Early 1970s. A couple of years after my mum died - I would have been about 12 - my dad was romancing someone he'd known years before who was also widowed, and she came to stay with us as she lived the other end of the country, with a couple of her daughters.
As there were so many of us in the house, my dad slept on the sofa and I shared his bed with the girl that was my age. We were later stepsisters.
But this week, when they were staying with us, they were total strangers to us. My dad's room was the only 'modern' bedroom in our house; an old farmhouse with 18thC bits and 19thC bits. The back part of the house had almost collapsed and before I was born my parents re-built it. As a result this was an unspooky part of the house - small boxy room, bright, with a large picture window. So it wasn't as if I was primed to see a 'ghost'.
One night, some time in that week, my soon to be stepsister was fast asleep and I realised I could see, only a metre or so away and on my side of the bed, an elderly man. He was floating in the air, seated but I couldn't see his chair. He was intent on making something. I couldn't see what it was but was terrified to move in case it saw me. It wasn't solid but made up of little dots of light. I know that as I remember thinking it looked like something in a comic - these days we'd think of it as 'pixellated'. I didn't know at the time but later realised he was dressed like a 19thC farmer/farm labourer. An elderly man with a beard.
I'd have told myself it was a night terror or I was dreaming, only I eventually got the courage to turn away quickly and in the process, banged my head on the metal bars of the headboard (unfamiliar bed - I miscalculated where it was). The next day I had a distinct bruise on my forehead: this told me I had been wide awake as if I'd been asleep that would sure as hell have woken me up.
In the morning I told my dad when we were alone but never mentioned it to the visitors. They were strangers and I thought they'd think I was nuts. My dad, whose bedroom it was, said he had never seen or heard a thing but he believed me.
15 years later, I went out for a meal with my stepsister. She said:
"It's a funny thing, but you know that week we came up to visit you, before your dad and my mum married? Well one night, when you were asleep, I saw a ghost...." She went on to describe, in detail, seeing precisely what I'd seen (don't recall if it was the same side of the bed, though). She'd never told us because... we were strangers and I might think she was nuts! My husband nearly passed out as she was recounting this as he had heard me tell my ghost story a million times - as did her partner when I said "Yes, I saw that too!" She said I was asleep when she saw it and I thought she was asleep when I saw it so it might have been different nights but that was the one and only time we ever slept in that room, that week.
She went on to tell me another story I'd never heard before, which sounded like it might be the same apparition - witnessed by two houseguests, a few years later. My dad continued to live in the house til the 1990s. He claimed he never saw or heard a thing. Although pretty well everyone else who ever stayed overnight there, had some kind of an encounter.
Around 2000, back in the village after many years living away, there was an exhibition of old photos in the library. One photo taken around 1900 I think, from the top of our lane, accidentally caught the front of our house. Standing outside was an elderly man with a beard, wearing the same clothes I remembered.
My mum and my grandad had died in that room, a couple of years earlier, but I have to say it held no fear for me whatsoever before I saw the old gent. Never slept in there again after. It became another stepsister's room and she never saw a thing in there, either.