A grim sort of a place, but was it haunted

If anyone asked I’d say I was a rational person, and however much I might wish there were fairies and mermaids and wishing wells and healing springs I actually don’t. I write about them as if they exist but really I know they don’t even though I have had a few odd experiences, I know there must be a rational explanation!

I don’t believe there are such things as ghosts but I did once have a strange experience. Three friends and I shared what was laughingly called a flat – in effect it was the bottom floor of a a house, with another flat upstairs. What we didn’t realise was that three ladies of a certain profession lived above us and we wee forever getting seedy men knocking on our door instead of theirs. My two flat makes were men so they usually answered the door if we weren’t expecting anyone… but that’s another story. Back to my “ghost” story. In those days there was no central heating in cheap accommodation, there was a gas fire in the sitting room/dining room and nothing in the two bedrooms, bathroom or small kitchen. Because it was so perishing cold, we took it in turns to make tea or coffee so only one of us had to leave the feeble warmth of the main room.

It was my turn to make the coffee. The main room had a carpet, tatty and threadbare but a carpet all the same. There was a short stone-flagged passage between that room and the kitchen which had lino or similar on the floor. We didn’t have slippers but just kept our shoes on, too cold to be in socks or bare foot, and there was no guarantee on how clean the floors were, despite our best attempts to hoover and mop regularly. So there I was in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, getting the coffee out of the cupboard, my back to the doorway. There was the sound of Jay coming through, he wore segs (metal studs/plates fixed to the heel of a shoe to prevent excessive wear) and his heels chinked on the stone flags of the passage then there were his footsteps on the kitchen lino. 

I turned to make some remark… and there was no-one there. Slightly stunned I walked back into the main room and there was Mark sitting with his back to me, working at the table, and on his hands and knees trying to work out why the record player had stopped working et again, was Jay, and he was wearing trainers. There was no way either could have been in the kitchen, and Mark didn’t have segs on his heels – they weren’t fashionable, and Jay was wearing trainers. I can’t explain what I heard, I hadn’t had a drink – we couldn’t afford it in those days, the kitchen was in a little extension sticking out the back – what had been the wash house a hundred years ago, so there was only the roof above, the upstairs ‘flat’ didn’t extend out over it.

It obviously wasn’t a ghost, couldn’t have been a ghost, and although we did have mice they were barefoot, I know this because one once left its footprints in the butter… yes it was a grim sort of a place, but was it haunted?