South London Spooks

No, not MI6 at Vauxhall. We're talking the supernatural/imaginary/anomalous phenomena for which there is a perfectly rational explanation - take your choice, or in true Fortean style keep open the option that all or none of the above may be true.

Any way, on 11th October South East London Folklore Society presents Patsy Langley talking on Ghosts of South London, with a particular focus on Borough and surrounds. 8 pm at the Old King's Head, Kings Head Yard, 45-49, Borough High St, London, SE1 1NA, £2.50 / £1.50 concessions.

Not sure if I can make it due to being treble booked, so I will throw in my own tale now. One of my neighbours in New Cross thinks they've got a haunted piano, or a house haunted by a ghost that is partial to tinkling the ivories. There was the time she thought her daughter practicing the piano, but she was actually in another room; the time she heard the piano being played in the night; the time everybody in the house was sitting down to dinner and they all heard some strange piano music (described as like fairy music). They live in a Victorian terrace on a busy road, so you could explain it as neighbours' noise, passing car stereos, or a hallucination. If you want to explain it by something else, why pick on ghosts (spirits of the dead), rather than say aliens or fairies? I guess that's folklore, the stories we tell to make sense of the things that don't appear to fit in with our habitual way of seeing the world.