My wife, Kelly, is a walking episode of Uncanny.
If you’ve never listened to Danny Robins’ excellent podcast, it’s essentially a collection of people recounting extraordinary experiences involving ghosts, hauntings, UFOs and other things that don’t fit neatly into our understanding of the world.
Kelly could probably fill an entire series on her own.
She’s seen dead relatives. She’s encountered ghost cats. She’s heard footsteps in empty houses, witnessed things materialising out of furniture, and had complete strangers tell her things about her life that they seemingly had no business knowing.
She’s even been told, repeatedly, by spiritualists that she has some sort of gift.
And yet she doesn’t really believe in any of it.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting here, having experienced comparatively little myself, quite happily believing there’s something more going on.
There’s something wonderfully absurd about that.
The cat that wasn’t there
One of my favourite Kelly stories involves a cat.
Now, Kelly isn’t particularly fond of cats, which makes this even better.
Years ago, she went out for an evening with some colleagues and stayed overnight at an old house belonging to one of them and his girlfriend.
Before agreeing to stay, she specifically asked whether they had a cat.
“No, no, no. We haven’t got a cat.”
Fine.
The following morning, while waking up, she felt a cat jump onto the bed and begin purring right beside her ear.
She startled awake, looked around, and couldn’t find it.
When she went downstairs, she was understandably annoyed.
“You told me you didn’t have a cat!”
Silence.
Nobody said anything.
Later, on the journey to work, she asked whether she’d upset anyone.
Eventually, her colleague explained.
They had owned a cat. It had died six months earlier.
And it used to sleep on that very bed.
Now, you can explain the sensation of a cat jumping onto a bed in several ways. She was waking up, after all. Dreams and reality can become rather muddled at that point.
But it’s the subsequent conversation that makes the story so deliciously strange.
Kelly wasn’t looking for a ghost. She was furious because she thought somebody had lied about owning a bloody cat.
And that’s just one of her stories.
The relatives who won’t stay dead
On another occasion, Kelly was staying in a hotel near Wembley while working on a university film project.
Her grandmother, Bette, had died about six weeks earlier. Her grandfather was seriously ill in hospital.
Bette was his wife. The woman he’d spent his life with. And she was already gone.
One night, Kelly was lying in her hotel bed when she saw her grandmother pacing backwards and forwards at the foot of it, muttering to herself.
Now, this was entirely characteristic of Bette. Apparently, she had a habit of wandering around talking under her breath.
Kelly tried to speak to her.
“Grandma, I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
But she couldn’t move. She struggled to reach the Tiffany lamp beside the bed, eventually managed to switch it on, and Bette disappeared.
The following day, Kelly learned that her grandfather was being discharged from hospital. All he kept saying was, “I need to get home to Bette.”
He went home, sat down in his chair, still wearing his clothes, and died.
Just like that.
Now, Ciarán O’Keeffe, the sceptical voice on Uncanny, would probably point towards sleep paralysis as an explanation for Kelly’s experience.
And he might well be right.
But there’s something rather beautiful about what happened, whatever the explanation.
Kelly herself has sometimes wondered whether Bette had come looking for her husband. Perhaps she was frustrated because he wasn’t at home where she expected him to be, hence the pacing and muttering.
And perhaps, once he finally got home, she came for him.
I don’t know.
Nobody does.
But I rather like that interpretation.
Two people who’d spent their lives together, separated for six weeks, finally reunited.
And the really funny thing?
Even Kelly, who still isn’t convinced about ghosts, likes to think her grandmother came back for her grandfather.
Then there’s Uncle Charlie.
Kelly once experienced somebody lying on top of her while she was in bed. She couldn’t move, but she recognised the figure as her deceased uncle, complete with the familiar cap he used to wear.
Again, sleep paralysis seems a perfectly reasonable possibility.
Except that a few weeks later, she attended a psychic supper.
One of the psychics told her she’d recently had a visitor. Somebody had been lying on top of her.
The psychic advised Kelly to tell the visitor to stop doing it.
Kelly hadn’t gone there to discuss Uncle Charlie.
And suddenly an experience that could easily be dismissed as an unusual dream became rather more difficult for her to forget.
How many ghosts does it take?
There are plenty more.
Kelly has a vivid childhood memory of visiting her great-grandfather in London. She remembers being in his kitchen, seeing the marrows he’d grown and even what he was wearing.
She’d recounted this memory for years.
Then her father pointed out something rather inconvenient.
She’d never met her great-grandfather.
He died before she was born.
I subsequently checked the family history, and he was right.
Then there’s the occasion when Kelly and a friend were sitting together and apparently watched a cat materialise out of a table.
Kelly turned to her friend.
“Did you see that?”
“Yes.”
“The cat coming out of the table?”
“Yes. Let’s not talk about it.”
And apparently that was that.
Personally, I’d have had one or two follow-up questions.
She’s also heard footsteps coming upstairs in an empty house while she was lying awake in bed. She’s seen a man sitting in a chair who asked her for help before she woke up. She’s witnessed an extraordinary flash of light moving through a room, something several other people apparently saw too.
She’s visited psychics who have described deeply personal experiences from her childhood. Others have singled her out and told her she possesses a spiritual gift.
And, rather wonderfully, she’s been told that she has this gift but doesn’t believe in it.
Which is precisely the problem.
Because Kelly is an intelligent, logical woman. She’s interested in spirituality, but she wants proof.
Not another strange coincidence. Not another apparition. Not another psychic telling her something unexpected.
I think she’s waiting for a ghost to walk into the room, slap her around the face and announce:
“Hello, Kelly. I’m a ghost.”
Although knowing my wife, she’d probably ask for identification.
Meanwhile, I believe
Here’s the strange part.
I’m the believer in our marriage.
And I haven’t experienced anything like the number of things Kelly has.
I wasn’t always like this.
When my mum died in 2000, I was pretty firmly of the opinion that death was the end. She was gone. That was that.
I didn’t have any particular belief in an afterlife.
But over the years, I became curious.
I started reading about life after death, psychic phenomena and experiments into things we don’t fully understand. I read about the Scole experiments, Rupert Sheldrake’s research and accounts of mediumship.
I also went with my sister to see the television medium Colin Fry.
Before the show, we’d joked that if our mum was going to make an appearance, she’d be first in the queue. That was her personality.
At the start of the performance, Colin began talking about someone wanting to thank a man called Bob, or a name beginning with B, for a garden.
My stepdad’s name was Bob.
And after my mum died, he’d created a lovely memorial garden for her, complete with a bench and a brass plaque.
Then Colin mentioned something involving children and martial arts.
My sister had enrolled her children in taekwondo.
I remember her grabbing my hand.
Neither of us put our hands up. We didn’t pursue the reading. We just sat there.
Was it my mum?
I don’t know.
I’m not claiming it was.
But it was one of those experiences that stays with you.
And over time, alongside everything I’d read and heard, my outlook changed.
I began to believe that death might not be quite as final as I’d once assumed.
Not because I’d found proof.
Because I became convinced there was more to existence than we currently understand.
A curious coincidence in Willesden
There’s another little connection between Kelly and me that I find fascinating. Nothing supernatural, just one of those coincidences that makes you wonder.
My father’s family came from Willesden in northwest London. They eventually moved through Stevenage to Nottingham, where I grew up.
Kelly grew up in Chesterfield. Her father’s family came from Derbyshire, with Irish ancestry, while her mother’s family originally came from London.
When we first met, I discovered that her mum was from Willesden too.
Interesting coincidence, I thought.
But a few years ago, I started digging into our family histories, and discovered something rather extraordinary.
In 1936, Kelly’s great-grandmother and my great-grandmother were living less than a mile apart in Willesden.
Two women, living in the same little corner of London, almost ninety years ago.
Did they know each other?
I’ve no idea.
My great-grandmother was a widow by then. Her husband, a railway maintenance worker, had been tragically killed when a train moved while he was underneath it.
The accident made the local newspaper. My father still has the original clipping.
And that makes me wonder even more.
Did Kelly’s great-grandmother read about it? Did she know my great-grandmother? Did the two women ever pass each other in the street, completely unaware that their descendants would one day marry?
I’ve no idea.
But I love the thought that our family histories might have brushed against each other long before either of us existed.
And there’s one final detail that makes this coincidence particularly special to me.
Kelly has always said that when she first met me, she felt an immediate connection. Something she couldn’t quite explain.
At the time, neither of us knew anything about our families having lived so close together in Willesden.
We only discovered that connection years later.
Now, I’m not suggesting our great-grandmothers arranged our marriage from beyond the grave. Although, given everything else Kelly’s experienced, I wouldn’t entirely put it past them.
Perhaps it’s nothing more than coincidence.
But I do find it rather lovely that two people whose families might have crossed paths almost ninety years ago eventually found each other.
And that the person who felt there was something special about our meeting, right from the beginning, was Kelly.
My wonderfully sceptical wife.
Belief isn’t the same as knowing
I think this is where the distinction between Kelly and me becomes genuinely interesting.
I don’t profess to know what happens when we die.
I don’t know whether consciousness survives death, whether spirits exist, whether time works in ways we haven’t yet discovered, or whether some of these extraordinary experiences have explanations that nobody has thought of yet.
I simply believe there’s something more.
Call it faith, if you like.
Not religious faith. I’m not talking about Christianity, Islam, Judaism or any particular doctrine.
I’m talking about a broader sense that our understanding of reality is incomplete, and that some of the things people experience might point towards something we haven’t yet discovered.
Look at the universe.
The sheer scale of it. The extraordinary complexity of existence. The unanswered questions about consciousness, time and reality itself.
I find it difficult to believe we’ve already worked everything out.
That doesn’t mean every ghost story is true, or that an unexplained event must be supernatural. Of course it doesn’t.
But I’m comfortable believing in the possibility of something beyond our present understanding without needing to know precisely what it is.
Kelly, on the other hand, seems to need something more concrete.
And that’s the contradiction.
I’ve developed a belief through curiosity, reading and a relatively small number of personal experiences. Kelly has had a lifetime of extraordinary experiences and still wants proof.
We tend to assume people believe in ghosts because they’ve seen one.
And that people don’t believe because they haven’t.
Our marriage rather neatly turns that assumption on its head.
The strange business of faith
Perhaps belief has less to do with what happens to us than with how we’re prepared to interpret it.
Two people can witness the same event and walk away with completely different conclusions.
One sees evidence of something extraordinary.
The other sees something they can’t explain.
Neither necessarily knows what happened.
And perhaps that’s the important distinction.
Having an experience doesn’t automatically mean you understand it. Equally, not having an experience doesn’t prevent you from forming a belief.
Kelly doesn’t deny that these things happened to her. She simply isn’t prepared to declare that they prove the existence of spirits.
I don’t need them to prove anything.
I already believe there’s something more, even if I haven’t the faintest idea what it might be.
And in some respects, I admire her position.
She’s not allowing anybody, including me, to tell her what her experiences must mean.
Although I do sometimes wonder quite how much more evidence she intends to demand.
A final word from my mother
There’s one more little detail that makes this whole thing even more entertaining.
Kelly occasionally thinks she’s communicating with my mum.
She says she hears her in her head and sometimes has conversations with her.
Usually, I suspect, when Kelly and I have fallen out.
Which is marvellous.
My wife doesn’t believe she’s got a spiritual gift, but apparently that doesn’t prevent her from having the occasional chat with my deceased mother about what an idiot her son is being.
We’ve also occasionally smelt cigarette smoke in the bathroom when there’s been no obvious source.
My mum was a smoker.
Naturally, my engineering brain has already considered whether a bathroom, with relatively little electrical equipment, might be a particularly suitable place for paranormal activity.
Yes, I appreciate how ridiculous that sounds.
And no, I have absolutely no evidence for it.
But I rather like the thought that somewhere, somehow, my mum is sitting with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, listening to Kelly complain about me.
Probably agreeing with her.
And perhaps that’s the point of all this.
I don’t need to know whether my mum is there.
I don’t need to prove that Kelly has a gift.
I don’t even need to understand what any of these experiences mean.
I’m happy to believe there’s something more.
Kelly, meanwhile, has enough material for an entire series of Uncanny and remains unconvinced.
My wife is a walking ghost story.
I’m the one who believes in ghosts.
And somehow, that makes perfect sense to both of us.