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Well, having resisted until now, I'll pass on my own close encounter. I do believe in spirits (not sure if I'd call them ghosts) but keep an open mind.
My mother and father were both in the RAF, my Mum came out of the service when I was born but Dad stayed in until I was 17. In my formative years I found moving to a new home and a new school very frequently was really upsetting me and was actually stunting my development, and Mum & Dad took the difficult decision to send me to prep school rather than have me move school constantly. I was fortunate enough to win a RAF scholarship which helped financially and so I was sent to Burys Court School, a prep school near Reigate in Surrey at the tender age of eight.
Burys Court is in a large 18th Century country house, a wonderful building that is full of character and history. The boys sleep in dormitories, about 12 to a dormitory, and ours was arranged in two rows of six beds facing each other on opposite sides of the room. This particular room had a huge bay window and on sunny spring and summer mornings the curtains weren't particularly good at keeping the light out. One morning I woke up early and looked towards the window where a shadowy figure was leaning over the bed of a boy I was friendly with at the time, calling his name and offering him a beaker of water - it was a plastic coloured beaker (we weren't allowed glass!). The figure was silhouetted against the light shining through the curtains, and it was the figure of a man crouching with his arm extended and holding the cup in his hand. I sat up in my bed and called out to my friend; the figure vanished (literally) into thin air and the beaker of water fell to the floor. I could hear the sound of plastic bouncing on the lino, so I knew the cup had fallen to the floor, but the figure had just disappeared. I rushed to my friend who still asleep, went to the curtains and opened them which let in the daylight properly and I could see that all the boys were asleep in their beds and that noone else was in the room. By my friend's bed there a small puddle of water where the cup had fallen but the cup was never found, although I looked high and low for it as did the others when they woke up. I reported it to one of the school staff but nothing came of it. I heard whispers that this figure had been seen before, but I don't know of any more sightings whilst I was at the school and I have never seen another 'ghost' since.
I don't know if this was the sleepy imagination of a young boy, but the episode has stayed with me, crystal clear in my memory, to this day and my abiding memory is one of nervous curiosity tinged with a little apprehension. I daresay the episode can be explained away in one form or another, but I still have the memory that tells me this was a spooky event........