[WillowTheWhisp]

Like you Janet I am sure life goes on and I have no worries at all about being dead ........... the actual dying bit I'm not so sure about. I'd like it to be as painless as possible. I've had one or two experiences. The most recent one was the photograph I posted of the strange glow on my daughter's bed in the B&B where we stayed at half term.

In 1986 my late husband and I stayed in a cottage near Weston-super-Mare. We had originally booked a holiday flat but the owner phoned us and asked if we would swap as the people booked into the cottage had changed their minds and would prefer the flat. The cottage was dearer but he said we could have it at the same price because of the inconvenience. We didn't really mind the inconvenience because it looked a much better choice than the flat.

It had been two small cottages (one up one down) which had been knocked through into one and a kitchen extension added. So downstairs we had a sitting room, dining room and kitchen and upstairs two bedrooms and a bathroom. The only apparent oddity was that you couldn't get from bedroom two to the bathroom without coming down a very narrow steep open stairs into the dining room, going through the sitting room and up the other stairs by the kitchen to a small landing which led to bedroom 1 and the bathroom. We didn't really mind that because we weren't using that room anyway.

The dining room was up a couple of steps and the door between that and the sitting room was on a sneck. It didn't matter how carefully we made sure it was closed before we went out (on the sneck) it was always open when we came back in. The first evening we had a meal in there, but after that we used the sitting room and a small table because the dining room was too cold, even though this was midsummer.

One evening my husband went upstairs for a bath and I was watching TV. I went into the dining room to get some cutlery and as I was standing at the dresser I heard footsteps overhead and creaking boards. I thought nothing of it, imagining it was Peter walking from bathroom to bedroom. It wasn't until I got back in the sitting room that I realised he couldn't have walked from the bathroom across that floor because there was no upstairs access to that room. As I went into the kitchen I could hear him singing in the bath!

When he came down I told him about the footsteps and he suggested maybe it had been a sound from the neighbours (we lived in a terraed house so hearing sounds from the neighbours was quite common) but I pointed out that the cottage was detatched.

I never went up into that room again. I sent him up to get something I'd left in there.

One day one of the villagers asked us if we were staying in "the haunted cottage" and asked if she could come inside. She didn't want to go into the "haunted side" though - just the sitting room and kitchen. We asked her who or what was supposed to haunt the place and she said she was hoping we could tell her because nobody had ever seen it. All they'd ever experienced was the cold and the sounds of footsteps in the bedroom.