DO you believe in ghosts?

I’ll let you in on a secret. I may well have seen one.

I’ll tell you about it shortly and you can make up your mind. But before that...

It’s all too easy, don’t you think, to dispel the notion of the supernatural as nonsense? Sceptics would argue that scientists in the 21st century have the most sensitive technology in all of history at their fingertips, yet it seems we still cannot prove or disprove the existence of ghosts with any certainty.

Believers, on the other hand, would say the evidence already exists in the form of photographs, video footage and audio recordings, and has done for decades.

The trouble is, they would say, no amount of proof will ever be enough for the closed-off, shut-down cynical mind.

If it is all rubbish, of course, why does each generation continue to tell fresh stories of sightings of spectres? Ghost stories have been told since the very start of time, across every culture and every social class.

Some might say we have a deep need for the supernatural in the same way that we need religion as a way of understanding what we can’t explain.

My own thoughts? I remain fervently agnostic on the subject. I have a healthy scepticism but also remain open-minded about it.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

So says Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play. And I think the Bard has it right.

Mankind can arrogantly assume that it has the answer to life, the universe and everything. But 100 years from now there will be fresh discoveries that will overturn much of what we hold as sacrosanct.

They will make our age seem as blinkered to future generations as the Victorians seem to us. Perhaps in decades to come we will finally, irrefutably, answer the question, is there life after death?

I promised you a ghost story.

When I was a little boy, I remember waking up one night in my bedroom and seeing an old man. I couldn’t get back to sleep and cried out. My dad came rushing into my room and calmed me down. I recall him hugging me and when I looked over his shoulder I could still see the old man’s face.

Years later, my parents admitted that an old man had died in the room where I’d been sleeping and over the years members of the family refused to sleep in the room as there had been strange goings-on and sightings.

Was it the ghost of the old man I saw? Or was it the creation of a small child’s vivid imagination?

I don’t know. But I’ve often wondered.

Have you seen a ghost? Send me your stories at jeremy.craddock@newsquest.co.uk and I’ll share them here.