Emma Heard started blogging about ghosts when Covid hit in June 2020, just after the country was put into its first lockdown.

She decided with some free time on her hands it was a chance to embrace her passion for the paranormal.

Through her writing, Emma, from Tisbury, shares her thoughts on some of the county’s most weird and wonderful ghost tales.

Her most recent post is exploring the tale of ‘The Four Witches’ at Grovely Woods. She also talks about her own relationship to the narratives, as well as what it means to be a sceptical believer.

Wiltshire Times:

“I’m actually quite scared of the idea of ghosts, as well as being really interested in it. So I’m not into going and doing the investigations like some paranormal groups do. I think I’d be too scared.

“I call myself a sceptical believer because a lot of it can be explained away by psychology and getting yourself all scared. I do believe that these sort of ghost hunting programmes should check the EMS levels, because if they’re really high in certain spots, they can cause you to have auditory hallucinations.”

Setting her sights on uncovering some of the untold tales across Wiltshire’s vast county, Emma is on a mission to bring like-minded people together with her writing to share in her passion.

Wiltshire Times:

She said: “The reason I do it is because I’m interested in the story element of it. Everyone likes a good ghost story, unless you’re not a believer at all.”

Emma gets calls from all kinds of people who believe they have witnessed something a little bit unusual, and think it could be linked to paranormal activity.

She added: “I was just speaking to someone earlier who rang me, and it’s the manager of a care room. They want to have a chat about a particular room that they’ve got really weird things going on in. So it’s those sorts of stories that I really love because they’re not out there, and I believe that they need to be documented.”

Balancing mum-life with her career as a copywriter, Emma came up with the idea of ‘Weird Wiltshire’ so she has a reason to “write for fun”.

Wiltshire Times:

She said: “I’ve always had an interest in ghosts, and I’ll blame my Nan for that who actually passed away a few years ago. She was a working-class Londoner, who used to work in a pub in Surrey.

“After she retired, we used to go back and the visit the people who owned the pub, and they would scare us with old stories of the ghost called Old Blind George. And I think I was in equal measures horrified but fascinated at the same time.”