At approximately 6:30 PM every day, a painting in the old house where former snooker champion Alex Higgins lives falls off the wall and clatters to the floor. And the current residents of the old apartment say that’s the least of their concerns since they discovered that their apartment appears to be haunted by the ghost of the snooker legend who appears to be staying around looking for one last game.
The legend of the game was discovered at the age of 61 last year to have died in his apartment of cancer just last July. And since then, 40 year old Amanda Miller has moved in and reportedly started hearing things that go bump in the night. The events she describes seem fairly mundane at times, but then extraordinary and even a bit eerie others. While she has reported hearing the traditional bumps and whispers that could be explained away by skeptics as coming from other adjacent apartments, there are also a few events that simply defy conventional explanation. One example is an event that took place when she was moving in. One of the refrigerators that Higgins had left behind in the apartment was unexplainably moved against the wall and somehow plugged in. Since no one other than Miller had been in the house, this was seriously troubling. And as time went on, things only got stranger from there.
Ominous feelings also seem to pervade the apartment, which once housed one of Britain’s greatest Snooker champions of all time. Snooker is a sport played with a cue on a pool table wherein the players attempt to sink balls worth different points in pockets. It differs from pool in that different balls are worth different amounts of points. It is largely popular in the UK and China. And few players were quite as good as Alex Higgins, born in March of 1949 and who died just this past July. Throughout his career, Higgins won over 22 titles including two world titles. A heavy smoker, Higgins died of cancer.
But even though his death was tragic, there is much curiosity over what precisely could be making this champion who led a very successful career in the sport he loved so much come back from the dead to haunt the apartment he once called home. Does he disapprove of what the current resident Amanda is doing with the apartment? Or is there something else from Higgins’ past tied to the location making him keep coming back time after time? Miller has responded by stating in an interview with the Sun that she will be redecorating in order to rid the place of the former resident’s presence.
The fact that the painting falls off the wall at precisely 6:30 every afternoon does seem a bit of a curiosity in this case. Perhaps Higgins is using the regularity of this disruption each day as a signal or an attempt to communicate something about his past. Higgins was said to smoke up to 60 cigarettes a day while alive and suffered from throat cancer. Ultimately it was the combination of cancer and a rough bout of pneumonia that ultimately deteriorated his life and caused his death. From the top to the bottom, Higgins lived a full life and seems to be continuing to have an influence on the world around him even after death.