My First Ghost

The Ghoul of Dundas St

Strange Footsteps

In the middle of the night, when the sounds of someone stalking around above me finally got too much, I got out of bed for a look. What were my mother, father, or sister doing up there at this time of night?The upper level of our house was a single, enormous room. The end above my bedroom was my ‘museum’ — where I laid out my fossils, rocks and bones of extinct birds. I quietly walked up the stairs, looking over my shoulder — and clarified that there was no one there. Puzzled, I crept back down and peeked into both my sister’s and parent’s bedrooms. All were in bed, asleep. I went back to bed, rattled. We had cats, but cats don’t sound like a person walking around the floor above me. I knew that damned well. The noise never happened again.

Our Student Flat

But that’s not what I want to tell you about. That was just an unexplained event. What I do want to tell, happened a good decade later, when I was at university in Dunedin. I’d done two years on the sixth floor of University College (UniCol), then two flats in Leith St, before spending over a year in Europe on my ‘OE’ (Overseas Experience).

When I came back to do my PhD, I’d been around, nothing too much scared me. I wasn’t nervous or jittery or anything. Four of us students, two guys, two gals, got an old house in Dundas St, on the edge of the student ghetto. I’d say it was probably turn of the century — let’s say a decade either side of 1900. The front was perfectly symmetrical, as was the style. The door was central, and on ether side was a room with a window. My room was the one on the right. The rent was low, the landlord didn’t bother us, and we didn’t bother him. But the corollary was, that when something did go wrong, we had to push hard to have it fixed. The hot water in our shower diminished to the point where, it had just enough flow to come up the bare pipe, out of the nozzle — then dribble back under the head, and down the outside of the pipe. At that point we had enough. When it was finally fixed, it was discovered that the hot water cylinder was the size of a modest duffel bag. I think even then, this was well out of regulations.

There were a few parties of course. The most memorable one was somehow advertised on the radio. Our house filled with people. Then the small front garden, then the footpath, and then, out onto the street. Shortly after that a Police car pulled up. Two nice young policemen got out and wandered through the crowd, pleasantly asking everyone if they knew who lived here. And everyone quiet pleasantly said they didn’t have a clue. Eventually the cops left, and the party carried on. Two of us wandered down to the kitchen to see what was happening down there. As we chatted, two hippy chicks appeared, with shopping bags of food. We watched incredulously while they prepared the food, and cooked it, on our stove. No one had a clue who they were. It was back in the days when things were fairly relaxed.

A Very Unpleasant Entity

One evening in that first year, I’d gone to bed. The bed was parallel to the passage which ran down the middle of the house. I was starting to drift off, but could hear my flatmates outside in the hallway, chatting quietly before they too, headed for bed. It wasn’t annoying in any way, comforting in fact.

But a few moments later I became aware of some ‘thing’ beside my bed. The best way I could describe it would be as a dark cloud, an utterly black patch in a murky room — but emanating complete horror and malice. As if I’d been spring-loaded, I flung myself across the double bed and out — to see nothing. My flatmates hadn’t heard a thing. They were still chatting, as I sat on my bed, hyperventilating. It was a weird experience and had never happened before.

The following year, I was back to the same room. For some reason or other, I decided to rearrange things. I turned my bed 90 degrees to what it was the year before. Now it was parallel to the back wall, which separated my room from Pete’s. On some evening I had once again gone to bed and was lying on my back, drifting off. I could hear Pete listening to American baseball on the TV in his room. Once again, just comforting background noise.

But something made me open my eyes, and I found myself staring up into, what, in hind-sight, I could only describe was a ghoul. It was a ghastly, grey-white face hanging over me and looking straight in my eyes. Think Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’. I knew, in that instant, from the feeling of complete anger and malevolence coming from it, that it was the same presence as last year. The moment our eyes locked, it shot out two hands straight for my throat. I yelled instinctively and lurched up at it, as it … vanished.

In thirty seconds flat I was in a fairly bewildered Pete’s room, very, very rattled.

What does one say? I think I was 25 that year, a wee bit old for getting so completely freaked by something that a breather in your flat mates room is called for. Any male embarrassment was simply blown away by the experience. I had no more trouble in that flat, but the two incidents gave me the distinct feeling that some very unpleasant entity dwelt in the house. Maybe it just didn’t like students?

If so, I wonder how it’s going now?

An other ghost I’ve encountered: