SPOOKY SUNDAY! 

By Nicolle Bryson. 

So I’ve been asking you the readers for some of your ghost stories to share and here below are some interesting paranormal experiences by you.  Let me know what you think and to share your own stories Email me on nicollebryson92@gmail.com if you’d like it to stay anonymous it can. Enjoy. 

Marian Main. 

Hi there lads and lasses. Let me begin this extremely long post by saying that I have never really believed in the paranormal, but that I have always respected people who do. I did get into some weird stuff in my mid-twenties though, but that’s another story. 

I have had a few weird experiences in my life, but I always put this down to logical explanations and trying to understand the laws of science and pure reasoning. So those things that have happened have never entered my thoughts or troubled me in any way. 
However, something occurred on Monday just gone that has made me question EVERYTHING about the subject of the paranormal. 
I have absolutely no explanation for this and I am still kind of freaked out by it. It has actually made me a bit upset. Not scared, but kind of uneasy. I wasn’t going to post this but made the decision to do so because this has made me uneasy, not scared, just kind of questioning myself and I am still trying to process this. 
So without further ado…
So, I found out something very strange related to something that happened when I was in my early twenties. 
So it is 1986. 
It was a beautiful summer day in August and my boyfriend at the time said he was taking me to Arundel Castle because the Arundel Festival was on. 
Lots of people seeing events, dressing up in period costumes, having fun etc. 
We went to the castle and started by being introduced to and then following a tour guide type of person, I don’t know if he was an official tour guide and/or whether he did this only during the festival, but anyway I got the impression he knew what he was talking about. 
We went through some rooms etc and to be honest I couldn’t really hear the tour guide because he was right at the front and we were three quarters behind all the other people (there was about twenty of us).

I felt very strange in some of the rooms and put it down to the summer heat. I was lightheaded and a bit nauseous. We were going for dinner after the tour so maybe I was hungry? But I honestly never had experienced that sort of thing whenever I was hungry. 

We got to the Keep of Arundel Castle and the slight breeze coming through the holes  was lovely. I was looking through one of these holes out onto the grounds and was saying to my boyfriend, “Oh look at how beautiful this is, it must take so much hard work to keep this looking so nice”. 

I could CLEARLY hear people chatting behind me, but as with a lot of people chatting in a crowd I couldn’t make out a single conversation.
I then felt a hand being placed on my right shoulder. I thought it was my boyfriend wanting to tell me we had to move on. 
If you can process that for a moment this is how quickly this happened. I literally looked around as I felt the hand on my shoulder in a matter of a second… 
There was no one there… 
No one… Not a single solitary person…
But literally a second before I HEARD people chatting and moving behind me. 
I was completely alone and the tour was way ahead of me. By the time I caught up with them there had been 40, maybe 45 feet between us. I know this because I was very good at judging distance in those days. Having been a groom most of my teenage years, if you ride horses, you will understand. 
I caught up to the group and my boyfriend said he thought that I had been behind him the whole time. 
I said nothing about what had happened in the keep. Again I put it down to the heat or hunger or both. I didn’t feel ill. Just strange. 
We were then lead into some very beautiful rooms which were as you would expect in a beautifully maintained castle. Very ornate and sumptuously beautiful. 
I was fascinated by the detail of the furnishings, the portraits and the floors and thinking how many thousands of people had trodden those floors, opened and closed the doors and windows. Sitting in those rooms when the castle was being used as a residence etc. 
We were walking through one of the rooms when a painting caught my eye of a very beautiful lady and without any explanation as I was looking at her, my mind was saying “I know you, I know you, I know you”. This to me was an involuntary thought and very strange. 
I felt as if I knew what I was going to see before we walked into the next rooms, and sure enough, the rooms were exactly as I expected them to be. Except the furniture had been now moved around slightly. 
This feeling was particularly strong in the room with the lady’s portrait. 
I looked away from the portrait and I immediately saw a man walking towards me from the next room we were going to enter. He was about 20 feet away from me. 
He was looking straight at me. I immediately noticed that he was dressed up. He had a darkish blue coat on with a fur edge. He had almost knee high boots on. He wore a neck ruff and he had a beard and moustache, very much like a cavalier but not dressed as such. His face was thinnish and long. He was also carrying what looked like a little book in his right hand. He was wearing what looked like a sword that made his coat stick out slightly on his left side. 
As he was walking towards me he was looking straight into my eyes, then he casually turned to his right, broke eye contact, and then proceeded to disappear from my view behind the door and wall in the next room. 
I thought that he was going to go through to another room which was situated directly in front of him when he turned to his right. 
I thought he was very impressive and I told the guide as much, who had been talking to some ladies. 
The tour was almost finished and the group had more or less dispersed. 
I told the guide that the people who dress up especially for the Arundel Festival and for the castle are very convincing, but how they must be so hot on this warm, sunny day in their costumes. 
The guide told me that there were no people wearing costumes in the castle but he did ask me what the man looked like, which I didn’t think anything of. So I told him what I saw. 
The guide’s face turned from an interested, engaged expression, to that of concern, I am sure it was a look of alarm. 
I didn’t know what to say when he looked like this. So all I could muster was “Thank you so much for the tour, it was very interesting and I would like to come back to see more one day.”
The guide turned away and went towards the room that I saw the dressed up man in. 
I followed after the guide because my boyfriend was now standing in that next room. To my surprise, when I walked into that room, the area where I saw the dressed up man walk towards was cordoned off with rope, no doubt so the public can’t interfere with the furniture etc. I wondered if he had stepped over the ropes?
But, there was no door there that he could have gone through. 
I looked around and did not see the dressed up man. Because I did see him with my own two eyes and wondered where he had gone. He was as clear as day. So I never thought anything of it. I thought that maybe the guide was mistaken, or maybe someone from the Arundel Festival had made his way into the castle for some unknown reason. I never gave it another thought, until now…
This is where this thing gets strange. 
I am sitting here with Pebbles my daughter on Monday just gone and we were talking about this time when I went to Arundel Castle. We were kind of discussing going there a while back, so I was telling her about this time when I went to the castle with my then boyfriend. 
I forgot to mention that I saw an owl from the castle keep. Which I thought was strange because I was under the impression they were nocturnal birds. 
So Pebbles and I are chatting away, and she asked me to describe the dressed up man that I saw, so I gave her all the details that I have shared with you. 
Pebbles went to her phone,  She asked me one more time to describe the dressed up man, which I thought was weird but I did anyway…

Pebbles just said “Oh… Wow ” while looking at her phone. She looked at me with real concern but in a kind of confused way. 

Pebbles then showed me what she was looking at on her phone. This is what she showed me… 
 THIS IS THE MAN I SAW IN ARUNDEL CASTLE 31 YEARS AGO!!!

I was actually very shocked to see this. And I am not easily fazed by anything. 

The man in the picture is Thomas Howard. He was the Earl of Arundel, West Sussex . But we are not sure whether he was the 21st Earl etc. 

Remember the portrait of the lady I was looking at??? When my mind was involuntary saying “I know you, I know you, I know you”.

THAT LADY WAS THOMAS HOWARDS WIFE!!! AND, her portrait is sitting right next to this picture of a portrait of her husband as shown above BUT, I have absolutely no memory of seeing this portrait of Thomas Howard that is right on the wall next to his wife!!! My daughter showed me a picture of their portraits sitting side by side on the wall on Google images! 

Pebbles told me after this shock and doing some research that Arundel Castle is reportedly haunted. This I never knew. 
She also found out through Google that some people have reported sightings of owls. Which apparently is a bad omen. Also, that Arundel Castle does not employ people to dress up on the grounds. She got this from their website, which ties in with what the tour guide said. 
So, I have no idea how to explain any of this, the hand on my shoulder, the fact that no one was behind me, the owl, the weird deja vu feelings in the rooms, the lady in the portrait, and LEAST OF ALL, the man I saw CLEAR AS DAY that was absolutely without a question of doubt Thomas Howard. 
When Pebbles showed me that image on her phone I was literally dumbfounded and shocked. This has completely confounded me. 

Whatever happened in August 1986 is now on my mind. I hadn’t thought about this in 31 years. Anyway,  I thought I would share this with you and see what you make of it.
Deanna Hackett. 

When i was a little girl and living in Chichester, my mum, siblings and dad were all decorating the sitting room and it got to roughly 3am and everyone was tired so went to bed without tidying up.  I woke up in the morning and all the mess had been swept into a corner, my mum had sworn it was a little old lady that she saw a few times in the house, also in the same house I remember I used to see a little boy called Thomas he was very old fashioned maybe victorian because of his clothing. He would come and see me at midnight most evenings and I would have have full  conversations with him in my bedroom, and then one night whilst the adults where down stairs they heard squeaking from upstairs coming from the spare bedroom. The only thing in there was our old rocking horse so they went up to check and we were all fast asleep but the rocking horse was still moving in the spare room. No windows were open, no drafts and they looked around and simply just couldn’t explain it at all.