I saw this is a tweet recently and it got me thinking because I do. But I have never really admitted it before as “non-believers” then look at you as somebody who has just said you like eating kittens.
I am not sure I believe all that happens on “Most Haunted” or that photographs with orbs are entirely real but I definitely believe that a presence can be felt.
Let me tell you why. Those that know me will remember this happening, I promise it IS true.
Before I started doing all the bookings and being “desk bound” for my main client (an inventory company) I was out on the road, checking tenants in and out of properties.
I had collected the keys from an agent one morning and went off to do a check out on a lovely property in a village I didn’t know. The tenants were not there, not unusual, so I made a start, checking the state of each room now, against the inventory compiled two years previously when they checked in. I always started upstairs and worked my way from room to room. Three bedrooms done. All pretty much as they had been two years previously. En suite done, bathroom also done.
And I remember looking out of the landing window into fields and thinking what a great spot this was. The sun was shining, it was one of those beautiful sunny May days. Enough dawdling, I remember thinking, I had two other houses to get round that day.
So into the fourth bedroom I went. I was immediately hit with the strangest feeling of icy cold. And I mean icy. The sun was streaming in the window but I was literally shivering. And I felt like I was being watched. It was the most extraordinary feeling of uneasiness I have ever experienced.
I finished that room and went downstairs. To say I then couldn’t wait to get out is an understatement. I genuinely don’t remember checking the downstairs rooms, I know I did them but have no recollection of doing so.
When I took the keys back to the agent I said something along the lines of “that is quite an odd house” and the agent looked at me and said “oh it is so sad, do you not know what happened”?
Uh oh I thought. No. I didn’t. It turned out the family living there had lost a family member in a car accident three months before and the fourth bedroom had been his. He had died on his 16th birthday, after being out with friends, no drink was involved but he had died instantly, within sight of the house.
You know that expression about a chilled spine? Yeah, that, standing right in the middle of an estate agent’s office in the middle of a May day.
It is not the only time this has happened to me with houses. The other time is too personal and painful to blog about but this was the first time it had ever happened and it made me think that actually maybe there is such a thing as ghosts.
Am I mad? Or do you have similar stories? I would love to hear them.
This is my day 21 post for #NaBloPoMo.
Where should I start. I have quite a few ghost stories having grown up in a haunted house. However most of the strage things that have happened to me happened since I love away fom home. Inexplicable shadows and footsteps (when I lived in Versailles), things being moved around my flat (in London – should just say this wouldn’t be stuff flying around or anything like that; more I’d go out, come back and small onjects would have changed places – thought I was going mad at first), and a distinct impression of being tucked in at night for whichever of us sleeps on the left side of the bed (here).
Once when I was living in the outskirts of Paris I looked out of my window into the garden in broad daylight and saw a little girl looking back up at me. Then she just disappeared.
In fact looking back (and I have moved a grand total of 22 times since I left home at 18) the only places where I haven’t felt anything have been the two places where I was on the top floor of new build apartment blocks.
I might sound like a loon but I am pretty sane really, most of the time. I also know far too many people that I completely trust who have seen or felt ghosts, including who have been with me at the time I have felt something, that even if I was a complete basket case, which I hope I am not, I would believe them. If you see what I mean.
Like you, I have never ‘seen’ anything at all so, in truth, I can’t say I believe in ghosts [as the movies would portray them].
But I did have an episode, I’m not sure what else to call it, at my Nan’s house [we miss you, Nan] before she passed away.
Let me start this story by saying that I believe we, as humans, have almost forgotten, or lost the ability, to understand our ‘other senses’. We tend to focus almost entirely on what we see and not what we feel, or sense. There’s that great movie line, in a movie I haven’t seen – but you get my drift, where one character says ” If I see it I’ll believe it…” to which a child replies ” No, you have to believe it to see it..” Forgive the paraphrasing, but I wholeheartedly sign up to that.
Anyway, back to my Nan’s old house…….I was perhaps 13 or 14 and we were staying with my Nan in Liverpool. I had gone up to take a bath alone, as you do, and when I was done I walked from the bathroom to the back bedroom I was sleeping in to dry myself thoroughly and get ready for bed. Everyone else was downstairs chatting in the kitchen, if memory serves.
By now I was dry and had started to put on the clothes I was going to sleep in. The central heating was on and the house was warm. Very suddenly, as I was dressing, I became unbelievably cold. I don’t mean chilly, I mean bitingly cold – as if I was standing outside dripping wet in a sharp frost – and every sense that I trusted was telling me to get the hell out of that room as I no longer felt that I was alone there. I can only explain that feeling as sheer, primal, terror. That was a base instinct flight response. My inner senses telling me to ‘RUN!!!’….and I did. I half fell down the staircase with my pyjama bottom’s still around my ankles. In my 46 years to date I have never experienced a feeling like it. Not even close to it, and I’ve been in some scrapes. It still brings the hairs on my body to attention to talk about it.
For that reason, and others that have happened to those close to me [including other incidents in my Nan’s old house I wasn’t aware of], I do believe in ‘something’. I don’t believe that you die and that’s all she wrote. Blackness and silence? No, I don’t believe that. But I certainly think that there’s ‘something’ else – even though I struggle to articulate it.
I’d try to put it into words by saying that this organic machine we are housed in, this miraculous shell of eletrical impulse, biomechanics, living tissue and emotion so strong they can compel us to acts we never thought possible, and to feel love so strong that it reduces us to tears, can’t just switch off and leave nothing behind. It just doesn’t make any sense that so much energy just ceases to be when we die. Logically there has to be something residual.
When we are alive we are more than just physical beings. Why would it be any different when we are no longer breathing?
I hope this makes some kind of sense?
Another one who has seen ‘something’ Old building built by MonkeyBoy’s dad’s family, over 100 years ago. Generations of his family were born and died there.
We went to live there for a while and one night as I went into the main bedroom I say a puff of dense smoke, slightly taller than me. Then it just vanished, not dissipated, but vanished.
For days afterwards I would get whiffs of strong Rose fragrance and would try and track the source, but could never do so, again the scent trail would just end.
I told whoever it was that I was delighted they had stopped by and that they were always welcome to be there. It was a comforting presence, I felt safe.