MID-WEEK MUSINGS 2

Visitations and Ectoplasm

Last week I was talking about my earliest supernatural encounter. This week, we move a little forward in time.

After the death of my Grandma, my grandfather wasted no time bringing his not so young, not so new, girlfriend to live in the house. Alice worked in a pub during the evenings. During the day she offered her services as a Medium. This was problematic for my mother, for while she and her church believed in spirits, they did not believe in contacting the Dead. If the Dead appeared, well, what could you do? Summoning though, was the Devil’s work, and even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t go according to plan - see the Witch of Endor story in the Bible. First Book of Samuel.

Alice though, was briskly channelling a quiz team of dead relatives, available to answer any questions on any subject, and all hoping that Granddad would be happy in his new life with Alice. While this was predictable, other things were strange; windows that opened or closed on their own. Scents of flowers. Worst of all, a scrubbing noise, like someone on their hands and knees washing a floor with a bucket and brush. I used to hear it when I went in the kitchen in the morning. I had a habit of climbing out of my railed bed and exploring the house. I still prefer to be alone in the early morning.

My mother, Mrs Winterson, soon had enough of scents, bangs, scrubbing, and exhortations to happiness, (not an emotion she trusted), and returned us to our cramped little house on a long stretchy street with a town at the bottom and a hill at the top.

This was probably what Alice wanted to happen - and she wouldn’t be the first to use a ghostly invasion, real or invented, to re-arrange the household.

This was in the 1960s. We had no inside bathroom. Our kitchen comprised a stone sink with a water heater above it, a gas oven on legs, and a rough table to one side. The rooms had coal fires. There were plenty of mice, but Mrs Winterson thought mice were common, and she was not common, so she refused to admit that we had mice. Whenever I saw a grey flash vanishing across the floor , she said, ‘Ectoplasm’.

The whole point of our family life, I think, was to call everything by another name. As long as it wasn’t named, it wasn’t real. We all know those fairy stories where naming is power. Know the name of other-worldly little fella, and his power is yours. Think Rumpelstiltskin - all that straw, all that gold.

But mostly in life we seek not to know, not to name, or to re-name or de-name.

It’s not mice, (we’re cold, poor, dirty). It’s ectoplasm, (we’re special).

Living like this, in heightened poverty and heightened pride, wrapped in a faith that depended on the supernatural as the building block of truth, what could we do but expect other-worldly encounters?

If you pray to a sky-god and believe in life after death, ghosts are as inevitable as mice.

My Dad told me that as a young soldier in the Second World War, he had returned on leave to visit his mother in Liverpool in 1941. Too late for the last bus, too exhausted to walk further, he looked for shelter in a row of evacuated houses. A soldier he didn’t know, came up to him and showed him an empty house. They both went inside. Dad pulled down a curtain, wrapped himself in it, and went to sleep on a broken couch. He remembers the man nodding at him, smiling. He said his name was Stephen.

The next morning, Dad was woken by a policeman. Every house in the row had been bombed except his. Dad was so tired he had registered nothing. He was used to sleeping under the sound of bombs and bullets. Dad went looking for Stephen, but there was no sign of him. In the pub later, Dad asked around. Stephen? Yes that’s the house where he lived, where Dad slept the night, but Stephen had been killed in 1940.

For me though, as a small child, my own ghostly encounters were more pantheistic than supernatural.

To a child, everything is alive. Everything is in relation to everything else. A teddy bear is as good a friend as a playmate from school. And most children have imaginary friends who are real to them. We see vividly what is not there - or we conjure from our minds the encounters we wish were there. To a child, this is ordinary stuff. Perhaps when we grow out of it, we call it the other-world.

And yet, not everything fits that observation.

When my cat Tibbles died, probably from an overdose of ectoplasm, he seemed to me to continue. I called him upstairs every night and believed that he slept on the end of my bed. This was harmless enough - until we got a dog.

All day, the puppy was happy. At night, I tried to take the puppy upstairs to keep me company. I carried him into the room, his fur stood on end, he growled and yelped and would not stay. He spent his nights downstairs with Mrs Winterson who didn’t believe in sleep.

After a while of this, we decided to ask Tibbles to go - which might have been unkind - but he seemed to understand. Perhaps he was only staying for my sake?

Or perhaps, he wasn’t there at all.

With a cat - who really knows? Cats are liminal creatures who cross worlds. Witches keep them for good reason, as threshold animals, as adepts at the space in-between. I have never been without a cat. They tell me if we are not quite alone. And I suppose, I am still not sure that I am quite alone.

In my Mid-Week Musing next week, I will tell you about a haunting in a house I own. I can’t explain it but I can tell it.

Join me again. And expect another story - maybe Sunday of this week, or probably Monday, because I am spiriting myself to New York City today. Crossing time and space into another world

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