Danny Robins' paranormal cold cases: my best friend's ghost

People often ask me which of my cases has sent the biggest shiver down my spine. I’ve heard tales of ruined cottages in the Scottish Highlands haunted by violent spirits, and Victorian houses where strange apparitions re-enact bloody murders, but the story that sticks in my head most, the one that can stop me getting to sleep, is Laura’s. It is deceptively simple in comparison and yet, for me, it is utterly chilling.

Laura is in her forties now, but the event in question happened in her late teens. She’d left home young and moved into a shared house full of strangers. One became a friend: Anna, a few years older and full of life and energy, with a Rubenesque figure and striking red frizzy hair that seemed to defy gravity. They became best friends. Sadly, however, Anna developed cancer and Laura faced the heart-breaking prospect that her friend was going to die.

She remembers the last time that she saw Anna (by then, they were living in separate houses). Anna was in bed, unable to get up and heavily sedated on morphine. Her last words to her best friend were: “Keep partying, Laura Bear”, her nickname for Laura.

Ghosts from grief

Having said goodbye, an emotional Laura walked home through the park. She reached a hill. “And I looked up and Anna was stood on that hill on a pathway near the trees.”

“Anna, who you know is ill at home, unable to go out?” I cannot help but interject.

“Yes. You know how you know your loved ones, how they stand, how they walk? Anna didn’t look like anybody else. It was Anna.”

I can hear the total conviction in Laura’s voice. When she got home that day, stunned by her strange sighting, her phone rang. It was Anna’s dad calling to let Laura know that Anna had just passed away.

Had Laura witnessed what is often called a ‘crisis apparition’, the ghost of someone that appears to a loved one at the moment of their death? Paranormal history is littered with such stories, often involving soldiers appearing to their wives or parents at the moment they are killed on a battlefield hundreds of miles away. Or did Laura have a hallucination brought on by her intense grief?

As intriguing as this experience is, it’s only the prelude to the real mystery of this case. Seven years later, Laura has moved on with her life: she has a son, who she’s left with a babysitter so she can enjoy a night out with work colleagues. They go to watch a psychic medium in a local village hall. Laura’s no believer, and even if she was, she thinks this medium is very unimpressive, blustering and guessing throughout the show.

When it’s over, Laura’s friends insist on chatting to the medium. By now, Laura wishes she could escape to the pub, but the medium spots her and says she is glad to have caught Laura before she left. “There was a woman with red hair here for you,” the medium says. “But she told me not to reach out to you during the show because you would have rejected it.”

And then the medium looks straight into Laura’s eyes and tells her the message that this female spirit asked to pass on: “Keep partying, Laura Bear.”

Maybe you can see why this one has never left me and why it can send a shiver down my spine, even now...

This article was first published in the July 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed

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From ghostly phantoms to UFOs, The Battersea Poltergeist's Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of paranormal encounters on his BBC Radio 4 podcast Uncanny. Episodes available now on BBC Sounds