Meet the ghostbuster who saw his first spook aged six

A king and his army stand frozen in time on the borders of north Oxfordshire, turned to pillars of stone, some say, by a particularly resourceful witch in the days when the world was young. So runs the legend of the Rollright Stones. They also say that it is impossible to count the Stones.

Try it, they tell you - and you'll come up with a different number every time.

Graham Wyley is a writer and broadcaster who specialises in the paranormal. He tried counting the Rollrights by marking his starting point with a matchbox.

The first time, he came up with 73. So he counted them again and arrived at 75.

On his third attempt, he concluded there were 72.

It would, of course, be easy to put this down to either a slender grasp of arithmetic or poor powers of observation on Graham's part.

Too easy, perhaps.

But then some things are easy to scoff at and difficult, or impossible, to explain.

When he was researching his latest book, The Illustrated Guide To Witchcraft, Graham accompanied a coven of witches and pagans who went to the Rollright site - which they regard as sacred - to bless the stones using an ancient ritual. "There were around 70 or 80 witches," he added. "A cauldron was lit and altars to the four elements were set up. A candle was placed on each stone.

"At around 11.30pm, the wind suddenly got up and was blowing the candles out, so a high witch, Madam Morgana of Avalon, performed a ritual to the wind - and it stopped. Watching this, I thought, 'Ah - a coincidence.'

"But then a heavy drizzle started and a high priest, whose name, believe it or not, was Merlin, carried out a water ritual.

"And the rain just stopped."

At 62, Graham is often described as "Britain's Number One Ghostbuster". Married with four children, he said he saw his first spectre sitting on the edge of his bed when he was six years old.

"My parents were worried that they'd got a child who was deranged.

"I called the ghost Charlie and I remember sitting crying one night because 'Charlie' hadn't turned up. It was only 12 years later that my mother told me that a man called Charlie Baker had committed suicide in that room - and had left his six-year old son behind."

'Ghostbusting' is his second profession. His day job used to involve working as an engineer for a company associated with Nasa. "I've always been interested in the unknown," he said, "but in my early 20s, ghosts just went out the window for about 17 years.

"After I became a self-employed engineer, ghosts came back with a vengeance. It started as a hobby which accelerated after the local paper picked up on me. I started getting into the darker aspects of the paranormal and of course the media loved that."

Radio and TV appearances followed - and Graham's ghostbusting career was under way.

He published his first book, an account of ghostly occurrences in the West Country, 13 years ago.

He said he has been frightened only once, by the sight of a 7ft tall poltergeist at midnight, on the edge of Dartmoor.

The apparition had been scaring the life out of farmers, who called in Graham to help.

"I remember feeling a presence behind me in the woods and when I turned round, this 7ft figure wearing a monk's cowl and robe was standing there.

"It hissed at me like a snake and the hairs on my neck stood on end, but I managed to stand my ground.

"It had no face, just a dark void, but I suddenly began feeling compassion towards it and a light appeared where its face should have been and it just dissolved." Sceptics will, of course, scoff and mock but that doesn't bother Graham. "Oh, they love to stack them up against me on television programmes," he laughed.

"But I can offer photographic evidence which has been verified by Kodak, pictures which are inexplicable - and of course there are my own personal experiences."

A couple of these experiences involve walking suits of armour and an adulterous love affair which was quashed by magic.

"A woman whose husband was having an affair with his secretary went to a witch I know and asked her to break them up.

"The witch took a photograph of the secretary and began singeing it around the edges until she had a powder and just the secretary's face remained.

"Then she split an apple in half, put the powder on it and buried it.

"When I asked her why she'd done it, she replied, 'As the apple rots, so will their love.' Two weeks later, the secretary was sacked and the affair was over."

The walking suit of armour case happened in Barnstaple in Devon.

Graham was consulted after a local reporter did a story on the armour which somehow moved from one end of a locked barn to the other at night. So the ghostbuster settled in for the evening by placing chalk dust around the feet of the figure.

During the night, a ladder went whizzing from one end of the barn to the other and the armour shook and rattled. Later, high up on one of the barn's timber beams, a chalked message was found which read 'E Sharnbrooke', together with a maths equation which worked out to five numbers.

When the ghostbuster looked up Sharnbrooke in the phone book, there was only one listed - under the number of the maths equation.

"When I rang the number, I was told that Mr and Mrs Sharnbrooke no longer lived there, but did I want to talk to a Mr Seymour? I said 'no thank you' and put the phone down.

"But when we checked parish records and newspaper cuttings, it emerged that a young lad called Sharnbrooke had been murdered in the barn by his tutor, who was never caught. The tutor's name was Seymour..."

As Graham is all too aware, trying to explain stuff like this is about as easy as trying to explain an episode of the X Files. Or accurately counting the Rollright Stones. Blindfolded.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.