We all have a ghost story to tell. Well, maybe not, but I have a ghost story to tell, and that's the important thing. Even better, I'm not actually making it up. Of course, it could just be the product of a deranged mind, and I'm not one to fully trust that what I perceive is what is real. I am a true skeptic; I tend not to believe most anything unless there are two independent sources, each with a signed affidavit from their mother attesting to their being sound of mind and of good character. Not that I have trust issues you understand. However, my experience was a strange one, and I'm still not entirely sure what happened. All I know is that I can't find any other explanation for what occurred apart from sheer coincidence. And I'm a skeptic with regards to coincidence as well.
When it comes to ghosts and the like (e.g., UFOs, demons etc.) I tend not to believe people's tales. I believe that it is likely that they genuinely think they saw / experienced what they saw / experienced, I just don't necessarily believe that they saw / experienced a ghost. I also don't believe that ghosts are supernatural; I believe that we just don't understand what they are yet. For instance, for years people believed in the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion. We now know that in certain instances where a body burns, the body fat renders down to a combustible liquid that burns via a wick (e.g., the person's clothing) producing an intense, localised heat that completely incinerates all body tissues, including the bones. I believe that given enough time and brain power, most things can eventually be understood. Most things. I defy anyone to explain Michael Jackson. Hell knows what happened there.
I believe that the 'ghosts' people see are a product of their brain rather than an actual event, i.e., endogenous rather than exogenous. Your brain is a very clever thing, but is occasionally prone to temporary (and sometimes not-so-temporary) malfunction. There are, as far as I'm concerned, six explanations for people 'experiencing' supernatural events that are not supernatural.
1) Misperception / Imagination We've all caught something out of the corner of our eye that appeared to be an axe murderer, but on closer inspection turned out to be a coat stand (or similar). Our perception of the surrounding environment is a lot more cursory than people realise; it's only when an inconsistency appears in our sensory input that our brain will react and make us focus our attention. I think that more than a few 'ghost stories' can be explained by the simple combination of a temporary misperception and an overactive imagination.
2) Hallucination / Delusion These two tend to be either drug induced (e.g., Bill Hicks and his UFO experience), fever induced, dementia induced or mental illness induced (e.g., schizophrenia, mania, depression).
3) Low sound frequencies This probably accounts for a lot of the 'I've got the heebie-jeebies' feeling that people complain of. Our ears can only hear certain frequencies of sound. Anything outside of the upper and lower limits (e.g., a dog whistle) aren't heard, but that doesn't mean that we can't sense it. Low level sounds can put our hackles up, but because we can't hear them, we might assume a supernatural influence. The best example that I've heard of this is of a scientist who took a 6 month sabbatical. On returning to the lab where he'd be working for many years, he found it on complete disarray. This turned out to be because the cleaners now refused to clean his lab because they felt it was haunted. They felt someone was staring at them who they couldn't see, and were just generally spooked by the place. He dismissed this (after all, this had been his place of work for years, and he'd never experienced anything in that time), and started back to work. However, he found that he was experiencing the same thing as the cleaners; that uncanny feeling that someone is watching you, which can become oppressive if experienced constantly. Eventually he either a) got sick of the heebie-jeebies b) got curious c) got sick of having to clean the lab himself d) all of the above. On investigation, he found that the people who manage the building that contained his lab had replaced the air-conditioning units in his absence. Further investigation revealed that the air-con unit in his lab was wired incorrectly, and was producing a constant, low-frequency sound. As soon as they fixed the air-con unit, the strange feelings stopped.
4) Electromagnetic field activity There's a group of paranormal researchers (skeptics rather than believers) who were alerted to the case of an 11 yr old girl who was having some strange experiences. At night she'd complain of strange noises, that someone would stand at the end of her bed watching her, and that things would brush against her skin. She was having problems sleeping, and subsequently problems at school, as well as being constantly scared witless. The parents couldn't understand it; they'd always lived in the same house and had never experienced anything like this before. When the room was examined, the investigator found that the girl's electric clock/radio that she'd been given for Christmas was emitting strong electromagnetic radiation that was causing her to have these hallucinations. The clock radio was thrown away, and the problems stopped.
5) Charles Bonnet syndrome An interesting syndrome in which a person, usually older with sight problems, start to have visual hallucinations; anything from simple patterns to complex shapes such as buildings and people. An interesting example that I've read about (I believe in one of Oliver Sachs' books) is of a gentleman who started seeing children where there were none. When his case was investigated, it was revealed that he lived alone, and had never married or had kids, and that this was a major regret in his life. These hallucinations usually cease after a couple of years or so, but many people don't seek medical advice for fear that they are 'going mad'.
6) Mass / shared hallucination As much as we think that we've out-evolved evolution, we're still animals, and pack animals at that. The same way that a shoal of fish will turn as one, and a pack of lionesses will hunt down an antelope with precision, we can pick up on other's behaviors and projected emotions without realising that we're doing so. So, when walking through a dark forest with a friend at night, it is possible to pick up the other person's feeling of anxiety about the situation, which is then amplified by our own anxiety back at them, culminating in you both pegging it along the path like the devil's chasing after you.
I think that these six explanations cover a lot of what people consider to be supernatural experiences. People are too trusting in their perceptions of the world around them. Your brain lies to you all the time, trust me on this. However, if two or more people independently experience the same apparition, without any foreknowledge about a possible ghost, them I might start to think there might be something in it.
And so, after a lot of intro, I get to the point of my tale. My ghost experience. Well, technically, I've had more than one, but this is the only one that I trust to be vaguely plausible. You can sweet-talk me for the others, but they're not as convincing. As a disclaimer, I should point out that there's a good chance that point 2 of my 'reasons why it's not a ghost' may well apply in this situation because I'm bipolar. I'll leave it to you to judge.
My parents own and run a small hotel in Wales. The foundations of this building are well over 300yrs old, and there have been various extensions and alterations made to it over the many years, including the addition of another storey to the building in the 1960s. It's also had many uses in its time, including as a grounds keeper's house, an all girls school during WW2, social club, and a hotel (which it's been now for around 50yrs). It has four ghosts; I state this as a fact, even though I have no proof for three of them, and only tenuous proof at best for the fourth.
I don't actually have my own bedroom at my parents, it's not really worth it seeing as how I only spend around a month there a year. So when I do stay, I either get a hotel room (if the place isn't full) or kip in the living room. Mum usually stays open for Christmas, but being a loving and caring mother, she always reserves me one of the hotel rooms. There are eleven rooms in total, and over the years I've stayed in all of them. I've only ever stayed in Room 9 once though, over the Christmas of 2001. Room 9 is a corner room on the top floor, and it tends to get a bit cold because it has two exterior walls. For this reason, mum usually lets it out last out of all the rooms. It's the only room in the hotel that never gets any compliments. No complaints mind, but no compliments either.
As I said, I was in Room 9 for the five days over Christmas. I wasn't very comfortable staying in the room during the day, mostly because it is quite cold, but also because the hotel has its own bar which I'm far more comfortable in for reasons that I probably shouldn't go into outside of an AA meeting.
My brain works a bit, how to put this... whack. Every now and then it shorts out on me, and even when it is working properly, I tend to have odd dreams. I also get regular bouts of sleep paralysis, which are quite painful, but now that I know what they are, I can wake myself up to stop them. I'm setting the scene here that I get strange sleep experiences. This is fundamental in what I am about to relate.
Every night that I spent in Room 9, I had the exact same dream each time, which is very unusual for me. Odd dreams, yes. Identical odd dreams night after night, no. I'd dream that I was lying in the bed in Room 9, but that there was something not right, something that was upsetting me in the room. This is where my dream self would notice that there was a man (can't remember any distinct features, but I know he was male) sitting in the middle of my bed, staring at me as I slept. This was really agitating my dream self, so much that it managed to break free of my dream-self's body (a dream out of body experience. See, told you my brain was odd) and started desperately trying to escape the room to get away from this man. He bore me no ill-will or malice. However, he projected an aura of deep melancholy which permeated me, filled me, dragged me down. If there was a more unhappy person, I don't think I've met them. I just wanted to get the fuck away from this source of misery. The dreams would upset me so much that I would force myself awake, the same way that I wake up during a bout of sleep paralysis. However, unlike the episodes of sleep paralysis, when I woke I couldn't bring myself to open my eyes. I kept them tightly shut. I'm not one to scare easily, but in the middle of the night, by myself, having had those dreams, there was no *way* I could bring myself to open my eyes.
Let us now skip forward to the summer of 2003. I never told anyone about the dreams; to me they were just dreams. My parents have remained good friends with the previous owners of the hotel, T & G. I was talking to G one night whilst doing the drying up after dinner, when the subject somehow got onto the topic of ghosts, specifically the hotel ghosts. I already knew about the ones in the bar and in Room 5, but was surprised to hear that the dinning room had one; a woman in Victorian garb (bustle and all) has been known to walk thought there on occasion.
"And of course there's the one in Room 9." This is the point in the story where I should have dropped a glass that shattered over the floor. As it was, it was just a knife that admirably survived the experience. As I picked it up off the floor, I casually asked "so, what's in Room 9?"
G related the story to me about how, in the late sixties after the new floor had been added to the hotel, a local GP came to stay for a night after an argument with his wife. He came down for breakfast in the morning, enjoyed a full English fry-up, and returned back to his room, where he then proceeded to carefully lay down sheets of newspaper over the bed, sat down in the middle and opened up his radial arteries. His body was found a couple of hours later by the then-owner's daughter when she came to clean the room.
Suddenly, the previous year's experience made sense. I didn't (and still don't) know what to think about it all; something not *that* remarkable had suddenly taken on a new significance. It saddens me greatly that this poor man is still tied to Room 9, trapped in the misery that made him take his own life forever. I think that's as about as close to a Hell as I can imagine. What I do know is that his story has made one thing very clear to me; when I die, I die happy or not at all.
I should probably say at this point that I did try to get an affidavit from my mother attesting to my good character, but she just laughed at me. Maybe she just thought I was joking. I'll try again later.
To the 'oh-so-witty' personality who decided to soft-link "Don't make shit up" a) It's a Halloween horror quest, making things up that are weird and ghoulish is the order of the day b) I didn't make this up. If I made it up, it'd have more blood in. I'm very macabre like that. c) Life. Get one. | 
