Ghosts

DH and I stayed at a luxury hotel just 15 minutes from where we live. The room was fabulous but I woke up during the night to see a middle aged woman sitting by the bed, she was wearing a tweed coat and felt hat and had a shopping bag on her knee. This hotel was a hospital in the 50s and 60s and mainly used for chest conditions. I knew it had been a hospital, I had accompanied patients there, so was it just my vivid imagination ?
Three years ago we stayed in a French hotel and I woke up to see a woman in a dress and headscarf and she had a bucket over one arm, the room was pitch black yet I could see her quite clearly right down to her ruddy complexion. The impression I got was that she was about to feed the chickens or milk the cows, perhaps she was trying to rouse me to help with the milking
I do not believe in ghosts but find these sightings hard to comprehend, I was not dreaming as I was able to move and hide under the covers.

I'm not sure about ghosts but I do think there is sometimes a sort of 'energy' that affects things. I had a perfectly good car a few years ago that I just had to get rid of just because every time I got in it I felt nervous and unsafe. Sold it and the buyer is still driving it around uite happily. Any ideas on what I was feeling ?

It's funny how you can sometimes sense whether you should be worried about a particular presence, isn't it? I'm sure there were more than a couple of 'visitors' in my old house, but only one or two of them actually frightened me. Instincts are interesting things!

Spooky KatyK

I once lived in a big detached house with three storeys. One of the bedrooms on the top storey was rarely used. After several guests refusing to sleep in it for a second night we gave up on it. There was no noise or objects moved just an overpowering sense of evil in that room.

I would never have believed in ghosts and always thought if I lived anywhere where there were strange goings on, I would be out of their like a shot. However, when we were first married we lived in a newly built flat. All sorts of odd things happened there. One of the bedrooms was always freezing cold, no matter how high we put the heating on. One night when we were in bed, I felt someone trying to pull the bed clothes off me. I tried to turn around but found I couldn't move. I'm sure it wasn't a dream. We would often see a bright light in the bedroom too. Worst of all, my DH used to work in a local pub and I was often in the flat with my DD who was about 2 at the time. One night when my DH was working and my DD was in bed, I was watching TV and I heard a loud bang behind me and a heavy glass ashtray was in pieces on the table. My brother used to babysit for us occasionally and he said to me 'there's something odd going on in this flat.' We had a PVC settee and when someone sat on it, it made a slight noise. My brother said he was in the kitchen and heard this noise and assumed DD had got out of bed so went to look and there was no one there but there was an indentation in the cushion as though someone was sitting there. We lived there for 5 years and many such things happened.

The community centre noises aren't unnerving or scary. Perhaps the person was so happy in her work that she never wanted to leave.

We lived in a thatched farmhouse in Suffolk during the early seventies. It was definitely haunted. You could hear footsteps on the landing some nights and doors opening and shutting where the doorways had actually been bricked up.

One dark winters morning I woke early and was aware of somebody standing at the bottom of the bed. I thought it was DD who had just moved from a cot to a bed and often clambered in with us if she woke up before we did. It was a young man (around 18 I reckon) quite smartly dressed in clothes that would have looked about right in a Victorian costume drama and he was lighting a pipe from the fireplace which was no longer in working order.

I didn't move a muscle and just stared at him for what was probably just a few seconds. He turned and smiled at me. I nudged DH who was sound asleep but he didn't wake up so I looked down at him. When I looked back up the man had gone.

We lived in that house for another year and the noises carried on. I never saw the man again but even though sometimes DH had to work away I was never afraid to be in the house alone with the children. I like to think that who/whatever was haunting the house they were friendly spirits.

I could explain the noises as it just being an old building with creaking wood but the locked door is more difficult.

My imagination tells me (or perhaps it's real) that I'm hearing a teacher putting out or putting away chairs. The hall could be used as two classrooms by closing a folding door or left as one large hall. The footsteps in the corridor sound like someone simply walking on a wooden floor (like most old schools there is a wooden floor beneath the carpet).

I'm very open minded about ghosts. I have heard the theory that walls can 'video' and replay past incidents. If it is a ghost I doubt it's aware that we're in the building. It's busy replaying it's past role.

DH has just reminded me of the times that the hall doors have been locked. We just assumed that someone had locked them although the room is usually left unlocked. Now we're wondering if that same thing that locks the kitchen sometimes locks the hall too.

I admire your nerve *nanadenise! when my children were young, my husband worked away from home a lot. We had just moved into a new house that we had built on an old plot when very odd things started to happen. I was largely on my own in the house, as the children were at school, but would feel sharp tugs on my clothes fairly often, as well as a child's voice shouting very faintly (our house was very isolated, so no children about). My daughter often referred to 'the man at the end of the garden' as well, who apparently was always digging about for something in the ground with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Oddly enough, sometimes I wouldn't be bothered by it and other times I'd sleep with the gun we had by my bed - not sure what I thought I was going to do with it if it were ghosts that were roaming about

When I got married, we bought MIL's house and she had said there was a poltergeist there. She had asked it to leave some years before and it move two houses down and her neighbour sent it back again. For the first month that we lived there, things would get moved, photos placed face to the wall and ashes from the boiler emptied down the path. I never heard it, but it left after the first month probably because I ignored it. It didn't return to MIL in her new flat or reside with any of our neighbours. So, if you lived in London W7 in the late 60s and had an unwelcome visitor, I am really sorry.

There was a fictional programme on TV years ago called The Stone Tape- it was about a film crew I think who kept seeing the figure of a parlour maid in Victorian dress descending a non existent staircase. The theory put forward was that somehow surroundings and the environment 'record' happenings and play them back when time gets distorted somehow. I quite like this theory. However 'there are more things in heaven and earth etc etc'.

tramp more scary than a ghost

There's usually a more earthly reason for such events - a friend worked in a children's care home with all sorts of goings-on with lighting, strange sounds, missing food, moving furniture, etc.

Obviously the children would be likely culprits but sometimes it just wasn't possible for it to be them e.g. during school hours.

The staff finally discovered a homeless 'tramp' living in the loft space - been there for years!

Very possibly haunted. Here is my similar story.
I worked in a shop in an old part of Carlisle when I was in my early twenties. We took turns each evening, to clean and tidy the staff room. I put the chairs on the table with the chair legs pointing to the ceiling while I mopped the floor. I left the room to take away the rubbish when suddenly there was a loud clatter. I went back into the room and all the chairs were lying on the floor! It was my future husband's shop, and he regularly went in early in the morning to find all the lights on, when he knew for certain that he had put them off before he left the previous evening.

Strange, isn't it?I have heard of quite a few similar things in buildings that were public buildings, hotels, schools, hospitals.Almost like a 'rememberance' of events in the past (wooden floors etc.)It's all about what happens to sound, is it trapped?I don't believe that it's anything more than sound btw nothing sinister, but must be unnerving for you all the same.