The Paranormal in My Art (part 2)

I once lived in a haunted house. The staircase, with a thick, aged, black wooden door placed at its base, was directly next to my bedroom. Every night I would hear creaks in the stairs, each perfectly separated from the other, as if someone was descending the stairs, always at the same time each night as I tried to sleep. As my mother and sister had to go through my room to get upstairs, I knew it wasn’t my family making these sounds. My mother would hear similar footsteps at different times when I was away, and all of us would observe, through the corner of our eyes, the movement of a figure in the window between the kitchen and the lounge, only to turn our heads quickly and see nothing.

We realised after being told by a neighbour that the previous occupant had been an old woman who had died shortly before we moved in. We were told she had died in hospital. Eventually I asked this spirit to stop making these noises as it frightened me, as I was only 11 at the time. Immediately the sounds ceased, until the last day we lived there when my mother heard someone going down the stairs, only once again, to see nothing. After we moved, our former neighbours told us the lady had died in the house, not the hospital and her spirit had remained, seemingly unready to move into the next realm. Later, I had a friend who was a very gifted psychic. She somehow tapped into this event, telling me the woman had been sad she had frightened me, and had never meant to. Prior to this, I had not mentioned this story to her or any of our connected friends. This is just one example of how the paranormal has effected and influenced me as a person and an artist. It is this expansive non-physicality of mind and experience I am inspired by, and a subject I infuse into my art.