The Skeptic Who Fled a Haunted House
That time I was overwhelmed by a sense of doom one Summer day in Avebury...
I spend a lot of time in haunted places but very little time being actually frightened in them. Most of my time working on ghost cases ends in the need for a good nap, eye strain, and often more questions than I started with.
I write about and investigate other people’s ghosts for a hobby - my role is usually to be the calm one in the corner saying, “Okay, but what else could it be?”
This story is the exception.
It happened on 14 June in 2023, the day after my 36th birthday. I went to Stonehenge on the 13th like a normal, well-adjusted person, and then to Avebury the next day because apparently my idea of a treat is standing near as many old stones as possible in 48 hours. Avebury itself is one of my favourite places. I live a bus ride away, so I’ve pottered around the stones more times than I can count since my childhood.
Avebury Manor, though? I’d never been inside…
A Hot, Ordinary Afternoon in a Very Old House
Avebury Manor is a 16th-century house tucked right into the village, on the edge of the stone circle itself. Inside, the rooms are dressed to reflect different periods in the manor’s history - Tudor, Georgian, early 20th century - and unlike a lot of National Trust houses, you’re encouraged to actually interact with things, sit on the furniture, touch surfaces, and feel like you’re in a home rather than a museum set.
When I visited, it was a scorching hot June day. Proper seek shade or melt weather. The manor wasn’t busy - there were other visitors around, but no crowds or tour groups clogging up staircases. Just that gentle, echoey hush old houses get between conversations.
I wandered through the rooms in the usual slightly nosy way - reading the signs, peering at furniture, mentally filing away quirky details, snapping photos for Instagram. Nothing felt off. Avebury Manor is beautiful, interesting, and comfortably theatrical and I was a visitor, not there on an investigation - I wasn’t on duty, so to speak, and I certainly wasn’t psyching myself up to experience anything. I was just having a look round a nice old house, and then I walked into the back bedroom.
“You shouldn’t be here”
The change was almost instant.
I crossed the threshold and was overcome with a feeling of focused hostility, as if I’d barged in on a private argument. The best way I can describe it is that my whole body suddenly decided I wasn’t welcome.
It wasn't a vague unease, not a bit of a funny feeling, but a full fight-or-flight response. Heart rate up, stomach twisting, skin prickling, that weird heavy feeling at the back of my neck. Every bit of non-verbal wiring I have was screaming: you need to get out of this room and that something bad was going to happen.
On the surface, nothing dramatic was happening. It was just a bedroom, dressed in period style, with furniture and interpretation boards. No cold spots, no flickering lights, no mysterious sounds. Other visitors were somewhere else in the house. I wasn’t hemmed in or being jostled.
I’m used to being spooked but when I’m working on a case in a haunted location, if I feel unsettled, I make myself lean in. I go back, test things, and try to recreate the feeling. That’s the job, right?
So I stayed.
I forced myself to do the normal, sensible things - read a sign, look at the flamingo painting, trace the lines of the ceiling with my eyes, check the view of the gardens from the windows, pay attention to the light. I tried to breathe through it and wait for the feeling to ebb.
Instead, it ramped up. The longer I stood there, the more unwelcome I felt. It was like being glared at by a person you can’t see. Not angry in a loud way, but intensely, tightly hostile. My brain knew I was just in a staged historic room but my body very much did not agree.
Eventually I gave up and left the room. I walked back along the landing, and went down the stairs with my pulse absolutely racing. At the bottom, I stopped in the corridor and just stood there, doing the classic “stare at a random patch of wall while you wait for your autonomic nervous system to calm down” thing.
I don’t know how long I stayed there. Long enough for my breathing to slow, long enough to feel like I wasn’t about to either cry or run. Long enough to realise that the thought of going back up there made me feel slightly sick.
And here’s the bit that really sticks with me: I didn’t go back.
Leaving, Instead of Leaning In
Ordinarily, that’s the moment I’d deliberately walk into the room again. Even if every hair on my arms was standing up, I’d go and take a second look. On 14 June 2023, in Avebury Manor, I walked out of the house instead.
I skipped the rest of the rooms, went straight back out into the sunlight and the familiar warmth of the Wiltshire countryside, and let the heat and the breeze do their thing. It felt like stepping out of a tense conversation into fresh air and soon enough the adrenaline bled away.
I walked around the outside of the house through the gardens and came to a stop in the area that sits beneath the window of that same back bedroom. Standing there I was wrestling the urge to go back inside and climb the stairs again, but looking up at the windows I had just been looking out of, I had that classic “being watched” sensation. Not as intense as inside the room, more of an echo of it.
In all honesty, I think that part was probably mind over matter because I’d just had a fright, and once you’ve been spooked in a place, it doesn’t take much for your brain to fill in the rest around it. After a while, the feeling faded, and the day went back to being an ordinary warm summer afternoon in one of my favourite places on Earth. I took myself to the Red Lion for a pint because blimey…
But that moment in the back bedroom has stayed with me.
What Do You Do With a Feeling Like That?
Avebury Manor, for the record, has a reputation for being haunted. Various sources mention a White Lady seen around the house and grounds, a weeping cavalier in a first-floor bedroom, and other ghost stories that cling to the building’s long history as a Tudor manor built on the site of a medieval priory.
If I were a different kind of writer, this is the point where I’d tell you that what I felt was one of those restless spirits linked to a past tragedy. That I experienced some sort of psychic imprint. It would make a neat story.
However, I’m me, and I don’t think that, but it’s difficult to investigate your own spooky experience. If someone else came to me with this story, I’d have questions:
Q: What were the weather and temperature conditions like?
A: It was hot - I’d been wandering around in the heat all morning.
Q: Had you eaten and drunk enough water?
A: No and no. It’s a bad habit, don’t judge.
Q: Were you alone in a place that has a haunted reputation?
A: Yes.
Q: Did you have any prior knowledge of ghost/s attached to the house?
A: I knew the manor had a reputation, but not the specifics of each room.
Q: Were you expecting to have a ghost experience?
A: No.
Q: Was anything in the room itself unsettling that might have triggered a response?
A: I can’t pin it on anything obvious, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something my brain clocked that I didn’t consciously register.
We know that context, expectation, temperature, fatigue, and anxiety can all contribute to intense feelings in places like this. We also know that old houses are noisy, drafty, and full of odd sensory cues that our brains are very good at turning into presence without our full awareness.
So can I come up with non-paranormal ideas for what happened? Absolutely. Maybe it was the sudden awareness of being alone in a quiet upstairs room in a very old house, or a subconscious trigger that my brain flagged as wrong and escalated (e.g. a smell, a shadow, a half-heard sound.) Perhaps it was the result of coming into the cool and dark interior of the manor from the bright, hot conditions outside.
None of these explanations are as glamorous as the image of an angry 17th-century bedroom ghost deciding to teach a skeptic a lesson, but they’re all more probable. And yet… even with all of that on the table, when I think back to that afternoon, the primary memory isn’t the heat, or the garden, or the information boards. It’s the feeling of walking into that back bedroom and my whole body going nope.
It is, without question, the strongest sense of presence I’ve experienced anywhere other than perhaps my childhood home that first started my fascination with ghosts back in the 80s.
Why Talk About it Now?
Partly because I was reminded of this story recently when talking to someone at a skeptic conference who confided in me their ghostly experience. I could see in their face that they were unsure if I was going to judge them harshly, so I shared some of my own stories, including this one.
Another part of the reason I haven’t written about this until now is that I didn’t want it to be flattened into content. I know how this goes - you share a story like this and people either jump on it as proof that you secretly believe in ghosts (an odd accusation aimed at me fairly often), or as something to be picked apart until there’s nothing left but, “well, you were just a bit hot and stressed, love.”
Both of those responses miss the point.
I still don’t believe in ghosts and I didn’t walk out of Avebury Manor a day older and a haunting wiser. I walked out with data - a vivid, uncomfortable, deeply embodied experience in a very particular time and place that I can’t neatly file away. Critical thinking doesn’t require you to pretend you never get spooked and being a skeptic doesn’t mean you’re immune to weird, emotional, or overwhelming moments. It means you don’t stop at the conclusion that something weird must be paranormal or unexplainable.
You can hold more than one thing in your head at once. It was genuinely one of the most intense, odd feelings I’ve ever had, there are a lot of good psychological and environmental reasons why that might have happened, and it still makes the back of my neck prickle a bit when I think about it.
All of those can be true at the same time.
I’ll Be Going Back
In early 2024, Avebury Manor was badly damaged by flooding and had to close for repairs. The National Trust are aiming to reopen it around Christmas 2025, once everything has been restored.
When it does reopen, I’ll go back.
Not because I think something is waiting for me in that back bedroom, but because repeat visits are one of the simplest, most powerful tools we have. If I walk into that room again and feel completely fine, that tells me something. If I walk in and get the same hit of hostility, that tells me something too.
Either way, it’ll be more data. Another piece of the puzzle of how humans, old houses, and old stories interact.
I love Avebury. I love the stone circles, the landscape, the pub, the slightly bewildering number of sheep. I love that it’s a place where history feels very present without needing any ghosts at all.
But I will never forget the feeling of standing in that bedroom in Avebury Manor on a blisteringly hot June afternoon and knowing, deep in my bones, that I was not wanted there.
Spooky? Definitely.
Evidence of ghosts? No.
A good reminder that being human in old places is always going to be a bit weird round the edges? Absolutely.