A Song For Clara

Hello, my name is Pete. I live In a city called Bradford In the UK. In 1992 I moved into my first flat which was a converted barn on a farm called 'Low Fold'. I'd been living in the flat for about six months when I started to hear strange knocking noises coming from the floor. At first I just ignored them, and didn't really think about it much, I put it down to pipework, gas, water etc. but on one particular night myself and three friends went back to my flat from a night out on the town. We were all sitting round laughing and joking when I heard a knocking sound, I said to my friends "listen, can you all hear that?", so we stopped talking and listened. Sure enough the sound came again, extremely loudly which made us all jump, but then we all started giggling uncontrollably. I said to my friends "Is that one of you messing about?" They all protested their innocence, so we decided to do an experiment. We all sat with our feet on the coffee table with our arms outstretched, and listened. One of my friends said "maybe it's a Ghost", and was pelted with Oooohs and Aaahhhhs and silly Ghost noises but then the loudest knock came from the floor, to say that we all hit the ceiling is an understatement, the hairs on the back of my neck were standing to attention like never before in my life. Then I said "let's ask a question see if we get a reply?". Everyone agreed, so with feet and arms still in position I asked "Is there anybody there? knock once for yes". Again the knock came right on cue. At this point my friend Pam got a bit upset and wiped a couple of terrified tears from her cheeks, but like a trooper she stayed. Anyway that was the start of it.

The questions continued all night until seven in the morning. We worked on the basis of one knock for yes, two knocks for no, and three for I don't know. Here's what we found out that first night.
We were talking to a sixteen year old girl called Clara (we found out her name by getting her to knock on the appropriate letter of her first name i.e. when we got to 'C' the loudest knock came! We said every 'C' name we could think of, but when we said Clara the knocks came in rapid succession like somebody rapping on a door, but through the floor, gosh it was spooky.
She had red hair, and wore a green dress, and would sit in the corner by the TV. We asked every pertinent question you could ask a "spirit" that night.
"Is there a Heaven?", "Where do you go when you're not here?", "Why are you here?" etc. She answered I don't know to all of them. By then we were all beat and needed bed. As I was seeing my friends out we all looked at each other in amazement, and just confirmed with each other that what had just happened, really happened. We agreed that they would all come back on that Sunday afternoon and see if we could resume where we left off.
That afternoon came, and we devised a plan. As soon as we asked Clara if she was there she knocked. So we decided to write the alphabet out on pieces of paper on the coffee table and I would run my finger slowly across the letters from A- Z. Clara would knock on the appropriate letter, and Pam would write the words down.
The first thing she spelt out was H-E-L-L we all looked at each other and gulped but then the insistent knocks told us she wasn't finished. She added an 'O' Hello! We all fell about in fits of laughter, Clara laughed too, it came out as rapid knocks, and was truly amazing.
It was a painstaking process but we found out that she used to play in the barn when it was a working farm in the 1890's. She used to live quite close and used to come to play at the farm. At one point a dog barked outside and Clara spelt out "It's Ralph" who turned out to be the farms guard dog whom she adored. She could see us, hear us and smell us. We found this out by asking her to sit next to me and I breathed where she said her face was. I asked her what my breath smelt of, she spelt out "PIPE". I was a smoker at that point. What she couldn't do was make any kind of physical manifestation, we did a test with a cigarette standing on it's end on the coffee table, and asked her to try and use whatever energy she was using to knock the cigarette over. Nothing happened. Clara told us that she would say the answers out loud and that she couldn't hear the knocks. To her it was her voice she was hearing. Then the question "Are there other people like you?" She said "Yes, Everywhere". You'd think it would be scary, but it wasn't, it was strangely comforting. The whole thing was. Anyway our communications with Clara went on for about two years until I moved out of the flat, at one point there were about fifteen people in the room talking to her, and not one of them freaked out. As I said it was strangely comforting.
The day I moved out i tried to say goodbye to Clara but there was no response, so as a last ditched effort I sat at my keyboard and played a tune that I'd written for her which she loved, and I listened.....nothing, I was so disappointed, but hoped that she'd gone somewhere better.
I'm now 40 and haven't thought about her in years, for some reason this website made me want to recount my tale. What the experience did for me was completely change my view on everything, I now know there is something else, we don't just die and then nothing. I'm not sure what happens but I'm convinced that something does.
Goodnight Clara, I'm sure we'll meet again sometime, somewhere.