PARANORMAL COLD CASE INVESTIGATING HISTORY’S MOST SPINE-CHILLING ENCOUNTERS
BBC Radio’s Danny Robins speaks to a woman who saw her bedridden best friend appear to her in a park – at the exact moment that she passed away
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
DANNY ROBINS is a writer, broadcaster and journalist. He is the presenter of the BBC Radio 4 podcasts The Battersea Poltergeist and Uncanny, available now on BBC Sounds
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o you believe in ghosts?” I ask. “No,” comes Laura’s firm and immediate reply. “But have you seen one?” I press. “Yes,” she says. “And the ghost I think I saw was my friend. My best friend.” 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
tha appears to a loved one at the that moment of their death? Paranormal mo history his s is littered with such stories, often involving soldiers appearing to oft their wives or parents at the moment the they are killed on a battlefield the hundreds of miles away. Or did hu Laura have a hallucination brought Lau on by her intense grief? As intriguing as this experience iis, s, it’s only the prelude to the real rea a mystery of this case. Seven years yea a later, Laura has moved on with her life: she has a son, who wi she’s left with a babysitter so she she can enjoy a night out with work ca colleagues. They go to watch a co psychic ps s medium in a local village hall. Laura’s no believer, and even ha iiff she was, she thinks this medium is v 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... d
LISTEN
You can hear Laura’s full story in Uncanny case 4, ‘My Best Friend’s Ghost’, available to stream on BBC Sounds: bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0011jxv
JULY 2022
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