Ellie Manning’s bedroom looks like it belongs to a stroppy teenager. The wardrobe doors are off their hinges and propped against the pink wall.
The pictures hang at drunken angles. A bright pink chair sits in the middle of the room, as if abandoned in a hurry, and tangled piles of clothes and toys litter the floor.
So far, so messily normal. But on closer inspection, things don’t feel quite right.
Three pink plastic crucifixes hang in a cluster above the unmade bed. A group of crystals line the windowsill like sentries. And the floor around the bedroom door is gritty with a thick layer of salt.
Oh yes, and Ellie isn’t a teenager. She’s just 11 years old and for the past month she’s been too scared to go upstairs — far less go into her room — in the three-bedroom house she shares with brother Jaydon, six, mother Lisa, and Lisa’s partner Anthony Powell, 25, in Holbrooks, Coventry.
‘We’ve had priests sprinkling everything with holy water, waving crucifixes and saying prayers, spiritualists with protective crystals and mediums laying salt down at the doorways to keep the evil spirits out,’ says Lisa, 34.
‘We’ve tried it all after everything that’s happened here in the past six months.’
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