The Need to Be Seen

I would like to start this story by saying that Ray was great.

A perfect gentleman and consummate professional. He didn’t send a single untoward word or glance in my direction the entire time we were together. Even when things got scary, he put my safety first. And in spite of everything that happened to us, we’re already talking about working together again.

I just want to lead with that, because I know that as soon as I start to tell my story – tell you that I’m an amateur female model who did a nude photoshoot with a male photographer twice my age in an isolated location in the countryside – most of the people reading this are going to go, “ahh, I know exactly where this is going.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. That kind of thing does happen in this industry. Of course it does. It happens in any industry where women interact with men. But that’s not what happened in the story I’m about to tell you.

So what did happen? I’m glad you asked.

My name’s Gemma. I turned thirty a few months ago. I answer phones for a living and I model from time to time. I’m not a professional, but I do get paid for gigs, and the occasional shoot here and there gives me a bit of extra pocket money on top of my wages.

My first ever photoshoot was actually a gift. It was a couple of years ago. I had just gotten engaged, and a friend stitched me up by buying me a bridal boudoir shoot. You strike sultry poses in white lingerie and get a book of glossy black-and-white photos to give to your hubby-to-be.

I didn’t see the harm in giving it a go. My photographer was a woman in her early fifties. She coaxed me through my nervousness and introduced me to a version of myself I didn’t know existed: sexy and confident and cool. I even felt brave enough to do a few without the lingerie. For the first time in a long time, I felt seen in a way that I was in command of.

My fiancé never actually became my husband. When I presented him with the photo album, his first reaction was fury that I’d allowed another man to see me naked. I patiently explained that the photographer had been a woman, and he calmed down, but the conversation shone a spotlight onto an ugly, possessive part of him that I’d been turning a blind eye to. We didn’t last long after that. I’ve been happily single ever since.

A few months later, I was moving into a flat with my best friend Abby. While packing up my things, I found the photo album again, forgotten under the bed ever since the argument it had caused. I blew the dust from the cover and cracked it open. Through my tears, I saw the self-assured smirk on my past self’s face, and I realised I wanted to feel that way again.

And so, once I was settled in at my new place, I started to do my research.

There are many avenues available for the young-ish woman who wishes to take her clothes off in front of a camera. The one I went down was a website called Portfolio Portal, or PFP for short. You make an account as either a model or a photographer, set your criteria – everything from the rate you wish to be paid, the distance you’re able to travel, and exactly what level of nudity you’re willing to do – and then you can start answering casting calls.

Correspondence is done through the site’s messaging system, and everyone has reviews from all the people they’ve worked with on their profile, alongside whichever photos they wish to display. This does a lot to ensure a model’s safety. If a photographer has a hundred models all vouch for their professional conduct, then the odds of any negative interactions during a shoot are slim. That’s not to say it never happens, even with trusted figures in the industry. But in my eighteen months of modelling, I’ve never had a problem with anyone.

Which brings me to my latest shoot.

A long British winter was quickly thawing into spring, and as the weather got warmer every day, I got in the mood to book another gig. A model I’d met through the site, who went by the name Calli Pigeon, had just done a location shoot with a photographer named Ray. I browsed through the gallery, impressed by the quality of the images: the composition, the usage of natural light, the obvious comfort in Calli’s body language. I shot her a message to ask about the shoot, and she got back to me saying that Ray was easy to work with and gave great direction.

Calli’s at the same level of modelling experience as me: we basically know what we’re doing, but we still need direction at times to pose in ways that look natural or dynamic on camera. He’d made Calli look great, so I was confident he’d be able to do the same for me.

I messaged Ray. He replied within the hour. He seemed chill, although it’s impossible to really suss out someone’s vibes in text form. A polite back-and-forth later and we had a day marked in the calendar. I was already brimming with excitement at the unusual location he’d suggested we shoot at.

“I’m thinking pizza,” Abby announced as I headed downstairs for a celebratory cup of tea. It was Friday, and Friday was our night to order takeaway and watch a bad film together. “What are you thinking, Gem?”

“I’m thinking I just booked another shoot and shouldn’t be eating five billion carbs,” I sighed. “But yeah, pizza sounds good to me.”

I made the two of us a cuppa while she placed the order.

“So what’s this shoot?” Abby asked as we took a seat on the settee and began the search for something suitably crap to watch.

“Oh, you’ll like this one,” I promised. “We’re shooting in an abandoned hospital. Somewhere in Staffordshire. It’s all run down in a kind of beautiful way. Just like me.”

“Bestie,” Abby began, “you know I only say this because I love you, but-”

“I know, Abigail, I know. I’m going to get naked with some strange old guy in an abandoned hospital in the middle of nowhere, and for some reason you think this is a bad idea.”

“I’m just saying!” Abby was smiling, but her eyes were serious. “I know you’re careful and I know everyone has reviews and all that, but just… be really careful, okay? Take some pepper spray with you.”

“Sadly not legal in this country,” I reminded her, “but I’ll take the farb gel, like always.”

Farb gel is the next best thing to pepper spray. It’s a ballistic red gel you can spray into someone’s face, marking their skin and clothes for up to a week. It wouldn’t incapacitate someone in the same way pepper spray would, but it was still a hell of a deterrent. I always carried a can in my bag and kept it nearby during shoots in case I needed it.

“Anyway,” I continued, “my friend Calli worked with him and had no problems at all.”

“And did he take Calli to an abandoned hospital in the middle of nowhere?” Abby pressed.

“No,” I admitted. “But you should see this place. You love horror films, you’ll love this.”

“I love horror films when my best mate isn’t starring in them.” She stopped scrolling and gestured towards the TV. “Ooh, look. The new Final Destination’s out.”

I grinned, remembering the time one of the old films had scared us out of using tanning beds for a month. “That’s the film sorted, then.” I sipped my tea. “Before the pizza arrives, let me show you some photos of the hospital.”

I pulled out my phone and pulled up the link Ray had sent me. The hospital was an infirmary that had been closed down in 2012. Since then, it had slowly fallen into ruin, but it was still surprisingly intact. It was now a popular site for urbexers and ghost-hunting YouTubers.

“It does look pretty sick,” Abby admitted as she scrolled through the photos. “Now I’m just worried about you bumping into a psycho squatter or falling through a rotten floor or something.”

“I’ll be fine, Abby,” I assured her. “I will be so, so careful. The careful-est.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” I saw the hopeful gleam in her eye, and realised that while her main motive was keeping me safe, a part of her really wanted to see the spooky hospital with her own two eyes.

“No, it’s fine,” I replied. I’d taken chaperones to shoots back when I’d first started doing them, and while safer, it led to a different dynamic that got in the way of actually taking the photos. Abby opened her mouth to continue protesting, but a ping from her phone interrupted her.

“Pizza’s on the way!” she sang. She started towards the kitchen, but then stopped and turned to face me. “You’re off the hook for now, Gem. But I will continue to be annoying about this in the coming days and weeks.”

Days and weeks passed, and the date of the shoot grew nearer. I cut back on the carbs and tightened up my gym routine. Being a model isn’t about being stick-thin, but I do like to make an effort when I have a gig coming up. Knowing I’ll be naked on a very high-definition camera serves as great motivation to avoid snacking and do my Romanian deadlifts (even if I hate them).

The day of the shoot was warm and drizzly. Abby fussed over me before she left for work, but she’d accepted by now that I was intent on doing this thing and knew how to keep myself safe. I skipped breakfast, showered, tidied myself up, and hopped on a train bound for Derby. My makeup was light, my clothing loose and comfortable. In my bag I had a few sets of lingerie whose colours would complement the interior of the hospital. I’d watched a few walkthroughs of the place on YouTube by now and had a decent idea of what to expect in there.

I switched trains at Derby and arrived in Stoke-on-Trent an hour later. It wasn’t raining here, but grey clouds still crowded the April sky. Ray was waiting for me in a café near the station. He was a polite, affable fellow in his early sixties. He gave me a firm handshake but didn’t try to hug me, which was a promising start. I sipped a latte and decided, after fifteen minutes of light conversation, that he passed the vibe check.

“Let’s have a look at this hospital, then,” I announced.

The drive only took ten minutes. When I told you that the shoot took place at an abandoned hospital, you probably imagined an imposing mansion teetering atop a steep hill, the kind of place Frankensteins create their monsters. But this place looked completely normal. The only detail that differentiated it from a functional hospital was the complete lack of people. There were no cars in the car park and not a soul in sight.

This place had been abandoned for years. We were not going to be greeted at the front door and given a guided tour. We were not supposed to be here. Nobody was. But as long as we didn’t start breaking down doors and doing criminal damage, we weren’t doing anything the police would bother about.

We had agreed beforehand that we’d poke around the building before we even thought about shooting. If anyone else was inside, we’d probably bump into them on the way. There was always the risk that someone would wander in during the shoot, but it was a risk I had decided to take. Camera bag slung over his shoulder, Ray led the way towards the front entrance. The doors weren’t locked.

“Oh, look at this place,” I gasped as we entered the lobby. The videos I’d seen hadn’t done it justice. The hospital had closed down over a decade ago, but the diamond-tiled floors, wide wooden doors and wrought iron railings made it feel like we’d stepped back in time by a century. The entryway was in perfect condition, save for the years of muddy footprints that led deeper into the building.

Other areas hadn’t fared so well. Ray and I made our way down corridors with crumbling walls and floors, discoloured by water damage and littered with debris. Occasionally we’d see a hole in a wall that could have been made by a sledgehammer. Random items were strewn here and there: an upturned wheelchair; a pristine-looking printer; a plastic umbrella, still open. There was less graffiti than I had expected.

“My mate Abby would love this place,” I told Ray as we poked our heads into an abandoned ward. The place looked like the set for a horror film. Doors stood half-open, only darkness visible beyond their thresholds. It was entirely silent. I wasn’t especially superstitious – at least, I wasn’t at that point in time – but if Ray hadn’t been there, I’d have been tensed up and ready to run.

Ray didn’t say a great deal. I could tell he was already in Photographer Mode, scanning each room and corridor for optimal photo conditions. After twenty minutes of exploring the hospital without sensing a single other soul, I suggested we just pick a place and get to work. It had become clear that the place was far too big for us to do a thorough inspection before we started the shoot. There were dozens of rooms across multiple floors.

“Suits me, if you’re comfortable,” he agreed. “We can get some good light if we start now.”

The next room I peered into gave me my first near-death experience of the day. When I glimpsed the gory, inhuman figure standing by the window, my blood froze blue in my veins. Then a sheepish grin spread across my face, and I flushed with embarrassment. It was one of those plastic anatomical mannequins with all the organs exposed.

“You gave me a heart attack,” I hissed at it.

Ray chuckled. “I’m glad you came in first, and not me,” he said. “That kind of surprise isn’t good for my angina.”

The room seemed to be some sort of lab. You’ll have to excuse my complete lack of hospital knowledge when it comes to describing things. It had desks and chairs, a few strange machines, and a whiteboard with faded, meaningless messages scrawled across it. Natural decay had hit this area hard. Pieces of the ceiling littered the floor, and a carpet of vivid green moss had spread across half the room. Sunlight streamed in through multiple windows; it seemed like the sun had finally shown its face outside. It was as good a place to start as any.

Using a partition between desks for privacy, I undressed. I exchanged my unexciting underwear for tan-coloured lingerie. Generally I took a mix of lingerie shots – suitable for sites like Instagram – and tasteful nudes for PFP. I had a thick dressing gown on hand to cover up and stay warm between shots, and to quickly throw on in case we came across another explorer. I’d brought flip-flops to avoid stepping on dirty, debris-strewn floors with my bare feet.

Ray had moved the mannequin away from the window. It now stood in the corner with its back to us, facing the wall. I felt safer already.

We got to work. Just like he had with Calli, Ray gave me polite pointers on how best to pose, without it feeling like he was ordering me around. I suggested ideas and he would refine them. And just like that, we fell into the easy rhythm of shooting. There was that sensation in my chest, powerful and warm, expanding beyond my body like sunlight. The sensation of being seen. The pride of being the protagonist of my story in a way that my everyday life did not allow. Not leered at, objectified or fetishised; simply being seen in a way that I was allowing myself to be seen.

We did shots with lingerie first, then shots without. After a few minutes, I shrugged into my gown and we took a look at the photos we’d taken so far. Even on the DSLR camera’s small screen, the images were striking. We were off to a good start.

I made eye contact with the mannequin’s single plastic eyeball and winked. Then I frowned. Hadn’t Ray left it facing the wall? I made a mental note to ask him about it, and then immediately forgot again.

To save on time, I decided not to get fully dressed and undressed every time we moved to a different room. Ray was paying my rate for five hours, and we both wanted to capture as many images as possible in that time. I roamed around the hospital in my dressing gown, feeling like a woefully underdressed character in a slasher film.

The first few hours were productive. The light was kind to us. I posed in abandoned wards and offices, on crimson staircases with carved balconies, at the ends of narrow corridors. We got beautiful shots of me praying in a partially-demolished chapel, sinister shots of me standing in the darkness of doorways, and a melancholy shot of me alone in a waiting room. We found an operating theatre that had ceiling-mounted surgical lights and spent a while arranging them around me. The contrast between me and my desolate, otherworldly surroundings really stood out on camera, and that sunlight in me shone brighter and brighter.

It was clear that five hours would not be nearly enough to see even a fraction of the entire site. We moved from place to place, aiming for as much image variety as possible. We worked well together, and the process grew more streamlined as we both understood how the other thought. The photos on Ray’s SD card soon numbered in the hundreds, then the thousands.

I was starting to feel light-headed from lack of food, but I pushed through it. Once the shoot was done, I would find a pizza place near the train station and consume my own body weight in greasy carbs.

With about an hour left on the clock, we stumbled across the morgue.

I doffed my robe and clambered onto the examination slab, shivering as my skin made contact with the cold stainless steel. It wasn’t comfortable, but the photo op was too good to pass up. Perhaps this would be my ticket onto PFP’s front page, a coveted position held only by exceptional images (or images taken by people the site owners were friends with). I lay back, and then sat stiffly upright and looked back over my shoulder towards the camera lens. I would look like a corpse that had come to life. Abby would get a real kick out of it.

As we scanned through the images a short time later, Ray frowned.

“That’s strange,” he murmured. “Do you see that?”

I squinted, looking closer. There was a white smear across a few of the photos.

“What is it?” I asked. “Light glaring off the metal?” It didn’t really look like glare – it looked more like a white mist between me and the camera – but I didn’t know what else it could be.

“Possibly,” Ray replied. He lifted the camera again. “Let me take a few test shots.”

I stepped back and stood in the centre of the room, unposed, dressing gown still on. Ray snapped a few photos from different angles, and then looked back at the LCD screen.

“Very strange,” he said, “it looks like… smoke… or…”

He suddenly let go of the camera, dropping it like a chunk of hot coal. It clattered noisily to the concrete floor. I thought he’d dropped it accidentally, but he made no move to pick it up. His face was pale, his eyes bulging wide. One hand went to his chest.

“A face,” he whispered. “There’s a face.”

I chuckled nervously, not sure whether to take him seriously or not, and retrieved the camera myself. I turned it in my hands and looked down at the screen. It showed me standing idly before a background of medical sinks… and over my shoulder floated what appeared to be a white, wispy face. It was blurry and ambiguous, its eyes and mouth dark absences. The eyes were very small, like animal footprints in fresh snow. The mouth was very large, like it was screaming. Or perhaps it was just as shocked as we were.

“Oh,” I said.

A shiver ran through my body like an electric current. The room was freezing cold. I hadn’t found that fact remarkable before, since I’d been laying naked on a steel morgue slab and being cold was just something I had to contend with. But now that I thought about it, there was an icy sharp edge to the air here that I hadn’t noticed anywhere else in the hospital.

I scrolled back through the photos, and my mouth fell open as my eyes made sense of what I was seeing. The misty figure wasn’t just a face: it had an insubstantial body too. Over the course of a dozen photos, it seemed to move across the room until it was standing right over my shoulder.

I span around, expecting to come face-to-face with some awful screaming visage, like those fake car ads that jumpscare you at the end. But there was nothing there.

I took a few deep breaths, in and out. Panicking wouldn’t do us any favours right now.

I placed the camera back in Ray’s shaking hands. “Can you take a few more?” I asked.

He gulped, and then nodded. I stepped backwards again, bracing myself for the feel of bony fingers wrapping around my throat, but I didn’t feel anything besides the cold air. Ray took several more photos at different angles and distances, and then turned the camera around so we could take a look.

“Oh,” I said again. “She’s right behind me, isn’t she?”

The spectre had a slender, feminine body, with a slight curve where its breasts would be. Her face didn’t have features, but there were holes in it that resembled eyes and a mouth. In every photo, she was hovering right next to me, so close to my face that she could have been a cloud of cigarette smoke I was exhaling. I glanced around again, but I simply couldn’t see what the camera could.

“We should probably go,” I said, and Ray nodded quickly. It was clear he was trying not to freak out. As he grabbed his bag, I stepped over to the door, grabbed the handle, and turned.

It wouldn’t move. It wouldn’t even rattle. The entire door and its handle appeared to be carved into the wall. It wasn’t a door at all, just a facade of one. Like a tunnel painted on a brick wall in an old cartoon.

I turned back to Ray. He had the eyes of a frightened household pet. “Don’t panic,” he said, his voice cracking on the second word. “We’re going to be completely fine, I promise. Completely… completely fine.”

I stood aside and let him have a crack at the door. It remained two-dimensional and unusable. He began to swear under his breath, using more and more force to try to twist the handle.

I turned away and scanned the room again. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew that if a photo were taken it would show the female phantom right next to me. It felt like my own shadow had suddenly gained sentience.

Thinking back now as I write this, I wasn’t as scared as I should have been. My heart was pounding and my breath was coming in shallow gasps, but I didn’t fear for my life. Something truly impossible was happening to us, but my curiosity about it weighed the same amount as my fear. The two were perfectly balanced on the scales in my mind.

Ray’s scales were tipping fast. He had begun to pound his fists against the door. “Let us out!” he screamed. “Someone! Anyone! Please let us out!” The sound of his assault grew louder and louder, until the cacophony began to hurt my ears. I turned back to him, intending to tell him to calm down, and saw that he was no longer moving. He was standing as motionless as the mannequin we’d seen before.

He wasn’t the one making those awful crashing sounds.

Every loose object in the room was vibrating in place. A row of locker doors on the far wall were opening and slamming violently. I realised that they would have contained dead bodies back when the hospital was operational, a fact that seemed to come from my gut instead of my mind. I threw up my hands to protect myself as a chair flew across the room, narrowly missing me. Decade-old pieces of paper swirled through the air like a flock of startled birds, although there was no breeze to carry them.

I could still hear Ray screaming even over the din. I looked back just in time to see him clutch his chest with both hands.

I watched in mute horror as he slumped slowly to the ground.

The room went silent and still.

I ran over to him, turned him over onto his back. His face was contorted in agony, his eyes squeezed shut. I’ve never done any first aid training, and I had no idea what to do to help him. In the blink of an eye, my imagination scripted and directed a scene in which he died in my arms and I sat in silence in a sealed room with only his dead body and the invisible woman for company.

“Bag,” he gasped. “Red… spray.”

For several long moments, I thought he was talking about the farb gel in my bag, and I wondered how spraying him with red deterrent dye could possibly help him. And then I stopped being stupid and began to empty his camera bag. There was a small red spray bottle in there labelled “GLYCERYL TRINITRATE”. I removed the cap and pressed it into his trembling hand, and he raised it to his mouth and sprayed it inside.

Slowly and carefully, I helped him into a sitting position, slumped against the wall. The spray seemed to have helped and his pain and breathlessness were already beginning to subside.

While he recovered from the angina attack, I checked my phone. It had no signal, obviously. I don’t know why I expected any differently. I’d seen a non-zero number of horror films in my life and this is just what mobile phones did in supernatural situations.

Next, I retrieved my farb gel. Careful not to hit Ray with it, I sprayed a few bursts in a circle around me. I was hoping it would adhere to our spectral guest somehow, making her visible with the naked eye, but all it did was get red splotches on some of the surfaces.

Then I searched the room. The floor was littered with loose objects and sheets of paper. Nothing useful. A whiteboard on one wall listed various internal organs and their weights; some comedic genius had written “PENIS” and “TINY” in permanent marker in an empty column. There was a single window admitting a waning afternoon light.

“We could break it,” Ray wheezed. They were the first words he’d spoken in several minutes. “Just let me get my breath back and I’ll do it myself… I’ll accept any… vandalism charges that come our way.” I opened my mouth to disagree with him, but he was insistent. “It was my idea to come here… it’s my fault we’re in this situation. I have to get you out of here.”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” I said. “Neither of us could have predicted we’d be trapped in a morgue with a bloody ghost.” The word sounded ridiculous when said out loud, but what other word could I use to describe it? I ran my hands through my hair. “Ray, we’ve been working together all day. We can get through this if we just continue doing that.”

His mouth twisted unhappily, but after a moment, he nodded.

“Get the camera,” I suggested. “See if she’s still, uh, attached to me.”

He struggled to his feet and raised the viewfinder in my direction. His hands were shaking so badly I could hear the camera rattle. I swallowed down my own fear and smiled at him. “You can do this,” I promised. “Just do it like we’ve been doing all day.”

With visible effort, he steeled himself. His eyes narrowed. The shaking stopped. He snapped a photo, wincing like there was a gun going off in his hands, but his voice was steady. “Yep, she’s still there.”

She certainly was. She stood beside me like a twin sister, facing the camera. She seemed more solid now. I could almost see features in the white cloud of her face, and the lines of her body had gone from faint watercolour strokes to sharp pencil sketches.

“I’m not sure if she wants to hurt us,” I said, “but she doesn’t seem to want us to leave.”

Ray attempted a smile that came out more like a grimace. “I told my wife I’d be back by seven.”

“Keep taking photos,” I told him. I looked to my right, to where the spirit was apparently standing. I spoke to the wall, hoping I was looking vaguely in her direction. “What do you want?”

Ray frowned down at the camera’s screen, and gestured for me to take a look. The latest photo showed me in mid-sentence, my mouth open and one hand raised. The spirit was now facing towards me, with her hand raised in the exact same way. Her intangible fingers were almost interlocked with mine.

“It’s almost like she’s posing with you,” Ray muttered.

And that’s when I knew what she wanted.

I looked at the open row of locker doors and the row of steel slabs that had once supported the bodies of the deceased. I saw myself kneeling on a bedroom floor, tears streaking down my face, a dusty photo album in my hands.

“You just want the same thing that I do,” I realised.

I looked out of the window. The light was fading fast. We didn’t have much time.

Ray averted his eyes as I undid my dressing gown and placed it on a nearby desk. Naked, I turned towards the empty space where the invisible spirit stood.

Ray raised the camera, and I raised my arms into an embrace.

The click of the shutter and the sound of Ray’s astonished gasp.

“Look,” he said. He turned the camera’s screen towards me. In the photo, the spirit and I were embracing. Like mist filling every fissure in a valley, she had flowed into my arms. Her image had sharpened again, and her black eyes now glinted in the sun’s sepia light. Her pale body was turned in a way that tastefully displayed her curves to the camera.

“She’s beautiful,” I whispered.

I realised that I was no longer cold. The frigid air in the room had warmed. The sunlight within me was shining again.

“Keep going,” I told Ray. “What are some good duo poses?”

Just as we had all day, Ray and I worked together. Only now, there were three of us.

I turned this way and that, following Ray’s suggestions. Ray would take a dozen photos of each pose, and the spirit would copy each one. With each photo, her image would get sharper and clearer, her face and body more defined.

The penultimate photo we took that day was an accident. I generally don’t smile during shoots, preferring a cool and neutral “resting model face”, but I was caught off-guard between shots. The photo showed me laughing, my eyes squeezed shut, and beside me the spirit was laughing too, her body language relaxed and loose. In that photo, she is no longer a ghost. She is as real as I am. We are glowing in a sunlight that seems to come from within.

In the final photo we took, she is gone.

The click from the doorway startled us. Ray tried the handle, and the door opened easily. We were free to leave. “Give me a minute to get dressed,” I said, and Ray stepped outside without a word.

The morgue was bathed in deep orange shadow. The silence was so heavy that it sat across my shoulders like a blanket. “I don’t know if you’re still here,” I said quietly as I dressed. “And I don’t know who you were, or how you died. But I hope we made you feel beautiful again, one last time.”

We left the hospital just as the sun was going down. We didn’t speak much on the short drive back to the city. The events of the day and my irresponsible lack of nutrition and hydration had left me weary. As if we hadn’t been witness to something utterly inexplicable, Ray told me he’d upload the photos to his Dropbox and we could decide on which ones to polish and publish over the next few days.

I entered the nearest pizza place like I was there to settle a grudge.

This was about a week ago. As I type this all out now, around twenty photos from the shoot have been uploaded to PFP. They’re getting a lot of great feedback. And that final shot of me and the beautiful unknown spirit is occupying a place on the front page.

An image search for her turned up nothing. I’ll probably never know her name. I agonised over whether to share the image or not, but I think she’d want the world to see her that way. Smiling and unburdened, ready to move on.

But I’m afraid there is a downer ending to this spooky little story of mine.

Abby was so mad I met a real ghost that she didn’t speak to me for days.