I lived in a haunted house for ten years

The house had remained unsold for five years. Nothing suspicious, just issues with the previous owner’s inheritance. It had that empty, full-of-dust-motes-through-ancient-windows feel to it. An old manor house, mostly 17th century with medieval bits and Roman foundations. It had high-ceilinged linenfold panelled rooms and two staircases, one narrow and dark and one elegant with carved banisters.
Strangely I never thought about ghosts. It didn’t feel sinister. In fact the first sign of trouble was technology. Our American predecessor had fitted it with state-of-the-art burglar alarms, linked directly to the police. I never found out how to set it. It went off anyway — at 2 am, repeatedly — and every time the police would come racing up the lane, blue lights flashing. It was the Chubb man who said: “Have you got a ghost?” He installed max-min thermometers and, behold, the temperature dropped suddenly and alarmingly at precisely 2am. “That’s the ghosts materialising,” he said knowledgeably. He changed the alarm to a ghost-proof variety.
And materialise they did. Not all at once. Just now and then. Some were corner-of-the-eye wispy shadows. Some were solid, just real people, there and then not. There was the boot boy who hankered after the kitchen maid (doesn’t every house have a servants’ hall? We called it the cats’ kitchen). And the little girl who ran down the main staircase in a flurry of white petticoats — a ghost expert came to research her history.
There was a Roman soldier in the herb garden (dismissed by an ex-army friend who learnt some Latin especially). And a little white dog still forlornly searching for his owner. His appearance raised the hackles of our own dogs and cats, but they didn’t object for long. I think they realised he was there first. From time to time we heard shouts from the part of the garden where there was once a tennis court. It had trees and brambles growing there now, but that didn’t stop us from hearing the sound of ball on racket and triumphant yells of “out”.
• Danny Robins: ‘Everybody’s house is haunted’
Then there was the wormhole.
It was in the dining room. It was a cold room, not often used. We ate in the kitchen except for special occasions when the whole family were there. Photos show strange lights and orbs floating over the dining table. (In those days Kodak had a service for checking out weird apparitions that appeared in photos. They confirmed there was nothing wrong with the film or camera. Today of course one could easily fake it. But not then. Then it was real.)
One day I was in there with my dad. Recovering from a hip operation, he still couldn’t walk without a stick. As we stopped to talk, he laid the stick on the dining table and we turned away. When we turned back the stick had disappeared.
“Where’s it gone?” he said.
“I don’t know, where did you put it?” I replied.
We both knew where he had put it.
We hunted everywhere — in the most obvious places, then the less obvious, then the downright impossible. Nowhere. I had to fetch his other stick so he could leave the room. Over time the whole family, friends and even casual visitors made it their objective to find it. To no avail. Then one day, months later, the stick reappeared on the table exactly where my father had left it. There was no one else in the house at the time.
Where had it been? Who, if anyone, had taken it, and why?
It was a friend who suggested we had a wormhole. I looked them up. It was a thing, a space-time anomaly, a portal, and they happened to other people. Often. Our son experienced it upstairs in his bedroom. (Immediately above the dining room … relevant? Who knows?) He had dropped some keys. As he grabbed for them, they vanished before they hit the floor. They reappeared several weeks later, rattling dramatically on to the floorboards in the middle of the night as though only just dropped.
None of our other experiences had scared me, but these did. They were too arbitrary, too inexplicable. And the thought kept occurring to me: what if one of us were to disappear, or one of the dogs? How would we explain that to the sceptical policeman who had dealt with our ghostly alarms?
And then, because I am a novelist, came the thought: there might be a book in this …
When we eventually, reluctantly came to sell the house, we wondered: should we tell potential buyers about its more unusual aspects? The agent said, firmly, not unless they ask. The people who eventually bought it didn’t.
The Story Spinner by Barbara Erskine (HarperCollins £20). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members