LOCKED in a cellar until he was 13. Drugged and molested by a rogue psychiatrist at 14. Then passed to a gang of pervert priests who raped him and pimped him out to a ring of paedophiles.

Stephen Smith endured more in the first 17 years of his life than many could countenance in a lifetime.

8 Stephen Smith, 58, spent his entire childhood being violently beaten by his dad before suffering a completely different nightmare in the care system Credit: Paul Tonge - The Sun

But his is the most remarkable story of survival you’ll ever read. Today, the 59-year-old defiantly declares: “I’m a survivor, not a victim.”

For the first time, Stephen, 58, has detailed the full extent of the horrors he endured as a child in a new book.

Until now, he’d never told the full story to a soul — not even his own children.

But getting it off his chest has already had an effect. He tells me over coffee in his native Nottingham: “I’ve always had nightmares and woken up screaming or crashing into things, and that used to be six times a night. Now it’s more like two.”

Stephen’s bleak upbringing is enough to give anyone bad dreams.



Kept in darkness and stabbed with scissors

8 The first time Stephen left the cellar was to go to hospital when his dad broke his arm Credit: Paul Tonge - The Sun

Since he was a baby he was kept locked in a cold and dark cellar by his cruel parents.

His only glimpse of the outside world was the sun peeking in through a coal hole, and his only friend was a spider called Peter.

Stephen recalls: “As far as I was concerned that was the whole world.” He would be visited daily by his father, who brought him food, homework — and a sickening dose of violence.

“You never knew whether he would be in a good mood, bad mood or knocking you about mood,” says Stephen. “Mostly he would beat the s**t out of me.”

The horrifying beatings were carried out with his father’s fists, feet and leather belt.

On several occasions he even stabbed his cowering son with a pair of scissors — Stephen still has a scars to prove it.

This horrifying violence was actually what gave Stephen his first glimpses of a world outside the cellar. When he was seven years old, his father beat him so badly that his arm was broken, so he took him to hospital to get it fixed.

Speaking to the doctor was the first time Stephen discovered his own name and how old he was.

He says: “It was crazy to see the outside world for the first time. It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it what it was like.

“I went in a car and I saw trees but I didn’t know what these things were. It was only later that I learned to put names to things.”



Back split open with a shovel

8 Stephen has chronicled his horrific experiences in a new book, The Boy in the Cellar Credit: Paul Tonge - The Sun

The doctors believed Stephen’s father when he claimed his son had fallen from a tree, and Stephen was too afraid to speak up about what had really happened.

But it wouldn’t be his last visit to hospital, with his father’s frenzied attacks prompting several trips over the years.

As an adult, Stephen would later learn that his first visit had been when he was just a baby, with a fractured skull.

Things came to a head when Stephen was 13, and his father attacked him with a metal shovel, splitting his back open.

He remembers “a pain so intense it caused my eyes to bulge in their sockets.”

This time, doctors weren’t convinced by his father’s explanation that he’d fallen on a tent peg.

Stephen was made to talk to a psychiatrist, and eventually confessed that his father was behind his injuries.

Astonishingly, the authorities still sent him back to his family.

However, not long after that the police raided the family’s Nottingham home and took Stephen into care.

It was the last time he saw his father, who died a few years later.



Twisted 'truth serum' experiments

To this day Stephen does not know why he was kept locked in the cellar. One theory is he was possibly born out of wedlock, and his deeply religious parents wanted to keep him hidden away.

He shakes his head: “It’s a mystery I’ll take to my grave.”

Social services placed Stephen in a children’s home, Ashley House, where he was overwhelmed by the volume of new experiences he was bombarded with.

He had a shower for the first time, learned to tie his shoelaces and came face to face with his own reflection — which he’d never seen before.

But safety was not to last long. Stephen was cherry picked by psychiatrist Dr Kenneth Milner, who was searching for “disturbed” children he could use for his research at the notorious Aston Hall mental hospital, near Birmingham.

8 Dr Milner carried out the horrific experiments at Aston Hall mental hospital in Derbyshire Credit: South West News Service

Stephen says: “I saw stuff at Aston Hall no 13-year-old should see. There was a ward called Elm and outside of it there was a big wire cage, like a tennis court with a roof.

"It was full of boys and men from around 13 to 70, some naked, some in straightjackets and helmets. They would be screaming or banging their heads or fighting or just rocking back and forth.

“The big threat was that if you didn’t behave they’d put you in there with them, which was pretty damn frightening.”

Not long after he arrived, Stephen started to endure weekly “treatments” at the hands of Milner.

He recalls: “At the time I didn’t know what he was doing was illegal or wrong. You were put in this little side room on a mattress on the floor, naked. Sometimes they’d tie your knees together.

“He’d come in, injection in your arm, then put this mask over your face and drip ether onto it, and basically you were just completely stoned, it was like the worst acid trip ever.

“Sometimes I’d wake up and there’d be all bruises all over my legs. By then I was an expert in being hit by a strap so I knew that’s what had been done. There were other injuries too which suggested he’d done more than just hit me, obviously when I was unconscious he could have been doing god knows what else.”

An independent report published in 2018 found that at least 65 children were drugged, stripped and abused at Aston Hall while Milner ran it from 1947 to the 1970s.

Victims like Stephen are now due compensation for enduring the evil doctor’s experiments with so-called “truth serum".



Raped in paedophile priest's 'sweetshop' of children

8 James Carragher is now in prison for multiple sex offences against children Credit: Ross Parry - SWNS

Stephen was at Aston Hall for about a year and a half, before social workers abruptly arrived and announced he was being moved to St Williams, a Catholic boarding school in Market Weighton, East Yorkshire.

This was, according to Stephen, a case of "out of the frying pan straight into the pit of hell".

Far from being a safe haven after the horrors of Aston Hall, St Williams was “a sweetshop for paedophiles,” says Stephen.

The headmaster was a twisted priest called James Carragher, who took a shine to “clever boy” Stephen, who he would regularly molest and rape.

Worse still, Carragher invited paedophiles from across the country to come and have their pick of the boys.

Stephen says: “They were all well-off, well-educated men. Some would come regularly, others would just turn up in their big posh cars, help themselves and p**s off.”

The school was rife with rumours that Carragher had murdered boys in the past, and would do the same to anyone who stepped out of line again.

Stephen says: “You lived in constant fear. He was a vicious sod and he’d knock you about but at the end of the day you were so scared you’d do what he wanted.

“Anyway when you had three or four grown men going at you there wasn’t a lot you could do anyway, it was a scream and bear it thing. You couldn’t get away from it.”

Desperate to get out, Stephen told his social worker and even a police officer — but nothing was done.

“We were completely on our own,” he grimaces. “They didn’t believe us or didn’t want to — they just let it happen.”

8 St Williams School in Market Weighton, East Yorkshire, where Carragher abused children Credit: Ross Parry - SWNS

The truth about the Carragher’s heinous crimes has since come out, after the school finally closed its doors in 1992.

In 2016, Carragher and Anthony McCallen, a chaplain at the school, were convicted of a total of 35 sex offences against 11 boys between 1970 and 1991.

McCallen, then 69, was jailed for 15 years, and Carragher for nine years. It was the third time Carragher had been jailed for offences at St Williams.

He’d first been tried in 1993, when he was jailed for seven years, and again in 2004, when he’d been given a 14-year sentence.

More than 240 men have made claims of abuse at St Williams during the 70s and 80s.

Stephen says he endured the horrors Carragher and his cronies inflicted by visualising the day he’d finally get out.

8 Stephen now performs in a band, Captain Starfighter and the Lockheeds

By his own account, his traumatic past turned him into a “proper b*****d” for much of his 20s, which he spent drinking and fighting.

But that all changed with the birth of his first son, Simon, in 1991, prompting Stephen to completely clean up his act.

Today he is happily married to Gail, his wife of 18 years, and is a proud dad to his four grown up children — Simon, 28, Oliver, 26, Jacob, 23, and Jessica, 21.

He’s a successful musician with spacerock band Captain Starfighter and the Lockheeds and a renowned fantasy artist who designs book and album covers.

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He hopes that by sharing his story he’ll encourage other victims to speak out. And astonishingly, Stephen reckons he’s had a “brilliant life.”

He smiles: “I’ve a great wife, great kids, always done good jobs.

“My philosophy on life is this: you cannot allow your past to define what your future will be.”

The Boy in the Cellar by Stephen Smith is published by John Blake Books.

8 Stephen's story is told in his book, The Boy in the Cellar