Ghosts I Have Seen, and Other Psychic Experiences

Violet Tweedale was a child when the rustling began. Something in a silk dress, she writes, climbed the stairs toward her bedroom each night, and something else she called Rumpus shattered the silence and woke her and her brother from sleep. This memoir of Edwardian-era supernatural encounters reads less like a ghost story and more like a child's frank account of sharing a house with the unseen. Tweedale grew up to become one of early psychical research's more unusual voices: not a credentialed scientist but a woman who took her childhood experiences as a starting point and never stopped investigating. She attended séances, spoke with mediums, and interrogated the boundary between what we call real and what we call imagination. The result is neither credulous ghost-hunting nor dismissive skepticism but something more unsettling: genuine uncertainty, beautifully articulated. For readers drawn to the personal history behind the spiritualist movement, or anyone who has ever wondered whether the strange things they witnessed as children were truly left behind.