Three Ghosts
Perhaps the most interesting thing I find about ghosts is how easily they insert themselves into one's memory.
I have experienced three ghosts in my life. The first was when I was five, and I saw the end of my bedclothes rise a foot into the air. I screamed and wept and refused to return to the bedroom for days, and even now tuck my duvet under my feet at night1. The second was when I was ten, in a local island churchyard haunted by a 'gray lady', who I saw in a beekeepers' bonnet moving through an overgrown area of the graves. The third was in our house, aged 12, where I heard the ghost of monks walking up the stairs. And yet, despite a very strong memory of each, I can tell you with certainty that none of them happened.
The latter I distinctly recall thinking up to scare myself, listening to the creaks of an old house – old, but not that old, and certainly not monastic in any fashion. The second was a fantasy of the playground, as we ran pell-mell around the graveyard as children, enthralled by tales of the local spirit and scaring ourselves with claims of visions. And perhaps strangest is the first, for which I have the strongest recollection of lifting my foot and yet within a fraction of a second shifting from thinking of it as an object of my own volition within the orbit of my legs, to one of supernatural agency way beyond my feet. The fact that this happened so quickly says, I'm sure, something about the relationship of young children to their bodies, and the ease with which internal narrative merges with perception at that age. Despite the many abnormal things that have happened to me since, I am, at heart, a scientist with a strong sense of observation and analysis, and these three events I recognise as something simultaneously prosaic – and yet strange.
For, despite knowing the context of each, I cannot see each supernatural event as anything other than genuine. My recall is as strong as that of any memory, and while I am fully aware of the creative nature of memory, these three events are, to me, 'true' in my recollection – and strongly so. That these three peculiarly ambiguous events only in my long memory should focus on the same occult feature, and should be so definitively both genuine and false, seems to me to say something yet more truly fearful.
13 July 1976
Notes:
1 An act of such peculiar topological acrobatics I refuse to believe a robot will ever be capable of replicating it – along with my strange habit in bed of suddenly flipping myself into the air and rotating to land on my other side, something of which my partner is surprisingly tolerant.