Fatima has been volunteering with Bradford District Museums and Galleries for a few years now – and this blog looks back on the change between when she started and now. You can read her first blog, written soon after she began volunteering with us here
Sometimes the places that feel the most haunted are the ones that end up saving us.
Unknown
The first time I saw Bolling Hall, it was through the eyes of my daughter. A castle, she had called it, her tiny fingers pointing in excitement. I had looked up that day, my gaze lifting from the grey pavement, from the burden of homesickness pressing on my shoulders. And there it stood—weathered yet grand, standing still against time’s relentless march. Something about it called to me, as if it had been waiting.
At first, it was just a place to escape. The silence of my home had grown too heavy, the loneliness too sharp. But Bolling Hall absorbed it all—the ache, the longing, the restless uncertainty. My daughter and I wove stories within its shadows; she was a princess, I was a warrior, and together we fought unseen battles within its gardens. What started as make-believe slowly began to feel real. The more time I spent there, the lighter I felt. The Hall was not just a building—it was a presence, an embrace, a whisper in the wind that told me I was not alone.
One morning, after dropping my daughter at school, I found myself walking toward it again. This time, the gates were open. Inside, volunteers moved through the gardens, their hands buried in the damp earth, coaxing life from the soil. The scent of greenery, of earth warmed by the sun, stirred something in me—something long buried beneath the weight of uprooting my life. I had watched my mother tend to her garden the same way, back in Pakistan. When a woman turned to me with a kind smile and asked, “Do you like gardening?” the answer slipped out before I could stop it: “Yes.”
That one word became a doorway. I began spending afternoons with the volunteers, letting my hands sink into the soil, feeling life press back against my fingertips. With every plant I tended, I felt something within me take root too.
And then came another door—an introduction to the Museum and Art Gallery. A woman there spoke of history and art with reverence and in her voice, I heard echoes of a passion I had forgotten. Soon, I found myself guiding visitors, sharing the stories of Bolling Hall, as if they were my own.
And perhaps, in a way, they were.
What started as volunteering turned into something more. A place I had stumbled upon in a moment of despair became my livelihood, my belonging. I was no longer an outsider looking in. I became part of its fabric, a paid member of the Visitor Services team. I even took on work at Cartwright Hall’s refreshment room, stepping further into a world that had once felt foreign.
One of the moments that fills me with the greatest joy is the Cherry Blossom Festival. Every year, I sit with children, folding delicate pink paper into blossoms. I watch their faces light up as their hands bring fragile petals to life. I see in them the same wonder my daughter felt when she first laid eyes on Bolling Hall, the same spark of belonging I discovered in its gardens. It is a reminder that, just like the blossoms we fold, we too can bloom in places we never expected.
Life didn’t go the way I planned. It went somewhere better.
Whenever I tell people I work at Bolling Hall, they always say the same thing— “That’s the most haunted building in Bradford!”
Maybe it is. But not all ghosts exist to haunt. Some stay to guide, to remind, to pull us forward when we’ve forgotten how. Bolling Hall never scared me—it saved me. It found me when I was lost, whispered when the world was too loud and led me back to myself when I didn’t know the way.
And sometimes, I wonder—was it just chance that brought me there that day? Or was it the ghost of Bolling Hall all along, leading me where I was always meant to be?
Because that’s the thing. We all get lost. We all feel like we don’t belong. But you will find your place. It might be in the corner of a quiet coffee shop, in the pages of a forgotten library book, or in the echo of laughter in a museum no one thinks to visit. Or maybe, just maybe, it’ll find you.
