How to start Smoking and Survive living in a Haunted house.

 

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