A former partner used to be a cook at Atherleigh hospital and, as she was on earlies to do the breakfast and subsequently the first one in, I accompanied her down to the kitchens. Access meant going down quite a long corridor at 5am and, as we turned the corridor fluorescent lights on, we clearly saw a women in a dark grey Victorian 'matron style' dress walk across (not along) the corridor.
For a split second she seemed to hesitate, as if she'd seen us, before walking straight through the wall. The interesting thing is, despite knowing that we had seen a ghost, her action of hesitating and looking back at us made us not feel it was so much a 'haunting' but that somehow we had seen a few seconds back in time and that she, quite possibly, for those same seconds in her own time saw us too, as something clearly caught here eye.
We looked into the history of Atherleigh and found that it had, at one point in it's life been a workhouse and that there had in fact been an additional corridor that originally crossed the one we were on but had been knocked down and the crossing bricked up.
The following photo (not mine as our incident took place in the very early eighties before camera phones) other than our sighting going from left to right, ours appearing to be at the very end of the corridor and the corridor itself being much darker/dreary than the one in the picture is very similar to what we experienced.
Still fascinates me to this day!
