'The eternal question - do the dead linger after they have gone?'

I’ve been there quite often since he moved with his wife and daughter out of London in search of the rural idyll. It’s been a while since we last met, with Covid, work and other obstacles getting in the way.

So I ought to have been looking forward to it.

Kent – 'the garden of England' – is sunnier and warmer than Cumbria, and my friend’s village is remote enough for the stars to stand out brightly in the night sky without the background glare from any major towns or cities.

But I was just a little nervous. It wasn’t my friend’s Alsatian, which was a puppy last time I visited but is now a fully-grown adult, full of testosterone and more ready to savage unfamiliar faces.

It’s the fact that I couldn’t stay in his house this time. And I had to spend two nights in a haunted house.

At the moment his mother-in-law is staying with him and his wife, so the spare room I usually have is no longer spare. I was in a pub-cum-guesthouse just down the road.

The village of Pluckley is said to be the most haunted village in England, and the pub where I was staying was said to have quite a number. Perhaps its spirits aren’t just the ones in bottles behind the bar.

I’ve never seen a ghost as far as I know, and I’m not sure I believe in them. But ascending the steep, dark, shadowy staircase to my room late that night I felt a certain apprehension gathering.

As it turned out I didn’t lie awake feeling fearful. But during the night my mobile phone rang, with a different ring tone. At least I think it did, though on reflection I might just have dreamt it.

When I awoke in the morning its clock was five minutes fast, and I’ve always been careful to keep it exactly right. Was a ghost tampering with it during the night?

And in the mornig there was a definite chill in the room. That may have been because a window was open.

Apparently Pluckley is a popular spot with ghost hunters, so the pub probably encourages the idea that it’s haunted, and does quite well out of it.

So does Carlisle. Citadel Railway Station is supposed to be frequented by ghosts. A small boy with a dog, a woman in a veil and a man without a head have all been reported.

The cathedral and of course the castle are said to be haunted. Most cathedrals and castles are. But more recent strange goings-on include the white mist seen drifting in and out of a takeaway in Botcherby, unnerving staff and customers alike.

I remain more or less agnostic about the existence of ghosts. But there may be a science bit.

Albert Einstein argued that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only turned into another form of energy. Thus the energy of the sun or wind can be turned into electricity - and needs to be, more widely.

If there was a violent death or a serious car accident, energy is bound to have been released. Indeed energy in our bodies keep us breathing and our hearts beating. If it can’t be destroyed, is some of it still lingering? Where does it go?

Most ghost stories may of course be cobblers. One family holiday when I was small took us to Dumfriesshire, staying in a cottage in the grounds of a large stately home.

The caretakers of the holiday homes also looked after the big house, and one of them told us how she would often enter a room to dust and see a ghostly figure standing in a corner, who would slowly evaporate as she worked. They didn’t frighten her at all, she added – they were like parts of the furniture.

It was only years later that I considered that she may have been making this up, and it was a tale she spun to all the holidaymakers.

I suppose our taste for ghost stories satisfies an appetite, found in all cultures, for the supernatural and mysterious.

Some of it lies in the desire to believe that death isn’t necessarily the end. It’s what the phoney spiritualists rely on when they prey on vulnerable people grieving for a relative.

And it must account for much of the appeal of religion – described by Philip Larkin as “the musical brocade created to pretend we never die”.

That doesn’t mean that all religions are untrue. But it probably explains why they are still popular.

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