WE live in the most materialistic age ever yet a good proportion of us believe in ghosts. Only one in a hundred of us regularly goes to church yet a belief in some sort of afterlife is widespread.

"It's very odd," says Paul Deveraux, arguably Britain's leading expert on the supernatural. "The whole subject is full of apparent contradictions. If, for instance, there is a road death and a spirit comes back to haunt a stretch of road, why does their vehicle sometimes come with them. Can a car have a ghost, too?

"And what about the ghosts who are wearing clothes when they put in an appearance. Do clothes have a spirit life?"

These, and many other prickly questions associated with hauntings are addressed by the author in his new book Haunted Land.

For his evidence of the existence of spirits Deveraux goes as far as the New Mexico desert to explore the links between the spirit world and Indian shamans. Some of his findings, though, come from nearer home.

"In Gwent there is a tradition of fairies which take the form of small lights known as 'corpse candles' which, it is said, always take the route a corpse will go on the way to burial."

A fairy funeral was seen going down Church Lane at Aberystruth in North Gwent and another at Llanithel Church.

Other 'spirit' stories have a more disturbing contemporary edge. One of the reports in Deveraux's book was in West Sussex at the height of the 1987 storms. A young woman was driving along a darkened lane when her car stopped and all its lights went out.

Seeing a man sitting on a gate as a possible source of help she approached him, only to see that he was wearing the uniform of a Second World War German flier.

As she approached, both the man and the gate vanished, to be replaced by a solid hedge.

The chronicler of these, and many more hauntings, was born in Leicestershire 56 years ago and during the 1960s drank deeply of the psychedelic culture.

"I remember gazing out of a window and seeing a bright ball of pulsing orange light which really shocked and surprised me. I was even more surprised when I found that a lot of other people had seen it as well. This would have been 1967 and as a result of it I started taking an interest in UFOs."

Fairly typical 1960s stuff. But as the hippies grew up and became executives or computer billionaires, Deveraux's interest widened and deepened.

The barometer of his belief in the supernatural has swung from belief, to extreme scepticism, and back to somewhere in the middle.

"There is a difference between saying that 'something happened' and that 'something supernatural' happened.

"In fact, I am turning very much more towards modern physics which, far from banishing ghosts, tend to give explanations for them.

"I look at the idea of these manifestations being the spirits of the dead but that doesn't seem to work. I look at the idea of shamans or witch-doctors and end with modern physics coming to my aid.

"In the case of what I call 'road ghosts' where things are seen along certain stretches of road you might try to explain them by saying that they are simply hallucinations. "Fine. But why should the same stretch of road encourage hallucinations in all sorts of different people who don't know one another?"

Haunted Land by Paul Deveraux is published by Piatkus Books, £17.99 hardback.