In March 1998, after taking part in a television program about ghosts,I got up to leave the studio.  A grey-haired, friendly faced woman approached me. She commented on my necklace- a gold, star of David necklace that I always wear. It was a souvenir of a lovely holiday in Isreal, and an ancient form of protection.

The woman told me an interesting account of a visit to her husbands grave. She was surprised when she arrived there one afternoon to see the ground immediately in front of his headstone covered with small stones. She looked around, puzzled, for any children who might have placed them there while playing, but the cemetery was empty.On a whim, she counted the small, round stones. There was one for every year of his life. The woman told me that she felt the stones may have been placed there by paranormal means. If not, somebody for whatever reason, had gone to the trouble of finding the correct amount and duly placed then in the spot.

There is a tradition among othodox jews at a funeral of placing a small stone each on the gravesite as a token of their visit, becasue stone  immortalized in the moving and powerful film Schindler’s List. At the end of the film, as the credits roll, all the chief actors make their way towards a grave arm in arm with the now elelderly survivors from the real story and place stones on it.

If one subscribes at all to the stone tape recording theory, then presumably any place with a predominance of stone in its construction is a likely place to see ghosts or hear sounds from the past.

It was in about 1990 that I was holidaying with my faminly on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, a beautiful, green and rock strewn island that is more like coastal France than England, with a warm, dry climate.

It was halfway through the holiday and keen to see all the sights of the island, we visited the underground hospital. This is situated in a series of huge caves. It wasartifically constructed during the second world war and resembles a rabbit warren. Its sheer size, when you considerthat it was hewn by hand, is quite amazing.During the second world war, when the German captured the island, they took prisoners of war, Jews and some local people and set them to work building the hospital. Such a place was obviously safe from enemy attack, being many feet underr the earth. It was used as a military hospital and centre of operation.

Today the place is a tourist attration. Some of the rooms are kitted out as they would have been in the 1940’s, complete with waxwork figures, furniture authentic to the period, and even sound-effects.

Apparently, many men died in the making of these tunnels, owing to exhaustion and rock falls, not to mention the German soldiers who died of their wounds in there. Anyone visiting the caves today can’t help but feel the effects of this, and pick up its gloomy atmosphere. Maybe this atmosphere affected me and led directly to my experience. It is hard to say, but I am not the only person to have had such an encounter in that placce.

We were all walking alone the central corridor in the caves. The children were not verr interested in them. Becky, the youngest, was a bit scared as the tunnels are quite dark and smelled a little musty. We were part of the way along the corridor, and had seen inside some of the reconstructed rooms. We walked past some with bars in front of them; they had obviously been used to detain prisoners.

All of a sudden I felt extremely cold, unnaturally so, and felt a rush of freezing air run through my hair. Then, glancing to the left  I saw a sign above the room. It said “Mortuary”. I saw a series of what looked suspiciously like bodies. Some were intact physically, but one had lost a leg. His clothes were ripped and he was covered in a fine layer of white dust. The smell of blood was unmistakable and overwhelming. I felt sick at this, initially thinking the room was yet another reconstruction, albeit one in bad taste. Then I realized that somehow, in some way. I was seeing the mortuary as it really had been during the war.

Leaving the children with my husband, I just ran and ran as fast as possible, wanting to get away from all those bodies and all that death. At the exit to the caves, an oldish woman was standing in a sort of booth, selling souvenirs of the hospital to the exiting tourists. The woman took one look at me and asked if I was alright. Breathlessly I told her that I felt sick and that I had just seen the mortuary full of bodies.

She looked unsurprised at this, and remarked that of course the cave didn’t have a reconstructed room like that, but the morgue had been where I described it. The woman told me that other visitors had seen this, and other strange things. Some had simply heard noises that frightened or intrigued them. It was all fairly common stuff, although she had never experienced any of it herself. It is not like me to be frightened of anything, but as I came out of the cave, despite the blazing heat of the mid-summer sun, I was shivering.

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