The book is The Highgate Vampire, by Sean Manchester. She sent it to me because at the time, there was some weird stuff going on at Highgate, including some odd sightings and encounters by visitors and people passing through the area.
Hooooooooooooo boy, have I had supernatural experiences? Okay, this is not going to help you despook yourself.
I’ll tell you some things about me right up front: I consider myself a faithful, non-denominational Christian. I also consider myself a scientist. I respect and admire logic, the scientific procedure, and the body of knowledge built up by the various scientific communities. And I definitely believe in ghosts, because of a variety of experiences I’ve had that present me with no other possible explanation.
When I was at Penn State, I lived in a lovely apartment building called Orlando Apartments. It was the oldest apartment building in town, dating from 1926. True masonry building with big open apartments and hardwood floors. Lovely. (Also the basement was a nuclear bomb shelter).
Now the basement held the laundry room. And it was generally frigging spooky. Not in a haunted kind of way. Just in a ‘dark creepy basement’ kind of way.
But also in a haunted way. One day I went down there, turned the corner into the main hall, and at the far end, under the light, there was a thin, dapper old gentleman in a top hat and dinner jacket. For just long enough that he registered as more than an after-image before he was not there. Older residents of the building knew of him. I wasn’t the only one to see him like that.
The laundry room consisted of two rooms, in fact. One held the dryers, and one—darker, larger, and more bare—held the washers. Sometimes, when I was standing in the dryer room and looking into the washer room, I would see the glint of red eyes, moving back and forth. After accounting for the possibility of any light sources that might throw up red glints (there were none), I checked around and again, I was not the only person in the building who had seen them. A couple of residents even said they’d seen the thing the eyes belonged to, like a gigantic black dog.
Both of my roommates were steady reliable people, and personal friends who were not prone to fucking with me. When I came home one day, my male roommate told me about the thing that had happened to him that day. He’d been sitting in the living room, reading, when he heard a woman screaming. Like someone having a physical fight—really upset or angry, the kind of screaming where a good person decides maybe they’d better get involved. So he ran out to the hall and followed the noise down to the floor beneath ours, through the hallway, to the point where he was standing right in the middle of it. Only there was nothing to be seen. And then it started moving down the hall away from him, and stopped at the far end.
Years later, I had another friend who actually hunted ghosts. I’ll call him Roger. Roger didn’t get so sophisticated as to take EMF readers along, but he was methodical about taking notes and trying to verify stories and experiences. He’d visit cemeteries, and he’d always take at least one other person along. So, one time, I went along with Roger and a couple of other friends. The cemetery in question was on the side of a hill. On one side of the space were the gravestones; on the other, it was just an empty field. We were standing at various points in the field—Roger was in the middle and about 10 feet higher on the hill than me, I was on his left, one friend was on his right straight across from me and the other was below us by about 20 feet.
We were all looking at each other when this loud clacking began just above Roger, like somebody banging two hardwood sticks together. It moved quickly down the hill between us and past our friend at the bottom, then across the road and into the brush on the other side, where it vanished.
We all heard it and were able to easily track it, and we all also agreed that we’d gotten a similar sense of…well, threat from it. Not the adrenaline jolt you get from being startled, but the kind of cold rush you get when you’re in actual danger.
Those are by no means all my experiences. Just a few that are easy to describe.