Halloween Special: Ghost Stories

Happy Halloween everyone!
In honour of the holiday the Yorick team are here to share some of their own ghost stories. We discuss phantom bakers that refuse to end their shift, a parcel from the ghostal service and the ghosts from fiction that made us the writers we are today!

Transcript

When seasons turn

And pumpkins burn

Enter Jester skeletons that dance

Goblins that Read Gothic Romance

On a stage Were wolves Maraud 

As an audience of vampires applaud 

Such spooky sights to be seen

Welcome to Halloween! 

Hello and welcome to Yorick Radio’s Macabre Month of Halloween! We are excited to take you on a tour of the most spine chilling artistic locations. We’ll huddle by the campfire and listen to bloodcurdling ghost stories.

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Hello, and welcome to a very special episode. We are delighted to welcome you to our wonderful campfire tonight. Come, take a seat. Make sure to keep checking behind you as you listen to these very special ghost stories. We're going to have a very eerie time. Thank you very much for being here, everybody.

Woohoo! Thank you! The temptation to go, Woooo! Behind you was undeniable. Oh my 

goodness, so creepy. 

I'm Kat

the Chamberlain Critic. 

Do you believe? 

I don't know, is my honest answer to that. I haven't had any of  this kind of experiences that are mentioned in this podcast. Therefore, I cannot say for sure.

Hello, I'm Mon, I'm the editing knight, and I definitely believe in ghosts. As you will hear, I have had experiences. 

I'm Ellis. I am the Abba Magician. I keep everything in order here. I definitely believe in something. I think that we don't understand everything and we shouldn't and I'm excited to not understand what you're about to hear.

I'm Rosie, I am the Chief Jester, and I am what I like to call a celebratory skeptic. I am open to ghosts being real. I am also incredibly interested in the folklore and beliefs behind ghosts. Today we're going to be sharing some spooky stories. Some of these will be things that we've experienced ourselves.

Some of these will be secondhand. Some of these will be general musings on the state of spookiness and eeriness. Ellis, would you like to start us off with a spooky story? 

I have a day job, some will be alarmed to hear, as a teacher when I was living up in Durness. And I was a teacher there, and it was a very small school, and by that I mean there were only four pupils in the entire school.

Very small village, lovely, lovely place. I lived in a council house, and I was next door to the school, and at the time I was on my own in the house Mon wasn't living with me at that point in time, although they did come up for extended visits where I would kidnap them. It was a particularly cold house, because unlike a lot of modern houses these days, it didn't have a boiler that you could flick on with a switch.

It was a wood burning stove. And every morning when I got up, the house was freezing cold, and I had to go downstairs and light my fire, and pack enough coal into it that when I came home in the middle of the day, or at the end of the day, the fire would still be burning.  It was obviously a very mucky job.

I needed to constantly clean out the ashes, put in new coal. Things got dirty. They always locked the doors. They were big, thick, heavy doors. I had the only keys. So one day, when I came home at lunchtime, I found that the fire was out. But I also found, on top of the hearth, A handprint. Now, under normal circumstances, this wouldn't be too alarming.

It could just as well be my handprint because, well, I'm constantly leaning down next to the fire and using it to stand up. The only thing was that the handprint was about the size of my palm. It was unmistakably a handprint. There was no doubting it. I took a photo of it. There was no one else in the house.

I was the only one that lived there. The house was locked up tight. It had not been there in the morning. I don't know how it got there. I don't have a reasonable explanation for that. Yeah, you remember the photo that I sent? I'm thinking of 

a 

f ing photo. Like, I cannot find that photo. 

Is that the extra element of the ghost?

You took the photo for proof, and now it's gone. 

It's probably more an element of my own idiocy, to be honest. 

Isn't that the scariest ghost story of all? Our own idiocy.

But that little house was just creepy in general, though. Yeah, 

we full on heard something in the night. There was a time where, we'd just switched the lights off. We're about to go to sleep. We're just chatting. And then we heard from the guest room. a definite, deliberate sound, like, that we both stopped talking and went, oh, that was a ghost, because 

this was like the chair moving across the floor or a drawer opening. It was like, 

there was a wooden scrape against wood and at that point I had exposed floorboards in the house 

really deliberately, like, not accidentally, not anything falling over. It was like, 

Now, a slightly different tack. Playwrights, love to put ghosts in for various thematic reasons as well as just a good old scare.

Cat, could you tell us a little bit about portraying a 

spirit? 

It was kind of a blend of some scenes from Shakespeare and some music. In Act 2, I was playing Hamlet's dad's ghost. For those of you who don't know, in Hamlet, his dad's ghost walks up and says to him, Hey kid I got murdered, can you solve it please?

You should write for Netflix, dude. 

Thank you. I was double cast as King Lear in Hamlet's Dad's Ghost, and I was like, this is the coolest show I've ever been in. And for being Hamlet's dad's ghost, It wasn't particularly ghosty in the sense, like, I wasn't floating about unfortunately. We didn't have the budget.

I had a very nice cloak on. It was quite royal because it was fluffy, but at the same time it was quite heavy. And so the way that I entered the scene is I walked down the aisle between these two rows of views and the cloaks kind of swishing behind me. I'm like, yes, good, this feels nice and ghosty. It was really good fun.

I really enjoyed it. And there's just something about playing a dead king's ghost who got poisoned by having poison put in his ear. You can't even whack it as they say. 

So Shakespeare used a lot of ghosts throughout his plays. Do you feel like he used them effectively?

My other favourite Shakespearean ghosts are the ones in Richard III, yay! It's less exposition and foreshadowing, it's more sort of like a rap sheet, you could say. All the people Richard killed or had a part in having killed. And they all come back and they go, It's your fault we're dead, you suck, woo! 

To quote Shakespeare.

And the interesting part is they go to Richmond future Henry VII's camp as well and they go Oh, you're gonna beat him. Woo. We love you. Go Henry VII. Woo. And then of course,  they wake up the next day and Richard has quite a famous monologue where he's going, Oh, what am I scaring off?  It's just dreams.

It doesn't matter. I'm going to be fine. Oh wait, am I fine? Do I hate myself? And he has this  breakdown. And it's just very interesting. To see a character who's been so self assured up to that point, and you feel sympathetic to him even though he's a dick. What brings him to that scene comes from all these ghosts, some from the previous play from Henry VI part 3, the ghosts. are the reason, in part, at least in Shakespeare's version of events, for him losing the battle of Bosworth Field because he's so affected by all the spooky crap that happened. And yes, he tried to dismiss it as a dream. Let not our frightened dreams fright our souls. Shields bear conscience. Swords are law.

Something like that.  I'm not gonna be scared. But then he gets on the battlefield and in some productions that I've seen, the ghosts are still there. And they're still on the stage while the battle is happening. And he'll be fighting Richmond, or fighting somebody else, or yelling for,  my horse, horse, kingdom for a horse.

And while he's doing that, a ghost will just be right there in his peripheral vision, or even in front of him, just looking at him like... Remember you killed me, mate. And that affected mentally, and that then affects the outcome of the battle. They're just so sassy. These ghosts are like, Yeah, we're gonna haunt you and be spooky and horrible, but we're also gonna be sassy as heck, and just insult you because you suck, and you're gonna die.

The repeated line that they all say is Despair and die. So they'll all do the wee monologue, and then they go, da da da da, despair and die. It's like, oh, oh, well, I guess I'm gonna despair and die. 

It's just interesting how you're saying that Richard performed badly in the battle because of the ghosts, and that's the  point in them appearing, Shakespeare writing that that affected him and that's why he lost at the Battle of Bosworth.

Because if you were to think of, Richard III and his possible real life experience, maybe he's experienced sleep paralysis and he saw these figures in that state and that still affected him,  so whether it was a ghost or a sleep paralysis apparition doesn't matter. It still affected him in the course of history.

To me, it sounds like the ghosts are a way of inputting doubt and worry in a very physical, yet obviously not physical because they're ghosts, ways, and making them more tangible. Because us as the audience know what's going on, we probably know some of the background history, we know what's coming, but the characters don't, so it makes sense that they experience these emotions and ghosts are a good format to carry these in.

There's a doubt in there of what is real, where does reality stop and my imagination start, when does sleep paralysis become a demon. 

In Shakespeare specifically, ghosts appear. When there is an imbalance in the natural order, monarchy is seen as part of a divine right. The world is unbalanced if the wrong person is on the throne.

So when something is wrong with the cosmic balance of the world that's when ghosts rise up from their graves. Macbeth, when he's on the throne, Banquo turns up because that's not correct. So by human action. Making the world incorrect, it is comforting for Shakespeare to have an equally powerful cosmic force represent this 

something is rotten in the state of Denmark and all that. 

Yeah, exactly, yeah. Mon, would you tell us a spooky story, please? 

I have a very spooky story Denotter Castle. So, in Aberdeenshire, there's a castle that is built on a cliff, a very old castle. I don't know how to describe it other than a tiny little cliff island.

And it's seen a lot of conflict, it's a ruin and it's very atmospheric sitting out on the sea. So I used to work there when I was a university student. The morning routine as... Junior Assistant Seasonal Custodian that I was, was to go down to the castle first of all. Now the castle is a ruin, so it doesn't have electricity, it has  a generator.

We all arrive with our  green shirts and big steel cap boots on, litter pickers in hand.  Me and my line manager, Brian. We go down the big, big flight of steps down the cliff. What I should mention before I talk about opening the castle is the idea of closing the castle the night before.

So again, since it's a castle where nobody actually lives in it, it's not got CCTV. Therefore, if you miss closing time, if you miss the custodian coming round shouting, castles closing, castles closing, then you get locked in,  it has happened. Not while I worked there but it had happened before.

And don't do it on purpose! 

Don't do it on purpose, people hide on purpose because they're like, wouldn't it be cool to get locked in a spooky castle overnight? The answer is no, straight away. 

Why is it no?

Because it's haunted. Hahahahaha So, there's Brian and I.

We come up some steps. And at this point, we know, as I say, all the noises. There's a lot of pigeons going around, so you hear like And then there's like scamper scamper around. And we just hear footsteps on the other side.

Full on adult man footsteps walking around and we both look at each other like oh Shit, oh, we've locked someone in. Oh, no,  that is the look of horror We give each other  we're about to face a tourist going. Oh my god I've been locked in here all night, 

So we quickly open the door And there's no one there. And then we look at each other and go Oh ho ho ho, there's no one there, oh ho ho, lol, ghost. But then we quickly move on. And we went, up to the kiosk. This is where,  the person that would serve you would,  open the window, slide Ticket and your guidebook, whatever, all the windows were hanging open.

Now, that again, is something that we always make sure we do at night. That's part of the closing routine, is close all the windows, secure everything. They were just open all of the windows. And on top of that, the megaphone that we used to get everyone out at night was making noises on its own.

Imagine a megaphone sitting on the shelf with its horn facing down, just going blo. Bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop. But it is like 5 to 9 and we need to open up the castle.  because there's tourists gonna come in and stuff. So morning routine, open up the toilets, open up the restored rooms and then come back down.

So that was my duty. I was like, oh god, okay, oh this is creepy but I'll go and open up. So I went up this tunnel and the whole time I was going up the tunnel  I feel like I'm being followed. Oh I feel really weird. I don't want to turn round but blah blah blah. But I'm like, oh I'm probably just freaked out because of what happened. Go open the toilets. Part of my job in the morning was make sure that the soap is topped up. So I was doing that. Right beside the sink is a towel dispenser that's  motion sensitive. You wave a hand just in front of it and it goes ch ch and it prints out a towel.

I know that this is very sensitive to proximity because, You'd have to walk right in front of it. To get to the cleaner's cupboard, and I'd never set off by walking right in front of it. You had to put your hand right in front of it in order to get it to dispense a towel.

I went to the bathroom to , fill up the soap dispenser, got all my supplies out, went back and forth in front of this thing. Duh duh duh. Cleaning cupboard. Just trying to get the soap dispenser,  lid back on. It wasn't working, oh, come on. Duh duh duh. I was kind of forcing it back on,  a bit annoyed. And the second I got a bit annoyed and started to use a bit of force, the towel dispenser beside me... Started going, dispensed towels, After towels, After towels,  in this huge big ream down to the floor and kept going. 

Something that It wasn't prone to malfunctioning. 

No, never, never malfunctioned.

Been there two summers, never malfunctioned.  It kept going and I don't know how long it kept going for because I ran. And I was just radio because we had handheld radios to communicate with each other, I was just like, Brian, there's a ghost! 

Stephen King, eat your heart out! This ghost made Towel dispensers scary!

I know!  There are signs up in the castle about the ghosts, , Oh, the green lady that haunts the bakery! And I'm like, what were the Ghost that haunts the toilet! The toilet the 

toilet! Spirits 

haunting bathrooms is a very, very common motif around the world.

In Japan, there are very distinct yokai that bother people in the loo. There's a famous one where it murders people if they answer the question wrong. In Africa, there's a ghost called Pinky. I think it translates to diminutive form of pink. And he harasses women in the bathroom. 

Are you sure that's a ghost?

Yeah. 

It's amazing how around the world spirits like bathrooms for some bloody reason. 

This ghost is so scary he made me piss myself I couldn't get to the bog. 

The first one I'm going to tell did not happen to me but it it was told to me by a friend that I trust. So I believe that they believe that this happened.

It's only two degrees of separation. So I live in an area which has been of. religious significance since before Christianity it's always been a site of spirituality and strange things happen around here.

And for multiple reasons, we have a few energy lines crossing. We have. ancient burial mounds, we have early buried monasteries, that kind of thing. We have disturbed graves, so that's always fun. 

I know. 

Rosie, 

what have you been doing over the weekend? Yeah.

Why didn't you invite us? 

I could have brought my broccoli and not a spade.

Oh, 

sorry. 

So. My very old friend and neighbor, I'm going to give them a different name just for the sake of privacy, we're going to call her Winnie, and Winnie is from a very old farming family in the area.

When Winnie was a little girl, she lived in the farmhouse with her mother and her father and her brothers. And this was a very chatty farmhouse.

There was always These strange noises happening, strange happenings in general, and they weren't afraid. It's, you get used to the sound of a house, you get used to its little energies, its movements. Even if you can't explain them, it just becomes another part of the family. That's why ruins are so frightening.

You're not just looking at a broken object, you're looking at a dead body. . So this house, has been around for a very long time, so it had a much more outspoken personality, it made its presence known.

So, Winnie was quite little, and her mother heard her come through into her bedroom. And she turned round and saw this little girl in a white nightie. And it was late at night, and she assumed this was her daughter. And she said, Oh, Winnie, Winnie, what's wrong? And the little girl said, Nothing. And her mother went for her glasses.

To put them on, see what's going on, and the child wasn't there.  And she runs into her children's bedroom and Winnie wakes up. She's been in the bed. She's very clearly been fast asleep. And kids can't fake that.  They cannot pretend to be asleep, and she had no idea what her mother was talking about.

So that taken on her shape. 

 It was very clearly a little girl  in a night dress. 

Uhhuh. Yep, . 

I love ghost stories. 

Let us return to Ellis.

Would you mind telling us another ghost story please? 



I used to work when I was a young teenager in a shop in the suburbs of Aberdeen and It was an old shop, it started off as a bakery, and it evolved into a kind of, not a supermarket, but a small one. It sold groceries, it had a deli counter, a butchery counter, and a bakery counter. And I worked there for, nearly seven years. And got to know it really well. The only part I never worked in was the actual bakery where they baked stuff. This place was one of the biggest and most definite haunted places that I've been. So, it was a really friendly place. I got on with almost everyone that I worked with, 

As it started to get later on, and it got darker, and particularly in winter I would start to get the heebies about going down into the stockroom. Now, to give you an idea, the shop floor, well lit, loud music playing, all that you would expect from a shop. But as you went through the double swing doors down into the stockroom, it was a big long ramp, probably 20, 30 metres, something like that.

 And you would go down and down and down into a stone floored, big, open stock room. And the roof was made out of clear, corrugated plastic, so the light came through it. And there were fluorescent lights, but sometimes they didn't work. I would go down in there, and I didn't mind it if there were other people, but past about six o'clock at night I would highly avoid going down there on my own when it got especially dark.

I cannot describe the feeling that I got there other than you know when something horrific is about to happen to yourself and you want to scream. That is what I got down there.

I would not go down there on my own, and I would not go down there if I could avoid it. 

There was one time when I was down there, I felt somebody touch my hand. I don't know what was going on. But I felt often in that shop like somebody was trying to take my hand. , and I remember one evening Late at night  I was down in the stock room on my own,  I was filling up this trolley of stuff to take up to the stock floor and put on the shelves, and as I was doing that I heard really rushed footsteps coming down the slope, and I saw My boss coming out the end  of the ramp into the bottom of the island and he just stopped and stood there.

And I could tell it was him because he had his black shoes on and his black trousers because he always dressed smartly. And he just stopped there and I thought he was wanting me so I looked up and there was no one there. But I heard his footsteps, I saw his feet and he was staring at me. And I bolted and I didn't go down for the rest of the night.

I know what his shoes looked like. I know his trousers had a crease ironed into the front of them. I know what he looked like. And at that point, I started to kind of question, is this place haunted?

 And over the years, people kind of told me stories  nobody really could say how or why it was haunted, nobody had really died there, there was nothing like that.

It was a family run business, but  everybody was kind of in agreement that the bakehouse was bloody spooky  so because it was a bakery, the bakers always came in at like 4 o'clock in the morning, baked till about 7, that would stock the shop and they would go home then and the bakehouse would more or less  be empty from then on, apart from when the cleaners came in.

There was a little storeroom off to the side where the fruit and veg could get delivered through a high up.

window . There were no stairs down onto the road. It was shuttered and locked up by the manager. But it did also lead into a flower loft,  so, there was one day, it was late at night, again it was about 6 o'clock, and I know that because we were starting to turn out the lights, 

I saw somebody in the bakehouse come out and go across from the bakehouse door, straight across the fruit and veg section, 

and I thought, that's a bit odd. They're a bit late going in to get flour at this time of night. But I went up and I had a look in. And the ladder wasn't down. And there was no one in there. Had they gone up the ladder? No, because the ladder can't go up when you're up there. So there, I thought, I saw someone in a white baker's uniform go across the fruit and veg section from the bakehouse door 

and I thought they were going into the flower loft, but the ladder wasn't down and there was no one there. Oh my god, so they just went 

into a wall or disappeared? They just 

disappeared. They just disappeared. So I didn't know what had happened and I was like, alrighty, then we're just gonna lock up and go home!

Because what else can you do? I couldn't tell it to go home. Clearly you work here, so. 

That sounds very Stone Tape Theory. 

Yeah, I get that as well, I don't know a lot about Stone Tape Theory, I know it comes from  a book or a movie or something, but  I know it's like houses or buildings maintaining a memory, and I do think to some extent that's possibly what was going on, but.

I don't quite believe that time runs linear linearly partly because I believe I've experienced a time slip specifically in the house that Mon and I are currently living in and There was one time we were cleaning the house I'd been cleaning the kitchen, Mon had been doing the bathroom, and I'd gone through to the bedroom for something.

And as I came back through to go to the kitchen, I thought I'd seen Mon inside our spare bedroom, leaning over the desk. And I got the fright of my life when I walked past the bathroom door and found them still in the bathroom. I'm like, oh my fucking god, somebody's in our spare bedroom. I've just seen somebody in our spare bedroom.

So I double back and check  and Mon came and obviously there was no one there. 

And at that point I got a splitting headache.  And Mon was like, write paracetamol they're on the desk. And immediately Mon marches through, goes to the desk and starts rummaging to find them.

And I'm like, that's exactly what I just saw. That is exactly the shape their body made, the silhouette, the clothes that they're wearing, everything is entirely what I just saw. And, ah, and I take the paracetamol, and I do feel better, but  I got that headache because I'd just seen Mon in the future getting me the paracetamol for the headache that they gave me by seeing me.

It's like a little tiny time loop there you hear stories of people experiencing a time slip like decades ago  they see a shop front and it looks like it's like 1930s cafe or something and then it's suddenly gone,  but like, that was like.

With minutes apart. 

Kat, are there any other notable spirits or ghosts in fiction that you can think of? 

The ghost that, Looking back at it, I should have realised that I was LGBT sooner. And that ghost is Jacob Marley. Christmas Carol. We studied at a school And, you know me, I get hyperfixated on a thing. I rewrote A Christmas Carol, set in the modern day. My first ever piece of fanfiction.

 It was the backstory of Jacob Marley, and it was... Basically a story of his life and how he ended up going to help Scrooge  in Christmas Carol.  His purpose is in the story to come back and to say to Scrooge, look, I've managed to arrange these three ghosts to come and show you the error of your ways and to fix your shit because you're fucking up.

I'd always thought, oh, you know, it's, that shows how good of a friend he was to Scrooge. But then there's been several adaptations I've watched Christmas Carol the musical with Kelsey Grammer. More than I care to admit.

 In that particular version They show the scene in which Marley actually dies. And Marley says,  I'm going to go home a bit early today. I'm not feeling very well. It's Christmas Eve.

Business hasn't been very brisk. And he's heading towards the door, and as he's heading towards the door he starts to have, I think it must be a heart attack. And Scrooge is standing there with the Ghost of Christmas Past, and watching this happen, and of course Scrooge, in the past at the time, younger Scrooge, doesn't notice anything because he's busy working,  and he falls over and he collapses, and Scrooge in the present watching this is like, oh Marley, no!

And. Then Scrooge is like, Marley, Marley, what happened? Jacob, Jacob, Jacob, what happened? And it's the fact he calls him Jacob, I'm just like, hmm, hang on a minute. And and then Scrooge, in the present, turns to the ghost, he goes, he was my only friend.

And, actually, in the original Dickens text I can't remember the whole sentence, but,  Marley was dead to begin with, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  Scrooge was his soul, executor of his will, soul mourner. Scrooge lived in apartments that once belonged to his deceased partner.

Also there's a really cool scene where the two of them are younger and they've just started Scrooge and Marley money lending. And it's the scene where Scrooge's fiance comes in and basically says, here's your ring back, you prefer money to me. And in that scene one of the lines that she says is The two of you here, all day late into the night, sooner or later you'll work yourselves to death and I won't be here to see it.

And at that point as she's saying the two of you will work yourselves to death, it cuts to Marlene. Obviously, it's a reference to him dying, but the two of you are staying late into the night doing all your work and you care more about your money and about this partnership than you do about your fiancé.

And obviously I'm reading a lot into this, but Jacob Marley.  I can't put my finger on it, but he's always been one of my favorite fictional characters and one of my favorite ghost characters. What Marley succeeds in doing, is bringing Scrooge redemption. And in my version of the story, that enabled him to be freed from the chain he'd forged in life.  His love for Scrooge is what sets him free. And he's able to ascend to heaven I love Jacob Marley and Scrooge. I just love them so much.

mon, do you have another ghost story for us? 

Yes. Als went to Trike Church, which is in the Highlands, and it's got a lot of really depressing history behind it. Troik, spelled C R O I K, or C R O I C K,  it's a church in the middle of nowhere in the Highlands.

This was the Highland Clearances then that dispersed the population, tragically. It's awful. Highland Clearances. Devastated the population up there, and basically wealthy landowners kicked their tenants off their land. And on the windows of this church in the middle of nowhere is graffiti on the outside from the 1800s from the evicted crofters who were seeking refuge in the gurns of the church.

 It's still there and you can see it and it's really haunting to look at. 

It's quite poignant. There's a lot of names and a lot of dates, but there are some quite poignant messages 

saying stuff like, in need of repair. Basically saying you're not charitable enough and look after us, please. 

Yeah, because 

they didn't let them into the church. They just said you can camp in the grounds, 

they camped there for a year or more, I think.

 We would go just any time because it was open and  We went, by the time the sun was setting, by the time we left it had set,  part of the reason we left was it started to feel a bit spooky.

So we went into the car, and then we kind of kept that feeling of being watched in the car, 

Because at one point I full on stopped the car and told it to get out.

And it didn't, clearly, because we got home,  in the middle of the highlands with no street lights, just dead black night  and then go into the house. We happened to look out the front window, and the car headlights were on.  There's no other lights up there. So if the headlights were on, you'd notice. And they were not on when we left the car. And we're like, ah, okay, and   turning the headlights on, it's physical effort to do that. 

But when I went out to turn the headlights off, the knob that you turn to get the headlights on had been obviously turned because they were on, but I remember turning them off because it had gone pitch black.

Then your car battery drained. 

Was it kind of like the ghost was saying, don't come back? 

I just got snagged in the car somehow.

He didn't like sitting in the dark. Oh, I like these lights, I'll have them on, thank you. 

My earliest experience of a ghost, I was very small. I would have probably been about four, and I was in my bedroom at my parents house, which had been built in the 1920s.

 And I was in the bedroom that my sister and I slept in. And I slept in the top bunk and she slept in the bottom. And I woke up in the middle of the night.

The rest of the house was quiet. Our bedside light was on because I would not sleep in the dark.  I woke up very quickly.  And you don't normally do that, normally you're a bit bleary and you go, Ehhh, what time is it?

But, I was just awake. And the reason I was awake, was because there was a face, hovering right above mine, almost nose to nose. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH OH I HATE THAT It was the face of, I think, a man. With fluffy grey hair.  And slightly saggy cheeks and a little bit chubby,  but I remember distinctly being utterly terrified because in addition to that he had a pair of pink rabbit ears. And I know that sounds bizarre, but the impression I got was that he was trying to entertain me.

Aww. And I remember... staring at him, and him staring back at me with a big smile on his face. And I was so terrified I couldn't move and I don't remember what happened next. And I remember distinctly having conversations with my mother, Mum, I feel like someone's in the room sometimes at night. I feel like I'm being watched. I don't like it.  And Mum would tell me, well, darling, that's just God. And I would be like, well, I don't know, it's not. My mum... I think, has expressed to me her own opinions on these things, and she's not entirely a disbeliever.

But I think that was her way of comforting a child whom she couldn't explain these things to, had no explanation to, and even if she did, couldn't protect me from them, they were just going to happen. 

I love that.  Some ghost stories are very deliberately malevolent, but a lot of the time, they're not.  It does sound like that one was genuinely... Trying to be nice, but just failed miserably. 

Yeah, that's how I choose to interpret it. They didn't look like real rabbit ears.

They looked like part of a costume. And I don't understand why I would have been dreaming about that. You know, it could have been a dream, and I was four. But it's such a visceral memory.  

 One time,  my neighbor friend and I, we were around about nine or ten, and we decided We were going to go up to this burial ground,  it's very, very old,  and we set off in the evening, which was again, a smart decision for these 10 year olds.

And my friend prides herself on being very brave and  back then she would never admit to being afraid of anything. We were heading through the fields. to get to this burial ground. And the closer we got, the more uneasy we became. And I know that, yes, it was an area that's heightened, of course we were going to feel uneasy, but  it was a very specific feeling.

We knew 

this wasn't okay. What we were doing was not fully permitted. And, We got a bit more jumpy because of that we were almost there. We were 

meters away 

from it at this 

point and there's a movement like that kind of like lizard brain sees movement.

You turn your head and we saw a person with  long flowing clothing, billowing in the wind. And I just knew that this person was angry with us. In the way that you can tell from a parent or a guardian they haven't even said anything yet and you know you're in trouble.

And we ran away. We just legged it back over the fields and through the woods. And again, my friend was very big on nothing frightened her. She was running just as fast as I was.

 I'm not telling you who that was. It's the detail of the clothes billowing in the wind as well,  even if it wasn't  windy where you were, it's like, that's like in a place they were. Like, oh, it just... 

 I know I said it was evening, it wasn't so dark it was the kind of summer evening, where the sun is on the horizon and it's golden.  It wasn't even dark and scary, it was actually really pretty. It was a golden light on green fields. 

Oh my God, so he could have mistaken it for a shadow, it's like it's a person. 

No, it was dark by the time we got home, but when we were up at the up at the mound, it was still daylight, we could see quite clearly.

But looking back on it,  I don't feel like I was in danger. It felt like a guardian, a parental guardian figure saying, You're too young. 

Get off of my property! 

 This one time I was walking up to my friend's house, probably about 15 at the time, and it was again a dark winter's night street lights everywhere, you know, it was in the middle of the city.

 We were walking up the road and it was quite quiet and I was getting this feeling like somebody was walking behind me. But I couldn't hear anything and I kept turning around  three times as I was walking I got the heebies too much and I took photos and every time I took a photo I got orbs  they could be dust, we were outside so probably not, it could be moisture in the air, my phone wasn't flashing, it didn't have that much sophistication on it, so I don't know, it could have been catching the street lights, it was an old phone, but I kept feeling like it was getting closer and closer and the last photo I took,

when I looked at it, I yelped, grabbed my friend and ran, because what I saw. was something,  I don't know what, but it had teeth, it had one three pronged claw, and it had an eye, and It was in motion, so it was completely blurred, but it was close enough to the camera that I couldn't see all of its face.

So, we bolted. I still have the photo somewhere, but at this rate it's probably on a floppy disk and therefore dead. 

This happened when I was at university in St Andrews, and I lived in a basement flat at the time. You had to go down some steps to get to it, and when you went down the steps, there was no way of getting out of that area apart from coming back up the steps. It was a little closed off courtyard.

And I was coming back to my house. I was expecting a delivery person to be arriving. So I was keeping an eye out as I was walking down the road on my gate because I was scared of them  leaving with my package. So as I was going down the road, I saw a person, all in black, coming up the road.

And they turned into my gate. so I started hoofing it down the road. And I was laser focused on that gate because I was worried they were going to come back out and leave.   I believed I had seen a person so much that when I wheeled around the top of the gate  I was already saying, I'm so sorry I'm late.

And there was nobody there.  And there's no way somebody could go down those steps and get out without coming back up the steps and I would have seen them. The whole time it 

was the coastal service. Coastal 

service, the 

coastal service, . But actually the thing that I then remembered, which made me really interested was modern western ghosts.

You think of pale spirits  and I remember distinctly this was black I thought this was a person in black clothing. But thinking back on it,  it was just a black person shaped thing. And I remembered recently that Roman ghosts were not white, they were black. That's interesting, a little bit of antiquity, history,  

I did hear that, the idea of ghosts being white and floaty came from early photography. Mm 

hmm. Victorian 

era. Mm hmm.  It's because of the delay in the actual taking of the photo.

 If you had two people sat down and one got up too early, they would remain as a ghost,  because it took so long for the exposure. That's quite a recent development that a ghost is white and ghostly and see through.

And that's the other thing about ghosts, they change with cultures, the way we perceive them, and  you could argue that's a cultural thing that's our imaginations, or you could argue that as we have different accents, We have different slang, we have different ways of dressing.

Maybe ghosts also have fashions and seasons and times. and St. Andrew's is a very old place and  it's not inconceivable that a Roman era  ghost could have been kicking around, 

going into my flat for some reason. It's over an Amazon package. I mean, 

the whole thing about ghosts apparently saying boo comes from the Latin meaning I alarm.

I read that somewhere. When ghosts say boo, they're saying I alarm or I am screaming. I 

love that! I am screaming! 

I'm screaming at you! I like that 

I alarm. 

I thought that tied in to the whole Roman ghost thing. It's just like, I alarm! 

Okay, we need to make a pact right now. When all of us are dead, we haunt to the same location and just go round going, I alarm.

I alarm. I alarm. I alarm. I am 

screaming. I alarm. I alarm. I'm screaming at you. I'm 

also screaming, yes. Like ghost seagulls. 

Well, on that delightful note of friendship lasting beyond the grave. Yay! Thank you very much for joining us around our campfire. If you're still here. I hope you're not too scared. Be cautious out there.

Thank you very much and have a lovely Halloween. Happy 

spooky season.

Thank you so much for listening. 

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