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

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.

I slept on the top floor of that Victorian house near Richmond Park in south-west London when I was a teenager, back in the 1990s. It was weird up there. Visitors would often mention the chill they felt in the room. The lights would switch themselves on and off. And objects used to move around in there, seemingly of their own accord.

There was a vase that lived on the little mantlepiece. I’d wake up in the morning, and it would be on the desk. I’d come back later in the day and it would be on the table. It was all a little odd, but not frightening.

Because I’m not the slightest bit interested in poltergeists, I never imagined it was anything that couldn’t be explained by the quirks of an old London house and the irritations of an older sister. I’d accuse her of moving things around to freak me out. She’d deny it, vehemently, as she does to this day.

I hadn’t thought about any of this for decades. But when my old neighbour told me about the room’s other occupants, the memory of the moving vase came rushing back. At first, I thought it had to be a coincidence. Loads of Londoners wonder if their houses are haunted, right?

Except the precise details recounted by one of my successors in the room grabbed my attention. This young woman, in her early 20s, told her family that, for years, a figure would appear to her at night and sit on the end of her bed. She described the figure as a faceless woman, which shook me because – and here’s the next big coincidence – nearly a century before, my wife’s great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door… by two gunshots to the face.

When my wife and I met at university in Scotland back in 1999, neither of us had any idea that her family had a connection to the row of houses where my family lived in London. But in 1937, her great-grandmother, Naomi Dancy, was brutally murdered in her bed, shot once in each eye as she slept. The culprit was ruled to be her brother, a shellshocked First World War veteran who was found near his sister’s body with his throat cut. After a cursory investigation, the police concluded that he’d killed his sister in a fit of jealousy, and then himself.

But as I dug into this long-buried family murder, certain details began to emerge, things overlooked or flagrantly ignored in the initial investigation. And the more I uncovered, the more doubt I had that the brother was the killer. Because there was one other person on the night of the murder whose behaviour was highly suspicious: my wife’s great-grandfather.

The trouble is, my wife’s great-grandfather is not an obscure ancestor. He’s the founding father of my wife’s family as they are today, the swashbuckling patriarch on whom my in-laws look back with pride. When I bowl in and suggest he might have been linked to the murder – and, oh, by the way, I am making a podcast about it – you’ll understand it hasn’t always gone down that well.

So here I am: I’ve got a ghost in the top bedroom of my childhood home, and it might be a faceless woman. I’ve got a murdered ancestor, with her eyes shot out in the house next door. And I’ve got a suspect that nobody has ever properly investigated. And I have a host of experts – from Scotland Yard murder detectives to historians of MI5 to ghost hunters and psychic mediums – trying to help me make sense of it all.

I know I am not supposed to believe in ghosts. My in-laws might disown me, and, who knows, I may never work in “serious” journalism again. But when you find yourself lying awake at night haunted by these kinds of questions, the only thing that’s going to un-haunt you is to do everything you can to answer them.

‘Ghost Story’ is available now from Wondery+, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts