My own little ghost story

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This actually happened.

I started my private clinic at the end of 1999. The first year was one of hard struggle, and at times I went days without a single patient. At times I wondered if I would be able to keep it going; whether I would even be able to pay the rent on the premises, let alone repay the loans I’d taken.

This story belongs to that era. Why I mention my problems of the time will become clear when I explain a bit more…

In order to understand the story you have to understand first the layout of the clinic. There are two main rooms, the waiting room and the treatment room (and, to one side, opening from the treatment room, the laboratory and bathroom, but they don’t come into this). There is one door opening from the corridor of the ground floor of the building to the left side of the waiting room, and that is the only entrance to the clinic. The waiting room is long and relatively narrow, lined with benches.

Then there is another door opening from the waiting room to the treatment room. It is the only other way out from the waiting room. That door is directly opposite the door into the corridor, so the doors face each other and as you open the treatment room door you look directly at the exit door. I mention this to make it clear that there’s no wayanyone can leave the waiting room without being seen from the treatment room when the door is open. Right?

Now, there is, between the waiting and treatment rooms, a tinted glass window set in the wall through which I can see if anyone's entered the waiting room while the door between the treatment and waiting rooms is closed. When I am seated at my desk, I can see the door to the corridor through this window, as well as about half the waiting room. I cannot see the right side of the waiting room, but there is no exit on that side. In this photo you can see the waiting room looking from the door side towards the far wall. 


One afternoon, then, I was just finishing on a specimen when I looked up at the window and distinctly saw a woman in yellow pass the window from the left (on which side the waiting room door is) and cross towards the right (on which side there are seats, but no exit, and which I can’t observe from my desk). I did not see her enter from the corridor door, but at the time I was not looking at the corridor door. I saw her in the waiting room, though, walking from left to right. I thought she was a new specimen.

I was talking to the specimen I'd finished working on, sitting at my desk, and all this time the waiting room door and midsection were under my direct observation through the window. The woman did not, repeat not, go out or re-cross the window. There was, as I have already said, no other exit...but when I opened the door to let the patient out and ask her to come in, the waiting room was empty.

Now of course I could theorise that it was the ghost of a dead woman haunting the building, someone who died there years ago. Unfortunately for that theory, it was a brand new building then - I was among the first tenants, and I watched the building come up. No dead yellow-clad women. No dead anyone. And neither I, nor anyone I know of, saw her either before that or ever again.

I have no explanations for this except a hallucination. As I said, I'd just started my clinic and patients were few. I was desperate for more, and, as part of subconscious wish-fulfilment I must have imagined the woman, I'm sure. At least I've never had a comparable experience again.

I wonder why not, though. Did my subconscious decide once was enough?

Stone In My Shoe

It’s odd the baggage we carry around, even when we know it’s baggage.

Today when I was walking to work (I usually do on Sundays) I felt a stone in my shoe and memories came flooding back.

Many years ago, when I was about six or seven years old, I read one of the hundreds of stories churned out by the late queen of children’s literature, Enid Blyton. This particular story concerned a boy who went out one day and felt a stone in his shoe. On bending down to unlace his shoe and remove the stone, he saw a necklace in his path. Knowing whose necklace it was, he took it to her and was rewarded with a coin (or something). As he emerged from the gate of the woman’s home he felt the stone in his shoe again and bent to take it out. And when he did this he saw a book in his path. Seeing the owner’s name written on the first page, he took it to him and got a plate of hot cakes or something (I read this thirty years ago!) as reward. When he left his home, he felt again the stone in his shoe and, bending down, saw someone’s wallet…

So this little do-gooder spent his morning wandering the village (Blyton’s stories were usually set in villages) finding something or other each time he bent to take the stone out of his shoe, and consequently returned home well fed and with a full pocket. At his garden gate he felt the stone again, and finally took off the shoe to find a blue, star-shaped stone. He flipped it over the garden hedge and went in to his mum. Mum asked what he’d done all morning, and he went into ecstasies over his extraordinarily good luck, and how he’d found something each time he’d tried to take out the stone. Mom asked to see the stone. He described it and said he’d chucked it over the garden hedge. “Oh,” she said then, “that stone was your good luck…” The boy went running into the street but he never found that stone again.

For some reason, this story stuck in my mind like superglue. For years after, each time I’d get a stone in my shoe I’d take it out and examine it to see if it were blue and/or star-shaped . Even though it never was, I’d carefully preserve it. I never threw out stones I found in my shoes. To this day, I might be able to find some of them carefully gathered, back then.

Even now, I still examine stones I get in my shoe. Who knows, I might just find a blue star-shaped one…

(And today’s was just an ordinary piece of gravel. So I threw it away.)  

Things Don't Go Bump In The Night

Of ghoulies and of ghosties

Of longlegettie beasties

Of things that go bump in the night

Good lord deliver us.          (Author - unknown)

Let me outline a hypothetical situation.

You’re walking along a lonely road in the last of the twilight. Dark clouds hang low in the sky. Long shadows hang across the road as trees hang their foliage threateningly overhead. Off in the distance you hear an owl hoot. A shiver passes down your spine. You feel as if, as the saying goes, “someone walked across your grave.”

Darkness falls, and you suddenly know – you know, for a certainty – that Something is following you, walking in your footsteps, and you are akin to that character alluded to by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner,

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

So – somehow, heart thudding, trying not to run for fear that you will be promptly chased down – you finally stumble to your destination, still safe. And when you get there, you learn – not to your surprise – that someone had hanged himself from the boughs of one of those trees under which you passed. You think you are “fey”. You knew.  

Again, let me outline another hypothetical situation.

You are in a lonely house that once held a loved one. You have stayed often enough in this room and heard her singing softly to herself in the next, you have stood at this doorway and watched her in the moonlight, twirling barefoot on the grass, arms raised, dancing. But she is dead now. And you – you are back here, and you sit in the dim light, reliving memories, and suddenly, you can hear her singing, and when you go to the window, you can see her pirouetting in the lawn – or is that a patch of moonlit mist Surely not! There she is, singing…!

Right.

Now, you are walking that same damned road in brilliant sunshine, and you don’t know that someone committed suicide from a tree, and nothing happens to chase you, even if the road is just as lonely. You are in that same house, but you don’t know that someone who used to sing and dance in the moonlight lived and died there, and when you see something in the moonlight, shimmering, it’s just a patch of mist.

Of course it is.

In one of his books, the late Carl Sagan gave the example of a night when he woke convinced a loved one had just died. He said he was so terrified of his idea coming true that he did not even dare get up to phone the person in order to make sure he or she was OK, for fear that he or she would trip over something trying to get to the phone and be killed, thus making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As Sagan pointed out, had something actually happened to that person that night (nothing did, of course) one would have a difficult time persuading him that it was all a coincidence that he had a “premonition” of that person’s death.

Absolutely true.

See here – at some time or other, virtually all of us have this sensation of knowing or feeling things beyond the visible surroundings or what we can perceive through our senses. It’s happened to me as well. Since the origin of this – like déjà vu – is most likely momentary synaptic linkages failing in the brain, it’s not exactly astonishing that it happens to everyone sooner or later. Also, if you’re imaginative, it happens more to you. But naturally.

So, if each of us has this sort of thing, and some of us have them at regular intervals, how come that this gets treated as some sort of message from beyond the shades?

While there is no single answer to this, I believe that it can be broken down basically into a few definite heads:

First, the will to believe. As believers in the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot prove, people will believe anything, and believe it, and believe it. You can go and prove it ain’t so (check out the Shroud of Turin) and they will still believe. I think it’s a way of trying to cope with the harsh realities of day-to-day life. After all, it makes things slightly easier if you can think that all this is just a sort of film set on which you’re an actor and great and slow forces are either directing your existence or just on the other side of a thin membrane. Not to speak of the hope that the dead can communicate and return.

Then, the fact that humans tend only to remember successes. Suppose you have two hundred episodes of feeling someone “watching you” (a feeling that may be a relic of our distant ancestry and which may once have had survival value, serving to keep us alert). Well, suppose in one of those cases, by the merest coincidence, you actually discover someone watching you. Will you remember the 199 failures? Of course not. You get my drift.  

Also, it dovetails into religion. I have a hard time trying not to laugh when I hear (especially) Christians raving against superstitions or condemning Harry Potter because it “promotes witchcraft”. Personally, I don’t see how casting spells in the hope of something happening is all that different from genuflecting before a cross in the hope of something happening. It seems to me that a religious background or upbringing makes people more likely than not to believe in this sort of stuff.

Then, of course, commercialism. This is the age where anything and everything is for sale, where Dracula’s Castle is a tourist attraction, where “haunted houses” draw tour parties, where “mystic spoon benders” like the “Israeli” Uri Geller trot out their stuff for a hefty fee, where Charles Berlitz makes a fortune writing about the wholly nonexistent Bermuda Triangle. A belief in the paranormal is a positive gold mine for someone willing to make money from it. I’d include stuff like Reiki and Feng Shui in this – after all, how come the people who are “experts” in all that aren’t healthy, wealthy and wise beyond all human possibilities if they hold the keys to everything?

I don’t pretend that there may not be things we haven’t found out, ESP and all included, but these undiscovered things, if and when they are dragged out in the light, will have to conform to laws – laws of nature that cannot contradict what we know now, because if they did our rational understanding of the world would fail, the experimental evidence we have now simply could not exist. If you have ghosts, they must conform to electromagnetic laws.

In the meantime, if you feel something walking behind you, it’s just your imagination. Turn back and look if you don’t believe me.  

It may be a mugger, or a rapist, of course.    

The Monkeyman

From 2007

In a world where creationist museums in the US depict dinosaurs disporting themselves with humans straight out of Eden, it might be comforting for some to realise that not all crazies subscribe to the Judaeo-Christian ethos...

Back in May 2001, I remember the TV coming alive with reports of a city terrorised, shivering, cowed. A dread monster prowled the streets of Delhi, seeking its victims. A dread name sped quickly from mouth to ear to mouth.

Who was this dark shadow, this monster of the night, this howling harbinger of horror? Was he a bird? Was he a plane? No, he was...

The Monkeyman.

Whence came he? From what dark dungeon of infamy did he come? What was his fell purpose? Why did he, helmeted, hairy, red eyed, shape shifting, who could clear tall buildings with a single bound, want with harrassing and attacking innocent people, making them jump off rooftops to their deaths?

The media wanted answers. Which meant, of course, that the nation wanted answers. Whether it really wanted to or not.

While practical jokers (who really couldn't be blamed) made hay while the moon shone, the police had to actually spend time on this idiocy and I recall Star News (as it then was; it's NDTV24x7 now) channel actually bring in a lady who was a zoologist and asking her if it couldn't be some hitherto unknown species of primate run amok. She burst out laughing, much to the annoyance of the anchor. Another brilliant deduction was that of a letter writer to The Telegraph who went to some lengths to "prove" that it was an alien from outer space - and had his letter printed. I guess the editor needed a laugh that day.

The best response I heard was of a guy interviewed on TV:

"We want that monkey be not catched because we are having lights and police in streets now."

Not, actually, a bad reason to keep rumours alive and flying. Rumours that continued to make hypersensitive people imagine red-eyed monsters who came to slash at them with metal claws all midnight and college girls sat up all night with sticks for self defence.

Eventually, of course, it died down, just as the "Ganesh idols drinking milk" stupidity had died down in 1995, just as the weeping madonnas and sweet seawater insanities died down - only to be promptly replaced by the next bogey, the Muhnochwa ("face scratcher") - a conglomeration of flying lights that came to scratch peoples' faces, apparently having nothing better to do.

And what was I doing all this time when aliens roamed the country?

Well, being some two thousand kilometres from the scene of the action, all I could do was send this limerick to Outlook magazine, in response to its breathless Monkeyman article:

Brave little monkeyman lets out a sneeze
Panicky residents run for the trees.
Overworked cops spend their day
Locking human monkeys away
Darwin's ghost says please oh please.

Predictably, they didn't print it.

The Demon And The Sun

The Sun rose over the horizon. He was full of his health and strength, vital with energy, and he looked forward to making his way across the blue vault of the heavens before putting himself to bed in the evening.

Unknown to him, though, a terrible danger awaited his coming.

Suddenly, the Sun shivered. A strange fear gripped him. Glancing over his shoulder, he beheld a strange and terrible tide of darkness advancing on him. It was the Demon come round again, and with a scream of silent terror the Sun plunged forward, but he was too late. A moment more, and he felt the icy tide of the Demon’s darkness stealing over him, reaching out to swallow him whole.

The whole of the Universe was perturbed and disturbed.

Set in their eternal orbits, the Stars shivered in their turn, with fear and anger, sending their malign influences flashing through the Cosmos in waves of evil energy that bounced and curled and lashed out like whips. A tide of this black energy swept over the Universe in a flood.

And down in the world of Men, the sky went dark, and food turned into poison in the mouths of those who, in defiance of the sages, wished to eat it. And the women who were born in the Astrological House most affected by the energies the Demon had unleashed as it continued swallowing the Sun suffered, too; their babies died in their wombs and their breasts fell dry as they tried to suckle. And worse was to befall, because, as the sages had foretold, their offspring and their parents began to die; for was it not written in the Scriptures that the children and parents of these women would die if they did not propitiate the gods?

A sad and terrible generation it was, the one that inhabited the world of Men, a generation that had ceased to venerate all their forefathers had held sacred. It was a generation that would suffer, and suffer indeed, for who knew when the Demon would release the Sun again from its iron grip?

And then the sages arose, and rang the temple bells; and all along the length of the holy river the terrified people stopped their accursed work and listened to the temple bells. And then they came, running, walking or limping, in their cars and carts, to the temples where the bells rang.

And then spake the Priests to the sinful people; “Go ye, and make yourselves worthy of salvation; fast and pray, and bathe in the holy River, and blow conches, that the Demon may be affrighted and let the Sun go; for surely otherwise he will swallow the Sun whole. And then Darkness will come down on the world, and surely everything will wither and die.” And the people were frightened indeed at their words.

Then spake the Priests to the women of mankind; “Behold, ye are sinful, and neglect your duties as mothers and wives, and think only of yourselves, and a blight is come upon you, and surely your children and your parents shall die for your sins. Go ye then, and set coconuts on pots of water, and place flowers, and fast, and pray. Pray, and do not step out of doors until the Demon has disgorged the Sun, or else you are lost for Eternity, and whatever befall your children and parents shall be your fault.”

And the men and women bathed in the holy River, and blew conches, and fasted and prayed, desperate in the face of the Demon, even as darkness fell upon the land. And yet, as they prayed and bathed and fasted, the Demon was forced back, and lo, the Sun emerged from his maw, little by little, until he was shining in the Sky once more.

Then the people prostrated themselves to the Priests and said, “We were unworthy and You have saved and succoured us. Pray accept our humble obeisance.” And the Priests tolled the temple bells to let the world know the danger was past, and the Sun shone again on the bright and wondrous land of India.

And far above, the moon sailed serenely on her lonely path, and the sun on his, so she no longer hid him from view, and her shadow did not besmirch by its touch the ancient world of Men.

The eclipse was over.


(Most of this – including fasting, ritual bathing and praying for the lives of one’s parents and children – will actually happen today in India, which claims to be the oldest home of science, when theannular solar eclipse due for this early afternoon takes place.)