[Redliner]

When I was in France in 1996, I was part of a travelling performance group for a couple of months, touring around doing shows in the southwest. We stopped in Bayonne for a couple of days, and the place we were performing was this old basque mansion that had been converted to a church. I got talking to one of the church members who had been there for a long time and when I commented what a neat building it was, she started telling me that the place was haunted. I laughed at her because:
1) I didn't believe in ghosts, and
2) This was France, where all the buildings are 800 years old. What isn't supposed to be haunted?
All the public areas were on the main floor, and the second and third floors were still just regular rooms. Apparently the church had tried having people live there before but had to move them out because all kinds of weird things kept happening: locked doors would open themselves, lights would turn themselves on and off, and it was impossible to regulate the temperature in the place - it would sometimes stay ice cold in there even with the furnace on in the middle of summer. At first they just wrote it off as being an old building with lots of quirks, but after a bit the "events" started getting a little more threatening. They would wake up in the morning to find that objects - even furniture - had moved around during the night, and a couple times they came back home at the end of the day to find their dishes smashed on the floor and pictures ripped off the walls. The place had an alarm, so it's not like someone was breaking in and messing with them - and nothing ever went missing, it was just moved around. She took us up through the upper floors and it felt a little weird, but I was never uncomfortable. You could tell the people had moved out in a hurry because there was still a bunch of stuff in there, almost like they were going to be coming back any minute.
We did the show and everything went great, nothing weird at all until we packed everything up and were leaving for the night. We set the alarm and were about to drive away when we noticed a light on up on the third floor. It seemed a little weird because the stairwell had a locked door on it and we didn't think anyone had been up there since we were earlier that day, but we thought nothing of it and went back in to turn it off. As we disarmed the alarm we starting joking about "oh, maybe the ghosts did it" and suddenly the whole place felt really cold and uncomfortable. As we were climbing the stairs my skin started to crawl and I had a really strong feeling that someone was staring at me - but of course the only people in the house were me, the local church group leader, (who had the keys) and another guy who was also with us. Of course I wrote it off as my mind playing tricks on me and we went and found the light, which happened to be in one of the 3rd floor bedrooms. We actually thought someone might be playing a joke on us so we searched the 2nd and 3rd floors and found nothing - we were definitely the only ones in there. We went back and I turned the light off myself, and we went back down, locked the door at the bottom of the stairs, re-armed the alarm, and went back outside. As we walked down the drive to our car I felt kind of weird again and turned around to look at the building - and saw that the same light on the 3rd floor - the one I had just turned off - was back on again. At that point I was seriously creeped out and we decided to just leave it on and get the hell out of there.

So yeah. Did I see a ghost? No. Could there be other explanations for what happened? Electrical problems, whatever? Sure, maybe. All I know is it sure felt creepy. I never really believed in ghosts before but I've seen and felt enough things between then and now to make me a lot less sure. What I do know is that there are a great number of forces at work in the world that I do not understand, and some of them scare the crap out of me.