In 1993, I moved to Gloucester Drive, Finsbury Park, London N4. At that time I used to walk along Gloucester Drive on my way home from work at approximately 1 a.m. One night I was walking along when I heard light-sounding footsteps on the other side of the street. It sounded like someone was in a hurry. There was no one about and the street was well lit, but I could not see anyone. I kept walking and then these light footsteps crossed the street in front of me and seemed to go into a front garden of a house alongside me. I heard the breaking of twigs on the ground leading toward a hedge. Then the hedge began to shake a lot in one particular area, like a diameter of two feet in the middle of the hedge, like whatever it was had been passing through the hedge. Then I heard the footsteps again walking through the front garden of the next house as I walked along. This continued for a number of front gardens and hedges, then stopped.
Over a period of several months in that year, 1993, I heard this same sequence of events at approximately the same time, 1 a.m.: the light-sounding footsteps on the opposite side of the street, always beginning outside house number 7, Gloucester Drive, then crossing the street and then going through the front gardens and the shaking hedges.
On one occasion, the sound had stopped and I was continuing to walk toward my home in the street when a shaking began in a hedge closer to home. Again it was an area in the hedge of about two feet in diameter. It was shaking so much that I thought a cat or dog was in the hedge, trying to get out. A hole opened up in the hedge alongside me, then closed with a whoosh sound, frightening the life out of me.
I never mentioned what was happening to my family as I thought they might laugh at me and not believe it. Then one night a son of mine came in the door, having walked through Gloucester Drive. He was white-faced and looked like he had a terrible fright. He told us how he had heard the footsteps crossing the street and the hedges shaking in the front gardens until one hedge opened up, like what I had seen. He said it opened up in a large way with an enormous hole appearing, then it suddenly closed very abruptly with a whoosh sound.
I told my son how I had experienced the same thing on several occasions. Another son of mine also witnessed exactly the same occurrences at the same time of approximately 1 p.m., with footsteps starting outside house number 7, then crossing the street and going along through the front gardens, etc.
I retired from work the following year and did not come through the street late at night anymore. My sons started to come home at an earlier time when they would be out, so they didn't hear it again.
But there was an instance where my son was coming home late and he saw a young man sitting on a low wall opposite house number 7. He was sitting with his head bent down and holding his head in his hands. My son passed him by, and from about 10 feet away he looked back and the young man had disappeared. There was nowhere that this young man could have gone, and so it was unexplainable. Again my son was very frightened when he came home.
It was some years later that I read on the Internet that Gloucester Drive is considered to be the fifth spookiest street in the U.K. due to the hearing of children's footsteps late at night. One resident told of how he used to regularly hear the children's footsteps running along the footpath outside his house late at night, and there would be no one there.
