My most recent experience, like Ebbie's, was in a museum: in this case the museum is a former school that has preserved one of the rooms as an authentic Victorian classroom that is visited by 21st children in costume, who have a lesson taught by a "Victorian teacher".

I had gone there to watch a lesson, as I had just been taken onto the team of Victorian teachers. There were three of us in the classroom - the museum director, the teacher and me, waiting for the school group to arrive. No other visitors in the building at the time. Suddenly we heard, apparently outside the window ( in the former school's playground) the familiar sound of chattering, excited children. "Ah, they've arrived !" ....This burst of sound then suddenly stopped as abruptly as it had started. We looked out of the window...down the corridor....nothing.   

The children's bus pulled into the car park over the road 10 minutes later.

I have heard an explanation for this phenomenon being that walls or objects can act as some kind of sound recording devices (rather like magnetic tape), and that under the right circumstances, what they have recorded can be heard being played back. Whatever it was, three of us heard it very clearly and at the same time. Those walls would certainly have absorbed a great many children's voices: it only closed down as a school in the 1980s.

In that classroom, and also some years previously when I was acting as an Anglo-Saxon at the West Stow living history reconstructed village, I have had the very strong feeling of a presence of people who are very happy to see and be around something familiar - like I am being welcomed by them as an old friend.

- jeanie