Have you experienced anything creepy at 3 am???

I think the most disturbing single incident for me was a loud crash from the ceiling almost directly above my bed, in my previous house.

It turned out to be something I'd not placed properly on a shelf in the loft, and it must have been slowly subsiding until it fell off.

My present one makes some very strange little noises from somewhere near the bedroom window. I think it's something loose above the uPVC window frame, rattling in a draught, but it is weird.

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Years ago though, I thought I was hearing a haunted railway line!

My parents' home was on a hill slope so the back, in which my room was situated, overlooked what was then a Royal Navy base, with the sea's foreground truncated by an intervening railway embankment maybe a mile from our windows.

The line was closed about five years after we'd moved into the house, but it was some while before the rails were lifted. In that time I could have sworn there were occasional, discreet nocturnal goods-trains running. I would jump out of bed and look, but saw no trains against the distant lights, or moonlight. No silhouetted wagons, no wisps of vapour (the railways still used steam locomotives at the time, mid-1960s).

Even so, there was the familiar, characteristic, steady clank-clank-clank-clank of trains of 4-wheeled, loose-coupled goods wagons running gently down the incline on their way, presumably, to the Base.

Secret movements on a temporarily re-opened line maybe, despite trains not being the easiest things to keep secret. Invisible trains, though....?

It was my Dad who found the explanation: the nearly-identical metallic sound was of anchor-chains, as ships out in the middle of the Harbour weighed anchor prior to putting to sea!