I didn’t believe in ghosts until I investigated the murder next door

Despite the chill in the air, the lights flickering on an off and a vase that moved at will, journalist Tristan Redman always dismissed the possibility of a poltergeist at work in his teenage bedroom. Until a former neighbour told him his chilling story about a death in his childhood home that got him thinking…

Naomi Dancy was brutally murdered in 1937 – shot in each eye as she slept (Tristan Redman)

I don’t believe in ghosts. Or I didn’t until recently. Now I don’t know what to believe.

I am supposed to be a “serious” journalist. I cover foreign news in Paris for Al Jazeera English. French labour strikes, the Cannes film festival, wars in Ukraine and Central Africa. But I’ve also spent the last 18 months on Ghost Story, a podcast about a ghost in my childhood bedroom – and whether that ghost is linked to a murder in my wife’s family, which took place in the house next door.

It all started a couple of years ago when a former neighbour told me a story about my old house. While making his rounds to raise money for the local museum, he’d discovered that, since I moved out, every occupant of the top floor has had inexplicable experiences up there. I’d never met or spoken to any of those people, and they didn’t know each other. But when my old neighbour asked if any of this sounded familiar, I replied immediately: I knew exactly what he was talking about.