The dreaded return to work after winter recess might be only a week away, but that’s not the only thing sending a chill down the spines of people in Parliament.
An aide to speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle has opened up about paranormal encounters she has had in the Palace of Westminster.
Speaking to the Sun, Jo-Anne Crowder described how she once felt a dog rub past her leg while working – but when she looked down, there was no pup to be seen.
When she confided in a colleague, she was told that ghostly woofs have been heard around the same area.
And that’s not the only spooky experience the top parliamentary official has had.
In an admittedly quite confusing anecdote, she said she had been walking along one of the building’s labyrinthine corridors when she saw her face reflected in the glass of a door.
Jo-Anne said: ‘I thought, oh, that’s my reflection, I can see myself. Don’t know what made me think of it, I could see myself.
‘But then I actually thought to myself, that is clearly not my face. That looks like me, but that is not my face.’
She continued: ‘There was definitely a grey-haired lady in this panel of glass.’
Despite the 150-year history of the current Palace of Westminster, there are relatively few reported sightings of any unquiet spirits wandering around the site.
The same cannot be said for one of the UK’s other centres of political power: Number 10 Downing Street.
In 2013, the building’s facilities manager David Heaton wrote a blog post for Halloween describing a supernatural entity he’d met there.
He wrote: ‘As I crossed the small dining room to the two large doors that open up into the State Dining Room I passed the end of the table, and absolutely jumped out of my skin because someone walked past me!
‘I’m talking about a space of a couple of feet, but because of the darkness I hadn’t seen the person.
‘On spinning round, the light from the door I had entered through showed I was on my own.’
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