Many stories of tactile ghosts are recorded across the years from séance chambers and haunted houses – entities that stroke, caress, tap, grasp, poke, pinch, punch, push, pull, scratch, slap, beat, levitate and even on occasion take intimate liberties with people. But have you ever heard of a ghost checking the pulse of a living person?
I must admit I had not, or at least until I read the remarkable account given by novelist Jeanette Winterson of the haunting of her Spitalfields home to the Daily Mail online last October. Situated near Spitalfields Market, her house dates from around 1780. The ground floor opened as a grocery in 1805, but the whole building lay abandoned and derelict when she bought it in the 1990s. During the rebuild, she decided to use it as a shop again as “a deli with good food”.
As part of the conversion she constructed a bedroom and bathroom in the basement for use by herself whenever friends came to stay. Within the basement area was a section dubbed the ‘vault’, considered to predate the rest of the property by over century, as adjudged from its mid-1660s brickwork. When digging into the ‘vault’, the skeleton of a cat with a charm around its foot was discovered, possibly a foundation sacrifice or precaution against witchcraft.
Perhaps this should have been a warning, for one night when sleeping in the basement she was awoken by “the quick, insistent sound of busy footsteps clattering
