The Door
I was about 14, and as the only child of a single parent, my mum was frequently home later than me.

It was getting on for the end of autumn, the skies turned the colour of a bruise and a slight chill wind swept the land at about the same time I came home, on my own, from school.

I was obviously on edge - maybe we'd had a talk at school about burglars, or I'd recently had a fright walking across the fields which were my short cut home... but I turned the key to the front door of our first-floor flat and pushed open the door.

Suddenly, the bathroom door just across the hallway slammed shut.

I shat myself. The flat door was intact & double-locked. There was no light on in the bathroom, which there always is if anyone is using it, because there is no window. I knew mum was at work and I was alone.

What should I do? Leave the house and call a neighbour, or the police? Naah - I'm a 14-year old panicking kid. I grabbed the first thing that came to hand - a piece of 1.5" x 1" wood about 3 feet long (4cm x 2.5cm x 1m for you youngsters!) and pushed the doorhandle down to open and forwards with it held at full length.

There was a resistance and the door slammed shut again.

"Come out!" I shouted (probably all wobbly and high pitched). I don't know why - perhaps the friendly burglar or evil spirit would kindly open the door and leave. There was no reply.

So I hit the cheap internal door as hard as I could with the wood, and put a hole in it, pretty much all the way through.

As I did this, I caught sight of something familiar: The clothes-drier, which was sat as usual astride the bath, had caught a breeze and slipped over in the bathroom, the angle pushing the door closed.

I had to explain the hole in the door to my mum when she got home. She took it quite well, actually.

So, I remain a sceptic, but do love a good ghost story and always get the creepy spine tingle thing. Nowadays, having spent the best part of 18 years hanging around doing historical shows at some of Britain's "Most Haunted Places", usually with an overnight stay, I have been occasionaly nervous but have never seen anything "supernatural" at all.

I feel robbed!

There was that one time at Warwick Castle... I was admiring the castle from the island, late at night, admittedly after a few beers but nothing OTT. A friend and I were watching the castle, thinking it was a lovely place to have as a backdrop for a campsite, when we spotted a dim green light moving in an upstairs window. It moved from one window to another, as if someone was walking down a corridor with a green torch. When it had traversed almost all of the windows, it disappeared.

A couple of enquiries the next day revealed that (a) the security guard does not do "rounds" and watches everything from an office with several monitors, (b) the rooms on the top floor aren't open during the night, and (c) the corridor that the windows open onto was divided into offices in the 1940s, so there is no continuous length of corridor there for our light to traverse.

Puzzling, but not scary. And that's as close as I've got to a supernatural experience.
( Doctor When May your wife shat and chipper, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 15:49, 1 reply)

Warwick Castle
As I live near it have heard many of the ghost stories, never seen any myself but at Xmas they do a great "Scrooge Tower" which is probably less supernatural but more scary!

I also once got freaked out by one of the mannequin type things they have set up to look like people from Victorian days as somehow I didn't notice it until I was pretty much level with it. I felt rather silly....
( TGB checking Off Topic is still shit at, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 16:02, closed)