I was once talking to a leading publisher about Hilary Mantel, who won major prizes and fame – after 24 years of writing novels of breathtaking originality – through her Wolf Hall trilogy. He said to me, perplexed: “She really thinks she can talk to dead people – did you know she believes she’s channelling the ghost of Thomas Cromwell?” It was clear to me he hadn’t read her previous work, as the clues were there in abundance. Beyond Black (2005) is the brilliantly unsettling tale of a morbidly obese clairvoyant, Alison, whose “spirit guide” is vile, handsy pervert Morris in a “bookie’s jacket” (wonderfully unlike the Indian braves and Egyptian queens who most psychics seem to summon up). In Eight Months on Ghazzah Street a woman cartographer follows her husband to Saudi Arabia and finds herself living under an “empty” flat, from which whispers, cries and footsteps emanate. The clincher is her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, in which deceased relatives and unborn babies make their presence felt and young Mantel encounters something darkly amorphous and fetid in a back garden.

Mantel is by no means the only writer to express an intimate relationship with previous eras. Peter Ackroyd writes his way along London’s ley lines and subterranean rivers, mining strata of the city’s previous epochs, as does the psycho-geographer Iain Sinclair. In recent decades quantum mechanics has popularised the idea that parallel universes are possible and, indeed, parallel timescales (because it proposes that tiny particles can exist in multiples states at one and the same time). In this world view, when you sit in an ancient building or gaze upon a historic battlefield, previous and even future occupants of the space are reverberating atoms away from you  – or ones from a different dimension. Some find such ideas “fey” or ridiculous, but I like the fact they make children’s books such as Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (where a 1950s boy plays with a Victorian child whenever a grandfather clock strikes thirteen, rather than midnight) or The Children of Green Knowe (an old manor house is haunted by past generations of children) plausible, rather than fantastical.

Lucy Boston, who wrote the Green Knowe series, lived in the Manor, Hemingford Grey, which dates from the 1130s. She made it clear in her non-fiction Memory in a House that the Manor’s previous inhabitants made their presence very clear as she renovated the house, uncovering its Norman heart – there was even a peeved poltergeist which chucked things around. Again, you may scoff, but my husband grew up in the adjacent village and knew “old Mrs Boston” when he was a boy. He swears to this day that on one visit, 60 years ago, he found himself alone in the entrance hall looking out at the topiary chess pieces in the garden, the scent of potpourri heavy in the air. All at once he saw a delicate white pony materialise and dart its way around the sculpted bushes before vanishing. Then he heard footsteps and turned to see Boston looking at him. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” she said.