When I was 16, I had a group of friends who were a mixture of boys and girls. One weekend, we stayed at our friend’s house (we did this nearly every Saturday for that whole summer) and that particular night, one of the girls drank nearly a whole bottle of vodka (you know the square shaped bottles) so she was asleep upstairs. The rest of us were sitting the front room, all the lights off and the tv on, just flicking through the channels (probably music channels) and I was sat on the end of the sofa, near the hallway door. I saw someone walk past towards the stairs. I thought, “hmm, I thought we were all in here” so I asked and I was right, other than the girl upstairs. My friend, who lives in the house, looked at me like I had just said something outstanding. He then went onto say that there is a spirit of an old man in their house; their whole family had seen him. His mum told me about it the next morning when I told her about what I saw.
Something else that happened that night was when we were settling down to sleep. I wasn’t sleepy at all. Suddenly, I heard someone crying out my name. It sounded like someone who was really scared and distressed, almost wailing. I sat up and I was so certain of what I was hearing (I actually thought it was the girl upstairs calling me), I woke my boyfriend up and made him come with me. When we got upstairs, I couldn’t hear it anymore. I went into the room where the girl was sleeping and she was just sitting in the middle of the floor, as calm as anything. She insisted that she wasn’t calling my name.
6 years later, I’m still 100% sure of what I heard and what I saw. Some people may dismiss it as my imagination but this isn’t the first time it happened to me. I believe in spiritualism. Maybe not “ghosts” but certainly in the energies in the earth. I believe that there is residual energy left behind by souls and that everything is sewn into the fabric of buildings, almost like a photograph, captured in time. If that makes sense. I feel that I can sense things, I know when there’s something there. I mean, I can’t go into a house and say, “ooh, there’s a young girl child” a lá Justin aka Derek Johnson aka Derek Acorah.
This all started when I was quite young and there’s a room in my nan’s house which I always really didn’t like. It’s at the front and it’s a small room where my uncle used to sleep (RIP Stephen). The wallpaper was old fashioned, the wardrobes still full of his clothes. My nan and grandad used to keep the chest freezer in there as well as it being my nan’s sewing room. I pretty much used to refuse to go in there one my own and never liked going upstairs alone. As the years went by, the room got redecorated but the feeling never left me. One night, when I was about 12 or 13, I was trying to sleep in the back bedroom. My nan was sound asleep in the other bed on the other side of the room as she knew I didn’t like being in there on my own.
As I tried to sleep, I was certain I saw a white shape jump across the room and thinking back on it now, I’m not so sure it’s what I thought it was. As the years went by again, I was staying at my nan and grandad’s again and we were just downstairs watching tv in the evening, it was probably about 8 or 9 o’clock. All of a sudden, I heard banging around upstairs. I looked at my grandparents and my grandad said, “oh, don’t worry, it’s just our ghost”. Now, my grandad is a very intelligent witty man and I’m the only person in the world who gets his jokes as they tend to go over other people’s heads and he can be quite cynical when he wants to be. I know when he’s being serious and that night, he was. Naturally, I just stared at him, wondering if he was being serious or not because admittedly, sometimes it’s hard to tell. My nan, who usually rebuffs his jokes, went onto say that she sometimes feels someone blowing on her face when she’s trying to sleep in the back room. Some time after, I spoke to my mum and my auntie Jacqueline about it and they told me it was true and they had too seen/sensed things in that house when they lived there. They went on to say that they believed that it was their uncle Charlie, my grandad’s twin.
In March 2008, I split up with Chris for seven weeks and one of those weeks, I stayed there. My nan stayed in the back room with me but I feel that whoever was there has gone now. Upstairs still has it’s feeling but it’s certainly not as intense as it was. I hope that whoever it was found their door and passed through it peacefully.
My house certainly isn’t haunted and neither is Chris’ so why do we see what we see? An old man called Jim owned our house before we did. I used to talk about Jim. I knew what he looked like. He died before I was born. At the top of our stairs, sometimes you can smell tobacco. Not just ordinary tobacco but the kind you get in cigars. It used to get really strong and there was nowhere for it to come from – we say, “I can really smell Jim today” and that’s how we always used to refer to it. As the years went on it became less and less common. Now it’s rarely said. When I was little, I used to describe my nan who had passed away before I was born. Obviously, I didn’t know what she looked like but my mum always used to wonder how I knew. A few years ago, my uncle stayed at ours and he and my dad went to the pub one night. My uncle sat on a wall and refused to move despite my dad desparately trying. My mum was the only one that got him to move. The next day, she swears that she saw my nan standing in the hallway where a picture of all her sons and her daughter hangs. My mum thinks that she was protecting her son. when we saw Derek at Fairfield Halls (for a laugh mainly), he started talking about an old lady with one leg in a wheelchair and pointed in my general direction. I swear that if he came and spoke to me, I would’ve been a believer.
Where the PC is, it’s quite easy to see something out of the corner of your eye and when Charlie said that he could see someone standing there, I used to say, yeah sure until I saw it myself. It’s so clear that I actually nearly spoke to it once because I thought it was someone in the kitchen! When I was drying my hair once in my mum and dad’s room, I saw someone walk past the bedroom! As before, it was so clear that I honestly thought it was someone else!
When me and Chris used to sleep downstairs in the back room, at night time someone ran around Scott’s room above. Thump, thump, thump etc. Scott is 25 years old and there’s no room to run around in his bedroom. As I lay awake at night, I wondered what the hell it was. The next day, I told Chris about it. When we started sleeping upstairs again, someone ran up and down the stairs and again, I mentioned it to Chris and he said, “yeah, I know” which means it’s not my imagination. If you walk past the bottom on the loft conversion’s stairs you see someone sitting on the stairs. Chris described seeing exactly the same thing as me before I managed to tell him the whole story. Do we share the same imagination? I think not. He’d know more about his house than I do.
In addition to Jim and my nan in my house, Dolly Dog is still there too. I hear her barking sometimes, hear her tapping around at night. Quite often, I’m tempted to call for her. Sometimes I think I even see her under my feet. My Dolly foot sensors are still active. And even my dad, the most pessimisstic man I know, admitted that he senses her/hears her sometimes. I think she chose not to cross over yet. It’s been nearly a year since she was gone already. When Ruby died, she was gone, we couldn’t feel her there anymore, same with Princess but Dolly being who she was, she obviously decided to stay.
In regards to Ruby, she was with us when we went to Selsey in October 2007, we know that. There was no way she’d miss out on that 
So what does this all mean? Everyone has their own opinions and their own feelings about it. It’s been a long time since I felt anything in a place; it actually grew stronger but now I’m probably out of practice.
What do you think? Comments below 
Derek Jr x
