G is for GHOSTS

I definitely believe in ghosts - losts souls who don't know they are dead. For without death there cannot be a ghost. The predominant reason I believe in such things is that I have experienced the presence of one who has passed. I have never seen an apparation but for several evenings around 8 pm in the evening I heard one.

This happened a long time ago when I was a mere 14 years old and one could put it down to hormones or auditory hallucinations I suppose; but I know what I heard.

In Tibetan Buddhism there is such a thing as a "hungry ghost", it is a metaphor one might say for those who have not lived their lives to their satisfaction and crave physical desires above all else. They try to fill a void that cannot ever be filled.

I think that I lived with one such creature. She was large and fearsome to me and much despised in my family. I knew that she was old, large and rarely bathed. She lived in a part of my house and looked after her brother, my grandfather. My father did not speak to her - they hated each other and my mother was forced to share a kithen with her and they had several heated arguments while trying to share the space. I really did not know what to do, how to act, to speak or not to speak. I trod a precarious path as I often would encounter her in the hallway of our large Victorian brick house.

Picture this house. When you walked into the house there were large "drawing rooms" on either side and directly ahead a large staircase going up to the second story (the house had 3). To the left of the staircase was a hallway which ended in a pantry directly ahead, a stone floor kitchen to the left and small living room to the right.

My grandfather and his sister, whose name incidentally is Auntie Bette enhabited the room to the left of the frontdoor but we (Mum and Dad and me) used the small room to the right of the hallway as our living room and dining room as the front room was too cold to live in and costly to heat.

Houses of this kind are damp and uncomfortable though they sound quite romantic on the surface they are incredibly uncomfortable to actually live in as a human.

One day Auntie Bette was carted off to the hospital and she never came back. She died about a week later. Well in a sense she did come back, or never left - I have never been quite sure.

Auntie Bette was in the habit, in true English tradition of making a pot of tea before bedtime and every night at about 8 pm she walked down the hallway with a distinct and heavy footstep. The problem for me was that she continued to do it for some time after she died.

At first I was, as one would say in todays vernacular, totally freaked out and went to my parents and told them --aah Auntie Bette's walking down the hallway - but they said the usual, "don't be silly" and "she is dead" and other profound responses to my feares. She continued her nightly voyage down the hallway for some time - at least two or three weeks and my fear level subsided a little to a mere utterance of, "there's Auntie Bette again" but my parents paid no attention to me.

Eventually she figuired out she was dead I guess but I could never go near her room - it smelled of her and it terrified me. I was sure she was still around. Perhaps she still is but its a rented house for students now - I bet there are some unexplained footsteps in the night from time to time.....