Fright Bites: The Woman on the Stairs
Haunted UK Podcast: History, Hauntings and the Unexplained
Steven Holloway
4.5 • 652 Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2026
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A young boy sits alone at the top of the stairs in a quiet family home.
The upstairs lights are off. The house is ordinary. Nothing should be there.
Then movement comes from the bedroom doorway.
In this Fright Bites episode from Haunted UK Podcast, Steve shares a chilling listener account from Richard, who grew up in a house in a coastal town in the North East of England. One winter evening, after being sent upstairs, he saw the full figure of an older woman glide from his bedroom into his sister’s room — a woman he had never seen before, and one his mother would later admit she had also encountered years earlier.
What makes this story linger is its simplicity. No dramatic haunting. No long build-up. Just a clear, unsettling sighting in a family home, witnessed by a child and later echoed by another member of the household. A woman with her hair in a bun, her hands cupped before her, moving silently through the space as though the walls and rooms still belonged to her.
Atmospheric, intimate, and quietly unnerving, this short true paranormal story explores memory, childhood fear, family testimony, and the strange possibility that some buildings may hold onto more than just the lives lived inside them.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Fright Bites, a mini-series from the Haunted UK podcast. |
| 0:14.0 | Over the years, you've trusted us with your true paranormal experiences, stories that chilled us, unsettled us, and stayed with us |
| 0:23.0 | long after the episodes ended. In Frightbytes, we bring you the very best short-form |
| 0:29.3 | listener submissions we've ever received, hand-picked, stripped down, and told in their most |
| 0:35.3 | terrifying form. These are short stories, real accounts. |
| 0:40.7 | No filler, no distractions, just a single moment |
| 0:44.2 | where something unexplained stepped out of the shadows |
| 0:47.1 | and into someone's life. |
| 0:50.1 | So dim the lights, get comfortable, and brace yourself. It's extremely rare for people to describe seeing a full-bodied apparition, |
| 1:06.0 | but that's exactly what happened to Richard in the following story. |
| 1:10.0 | I grew up in a house in a northeast coastal town, exactly what happened to Richard in the following story. |
| 1:17.8 | I grew up in a house in a northeast coastal town. I believe it was built in the 1960s. |
| 1:22.9 | From the front, it looked like a bungalow, but there were bedrooms built into the roof space. |
| 1:28.3 | When you walked through the front door, there was a small hallway. The bathroom was on the right, the lounge on the left, and straight ahead with the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. |
| 1:33.3 | At the top of the stairs, my bedroom was on the right and my sisters was on the left, with only the width of the staircase separating the two. |
| 1:42.3 | This experience happened during the winter months. |
| 1:46.6 | It was early evening, but already dark outside. |
| 1:50.3 | I would have been somewhere between six and eight years old. |
| 1:54.0 | I'd been a bit naughty and had been told off by my mum. |
| 1:58.1 | Feeling sorry for myself, I went and sat at the top of the stairs, sulking. |
| 2:03.1 | The lights were off upstairs, but my dad was in the bathroom downstairs getting ready to go out, |
| 2:09.0 | so there was some light coming from both the bathroom and the lounge. |
... |
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