Long life | 10 March 2016

I used to enjoy the ghost stories of M.R. James, but I’ve never actually seen a ghost or even believed that ghosts existed. I have visited many allegedly haunted houses in my life but no scary apparition has ever crossed my path. The old house in which my grandparents lived in Lanarkshire was such a place (its ghost, like so many others around Britain, was supposed to be a ‘grey lady’), but I stayed there year after year untroubled by spirits, though the portraits of my puritan Scottish ancestors were sometimes frightening enough. I have always thought that people who claimed to see ghosts suffered from hallucinations or had especially sensitive peripheral vision.

However, I feel sure that my tenant in Northamptonshire, the man who rents the Coach House at Stoke Park near Towcester where I live, has no such illusions. He is no impressionable dreamer but a down-to-earth businessman with interests in the United States and Australia as well as Britain. He is not the sort of person to be troubled by the spirits of the dead. Yet he has been having strange experiences in the Coach House lately. There have been weird noises — creaks and clanks and bangs — and objects have been moving around, apparently of their own accord. The remote control of the television, for example, left its usual place by the set for some hours, only to return there later. My tenant had been alone in the house, the whole time, and he swears he never moved anything.

He sought advice from a friend — somebody with royal connections you’d be aware of, but whose name I will not reveal — and was told that there was clearly a ghost at work here, and one that he should confront and challenge.