This is a true ghost story, but it is also a story of
how we readily change our ethics to suit a situation and the excuses we make
for it, because all addictions are crutches.
Like a lot of people from my generation, I started
smoking in high school. It was cool to hang with the gang just outside the
school gates, smoking cigarettes, especially those pilfered from an unattended
parent pack.
Jump a generation into the future and it’s just not
cool to smoke any more, period. The last handful of a soon to be extinct social
group, smokers have descended to Leper status.
I gave up when I fell pregnant with my first child,
completely out of duty. It never entered my head that one day in the future I
would smoke once again. Completely impossible-Nada, never, no way!
18 years later, a day after New Year’s Eve, not long
after my beloved father died, sitting somewhat lonely on the back step outside
the most haunted house I would ever live in, I struck up a cigarette.
I had chosen a Winfield Blue from the array of packets
before me. 6 of my friends had the night before held true to their resolutions
and handed me their packets of unused cigarettes to dispose of. I was the most
convicted non-smoker they knew. I never realised how much of a turncoat I truly
was.
Really, all I wanted was an excuse not to go inside. I
never believed in smoking indoors, in cars etc.
If I was smoking, I couldn’t go inside could I?
The light was fading, my head was spinning; deep breaths
in and long breaths out, in between the coughing & spluttering, the bile of
acid rose in my stomach to greet my windpipe with a punch. Ah! Still it was heaven,
albeit, a long forgotten one.
The kids were at their dad’s for the weekend, and I
alone except for the ‘others’, no one would know of my naughtiness. I had
enough stash to keep me outside all night.
I must have fallen asleep at some
time.
As the first rays of light hit my face and my neck was
stiff from leaning against the back door, I heard a crunching munching noise in
front of me. One sticky eye opens to a rather large bull chomping on my
marigolds a couple of metres away. He was staring right at me.
At that moment I was more scared of this massive beast
than I was of the ghostly squatters that occupied the house with us.
I wasn’t to know that Henry, the neighbour’s bull, was
rather tame - I was a city girl recently turned country.
I slid up the door ever so slowly, holding panic at
bay, till I reached the handle and fell backwards into the house, kicking the
door shut with my foot as I lay on the ground. My stash of cigarettes left
behind on the doorstep. Damn!
A phone call revealed that my neighbour wasn’t home.
Henry thought my backyard was a feast and wasn’t willing to leave anytime soon.
If I hadn’t been smoking I would have cried at the devastation of the lost
flowers, ripped out grass and the huge pats of steaming dung, but I was more
concerned on how to get my precious smokes.
No amount of shooing, booing and
banging saucepan lids together from the sanctuary of the kitchen window would
get Henry to move back to the paddocks.
Great, I have only been smoking for a few hours &
I am already going through the anxiety of withdrawal.
An hour later as Henry finally turned his head from
the direction of the back door step, I opened the door with slow motion
stealth, crept down the step, bundled up the packets in my arms and started to
crawl backwards keeping an eye on Henry at all times. I raced out to the front
veranda and lit up, enjoying it like a treasure hunter finally finding his
gold. There was even a euphoric high five jump in the air.
Dry mouthed, I hungered for a cup of tea, but it was
such an enterprise to make one. The ‘others’ & I would play on/off tag over
& over with the kettle, every time I switched it on, they switched it off.
The first time it happened I thought it was the
kettle, so I purchased a new one. It took 4 days after moving in to realise it
wasn’t a case of a faulty kettle. No wonder the house had been on the market
for over 2 years, empty & hastily abandoned by its previous short- term
owners.
Most days I remembered to put a saucepan of water on
the stove to boil, which it seemed they didn’t have any control over. This
particular morning I turned the kettle on. 2 seconds later it switched itself
off. Sigh.
Smokers have a higher level of Serotonin, which induces
more Dutch courage than a non-smoker, which is why, when this time the kettle
clicked itself off, I let out a string of aggressive threats to my ethereal
residents, frightening them into absolute silence & inactivity for 2 days,
beginning with the kettle switching back on immediately!
Well! That’s more like it.
Mind you though, the threats only worked the one time.
If I was thinking that screaming threats of laying rock salt on the floors and
drenching the house in holy water would permanently evict the house of its
ghostly tenants, I was sadly mistaken.
Ghosts are not like children; you can’t bluff them as
easily.
From that day onwards, now that I had renewed my secret love
affair with cigarettes again, I really wanted all the kids in bed by 8.30 so
that I could have as much time as possible to spend with my little white cancer
sticks. My days tragically changed to counting the hours down till we could
meet again.
Smoking seemed to inject a shot of tenacious, enduring
courage.
I no longer felt the fear of leaving the kids in my bedroom
where we now all slept, shivering with angst as the footsteps of the unseen
could be heard along the hallway, or the echoes of long ago conversations filtering
through the house, or even when the hairy-backed man with woeful vocals took
the liberty of sharing a shower with my 5 year old son.
So many nights I would hear his ear piercing scream “MUM
HE’S IN THE SHOWER AGAIN” meant that I would have to stub out my half used cigarette,
with a long drawn in breath in frustration. Once I called back having only just
lit my smoke “Just close your eyes, I’ll be there in a minute!”
7.5 minutes later I walked into the bathroom finding
my little son cowering in the corner sobbing under his wet towel. I could feel
with horrible guilt the words ‘worlds worst mum’ being tattooed on my forehead
with red-hot flames.
I certainly had my priorities wrong. From then on, I dutifully
waited with him in the shower & until he had actually fallen asleep each
night before sneaking off to my smoky tryst.
For the 6 months that we lived on the isolated property
before I started to smoke again, I would have never, ever set foot outside once
it became dark, and never near the granny flat where I had set up my fledgling
business. Each afternoon I would lock the door as I walked towards the house
and padlock the wrought iron gate heralding it’s entrance. Each night without
fail we would hear footsteps stomping down the path, the gate squeak open and
the banging of the granny flat door. Some nights, an eerie unexplainable blue
light could be seen emanating from inside the workshop.
That area was also the only place that I could smoke
undetected. Hiding my contraband under an upturned pot next to the house, I was
well within the shadows to have a smoke or few each evening. The first few
times, I had my back to the wall, my eyes darting sideways with a certain
amount of apprehension, it seemed our ‘granny flat’ residents didn’t like the
smell of smoke, as it was a very long time before we heard the nightly ritual
again.
I wondered if I should do the same for the house. The
risk of being caught smoking by the kids? Hmm, no way!
Each weekend as the kids left to stay with their father,
I moved my smoking spot to the back door step and late into the night, inside
the house. The feral animals that moved around the peripheral edge of the bush
scrub in the daytime would creep closer to the house late at night. A timid,
petite woman alone was fair game.
Many a night I lay awake listening to the animals rummaging
outside the house or the ghosts doing their own thing or dealing with the nocturnal
animal problem themselves.
I swear one night, alone in the house shivering with
terror under my blankets listening to what seemed to be a feral dog clawing at
the back door, one of the male ghosts shouted out “Get out of here you f***ing
mangy dog!” and possibly the sound of a gun shot thereafter. I sat bolt
upright, not at all sure what I heard was real or not. I must have smoked the
entire packet before dawn, but at least the house was ‘quiet’ for the remainder.
My weekends became a smoky sleepless affair.
There would come a time when the kids would find out. The
stale ashtray smell hovering around my persona should have betrayed me much
earlier or maybe the kids were in denial, that their mum was less than perfect.
One night, squished between 2 sleeping beauties, a
snoring buffoon and a fecund farting arse, I just couldn’t sleep out of sheer
discomfort. Leaving the jungle of 4 bodies behind, I headed for the kitchen.
On my way I passed a watery apparition in the hall. I
took one look at it and snarled “Not now!”
The kitchen light was on, even though I had turned it
off before bed, but that was nothing unusual.
Down in one of the abandoned
bedrooms I could hear a stereo softly playing, even though it wasn’t plugged
in, but that was nothing unusual either.
I chuckled when I recognised the tune
“Keep on Moving” by a boy band called Five. I even found myself singing along.
I perched myself up on the bench, lit a smoke while
waiting for the saucepan of water to boil when the shower in my bedroom ensuite
started and the hairy backed man with the woeful vocals commenced his dreadful repertoire.
All 4 kids came running out faster than superman, one after the other. Huey,
Dewey, Louie & Moe stood before me with mouths agape, and I, mid puff. Oh
crap, sprung.
Arguments arose from all 4 mouths that turned into a
cacophony of sound, what no one realised was that the wannabe opera singer and
the boy band down the other end of the house had completely stopped.
It took a great deal of convincing my offspring that by
me smoking bought a few precious hours of peace each night. I was almost going
to mention that by my sacrifice to a life of smoking, I would be protecting my
darling loved ones from the perils of a supernatural force. I thought that
might be going a little too far.
It wasn’t until I mentioned the very obvious fact that
in ghost movies, it’s only the people that don’t have a smoke in their hands
that get attacked. You never see anyone puffing away get done over by a ghost. The
fact that considering our current living arrangement, our poverty meant we
didn’t have a TV and even if we did, I wouldn’t allow them to watch horror
ghost movies anyway, they logically believed me.
It took sensible daughter to question what was funding
my vice? The then $8.95 packet of cigarettes would buy milk & bread for us
for the week. We had a strict budget, I cringed, um, I had scrimped on other
things?
The funny thing about addictions is that no matter how
impoverished one is, there is always money to buy the addictive substance. I
still can’t figure out how I managed it, being a single mum of 4 kids, a uni
student and making only meagre portions of money to sustain us all, yet we
survived.
We had everything money couldn’t buy – Poverty, Love,
and a uniquely large collection of ghosts.
The locals, as they had done with all the previous
tenants, laid down their bets as to how long we would stay. After a year they
were left scratching their heads “Strewth! No one has lasted this long!”
As long as there wasn’t any strange red slime dripping
down the walls, we were staying put.
We never indulged the locals how many times we packed
the car ready to leave. The times we all sat quietly listening to ghostly
conversations, ghostly sweet laughter of a once happy child, sharing showers
with apparitions, how the lights would brutally flicker for long agonising moments. The
list of so many other disturbing occurrences was so long it would take a month
of blue Monday’s to read through.
The strange thing was when I met my future husband;
whenever he visited the house it was completely quiet. He never once
experienced anything, zip, zilch, nix!
“Are you sure this house is haunted?” questioning our
experiences.
I asked him to move in.
The moment his belongings arrived the haunting
completely ceased to exist.
The next 3 years, life became normal until our baby
came along. Within the month after her birth the ghostly occupants became
active again or returned home, even hubby’s dog Pollie experienced the bathroom
ghost. Never saw the dog move so fast out of the house with her tail between
her legs.
I’m not sure whether it was because we had both stopped
smoking due to the baby, but hubby seriously suggested we move.
“I don’t know if the dog can take it much longer”
cradling the whimpering large dog in his arms. I’m glad he didn’t call her
Lionheart or something similar, which would have been rather embarrassing.
With that we packed up the family and moved to
normality.
Out of revenge I chose the same realtor to act as
leasing agent. She suggested a few times if I had considered using a new agent
down the road. Letting her know with a large Cheshire smile, I had been so impressed with her previous service I couldn't think to use anyone else, she paled.
Filling out the forms, she automatically ticked
non-smoking tenants. “Darling” I intervened, “I actually prefer smokers. The
survival rate is higher”
She gulped.
Postscript.
All families go through tough times at one stage or another. I'm quite sure just like my own family, there are many stories to tell, as diverse & as varied as there are people that walk this wonderful planet.
The most important relationships we have stem from the families we create. Families are the people that we gather around us, people that we share our lives with, related or not. Families are our real crutches in life, once that is acknowledged any addiction can be overcome.
Enjoy!
Another blog written smoke free by a Haunted House Survivor. All photo's have been gratefully sourced from Google Images
*Scoop up bag of little
Easter eggs and torch.
The Easter Egg hunt! - 
