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- On Ghosts
On Ghosts
and offering help
Hello friends,
I have several too-strange-to-be-true magical stories. And they’re all, believe it or not, true. These are the sort of stories that I would never believe had I not experienced them, and even then, my rational mind still balks at their veracity.
My teacher Victor Anderson used to say, “Perceive first, believe later.” That phrase has served me well over the decades, allowing me to experience life in all its wyrd, uncanny glory, without needing rock solid belief in any of it. What can I say? It works for me. And true believers of all stripes—including staunch secularists—start too many wars.
These stories are so strange, I tend to never write them down—except in fictional form—relying instead on sharing the experiences with trusted friends. Three of those are ghost stories. One of them became my short story, Riding in Cars With Ghosts. The second, I finally wrote up for my Patreon supporters a couple of weeks ago. Now I’m passing it along to you, during the most wonderful season of the year.
It’s about helping a ghost in need, and here’s how it begins…
The house was small but lovely.
It was a rental, up the hill from a busy street and a half-wild park. It was the sort of neighborhood where I would cross the street to avoid the busy skunks as they ran errands for their families.
The white house was hidden behind a wooden fence covered with thick ivy, including the gate. If you didn’t know the gate was there, you would walk on by.
Once inside the gate, you passed through a postage-stamp sized courtyard to the door.
Inside was a living room with an old iron coal burner that my partner and I would burn those tiny half-sized Duraflame pressed logs in. They were the only fuel that would fit. Behind the living room was a small kitchen. On the other side was the shower room and a tidy sleeping porch that I used as my writing office. I would look out the multi-paned windows at the towering eucalyptus trees that clung to the hill out back.
The bedroom was an open loft space upstairs. At the very top of the stairs was a tiny washroom with a toilet and small sink.
And this is where the ghost comes in…
You can read the rest over at my website. I hope you enjoy it. Please do let me know what you think.
And tell me: Have you ever encountered a ghost?
best wishes — Thorn
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