beccaelizabeth | Ghost stories

wesleysgirl asked "Do you believe in ghosts?"

I answered with my current favourite quote

"I believe in the kind you carry with you. Everyone you've loved and everyone you've killed."

Highlander episode Haunted

In not-quote language, humans are certainly haunted, though it remains unclear by what and where from.

I'm not sure if I've had a ghost experience, or if I had a string of incidents involving bad plumbing, bad electricals and bad (prescription) drugs. Freaky things happened, but its all in the perception and interpretation.

Like, when I was at boarding school, there was a corner of the girls changing room that nobody wanted to use. We were assigned pegs, but the ones in that corner didn't want to use them and just grabbed their stuff and moved up. And the room never, ever felt empty. You know how there's always some kind of noise if someone else is in the room, even if they're the other side of the hanging clothes? Always felt like that in that corner.

On the opposite wall there was a row of shower cubicles, tiled and seperate, and the one in the opposite corner to the bad corner was also a bad place. No one would voluntarily use it. If teachers yelled someone would use it. Standing in there felt very odd, like you were standing in a seperate room and everyone else was very far away.

So one day it was getting late, after optional swimming so there were only half a dozen of us there, and we were in a hurry. The girls changing rooms were on the other side of the school from everyone else at that time of day. In fact, the other side of the road (there was a tunnel). So it wasn't a place anyone wanted to linger in the first place.
Not enough showers, still we wouldn't use that corner.
But showers done, we turned off the water and hurried to get dressed.
Normal small girl chatter, but the person from the bad corner had brought their clothes around so they were in the middle with the rest of us.

Then one shower turned on.
By itself.
The bad one.

And these were not showers that had individual controls. There was one big lever to turn all the showers on or off, and it was firmly in the off position. Yet, shower.
Water water water, water stops.

Then the girl on the end screamed
there were footprints coming out the shower
and walking across the floor
to the bad corner

everyone, no matter what their state of dress, ran out that room fast as anything. Seriously. Grabbed clothes, grabbed shoes, *whoosh*. Never seen me move so fast.

Now granted, I've told that story a lot in the possibly 20 years since, so I probably enhanced the detail in the telling, but I definitely remember being scared.

Objectively, all I saw was a shower running when it shouldn't ought to be able to. But plumbing has its own magic, which is strange and arcane and makes water run uphill on a daily basis so can probably manage to come out the wrong hole.

But at the time, that was a ghost. That was a very scary ghost. In a room we had to use every single day.

But here's the another story for comparison.

There was a ghost in our dormitory.

I never saw it, not even once. I usually fell asleep pretty early. But everyone else in my dorm swore there was a big spooky ghost, and they were absolutely petrified.

So one night I woke up, sat up, and everybody screamed.

Turns out, the mirror on the door and the lighting in the room combined to turn me into their ghosty.

Which is pretty funny from here. But at the time? Took a while for anyone to be laughing.

I pretty much figure, any place with lots of children all talking together is going to have stories. And any place that has lots of children all together in the dark is going to have ghost stories. And any lot of children all together in the dark in the middle of a hurricane in a glass sided room being read to by candlelight from a collection of M R James ghost stories is going to have serious therapy in later life. Or possibly become horror writers themselves.

Because those experiences, whatever sparked them, have weight and consequences. They have emotional reality. Humans make patterns out of their lives. They make stories. And those patterns and those stories are all about what it means to be human. Maybe something happens objectively, like a room getting colder, but it happens *to* somebody. They feel the room get cold. And whatever they make of that, that is real to them.

So yeah, I believe in ghosts. Strange things hanging around in dark places. Inside human heads, pretty dark. And very strange.