I know this post seems wildly off course and has nothing to do with AvPD – at least not on the surface. But this week I’m going to write about the time I did something unthinkable: I felt brave. I started my very own local ghost hunt group. They say if you follow your passion, you’ll find your people, your “tribe,” and the conversation will spark like magic in the dark. Instead, I pulled the ultimate disappearing act. One moment I was there, the next I was gone – blocking everyone, vanishing without a trace, and vowing never to see them again.
But for anyone who is interested in the supernatural, I thought I’d just post my two ghost stories here first. They really did happen and I had witnesses. My very first experience happened when I was 17, and it sparked a lifelong interest with how these things might be possible from a scientific perspective.
My Two Tales From The Other Side
The Ghost That Followed Me
Back in 1982, aged seventeen, I was living in a bedsit in a large, old semi-detached house on West Hill Road in Luton. My boyfriend Kevin rented the room just inside the front door, while my own room was upstairs at the end of a long corridor. Two other women, Alison and Kathy, lived there too.
One Saturday afternoon I came back from town with a message for Alison. I heard her playing a record upstairs and ran up to tell her, but about a third of the way up the staircase, the music faded away in what I can only describe as an otherworldly way. Too spooked to continue, I ran back down and went into Kevin’s room, even climbing out the window because I didn’t want to pass through the hallway.
When I returned later, Kevin and the two girls were standing outside his door. They were talking about footsteps they’d heard in the attic the night before. Kevin got annoyed, went around the house, checked every room – nothing. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, I said boldly, “If Kevin can go up and look, then so can I.” But as soon as I put my foot on the first step, horrendous running footsteps charged from my bedroom down the corridor straight to the top of the stairs. We all froze. That night, all four of us slept together in Kevin’s room.
A few weeks later, Kevin and I moved into our own place – but whatever it was followed me. I remember a coat hanging on a hook in the hallway and by the time I’d made a coffee and turned around, the coat had moved to another hook. Windows opened and closed on their own. I refused to stay in the house alone and would walk around town while my boyfriend was at work. My imagination you say? On moving day, we packed everything and stood in the kitchen wondering where the house keys had gone, when they suddenly fell from mid air at the top of the stairs. Kev was standing right next to me at the time.
It wasn’t until decades later that I realized the record I thought Alison had been playing that day was “The Message by Grandmaster Flash”. Coincidence? Maybe. But the fact that I’d been bringing a message for her at the same time has always made me wonder if there was something more in it.
Staged By The Hosts, Which Made Me Laugh And Triggered A Ghostly Reaction
Fast forward to around 2011 and I went on my first ghost hunt. I went with two friends Lucy and Shelly, and we laughed at the hosts who were walking around pretending to talk to spirits. It all felt staged.
After a couple of hours, we were told to wander off on our own. We were at The Guildhall in Northampton, an ancient building with a prison cell block underneath. I sat in one of the cells with Lucy, eating vegan sausage rolls and declaring nothing was going to happen. I remember that we were both laughing – expending energy? Just as in my previous ghost story when I said loudly that I was going to search the house too. Meanwhile, Shelly sat on a bench in the shower block next door, taking photos down the corridor. Suddenly, we heard her shriek. We ran out to find her pale and shaken, showing us her phone – she’d captured what looked exactly like a man in prison scrubs. I still have that photo.
That was the moment I stopped joking and decided to take the night seriously. Later, standing in another room with Lucy and two strangers, something utterly bizarre happened: a Tic Tac sweet fell out of thin air, landing on the floor right in front of me. We all saw it.
Later we found out that in another group, a woman had placed three Tic Tacs on her leg, jokingly telling the ghosts to take one. When she looked down, one was gone.
I went to other ghost hunts after that one but nothing happened, apart from one time a group of us were using the Ouija board; one of us went into another room and wrote down seven letters on a piece of paper. Those of us in the other room asked the Ouija board what the letters were and it creepily got them all right, in the same sequence apart from the last two which were back to front.
It seems to me that both these hauntings were provoked somehow (or maybe were given the ability to interact) by my laughing or challenging whatever was listening. Maybe these spirits (if they are spirits) zone in on these human energies. I have no idea but all the above is true.