Having spent the past hour procrastinating by watching Ghost Adventures on Really (I know, I know, shame on me) I felt it appropriate to discuss that very topic in today’s post. I’ve always had a healthy respect for the paranormal, which I think stems from an experience I had as a small child in a stately home in Oxfordshire. I remember standing on the upstairs landing at the end of a long hallway lined with portraits and being rooted to the spot, inexplicably struck by terror. Even now all these years later I remember it vividly, and when I told my mother she was amazed I remembered as I’d been so small at the time.

A few years after that incident there were some rather odd goings-on at our family home. It only lasted a short while, but during that time the sign on my bedroom door was removed and stuck back on the other way around, and a shirt belonging to my step dad that my mum had hung to dry in the spare room was found with its sleeves tied in a knot (only me and my mum were present at the time and both adamant we hadn’t done it).

Whilst my own experiences hardly offer conclusive proof in the afterlife, they’ve certainly made me question the existence of ghosts – and other peoples’ stories have only served to back up their existence. My ex-boyfriend’s family had some stories of their own about their family home, one of which involved his brother leaving a jigsaw on the kitchen table one night and returning the following morning to find it completed on the floor (and before you ask, there was nobody else in the house at the time, so unless it was a thief with a keen interest in jigsaw puzzles I’d suggest this was rather odd, to say the least). I stayed there many times and always noticed a chill on the lower landing at the back of the house – not knowing for some time that was where my ex’s sister once claimed to have seen an old lady in a rocking chair.

I can’t prove the existence of ghosts any more than the next person, but I do believe in an afterlife, and in the possibility of souls becoming trapped between this world and the next if they feel they were unjustly taken from the world, or if they have a message for the living that’s preventing them from passing on. Some might think I’m crazy to hold these views, but I know what I felt that day on the landing as a small child in the grip of fear. And unless they too have experienced that fear I’d politely suggest the doubters keep their views on the matter to themselves.