staff are lovely, and the location is breathtaking, perched right on the coast with the Channel stretching out in front of you.

But for me? Even after twenty years of policing and writing over 50 books about horror and action and wild adventures – I’m fine thanks. And Deli is too.

Even Isabella lifted her head from her phone and felt freaked out. Until we got back in the car.

If you’re on the island, I’d still recommend going. Just maybe not at night. And maybe don’t bring your dog.

This blog was first published as an article in NationalWorld