Paranormal Activity: I Saw A Ghost - But I Don’t Believe It
When I was nine years old, I saw a ghost. This has always bugged me—primarily because I don’t believe in them.
It was the middle of the night, and I’d just been to the bathroom. I tramped back sleepily along the silent landing, and as I re-entered my darkened bedroom, I froze. Looming over my bed, watching me, was the tall, narrow silhouette of a man. I couldn’t make out any features. I gazed open-mouthed upon it for the longest second of my existence, and then I did what anybody would: shrieked like a rusty hinge and ran for my life.
I burst into the warmth of my parents’ bedroom, insane with terror. With all colour drained from my face, I pinned myself to the wall and crumpled down it, ending up in a wailing, gibbering heap against the skirting board. My mum jumped out of her skin and began screaming too—both of us, staring at one another across the darkened bedroom, just shrieking and shrieking—until my dad sat bolt upright, like Dracula rising from the coffin, and bellowed ‘What the hell is going on?’. At this point my mum’s cries died down to a murmur and she was forced to admit that she wasn’t entirely sure.
I slept in their bed that night, shivering. My parents laughed when I told them I’d seen somebody in my room. My mum told me I’d been reading too much Harry Potter—and I had to admit, it did look like a Dementor. But her breezy explanation never satisfied me. Although I was, at that age, obsessed with the boy wizard, I didn’t believe my enthusiasm for Hogwarts was enough to cause waking hallucinations. I was rather fond of Jurassic Park at the time, too, and yet I’d never suffered visions of brontosauruses plodding down the garden path, arching their necks to nibble at the rhododendrons. My parents could laugh, but I knew what I’d seen—what I’d felt. There was something in my room that night.
For the rest of my childhood, I believed the house was haunted. It certainly looked the part: a three-storey Edwardian semi-detached with a spindly tree in the front garden and a rickety balcony outside my parents’ bedroom. There was an attic and a basement; both freezing cold in all seasons, both eerily quiet, both prone to random groans and bumps—most commonly when I was alone in the house. My brothers agreed the house was malevolent, although our repeated suggestions of this were waved away by my parents. ‘Ghosts don’t exist,’ my dad would sigh, watching Match of the Day as a flurry of crashes and ghastly whines erupted from the attic. ‘It’s just the pipes’.
Convinced I was trapped in a house full of spectres, I took solace in logic—or at least, what counts as logic when you’re nine. I thought of the environments ghosts usually operate in—how spirits in films only seemed to attack people who were visibly panicked, inching down darkened hallways and quavering ‘hello?’ into the gloom. It seemed perfectly obvious to me that hauntings always took place under an atmosphere of isolation, dread and uncertainty. I decided, therefore, to nurture a constant atmosphere of ridiculousness, the sort of vibe no self-respecting ghost would be seen dead in.
Whenever I was left alone in the house, despite being terrified I began replying to every eldritch creak of the stairs with a slow clap, and a sarcastic ‘Oh very spooky’. If a deathly clang rang out from the basement, I’d counter it with a long, loud fart to dispel the creepy atmosphere. A door would slam upstairs and a chill wind would rattle the house, and without pausing the Playstation I’d yell ‘3/10, lame’ over my shoulder. The spooks couldn’t possibly attack now, I told myself—I’d taken the wind out of their tattered sails.
It was only years later, long after we’d moved out of that creepy old house, that my mum came clean. ‘I didn’t want to scare you, but I thought it was haunted too,’ she confided in me one evening. Then she leant in closer. ‘You know, I was making your school lunch one afternoon, and I swear to god, a slice of cheese levitated.’ When I pressed her on this, I learned that the cheese slice—Red Leicester, I believe—had been lying, quit stoic, on the chopping board, before spontaneously leaping up and performing a backflip, landing on its opposite side. If we were haunted, I decided, the ghosts had had their budget cut.
When I entered my mid-teens, my belief in the supernatural wilted when I stumbled upon an apparent paradox. The worst thing a ghost could do to me, I realised, was kill me. But the existence of ghosts dictated there was an afterlife. If a ghost murdered me, I figured, I’d just become a ghost too and chill out. And if a ghost couldn’t physically harm me, well, what was there to be afraid of?
I also found it suspicious that I’d never seen a spectral goat or bluebottle or stegosaurus. Why should humans get all the ghostly fun? And why did it always seems to be pasty Victorian children and widows in raggedy gowns doing the haunting, and never gangly spectres clad in joggers and bomber jackets?
These ponderings helped banish my superstitions, and before long I was firmly grounded in the real world: where everything is as it seems, and any bump in the night is more likely to be the couple upstairs getting their weekly shag in than a demon scuttling across the ceiling. Today, save for the occasional ‘What the SHIT is that?!’ moment when I come home drunk and mistake a coat on the banister for a Ringwraith, my adult life has been free from the ghoulish terrors that occupied so much of my mind as a child.
Isn’t that just a little bit boring, though? Logic and reason are all well and good, but the answers they provide are rarely thrilling. In all likelihood, my parents are right about that night eighteen years ago: in the darkened bedroom my mind played tricks on me, and my ferocious childhood boogeyman was really nothing more than a pair of carelessly slung underpants tangled around the slats of my blinds. Most days, I agree with this: it’s sensible, logical and feasible. For the rest of my life, however, there will always be that small, giddy thought tugging at me: that what I saw in my room that night wasn’t a trick of the light or an overindulgence in young adult literature—it was the genuine article.
A real, live ghost.
Alright, well not exactly ‘live’.
…You know what I mean.
Written by Dan Hackett
Dan is a copywriter living in Bristol. He wrote his first novel last year, though he's not tried to get it published yet. Instead, he is currently sitting on it like a goose on an egg, refusing to let it hatch, mortified at the prospect of releasing it out into the world. If you fancy telling him to get his act together, his Twitter is here. Oh and he writes about travelling sometimes, too.