IT HAPPENED TO ME...

First-hand accounts of strange experiences from FT readers

Passenger vanishes

I work as a train guard, selling and checking tickets, patrolling the train and operating the doors. I step out onto the platform to ensure that everyone is on, or off, the train safely before departure at each station.

One night a couple of years ago, I had completed several trips and was making the last journey of the evening between Bradford and Ilkley. It was mid-week, and as usual this service was very quiet. After leaving Bradford, I made my way down the train to check tickets and also to see who was on board. I went though the first two carriages, where there were only two or three people. Then I went through the doors into the next carriage, where the toilet is. I came round the inside of the cubicle to see a man sitting on a fold-down seat, with his head back and eyes closed. I thought his unusual pallor and dark rings round his eyes were theatrical make-up. I had a distinctly unsettling feeling about him and decided not to approach him.

I continued through the train and counted the number of passengers on board: six. This way I could count them off at each station and if no one was left on board I could walk to the front between the penultimate station and terminus to do my security check without the need to release any doors and lock them up again. People got off at each station. I counted five off, but the doors where the strange passenger was sitting had not opened and I had not seen him get off.

We arrived at the penultimate station, Ben Rhydding, and logically there was only one passenger left on board: the man with the pallid face. He was obviously going to Ilkley, so I walked down the train intending to open only the door nearest to where he was, although I felt apprehensive about this. There was nobody there. I checked the toilet and walked into the next carriage, in case he had moved. The train was empty. I have not seen him since. He looked as real as any other passenger. CB

Yorkshire

Sissinghurst shade

Some years ago, I frequently stayed for three or four days in a large Victorian house in the grounds of Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. I would walk to Cranbrook down an ancient trail and sometimes to Frittenden. I loved to walk at dusk with the dogs. One evening it was just me and Hattie, a border collie. I skirted the large moat and climbed over the stile. We walked down a slope towards the first of two lakes, but we stopped in our tracks when I saw a man on the other side of the lake looking towards us. He was tall, even handsome, and very, very still. His smart tweed suit and matching waistcoat suggested the 1920s or 1930s. There was something unearthly about him and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. We turned and hurried away to the stile and ‘home’. My hostess agreed it was wise to turn back as nobody should have been there at that time, once the garden had been closed to the public.

Could it have been the shade of someone from the Bloomsbury Group, who often visited Sissinghurst? Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson were perfect hosts and enjoyed the company of family and friends. Barbara Stevens

Merivale, New Zealand

Missing mouse

Having found a motionless but un-bloodied mouse on the garden path late one afternoon, which I thought to be courtesy of one of my feline friends, I gave it a thorough medical examination, in the form of a quick once-over, and tried my best to revive it with the stroke of a finger and a bit of food placed near its nose. After half an hour there was no change and it looked to be all over for the little creature. I placed it in a small and secure cardboard box, ventilated with tiny holes in every side, and periodically checked on its progress. Five hours passed and I made my last check on it for the day. It still showed signs of life, but no sign of being conscious, appearing to be in a state of suspended animation. I closed the lid, keeping it in place with a book on top to prevent it escaping, should it revive, straight into the path of a cat. I then placed the box in the cupboard beneath the stairs. The following morning I removed the box, took off the book, and carefully opened the lid. The box was empty. None of the holes in its walls, made with the nib of a pen, was big enough for the escape of a fly, never mind a mouse, and even an adult rat could not have raised the book-weighted lid. Nobody else was in the house that night, and the cupboard door, like the lid of the box, was completely secure, but somehow the furry Houdini beneath the stairs had disappeared.

Stefan Badham

Portsmouth, Hampshire

Damp atlas

We had to buy a new car atlas in 2007 because the existing atlas, normally kept on the back seat, became at first damp and then so wet as to be unusable. No rational explanation could be found – the car was a hatchback, not open to the air, and while there was a bottle of water in the car it was screwed tightly shut and some distance away from the atlas, and below it, on the car floor. There was no water in the car and if rain had got in through the roof it would not have soaked just the atlas.

In July 2009, looking in a sports bag I usually keep in the car, I found a shabby-looking cassette of Brazilian music which neither my partner nor I had ever seen before. Was my car haunted? Or was I?

David Gamon

By email