Continuing with my series of ‘true’ experiences of unexplained events through my life, today’s anecdote happened only about twelve years ago in the house I am living in now, and is called, ‘The Drawing on the Wall’.

When we first moved into our present house twenty something years ago, our two children, a girl and a boy, were aged nine and six. There was much work required to do in the house as the previous occupants had left it in need of improvement. We rearranged a couple of internal walls and had a new kitchen and bathroom fitted. We wallpapered and painted every room, hall, stairs and landing, and had new carpets fitted throughout.

When we stripped the old wallpaper from the stairs leaving a bare wall, my daughter drew a life-sized picture of herself on the wall half way up the staircase, nothing special, it was more just a stick figure with hair. Then it was papered over and forgotten about.

About ten years after the decorating was done and our son and daughter were away at university, we once again set out to re-decorate the hall, stairs and landing. My wife and I stripped the wallpaper we had originally put up, but when we reached the patch where my daughter had drawn the picture of herself, something very strange happened.

Both my wife and I were on the stairs when the paper covering the drawing was removed. At that moment, we both heard, as clearly as if someone had been standing next to us, a single word spoken aloud: “Mum!” It was the voice of our daughter as it had sounded when she was a child. Both of us heard it and recognised it, there was no mistake, it was her voice.

That was it, we spoke to her that night on the phone in her student accommodation, she was fine, no problems. We papered over the drawing as planned, but when we decorated again a few years later, stripping the paper from the same place, we half expected the same to happen, but no such phenomenon occurred.