Do You Believe in Ghosts?

Have you lain awake at night and felt someone or something watching you? Walked into an empty room and seen flickers of black spots at the corners of your eyes? Felt an unexplained coldness cut to your core? There could be a perfectly sane scientific explanation. Or you could have experienced something we don’t really understand.

Do ghosts really exist?

I think they might.

My grandfather died when I was five years old. I was deemed too young to go to his funeral and he was whisked away by adults who spoke in whispers and pushed me out of the room. But I never forgot him, he had taught me to read and cuddled me while I read haltingly from my Children’s Bible almost every evening.

Once, I was about seven or eight years old, I fought with my mother and ran away from home. It wasn’t a well-planned escape, I had no money and only the shorts and T-shirt I was wearing. At dusk I became disoriented and realised I was lost. I pressed myself into a doorway and slumped to my knees. How would I ever get home? And what would my mother do to me when I did?

It felt hopeless. I had no idea which way to walk. But as I sat in that doorway I heard my grandfather’s voice calling me. I followed the sound to the end of the alleyway, then along the street and across the road. At the busy intersection I didn’t know what to do, until an elderly man crossed the road and turned into another street. As he disappeared around the corner, he lifted his cap and turned to smile at me. I sped after my grandfather; of course he wasn’t at the corner when I got there. But the road to my house was.

Had Grandpa come to help me get home? My mother didn’t believe me. But I don’t know how I would have got home otherwise. How about you? Do you believe in ghosts?