Stranger than fiction...

Whether you are a believer or not, you may be tempted to celebrate Halloween at the end of the month, just like many people from all over the world plan to do. Also known as Allhallowtide, the yearly celebration is dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed believers. Traditionally the main focus of the celebration is on All Hallow’s Eve and revolves around the theme of using “humour and ridicule to confront the power of death” (Thank you Wikipedia for the explanation. Usually my research is a little more robust, but I’m feeling a little lazy this morning. ;))

So it is only natural, at this time of year, to wonder if there are such things as ghosts, or can all experiences be explained away by hallucinations, medication, wishful thinking, chemical reactions in the brain, or something else we have yet to fully understand. Certainly there are phenomena that are yet to be explained or even discovered. We only have to look back in history to realise that all because it is unbelievable, it does not mean it cannot or will not exist. For example, imagine explaining television to someone from the 18th century. Even today I find it mind boggling how pictures can be sent through the air to pop up on a screen thousands of miles away and appear exactly the same as how it was sent.

So do I believe in ghosts? I honestly don’t know. My head tells me one thing, my “sitting on the fence” and “open mindedness” tells me another. I have certainly had some odd experiences in my life that I cannot fully explain. I write fiction, but what I am about to recount are my true experiences. They are not terrifying, so please don’t read further if you are hoping for a gory story as you will be disappointed, but they have kept me “sitting on the fence” and unable to jump down on either side.

When I was in my early thirties, I lay in bed ill with chickenpox. The house was empty and I was sleeping, but awoke to the sensation of someone sitting on my bed. It was not a “feeling” or “sixth sense”, I actually felt the mattress depress by my side. I opened my eyes and on my bed was a child of about eight, with their hair in a ponytail and wearing a child’s dressing up costume of a roman soldier. The child did not turn to look at me, but simply disappeared in front of my eyes — very slowly. The strange thing is, I was surprised, confused, even a little shocked, but I was not scared. Perhaps, at the time, I simply did not have the energy to be any of the above. I later explained it to myself that I was ill and that it was probably a hallucination. Yet what still confuses me to this day, and which I find difficult to explain, was that I only opened my eyes because I felt the mattress move by my side. If I had not, I would not have opened my eyes to see who it was. So was this a chemical reaction brought about by illness or something else? If it was the former, does it adequately explain the sensation of the mattress depressing by my hand? I really don’t know, but I know that at a time of crisis, people do see things.

For many years I worked as a nurse in a critical care unit. A patient who had been involved in a serious road traffic accident was finally on the road to recovery and was waiting to move to a standard ward. For this piece I will give the patient a male gender and call him “Ben” (although that is not his real name and only I know “his” real gender as I take confidentiality very seriously). He should have been happy about his imminent transfer, yet something was on the patient’s mind and he called me over. He asked if I believed in ghosts. When I told him that I was open-minded about it, he said he wanted to tell me something. He told me that after the accident, as he lay in the road bleeding, his father, who had died a few years before, had come over to him, stayed with him and told him over and over again that it was not his time to die. Ben’s injuries were severe, so severe that without early medical help he would have died. What distressed Ben was that until this experience he had not believed in ghosts/spirits. The experience, which at the time had comforted him, now shocked him and left him confused as he reflected upon it. Basically it had tilted his world. We chatted for a while and he felt the better for it. Whatever the reason/cause for his experience, he was left with the knowledge that however it came about, when he was in the most terrifying moment in his life he was given comfort by the man he loved. So what happened here? Everyone will have an opinion, I am sure, and as far as I am concerned, that is okay with me.

The next two experiences are not to do with ghosts/visions, just something strange that perhaps shows that the brain is a strange and complicated organ.
When I was 14 I slipped on some ice at school and banged the back of my head. After I fell over, I got up and continued to my maths lesson. During the maths lesson I became ill. The teacher noticed my confusion and I was escorted from the room to the sick bay… at least that is what I thought had occurred and I would have staked my life on it too. Apparently, according to the eyewitnesses, I never reached the maths lesson. Instead I lay unconscious on the concrete path, with my two friends looking down on me scared out of their wits. When I regained consciousness a few seconds later, they walked me to the sick bay room. Following my accident, and before the school staff took the incident seriously, I temporarily lost my sight, certainly lost parts of my memory, became confused and finally, when the severity of my head injury was finally noticed by a teacher, admitted to hospital. I used some of my experiences in my second book The Gossamer Trail where the hero undergoes similar symptoms of a head injury. The reason I am adding this story to my experiences is that I know my memory/experience of entering the maths lesson is false and that my brain made it up. Why my complicated organ would bother to do that particular experience, I have no idea. At the time I hated maths and disliked the maths teacher who taught it. I would rather it made something else up, like meeting my favourite pop star, or perhaps eradicating all the spots I was suffering with at the time. However my point is that the brain is a strange thing, particularly at times of stress.

But strange things can happen to several people at once and cannot be explained so easily. One day my daughter and I were both in the same room of our house. My husband was away for the day, but out of the blue we both heard him speak in the next room, which was the kitchen. We both looked at each other and naturally thought he had returned home early, but when we went to him he was not there. We both heard him say the same two sentences; we both recognised his voice and both believed he was in the kitchen. However, in reality he had not returned, in fact at the time we heard his voice he was about thirty miles away. I must admit, that experience did unnerve me and I was concerned something had happened to him at that moment for us to hear his voice. Thankfully nothing untoward did happen to him and all was well, yet I have no idea what occurred that day. That experience was spooky.

The last experience I am going to bore you with is a family experience in the north of France. Fourteen years ago we stayed in a little cottage in the middle of nowhere. The weather was changeable so one day the whole family stayed in and played cards around the kitchen table. Suddenly, we heard a child laughing in the children’s bedroom. We went to investigate and, of course, it was empty. This incident happened a long time ago now, but we all remember it and have the same memory of it. I don’t remember feeling scared at the time and, strangely, even our children were happy to go to bed that night in the bedroom where we had heard the laughter coming from. It was not the only incident that made us think that something was going on in that cottage. The other was a door knob turning slowly by its self. I saw it with my own eyes and when I opened the door no one was there and the children were asleep in their beds. I cannot explain what we heard and saw or why we did not run screaming from the cottage in terror. Perhaps it was because it was a young child sounding happy that removed any fear as if it had been a deep growling voice you would not have seen me for dust.

As I get older I have come to realise that reality is stranger than any fiction we can write. Experiences are as varied as the people that have them. I remain bewildered and curious about life. Needless to say, I still remain on the proverbial fence, where I look down on either side. Do I believe in ghosts? The answer is that I really don’t know, but whatever you believe in is fine by me.