Personal Stories of the Bedtime Stories Team - Simon

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Hi folks, it's Rich again.

I hope you're all well and that you had a lovely Christmas.

I also hope you enjoyed our personal stories episode yesterday.

And today we're going to be doing some more personal stories, but this time from simon now simon has been a writer with bedtime stories since 2019 and as a serving police officer he's had some truly bizarre experiences whilst on duty we'll be carrying on with the same format as yesterday with a more relaxed conversational sort of tone but this time simon will be narrating the episode as we feel the story is better coming from the horse's mouth.

And then finally, I'll be finishing off with another personal story of my own just to finish out the year.

And just to make you aware, we recorded this one right after the Phone Calls from the Dead story, which was featured in the In the Wake of episode, I believe.

So you don't have to check that out to get any context for this one, but there is a part in that story where I mentioned specifically the Phone Calls from the Dead episode.

And hopefully it'll all make sense when you listen.

And this is just to clarify that situation.

So without further ado, let's get into it.

One of the most common questions I get asked is how I ended up writing for bedtime stories and I think like a lot of people I ended up stumbling across a random video on YouTube.

In my case it was UberCity

and went down a bit of a rabbit hole and ended up binging all the videos and addicted to the channel.

End of 2018 Rich puts out an advert on social media looking for a writer.

I chanced my arm and gave him a submission.

As it happens, I didn't win.

I think he said I came third or fourth.

I can't quite remember.

But eventually I managed to twist his arm and ended up writing full-time for the channel.

And I think, bearing in mind how big the Bedtime Stories brand has become, it's global now and when he put out for the writer he had people applying from the US, from Australia, from all over the globe.

I think if you'd have told him at the start he'd end up giving the job to a chap who lived 20 minutes down the road from him, he probably wouldn't have quite believed you.

But he did,

and here I am.

Now, I've got to know Rich quite well over the last year or two and we've got a lot in common.

We're both Midlanders.

I mean he's more of a Shopshire lad, if I'm honest, whereas I'm very much a black country boy.

And apart from a couple of years where I moved up north to study for my degree in the north of England, I ended up, like most Midlanders, being drawn back to my home area.

It's a strange place to get your head around if you've not been born there or lived there.

There are a lot of cultures, there's a lot of traditions.

The language, particularly the accent, can be quite hard to understand sometimes.

I think I can trace my love of mysteries and the unexplained.

If I'm going to lay it anywhere, it's probably at the doorstep of my granddad, Matthew.

He was a local doctor, he had a commission in the territorial army, and from a young age, he got me hooked on stories of UFOs and other supernatural phenomenon from around the globe.

The stories that I've written recently for bedtime stories relating to wartime and soldiers and the things they've seen are very much a tribute to him.

He'd literally spend hours just sitting there and explaining to me what made these events so mysterious, so interesting and so captivating.

And when I write episodes like UB65, for example, they're sort of my way of repaying it to him, sort of keeping the stories alive.

There's a long tradition of public service in my family, and in 2003, I applied for my local police force and was successful.

I was confident when I applied, I don't really know why now, thinking about it, that I'd just end up getting posted to my hometown, which was Wolverhampton.

And it didn't work out that way.

Instead, I got posted to Dudley, which was the next borough down.

I didn't really know anything about Dudley, didn't know the people, didn't know the area.

At that time, I didn't really know much about policing either.

So the first couple of years went by quite quick.

When you're a police officer, you're working hours that sort of normal people don't, and you're exposed to situations that normal people don't ever get exposed to.

Every day you're going to five or six different jobs and you're doing that five or six days a week and given that sort of huge level of personal interaction it's not really any surprise that police officers tend to get faced with situations that they they can't really understand or explain away and I know I did.

After the first couple of years where I'd been working I ended up qualifying as a tutor constable and what I'd do is I'd babysit the sort of new student constables as they came in.

and work alongside them for three months teaching them and assessing them until it was decided that they were fit to go out on their own.

And if there was a period where I didn't have a student to teach, I would end up just crewing up with somebody else whose crewmate was away for the day.

Or I'd just grab a set of keys to a patrol car and go on my own and volunteer for things.

One night I'd done exactly that.

I was on my own, I was just driving around on a night shift,

only myself for company.

And it was midweek, it was the early hours of the morning, and there was not a lot going on on the radio.

There was a report came in of a disturbance not too far away from where I was.

There was nothing going on, so I volunteered to go and deal with it.

And the controller assigned me the call.

And whilst I was on my way across to it, he told me that there was a local resident near the nature reserve who could hear a woman screaming.

That nature reserve was the Wren's Nest Nature Reserve, which was directly next to the Wren's Nest Estate.

And the Wren's Nest Estate probably generated more police incidents for us to deal with than the rest of the borough combined.

For some reason, it was the sort of breeding ground of most of our local customers and their extended families.

And we'd often find ourselves chasing car thieves and burglars down through a rabbit warren of alleyways and towpaths that ran through the estate.

But bizarrely right next to it there was this huge area of outstanding natural beauty which was the Renseness Nature Reserve.

When I got there I pulled up outside the address where the resident had called from and I got my torch out and walked off into the nature reserve.

The radio was starting to heat up a little bit at that point and I could hear incidents kicking off all over the borough and pretty soon any available backup was already on its way to other jobs.

So for the next hour I was on my own just traips along the paths, shining my torch in the foliage and with the exception of the occasional fox or a angry badger there was just me just wandering through the trees and looking for this woman who'd been heard screaming.

Anyway, give it 45 minutes and I haven't seen anything and I haven't heard anything so I decided to call it a night.

There's no one around, I can't hear anybody screaming, so I've told myself that it's probably just some kids on the way home that the witnesses heard messing around.

But then I walked out of this tree line onto one of the main paths and caught sight of this woman standing on the pathway a little further ahead of me.

It was a relatively open patch of ground, it was quite a full moon overhead

and I was looking at the silhouette of an average sized woman with long hair.

Couldn't really make out much more detail other than it was a female figure that that I was looking at.

So I think to myself, well this is her then isn't it?

This is this is the woman that I'm looking for.

So I shout out to her, tell her I'm a police officer and I ask her if she's alright.

And she doesn't reply but instead she sort of takes a step backwards and puts her arms up as if she was sort of warding or warning me away.

So I figure it's the middle of the night, someone's just come out of a bushes in front of her.

She's probably a bit scared.

So I turn my torch on and I shine it onto the stab vest I'm wearing, which has got my name and my colour number on it.

And then I shine it onto the the sort of police fleece that I'm wearing around it, and then I slowly rotate the beam until it's pointing towards her.

And the second the torchlight touched the ground where she was standing, she disappeared.

And I don't know why, but rather stupidly, my first reflex was to turn the torch off and turn it back on again, like she was going to magically reappear with it, which unsurprisingly she didn't.

And I can't quite figure out what's going on because she was definitely there and she definitely stepped to go away from me, but now she's disappeared.

So I start shining my torch around the ground that I'm on.

There's no bushes, there's nowhere for her to hide, walk up and down the pathway, shout out a couple of times and eventually my nerves get the better of me and I make my way back to the car and drive back to the station.

And while I was doing it I kind of came to the conclusion that it was probably best not to tell anybody about it.

No one else had seen what had happened.

All that would happen is I'd expose myself to a lot of Mickey taking from the other officers and the worst case scenario was they might review my suitability to tutor people, which isn't something I really wanted.

About a year or so later I was tutoring a student called Stuart and Stuart was a good lad, he was very capable and so despite the fact that I'm supposed to be making him do all the work and assess him it didn't take long before we were pretty much just sharing the workload together and we had just started a night shift and we got a call saying that there had been a burglary at a local off license so Stuart takes the call and we start making our way over there now the shop in question was one we were both really familiar with Even though Stuart had only been a police officer for a couple of months, he'd already been there a couple of times.

And basically the issue was that the chap who ran it spent most of his days selling alcohol and sort of low-level drugs to the local kids.

And then when he would try and rip them off, they would kick off and we'd get called.

And it was in the middle of a housing estate called Pensnet, just opposite the local hospital.

And I think both myself and Stuart had decided before we got there, the chances were this wasn't going to be a regular burglary.

A couple of minutes later, we get to the shop and there's the owner pacing around outside waving a cricket bat round clearly in a bad mood.

Stewart gets out the passenger seat and goes to have a word with him and the shopkeeper starts mouthing off at him saying it's taken us ages to get there, why does he pay his taxes and I have a bit of a sense of humour failure at this point and basically go over, tell him to wind his neck in and ask what he wants us for.

So he's still got this cricket bat in his hand and he goes walking around the side of the house and we follow him.

And as we do so I notice that the big metal shutters at at the front of the shop are pristine and the fire exit doesn't appear to have been forced so I'm struggling at this point to see where this burglary might have taken place.

Shopkeeper leads us into the back door and we go across the shop floor up a set of steps and into the flat that he lives in above

and there's a old black and white TV monitor in the corner of one of the back rooms.

He sits down, motions us to go and look at what he's doing and he starts playing the footage and it's a black and white camera feed which we recognise comes from a camera covering the front of the shop.

And he starts muttering to himself and he rewinds it to a certain point and presses play.

And as the footage starts rolling I have a check of my watch and see that it's about 15 minutes prior to us arriving.

So we're watching it and for a few seconds nothing's happening and then this figure walks across the screen from right to left, straight through the metal shutters of the shop, doesn't pause, disappears through the shutters and then you see the shop's strobe lighting and alarm activate at the front.

And before we even get a chance to ask the shopkeeper to replay it, he's already played it back again and started playing it in slow motion.

Now this figure, it's the size and shape of an adult male.

It's got its arms and legs walking like it hasn't got a care in the world, but it's shadowy, it's smoky.

You can see right through it, you can see the pavement and the wall behind it as it moved.

And it just walks coolly and calmly straight through these metal shutters and there's a pause and then you see the alarm box activate.

So at this point the owner's looking a little bit smug like he's potentially won something and he turns around and starts telling us how he's heard the alarm go off, he's grabbed the cricket bat, he's run downstairs to confront whatever kids are in his shop and there's no one there.

He's checked outside, come back in and then he's checked the camera footage and called us.

And essentially he wants us to explain what's happened.

I can feel Stewart's eyes burning into me from behind me

and I can't quite think how to explain it so I asked the owner to play the footage again just to buy some time,

watched it and then decided to tell him that clearly it's an old VHS system, must be one of the old tapes, must be some old footage that's got mixed up with the new footage.

What we're looking at must be an echo of a previous customer from the day before walking through the shutters.

There's nothing more sinister to it than that.

So he's not very impressed with this explanation, but at the same time he hasn't got much choice.

So after again moaning about the fact that he doesn't know why he bothers paying his taxes he orders us out of the shop and we head back down to the car.

Stuart updates the controller to the effect that it's not a burglary and we start driving back to the station and at some point during the drive he asks me if I believe what I just said to him.

And again not really wanting to get into a difficult conversation with him or open myself to any ridicule, I just said, yeah.

it's just an old VHS system, you know how unreliable they are.

It's probably just broken.

Wouldn't worry too much about it.

Now, unlike the incident that happened at the Nature Reserve, this was a little bit more problematic to try and keep quiet.

Stew was involved and yeah, there was no reason for him to keep quiet about it.

So over the next couple of days, other officers would approach me and ask me about the ghost that we'd seen at the corner shop.

And I'd laugh it off or just change the subject or not talk to them about it.

And I got away with it it up until I found myself alone one of the days in the crew room with another officer called Martin.

And we were chatting away about football and telly and various other things.

And then out of nowhere, he just calls me out on this footage.

Now, Martin was an ex-soldier.

He was completely no-nonsense in his attitude towards how he police people.

Very good in a fight, very safe pair of hands.

But if he got the feeling that somebody was trying to pull the wool over his eyes, he'd just go at them doggedly until he got them to tell the truth.

And in this case, it was me that he went at.

He basically told me that my explanation was nonsense, that old footage wouldn't have set off an alarm sensor inside the shop, and that he thought I was just lying to cover it up.

And then before I could admit that to him, he basically confused the hell out of me by telling me a story that happened to him one night when he'd been on his own.

I didn't know Martin that well.

He didn't live in the same area that we did.

He didn't tend to come to the work socials because he lived quite a distance away.

And he'd transferred in relatively recently from another police station.

So we knew each other to work with, but we didn't know each other socially.

He started explaining to me how when he'd been at his old station the one night, him and his colleague had been called to a domestic incident and they'd gone there and they'd locked up the husband.

the dad of the family for assault.

Driven him back to the local custody block, lodged him and while Martin's colleague had started doing the paperwork Martin had gone back to get a statement off the wife.

He arrives at the house and wife is a bit reluctant to make a complaint and eventually has to strike a bit of a deal with her that he'll load her and the three kids in the back of the police car and drive her a couple of miles down the road to her mum's house so they could stay there.

So Martin stands and watches as she starts putting a bag together for the kids and the kids, they're all quite young and they don't seem particularly bothered about seeing a police officer around the the house, which is always a little bit sad.

Eventually, it's all done, and he shepherds them out of the house into his car, puts the key ignition to drive away, looks in his windmill and stops.

Behind him, through the gap in the closed curtains in the living room of the house that they've just walked out of, he can see a face.

And it's a young lad, and it's staring back at him.

And they hold each other's gaze for a couple of seconds, and then Martin stops, puts the handbrake back on, turns round and watches as his face disappears behind the curtains.

So he turns to look at the wife and the wife, the mum of the kids, can tell something's wrong and she asks him, why aren't they going?

Why haven't they left yet?

There's a pause and Martin says to her, look,

one of your kids is still in the house.

And at this point, the mum turns around and looks at him and goes, well they're not.

Look in the back of the car.

I've got three kids and they're all there.

And Martin, he's just not having any of it.

And he says, give me your house keys.

Stay here.

So she hands her house keys over.

He locks him in the police car.

He walks back to the house and goes inside.

And he searches the house from top to bottom.

He spends 10 minutes going every room, every cupboard, under the beds.

I think he even looks up in the loft.

And he cannot find this kid at all.

And every indication in the house is that she's only got three kids.

And he's frustrated as hell because he knows what he's seen.

And he goes out, gets back in the car, and before he can say anything, the wife just cuts you off and says, listen, we either go go now or you don't get your statement.

So, Martin complies, starts the car up, drives around to her mum's house, kids get tucked into bed and he takes a complaint statement off her.

And at the end of it, he says, I want you to tell me what I saw.

I want you to tell me what was in your house.

And the mum basically pauses for a sec, can see that he's not going to take no for an answer.

And with a completely straight face, she says it's a haunted house.

She says that for years the kids used to tell her that they had a friend, a little boy, who they used to play with in their bedroom.

She said she never saw it herself, but she'd always felt like there was someone watching her and she never fully felt comfortable being on her own inside the house.

That feeling, that feeling that you're being watched, that there's something there that you can't see, is something that I experienced at another job that I went to.

And that was an incident that took place on a hot summer's day.

I was screwed up with a special constable, which is a volunteer officer who I didn't know very well.

Didn't see him afterwards, so I'm not sure whether he joined the regulars or not.

And we had been carrying out an anti-social patrol in an area called Gornall Village.

So we're driving through the village centre, moving on kids who are hanging around outside shops, and the radio comes into life and says that there's a burglary, a break in progress going on.

Somebody over in Turls Hill has been walking their dog.

They've walked past a house and heard breaking glass at the back and they think the burglars are inside right now robbing the place.

Now, a break in progress is the gold standard for a uniformed police officer.

To catch a burglar inside a house burgling the place is as good as it gets.

So, unsurprisingly, every man and his dog shout up and say they're going to go to this job, including us.

And we go hairing across the borough.

And by some quirk of fate, it's myself and this special constable that get there first.

Pull up in the car, just short of the address, so that they can't see me pull up.

And as I get out of the patrol car, I can hear smashing glass coming from this house.

I can hear what sounds like furniture being upturned.

And I grab hold of the special who's over excited and overall by what's going on.

I said, look, you watch the front of that house.

If anybody comes running out the front of that house, it's not me.

You grab them.

You grab them and you put them on the floor.

Okay, good.

And then I run around to the back of the house, go through the back gate, and stand flat against the back wall so that if anybody's looking out through the windows, they can't see me.

And while I'm standing there, I can still hear smashing and banging and crashing inside.

And it sounds like someone's trashing the place.

A couple of minutes later, two more officers come running around the corner and tell me that the front and the back are all covered off now and I run up to the back door, the kitchen door and try the handle.

And straight away, two things happen.

One, it doesn't open because it's locked.

And two, the noises inside just stop, like someone had pressed the switch and just turned them off.

The kitchen window is slightly insecure.

So we open the kitchen window rather than smashing it.

and I climb in and go into the kitchen.

And when I get in there, I find it's empty.

It's unfurnished.

Looks kind of like perhaps somebody's been moving out or cleaning it prior to selling the house and my heart is racing.

I'm just like full of adrenaline because I'm just convinced there's a burglar in this house and I'm going to catch him.

So I shout out that I'm a police officer.

I take out my batten and iron racket and I challenge this person.

I say right show yourself.

Surrender now.

And nothing happens.

It's just completely quiet.

And whilst I'm doing that, the other two lads have climbed in through the kitchen behind me.

So we set off into the house and and we're slow and we're cautious.

We've got our battens out, we've got our torches out, and it quickly becomes apparent that every room is as empty as the kitchen.

This is an old house that's been cleared out, probably prior to being sold.

There's no furniture, and more importantly, there's no broken glass.

All the windows are intact.

Mirrors, picture frames, there's nothing there.

It's just an empty house.

And I'm getting a little confused at this point.

But again, I identify myself and we go upstairs.

Assume we're going to find the place trashed.

And again, it's pristine, spotless.

No dust, no broken glass, no damaged furniture, absolutely nothing.

I'm struggling at this point because I know what I heard and that doesn't match with what I'm looking at.

So whilst the other two lads get bored quite quickly and head downstairs, I carry on searching and I go up in the loft and for the next 15 minutes I'm convinced that I'm going to open a cupboard or, you know,

look behind the curtains and there's going to be Billy Burglar stood there waiting for me.

But he's not.

There's nothing.

And I found myself standing in the kitchen getting ready to climb back out and i just got suddenly consumed by this this feeling that somebody or something was there with me in the kitchen and it was watching me and it was really really delighted and chuffed with itself that how i felt how i felt that i felt really uncomfortable a little bit nauseous and and i've never climbed out of a window so quickly to be frank

In the days and weeks after that, I'd check the police systems, police computers, I'd chat with the local local bobbies, and there was nothing on this house at all.

The police had never been called there.

It was frustrating.

There was no leads to go on, no previous occupiers, nothing.

It was just a complete mystery.

And I suppose out of anything that I've said, that's the incident that stays with me the most because I just cannot explain what I heard and what I found when I got there.

When you join the police, you get trained to be a problem solver.

As a a response officer you work for eight to ten hours a day.

You go into people's lives on the worst day of their lives and you put a sticking plaster on for them till the end of your shift and then you go home.

And you're very good at solutionising and you're very good at fixing problems.

But the only way to do that is to look at the evidence, look at the facts and knit that together and come up with a problem.

And just as Martin couldn't explain what had happened to him, I couldn't explain what happened to mine because there was no evidence to work off.

I couldn't tell you now if those experiences were paranormal.

I just don't have enough information to work off.

All I can tell you is that they all happened and they all left me feeling a little bit anxious and intimidated about them after they had.

To a certain extent I can believe that when you're working night shifts and you're not sleeping enough and you're stressed, that your brain can invent things that don't exist.

And I can certainly rationalise that in relation to the incident at the Nature Reserve.

I had been sent there to look for a woman, so my consciousness created one for me.

To a certain extent I can accept that.

It doesn't feel right, but it could explain what happened.

But my mind didn't invent the CCTV at the off-licence with the figure walking through it, and it didn't invent the sounds in the empty house I went to because other officers saw that and heard that.

I do believe that incidents like this happen every day, all over the place.

and that the people who are involved in them are usually too scared to share them with people because they think they'll be ridiculed.

Are they evidence that there's something more to life we don't understand?

Is it possible that after death people will still try and reach out and try and talk to people?

I don't know.

I only know one thing, and frankly, it's that questions like that, well, they're well above my pay grade.

Hey guys, I hope you don't mind, but I thought I'd do another personal stories episode off the back of Phone Calls from the Dead.

I hadn't intended to do this, but after reading Simon's script for that episode, I was shocked at how similar some of the stories were to something which occurred within my own family.

I had no idea how common the apparent phenomenon is of receiving a communication from someone who has passed away.

And somewhere in the process of editing that script, I had an urge to relate the experience I'm about to share with you, which may end up sounding crazy, but it's something that's deeply personal to me and especially to my mum, who felt the full force of what she believes is a true example of life after death.

None of what you are about to hear is really dark or creepy, but instead something life-affirming and hopeful in the face of a tragic loss.

As some of you may or may not know, I come from a fairly large family.

I grew up with four brothers and a sister, And during the course of my life, I have lost two of those siblings.

My sister Michelle died in 1987 at the age of 19.

I think I was about five at the time, so I didn't really understand what was going on.

And then more recently in 2014, my brother Adrian passed away at the age of 34.

Now strangely enough, they both died of the same thing, which was epilepsy.

They both had grand malseizures whilst they were on their own, and sadly no one was there to

help them.

It's not a condition that runs in my family.

My sister's epilepsy just came out of nowhere and my brother, well, he sustained a nasty head injury in 2012,

from which he then developed very intense seizures.

So that's how they both passed away and I guess in a poetic sort of way they were uncannily similar to each each other in terms of their characters and personalities.

In both cases, my mom experienced some very strange occurrences after they died, and in this instance, I'm just going to focus on what happened after Adrian passed away, as it's still quite fresh in my memory.

And depending on how you feel about this, maybe I'll share what happened with Michelle too at some point.

Now, I've said a couple of times before that Bedtime Stories is very much a dedication to Aide.

He was an artist himself and he had an amazing talent for drawing pencil and charcoal style scenes and characters.

And going back almost 20 years, he and I had this idea to write creepy stories and put them on a website,

with him doing a drawing for each one.

But as the saying goes, life gets in the way of making other plans and we just never got around to realizing this dream we both had, which is why I made the decision to push ahead with bedtime stories after

he had gone.

But that was, for all intents and purposes, the genesis of what you are listening to at this moment in time.

Now the first few days after he passed, we spent clearing out his house.

Most of his belongings were boxed up and kept in a spare room at my mum's house, ready to be put up in the attic.

But they ended up staying in that room for months.

I guess none of us were quite ready to deal with that process.

It would have felt like we were putting Aid away in the dark to be forgotten about and

that just didn't seem right.

Anyway, about four weeks after the funeral, so five or six weeks after his death, my mum is pottering around in the kitchen when she hears this vibrating sound.

And straight away she knows it's a mobile phone, but...

when she checks hers which is on the kitchen table beside her um she can see that the screen is blank so it's not hers that's ringing.

And after a few seconds she realises that it's coming from above her head.

So she heads upstairs and upon entering the spare room which is above the kitchen the sound becomes more pronounced.

So she starts going through the boxes of Aid's belongings and in the first one she opens is his mobile phone, screen lit up with private number on the display.

Now I should mention that nobody had touched Aide's phone since he had died

except for in the first few days when we went through it to call his friends and let them know what had happened.

Otherwise it had been sitting in that box for six weeks and by rights it should have been completely dead.

Even back then smartphones would only last a couple of days tops.

even if you kept him in standby mode so that was the first strange thing.

The second is that when my mum answered it, there was no one there.

It was just silence, apart from a couple of almost inaudible clicks on the line, so she cancelled out of the call.

But almost immediately after pressing the button to hang up, it starts ringing again.

And this time the name of Aid's girlfriend comes up on the screen.

So my mum answers and...

There's Aide's girlfriend on the other end of the line, almost hysterical, saying, Aid, is that you?

Are you there?

And of course my mom says that it's not Aid, it's his mom, and then she asks his girlfriend if it was her just now trying to call Aid's phone from a private number,

to which his girlfriend says, no, I just got a missed call from Aid's phone and when I rang back, you answered.

And obviously my mom tells her that that's impossible as Aid's phone has been in the box all this time and that no one has even been near it.

So

she doesn't understand how the phone has called his girlfriend

anyway they ended up having a lengthy conversation reminiscing about aide which my mom found a certain degree of i guess closure in

afterwards they said their goodbyes and they uh they never spoke again um as soon as my mum hung up the phone went blank out of battery as if

as if it had never been powered on.

And to this day, she's convinced that somehow Aide wanted the two of them to speak.

But this wasn't the only time that something like this happened after Abe passed.

In fact, it wasn't even the first.

My mom is adamant that he contacted her twice before his funeral, only this time it wasn't through a phone or electronic device of any kind.

About a week before the service was due to take place, my mum was stressing over what to put in Aide's coffin with him.

There was nothing really in his belongings of any kind of sentimental value and

she was getting quite upset about not having anything to give to him.

Anyway, one of the nights she's awoken in the early hours of the morning by what she said felt like a hammer banging inside her head and there's this voice which says picture top of cupboard.

picture top of cupboard and it's just like that the way my mum described it she says it was like a hammer blow with each syllable

so the next day i get a phone call from my mum saying we need to go to to aid's house because she thinks there's something we might have missed um

you know i tell her look mum we cleared everything out how could we have missed anything and that we have to hand the keys back in a couple of days but she's not having any of it she's convinced that there's something of aid still in that house.

So later that day I drive her over there and we check every cupboard in the place, top to bottom, and there's nothing there.

We don't find anything.

And just as we're about to leave, my mom, who's close to tears as she was convinced we would find whatever we were supposed to find,

points to the kitchen cupboards and says,

did you check up there?

Now these cupboards are attached to the kitchen wall in such a way that there is something like a two two inch gap between the ceiling and the top of the cupboard itself.

It's not the kind of place you'd ever think to store something, so I kind of bite my tongue and climb up onto the work surface.

And on top of the very first cupboard I check, I can see that there's something there.

So I slide it out of there and when I see what it is, I just stand there in shock.

for a few seconds and turn to look at my mum

and when I pass it to her her, she looks at it, puts a hand over her mouth and just begins to weep.

It's a picture of Aide's son, sitting there with this big cheeky smile on his face.

Only Aide would have known where that picture was.

It was something that was precious to him and that's why he'd put it away in such an obscure place where no one else would think to look.

Which is why we didn't find it when we cleared out the house house the first time.

And we never would have found it if my mum hadn't been told to look on top of the cupboard.

So that's what my mum ended up putting in the coffin with him.

Now believe it or not, the same thing happened again a few days later.

And this time it was to do with which song to pick for the service.

We were supposed to select three and we'd already chosen two, but we were struggling with

the third.

We didn't know what to what to choose.

And again my mum was awoken in the early hours with the same hammering sensation, but this time it was Cindy Lauper, true colours.

Cindy Lauper, true colours.

Same rhythmical hammer blows with each syllable.

Now as soon as my mum told me I couldn't believe it, I said, Cindy Lauper.

I said, there's no way Aide would choose something like that.

You know, like me, he was

a rock and indie indie kind of guy.

Never in a million years would you catch him listening to Cindy Bloody Lauper.

And I couldn't even accuse my mom of picking it for him because she detests anything like that.

She's into, you know, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, that kind of music.

So it was just a completely random song way out of left field, which didn't seem to make any sense.

until we read the lyrics.

And when it came on at the service after I delivered Aid's eulogy,

the tears just wouldn't stop.

My mum's also seen him a few times around the house.

Occasionally,

she'll walk around a corner and see the back of him walking through a door or turn to see him sitting in a chair only for him to disappear when she double takes.

And just a couple of weeks ago, when we were visiting my mum for Sunday dinner,

my partner saw his outline behind a frosted screen door as she came out of the bathroom.

And even I saw him briefly after my twin boys were born in 2018.

In my old house, we had a corner sofa, and I just put my newborn son, William, down to sleep on the corner piece next to me, surrounded by cushions so that he couldn't roll off.

And I was tired myself due to the lack of sleep me and my partner were having, which was was understandable given the situation.

And so I lay down on the sofa near him and just dozed off.

And just as I woke up, I saw Aid on the adjacent section of the sofa, arm resting on the back, leaning in towards William.

And he just smiled at me and then faded away.

And it was really quick.

It was, you know, about a second or two.

And it was like he was watching over my son as I slept.

And I'd always put it down to like a waking dream.

But the more I think about it, the more I doubt that as an explanation.

Because

waking dreams only occur when coming out of deep REM sleep.

And it takes around an hour or two of dreamless sleep before the body even enters the REM phase.

And I'd only been napping for around, you know, 10 or 15 minutes.

So I don't know what to think.

My mum, on the other hand, is utterly convinced that Aid had contacted her in all three of the aforementioned instances.

Now, of course, I never received any of these communications myself, so I can't speak for what my mum experienced.

Was it all in her head?

Was it just wishful thinking?

Her way of coping with yet another loss of one of her children?

I don't know.

But I do believe her.

But then of course, I want it to be true, even need it to be true.

Sceptical as I am about most paranormal things, I just can't bring myself to accept that there's nothing after death.

It just makes life seem so trivial and pointless.

When I went back to work a few weeks later, after Aide had passed away, a guy I barely knew who worked worked over the other side of the office came over and spoke to me and

he told me that many years ago he'd lost his seven-year-old daughter

and the one thing he said which has stuck with me is that time's a great healer.

You'll never fully mend but it does get easier

and with that he walked away.

The thing is, I feel like Aid's still around and I think anybody who's lost someone close to them will tell you the same thing.

Even now sometimes for the briefest of moments I'll think about you know giving him a call and seeing if he wants to go for a beer and maybe a game of pool

and then I realise and I just feel

sad.

Like all brothers you know we'd fight a lot and argue over stupid things.

But many of my most cherished memories were created with him.

He was responsible for some of the funniest moments in my life and some of the most heartbreaking.

He was my best friend and

I miss him.

I just hope I

get to see him again one day.

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