WITH Halloween now a memory, many would have pushed all thoughts of ghosts away – at least until next year.

That may be set to change, however, as ghost expert Dr Caron Lipman launches two new “ghost tours” of Islington, with one focusing on Angel and another on Holloway.

The academic was drawn into the paranormal world after a ghost sighting of her own at the age of 19, when she was a student at Leeds ­Univer­sity.

“I woke up to see a woman sitting on a stool staring at me,” she said. “I was actually woken up by a crashing noise in my room. And when I woke up, I found that actually there was nothing that had fallen over at all – but when I turned round I saw the woman staring at me.”

Dr Caron Lipman

Was she frightened? “At the time I was just curious. The anxiety came later when you think ‘God, what was that?’ At the time it was just fascinating. I had such a good look at her. And it was almost like she was staring through me to see ‘who are you?’ She was trying to understand me!”

In the intervening years, she has completed a PhD called Cohabiting with Ghosts and has heard the accounts of hundreds of ghost spotters. She describes their experiences as “complex”, both in what they experience and how they feel about it.

Generally women are scared if they see or hear male ghosts, she said. Like one of her case studies, where a woman who lived alone and heard heavy footsteps on the stairs and a creaky floorboard, and simply lay in her bed, her breath held, waiting for her bedroom door to open. It remained closed.
For others, it is a humorous experience rather than spine tingling.

And for some, such as one man who approached her at the end of a talk she had given, it is something traumatising that challenges their “worldview” in an unacceptable way. The man said his sighting “had literally haunted him,” she said, because he worried he would be “considered unhinged in some way”.

While the existence of ghosts has long been debated, Dr Lipman has clear ideas on what she calls the “hundred million dollar question”.

“It depends how you define a ghost and I think that, in all honesty, my view is there is no one interpretation of these experiences,” she said. “They are uncanny, they don’t fit any rational categories.”

She describes how for many people believing in ghosts is a slow, dawning process. People may see or hear something, “but then you blink and it’s gone” so you push it aside, except it keeps on happening and cannot be ignored.

“You get more and more of these events building up until eventually the person witnessing these things says to themselves, ‘It’s not me. There’s something going on here’,” she said.

Visit storiesofourstreets.com for more information on Dr Lipman’s walks.

A rare medium who took flight

ELIZABETH Guppy was a famous Victorian medium who lived in Holloway Road and who claimed, on June 3 1871, to have levitated out of her Highbury home to a seance room in Lamb’s Conduit Street in Holborn.
While Spiritualists such as Arthur Conan Doyle believed her escapade was genuine, it was dismissed by sceptics as a hoax. The event is depicted in the picture, left, which was taken from the front cover of a book published a few years later. Dr Caron Lipman tells her story on the “Uncanny Islington” walk.