As someone who had never believed in ghosts or spirits  can you imagine how surprised i was when some strange events happened to me in my own home. My girlfriend and i have lived in our apartment for fifteen years we had experienced no strange happenings in our home at all for the first  five years when one night we were just quietly sitting watching some TV when to our astonishment a golden orb about the size of a baseball suddenly appeared in the middle of the room at around a foot below the ceiling, the orb slowly floated to the far corner of the room before exploding with a bright flash and a loud bang. Although this was very strange, because nothing had ever happened in the house before we put the occurrence down to static electricity being as it was a stormy night outside , and nothing weird ever happened to us  for another eight years or so, then suddenly we were subjected to strange happenings on a regular basis.

One night around two years ago we returned home after a night out and i hurried into the kitchen to make a coffee while my girlfriend went into the spare room to hang up her coat , she suddenly screamed, i rushed into the spare room to find  her staring incredulously at the pine furniture we kept in the room, the four legged chairs were all leaning, well balancing would be a better word against the wall on one leg, my initial thought was that we had been burgled but looking round the room and then round the rest of the house nothing was missing.

We tried to think of an explanation to what had happened but could not come up with any logical answers, in fact i tried to position the chairs in the manner that we had found them and could not make them balance in the way that they were, I’m one of those people that when i hear of strange things happening i always remark “why didn’t they get a picture” now i know why, i was so shocked , taking a picture was the last thing i could think of. From this time on we started to notice objects being moved around our home, we would put things down and then they would go missing but then turn up at a later time, i witnessed a mobile phone slide across the living room table and we both saw a wine glass violently shaking on the same table, i was woken up on numerous occasions by something stroking my arm or head in the night and my girlfriend has been woken by something whispering her name in her ear  on three separate occasions. About six months ago i was lying in bed on my own trying to get to sleep when incredibly a light appeared in front of my eyes, the light was golden in colour and about the size and length of a pencil and crackled audibly, it was exactly the same colour as the orb we had seen some years ago only a different shape, the “light” appeared for around five seconds before disappearing with a bang. As you can imagine i found this quite a startling and rather frightening experience and sat on the edge of my bed for a short time calming myself down, after a few minutes i got back into bed and once more turned off the light when suddenly BANG! something which sounded like a human palm slapped my guitar amplifier, at this point i sat up on the corner of the bed and once again turned on the bedside lamp, by now i was mentally and physically frightened and was made worse when to my horror my bedroom curtains quickly flew apart, at this juncture i was so scared  i decided to try to reason with whatever was causing these events and shouted out ” Why don’t you leave us alone, please leave us alone we have done nothing to you” from that moment neither myself or my girlfriend have experienced any strange happenings at all. For six months now all has been quiet, so what caused these things to happen in the first place? One sort of believable answer came from a friend of ours who has an interest in the spirit world, our apartment is one quarter of a building which was once a single large house , around the time of these events my neighbour was having a lot of work done to improve her apartment, there was a lot of hole drilling going on and walls being knocked down etc our friend believes that this disturbed a spirit that lives in the building and caused it to show some unhappiness at the disturbance for a short while and now the building work is finished the spirit is at peace again, a decent explanation i suppose if you believe in such things, from my point of view i don’t know ,all i know is what i have  witnessed and what ever caused it i don’t want to experience again. We  recently returned from a two week holiday, during our time away we gave my 22 year old daughter a key to our house so she could water the plants and collect up the mail, when i spoke to her for the first time on our return her first words to me were “Dad is your house haunted?” when i asked what makes you ask that she replied “Well i was sitting on the toilet when this golden pencil thing appeared in front of my eyes and then vanished with a bang” To avoid causing them any alarm we had never mentioned any of the spooky events that had happened to us to my children! I have decided to do some research on the house and found that on the site our apartment now sits there was once a large house which was home to a local dignitary and his family , i can find nothing that suggests any wrong doings or impropriety from this family who seem to have been well liked and respected in the village that we live, the only slightly strange thing i have uncovered is that the master of the house was the local puppet master and for someone like me who doesn’t like puppets that’s quite weird, if the happenings begin again i am going to call in a priest or spiritual adviser, i don’t want to go through the events of six months ago again, its not nice being haunted!