Shortly after I turned 18 our family moved to quite a big house on Thorn Park which is an exclusive development where the properties are set at an angle to each other and screened by hedges and trees. Almost as soon as we moved in I began having the dreams.

In my dreams I would be led down a narrow passage where there was no light at all and yet I somehow knew where to go. At the end of the passage was a chamber; sometimes it would be the same chamber as before but usually it would be a different chamber each time. Whatever chamber it was it would contain huge devices which I only ever saw partially because the only light was a flickering red light of the sort cast by flames. The devices would always have huge thick timber beams and frames with leather straps to restrain my delicate limbs and sharp blades or spikes to torment me. Hot irons would be pressed against my skin or inserted...well you get the idea.

Despite suffering these tortures in my sleep I did sleep well. I think I must have been sleeping really deeply while I dreamt but I would always awake with my hand between my legs and I would have to masturbate really intensely to ease the primeval urge within me. These are not the sort of thing which an eighteen year old girl likes to discuss openly so I never did talk about them therefore I had no way of knowing if every girl experienced the same thing. Sometimes I would fear that I was afflicted with a lustful insanity and at other times I told myself that I was a normal healthy young woman.

And as time went on it was more than just dreams. My mind would fill with all sorts of ideas along the lines of "What would it be like to....?" This curiosity consumed me and the only way to get any peace was to experiment.

The first thing I did was to sleep all night with a pillowcase over my head as if I were hooded then I bound my ankles with a scarf and then I fell into the habit of gagging myself with another scarf although I don't think I ever wore my gag all night. It was frustrating that I could not tie my hands but, of course, I knew that sex shops sold handcuffs. Surely I was a nice girl; I was not the sort to go into one of those sleazy places. But the idea would not go away and really it was inevitable that one Saturday I sneaked into a shop and came away with my own silver pair of handcuffs. I put them on as soon as I was back in my bedroom and I could not wait for that night.

Sometimes my hands were cuffed behind me and other times they would be in front. I had tied the key to the connecting chain with a length of string. My experiments became more and more intense and often I would be gagged, hooded and with my ankles bound then I would lay on my belly, naked, with my hands through the wooden rails of my headboard and handcuffed in place. The sexual energy thus produced was intense but now my hands could not reach my pussy so I had to grind my belly into the mattress and press down on my breasts so that my tender nipples rubbed on the sheet beneath me.

I cannot remember when the man first appeared. Well he did not exactly appear; he was in my mind but I did not have to be asleep to see him. When I was awake he would arise out of my imagination. He was huge and towering above me dressed only in a brown monk's habit with the hood up. I kept trying to see his face but the hood always blocked my view until one night when I was strapped to one of his devilish contraptions in a dream I saw him full face. His face was a grinning white skull.

My abasement of myself continued. Some weekends I would be alone in the house all day so I was free to experiment and, on the odd occasion, my parents went away for the weekend so I would have the house to myself all night for two nights. These precious times often involved careful preparation. I would fill a washing up bowl with water and hang my handcuff key in the bowl on a string which was loosely taped to the sides of the bowl so that the key hung half way down into the water. The whole bowl then went into the bottom of the freezer where it froze solid. That night Julie lay down on the hard kitchen floor completely naked and with my ankles and knees bound. There was no key attached to my handcuffs now, the key was frozen into the ice block which was slowly melting beside me on the floor so once I had snapped my cuffs shut behind my back all I could do was to wait helplessly and dream of what would happen if we were burgled in the night.

Sometimes when I had the house to myself I would ensure that beforehand I bought one of those multi box packets of matches. The matches went into the refuse leaving me with six empty matchboxes. Into five boxes I inserted a small coin so that they rattled. My handcuff key went into the sixth box and, having blindfolded myself, I went all over the house throwing a matchbox into each of six rooms. Then my ankle bindings and handcuffs went on and I had to make an awkward tour of my home on my belly until I found the right box so that I could retrieve the key and free myself as I lay panting on the carpet.

By this time I had purchased a length of chain and two padlocks so I could restrain myself on my bedroom floor at night. My ankles were chained and my hands cuffed behind me with my ankles padlocked to the handcuffs so that I was hogtied for a very uncomfortable night on the floor. Girls in punishment and bondage are not permitted to sleep in a warm bed.

On other occasions I spent the night in the garden shed handcuffed to the lawn mower or in the garden one summer naked and manacled to the base of a tree.

Still I wondered where all this was coming from. Was it just being driven by my own perverted and depraved mind?

Things became clearer when the family decided that we wanted a pond and some contractors came into the garden with one of those small excavating machines. I arrived home from college to find that the digging machine had tumbled into a pit and all work on the pond had been stopped. Looking into the pit I clearly saw the stone walls of a chamber and part of an archway which led into blackness.

The investigations took time allowing for all the shoring and propping so that men could safely enter the pit but eventually it was revealed that we had discovered an underground complex which was probably the cellarage of an old house. There were long narrow passages and small rooms which extended from our boundary under the neighbouring properties but the investigators did not only find stone.

When they found the first skeleton it was not long before they found the next and then the next. In all seventeen young women lay in those chambers some with the rusty chains still around their bones. Some of the skeletons showed evidence of where a hand or a leg had been severed pre mortem and one of the skulls was never found.

Clothing rots away very quickly so pathologists never expect to find it but they do expect to find belt buckles, zips and buttons. In this case they found none of that; these women had all died naked.

In one of the passageways they found a collection of bones which confused them at first. It turned out that they had two skeletons here and, because the muscles and sinews had decomposed, the loose bones had become intermingled. One skeleton was a woman of about my age and the other was a large man who had an axe laying in his chest cavity. The female skeleton showed evidence of having been brutally hacked and forensic pathologists speculated that the man had been attacking her but she had somehow got free, grabbed the axe and then swung it at her attacker but she had been too weak to escape and had died beside the man possibly due to blood loss.

In another part of the cellar were two women behind metal grilles. They showed no evidence of injury to account for their deaths but if they had been locked up and then left they would have died from thirst. We shall never know whether they had been deliberately left to die or if their captor had imprisoned them and then died before he could do whatever he planned to do to them.

Local research showed that our estate was built within the grounds of Thorn Park, the mansion which stood here and whose cellars contained the charnel house. The last resident of Thorn Park was Thaddeus Gryphon who had simply vanished without trace. The rates on his property had not been paid and the house fell into dangerous decay. Gryphon had no known heirs and eventually his estate fell to the ownership of the council who sold it to the developer who built our house. Presumably the entrance to his basement of horrors was concealed to prevent anyone from finding his grisly secret so when he went down to the cellar one night to inflict more abuse on his victims he secured the door behind him and then met his end with the axehead in his chest. When the demolition contractors moved onto the site they had failed to find the cellar so it had lain there until we began to dig our pond and the old stone finally gave way tipping the digger into the pit.

So did the discovery of Gryphon's secret put an end to his night time activities in the bedrooms of modern maidens? Well I cannot really answer that question. You see this was just the time when I moved out of the house to come to university so I stopped regularly sleeping there.