The phone call that shattered Karen Hamilton’s world came while she was at work in Sydney one day in 1994.

‘My mum was on the other end of the phone, she was frantic and upset,’ the now 67-year-old tells Daily Mail. 

News was breaking across the globe that a nondescript terrace house in Gloucester, England, had been unmasked as a ‘House of Horrors.’ The house’s owners, Fred and Rose West, had been unmasked as a prolific serial killer duo who turned their own home into a literal graveyard. 

Over a period of two decades, they lured, tortured, and murdered young women (including their own daughter, Heather) and buried many of the remains beneath the cellar floorboards and the garden patio.

Hamilton remembered those floorboards all too well. She’d spent a year sleeping most nights at 25 Cromwell St, while living in the UK on a working holiday.

With deep family roots in Gloucester, she spent her days working secretarial jobs and her nights as a barmaid at a local disco. It was there she met Liz, a fellow barmaid who lived in a top-floor bedsit at number 25.

To save her elderly aunt and uncle from being woken up by what she describes as her ‘ungodly hours,’ Hamilton began staying with Liz for weeks at a time. 

‘We were going out, and we went out a lot at night. Didn’t get home until two in the morning,’ she says of what she thought were the ‘glory days’. 

Rosemary and Fred West are believed to have murdered at least 12 people together, although some sources suggest the total could be higher, as there are suspicions of further victims

‘Fred always creeped me out, I gave him a wide berth,’ says Karen Hamilton, who was a lodger with the Wests during the time of the murders 

But while the two teenagers were ‘dancing around and enjoying their adventures’, a graveyard was being filled beneath their feet.

A sickly smell from the house below

Though she was clueless about the crimes at the time, Hamilton, who has written a soon-to-be-released memoir about the experience entitled Nightmare on Cromwell Street: My year living with Fred and Rose West, remembers an oppressive ‘wrongness’ about the home and the Wests.

‘Fred always creeped me out, I gave him a wide berth,’ she recalls, adding that he warned her never to enter the small, silvery metal door with a lock that lay at the bottom of the basement stairs.

‘That ended up being where many of his victims were kept,’ she adds.

But it was the smell that sent an immediate jolt of recognition through the now-67-year-old. She said she always noticed an odd, sickly smell coming from the ground floor of the house, but put it down to cooking or food that had gone bad.

‘It wasn’t until I found out about the murders that it hit me what that smell actually was,’ she says.

Karen was born in Australia but had strong family connections in the UK 

Karen Hamilton went to Gloucester, England, for a working holiday when she was 20. She spent her days working secretarial jobs and her nights as a barmaid at a local disco. Because of the ‘ungodly hours’ she kept, she eschewed the room available at her uncle and aunt’s house, and instead lodged at 25 Cromwell Street 

Karen’s friend and fellow lodger Liz also managed to escape from the Wests. The pair spoke over the phone after news of the murders broke, but Karen never saw Liz again 

A violent premonition with a tragic end

Hamilton, who says she’s always been able to ‘sense’ things and has experienced several premonitions in her life, says that the most severe supernatural experience she ever had came while she was speaking with Shirley Robinson, another lodger who was pregnant at the time.

‘I used to see her up and down the stairs from time to time,’ she explains, ‘but that was the first time I really got to know her, and we had an afternoon together in Liz’s bedsit, because I was going to be going home.’

‘I’m looking at her, I’m saying hello, we’re just facing each other, and then all of a sudden, I am thrown back against the wall, as though someone had picked me up and thrown my whole body against the wall,’ she recalls.

‘It hurt, and I was in shock, but when I came back into my body, so to speak, I hadn’t moved at all. It’s so hard to explain and it sounds really weird, I know.’

At the time, Hamilton recalls feeling extreme violence and rage in her body – and was confused as to what it meant.

‘At the time, to be honest, I assumed it meant that she secretly hated my guts, that I was feeling this,’ she says.

Decades later, she discovered that Fred West had strangled Shirley in that very room – Liz’s bedsit – using Liz’s own belt.

25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester became known as the House of Horrors after Fred and Rose West’s victims were found buried under the patio 

Warning bells and quiet little girls

Another eerie experience came one day when she’d been living up the road with her aunt and uncle, and had dropped in to call on her friend Liz, knocking on the Wests’ front door.

‘No one answered, and I turned to walk back up the path to the gate, and I heard it open,’ she remembers.

‘Rose West was standing there, with the two little girls on either side of her. They were gorgeous little girls, it was hard to tell them apart, but very quiet and well-behaved.’

Hamilton says Rose told her Liz wasn’t in, but invited her in for a cup of tea. Considering accepting, she says she was overcome by the sound of warning chimes and bells going off in her head.

‘Literally, they were loud, like, ding ding ding – I actually turned around to see where the noise was coming from,’ she explains.

‘And I just heard this voice in my ear, saying “she’s too nice, she’s too nice, she’s too nice,” not in a pleasant way – in a warning. As in, don’t believe it.’

Hamilton would discover decades later that Rose West would often use tea to drug victims.

‘I wouldn’t go near Rose or Fred after that,’ she says. ‘Rose’s eyes were so dark and black, I just could not look into them.’

Decades of haunted dreams

For Hamilton, the lingering trauma of processing what she unwittingly lived among has stuck with her throughout the years since discovering the Wests’ crimes.

‘I’m just a very small part of it,’ she says, ‘nothing happened to me, I had nothing like the trauma of those poor girls. But I kept thinking back to odd things I’d noticed. Like the fact that I always felt like I was being watched on the stairs, they were so creepy, and little did I know there were bodies buried underneath.’

When she got in touch with her friend Liz, having lost touch in the intervening decades, Hamilton says she was grateful to realise not only had she survived, but also that someone else understood.

‘When we spoke on the phone she said, “They were underneath us, Karen. They were in the basement. I was in shock.’

Sadly, Liz later sent a letter to Hamilton informing her she had cancer – and it was the last time the Australian woman heard from her friend in the UK.

Now Hamilton recalls she had recurring dreams – before the discovery of the crimes – that abruptly stopped once the Wests were caught.

‘For about 15 years, I had dreams of three bodies being buried, three mounds of dirt,’ she recalls.

‘I had those same dreams for years and years, and they stopped when the story came out.’ 

Nightmare on Cromwell Street by Karen Hamilton is published by Hembury Books and is available to buy here and in all bookstores