Samhain Spooks

Happy Halloween everyone!

So it's that time of year again, the night when the veil between our world and the next is at it's thinnest and the spooky things come out to play. Or at least in my street it's the night when the kids come knocking on my door looking for sweeties.

I must say I've had a few experiences with things that go bump in the night. My best friend's childhood home was definitely haunted.* There were at least two ghosts that enjoyed making life interesting for her family and their visitors. The first was actually in my best friends room, the second downstairs on the ground floor of the building.

She and her family had lived (and died) in this house for generations. A huge town house of at least 200 years in age they had revamped it so that they could run a business from the ground floor, with family bedrooms situated on the second level and the living room and kitchen on the third floor. My friend stayed in an apartment sized room in the attic, in what would have been the servant quarters.

It started off quietly at first, noises in her room, like someone coughing or rummaging through her things. Then the lights would turn themselves on and off. To sort the problem her parents had the place re-wired to no avail. Things would get moved about when there was no one there to have moved them and would go missing only to turn up again in plain sight.

Her stereo was the strangest thing. It would turn on by itself. It was an old stereo and we just assumed it had gone a bit wonky. She got a new top of the range three CD changer to replace it. Suddenly it upped a level. The stereo would turn itself on, play a track from one CD, switch to another CD play a couple of songs from the middle of an album and then move on to the next disk. It seemed to have favourite songs, ones that it would play more than any others, Sigur Ros was particularly popular. There is no technical explanation for what happened, not a power surge - nothing. Once it played when it wasn't even plugged in. It could get really annoying (especially when it started blasting at full volume in the middle of the night) but if you asked it politely to stop playing it would, but shouting at it never worked. She obviously had a ghost that believed in manners. It could be decidedly unsettling, yet in all the years that she lived there we never once felt afraid up in that room.

Downstairs was a different matter.

There were cold spots downstairs. A tall, thin man dressed in black was spotted regularly, even by people who were the strictest non believers. One friend- an atheist- was so scared by what he had encountered there that he refused to go downstairs alone.

One night after returning from the cinema (sober I might add), my friend waited for me by the front door as I ran to use the bathroom along the hall. As I walked back towards her I suddenly stopped dead in my tracks. I had become ice cold, but not from a draft. The only way to describe it is that I became cold from the inside out. Colder than I have ever felt in my life. I could feel and hear someone breathing on my shoulder. I bolted. Reached my friend and spun around, wondering if her older brother was playing a trick on me, but there was no one there. She had seen nothing, but said that I had stopped deadly still for about 2 seconds, almost like a cat that has it's hackles raised, and then ran faster than she'd ever seen me move in her life.

To this day I refuse to be in that hallway with the lights out.

So, do any of you have any spooky experiences to share on All Hallows Eve?



*I know what you are thinking, and no, I'm not mental.

Eeek!

I got up at an ungodly hour today (5am) to get ready for work and for me, everything was going smoothly. I showered, dried my hair, did my makeup, got dressed, had breakfast and put on my coat.

I was thirsty and still had a couple of minutes before I had to leave so I went to get a quick drink of water. As I was filling my glass I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. Something on the left lapel of my beautiful new red coat. I looked down.

I yelped, and pulled my coat off faster than I have ever undressed in my life.

It was a spider.

And not just any spider. It was the hugest spider I have ever seen in my life outside of a zoo.

And it was on me.

I'm grimacing and squirming just at the thought of it as I type.

So the coat was off and I flapped it and flapped it, and checked it and checked it for about 15 minutes but there was no sign of the spider. It must have fallen off and scuttled into some recess in the kitchen I told myself. So eventually, running late for work having missed my bus and facing a 20 minute wait in the storm raging outside, I put my coat back on and called a taxi.

My skin was crawling.

This was not helped by the taxi driver. I told him my tale of woe, and he told me the spider was on my hair. Again I yelped. The bastard laughed. Ha ha very funny I said.

I got to work and trudged up the stairs to face 10 more stupifying hours on my feet. I was in a foul mood. The taxi had cost me a tenner.

Getting into the locker room I stopped at the mirror and re-applied my lippy, had a quick skoosh of perfume and brushed my rain damp hair. I put my bag in my locker. I took off my coat.

The spider fell out.

Very much still alive.

And even bigger than I had realised.

It was the size of the palm of my hand, it's body was the same thickness as my thumb.

It had been on me all that time, I felt sick.

I stood on it.

It was dead.

Still my skin crawled.

Two hours later I went for my break, the locker room floor had not been swept. The dead spider was no longer there.

I thought I'd killed it, but did I?

To think I used to say I'm not scared of spiders.

Eeek!

A very poor Artists Reconstruction.