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Paul Screeton – Quicksilver heritage

One winter night with three friends I was out for a walk in Hartlepool. We were aged about ten years old and were passing a mansion house, then closed and boarded up, but now a Roman Catholic school.

The grounds were overgrown and it had an eerie atmosphere. We were contemplating whether to explore, when two of us saw a smoky, white phantom shape, man-sized and of a vaguely human shape.

Two of my friends could not see it, but after it disappeared we climbed the wall and threw stones in the direction of its dematerialisation, until a woman from the house next door came out and yelled at us.

We were more afraid of her than the ghost . . . and fled.

Years later a school-friend to whom I was relating this tale said that he had been outside the same house and seen a hand hanging out of a window. Tramps, apparently, were then in the habit of dossing down in the building, but my schoolmate ventured inside . . . and found no one.

The house is not on a confirmed ley, but is on high ground not far from some ancient sites and places where prehistoric artifacts have been found. That ghosts exist, I am, of course, convinced, having seen one, but the fact that two out of four people present saw it suggests that psychic faculties are involved.