All normal experiences resemble one another, but each paranormal experience is paranormal in its own way. And paranormal experiences are by definition unrepeatable. So those who don’t experience an encounter with aliens, hear the clank of spectral chains or meet a yeti, are condemned – or delighted – to rely on anecdotal evidence. I offer these fragments of my family folklore partly to show how intrinsically slippery anecdotal evidence is, and partly to show how even the presumed causes of these reported events may depend on the nature of the story (and the storyteller). Nonetheless, these are true stories. That is, they are told by reputable people of impeccable social standing – 'credible witnesses', in the jargon – who believe they are reporting what actually happened to them.

THE VIRGIN AND THE SAILOR

My dad, Hector Lachlan Frank Brookesmith, was known to his immediate family as 'Dooley' and Frank to everyone else. He was a third-generation New Zealander. My grandfather (also called Frank) made a fairly precarious living as an artist. Like any parent, my grandfather wanted security for his children, and perhaps regretted having given up a respectable living as a lawyer for the uncertainties of the bohemian life. At any rate, he was determined that his son start life in a stable job, with a proper salary and career prospects. So when Frank Jr left school in 1917, aged 16, his dad found him a place as a bank clerk.

In 1920 or so, there he still was, stuck in Christchurch, New Zealand, pushing the pen. By then he had been given the flat above the bank to live in, which was a handy perk. There was, of course, a catch. He was required to defend the place against brigands and bushwackers, and was issued a Webley .455 revolver for the purpose. He would sleep with this enormous pistol under his pillow, and at weekends took it out into the countryside to hone his skills at marksmanship.

One night in his grace-and-favour apartment, he awoke suddenly. Peering warily down the length of his bed, half-fearing to find an intruder in his room, he found himself agape at the figure of a young woman, dressed in white, kneeling as if in prayer beside his bed - and leaning her weightless arms on the covers over his knees.

This apparition, he swore, bore no relation to any image from any dream he had been having immediately prior to waking up. Indeed he had been (he said) in a dreamless sleep. What he saw, he admitted, frightened him. But his reaction was weirdly rational: he wondered if it were not some outlandish decoy set up by some particularly imaginative set of burglars. So, he reached for his official revolver. As he swung it into the aim, the image of the girl kneeling by his bedside faded away.

He found himself rather sheepishly - if that's a word you can safely use of a New Zealander – waving a heavy revolver at his own bare feet, which were sticking up from beneath the covers (as they always did). Making the best of a bad job, he crept around the flat and then the ground floor – the working area of the bank – looking for any sign of a break-in. Nothing was out of order. But neither could he explain the apparition that had woken him up.

The old man finally escaped the world of antipodean high finance in about 1922. Once a legal adult, he ran away to sea. In his book I Remember The Tall Ships (Dunmore Press, 1980), he recalled a 'haunting' that briefly afflicted the tanker Orowaiti on a voyage across the Pacific from Wellington, New Zealand, to San Francisco, in the early 1920s.

After the ship's chief engineer had committed suicide by tipping himself overboard, the rest of the crew, understandably distressed at the incident, swore that the dead man was haunting the bow end of the ship. The ghost was invisible, but its constant, eerie whisper could clearly be heard. Determined to find out what was really going on, and encouraged by the second mate, my dad went for'ard at about four o'clock one morning to investigate. This is what happened next:

"I froze, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end... It felt as if all my hair was standing on end. Someone was talking in a hoarse whisper! ... I ran down the ladder to the foredeck and I walked into the space under the foc'sle head. It was all as dark as the inside of a cow but I knew what was there... I stood quite still and listened. There was no sound save the usual creaks and cracks of a ship in a seaway...

"I went back [..] to the after rail and I could hear a faint whispering. I could not distinguish the words but there was no mistaking the sound... My skin crept. I knew that I could easily imagine words, but I simply had to find the source of the sounds. I moved about and found that, the nearer I was to the gypsy [a small winch], the clearer was the sound. It was an indistinct asthmatic whisper.

"I put my hand on the [anchor] chain where it went down the pipe into [its] locker and I felt it! As the ship rolled, the rusty links moved against each other to make this harsh sound."'

"Rub two pieces of rough iron together and you will hear what we heard,"' he wrote. "Add to it unhappiness and superstitious fears and you will have a haunting."' He silenced the 'ghost' by lashing the anchor chain down with rope. "I've found the ghost and I've bound him hands and feet,"' he reported to the second mate with a certain grim complacency.


Here we have a witness to two very different kinds of haunting, and one with a startlingly cool reaction to each. But the real importance of these stories is that, for my dad, the existence of false ghosts did not preclude the existence of real ones, and he was able to accept (or contain) both an inexplicable experience and an explicable one as part of the normal weft and weave of everyday life. I don't think he was unusual in this. The alleged rift between the believer in the paranormal and the sceptic toward the paranormal is not as schismatic as some would like to think - or would like others to think.

WAYS TO SAY GOODBYE

My mother considered herself a little fey, if modestly so, as became women of her generation. But she did, allegedly, have someone communicate with her from 'the other side'. Paradoxically enough, she thought that her own death would mean oblivion.

In the early Seventies, Luke Twose was a business associate of my youngest sister. He lived, part of the time, in a house on the northern edge of the Somerset Levels. He became a friend of the family; all of us knew him. My mother was, and this may be important, one of his biggest fans.

Then, as I recall, unknown to any of his friends and acquaintances bar my sister and a very few others, he was found to have cancer of the liver, which finally killed him. My mother wasn't one of the few who were aware that Luke was ill. On the day he died, she was poking about in her garden, one of her favourite occupations, when she suddenly became aware of his presence, and she distinctly heard him say, "Goodbye, Marjory."' My sister phoned that evening to tell our mother that Luke was dead, and why. In her own account, my mother said (before my sister was able to utter more than a cursory 'hello'): "It's all right, darling, I know, Luke's dead."'

It's a good story, isn't it? But if you think about it, it has holes all through it. No shock, for instance, is registered. Nothing like: "What was wrong with Luke?"', even. Not even the impulse to lift the phone pronto, and find out what was going on. My sister too is not impressed:

"I never did believe the Luke story, sorry to say. Mum told it to me when I rang her to tell her he'd died. I do believe that she had been thinking of him strongly, and when she heard the news she embellished it, saying she had 'felt' him fly past - evidently on the basis that he would be flying 'home' (which it wasn't) to Somerset. [The story] got more embellished as time went on."'

Well, it wasn't embellished, but positively different, when I heard it. And very quickly, for I heard the story from my mother within a day or two of Luke's death. Not only that, but I myself have likely projected a few ornaments onto the tale. It transpired in recent discussion with my sister that my mother had known that Luke was dying, and for some two months before he actually did - although she did not tell me that. Perhaps critically, it was I who learned about his illness only after he had died.

So, here we have three people offering significantly different versions of the same 'event'. What was the event? Did a solitary random zephyr blow, just as my mother was thinking of Luke? Did she invent it all? Impossible, now, to say. Which account, then, can you trust, if any - my mother's, or my mother's account as I recall it; or my sister's, as she recalls it? This problem of divergent accounts becomes even starker in my next story.

THE KENWOOD SPIRIT

First, here's the tale as I recalled it before grilling my hapless sisters in 2004. In 1969, my elder sister, her husband J., and their two sons, Richard (aged seven) and Andrew (aged four) moved into a posh bit of Surrey. The house, however, needed a lot of new paint, carpets, and other kinds of making-good. Money was tight, so my sister got to do all that while the man of the house was out toiling in the City. For weeks the place was a shambles, there was a lot of fractiousness, and the children were unhappy and querulous.

While the younger one slept normally, without problems, my older nephew started to have nightmares. Naturally, my sister was upset. Then, one night, she heard footsteps coming from the boys' bedroom, and going down the stairs. On the ground floor there was a cloakroom, so she assumed that one of the boys was going downstairs to the loo. She was delighted: they hadn't gone to the loo in the middle of the night, on their own. And, thus pleased, she went back to sleep. Nonetheless, the elder boy's nightmares continued. A night or two later my sister heard feet in the upstairs passage again, coming from the boys' room, and going downstairs. This time she stayed awake, and got worried, because she didn't hear any feet coming back upstairs. So she got up and stuck her head around the door, and there the two little blond-headed angels were-in bed, fast asleep. Hair stands on end, and so on. She then decided Something Had To Be Done-which we'll come to in due course.

My sister's version of what occurred is noticeably different in detail. In her words:

"The house when we moved in was a tip, and J. had this obsession to get it straightened out by the December [of 1969]. J. still went to work every day, gave me lists of what to do every day, painting, etc.-I also had to run the home, take the boys off to school and nursery school. I was questioned at night about precisely what I had done each day-the pressure was intolerable... He was totally obsessed, just appalling. So between us it was extremely stressful, and I was exhausted out of my skull. Nothing was fun any more. All of which took my anxiety levels to new heights, and the boys, particularly Richard, were affected by the atmosphere in the house.

"Richard was having nightmares over a period of weeks, which was of obvious concern, and as far as I can remember, I managed to extract from him that 'someone' was in the room. I think it was around this time that he started to sleepwalk-[we were] into winter by now. I would gently lead him back to bed and he would settle well for the night. Then I heard footsteps along the landing (not on the stairs) a number of times. I would get out of bed to see if it was one of the boys. And it wasn't. They were sound asleep. This went on for a few weeks.

"I then realized we had an unhappy spirit among all the anguish going on.

"That is when I took it upon myself to do something. I felt a great compassion for this spirit and was aware that between us we had disturbed something. The whole thing seemed to be centred around the boys' room..."'

This was confirmed by one of my nephews, who said that, as he recalled, it "tended to hang out in our toy cupboard"'. A piquant detail, perhaps. My sister continues:

"Worrying myself sick about what was happening, I decided I would talk to whatever it was. Took the boys to school in the normal way, and then went up to the bedroom, shut the door, stood over by the window... looking into the centre of the room and, although feeling rather strange as I hadn't before, to my knowledge, spoken to four walls all on my lonesome, said: 'Everything is all right, we are all right. Do not worry anymore, it is really okay'.

"And from the inbuilt cupboard in one corner of the room, I heard two distinct knocks. I returned those knocks and stood for a while and then left the room. Richard had no more nightmares, I never heard footsteps on the landing again. I like to think 'it' was at peace after that."'

This latter part of the story-my sister confronting the spook or, as I tend to think of it, poltergeist-is exactly as I recall her telling it some three decades-plus ago. The memories coincide precisely.

But the memories diverge drastically when it comes to what the 'spirit', or 'entity', or 'cause' of these manifestations was. Initially, my sister the ghost-buster told me: "I am totally convinced 'it' was a child-I don't know why, but I know it was."'

I hadn't recalled, perhaps was never told, that there was a 'ghost' or 'spirit' involved. My memories stop with the two answering knocks, and I'd filed these odd events under the catch-all heading of 'poltergeist'. They seemed entirely related to psychological and emotional tensions in the family; and as a devout Occamist I saw no reason to multiply hypotheses. So, hearing this about the ghost of a child, I pressed my sister further. And it turned out she did 'know why':

"I tried to find out the history of the house later and came up with some of it. A Ken someone (don't know his surname) had built the house in 1937 for his wife and young daughter (or the wife may have been pregnant with the daughter-not sure about that). Anyway, he was killed in the [Second World] war. His wife and daughter continued living there and, one day, while the daughter was being taken to school, the car became involved in a serious accident along the Seven Hills Road and the daughter was severely brain-damaged as a result. They actually came to visit the house when we were living there because they wanted to see it again-she had sold [it] eventually to the couple we bought it from. It was named Kenwood after husband Ken and the woods at the back.

"I always thought the spirit was a child (still do a bit) but maybe it was Ken who couldn't bear to think anyone living there was unhappy, as he had built it with a love for his family."'

Obviously this adds a bit more to the tale, the story, than having just a plain old polt on the rampage. And though this bit of historical research doesn't really buttress the 'ghostly spirit' hypothesis-there's no clear chain of evidence-it makes the story more rounded.

When I first asked my elder sister for her account of the Kenwood Spirit, I'd also asked my youngest sister what she remembered hearing of it. She answered: "As for Kenwood, I guess that's for [her] to tell... She became convinced-this I do know-that it was the ghost of her dead baby."'

The 'dead baby' was my elder sister's first-born son from her first marriage. He was severely hydrocephalic and died when he was about six months old. Now, my elder sister had told me only that she was convinced that 'it' was a child. So naturally I taxed her about this. She was startled-the idea, she said, had never, ever, entered her head. Her first-born had died about 15 years before the events we're talking about. She had been married to her second husband for nearly 10 years. There was no connection, in her circumstances, in her thoughts, or in her emotional life, with her previous marriage or her late son.

Clearly anyone who had only collected one of these three versions of the affair would have had a very different idea of the significance of the Kenwood Spirit. There is a common core, that's obvious, to the narrative, and no one gets the scene with the spooky knocks wrong. But all three narrators ended up with their own take on it. With no ulterior motive, shifting memories have altered the account, its significance, and its 'cause'.

A LADY AND A CAT

My youngest sister saw a ghost in 1950, when the family (all of us) were up from Huntingdonshire, staying with my grandfather and his second wife, Dorothy, at their place in Finsbury Park. So here is her story:

"I was the one who saw the lady and cat. Or, rather, the narrow-waisted long-skirted profile of the lady's back (not so little or old), skirt trailing a bit on floor, just disappearing in other words, crossing from right to left, and followed by [a] black cat. Very swift glimpse. I was going alone up the stairs (I guess the others were further down), and Dorothy was alone in the flat, in the sitting room with her Daily Telegraph. You may remember [or] know that they had a cat themselves, dark in colour. I went in to [Dorothy] and said I'd seen [Mephista, or Shelfbracket, or whatever her cat was called] cross the landing, and where was she?

"'Did you really?' Dorothy said with smile. 'She's in my bedroom.'

"And she was [and the bedroom was in the opposite direction along the passage to the way the lady and the cat had been going]. Dorothy then told me the story of how she had seen a lady in Victorian dress with [a] cat, more than once. The story hadn't been told previous to this."'

In other words, Dorothy hadn't previously told anyone about her own sightings. So no question of a suggestion being planted subliminally or otherwise in my sister's mind. Her story is independent confirmation of the apparition. As far as I know, Dorothy felt no urge to find out whose ghosts these were.

THE WHOLE DEAD DOG

Imagine standing on a stair, looking down at a passageway of civilised width. To the left you can see a door, which leads into a dining room, as it happens. To the right, the passage continues a short way and through an open door you can see into a drawing room. It is a light, airy house, and it is midday. You can see quite clearly. Opposite the bottom of the stairs is another door, which opens into a shower room. You know, although you haven't seen them yet, that in the shower is a Jack Russell terrier bitch and her recently-born puppies. You walk down the stairs and turn left toward the dining room.
Lizzie Hopkinson proudly displays the two surviving offspring of her Jack Russell terrier’s shameless philandering. The ghost puppy seen by the author had significantly different markings from these two.

The Jack Russell, whose names vary from Harriet to Hatty to Worm, has got herself pregnant partly through the agency of a sheepdog from the farm up the road, partly through the agency of another Jack Russell down the road, and wholly through the astonishing ability of canines to commit fornication through a catflap. One sunny day the Worm, now great with child, is left chained up outside while the household rides out. It breaks its chain and scampers off into the wild countryside. Somewhere, it gets trapped by its trailing chain and doesn't come home for a week. By then it's a skeleton, bloated by a bag of bastards.

Almost immediately it gives birth, violently prematurely, to eight puppies. Two are stillborn. In the next few days, two more die, too feeble to be viable. A little later, another dies. You hear about this on the electric telephone, just before you arrive for the weekend. You are expecting to have to meet three puppies.

Dobermann Spencer quizzically regards the two surviving, non-ethereal Jack Russell puppies. Although once employed as a (tax-deductible) guard for a horse trading company, Spencer would not have had much of a career in the Waffen SS. He hid in a corner on first seeing the puppies, and cowers when toasters pop or Bonios are tossed at him.

So there you are, coming down the stairs. As you turn left to go into the dining room, you see a basically white Jack Russell puppy with large dark splodges on its coat, trotting from the shower room into the drawing room.

Not long after, there are cries of "Have you seen the puppies? You must come and see the puppies!"', although it is well-known in the household that you really don't do dogs. But dutifully you accompany the goddaughter to view the miniature creatures.

In the shower there is the incorrigible Worm, and two offspring. One puppy is essentially white, with black markings on its face, like its shameless and apparently indestructible mother. The other is basically black, with white markings on its head and body.

"Oh,"' you say innocently. "Where's the one I saw padding off into the drawing room just now?"'

"No, there's only two left."'

"But I saw it. Big brown marks on its body. Not like these. Going into the drawing room."'

"You couldn't have. Look, they can barely stand yet, let alone walk. Anyway, that one's dead. She ate it in the night."'

As I said, I don't do dogs. I really don't. But the one time I get to see a ghost, it's of a dead dog. Is someone trying to tell me something here? I'll say, "I don't know."' It's a lot more comfortable than having to think: "Maybe. And if so - what?"'

At a meet on 1 November 2003, at Builth Wells, I pledged to carry on riding to hounds when the sport was made illegal, and to go to jail if need be. There were 700 horse in the field that day - about the same number that rode so recklessly at Balaclava, and as capable of bringing tears to the eyes. They were very busy on the mountain that afternoon, and the hounds and huntsmen even more so. They didn't catch a fox.

Reflecting on anomalous experiences, I think that we are like that hunt (that particular hunt) in trying to handle accounts of them, let alone explain them. And worse follows. Not only does the quarry usually get away: we don't even know if we're hunting a fox. Or, if we are, we don't really know which one, or even what a fox is. And I speak as one who's skeptical - skeptical with a K - about virtually all matters paranormal.

So, in light of my own and my family's experiences, what should I do, already? Shrug?