Oh, I'm with you, sorry if it came across like I was just going "oh its definitely 100% bollocks", cos I grew up being told by family members on both sides that it absolutely was true. I don't know what I think now, personally, but I do think that at the very least things happened that can't be explained "rationally", as it were.

My grandmother on one side would swear on her kids lives that she knew to go to the Anderson shelter in WW2 before the sirens, because a ghost shook her bed. I think she truly believed that too.

My other grandmother told me about how her aunt got upset during dinner one evening (also WW2), crying and devastated because she saw her son who'd been sent abroad somewhere standing behind his wife with his hand on her shoulder, and then the next day they got a knock on the door with a telegram to say he'd been killed in battle. Again, I don't know what I think of it, but I know they all believed in it.

My own aunt got really angry with me and my cousins once for hiding her chequebook, we were all thick as thieves and none of us owned up to it, and I think they'd have told me if they'd hidden it, I certainly didn't, I remember her tearing the house apart looking for it, pulling the drawers completely out of the bureau and taking everything out item by item and putting it back the same way, several times, and then after hours of this, opening the drawer for the Nth time and asking "the ghost" to give it back because she needed it, and the chequebook sitting smack bang in the centre of the drawer on top of everything. I was there and saw that happen. She had always insisted that a previous owner of the house was this postie who'd died in the house, and she was adamant that he haunted the place and pulled pranks on her all the time.

My mum swears that she saw a medium after my sister died, and that the first time she'd gone to her, the medium told her that my sister said to say thank you for the beautiful freesias, and mum was like "wtf" because she'd planted some bulbs on my sister's grave but they were barely shoots that morning when she'd walked the dog (she went to her grave every time she walked the dog), and when she went there that evening my mum will swear on my sister's grave that those freesias had fully grown and were all in bloom, it was way too early in the year for them still and they'd been about an inch high that same morning. Mum had the tapes of the sessions and I'd heard them when I was a teenager, about 10 years after my sister had died, and asked Mum about what the freesias thing was about, and she told me that then. She even said she went into it thinking it would all be bollocks but wanted some comfort and someone she'd worked with said she was good, Mum dismissed it initially as a load of shit, everything she'd said could be guessed, etc, but when she'd said the thing about the freesias Mum had thought "well how would she know I'd planted freesias? They're not the sort of thing you usually put on a grave", and it was only April so they'd not be flowering then anyway, she'd only planted the bulbs a couple of weeks before.

It's easy to dismiss all these sorts of things as people being flighty, or easily led, or stupid, or badly educated, or naive, or whatever. But these are all women I know very well and none of those words are ones I would use to describe any of them. They weren't generally gullible, they didn't/don't swallow anything you tell them, these were all stories that each of them would tell you as their "wtf moment", if you like.