In the summer of 2008, my now husband Adam and I got engaged. Our relationship had been a bit of a whirlwind and in the week following our engagement, we went on a mini break with his extended family, who had come over from the States to the UK to stay in a big Air BnB type property; a period farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales.

The property was out in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest town, and it had great big dormitory type bedrooms. When we arrived, my Father in law to be joked that he had already hidden the guestbook from Grandma, because the last few reviews had mentioned strange goings on and the shadow of a woman in the corner of the master bedroom.

We were assigned a huge room to ourselves, which must have had about eight single beds in it. As I mentioned, we were newly engaged, there was no way we were sleeping in separate beds! We pushed two single beds together, creating a megabed at the top end of the room. Despite our earlier enthusiasm for the new love nest, my husband went to bed early that night; he had been complaining of feeling unwell and was tired from the drive. He doesn’t sleep well and suffers from extreme night terrors. I frequently wake in the night to him flailing and panicking about a nightmare he’s having or something he’s convinced he’s seen in the room. These episodes can be terrifying for me; abruptly awoken from a deep sleep to desperately calm down a tremendously strong man who won’t be reasoned with until he’s wide awake himself.

When I got into bed later, I just knew this would be one of those nights. I had a sinking feeling that with him being unwell and in a strange new place, he’d have sleep disturbances. I sometimes trigger these terrors by getting into bed when he’s already asleep but the bed we had created was so large that I didn’t even touch him, in fact, I couldn’t even feel him near me.

At around 2am, I was woken up. As I mentioned, we were out in the middle of nowhere but we’d left a curtain open at the the other end of the room and moonlight was flooding the bedroom. As my eyes adjusted I saw that Adam was sitting at the bottom of the bed, on the side furthest from me. At the time he had very long, brown hair, just like me (people would often joke that we looked the same from behind with our matching hairstyles). He was sat with his head in his hands, leaning forward, his long hair covering his face. He was wearing a white T shirt which isn’t what he usually sleeps in but I hadn’t been there when he got ready for bed. I wasn’t sure if he had been sleepwalking, or if he was genuinely awake and was having trouble sleeping so I waited for a while to see if he was going to start sleep talking nonsense. After watching him for a couple of minutes I decided he must be awake, he hadn’t moved from the bent forward position and was breathing in a slow and laboured way, I assumed because he wasn’t feeling well.

What happened next terrified me so much that I froze in the bed. I was about to ask him “are you ok” when something else in the bed moved, next to me. I looked at Adam, at the bottom of the bed, to see if he’d moved the covers or something but he was just sitting there, still and silent. Adam’s voice then spoke, but his voice didn’t come from the end of the bed, it came from right alongside me; “Emma why are you sitting at the end of the bed?”

Instinctively, I reached out to grab whoever was in the bed next to me and I immediately found Adam’s arm. “I’m here”, I shouted to him frantically. He leaned over and turned the bedside light on and sure enough, we were both still in bed. I looked to the end of the bed and the figure that I thought was Adam had disappeared. He had been watching the figure too, and was convinced it was me, with my long brown hair across my face and wearing a white nightie. Inexplicably, we both managed to fall back to sleep and in the morning we talked through what we’d both seen. This hadn’t been a dream or one of Adam’s episodes, we’d both watched the figure that we thought was each other.

We slept with the bedside light on for the rest of the week and were expressly forbidden from telling Grandma, who each morning would complain of sensing a presence in her room. When the hidden guest book was returned to its rightful place, I flicked through for mentions of a ghost. Sure enough the ‘ghost’ was described as a large figure, wearing white, with long dark hair. We didn’t return.