Ghosts

I received an email the other day, and it was from someone calling themselves simply 'Peter' (it wasn't really that name, but it will do for the sake of this post) who has obviously been following my blogs, albeit anonymously. He said that he had been reading about what he called 'ghostly goings-on' at my childhood home in previous posts, and attached a video which he said I would find very interesting if I concentrated on it carefully, mentioning all sorts of guff about the death of Princess Diana as a prelude.

Of course, I didn't open the attachment for fear of some nutter sending me some dreadful trojan virus or whatever - these Macs are pretty good at keeping that sort of thing out, but not 100% invulnerable.

Instead, I copied the identification of the attachment into You Tube, and it came up with that fake car advert of a new, white car peacefully winding it's way down a leafy, country road to soothing music, when all of a sudden a ghoulish face pops up accompanied with an ear-splitting scream. I had already seen it, and even the first time it didn't make me jump (my dad would have been as proud as Bela Lugosi).

So I replied to his message saying a limp 'ha ha' or whatever, and that I'd already seen it, then he sent another message with the following cryptic information:

"Shame, I enjoy a good laugh.

On a more serious note - I am very much a sceptic in the paranormal, etc., but I have this lady friend who claims to be really in touch with those sort of things. Others say she is amazing but I have my doubts.

She tells me she is in tune with your blog (she was the one that drew me to it) and that if you send the name of any of the rooms in the house you mention she will produce a floor plan that will be at least 90% accurate. She also says she can produce a plan of the garden showing exactly where the gardener was shot as she further claims 'contact'!

I would like to prove her wrong as I believe life is too short to be absorbed with such things and when you're dead you're dead, so it's over to you."

I said, go ahead then, send me a plan, which he did in a short while. The plan - though crude - was extremely accurate, and although I had no real idea exactly where the gardener was shot, it did know of the location of a drain nearby, which could not have been ascertained from the photos of the house posted on my blogs, with the position of a thatched 'summer house' which he described as a 'shed' in his message.

I have to say that I was impressed, so asked him to ask her if she could pin-point the location of an illegal flick-knife which I buried as a child, somewhere on the map, about 8 feet in depth.

Soon, Peter came back with a verbal description of the precise position of the knife, saying that she said it was 6 feet down, not 8, and that there were other weapons hidden about the site which she had picked up on.

Peter said that he belonged to a group of about 20 researchers attached to a university, and implied he was sceptical about his colleague's abilities up until this point. He also implied that he would never reveal his true identity, and advised me not to blog about it - later saying that it would not matter, since nobody would believe me anyway. He said that the only thing he knew about me was my real name. Hmm...

He had said that he - as a non-paranormal researcher - had access to vast amounts of military records, and would tell me about my father's and his brother's true exploits in the war, adding that I might not like what I heard. For some reason, I would have to wait a few days for this information. I said that I had thought that he might be out to con me (as if!) but he assured me that they were making no money from it at all.

"You do not appear to be the gullible type and have a strong sense of self protection and preservation so I am quite sure that continuing with you, should you wish to do so, will not cause you problems if you bear in mind the above. Besides that, you appear to be entering the first stage of the Victor Meldrew complex.

Just as your real name is not Tom, or even Stephenson, mine is not Peter. The only thing is I now know your real name, but you will never (or should never) know mine. If you choose to continue at the very least you may bury a few demons (or create some) but will have a very interesting blog to write about. Some will become spellbound, but most will treat it with a pinch of salt so it won't become a threat to us.

I will pass on your Witchy responses later tomorrow when she responds and would be grateful for your feedback over how accurate the information is, and, as I said before, I will forward on the military details as soon as I can in the next couple of days."

So I went to bed - the 'medium' (who I had dubbed 'Witchy-Poo) was getting tired anyway, like me.

Then I woke up in the middle of the night, and - as so often happens after a little sleep in the small hours - experienced a moment of lucidity. I suddenly knew who 'Peter' really was. I went downstairs and turned on the computor to find this:

"Hi Tom

One further point, I have just noticed an email to me from Witchy sent just after I spoke to her regarding the knife.

She says that as there does not appear to be any serious crime involved with the knife it is hard to 'lock-on' as this is where her concentrations have been attuned to go. She suspects it is an innocuous reason, most probably brought back from abroad on a school trip. She does say, however, that a policeman was involved in its burial if that makes any sense?

Regards, Peter"

This confirmed my suspicions. Only two obvious people knew about the hole in the ground (dug for drainage purposes near the lawn of the house): the policeman that helped us dig it, who was a paying lodger at the house all those years ago, and my long-lost brother who knew I had thrown the knife in it before it was filled. I had bought the flick-knife on a school holiday to Switzerland, and only he knew it existed.

I sent 'Peter' a message at about 3.30 this morning expecting the reply I eventually received saying that he did not know what I was talking about. This was further confirmation, since all his adult life, he has been a pathelogical liar and con-artist and - without going into too many details on this blog - it has landed him in prison more than once, as he knew it surely would.

His technique in the old days worked on the principal that the more often you repeat a blatant lie, the more likely it is to be accepted as the truth (after a while, most ordinary people who are not prosecuting lawyers run out of energy), but the fantastically complicated scenarios that the lie was built around would inevitably lead to detection in the long-run. The basis of this particular lie was so simple that it too would inevitably be discovered, but the motives for it are more complex.

He could not stop himself from this sort of behaviour, for which the rest of his family - including his long-suffering parents - felt genuinely sorry for him. My sisters and brothers-in-law were the last to give up on him, finally telling him to stop hanging around outside their houses feeling sorry for himself, and the last time I saw him was at our father's deathbed, over 20 years ago. He did not attend his mother's funeral - he didn't even know about her death until he turned up about a year after it had occurred. Our mother blamed herself for his state of mind right up until the end.

Naturally worried about him, one of my sisters has made repeated attempts to find out if he was ok - or even still alive - by accessing the vast database of records she had when she was working for a government office. He did not show up on any of them. Well now he has shown up here. For various reasons, it is easy to find out who I am if you can really be arsed - as I have said before - and it would be even easier to find me on government records, but that would take half the fun out of it, wouldn't it, Peter? How about commenting on this post to refute any of the above? Somehow, I don't think you will.

I am sorry this post is not a barrel of laughs, or even that entertaining, but it is a good example of why it is sometimes best to keep a few skeletons in the cupboard by assuming a very flimsy veil of anonymity. The subject title of his emails to me is 'Ghosts'. You can say that again.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.