A Presence
Thre are times when, lying in the dark and aware that my body, for a moment or two, is not signaling its shortcomings, I sense a presence sharing the room with me.
I’m not particularly religious, but I do think there are a multitude of powers much larger than me and that, occasionally, they like to flex their muscles.
This visiting manifestation bears me no malice, but neither is it benign. It is simply there for a second or two. I sense that it is feminine, perhaps because it is that gender that brings life. It has neither voice nor physicality. It simply is, and I’ve persuaded myself that may be a woman I have known.
Literature, legend, and folklore are chock-full of apparitions that often bode ill—think of Dickens’ Scrooge and his encounters with Christmases past and future. These presences speak and warn of a dire future. Mine, luckily, does not. It offers a moment or two of silent companionship, then evanesces.
As a child in France, I often spent weekends in St. Germain, a suburb of Paris. The house my family and I occupied had been built in the 16th century and had neither electricity nor water. It was narrow with creaking stairs and crumbling plaster. More important, it was, according to my mother, haunted by the ghost of a long-ago ancestor who had perished in the French Revolution. The woman, whose name I never learned, had been a royalist and met her fate during one of the riots that led to the demise of Louis XVI and his family. I never saw or heard the St. Germain ghost, and I doubt that she crossed the Atlantic to haunt my one-bedroom apartment. Plus, we share political affiliations. I’m a royalist too.
Ghosts aside, I’m curious to know if sensing a bodiless presence nearby is age related. Is it a common experience among us older folks?
I’m not particularly religious, but I do think there are a multitude of powers much larger than me and that, occasionally, they like to flex their muscles.
This visiting manifestation bears me no malice, but neither is it benign. It is simply there for a second or two. I sense that it is feminine, perhaps because it is that gender that brings life. It has neither voice nor physicality. It simply is, and I’ve persuaded myself that may be a woman I have known.
Literature, legend, and folklore are chock-full of apparitions that often bode ill—think of Dickens’ Scrooge and his encounters with Christmases past and future. These presences speak and warn of a dire future. Mine, luckily, does not. It offers a moment or two of silent companionship, then evanesces.
As a child in France, I often spent weekends in St. Germain, a suburb of Paris. The house my family and I occupied had been built in the 16th century and had neither electricity nor water. It was narrow with creaking stairs and crumbling plaster. More important, it was, according to my mother, haunted by the ghost of a long-ago ancestor who had perished in the French Revolution. The woman, whose name I never learned, had been a royalist and met her fate during one of the riots that led to the demise of Louis XVI and his family. I never saw or heard the St. Germain ghost, and I doubt that she crossed the Atlantic to haunt my one-bedroom apartment. Plus, we share political affiliations. I’m a royalist too.
Ghosts aside, I’m curious to know if sensing a bodiless presence nearby is age related. Is it a common experience among us older folks?
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