It’s a week until Samhain, Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve… whatever name you know this day by, it’s a time when the veil between this world and the next is supposed to be at its thinnest. It’s a time that’s long been associated with spirits and ghosts.
But that’s all just a story, right? Ghosts aren’t real. My scientific brain cannot see a way that the fuzzy outline of a person could continue walking around after their body has passed away.
And yet.
There are so many experiences - both my own, and those of people I trust - that I can’t explain. How can I maintain my rational, scientific approach and still make sense of the otherworldly happenings around me?
The thin veil
The year is dying.
In pagan tradition, 1st November marked the start of the year. The harvest has been collected, and nature is shedding the old and dying, clearing out everything that’s no longer needed. During the winter, the process will begin of growing it all again from the beginning - incubating and nurturing new buds and shoots in the darkness. So it makes a lot of sense that this was seen as the endpoint; then, in winter, is the new start.
The death of the year was seen as a liminal space, where the veil between this world and the Otherworld was at its thinnest. It was easy for spirits and ghosts to pass through.
Death and decay would have been all around our ancestors at this time - not only the leaves falling to the ground and the bare fields, but this was a time to slaughter some livestock ready for the winter. The light was fading, the nights getting longer, which was not only symbolic but a very real threat when wild animals had more cover of darkness to attack. There would also have been fear - about being prepared enough for winter, about how harsh the winter would be, about whether they would be able to survive the cold and dark. No wonder it became associated with ghosts.
So it can all be easily rationalised. It’s understandable that all these stories appeared, helping those living at the mercy of the elements to process their fear and dread, and their own sense of ending, at a dark time of year. It’s not surprising that people might have had all sorts of spooky experiences, in the dying light, with only flickering fires and candles to see the world by, with dangers lurking around every corner.
It’s all completely explainable. There’s no magic or mystery at this time of year. There’s no such thing as ghosts. It’s simply a story.
And yet.
Ghost stories
I say that I’ve never seen a ghost, but my mother insists that I have.
When I was a teenager - maybe 15 or 16 - I had been out with my then boyfriend. He was a couple of years older and had a car, so he dropped me back home. We sat in the car for a while, taking our time saying goodbye as teenagers do, and I happened to glance up at my bedroom window, which was at the front of the house. I saw my brother looking out and watching us.
I burst into the house in a fury, full of teenage territorial outrage. I looked in my room but my brother wasn’t there, so I went to my mum’s room to tell her of this intrusion. My brother, who would have been 12 or 13 at the time, was sitting on her bed talking to her.
“What were you doing in my room?” I shouted at him. He looked confused.
“He hasn’t been in your room,” my mum said, “he’s been here talking to me.”
“I just saw him!” I insisted. “I saw him at the window from outside.”
“He’s been here with me for about half an hour,” my mum insisted. It was believable - my brother isn’t always the chattiest, but once he gets going he goes on for a while. He’s an engine that takes a while, and a bit of encouragement, to whir into action, but can then be relied upon to last for hours. My mother also prides herself on being deeply honest, and I’ve never known her lie to me.
I went off in a huff, convinced that everyone was conspiring against me. After all, I knew what I saw, and I was even more angry that they were trying to deny the evidence of my eyes.
But, later, my mum came and told me a different theory. She believed, and still believes, that I’d seen my older brother.
He died when he was just two days old, born at only 24 weeks because my mother had preeclampsia. She nearly died herself - in fact she was clinically dead for a whole minute. She says she floated out of her body and looked down at the doctors and nurses frantically trying to save her. She says she knows this was real, and not the effect of reducing oxygen in the brain as is often claimed by scientists, because she’d been in that hospital bed for a while at this point, and she’d been looking up for days at a stain on the ceiling, wondering what it could be - when she rose up into the air, she floated close enough to the ceiling to see that it wasn’t a stain at all, but a small hole in the tile. The doctors managed to bring her back down into her body again. Her baby, sadly, didn’t make it.
My mum believes he has visited her since, and that she was struck by how much he looked like her younger son. So she has no doubt that it was him I saw at the window, and that it would make sense for me to mistake him for our other brother.
I would love to believe that I’d seen him, this brother I never met, and that he is out there watching over me. But I just can’t believe that that’s possible… can I?
Other people’s ghost stories
My mother has form for things that go bump in the night. She has stories about seeing her eldest child and her parents after they passed over into the spirit world. One that always gets me right in the feelings is the one that involves me. My grandparents died very close together - my mum swears that they simply couldn’t live without each other - and I was still quite young. I used to go to great lengths to delay having to go to bed (and now I have been given a daughter with the same determination to never go to sleep, which is fun), and, being raised in an Italian Catholic household, one surefire way I could ensure I wouldn’t be dragged away and bundled into bed was to say I wanted to say my prayers.
So I was praying at the end of my bed, not long after my grandmother had died. My grandfather died first - he had a stroke soon after they found out that my grandmother was dying of cancer. My mother’s theory is that he couldn’t bear to carry on without her, and that he wanted to go first to be there to help her cross. But, of course, I don’t believe in any of that. But as my mother stood in my bedroom watching me pray, and mentally rolling her eyes at my bedtime delay skills, she felt a presence behind her. She didn’t turn around because she didn’t want to scare them away - somehow she felt she knew who it was.
She heard her father say, “Come on now, we have to go.” Then she heard her mother reply, “Just a minute, I just want to hear the babby say her prayers, then I’ll come.” When I’d finished, my grandmother said, “Ok, I’m ready now,” and the presence left.
Surely that’s just a flood of emotion hitting a woman deeply affected by grief as her heart was swelling for a beloved child?
But then there’s the time she went to a medium…
My mother swears that she was once deeply sceptical, too. It’s hard to imagine, given how intensely spiritual she is now, but she insists that she never used to believe in an other world, and that it was her mother who was the believer. As a teenager, she used to scoff at my grandmother’s fixation with spirits. My nan was very much at the hub of her local community, and she used to invite a medium round to her house, where other people would gather for readings. My mum would always make fun of this, and one night she was giving my nan a lecture about how this woman was ripping her off, and how she shouldn’t be encouraging other people to be ripped off too.
“You can’t knock it if you haven’t tried it,” my nan told her. “I tell you what, you go and have a reading, I’ll pay for it. If you still think it’s nonsense after that, then fine.” My mother said she didn’t want to do anything so ridiculous, but my nan said that in that case she could pipe down and keep her opinions to herself. My mum was feeling in a contrary mood, so she agreed. My nan pulled rank to get her daughter in for the first reading, and bundled my mum into the room.
The medium was a small, elderly and quite ordinary-looking woman. She asked my mum to sit down, and said she’d need a piece of jewellery or a personal item to hold. My mum took off a locket she was wearing and gave it to the lady.
“There’s a piece of hair in this locket,” the medium said.
“No there isn’t,” my mum replied.
“There is,” the woman insisted, “there’s a piece of hair inside.”
“No there isn’t,” my mum repeated. Just in case anyone’s wondering where I get my stubborn and argumentative side from. The woman sighed and carried on.
“There’s a man coming through. His name begins with a B.”
My mum shook her head. “I don’t know anyone beginning with a B.”
“It’s definitely a B,” the medium didn’t waiver. “He’s writing it for me clearly.” My mum shook her head again. “He’s writing the whole name now. B… O… B. Bob.”
“I don’t know anyone called Bob,” my mum told her. Because she didn’t. She was all of 17, and she didn’t know that many people who had died, so she was very sure that she didn’t know any Bob.
“He keeps writing it over and over, it’s definitely Bob,” the woman would not be shaken off course.
“I don’t know any Bob,” my mum repeated.
“Look,” the medium said wearily, “I can’t speak to him if you won’t acknowledge him.”
“How can I acknowledge him if I don’t know who he is?” my mum retorted.
“Well, there’s not much I can do then,” the medium told her irritatedly, offering back the locket.
“Fine then,” my mum replied, taking the locket and flouncing out.
“Well?” my nan asked. “How did it go?”
“I told you,” my mum sneered, as she put her locket back around her neck, “load of old rubbish!”
At that point, her then boyfriend arrived to take her out for the evening, so she said goodbye to her mother and got into his car. Her boyfriend began to drive away as my mum recounted what had just happened.
“… and she said his name was Bob…” Her boyfriend slammed on the brakes.
He went completely white, and just stared straight ahead.
“What’s the matter?” my mum asked.
“That’s my brother,” her boyfriend answered.
My mum had known him for a while, but he had never mentioned a brother. His death had been so traumatic for him and their mother that no one ever talked about him. This was the first she was hearing of him. At that point, she remembered what the woman had said about the locket, so she opened it up. Inside, was a lock of hair. Then it came flooding back. My mother was a hairdresser, and she’d been cutting her boyfriend’s hair. As a joke, she had taken a piece and put it inside her locket, like they used to do in the olden days. Then she had forgotten all about it.
“Shall I go back and find out what he wanted to say?” she asked.
“No,” he shook his head frantically, looking terrified at the idea. “Let’s just go.” He drove away and never spoke of the incident again.
This part of the story always infuriated me - how could he not want to know?? I’m sorry if that irritates you too, and I think if it had been up to my mother she’d have run back in the house and had a good chat with Bob, who probably had a lot of thoughts about being written out of his family history, or maybe he wanted to send a message to his own mother to help her to move on and process her grief. But we’ll never know. That’s where it ends.
And there’s more
I could fill volumes with my mother’s uncanny encounters, including the time a medium described my father in detail to her, years before they met. And the time my nan, in spirit form, helped her sew a dress for me for a ballet show when my mum was ready to throw it out the window in frustration. There’s also the time I went with her to a medium for my own reading, and the door flew open, unaided, just as the woman was telling me my grandfather was coming into the room. She described both my grandparents down to the smallest details, even picking up on the fact that I have my nan’s eyes.
There’s the time my friend, whose then boyfriend claimed to be a medium, was woken in the night by him sitting up in bed and staring at the wall in front of them. He said a woman had appeared to him and was begging him to understand that it wasn’t her fault that the children had died. My friend moved house shortly afterwards.
Or what about the time another friend heard her dead mother in her ear say, “where’s the little one?” Her young son was playing in the garden, right in front of the window where she was washing up, so she looked out… just in time to see him managing to pull open the garden gate. She ran out into the garden in time to grab him before he made his way out towards the road.
When my mother lost her baby, she was so distraught at the thought of this little one being in the next world alone that, in her anguish, she called on the only person she could think of who was in the spirit world - her grandmother. She asked her to look after her baby. Years later, a medium said to her, “I have Rose here (my great-grandmother’s name) - she says don’t worry, she heard you, she has the baby, she’s looking after him like you asked.” My mother couldn’t speak - she had never told anyone about that. How could this person possibly have known?
But science though…
Are all these people crazy? Grief can make your brain do wild things. It also drives you to want to believe that the person you’ve lost isn’t really gone. But so many of these stories involve input from people who couldn’t possibly have known about the ghosts in question, and who weren’t in a position to be emotionally affected. Even if they were skilled at reading people, in many cases they were saying things that even the person they were supposedly reading didn’t know, so how could they have figured them out?
As compelling as the evidence might be, I just couldn’t see how it could work. How your being could stay together once your atoms dispersed. I believe in energy - we are all powered by energy, as is everything in the universe. It was a big explosion of energy that set the universe in motion in the first place. Energy can’t be destroyed, it can only be created and transferred. So, once we die, our energy has to go somewhere. My belief has always been that it goes out into the universe, ready to be used for other beings - new humans, animals, plants… sustaining the continuation of galaxies. That’s what I see as our “soul”. But I didn’t see how it could be possible for all the energy that made up one human to stay together after death. Surely it would spread out - some might go into a new baby, some into a tree, some into the stars…
Then I read about quantum entanglement. According to quantum physicists, two subatomic particles that have had a particular kind of close relationship can continue to influence one another even when they are separated by billions of light years of space.
Perhaps, then, the particles that make up our energy field, our “soul”, could continue to be intimately linked even without a physical container. Maybe it would be possible for them to find their way back to one another.
Maybe there might be a scientific explanation for ghosts after all.
And then… well, then I just don’t know what to think.
Love this post! Thank you for sharing your fabulous ghost stories. I don’t think science and ghosts are mutually exclusive. I think both can exist in the same space. I defin believe in science--and in ghosts. I’ve experienced both too many times to deny either one. Thanks again for sharing your experiences!
Maybe it's because my parents are getting older, but I find this strangely comforting. :)