Back in the latter end of the 1970s I used to live in Norwich. Not Norwich, Connecticut nor Vermont or Ontario or Massachusetts, but the orginal ancient city in England's East Anglia. It's a cathedral city with old, old winding streets and lokes and secret hidden places and it felt like it was just packed with history, not all of which was good..
I lived about a half-hour shortcut walk from the cinema where I worked in the evenings. It could be a pretty little trek during the day, but at night it was more about being careful because it was bloody dark and some of those alleys were treacherous cobblestone. The walk took me through a part of the old city known as Tombland, the old centre of the city where the markets took place. Set between the cathedral and the castle it was the convergence of so many of these streets and shadowy ginnels.
Those back alleys were dark and they were narrow, with the old high buildings either side huddled together against the walls of the Cathedral Close on one hand and the ancient pubs and whatnot on the other. The one I chose to walk to save me a few minutes ran between Saint Faith's Lane and the Samson and Hercules (a faintly reputable nightclub at the time, with a connection to Shakespeare's Falstaff).
This particular evening was nothing special, just your average summer evening as I recall. It was late, close to midnight and I was pretty tired. In this alley was a point just before the end where the walls narrowed, the back of one building bulging rudely into the thoroughfare, and also the point where the spill of a streetlight lit the space. As I walked up toward Tombland this night, and approached this point I was distracted by what appeared to be a dog, nothing too unusual there. Except that this dog was walking on its hind legs and had a round head. I stopped. Of course I stopped. The dog-thing also stopped and turned to look at me. I had a fleeting moment to look at it. It resembled a child, but the skin was wrinkled and shiny. It was naked, with long skinny hands. It resembled my image of the ghoul from Pickman's Model. I swear that it pulled a scornful face in that moment; we were both frozen to the spot for a second or two before it turned back to its previous trajectory and walked into the wall on the other side. It walked into the wall and it vanished.
It took me a moment to get the courage to walk, even briskly, past that point and into the light of the modern city, all the while wondering if I'd witnessed something coming out of a hellgate or weird dimension.
I have to say at this point that, like Rancid Pickle, I don't believe in such things. Not in ghosts, not in angels, not in demons, and certainly not in ghoulish creatures that can walk out of one wall and into another. Of course I went back in daylight to examine the scene, and naturally I found nothing unusual. Just two old walls bounding a narrow alley at the back of ancient cathedral grounds in a city renowned for being horribly haunted.
But for all my attempts to convince myself I'd just had a moment of over-tired imagination you can bet it was a shortcut I never took again.
I realise this is the third time in a month I've told this story in the context of my "not believing in supernatural stuff".