WE have a ghost at St Michael's. I was phoned up one morning by the Secretary of Zion College, an old theological library near the City Temple.

He said: "I've come across a large photograph of one of your predecessors. Rather a fine portrait it is too. Would you like to come and collect it?" So I went and picked up the picture, which was indeed very handsome: the picture of The Rev'd John Henry Joshua Ellison, who was Rector of St Michael's in the early part of the 20th century. I fixed it to the wall in the vestry.

The following Sunday at the parish Communion I was standing at the high altar leading the prayers when suddenly there arose the most furious banging and clattering from the south west corner of the nave. I thought at first it must be an unruly child throwing a tantrum. After a few minutes the noise ceased and I thought no more about it. But at the end of the service all the congregation were agog, discussing the cause of the disturbance. Everyone had heard it - you couldn't help hearing such a loud commotion. And there were no small children in church that morning.

One man in particular, a very level-headed chap, an engineer, was seriously frightened. He was trembling even as he told me what he had experienced: "It was happening in my pew - as if someone was stamping his feet angrily or kicking the woodwork. The whole pew was shaking for three or four minutes. Right next to me, it was. But there was no one else in the pew except me." Two people in the pew immediately behind him said they felt the same movements. It was then that the Parish Clerk came forward and said, "I think I know what it was all about...

"Some years ago I was laying out the altar cloth one morning for the service. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a clergyman walking slowly but purposefully up the south aisle towards the vestry. I wondered who it might be since we had not booked a visiting preacher that day. Anyhow, I walked out of the sanctuary, round the side of the chamber organ and into the south aisle to meet him. He walked through the door - which I always keep locked, as we've had things stolen during choir practices - and into the vestry. I rubbed my eyes. I thought I was seeing things! But when I opened the vestry door and went inside, there was no one there."

The Parish Clerk gave me a severe look: "Except you've gone and put his picture up in the vestry, haven't you? I bet that's what stirred the old boy up and made him rattle the pews!"

I remain to be convinced - though I don't think anyone could explain the commotion in the pew that Sunday morning by merely natural causes. It was, in my view, far too loud and continuous for it to have been the wood expanding or contracting with a change in the temperature of the building. But ghosts in broad daylight? It's a bit hard to swallow. I belong to the fairly sceptical school of thought when it comes to supposedly ghostly manifestations. I might even say I share Ebenezer Scrooge's view that you can put down seeing ghosts to trouble with your digestion. As Scrooge said to the ghost of Jacob Marley: "Why, you could be an undigested piece of cheese! There's more of gravy than grave about you!" Well, all I can say is that the whole congregation must have eaten vast cheesy breakfasts that morning to account for so much clatter.

l Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange