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This is weak on detail, I'm afraid, but I feel fairly sure that I've read accounts of situations in which the presence of a regular human activity has been inferred but is later proved to have been impossible.

Which is to say, there is a regularity to allotment work as there is most work: weekly, seasonal and soothingly repetitive; it lends itself to these scenarios:

Old Fred arrives, disappears into his dilapidated shed for a few minutes, comes out with wellies on and his pipe in his mouth, and sets to work thinning out his peas or what have you. You've seen his figure, heard the rattle of the lock that always sticks and caught a whiff of the smoke so often that it assumes the qualities of a 'background phenomenon' labelled 'pay no heed' in much the same way as mood music is simultaneously present yet imperceptible to consciousness. You might pay more attention to it all from time to time, but for the most part, you yourself are lost in the non-reflective consciousness of a repetitive task or three—like turning over the new patch for the lettuce while half listening to TMS.
And then one week you get home from the allotment to hear from your wife that Old Fred was killed in a road traffic accident earlier in the week—or perhaps it was a Great British heart-attack—but you can't shake the nagging sense that he was there among the rows of potatoes that very morning; at any rate, you could swear that someone was smoking his Old Holborn...

Of course, it's likely all a product of your pattern-recognition equipment making a lazy jump too many, but it's the mechanics of how and why it does so—and where the threshold lies—that can be so interesting.

I've no wish to drag the thread too far off topic, but I've just read a great encapsulation of how places of regular human activity—such as allotments—seem to retain a residual atmosphere of humanity: how human presence is implied even when it is not actually perceived.

Here the setting is relative wilderness, largely devoid of human habitation; how much greater must the air be felt when one is surrounded by methodically tilled soil and purpose-laden tools and devices tailored precisely for man's comfort?

The rest of the party had gone off with many warnings to beware of Indians, and not to stay late enough to be the victim of a frost that thinks nothing of forty below zero. After they had gone, the loneliness of the situation made itself unpleasantly felt. There were no other islands within six or seven miles, and though the mainland forests lay a couple of miles behind me, they stretched for a very great distance unbroken by any signs of human habitation. But, though the island was completely deserted and silent, the rocks and trees that had echoed human laughter and voices almost every hour of the day for two months could not fail to retain some memories of it all; and I was not surprised to fancy I heard a shout or a cry as I passed from rock to rock, and more than once to imagine that I heard my own name called aloud.

In the cottage there were six tiny little bedrooms divided from one another by plain unvarnished partitions of pine. A wooden bedstead, a mattress, and a chair, stood in each room, but I only found two mirrors, and one of these was broken.

The boards creaked a good deal as I moved about, and the signs of occupation were so recent that I could hardly believe I was alone. I half expected to find someone left behind, still trying to crowd into a box more than it would hold. The door of one room was stiff, and refused for a moment to open, and it required very little persuasion to imagine someone was holding the handle on the inside, and that when it opened I should meet a pair of human eyes.


Algernon Blackwood, A Haunted Island.
 
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Been back down the allotment everyday for the last ten days. Booked time off of work to get my plot sorted out and do a bit of work on the two, sadly neglected plots that my daughters have…a lot of hard work so far and only half way through theirs, mine in contrast is ready for the new season with some of the pea and bean nets up with only a couple more to do.
Anyhow, nice sunny mornings and no ghostly presence felt whilst working on my plot, but moving on to daughter No. 2 plot he/she/it made its presence felt again, twice. Each time it was fleeting and both times were on the same day. It sort of felt as if a presence had poked its head above a parapet to see what was happening only to recognise me and bugger back off again. The second time, an hour or so later, was like a double take “I know you but you are in the wrong spot…what are you doing on that plot?
Since I moved onto daughter No. 1 plot, nothing! But that is next to the car park and is generally busy with all the toing and froing.
Am back down there later today so will see if the presence makes itself felt again.
Just wondering; have you ever looked at old maps to see what, if anything, was there before the allotments?
 
Here the setting is relative wilderness, largely devoid of human habitation; how much greater must the air be felt when one is surrounded by methodically tilled soil and purpose-laden tools and devices tailored precisely for man's comfort?
On a similar note, I always feel more at ease when in an 'old-fashioned' house with wooden or quarry-tiled floors (no horrible carpets), no television (certainly not being the centre of attention in a room anyway), darker than a modern house, old brick and stonework, herbs growing in pots etc. In other words a more 'basic' dwelling with less 'non-useful' items that modern houses seem to be full of today.
 
For years and years at our allotment site there was a chap who did everything, helped everybody and was pretty well there every day once he retired. When you came through the gate you would see him on his plot, or at the tea hut and you would say hello. After he died, it took a good couple of years to remember that he wasn’t there, it was just a very strong feeling up until then that he was still around. Not in a bad or creepy way, just that you still expected him to be there on his plot, because he was always there.
 
I have spent a considerable amount of time down the allotment in the last two weeks but the creepy ghost feeling hasn’t rematerialised. I have however gone down early with a fleece over my T-shirt, taking it off when it warms up. On several instances I have caught site of a figure on the allotment but on spinning round to see who it is, I found it was my fleece hanging up on a bit of timber or a road pin.
So easy to see how people believe they see things that are not there.
 
...On several instances I have caught site of a figure on the allotment but on spinning round to see who it is, I found it was my fleece hanging up on a bit of timber or a road pin.
So easy to see how people believe they see things that are not there.

Absolutely. Reminds me of an experience of my dad's that I've related elsewhere:

For a short time during the early years of WW2 he was billeted in London. One night when he thought things would be relatively quiet because it was fairly windy he was crossing Hyde Park when he got caught in an air-raid and decided to make a run for a shelter near Marble Arch. While running for his life in the pitch dark he became aware of an amorphous white shape keeping pace with him, fluttering just behind his left shoulder and right on the edge of his field of vision. When he turned his head to see what it was there was nothing there and when he faced straight ahead again the fluttering shape would reappear in his peripheral vision. Caught between the bombs and the thought that he was being tailed by a ghost he decided the bombs were probably more dangerous and legged it across Hyde Park for all he was worth.

When he reached the entrance to the shelter the thing was still there - he turned full circle but whatever it was stayed just out of his direct sight - until he realised it was the enormous army issue handkerchief he‘d had clamped to his face for most of the day, due to what he describes as the worst cold he’s ever had in his life, fluttering in the night breeze. He’d let go of it and it had caught somehow in his webbing and was trailing in the wind behind him as he ran.
 
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