Home Front

‘Ghosts,’ read a Top Tip in a recent issue of Viz. ‘If you want to be believed in, stop hanging around ruined castles and only coming out at night. Try a Lidl or IKEA on a Saturday morning.’

What a good idea for a ghost story. The Haunting of IKEA. It could even be a promising film in the right hands (ie, a director who understands that suggestion is scarier than piling it on thick, like 99 per cent of most horror films these days). Imagine: tealights mysteriously ablaze in the marketplace after closing time; a lone Billy bookcase balancing precariously on a Klippan sofa for no accountable reason; Swedish meatballs spelling out malevolent words…

Ghosts in old castles and manor houses are as predictable as pub bores. The inexplicable slam of a creaking door is the paranormal equivalent of someone at the bar asking, ‘How old do you think I am? Go on, take a guess!’

This is why the Enfield poltergeist case of 1977 caught the public’s imagination. If it could happen in an ordinary council house, it could happen anywhere. The case had its sceptics. Ventriloquist Ray Alan even visited the house to study adolescent Janet – the focus of much supernatural activity – purportedly speaking in the gruff voice of the entity. He concluded it was vocal trickery (unless Lord Charles told him to say that). But alarming incidents – levitating armchairs and whatnot – witnessed by many others, from policemen to BBC reporters, cannot be explained. I quite enjoyed the TV dramatisation a few years back, with Timothy Spall playing the kindly paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse.

But it was not nearly as chilling as the original TV reports from the time. (I remember being so disconcerted to see that Janet and I had the same Starsky and Hutch poster that I had to take mine down and replace it with Wings.)

Today’s early adolescents are too busy planning global climate strikes to concern themselves with anything as trifling as the paranormal. But at my horrible all-girls comp in 1977, fellow enthusiasts and I survived the tedium by telling one another ghost stories. Many of mine were passed down from the Aged P, who in turn got them from her Irish undertaker granny. The Angel of Death featured heavily – knocking on doors of dying relatives or causing loud crashing noises.

In the early seventies, my mother was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. Though I was mildly intrigued by the quarterly journals, they were always a little too wordy, and had no pictures (rather off-putting for a child who found Look and Learn a bit challenging).

Given that my stepfather wrote a biography of Hitler and my mother co-wrote The Encyclopedia of Murder, living with our extensive library of crime books and artefacts felt like growing up in the Black Museum. This was why I wasn’t madly keen on reading. I yearned instead to become the first girl footballing prodigy, much as I imagine being raised in a political household made Harold Wilson’s son want to become a train driver. Apart from Black Beauty, one of the only books I read before the age of ten was The Wickedest Witch in the World by Beverley Nichols. It was my White Fang, the book so beloved by Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love that he never bothered reading anything else.

Then, when I was ten, my mother suggested we read Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel together. (Shortly after I’d written that sentence, the Aged P rang and said, ‘Do you remember when we took it in turns to read My Cousin Rachel to each other?’ Spooky!) I never looked back.

But I return to ghosts. I’ve never seen one, but I did once hear, when alone in the house, a thundering crash from my then-13-year-old son’s bedroom. It was as though an entire bookcase had been pulled over. If the dog hadn’t barked, I might have thought I’d imagined it.

Betty and I used to enjoy a popular TV ghost-hunting programme. (‘Load of old nonsense,’ Mr Home Front would sneer. ‘You don’t have to watch it!’ we’d chorus crossly.) One night, he came home and triumphantly announced that his new colleague, Dave, was one of the sound recordists.

‘I asked him, “Are those noises for real?” And he said, “They should be – I made them myself!” ’

I was as crestfallen as a child being told Father Christmas doesn’t exist. (Although Dave did confess to seeing a terrifying apparition by the swimming pool on the Queen Mary.)

Anyway, I’m off to write my IKEA ghost story about a Bookham husband left to wander the warehouse aisles for eternity after his wife kills him in a fight over how to load an Ektorp sofa onto a trolley. Any resemblance to persons living is purely coincidental.