Three Ghost Stories

I’m a big fan of the That Chapter podcast, which I listen to most days when I’m out on my run, and hosts Mike and Keith regularly record Listener Story episodes where they read out spooky and scary true stories from their listeners. I’ve been meaning to send in a story of my own for a while, but I didn’t think I had anything interesting to tell them about.

Then I realised that I had three different things, each of which was too short to be a listener story in its own right. I had to figure out a way to bring the three of them together.

You can judge for yourself whether I was successful.

***

Greetings, Mike and Keith!

My name’s Dane, and today’s story is a three-parter of sorts, revolving around the weird, ghostly connection I seem to have with my dad. Let’s give it a goo.

The first story took place when I was so young that I don’t remember it, but it’s one of the few things that both of my parents agree on.

We used to live in an old, old house in a tiny, tiny village. One night, after my parents had put me to bed, they heard me talking to someone. Given that there were only three of us in the house and this was back in the early 90s, before kids were raised with a smartphone in one hand and a tablet in the other, that seemed unusual.

My dad drew the short straw and went upstairs to check on me, and as he pushed open the door to my room, he peered through the darkness and saw a young girl sitting on the end of my bed. She had a pale face and big, brown eyes that were nearly all pupil, and she was wearing an old-fashioned floral dress. My dad later said that she looked Victorian. Must’ve been the pallor.

He was shocked, of course, and his instinct was to reach out for the light switch and to flick them on. In the split second it took for his eyes to adjust, the little Victorian girl disappeared.

I, meanwhile, was lying wide awake in my bed, staring across the room at him. When he asked me what I was doing, I told him I was “playing with the little girl”.

We moved out of that house shortly afterwards.

My parents got divorced when I was six or seven years old, and I ended up splitting my time between them. I don’t remember much about that time (apparently it’s because I have trauma, howboutdat?), but I do remember one night in particular when I was about eight years old.

My dad and I both have bad nightmares, but while I just grunt and whimper in my sleep, he has a habit of groaning. It sounds like someone doing a bad impression of a zombie.

That night, I’d been reading Attack of the Mutant, one of the Goosebumps books by R. L. Stine, which featured a bad guy who could change his shape at will. When my dad started his zombie act that night, it woke me up—and I promptly experienced my first ever case of sleep paralysis.

I was trapped in my own body, lying on my side and watching the shadows on the wall as various everyday objects just out of my sight morphed into human shadows and moved around before morphing back again, while the sound of the living dead filtered in through the thin, council house walls.

We moved out of that house shortly afterwards, too. Thank God, because I was so scared to go to sleep that I stayed awake most nights until the sun peeked over the horizon.

The third and final part of the story is the scariest, although it didn’t happen until 20 years later and so I’d grown from being a scared little kid to being a scared little adult. I still think about it most nights after I turn the lights out.

I’d just broken up with my girlfriend at the time and had accepted an offer from my dad to fly out to Spain with him. He had a holiday home out there that needed some work, and so he paid for my flight and food in exchange for me putting in a couple hours’ work every morning.

That work mostly took the form of going beneath the house into a crawl space full of rubble that had been left over by construction workers. I had to scoop the rubble into buckets and then drag it back out through a knee-high hole in the wall, where my dad was loading it into sacks that we’d later throw into the back of a hire car and dump into what I’m pretty sure were public bins.

Does anyone know the Spanish word for fly tipping?

The crawl space was dark and dirty, and even at six o’clock in the morning, it was too hot to wear anything more than a pair of shorts and some grubby trainers. I had to find my way around with a cheap flashlight.

I’d been doing this for the best part of a week and had slept like a log each night, but then I woke up one morning with that all-familiar sleep paralysis. I could hear my dad in the room beside mine, doing his best Spanish zombie impression. The sun was on the horizon, and enough light was filtering into the room that I could clearly see my surroundings. I was alone in there.

And then the voice said, “GET OUT.”

It had a weird quality to it as though it was speaking in two different octaves at once, or perhaps in the Devil’s Chord that Hendrix used at the start of Purple Haze. It had a lower pitch that was almost like a growl, and a higher one that was more like a scream.

The only other way I can think of to describe it is to say that it was in bold and all caps, but without an exclamation point. It was a voice that didn’t shout because it didn’t need to. It knew it would be heard.

It said it again: “GET OUT.” And then a third time: “GET OUT.”

By that time, I was fully awake, although I couldn’t move. I could still hear my dad groaning in the room beside me, and so I knew it wasn’t him. When I asked him about it after he woke up, he said that he hadn’t heard the voice but that he’d had a nightmare that we’d found a body in the rubble below the house.

I didn’t hear the voice again. I just lay there in my bed, willing my body to move, until eventually I could move my toes, then my fingers, and then the rest of my body. I knew that I hadn’t been dreaming because other than the passage of time, there was no interval between when I heard the voice and when I was able to climb out of bed and get the hell out of there. I didn’t “wake up” because I was already awake.

Needless to say, we didn’t do any more work in that crawl space. And just like those other two times, my dad sold the property soon afterwards.

I tried giving it a Google, but I couldn’t find anything about a body being found in a crawlspace, although a four-year-old kid drowned in a swimming pool and a Lithuanian drug dealer was shot dead on his doorstep, both within eighteen months and less than a mile from the place.

So I guess we got off lucky.

That’s it for now, maybe because these days, I only see my dad in the daytime. Even after clearly hearing that voice and having no explanation for it, I don’t believe in ghosts.

But maybe ghosts believe in me.

Sin é,

Dane

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