In her memoir Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel describes seeing her stepfather’s ghost on the stairway of a cottage that she was about to sell. She considers that the image might be “nothing more” than a prelude to a migraine — for her these warnings often took the form of visions, “floating lacunae in the void, each shaped rather like a doughnut with a dazzle of light where the hole should be” — but she insists on the reality of ghosts all the same.
