Growing up and leaving my version of Neverland, things took a turn for the worse. I guess it started around age 12 or so and maybe peaked at 17. Nights became sheer living hell at times as I lay in my bed scared to death. It started innocently enough in seeing a ghost. The man dressed as a Cavalier was sat at a desk writing, got up abruptly and walked out through my bedroom wall. My brother who I shared a room with saw him too.
It went a bit pear-shaped after that though. Strange noises…. bangs, cracks, deep sighs, all unexplainable. Then footsteps. I hated the footsteps. Listening to ghostly footsteps moving closer and closer and closer…. Doors opened by themselves, things vanished inexplicably to turn up equally inexplicably somewhere else or even where you knew you had left them.
The whole tale is told in Inner Journeys. Here is an excerpt…
For example, one evening in my late teens I came home from the pub just drunk enough to feel that I could get some sleep. I was visiting for the weekend from College and I always needed to have a couple of beers before I could sleep in that house. I was sleeping on the floor of my brother’s room and he was already soundly asleep when I lay down or rather passed out. Despite my drunken condition, I was suddenly aware of the front door of the house being opened. It’s amazing how alert you become when you are scared half to death. I was no longer feeling that warm woozy effect of alcohol but was now sat bolt upright, the hairs on my body stiff with fear.
“I did lock the door didn’t I?” I said to myself trying to recall if I had checked the lock as I had stumbled through the doorway. I knew I had. Next, I heard a quiet low pitch moaning and groaning that sent chills running up my spine. It was so quiet that I could hear the silence as a continual buzz only occasionally punctuated by the low moans. Then, I heard footsteps coming slowly up the staircase as if the person on the stairs was struggling to climb each step. As this was happening, my heart was racing and the noisy silence was now drowned out by the sound of my own pounding heartbeat deep inside my bursting chest. When finally, I realized that whatever or whoever this was had now reached the landing, I found that I could actually move and started to back away from the bedroom door slowly and as soundlessly as possible. As I did so, the door started to slowly open and I let out a scream that was loud enough to wake the entire city of Hull. Strangely enough, only moments later, my father burst through the door with such an angry look on his face that I thought he was about to chastise me for screaming. Instead, he simply asked if I was OK and told me that he too had heard our intruder.
Whatever this phenomenon was, it occurred more and more often and with greater observable physical activity as time went on. One evening, sitting with a girl friend in our living room in the early hours of a Saturday morning, a similar event occurred and the sight of a door opening by itself was enough to send her home for the evening. At least it wasn’t just my imagination!
These experiences too gradually faded. My poltergeist activity faded as those hormones settled down and as life drew me in…….