It made Tara, star of TV's The Camomile Lawn and hit movie Brassed Off, a firm believer
in the spirit world.

Tara had her ghostly encounter when she spent the night at a friend's parents' home in the Cotswolds. "The house was a converted coach house and we had talked about the fact that
it was supposed to have been haunted by a ghostly coach and horses that people had heard pulling into the courtyard," she says.

"I woke up early one morning and heard talking outside my window. So I got up and peeped through the curtain. There was a man sitting a few feet away eating breakfast and talking to another man with his back to me." Tara, 30, couldn't make out what they were saying but decided it must be her friend's father. She got dressed and went to meet her friend in the kitchen.

"I said: `Shall we eat breakfast outside my room where your dad was?' and my friend said: `There's nowhere to eat outside. He ate his breakfast here in the kitchen.'

"I said: `But I saw him sitting on the patio' and he said `There is no patio'. Later he showed
me outside the window and all that was there was a rosebed.

"It was bizarre - when I'd seen the two men it was 8am and light. They'd been dressed in
suits and the guy standing up seemed to be in a groom's outfit.

"It all seemed very normal at the time . It didn't scare me, I was just really puzzled by it.
You think of ghosts as big white sheets and it wasn't what I expected at all."