Have You Ever Seen a Ghost?

Let the unexplained and mysterious tickle your curiosity

I won first prize in a short story contest by Puffin Books when I was around nine. I no longer have the story and don’t remember what it was about, but I’d lay money there was a ghost was in it.

Back then, I devoured all things unexplained and mysterious. If I wasn’t at the library, I’d be monitoring radio signals for evidence of alien life, pendulum dowsing for lost things or making paper pyramids to keep fruit fresh for years… my curiosity was endless.

Then it started becoming real.

I was doing homework with my sister one afternoon while our parents were out doing the weekly shop. I casually mentioned I was about to get a brand new bike. She said that sounded nice and we carried on working. When my parents got home, there they were wheeling a brand new Raleigh bike with their shopping hanging off the handles. A spur of the moment present.

Another time lounging in front of the TV, I sprang up to tidy the front room. Someone’s coming round, I said. A short while later, the doorbell rang and it was a family friend dropping by on a surprise visit.

People say I probably overheard my parents discussing a bike at some point. They say unannounced surprise visitors aren’t unusual either. Especially in those pre-internet days when real-life socializing was normal.

But then there’s this:

It was someone’s birthday, brother or sister, I forget which. My dad’s new boss came to the party and because he knew a bit of magic, he became our entertainment. Everyone was flocking around him when he called me up for a trick. I hung back but everyone pushed. Come on, they said. It’s magic. You love magic.

I went cold the minute I got to him, recoiling when he put his hand on my shoulder. I was rigid and bristly like those cats you see in cartoons. I knew I was going to get into trouble for being rude but the fear had me and I turned and ran. Legged it out as fast as I could, falling over myself up the stairs and down the corridor and finally into the safety of my bedroom. My sister came up to see what was wrong. That man’s going to die, I said.

The other kids came upstairs, we started some other game and the weirdness dissolved away.

A few days later, Dad came home and said his boss had died. An undiagnosed illness.

Experiences like these are endless. Enough spookiness to tickle the tastebuds. Not enough to give me the lottery numbers.

When we moved into a new house, I felt “something” sitting at a table in the corner doing some darning. We didn’t even have a table in that corner but my mind’s eye showed me a sepia vignette of a tired old lady sitting peacefully with her sewing box, bent over her work, lost in thought.

I felt that same “something” follow me up and down the stairs. She was curious about me. It wasn’t scary but the presence was so strong sometimes, I’d turn thinking my husband was behind me even though I was alone in the house.

When we pulled up the carpets, we found newspapers from WWII lining the floor. Was it my “something” who’d put them there?

Decades under the carpet had not done the newspaper much good. But regardless of the mold and disintegrating underlay, wholesome faces smiled out of the adverts of a long-ago era bringing a forgotten time back into the room, proving that nothing really dies. That time travel exists in the mind already, we just haven’t connected it to the body yet.

I’m reminded of an evening back as a child. A radio show is playing and they’re hypnotizing people back into their past lives. Men and women are crying as they’re taken back into traumatic memories.

I wonder if all past lives are traumatic. I wonder if mine was. It excites me that there are so many secrets tucked away in the mind and I’m still a little girl and can spend my whole life finding things out.

The past has always been important to me. I enjoy memories and how the future is wrapped up inside the past.

I enjoy the sheer mountain of experience we all stand on. The 360 degree view showing us what’s out there; our minds creating weather conditions that determine how much we see.

I’m a writer. My non-fiction reflects lessons I’ve learned. My fiction leans to the paranormal and makes me tingle as I write.

People ask me if I believe in ghosts. How could I not?

But ghosts don’t always show as the “something” that darns.

Ghosts are in the air around us and in our very minds. The cup he last drank from before he left forever. The smile that lives on in your head and makes you happy. The guilt that toxifies certain memories, turning them into a Freddy Krueger that hunts you until you think you’ll go quite mad.

The mind is delicious and the ghosts it creates are revealing. Listen to your ghosts because they’re showing you something.

It’s not magic. It’s unexplained and mysterious. And I have the rest of my life to figure things out.