Ghosts

We were told by the previous owners of our Elizabethan farmhouse in the Chiltern Hills that the house is haunted. Our previous house, a similar age of building and farmhouse too did have "footsteps" at two o'clock in the night across the galleried hall's landing. It was not central heating! Within the first couple of years of living in our present house, "footsteps" in the night on the creaking stairs were heard by my husband and he asked if it was me. I was asleep by his side. The alarm contacts on an attic door were being broken (doors open when we were out) and eventually I took one door off and no further false alarms. One guest saw the "old man" sitting at the end of her bed in our elder son's bedroom and she had been a nurse and "seen" ghosts in hospitals when working night shifts. In the orchard, my husband felt certain his ladder was pushed from under him when he was pruning an apple tree. The most interesting "ghost" was one night when BOTH my husband and myself, fast asleep, suddenly woke up together and looked spontaneously without either indicating what to see, to the fireplace wall on our left and saw a shimmering shape. It was not the moon casting beams. Nor ball lightning. We are certain it was something else!