London, Dec 25 (ANI): Harry Potter creator JK Rowling might have reached great heights of success but she is sill haunted by the 'ghosts' of her troubled past.

The 42-year-old recently confessed that she finds the success of the Harry Potter books so astonishing that she sometimes feels it is all a dream.

The author admits that she still cannot completely break free from her earlier poverty, when she used live on state benefits in the flat with her daughter, Jessica, after the collapse of her first marriage and the traumatic death of her mother.

Rowling describes her life before Harry Potter as a 'mess'.

"It was my life and it was very hard and I didn't know there was going to be this fairy-tale resolution. The room is full of ghosts," the Telegraph quoted her, as saying.

The writer, who had battled with depression, said that her tenement flat in Edinburgh was "really where I turned my life around completely".

Even now she finds her success so remarkable that: "Some days I do feel like, 'Is it real?' "

"I feel I really became myself here, in that everything was stripped away, I'd made such a mess of things. But that was freeing, so I just thought, 'Well, I want to write', and I wrote the book and what is the worst than can happen? It gets turned down by every publisher in Britain, big deal," she added. (ANI)