It’s now October – the weather and the news are sending shivers down all our spines. This time of year, however, bring other chills, uninfluenced by whether or not you are brave enough to ignore the high fuel prices and turn the heating on.

All of us, as children, have felt a tingle down the spine when telling ghost stories at sleepovers or camping. I was convinced for years that the fireplace in the room where I sometimes slept while at my grandmother’s house was haunted; convinced I could feel cold draughts creeping across the room and see shadows leap in its deep brick depths. I could tell you now, of course, that draughts are how open fires work, but aged nine there was nothing so thrilling for me as being cosy in bed convinced there was a ghost in the room and feeling the eyes of the rabbit-hunter in the print on the wall watching me. 

Britain has the second-highest reporting of paranormal geography in the world (second to the US) and much of it revolves around our oldest buildings – the ghost of a headless Anne Boleyn who haunts Blickling Hall in Norfolk, skeletons chained together in Dunster Castle, and locations in Edinburgh such as Mary King’s Close where plague victims were sealed up to die while they were still alive. There is something about a building that seems to act as an anchoring point for ghosts – or for human superstition and disquiet; call it what you will.

A book I read long ago, Architectural Voices, Listening to Old Buildings, posits the theory that a house may be more than its physical materials; that the creepy feeling we get in some houses, or the numinosity and awe we feel in some churches, may be more than just our mind playing tricks on us. Can buildings absorb the emotions and events that happen within them? The authors suggest that some buildings seem more sensitive than others, perhaps due to the porosity and physical characteristics of the materials – brick and limestone being more absorbent than steel or glass, for instance.

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