The actor, Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the hit sci-fi series, said odd things happened after he bought the property in Los Angeles when he was filming The Next Generation.

Sir Patrick, 83, said: “Returning home one evening, I opened the door to the master bedroom and immediately my nostrils filled with the smell of something roasting in the kitchen, one floor down.

“I thought that I must have left the oven on when I went to bed the night before, so I hurried down the stairs to the kitchen, where the smell was even stronger.

“Yet the stove was not even turned on, and the oven was cold and empty.”

Things took a scarier turn when his actor son Daniel came to stay and he came home to find him “clearly freaked out”.

Patrick continued: “He led me down into the living room, where the floor was scattered with books that had obviously come from the shelves lining the wall.

“Dan told me he had been watching TV when the books suddenly flew across the room, as if thrown with great force.

“The incident scared him so badly that he left the house and returned only when he knew I would soon be home. He would never again spend a night in the house alone.

“Then the noises began: the sound of voices coming from a room that was empty; the sound of footsteps on the stairs when nobody was using them.

“Every night as I crossed the first-floor hall to go upstairs to the bedroom floor, at a point just before the first step, the temperature of the space abruptly turned icy.

“As soon as I put my foot on the first step, it went back to normal. I had an urge to look over my shoulder, but I never dared.”

In his new book Making It So, Sir Patrick also said he later rented the place to a young couple who told him they had similar eerie experiences hearing mystery voices and footsteps.

They added that their daughter also saw “a shadowy male figure standing in the hall, just at the foot of the stairs”.