The Big Read: The Soviet in my attic

I'm trying to believe my house might be haunted. The main problem with this is that I don't believe in hauntings, and the same goes for ghosts, spectral presences or the persistence of the spirit after death.

Come to that, I don't believe in the spirit before death either, but that might just be a matter of nomenclature. But still, my house may be haunted, and I'm trying not to let my disbelief stand in the way.

I'm a rationalist, but in every haunted house movie there's some jut-jawed rationalist who doesn't believe in ghosts. He's the one who, when the unseen hand writes "Get out!" in blood on the living room wall, doesn't get out. We at home, watching wise as gods, yell, "Please just go already!" but, trapped in the limited horizons of his world view, he doesn't. Soon he regrets it. In the original Amityville Horror that man was James Brolin, beardedly denying that he shared his home with the devil. Now he's married to Barbra Streisand. Of late I've been wondering: am I James Brolin?

My house has a gentle haunting. There are no sudden empty-socketed faces in the mirror or ectoplasmic fingers. Vases don't fly suddenly across the room, possibly because I and my elbows have already taken care of all my home's vase-breaking needs. Admittedly, when I first moved in there was one disturbing presence: a Jacuzzi, which I immediately had exorcised by two large workmen. Jacuzzis are the devil's work, and lead to moustaches.

But here's what does happen hauntingly in my house: at strange hours of the night, on the landing between the bedroom and my study, I smell someone cooking beef stroganoff.

Now I don't have strong feelings about beef stroganoff. It's a strangely Russian misuse of meat - "tough" and "creamy" are not adjectives I like associated with my beef - but it has no special emotional associations for me, no madeleine crumbs leading back through the woods to my childhood.

So I can think of no reason short of a stroke that I should be hallucinating the smell of beef stroganoff, and if I'm having a stroke, then others are too, because I have brought them home to sniff the air and they confirm it. Admittedly, it's possible that one person saying: "Can you smell beef stroganoff?" might induce it in another. Whenever some bore urges me to taste my wine all I can ever taste is wine, until he says, "Do you get the pencil shavings?", at which point it's as though I have sharpened a Stabilo Boss NB into my mouth. But still.

My house was built in 1886 by a merchant named Richbrough. He built four houses in a row down one side of our short, narrow street - one for each of his daughters. Oh, what Victorian miseries and solitudes roiled through these walls? How many hearty though often over-cooked beef stews were salted with secret tears and sorrow? But wait - could the Richbrough girls even have known beef stroganoff?

Is it not a weird invention of the 1970s, like chicken à la king and corduroy? Certainly not. The earliest known recipe for beef stroganoff is to be found in Elena Molokhovets's excellent Russian cookbook Podarok Molodym Khozyaykam. You will know it better as A Gift to Young Housewives, once found in every Russian kitchen, and published in 1861, a full 25 years before my house was built.

So what am I to believe? A recent article by Mandy de Waal reminded me of David Eagleman, a neuroscientist who calls himself a "possibilian". He describes science as a pier we build to extend the dry land of knowledge into the ocean. We stand on the end and pass a flashlight over the waters, but it would be terrible arrogance to be too certain what wonders and monsters might roll and rise in the deeps, and also not much fun. A possibilian accepts how much we don't know, and entertains the simultaneous possibility (however improbable) of a wide range of conceivable scenarios.

Perhaps then I should embrace a number of possibilities: that I have a brain tumour, and when it strikes me down in a month you'll all say, "Someone should have done something about it; the poor man was crying out for help"; that there is a small Soviet émigré hiding in my attic, nightly warming his nostalgic nosh over a gas burner; or that one of Mr Richbrough's spectral daughters, seduced then abandoned by her Russian sea lieutenant, each night still sobs over her lonely stroganoff, her Gift to Young Housewives propped translucently open on the table beside her.

Of these three options, I kind of hope it's a ghost. I just wish she'd learn to cook something else.