David's story.

David is actually Doctor David Hammond, to give him his correct title. He finished a degree in Chemistry, then after a year which turned out to be a foolish mistake, remaining a student was judged to be his best option. This was judged by other people, not by David, so he went on to gain his PhD in Inorganic Chemistry, before seeking a job. It was a great job to start with, using his knowledge of chemistry, researching the best ways to make whatever he was asked to make, by people he seldom met, who worked in a head office that he never visited.

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David worked in Bristol, not where he grew up which was in a dull town in Derbyshire, but he liked Bristol and made it his home. His job involved using the facilities at the university, where he met Janet, who would become his wife. He stuck that job for eight years, but for most of that time he was bored with it. Getting the job demanded his PhD qualification, but the work involved did not. Any capable first-year student could manage the challenges that he was presented with perfectly well.

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It was probably because he was bored that one day he took a somewhat lax attitude to health and safety while setting up a test reaction that was liable to be potentially explosive. Before he put the safety screens in place, the reaction realised its potential, and actually exploded. It was only a small test, and therefore only a small explosion, but enough to put David in hospital for eye surgery for a few weeks, a few weeks during which he had not much to do, what with being temporarily blind.

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This was 1995, and David was 31 years old. By sheer coincidence, David was born on the same day as myself, the last day of June in 1964, so I can confirm that in 1995, there wasn’t much to do if you were parked somewhere, left for hours on end, unable to see anything. There were no podcasts, just the radio, or the wireless as many people of David’s age were brought up to call it, and his CD player, although choosing a CD to listen to when you cannot see can be a frustrating process.

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David was treated at the Bristol Eye Hospital, in a pleasant new building designed for that purpose, opened less than ten years earlier. He soon became baggage however, and was transferred to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, only being carted back to the eye hospital when more work was done, and to show the students there what happens to people who ignore safety procedures. In the infirmary, he was parked in one of the old buildings, and it was there, during the quiet of night after night, that he began to realise that the voices that he heard in his head were not nonsense, nor were they signs of impending madness caused by his complete lack of interest in his work.

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As he paid more attention, he realised that it was just one voice, and it was definitely there, whenever the ward was quiet enough for him to notice it. He became better at hearing the voice, and began to study it, and the person behind the voice, because he was beginning to understand some of the personality of that voice. With absolutely nothing else to occupy his time, he became fascinated by this voice, and the details that began to emerge as he concentrated on it in the right way.

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Three years later, he would give up his secure job, the job that he had studied for, the job that paid the mortgage, to become a presenter on a new ghost hunting television programme. He had spent those years visiting sites that were supposedly haunted, to see if he could find anything there that was similar to the voice that he had learned to study while in the hospital. Mostly he found nothing, but occasionally there was something to justify the silly stories and nonsense. It became his hobby, he and Janet travelling to these places when they could. It was fun.

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His new job wasn’t fun at all. He was hired because they said that they wanted somebody to give a serious opinion as they investigated supposedly haunted buildings. The reality was that they wanted somebody to be the dismissive fall guy while they fooled around in buildings where David rarely found anything of interest. It was a ridiculous farce, but it made popular television, and it started him on the road to his new career.

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By the time we pick up David’s story in The Gate in the Shadows, and Janet’s too, because her life would also become thoroughly entwined in this new direction, he is firmly established as a serious researcher, not into ghosts, or hauntings, but into the reasons why people believe in such things. There is undoubtedly something behind these beliefs. David is usually able to detect what it is, and can sometimes even provide some details of what it makes people believe, but as for ghosts themselves, they obviously do not exist.

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Or do they?