AT the opening of the Treasures of St Cuthbert exhibition in Durham cathedral, all the staff – even the dean – were extremely excited about Pepper’s Ghost which spookily glides above Cuthbert’s 1,000-year-old coffin.

This doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that there is a ghostly apparition of the saint arising from his battered tomb. Instead, there is a holographic information display moving about the coffin, describing all the pieces of interest. It’s a Pepper’s Ghost display – an optical illusion that looks as if it is there beside the coffin even though it is not.

No one, not even the dean, knew who the Pepper was who had created this ghostly trickery.

John “Professor” Pepper was a Victorian scientist from the Royal Polytechnic Institute in London, who premiered his invention on Christmas Eve 1862 by performing a Charles Dickens seasonal story, The Haunted Man, with a real moving ghost.

It was based on the effect that you get when you look from a bright room out of a window on a dark night. You see your reflection in the glass as well as the view outside.

Similarly, Pepper perfected a centuries-old technique whereby he had well-illuminated ghost running around out of sight beneath the stage. The front of the stage was covered by a large piece of backless mirror glass which was angled to catch the reflection of the ghost down below. The audience looked through glass and saw the ghost and the actor who was being haunted.

For a decade, this was the hottest effect in showbiz. People paid just to see a good ghost. Pepper became the Brian Cox of his time, touring the world lecturing and demonstrating, although his reputation was harmed in Queensland, Australia, when he tried to break a drought by flying a 20ft steel kite among the clouds and firing rockets and landmines at it to make the clouds produce rain.

It didn’t, but Pepper’s Ghost still lives in Durham cathedral bringing St Cuthbert to life.

LAST Saturday morning, friends bought a new mattress in Northallerton. They strapped it to their roofrack, drove it home to Croft-on-Tees and parked it a short distance from their house while they prepared the room.

They returned to the car a few minutes later to discover the mattress had gone. An eyewitness reported that two people had unstrapped it, loaded it into the back of a gold Saab and driven away so brazenly that he presumed that it was theirs to drive off with. Afterall, who would have thought there were gangs of desperadoes roaming our streets looking for momentarily unguarded bedware?

It is sad that you can’t leave anything unattended these days. My friend was all for driving round Darlington in search of the gold Saab, but he was eventually dissuaded by the impossibility of finding the culprits because after their crime, mattress thieves always lie low for a while.

STUCK behind a slow-moving combine harvester at the weekend, I thought about crop circles. Whatever happened to them? In 1991, I attended a crop circle conference in Leeds where wild theories abounded aliens trying to send us messages by making elaborate shapes in fields? Were all the circles hoaxes, or have the aliens concluded that there is no intelligent life on earth worth contacting?