I Don’t Believe in Ghosts

But here’s a real ghost story that happened to me

The photo above isn’t related to this tale, but it is one of the latest pieces of “evidence” to prove that ghosts exist.

Photographer Adam Smith caught the blurry apparition staring out the window of an abandoned long stay institution (or as they rather unsympathetically called it when it was open, the “lunatic asylum”) and uploaded it to Facebook to show the world what he saw. Smith seems fairly convinced it’s a ghost of a dead patient but more likely it’s just a smudge on the camera lens or a refraction of light on the distorted window pane. It’s a bit like when people see Jesus in their burnt pancakes or alien faces in rocks on the moon. Humans see humans in things that aren’t human. We give cars faces in our head, windows in buildings can look like eyes and simple, three dot emojis look like expressions to our idiot brains. 😮

My ghost story isn’t about a smudgy lens or a dodgy photo, it’s more solid than that. It’s anecdotal for sure, but in light of these other pieces of evidence I still find it the most unexplainable story I’ve heard. So wait until nightfall, dim the lights, get under the duvet and brace yourself for a fairly sensible account of something not that scary.

Some unspecified time ago when I was a teenager and no one but car dealers and business executives had mobile phones, when Top of the Pops was still a real show and everyone trusted the presenters, when only rich people had Sky TV and you could smoke all night in the local boozer, some friends and I decided to go to Minehead on holiday.

The plan was to hire a holiday cottage, get drunk, maybe visit Butlins, hang out at the seaside and not be in the vicinity of our parents for a whole, blessed week.

Skip forward a month or so and we’re all disembarking a coach and opening the door to what would be our home for the next seven nights. It was a big town house spread out over two floors with an expansive garden, spacious front room and a King Arthur style round table in the middle of the kitchen. Bedrooms upstairs were quickly claimed. I was in the master bedroom with my then girlfriend as that’s what happens when you’re the only couple, suckers. Two mates went in the back twin room, another girl in the single room and most importantly for this story, in the middle twin room went friends Will and Helen.

A final room, also off the middle landing was locked. It had a window above the door so we all took turns jumping up and looking in to see the juicy secrets that were contained within its impenetrable walls. A step ladder and some paint pots, seemingly. Oh.

One late morning, about half way through the week, when I was in the downstairs toilet having a bad time after the previous night’s pickled onion eating contest (yep, I know, shit got wild) I heard Will coming downstairs. I finished, cleaned up and came into the front room where he looked dismayed. “This house is haunted” he said.

Now before we go on, Will isn’t the kind of man to make stuff up. He’s your regular, reliable Poindexter. A logical man who is an atheist and would fix your computer if he actually bothered to come round your bloody house when you bloody asked him.

Anyway, we all heard him say it. Haunted. It was exciting but at the same time we were in this house for another three nights so you couldn’t help but hope this is actually a story about putting down his watch somewhere before bed and it had moved when he’d woken up and nothing more unnerving.

“Someone was pulling on my bed covers when I was in bed” he said.

Wait, what?

“I couldn’t move.”

Wait, what?!

So it transpired that Will was lying in bed upstairs, alone and hungover. It was around 11am. Out of nowhere he could suddenly hear a little girl’s voice. It was clear what it was, even though the words themselves were inaudible. He wanted to get up, panicked but frozen. Not however, as panicked as when the someone started pulling at the bed covers from the bottom of the bed. He was lying on his side, unable to look or move as the duvet continued to be tugged. Then it stopped but quickly resumed behind his back, the duvet being pulled again while the little girl’s voice mumbled on. Then it stopped. All of it, and he hastily got up and came downstairs.

As fun a story as this is, it’s not over. Yet. Sure there were other things that happened afterwards that I firmly put in the category of “imagination” and the over excitability of youth. You know the type: People hearing someone moving up and down the stairs after dark, creaking floorboards outside rooms and general things that go bump in the night. Whatever the case, that initial experience scared Will enough for him to sleep in the front room for the rest of the week. Also, as an amusing aside, one of our other friends, completely sceptical and piss-taking about the whole incident also happened to slept downstairs for the rest of the week “by accident” as he got drunk and slept in a chair. Three times in a row.

The holiday flew and three days later the landlady was coming to see us off and more importantly, check we hadn’t wrecked the place. We were all standing in the kitchen by the big round table as she totted up the cost of three broken tumblers. It wasn’t until she left that we found out she’d been DEAD FOR ONE HUNDRED YEARS.

Ok. That’s not true. What is true is we did break three glass tumblers. A pretty low damage rate if you ask me. Anyway. Before she left she asked us how our stay had been. Helen, Will’s room mate said “This is going to sound weird but is this house haunted?”

“Oh yes!” the woman said without batting an eyelid. “By a little girl.”

Wait, what?!

“I used to live here with my family.” She went on. “The little girl used to follow my young son around. No one since has mentioned it apart from you. Perhaps it’s because you’re all young and that’s why she made contact.”

What the fuck?!

“We locked the room on the middle landing as that’s where she is, mainly.”

Everyone stood there slack jawed and bulgy eyed. How did she know that the ghost was a little girl? We never told her. Also, what the living fuck was a woman doing hiring out her holiday home when it was shitting well haunted?

In retrospect some sort of refund may have been in order. I might not believe in ghosts but here she was, charging us pennies for three broken tumblers when she was convinced her house was occupied by the restless spirit of some kind of Chucky Doll who harassed the sleeping residents. Surely that’s a breech of contract? (Edit: Actually, to be fair, it’d be pretty hard to ask for a refund when we accidentally left a box of fresh vomit under the round table from the night before.)

Anyway, we left and that was that. Our story. I can’t explain it. Perhaps Will was in the woozy land of booze and half-sleep and imagined it all, but he’s hardly the type. Like I said, he’d fix your computer good if you could prise him out of his own bloody home. Perhaps the woman decided to play along and freak us out. Yet the facts reconciling the way they did was too spooky for my liking and the matter-of-a-fact way both Will and the landlady spoke about it made me question any explanation I’ve heard since that day.

My intuition tells me they both firmly thought they were telling the truth. Or maybe it was all made up. Who knows. Whatever the case, trust me when I say it doesn’t stop your mind whirring in the dark hours of the night, convinced something just moved the duvet. Sleep well.