Ghosts

There's been a few recent Ghost things on the Net. The BBC is carrying a story about some psychology experiments into ghostly experiences which is very interesting. The theory is that the brain interprets particular environmental factors as spooky presences. Despite the researchers anti-ghost line the BBC did stick some interesting spooky photos with the story, taken during the experiments, showing strange things.

At the same time Scary Duck declared Ghostbusters his Number 1 all time greatest film. Until he retracted it in a later post that is. I'd post the link to the actual story, but his archive links seem as crap as everybody elses.

With these ghost stories floating about I thought I'd add my stories from the family archive:

My favourite story is this one. One of my cousins has a little girl called Alice. I'm not sure if that makes her a second cousin or first cousin once removed or what. Anyway, a few years ago she was looking through some family photographs with her grandmother (my aunt Christina), and they came upon a picture of my father. He died 18 years ago, when I was a wee nipper. Alice didn't know this of course, and my aunt was quite surprised when Alice said she had seen him. The sighting had happened at a party, and Alice had seen my father at the bar, smiling at her. I like this story. It's nice to think that my father is propping up bars somewhere.

I have never seen my father's phantom myself, though I did hear him once. It was sometime after he had died, but I can't remember when exactly. It was somewhere in the wee hours and I was lying awake. I often had problems sleeping when I was a child, often lying awake for hours and hours. Even now I wake up a lot during the night, but usually I just go back to sleep again. As I was lying there I suddenly heard my fathers voice, from the direction of my mother's bedroom. He just said 'Ginny', which is what most people call my mother. The voice had a gargling quality to it, which was how I last heard his voice when he died. And that was it. I have to admit, I was pretty scared. Was it anything really? I'll never know of course. And I've never told my mother about it.

I had a few other spooky experiences in my younger days. When I was a boy my bed was five feet off the ground, with a desk and cupboard arrangement below. One night, and I have no idea how old I was then, except that I must have been older than 7 and younger than 17 (probably older than 7, I must have been at least 9 or 10 because the bed arrangement was a later feature), I had just got into bed and was lying there when I heard a growling, snarling sound coming from the floor near the door. We had a dog called Toby, but he was downstairs and never went upstairs, wasn't the snarling type, and it didn't sound like him anyway; if it had I wouldn't have had a problem. Also, because my door was on the landing opposite the top of the stairs I would have heard him climbing up. Toby was not a dog with finesse. So, as you might expect I was terrified. Part of me wanted to look over the edge of the bed to see, but the part of me that was soiling my pyjamas won (though I'd like to point out that I didn't actually soil my pyjamas). I wish I had looked. I wonder what I would have seen.

Other scary experience of my own happened when living with my grandmother, either in my late teens or early twenties. I was dreaming, and I used to have some wierd dreams back then (I don't have them so much now, and I do miss them). It was totally dark, and I could just hear this menacing laughter. I woke up and opened my eyes, but I could still hear the laughter. As I lay awake the laughter receeded, as though towards the back of my head, until it was gone. Real scary at the time, though I think that was just my dream taking its time to get lost. Still scary though.

Coming back to more recent times, another aunt of mine, Jessie, had a scary experience the night before my wedding, about a year and a half ago now. She was staying (as was most of my family) at Langdon Court Hotel near Wembury, a beautiful old house where we had our reception. The lights were out and she was lying in bed facing a large mirror that was in the room. All of a sudden, in the mirror, she saw a woman walk across the room. Nothing else happened, but she was terrified and barely slept for the rest of the night. She didn't sleep well the next night either, though she didn't have any more experiences.

My brother Robert, who was staying at my mother's house in Essex during the mid 90s, watched someone walking up the path to the front door. He opened the door, and there was nobody there! He had a good look around, but there wasn't anybody to see at all. Hehehe, he was quite scared then. My mother finds it funny.

So there are the family ghost stories. There are probably a few others. My other brother Stuart is currently bar manager at the White Hart in Brentwood, which is an old coaching inn, and he says he has had a few scary moments. But ghost stories scare him easily. What do I think of all this? I don't know. After all, how can anyone say what they mean? Are the experiences all-in-the-mind, or caused by something objectively real? If so, what is the nature of that reality? I'd like to know, but don't suppose I ever will.