There's something strange in the neighbourhood

I’ve just heard word that the drummer from Vampire Weekend (my new favourite band – ) was hit by a car in London last night and is in hospital with head injuries. Poor bastard. At least his healthcare will be free.

Last night, I had a séance. Well, tried to. Looks like I don’t have the powers within me to channel the spirits of the dead, because fuck all happened. Maybe my new house just isn’t haunted. I grew up in a haunted house, and even though nothing much happened to me post-childhood, it was still a damn eerie house. It just has this atmosphere. The landing is always cold. You’d never stay in it alone and if you did, you had all the lights on. My new house isn’t like that at all. It’s very calm. The only thing that scares us is the constant rumblings in the alley behind the kitchen, leaving us all frozen in our seats looking nervously at one another, wondering what exactly we would do should some maniac climb in through the window. Once, said maniac did climb in through Rachel’s bedroom window. She shot out of bed, told him to fuck off and he did. Crazy days.

So anyway, back to the ghosts. Before I get into it, I’ll clear this up first – yes, I am an atheist, and many people question how an atheist can believe in ghosts, as surely that means there is afterlife, but I read into a lot of Buddhist teachings, which, in a nutshell, state that each body is inhabited by a soul, and as much as I believe that when people die their body will simply perish, the soul can live on. Either in the spirit world or through reincarnation. Besides, there is no way I could have grown up in my parent’s house and not believe in ghosts. They were in every bloody room.

The first one I saw was a little boy called Peter. At first my mum though he was my imaginary friend until one day she said she saw me talking to him and my eyes were fixated on something, as if it were right infront of me, even though to her there was nothing there. I vaguely remember him. We used to play in the living room. I asked him to come to school with me one day and as soon as we left the front door I lost him, and then never saw him again. Then there were the scarier incidents, as we got a little older, like the tape player constantly stopping, rewinding, fast forwarding, all by itself. The night that I was lying in bed and heard a pen rolling across a flat surface, then stop, then roll back again. The night I went to bed with my curtains closed and woke up with them having been pulled open. The weird black figure that ran past the window when me, Vik and Rach were watching a DVD (we looked outside, there was noone there). The time Vik was playing with her new camera phone and took a photo of the landing; when she looked at the picture there was this grey figure at the top of the stairs. The best occurrence ever though, happened to my dad. The only non-believer, oddly enough. Me and Vik had gone on a night out afew years ago, and my dad woke up at about midnight as my Mum has gotten up to go to the bathroom. He saw what he thought was me, standing at their bedroom door waiting for Mum, and then ‘I’ followed her down the landing. He thought nothing of it and went to sleep. The next day he asked me if I was ill.
‘What?’
‘Were you sick last night?’
‘No? What are you on about?’
‘You, last night, in our room. You went with your mother to the bathroom.’
At this point my Mum chimed in: ‘What are you on about? The girls didn’t get in until after 2.’
Dad looked puzzled but said nothing. It was only down to me and Vik badgering him about it later that he told us he’d seen a young blonde girl in a long blue dress following Mum down the landing. I so wish I’d seen that. Ooh, I just remembered another one – afew years ago we were looking through a bag of old photos. There was one from my birthday when I was a kid, and I’m sat on the stairs with my friends and cousins. And then, on the stair behind us is this girl, wearing a very dated dress, just sat smiling. Noone has any idea who this girl is. I’ll try and dig out the picture and scan it, it’s super creepy. I should call Yvette Fielding, get her round. It would make for a killer programme.