Photo by Vincent Nguyen on Pexels.
Writing inspired by the following SWC prompt:
Tell the story of a childhood ghost.
My Childhood Ghost
by Keith Gray
I want you to imagine the fuzzy glass of a bathroom window. This window looks out onto a square back garden. It’s nighttime. Now imagine a 7 year-old boy standing in the bathroom in front of the window cleaning his teeth before bedtime. He’s in his favourite pyjamas – they have Muppets on them. The boy is cleaning his teeth and staring out at the shapes of an apple tree and a garden shed. Of course, he can’t see them properly, can’t see them clearly, because of the fuzzy glass and the fact that it’s dark out in the garden while it’s bright in the bathroom. But the boy has lived in this house all his life so knows exactly what those softened silhouettes out there are. Then he sees another shape – blurry in the darkness, towards the back of the garden. And this shape shouldn’t be there. The boy feels sharp but tickling cold on the back of his neck. Someone is out there. A man. There’s a man in the garden. Standing there, unmoving, silent, staring back at the boy: watching him.
I was that 7-year-old boy. And this is a true story.
I grew up in a new-build suburb. My parents were the first people ever to live in the house (it was actually a bungalow, no upstairs), they watched it being built and were married one week before they moved in. I appeared only a few years later.
My dad was proud to own a new home but, weirdly, was never quite satisfied with the house itself. He was forever redecorating. He moved from room to room – new wallpaper in the bedroom, then new carpet in the living room, then new cupboards in the kitchen, then painting the ceiling in the dining room… My mum was regularly annoyed that there was always one room in the house that was a mess and out-of-bounds as it was being ‘done-up’. And I don’t think my parents always agreed on the definition of tasteful interior design. I mean, this was the 1970s, officially the decade that taste forgot, but my dad was a little too keen on fashionable wallpaper. I had lime green wallpaper in my bedroom, with purple triangles on it. In the living room the wallpaper my dad had chosen was orange flowers, bigger than your head. And, yes, we even had wallpaper in the bathroom. It was this geometrical, repeating pattern of slender brown blocks and wobbly yellow circles – maybe abstract sunshines? My best friend Eddie told me that if he stayed too long in our house the wallpaper made his eyes go funny and sometimes even made him want to puke. In hindsight, maybe I should have been more scared of my dad’s taste in wallpaper than I was of spooky figures in the garden.
It was a friendly suburb where I grew up, with lots of young families like mine, so lots of kids my age with whom to play. The local park, with swings, slide, duck pond and football pitch, was at the end of my road. Me and my mates rode our BMXs everywhere.
Everything felt safe and ‘normal’. But even as a little kid I was very easily bored. I had a massive imagination. I was obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster, and UFOs, and especially ghosts. But you didn’t get ghosts in a 1970’s new-built suburb. You needed derelict mansions in the woods or creepy castles. Bungalows were rubbish when it came to ghosts. I wished and wished so hard that we lived in a haunted monastery with headless monks.
I believed I was brave. I’d read so many books and comics about ghosts that I reckoned I knew what to expect if I ever saw one. I told myself I was fascinated but not scared. But on that night when I saw the blurry figure, the outline of a man, dark clothes and round, pale face, watching me through the bathroom window, I screamed.
My dad was watching TV in the living room. He came charging through to the bathroom so fast at the sound of my screaming that he almost crashed the door right off its hinges. ‘A ghost,’ I yelled. ‘A ghost in the garden.’ And I must have looked all sorts of terrified – wild-eyed, shaking, and foaming at the mouth thanks to the toothpaste.
My dad didn’t believe in ghosts. He was the one who’d always told me that ghosts only hang around really old buildings, not new ones like ours. No way did he think the man in our garden was a spirit or ghoul. He was quick to switch the bathroom light off, so that no one could see inside, and sprinted outside looking for the intruder. I could see my dad’s fuzzy silhouette through the glass dashing around out there, from the apple tree to the shed and back again. But the intruder – the ghost – had vanished.
My mum cuddled me in bed that night. I couldn’t sleep. And my dad took away my latest book on poltergeists that I was reading – he gave me an Enid Blyton book to read instead. Both of my parents, however, were worried. I could tell. In hindsight, they’d been worried that it was a real-live person in the garden, not a spooky dead one. The problem was, whoever it was, whatever it was, it came back the following night.
In fact, the shape, the figure, the ghost, came back every night for the rest of the week. And every night I’d call my dad, and every night he’d check the garden, and every night there was no one and nothing to be found. I know he looked for footprints. I know he asked the next-door neighbours if they’d noticed anyone sneaking around. I know he wondered if it was maybe my own reflection I could see, or even if I was making it up. But I was obviously too scared to be lying. When I stood at that bathroom window, I swear, I could see a figure at the bottom of the garden staring back at me. Yes, blurry and indistinct – I couldn’t make out their actual features on their pale, round face – but they definitely weren’t wearing Muppet pyjamas. All of my bravado and reckoning that I wanted to see a ghost… Now that I actually had one haunting me, stalking me, I was terrified.
But 7 year-old me was the only one who could see this figure. Which was simply more proof to me that it was a ghost. My parents tried to calm me down but I refused to go into the bathroom at night. I started getting washed and cleaning my teeth at the kitchen sink at bedtime. And the worst thing for me was that my own bedroom window looked out into the back garden too. Not that I could see the ghost from my bedroom, I could only ever see it from the bathroom window. But as I tried to get to sleep at night, I reckoned the dark, blurry figure would be lurking in the garden just outside my bedroom. As I curled up under my duvet, I could feel it. Unmoving; just watching. I had horrible nightmares.
And, not only did I not want to get washed or clean my teeth in the bathroom, but I also refused to use the toilet in there too. I wanted a bucket next to my bed that I could pee into. This went too far for my mum, when she came to get me up for school one morning and accidentally kicked over my bucket of piss.
There was actually a really easy and really boring solution. From supernatural to super-practical. My dad fitted a blind above the window in the bathroom. You know, one of those pull-down roller-blinds? So I could stumble into the bathroom with my eyes closed, reach up and quickly yank the blind down before I had to even look out of the window. Like I say: easy, boring, but it worked.
I mean, I knew, I could still feel the ghost standing there at the back of the garden watching, staring. But I couldn’t see it. And as the weeks, then months went by, I more or less forgot about it. I got older, and began to worry less about Loch Ness Monsters, UFOs and ghosts, I suppose. In fact, in all honesty, I forgot about the figure in the garden completely. Until I was 11 years old, and my dad decided it was high time to redecorate the bathroom. He brought in his tools and ladder, and he removed the roller blind. Instantly, the ghost in the garden was back. Right there between the apple tree and the shed. Still watching me. It had been waiting all these years.
I was 11, older and I thought wiser, and now genuinely more curious than scared. I didn’t tell my parents it was back, or still there. Instead, at night, I talked to it. I asked it what it wanted. I asked it if it was maybe an omen, or a messenger? Did it have a message for me? I wondered why it had chosen to be seen by me, and no one else. It didn’t look exactly the same as I remembered. Not quite so ‘human’. A big, pale, round head on a blocky, rectangular body. And although its shape was distorted, fuzzy, indistinct because of the bathroom window and the darkness of the garden, I still knew it was the exact same figure that had haunted me when I was 7. I asked it if it needed help travelling to the ‘other side’. I asked if I could help it to cross over.
And yet it was my dad, again, who finally helped it to go. Remember I told you about his terrible taste in wallpaper? Remember I said the bathroom wallpaper was big brownish rectangles, with yellow circles sitting above them? That’s exactly what my ghost was. There was a particular circle and upright block, that by chance were placed in such a way, that when I stood in one position were reflected over my shoulder into the window. What with the overhead light, and the fuzzy glass, and the darkness outside, the wallpaper pattern was reflected blurred-up, merged together. Somehow, to my 7 year-old imagination, that pale circle on the dark rectangle had become the shape of a person. A still, silent, watching person.
And just like I told you: maybe I should have been more frightened of my dad’s taste in wallpaper than of spooks or spirits. But, when my dad removed that scary bathroom wallpaper and painted the wall white, my childhood ghost could finally rest in peace.