One of the strangest things about ghosts and apparitions is the fact that some people can see them but not others. It may be very reassuring for those who can’t, of course, but this is little consolation to those who can.

Monica fell definitely into the “seeing and believing” group. All through her life, she seemed to pick up signals or sensations that others were totally – blissfully – unaware of. It seemed that she was able to pick up echoes of traumatic events that had happened on a site, usually horrific deaths.

One such case happened in the late 1970s, when she went to stay with an old friend who lived in Pennsylvania. The friend fussed about getting her room ready and realised that she did not have enough pillows.

“I can borrow some from my mother’s house. I have a key,” the friend explained.

They set off to the nearby house but as soon as they approached the front door, Monica recoiled in horror.

“Don’t put the key in the lock,” she shuddered. “I don’t like it here. Forget about the pillow.”

And to her friend’s surprise, she grabbed her arm and pulled her away, refusing to go in. But the friend laughed her off, having been in the house regularly without incident. Monica waited by the door while her friend popped into the empty house but she was not at all surprised to see someone in the upstairs window, watching them as they returned to her friend’s car.

She later found out that a former Air Force pilot had died in the house but there was no explanation for why she was the only one to feel or see his presence.

That was not the only case. While she was living in the Netherlands several years later, she went to stay with a friend in his fairly modern home. When she went upstairs, she felt horribly cold, all her senses suddenly alert.

She shook herself. It was a new house, with no history yet, nothing that would account for the feeling of evil. And yet as she stood in the room, she was irresistibly drawn to one of the walls. She slowly reached out her hand and placed it flat on the wall. She drew it away in shock. The wall was freezing cold.

Startled, she almost ran out of the room and bumped straight into the arms of her friend, who almost seemed to be waiting for her in the corridor.

“Did you see him?” he asked, his voice devoid of any emotion.

“Don’t worry. You’re not the only one. Many others have seen a man in that room.”

Monica’s impression of evil had been well-founded. Her friend admitted that the house had been built over the site of an old farmhouse that had been demolished as no one would live in it. The man who lived there had slaughtered his family and then killed himself.

But all the incidents pale beside the experiences she went through in her own house.

The man who lived there had slaughtered his family and then killed himself

Monica moved to the Netherlands in 1973, and lived with her husband and two children in a pretty village near the border with Germany and Belgium.

It was a quaint house, with a fireplace in every room and a rambling garden. It had a huge, sombre attic, with a wooden floor that was so warped and buckled that furniture had to be tied to the wall to stop it from sliding away.

It was really no surprise that the house would settle imperceptibly, creaking and cracking its ancient, wooden joints.

They were the sort of noises you would hear in any large, old house.

They certainly did not explain why Monica found it so hard to find babysitters. None of the girls recommended to her would accept to stay in the house any later than 10 o’clock.

But they would refuse to say why, sheepishly blaming it on homework or such, even though she knew that they often babysat for her neighbours through the night. Eventually, one admitted that the house had a reputation for “strange noises”.

And she began to wonder.

She had never felt quite alone in the house and would often find herself standing at her bedroom door, staring with morbid fascination at the closed attic door. She would shake herself, trying to convince herself that there was no one on the other side of it.

But one night, she wondered whether her instinct was right. Maybe there was someone there.

She woke up, cold and suddenly wide awake. There was a shadow in her doorway. She fumbled in the dark for her glasses and quickly put them on.

A young woman, in her late 20s, was floating in the doorway, filling the space in a nebulous cloud, a diaphanous veil drifting in the air around her.

Blinking furiously, Monica shook her sleeping husband. He snored once and turned over, pulling the blankets tighter around him. She pushed and shook him but he remained resolutely asleep.

The figure drifted away. She looked first at the empty doorway and then at her sleeping husband. She must have dreamt it. She must have.

To be continued next week

This is the 46th in a series of short stories The Sunday Times of Malta is running every Sunday. It is taken from The Unexplained Plus (Allied Publications) by Vanessa Macdonald. The first edition was published in 2001 and reprinted twice. It was republished, with added stories, as The Unexplained Plus. The Maltese version of the book, Ta’ Barra Minn Hawn (Klabb Kotba Maltin), is available from all leading bookstores and stationers and from www.bdlbooks.com.

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