I was a teenage poltergeist...
Back in High School I was in some sort of school play as a circus member, my terrible acting skills compensated for by the fact I already had all my own equipment* for juggling, meaning that my involvement saved a few pounds of the play's meagre budget.

Anyway, come the night of the play we spent time between scenes following the time-honoured tradition of scaring the bowels out of young girls by passing on a few of our school's ghost stories. The best known of these involved a student hanging herself in the music room, where she could still be seen wondering about and heard playing the piano.

Enter Pete, who was working backstage that night and therefore dressed entirely in black. Pete was a seriously talented pianist, and - luckily for me - very skinny. After a painstaking half hour I finally persuaded the trembling girls to venture upstairs to the pitch black music floor in order to commune with the dead bint's spirit. While the girls were huddled in a corner near the door, Pete reached out of his cupboard and softly began to play... cue many girlish screams and flapping-of-hands. When we decided they'd had enough of this, pete stopped playing and the girls exited past the piano into the corridor to the stairs.

It was at this point the poor girls were introduced to my newest and favorite prop, which made a loud *thud* *BANG* *thud* as my glow in the dark bounce ball flew past them, banged noisily off a metal cupboard five yards away and ricoched back to my hiding place.

Although I now feel sorry for these girls, I take some satisfaction in the knowlege that their second set of screams was loud enough to be heard over the noise of the show in progress on a different floor at the other end of the school.

Weirdly, as I lay in bed that night laughing about the whole thing I was disturbed by a snatch of piano music before about a dozen books fell off the shelves onto my floor. Laugh? I almost shat myself...

As it turned out, we had a very minor earthquake during the night which was cushioned by my bed but toppled precariously-balanced things all over the village. After a bit more investigation, the music turned out to be from an ice-cream van Harold Bishop was driving through the night on a quest to find out what the f*ck "Web 2.0" is...

*tee hee

Gravitas (who was raised religious and has therefore spend hundreds of hours in churches and graveyards, often alone and at various times of night and day but has never once seen anything even slightly odd there. I have, however, studied hypnosis and am constantly amazed by what people can make themselves believe they saw or heard given the right environment or suggestion.)

length/girth/appalling body odour
(Not very much gravitas at all, Sat 22 Apr 2006, 22:30, Reply)