It all started off when Dad got a job in Oxford. We had been living in Birmingham and we had been thinking of moving for a while, so it made perfect sense to move. But had we made the right choice?
On the morning of the move, we had to be up really early to check we hadn't left one of Alice's shoes behind or anything. Alice is my baby sister, she's really sweet but she can be a bit of a pain when it comes to bed time.
The journey took an hour but it seemed like forever.
When we got there, a woman who was doing her garden sneezed and looked up at us. She paused for a moment with a look of evil on her face. Then she jumped up and ran inside laughing, leaving all her gardening tools behind. "Mad woman!" said Dad. I said, "Maybe that's why the other people left!, making a joke out of it.
Every night you can hear weird noises coming from her house
When I eventually started going to school in Oxford I noticed that the woman was watching me from her window. She would see me and then look at her watch. I told Mum about this but she just said "Anna you're paranoid". My name's not Anna, it's Anastasia but they call me Anna for short.
On Friday the 13th (unlucky for some - it was for me anyway) I was walking to school as usual when I noticed that the woman next door was following me. I wondered what to do. I told myself that she was probably going to the shops or to see someone. I'm a very nervous person, I don't like feeling that someone is following me. I turned to walk through the park. If she was going to the shops, she wouldn't come this way. But she did.
I started to run. All the time I was looking behind me. I didn't make it to school that morning. I was too tied up for that. I was in some underground place. Every day of my life since the move I had been living next door to a witch.
Wherever I was there were lots of witches. It was probably some sort of meeting place. All of the witches were in a huddle, whispering. All the time, they kept on looking over at me. They sat me on a chair and tied me up until they figured out what they were going to do with me. One of them came over holding a little bottle of something in her hand. "Open your mouth you little rat!" she said. I shook my head. She grabbed my nose so I just had to open my mouth. She poured whatever was in the bottle into my mouth. It was foul but she made me swallow it.
She cackled, "In thirty seconds you will be nothing any longer". All of the witches laughed. I felt very very dizzy. I was spinning. They started to sing a song.
"Oh did, die, die, all the children in the world, die die die!"
There were other words but I can't remember those. I felt myself fall to the floor. Bang!.
The next thing I knew, I was riding in an ambulance to hospital with a paramedic leaning over me. When I tried to tell them about the witch, no one would believe me.
As for the witch next door, she was never seen or heard of again.
I'm recovering well. Though Mum and Dad believe that the 'witch' tried to poison me, they don't believe that she was a witch.