Light pulls swing of their own accord. A breathy female voice calls for help. Invisible soldiers tramp. A Monet print is repeatedly hurled off the wall. Guests report that someone strokes their face and holds their hand as they sleep.

All of these mysterious happenings have been chronicled at the Dobbins Inn in Carrickfergus.

“Does she throws things to the floor?” I asked our server/housekeeper Edith after our first night in the hotel. Fellow teacher Joan Weber and I had stayed in the adjoining room to haunted room 21, and in the morning found a scattering of objects on the carpet: empty tea packets, receipts and my glasses.

Edith told us that during the 15th century, Elizabeth (or Maud) Dobbins, wife of first owner Hugh, fell in love with a handsome young soldier at the Carrickfergus Castle. Returning from the Tyrone Rebellion, Hugh discovered his young wife’s indiscretion and stabbed the lovers to death. According to folklore, Maud wanders the hotel and the soldier still wanders the fort.

But Maud is not alone in her hotel purgatory. A baby died in our room 22. A young boy appears in a meeting room down the bumpy and musty hall. Soldiers crash about in the hallway outside the first floor bar.

Energy is vestigial and cannot be destroyed. A seven-hundred-year-plus building is drenched with its history, both jovial and bloody. While I wrote in the Thomas Seeds meeting room, I saw several white wisps slide by. When Edith gave us a tour of room 21, Joan’s hairs rose up, and my right arm tingled with electric shock. When we bid Edith farewell today in room 21, the television turned on by itself to a French cooking show.

I accept the existence of the other side. I’ve collected ghost folklore for my novel Dredging the Choptank. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt in our philosophy.” But I need a Rosetta Stone to decipher the message. Does Maud want us to cook more? Was the Monet print a fraud? Should I abandon my glasses in order to truly see?

One phantom theory supposes that the unsettled dead want their story told. I’m right-handed and that was the arm that vibrated like a tuning fork whenever I was in room 21. I’m a writer. I’m a conduit.