#20: A Haunting

on ghost hunting and what makes us believe

I’m the first to admit that my belief system is contradictory at best; I don’t believe in God but I dabble in astrology and tarot, and I’m pretty sure I believe in ghosts. At any rate, I’m fascinated by the unexplained. As we recover from Halloween/All Hallow’s Eve/Samhain/Dia de los Muertos (depending on how you celebrate) and settle into November, the dark nights coming thick and fast and the trees outside looking increasingly skeletal, I thought I’d do a little spooky deep dive into my brushes with the paranormal. After all, who doesn’t love a good ghost story?

one of my favourite spooky paintings: the ghosts on the tree by franz sedlacek (1933)

According to a YouGov study, 38% of Britons believe that ghosts exist, while 20% are open to the idea that we can communicate with the dead. This, when you consider how little proof there is of the phenomena, is quite a significant number. So what is it that attracts us to our white sheet-clad friends? Is it a simple love of mystery? A thrilling brush with the unexplained? Or is it a way to convince ourselves that death is not the end, that some part of us lives on, even in a half-substantiated, spectral form?

If you ask a room full of people to raise their hands if they’ve had a ghostly sighting, I reckon you would see quite a few hands go up. So, what’s really happening here?

As I’ve mentioned in a previous essay, my grandmother on my Swedish side saw ghosts and communicated with the dead. She crossed the veil over ten years ago, so we’ll never know if she was telling the truth, if her visions were mental health related hallucinations, if she really did speak with the dead, or if any of the other explanations we can come up with to explain her experiences ring true. What matters, I suppose, is that she believed. There were ghastly visions - figures rising up from graves as she walked past a cemetery, the gallows outside her window - but she also communicated with the dead in dreams, and was able to pass on messages from my grandfather’s mother that had him in tears, sharing knowledge that she would never have known otherwise.

As a child I was fascinated by her gifts, and would sit in empty rooms peering into shadows, looking for the hint of an outline of a figure, terrified that I might actually see something. I danced on the knife’s edge of belief, wanting my grandmother to be telling the truth while simultaneously telling myself that of course there was no such thing as ghosts. I was safe. The shadows were just shadows.

In the end I didn’t actually experience anything until years later, when I was sixteen. We were living in England, and my sisters and I were home alone while my dad and stepmum were out to dinner. We were sitting around the dinner table when all three of us paused to listen to the distinct sound of two men walking around and conversing in the room above us. The thing was, it was 8pm and there was definitely no-one else in the house with us. Or was there? After a panicked call to our parents, our neighbour agreed to come by to check, and he confirmed that we were indeed alone. As far as hauntings go, this one was fairly mild - nothing was broken, we hadn’t actually seen anything scary, and there had been no sense of malevolent energy. We now speak of the experience with a dismissive giggle, but it has stuck with us through all of these years.

balbegno castle

That had been the extent of my paranormal experiences, until my dad and my stepmum bought a haunted, dilapidated castle in Scotland a couple of years ago. Balbegno castle was built in 1569 by one John Wood, although the history of the property goes back much farther than that. There are even rumours that an ancient castle belonging to the lady Finella, who supposedly orchestrated the murderer of King Kenneth III, once existed on this site way back in the 900’s.

Naturally there’s no surprise then, given the property’s history, that there are few things that go bump in the night. Family members and visitors all report hearing footsteps, children’s toys, doors slamming, drunken singing (it wasn’t me I swear), and even a baby crying (shudder) in the middle of the night. The kitchen, especially, seems to be a hotbed for action. There was the Christmas when knives kept throwing themselves off the countertops, until my no-nonsense aunt sternly told the empty room to stop it and let her cook dinner in peace. My little brother tells me he often has to walk down to the kitchen in the middle of the night because the radio likes to turn itself on and play classical music at an ear-splitting volume. One evening my stepmum, siblings and I were sat around the table when we watched a metal spoon, shoved upright in a wheel of cheese right in front of our eyes, bend in half. Bewildered, my sister tried to bend it back, but it was immovable. Then there was the time my little cousin, only seven years old, asked me if I was the one he had seen walking around on the landing in the middle of the night (I was not). Even my dad, who has always been a staunch non-believer, now admits that something is going on.

I’m sure there are reasonable, logical explanations for all of the above, but isn’t it a little fun to suspend our disbelief for a moment and say sure, why the hell not? After all, how much do we actually know about life, death and the constraints of the world? Who are we to say that something does or does not definitively exist?

Viggo and I are headed up to the castle in a few weeks to celebrate Thanksgiving. Here’s hoping that the only cries I hear at night while I’m there are his!

one of the rooms in the old tower (it has been refurbished since I took this snap!)

Whether you believe in ghosts or find it all nonsense, I think we can agree that there is something about the supernatural that we just can’t get enough of. And ghost stories, of course, serve a purpose all their own. Like horror as a genre, they’re a form of escapism. In an essay titled Why Horror Makes Us Feel Safe, the author writes: “It’s been said that horror gains popularity in troubled times because it provides us with a distraction from the terrors of the real world […] For just a little while, we can sit under our blankets and worry about the monster under the bed instead of the troubles of our world.”

We can say the same about ghosts and ghost stories; in the age of technology, when facts are laid bare and knowledge picked apart, there is something romantic about choosing to believe in the inexplicable. There are real horrors happening in the world right now, things much more frightening than a ghost or two. Sometimes we need a little scare to remind us that there are things much older than us that are still making their presence known, that this world is ancient and we are just a blip on the timeline.

There’s some freedom in that, is there not?

Thanks for reading, spooky friends! If you have a ghost story to tell please share it in the comments :)