When Erica first went to the house in Mdina, it was for a friend’s housewarming. She was only in Malta on holiday but the house felt immediately right to her. She could not get it out of her mind; she felt so welcome there…

A friend, sick of hearing about the house, had a brainwave and encouraged her to ask the owner whether he would be interested in letting her use it for a few weeks every year.

Erica was overjoyed when he said yes. In 1977, she finally stayed there alone for the first time. She found it impossible to explain why she loved the house. It was only small by Maltese standards, and the downstairs part, which dated back to the 13th century, was dark and gloomy, full of shadowy corners.

But it was not this foreboding ground floor which was haunted. It was upstairs. The first floor was older, having been added on after the earthquake in 1693.

Erica knew immediately which room was to be hers: a large room with oak beams, flooded with light from the central courtyard. It had a small annex at one end, which led to a narrow spiral staircase. She rea­lised with a grimace that the staircase was too narrow to be of practical use (she couldn’t ima­gine trying to negotiate the steps with a laden tea-tray) but that bedroom it was to be.

She soon found that someone else still thought of it as their favourite room.

One night, she was woken up by the sound of sweeping. It was a rough, grating sound, as though the person was using a birch broom. At first, lying there in the dark, she thought the noise night be the wind but it was a still, calm night. It was too regular and recognisable a sound to be written off as plumbing and it was certainly not coming from outside.

Who on earth would be sweeping in the early hours of the morning? Totally unafraid, she turned on the light. There was nothing, no one there. And the sound of sweeping stopped straight away. She waited for a few seconds, wondering if she had dreamed it all, but as soon as she turned off the light again, the rasping started yet again.

Over the years, she was to hear the noise over and over again. She never saw anyone in the room, but once, when a friend was staying with her, she went downstairs to clear away some of the cups and glasses from the bedroom and she is sure that she saw a dark figure walk through the kitchen. There was nothing beyond the room except the outside toilet.

She called up to her friend to make sure that it was not her she had seen.

“I’ve just seen something rather funny,” she said calmly.

She was quite worried that someone might have gotten into the house but the kitchen was empty, and so was the toilet. She shrugged it off without a second thought.

Over the years, other friends came to stay with her and many regularly heard the sweeping and rustling. Most of them found it very disturbing. No one could really understand why she felt so good about the house. Many of them shuddered and refused to go into the bedroom at all. The husband of one of her friends only made it as far as the bottom of her lane.

“Don’t you find it a depressing house?” she was constantly asked.

And she would always reply: “No, I love it!”

Her curiosity was aroused. She tried to find out whether there were any rumours connected with the house. All she could find out was that the children next door used to say that an old lady had once been pushed down the stairs by a ghost. She did find out that a lady had, in fact, fallen down the stairs and had been certain that she had been pushed. But nothing remotely sinister every happened to Erica.

A friend of hers was psychic. This seemed to encourage the ghost, which started whistling behind the visitor whenever she was standing in the kitchen. For the first time, footsteps were heard.

Erica and her friend were once at her neighbour’s house for tea and her friend said with a shudder that she was quite afraid of the house.

“Nonsense,” said the neighbour, “they wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Both Erica and her friend stopped mid-sentence and looked at the neighbour.

“So,” asked Erica. “You do know something…”

The neighbour looked sheepishly into her cup of tea.

“Well, perhaps the ghosts are trying to tell you something.”

One night, she was woken up by the sound of sweeping. It was a rough, grating sound

Apparently four people, a man and his three sisters, used to live in the house (the neighbour thought it might once have been a bakery) and that one after the other had passed away a few decades before and were buried in a small, nearby chapel.

The neighbour hesitated and then added: “I was in the church recently, arranging some flowers, when I noticed that their tomb had no candle on it.”

The parish priest looked up in surprise when Erica walked into the chapel carrying flowers and a votive candle. But he did not attempt to talk to her. No sooner had she laid them down on the grave of Mary Anna, one of the sisters, than her friend said that the mood in the house seemed to lighten.

But the house had more mundane problems than its ghost.

It was getting old and dilapidated and the time came when Erica had to think about moving out. The ceilings were leaking and one of the walls was collapsing into a nearby garden.

Erica was quite emotional about the inevitable parting. She had got used to the idea of someone standing behind her and had got used to simply turning and asking: “What is wrong?”

She would often go into the shadowy room at the back of the ground floor and sit in total, inky darkness, feeling calm and protected. But she had to move and the ghost responded to her emotion.

The pungent smell of incense wafted through the house as a sort of final gesture. She walked through the bedroom into the small room. The small slab in the corner was slightly more worn than the rest from countless night-time sweeps. It was not Mary Anna, she was sure of that. She, at least, was at peace.

And suddenly, the image flashed through her mind of some dark secret, perhaps some mentally disabled child who had long ago been left chained in the corner.

Once the image had been conjured up by her imagination, she could not get it out of her head. She fetched a small candle and lay it slowly on the floor, and suddenly it felt as though the oppressive feeling of that corner was sucked out of the house.

Was it all her imagination?

The house was still there the last time she came to Malta in the 1990s, albeit in an even worse state. She went to stand in front of it, unable to tear herself away from it completely.

Later that afternoon, she was sitting in a nearby tea-room and overheard some people talking about the house.

“What became of the haunted house?” they chattered.

She smiled to herself. To her, the ghost was far removed from the scary phantoms of people’s imaginations. It was part of that lovely house and she could understand why Mary Anna had left a part of herself behind her. Erica felt that she too had left a little part of herself sitting on the stairs, listening to the overflowing silence of the house.

This is the 27th 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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