Something for Halloween.
Halloween night. It’s a tad chilly in Sydney (which I don’t mind) so I’m tucked up under the blankets thinking that this is as good a time as any to update my blog, after a bit of a self-imposed break from my work. (Apologies to anyone who’s contacted me via this page, it was lovely to read your messages and I’ll be getting back to each of you shortly.)
I’ve been thinking all day about which extract to post, but have decided not to go with one of the scariest stories in Where Spirits Dwell, rather I’ve chosen one that encompasses—and celebrates—the idea that a lot of the stories my interviewees have shared are neat little mysteries (which may never be solved.)
So if you’re not all “Halloweened out,” sit back and enjoy this extract from Where Spirits Dwell. It’s called “Dropping in.” Oh, and while it’s not the scariest story in the book, I don’t want you to get the idea it isn’t the least bit spooky. I wouldn’t want you to get that idea at all …
DROPPING IN
“There was an old man in my room this morning”
“I wouldn’t say it was a haunting, it was just an experience.” So Daniel Lightman prefaces his ghost story. He was only 14 when it happened, but the “experience” hangs in a corridor of his mind like a life-size portrait, its edges and contours frozen in time. For 13 years, Daniel thought he knew everything there was to know about that distant moment, but today, he’s prepared to examine it with fresh eyes, to face anew the man in the frame.
In the late 1990s, Daniel and his father were living in a relatively modern ground floor apartment in a Northern Sydney suburb. “It was very dark, it never really caught much natural sunlight, it just had a dark sort of feel about it,” recalls Daniel, adding that it was common to walk into a room and have the sense that something or someone in there was scurrying away into the shadows. That is the only unusual thing Daniel recalls about his former home. Certainly, there was nothing to prepare him for what took place one weekday morning at about 6:30 am.
It was a school morning and Daniel was savouring the last hour of sleep before the alarm sounded. To his surprise, he was suddenly awake, as alert as if he’d splashed his face with icy water, and he was no longer alone. Says Daniel: “He was standing at the entrance of my room.”
His bed faced the doorway. The visitor, who seemed to be in his sixties, stood barely three metres away. “He had a hat on, a small-brimmed hat, and he was reading something, I don’t know what it was exactly, it could have been a newspaper,” says the 28-year-old sales executive. “I was freaking out, it just made all the hairs on my arms stand up on end, and I was looking, rubbing my eyes, thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’ and he was there for, I don’t know, maybe a couple of seconds?”
The man wore “an older-style suit in a dark khaki colour,” he says. “And I just remember his little hat. It wasn’t rigid like the hats businessmen wore in the 1960s, it was more an old man style of hat; crease in the middle, with a really small brim.” These details were branded onto Daniel’s memory through some process that had nothing to do with him—uppermost in his mind was the sheer shock. Ghost? The word never entered his mind. The man looked utterly lifelike. “I thought there was someone standing in my room, I almost jolted back in my bed.”
Daniel didn’t scream for his father, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid. He heard someone gasping, trying to retract and melt into the wall, snatching even the breath back, back in and away from the man—and realised he was responsible for the raggedy sound. As he stared, trying to process the incongruous scene, the man registered the boy’s presence. “He stopped reading and then looked up and smiled.”
“That was it,” says Daniel quietly. “It was almost like he was there one moment, then gone the next. It wasn’t a fade away.” For the next few minutes, Daniel didn’t move. “I was trying to get my marbles together, I didn’t know what was going on. I definitely didn’t spring out of bed, I was just sitting there thinking, ‘What just happened?’ ”
Later that day, he told his father. “I said, ‘There was an old man in my room this morning. It freaked me out.’ He was pretty open to that sort of thing. He wasn’t horrified and he wasn’t disbelieving in any way.” Daniel’s dad suggested that the visitor was the ghost of their recently deceased neighbour, Mr Mumford—“Mrs Mumford used to always say he was still around and would visit her”—coming to say hello. Though this explanation has suited him just fine for over a decade, today Daniel concedes that he and Mr. Mumford were not really that close, in fact, he’d never exchanged words with the older couple, and that there were physical discrepancies too. “Now that I think about it, I don’t know that it was him, what I remember seeing versus what I remember him to be. It could have been somebody else.”
Who?
Daniel casts his mind back to what his life was like then, back in year nine of high school. “I had been through a pretty strange patch actually,” he offers, after a pause. “I was kind of misbehaving a bit. I didn’t do anything really naughty, but I was getting into a bit of trouble at school and just being a bit of a rat, I guess. I wasn’t a criminal, but I wasn’t the best boy, so to speak.”
The eloquent young man keeps to himself the details of his mother’s absence from the home, and I don’t pry, but I wonder about the role of grandparents … grandfathers, in particular. “Now that we’re talking about it, what I described does sound similar to my grandfather on my dad’s side, Pop, who I was pretty close to when I was younger, between the ages of three and five,” he says, sounding intrigued. “We used to spend quite a bit of time together.”
Though he’s since passed away, Pop was definitely alive when the ghost appeared, but had been estranged from his son and grandson: “He’d had a bit of a falling out with my dad and they hadn’t spoken in years.” When Daniel mentions this, something else occurs to me. “Have you heard of apparitions of the living?” I ask him. Paranormal literature is bursting with stories of people who’ve seen and interacted with apparitions of people who are living, but often geographically distant. Sometimes, the apparition is of a person on their deathbed who comes to say farewell, but in other cases, the phantom is of a person who is alive and well and unwittingly projects his or her image to a loved one, usually because they’ve been thinking of that person. The process is essentially telepathic and involuntary, according to the late paranormal researcher Hans Holzer.
It’s possible that Pop had heard about his grandson’s minor trouble at school and that one day, sitting in his favourite chair at home, the newspaper on his lap, he dozed off as his thoughts drifted to the boy he hadn’t seen in years. That is potentially all it took—a grandfather missing his grandson. It’s also likely that both the patriarch and the boy had more psychic ability than average folks.
The puzzle of his identity aside, Ben is certain the man meant him no harm. When he looked up and smiled, “it came across as a peaceful gesture, not threatening or uncomfortable,” he reflects. “He was wanting to let me know that he was okay.” And perhaps, that he would be, too.
From Where Spirits Dwell, by Karina Machado.
