I remember during a big thunderstorm sometime in the 90s, I was looking out of our back window which being high up on a ridge meant you could see for miles over countryside and towards the Welsh borders. As I was watching the distant lightning, a light blue plasma ball-like sphere appeared what looked like on the horizon tens of miles away. It was the same sort of colour as lightning, and had the same sort of bright glow. I'm sure it just floated there for quite a few seconds, long enough for me to observe it, before disappearing.

My conclusions are two things:

1) Ball lightning, which lingered. I believe this is very rare, and it looked more like it was miles away on the horizon, so if it was ball lightning it would have been massive wherever it happened to be! Unless it was closer but just looked like it was on the horizon.

2) A more recent theory I've come up with is that lightning struck a power station or similar miles away and gave off a weird spherical glow.

I've got a handful of other personal stories to share as and when.

Discuss - and share your own experiences.

We had a really fat neighbour in the early 90’s who usually wore skin tight PVC trousers. You could actually hear her squeaking as she came and went.

We used to watch her in amazement, until she screamed at my mother ‘what the **** are you looking at?’ and when my mother said ‘I’m not quite sure’ she threatened to batter us all and set fire to the place.

Also, many years ago a friend of mine was in hospital dying.

For no apparent reason, I went to the window, opened it, looked at the sky, and felt a deep sense of absolute peace. I looked at my watch and it was just about twenty past eight, then got on with my night.

The next morning her husband rang to say she had died the previous evening, at just around about twenty past eight.

His exact words were ‘I’m sorry to say X died last night, about twenty past eight’. I didn’t say anything about my experience, it didn’t seem right, but I sometimes wonder if I should’ve. He might’ve found it as comforting as I did. I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t just a coincidence but some mark of her energy.

I was never friends with him before, but we tried for a couple of years to establish a friendship. It didn’t gel. I heard on the grapevine that he joined the Hare Krishna and then died, left the money to some guru. Just a few weeks ago I was thinking fondly and rather sadly about him, about not trying harder to remain in touch - I found a lovely little note he’d written me, in a book he’d given me.

I've known other people have similar experiences when a family member has died. I don't think I have really.

One person had a small piece of paper float down off a shelf with a comforting message on it as they walked past just after a relative died.

I don't know how many of these things are coincidental, but at least it gives us something to talk about.

Butterfield wrote:

I've known other people have similar experiences when a family member has died. I don't think I have really.

One person had a small piece of paper float down off a shelf with a comforting message on it as they walked past just after a relative died.

I don't know how many of these things are coincidental, but at least it gives us something to talk about.

It’s not my only strange experience around death. One of my first was when my great grandmother died. I was at my grandparents when the phone rang, and I said to my gran ‘that’ll be about great gran, she’s just died’ and she said ‘oh what a horrible thing to say’. When my grandfather came in he was visibly shaken and said ‘I have to go to the hospital, my mother has died and they need me to formally identify her’.

She was over 100, but other than that there was nothing wrong with her, so its hardly as if it was expected. She died at the Harrods sale. I think it’s comforting to think the last thing she ever saw or experienced was the thrill of spotting a great bargain.

Probably my first was when I was three, and visiting a woman whose husband had been killed. I was playing in her hallway when I turned and saw him, wearing his red Converse. I followed my gaze up from the shoes and he reassured me he was OK and wanted me to tell his wife that he was happy and that she should be too. Then he disappeared.

I rushed in to tell her this, and she was quite comforted, until my mother overheard and dragged me out of the room while apologising.

Because of this, I’ve always had a thing about red Converse. Particularly on men, but I have always made sure to have a pair of my own, and I think of him every time I put them on.

The same feeling of deep peace and almost unknowing acceptance happened with my other great grandmother. I wasn’t speaking to my father or his parents at the time, but while watching the Sunset Beach omnibus my brother said to me ‘why don’t you go over and see your great gran, you haven’t been for ages and it’s not her fault her grandsons an a***hole’. I thought about it for a while, felt calm, and said ‘there isn’t any point, I don’t think she’s here anymore’.

I know it was late summer because I’d just come back from holiday. That autumn my father turned up randomly, after a Chelsea match, and among his spiel he offhandedly said ‘fanks for comin to me nans funeral by the way’. When did she die I said. ‘Over the summer’ he said. I sensed that. I had said goodbye to her presence in this world in my own way. I’d lit a candle the night I’d thought that, and lit a cigarette off it, which she’d have found good enough.