Supernatural Doings Afoot

I just saw a spectral apparition of two huge black boots in my hallway, moving towards my bedroom door.

This wouldn't normally bother me, but I was already feeling quite jumpy*, and it wasn't that long ago that I saw the spectral apparition of a huge man in an aran jumper standing in practically the same place, which for some reason at the time I interpreted as 'a giant from the real world come to get me'.

(Sometimes I have these sub-Philip K Dickian notions that I am not in the real world, but in a dream, and that soon I will wake up into the real world, and it won't be as nice.)

My parents were looking after a haunted house in France once, and I went to stay with them, and saw the ghostly apparition of a pair of shoes, a pair of grey socks and the bottom of a pair of trousers standing next to me as I was brushing my teeth.

When I lived in Slough I often used to see the otherworldly apparition of a lone black sock, darting from the living room into the hallway. My brother lives there now, and he and his girlfriend see the sock ghost quite regularly. Apparently the house used to belong to Aleister Crowley, but I don't know if it is his sock.

I sort of believe in ghosts (although not to the extent that I strew special ink and trigger objects about the place at night to see what they get up to) but I'm at a loss to explain why so many of my brushes with the supernatural have involved footwear.

Still, I'm glad, because it's quite hard to be scared of ghost shoes and socks.

But all the same, brrrr.


UPDATE: Following this disturbing experience, I had to select the least frightening book from my bookshelves to take to bed with me. This turned out to be Piers Morgan's memoirs.


* It later occurred to me that the reason I was feeling jumpy was because I'd been reading Tim Footman's analysis of 'Climbing Up The Walls' by Radiohead, which really unnerved me. Top marks for incisive and unsettling deconstruction, Mr F. Although it doesn't take very much to freak me out - I had nightmares for days after watching Edward Scissorhands.