Monica said nothing about her strange sighting, writing it off to herself as a dream, provoked by her babysitter’s talk of noises. But it was not that easy to explain away the next two times she saw the strange, translucent character hovering in the corridor outside her bedroom. Those times, she had been wide awake.

She was evidently not alone in her sensitivity.

A girlfriend once came to her house for a chat and walked straight out again, unable to explain why she felt stifled, unable to breathe.

Her teenaged brother came to stay with them and offered to babysit. When Monica and her husband came back, she found all the lights of the house switched on. He had gone to sleep in one of the kid’s rooms, fully clothed.

“The noises,” he shrugged.

One year, she was planning to visit her family in Malta and roped a male friend into watering their plants. She was really quite surprised when she returned a few weeks later and found that all the plants were dead. He was a reliable sort of person and she preferred to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But even she was not prepared for his story.

“Man, I don’t know what you have in your house,” he said, trying hard to sound blasé about it. “But it sure doesn’t like me.”

He explained that as he was pottering around downstairs, he heard footsteps going up into the attic. Not one to allow his imagination to run away with him, he headed upstairs. But when he flung open the door, all he could see were the indistinct shapes of furniture, their edges blurred under dustsheets. The attic was utterly silent, nothing moved. He turned back, shaking his head and reprimanding himself for allowing his imagination to get the better of him. But as soon as he picked up the watering can, he heard the footsteps again. And then again.

I don’t know what you have in your house… but it sure doesn’t like me

Until then, he had managed to shrug off the strange sensation. But the third time proved too much even for him. He heard the attic door open and close and then the footsteps slowly but surely could be heard coming down the stairs.

“I’m sorry,” he shrugged. “But that’s when I said ‘adios’ and legged it out of there.”

But strangely enough, whatever the apparition was did not have the same effect on Moni­ca. She actually felt filled by a tremendous feeling of well-being whenever she saw the image or heard any strange noises. Perhaps whatever it was only reacted against outsiders.

She tried hard to find an explanation for the apparition but the house did not seem to have any history of trauma. There was only one possible explanation that nagged at the back of her mind.

The village had been one of the innocent war casualties and had suffered at the hands of bombers bound for towns on the German border. Many of the two-storey houses had been hit, and because of the shortage of wood, parts of the older houses had been cannibalised to build their replacements or to repair them.

Perhaps the ghost had been brought to the house in the remnants of another? And there the story would have ended.

Monica would probably have never said anything to me about the story, after all these years. But some 10 years later, once they had moved out of the house, her husband jokingly brought up the subject of the strange noises.

“You know, I think maybe there was a ghost,” he said tentatively. “I think I may have seen it. One night I woke up suddenly and saw the shape of a woman in the doorway to our bedroom.

“It didn’t seem at all intimidating and I tried to wake you, but you just wouldn’t wake up. You must have been really deeply asleep, because I really shook you,” he continued.

“I guess I was probably just dreaming.”

Concluded. The first part was published on March 21.

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.