All in the Mind?

When I was young we used to live next door to a haunted house. Well, I say it was haunted but really it was just unoccupied and in a mild state of disrepair, but to any child under the age of eight who, like me, had lived their first eight years in the late 1970s/early 1980s and been fed a diet of Scooby Doo and The Red Hand Gang then obviously it had to be haunted. The myth was further fuelled by my parents who told me not to go round there but never really explained why. They were most likely concerned that I’d fall down a man hole or be squashed by a falling piece of masonry but I took their lack of explanation as proof that terrible things had happened there, possibly a grisly murder, and therefore it was haunted by those lost souls.

When friends came to visit the conversation would inevitably come round to the haunted house and lead to an expedition through a gap in the fence from our back garden round to the haunted house whilst my mum was distracted. The garden was terribly overgrown and we had to fight through brambles to get to the back of the house and peer through the window.

It always looked like someone had left in a bit of a hurry as there was a dirty mug by the sink, and an old browned newspaper on the floor. The curtains were tatty and hanging down and the door to the stairs was intriguingly ajar. On more than one occasion we convinced ourselves that we heard ghostly footsteps coming down those stairs and that the door had slowly creaked open.

We never stayed around long enough to see what horror would emerge as we’d worked ourselves up into such a frenzy that we had fled back through the brambles at top speed and returned to the safety of our garden, all giddy and out of breath, just in time for my mum to come out and investigate what all the shouting had been about.

At some point during the late 1970s the vicar came round to visit. I’m not sure why exactly, we weren’t church goers but I guess that in those days in small villages on the Isle of Wight that’s what vicars did. In any case, as he was leaving I decided to tell him about the ghosts next door and so pointed out the house and said “That house is haunted”. The vicar, a wiry, white haired chap, looked at me sternly and said “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Terence”.

Being about four or five years old at the time I didn’t have the wits about me to enter into a meaningful debate on paranormal activity and its relation to theology so just stayed quiet, considering how wrong this vicar was. How could he stand there and say that and yet he’d come to our school and talked about miracles, claiming that he had prayed for help when he couldn’t get his bonfire lit one evening and then God intervened and before long he had a fully blazing bonfire with flames higher than his house, or something equally as absurd. Things just weren’t adding up.

Fast forward to the mid-1990s and I worked in a bookshop in Southampton. My interest in ghosts had subsided and been replaced by my interest in UFOs. I used to lie awake at night wondering whether I was about to be abducted. I blame The X Files.

It was a large bookshop spread out over three floors and I worked on the top floor, in the academic book section. We used to open until 8pm on a Thursday evening and I often volunteered for this as it meant I could go in later in the morning and the shop was usually nice and quiet in the evening.

This was one such evening during early autumn, it was wet and cold outside and customers were thin on the ground. The layout of the store meant that I was behind a large counter at the top of the stairs which for some reason made me feel like Noel Edmonds on The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, just without the purple dinosaur. From my vantage point I could see each and every person who came onto the floor.

This particular evening I was busy writing out the usual postcards to people to inform them that their ordered book had arrived when a chap walked up the stairs, looked vaguely around and asked me where the French language course books were. Having not seen a customer for an hour or so I was in a benevolent mood and managed to extract myself from behind the counter and point him in the right direction. As I did I glanced down in to the main part of the shop floor and saw an old man I’d not spotted previously, a little chap with white hair, glasses, and a beige coat, stood the opposite side of the small ‘General Science’ shelves, thereby looking at my recently put together ‘Astronomy’ section.

I was surprised to see him as to all intents and purposes I thought I was on my own up there. The guy thanked me for showing him where the French books were and as I turned to return to the counter I glanced down again to see that the old man had gone. This was all in a matter of seconds and to me this sudden disappearance was deeply suspicious. I therefore made the assumption that he had ducked down behind the shelves and was probably filling up his coat with Planispheres and Patrick Moore books.

Believing I had a shoplifting pensioner on my hands I sauntered down across the floor in a casual but really obvious manner, half heartedly straightening books on my way, and I eventually reached the ‘General Science’ section. I turned the corner to see…..nothing. I looked round, there was no way he could have got past me and no other exits, so where the hell was he? I quickly did a search round but no old man. I was genuinely open mouthed.

I returned to the counter and considered this for a moment. I’d heard tales from other employees about the possibility that the building was haunted but I’d always dismissed it as bored hysteria. Now, with my own eyes I’d seen an old man who wasn’t there which must mean, I could hardly believe it, I’d seen a ghost. I wasn’t scared, I felt quite exhilarated. I told colleagues and they were excited for me, I was the man who’d seen the fabled ghost of Dillons, and he was just some normal old bloke, probably a former customer who had travelled back from the afterlife for a browse. When you put it like that it’s a nice, almost heart-warming, story.

In the intervening years I’ve read books such as Oliver Sacks’ ‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’ which tells true stories of the strange neurological cases of people who, through illness or otherwise, had radically different perceptions of the real world. For a time I even worked in a Psychiatric department of a local hospital (yes, I definitely worked there, I wasn’t a patient with delusions of grandeur and special shoes) and I used to be fascinated by the case notes of people who would start to hear their name being called when no-one was around, or would be thinking about a word or a thing and then suddenly the person on TV or on the radio would mention the same word or thing and instead of just putting it down to coincidence they started to become obsessed by it and noticing these things more and more often until the radio DJ or the news reader was, to their mind, talking directly to them and instructing them to do things. It was all quite scary because this was all created by their mind and there was nothing they could do about it.

So, rationally my old man wasn’t a ghost but was an illusion created, for whatever reason, by my own mind, and that can’t be right, can it? Thankfully I’ve not gone through life seeing things that aren’t there and I haven’t noticed Chris Moyles or Steve Wright telling me to go and throw myself under a bus so all is well and I’ve not lost what is left of my marbles.

So all things considered then it must have been a ghost as the alternative is that I was hallucinating. Either way I shall call in Derek Acorah at once to settle this once and for all. What’s that you say Derek? "Mary loves Dick". Hmm, maybe not then.