People kept saying, much to my parents' frustration, that the house they used to own as a holiday let was haunted. Mum was pretty sure that everything they claimed to hear ("screaming" for example) was basically city folk not knowing what wildlife sounds like. There was one lady who claimed to have "felt a presence" in the house. Mum reckons she felt the presence of the stoats who were living in the loft at the time.

So imagine my surprise when Mum told me that she thinks that a place we stayed at in France when I was young was haunted. Apparently, she woke up on several nights hearing footsteps, which would pause outside their room. Obviously, she thought that it was one of us, having had a nightmare, coming for comfort and hesitating to wake them up. So she'd go and open the door and as she approached it, she'd hear the footsteps running away and the sound of a door closing, but from a direction where there was no door (but it was likely based on the layout of the house that there used to be, as it was attached to an old barn there). She went and looked in on us and we were in bed, fast asleep.

We stayed there several years in a row and it happened every time. She never did work out any rational explanation for what she was hearing, though I don't think she actually did see anything either. Nor did she feel scared or threatened by the strange noises disturbing her sleep each night. She never mentioned any of this to me or my brother until we were much older, and we never noticed anything strange about the place either.