Real Haunting - Part 1/2

thecactus · Joined: 07 Mar 2011 Posts: 3196 Location: Northern Ireland

This is a chapter from a biography I read of an Irish writer - My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress by Christina Mckenna of a true haunting:

The Haunting

There are certain things in life which defy logic. Our five senses limit us to what we believe to be the ‘truth’ about this world. Many people hold the contradictory view: that it is acceptable to believe in the supernatural being that is God, but are opposed to the notion of ghosts or spirits, as
though such entities are an abomination of negative energies to be stoutly
renounced. Fear of the unknown is a powerful impediment to any kind of
exploration in this regard.
We journey through life so attuned to the realities of the material world
that we blind ourselves to the manifestations of the incorporeal. But sometimes
the spectral universe clamours for our attention to such a degree that
we are forced to confront its reality. I was forced to confront this world
when I turned eleven.
Up until then I had never thought much about death or dying, much
less about ghosts or spirits. As a child I had listened to stories from the
mouths of old-timers about wailing banshees and menacing fairies, and always
been careful to vitiate the terrible endings with fingers stuck in ears.
Although I was unaware of the existence of these ethereal visitors, they
remained incomprehensible abstracts. They were as elusive as the heavenly
firmament that I roamed in my dreams, or that piece of sky I tried to clasp
in my cupped hands as I lay on my back in the sunlit garden.
All my innocent musings were to undergo a dramatic shift in the autumn
of 1970, and my notions of life, death and the hereafter would be
altered forever. One late autumn evening an extraordinary visitor arrived in
our midst, unannounced and unrecognisable. It remained for six harrowing
weeks, rupturing the calm, amber days and ripping through our senses with
an urgency and vigour that is unforgettable.
The story begins with the waning of Great-aunt Rose, and that in turn was
preceded by another incident: the raging goat that drove us to her door on
that hot May day. These things held the genesis of an awesome future event.
For one fateful hour old Rose had been forced to exhibit unthinkable kindness;
offering us tea and cake had stirred her heart and quelled our terror. It
was the first and last time she’d shown such generosity of spirit towards us,
and we were not to know that it came with a price. As I’ve remarked before,
benevolence and compassion were not features of my father’s forebears.
In late August that same year Aunt Rose slipped while carrying turf
from the shed, and the injuries she sustained put her in hospital for a time.
My mother saw the fall as a long overdue comeuppance for a selfish
life. Aunt Rose barely countenanced Mother’s existence, despising her for
having corrupted one of her nephews and having the gall to bring forth
children as tangible evidence of that corruption.
But Mother – always the forgiving, dutiful soul – offered to take care of
her until she’d regained her strength. Uncle Robert didn’t know how to; he
knew how to take care of money, but not of people. Aunt Rose had quite a
stash; the mean-spirited often do. Money, it seemed, was her very purpose
in living. For Robert, the thought of getting his hands on it was what kept
him attentive to her needs.
So the boys’ bedroom was cleared to accommodate the patient and the
parlour became their temporary sleeping quarters. However, despite Mother’s
unstinting care and devotion, Aunt Rose never recovered from the fall;
it had propagated the cancer that would release her from the bitter past and
agonising present, and into the ‘painful’ future of the hereafter. She spent
six weeks with us, after which Robert moved her to the guardianship of the
nuns at the Nazareth House in Derry.
She died soon after. The nuns were paid handsomely for their trouble;
my mother received absolutely nothing for hers. Robert’s attentiveness paid
off as well. He received the bulk of her squirrelled-away £300,000 fortune.
The clergy fared handsomely too. It is a rather depressing feature of the
miser’s canon that he will seek reprieve from punishment in the next life by
generously greasing the palms of God’s representatives in this one. It seems
that God takes on the role of the last great banker in paradise. Who knows
how many monastery farms have expanded or priestly purses have fattened,
on the logic of this fallacy?
On 31 October, approximately six weeks following Rose’s demise, nineyear-
old John was woken by the sound of a light tapping from under his
bed. It was the same bed his dying great-aunt had lain in, and he shared it
with his brother Mark. He wandered into Mother’s room and told her that
he couldn’t sleep. She listened, concluded that the tapping was caused by
an agitated water-pipe, and sent him back to bed. But the tapping persisted
and, with Mark’s help, Mother and I dragged the mattress from the bed
and into the kitchen. The boys eventually fell asleep there.
The following day, however, the tapping could still be heard, only this
time it had travelled, and continued to travel: we heard it coming from various
points on the floor of the boys’ room. This disproved Mother’s noisy
water-pipe theory.
With each passing day the frequency and volume of the eerie sound
increased. After a week, when all efforts at a logical explanation were exhausted,
the bed taken apart and reassembled, the floor inspected, the
foundations checked, we were forced to come to the unnerving conclusion
that we were dealing with a supernatural entity.
As a child, having to face this reality was extremely terrifying. It was a
truth I would never fully have the measure of, or be able to banish from my
thoughts. It was like witnessing a horror that had occurred
within my field
of vision, while I was innocently focusing on a beautiful landscape.
There were no ready answers to my questions because they lay outside
the limits of human understanding. This was a malevolent invasion and it
gripped me with a fear more terrible than anything I’d ever experienced.
I thought I’d known dread in Father Monacle’s confessional and Master
Bradley’s classroom. Such fears were nothing compared to this.
The growing terror inside me kept apace with ‘its’ progression. After a
week it began hammering on the walls and floor of the boys’ room, furniture
would groan and the bed shake. Every nerve and sinew in us began
to tighten in response to those awful sounds, only easing briefly when we
thought they’d at last gone away. I don’t know how many times we’d turn
from the door to that room with tremulous hope.
‘It’s gone,’ one of us would say without much conviction. ‘Shush . . . listen;
it doesn’t usually take this long. That’s it. It’s definitely gone.’
I can still feel the hope that flickered in me then and grew to a blaze of
pathetic longing. We’d enter the boys’ room and wait in the testing silence,
in the calm before the storm, in the chill of that room. We’d wait, praying,
hoping, standing stock-still, not daring to blink or swallow or breathe
too deeply in case – just in case. But as sure as hell and heaven it would
come: the thunderous communication from another place, and it would tear
screams from every throat and precipitate a headlong dash, back into the
terror we’d tried to escape from. It acted like some kind of demon doctor
at a sickbed; at any given hour it would deliver a dose of fright and panic
to keep us mindful of the fact that it had the power. We were the patients
in need of healing, but the big question was: Who or what had caused the
contagion in the first place?
Mother went frantic. Her only recourse was to multiply and prolong the
rosaries; we often said ten a day. The parish priest, Father O’Neill, came to
listen to the noises, and said that prayer was the only weapon we had. He
concluded that it was the soul of Great-aunt Rose. She was in torment in
purgatory, he told us, and needed our invocations in order to be released.
He got down on his knees and assured her of our continued devotion, beseeching
her to be gone to her rest. But she refused his plea and continued
to fill our sleepless nights with fresh assaults.
We noticed that the phenomenon seemed to follow John. He was the
youngest of the trio who had supped at our great-aunt’s table that fateful day.
During that first incursion it had tapped its way from under the wardrobe
at the far end of the bedroom, and settled under John’s side of the bed.
We experimented with it. The oilcloth was lifted from the floor so as
to dampen the sharpness of the raps, but the noise continued unabated, the
volume shifting in consonance with the stone floor. We’d evidently angered
it. Suddenly the tapping ceased and something altogether more horrifying
replaced it. We heard the excruciating rasp of fingernails being dragged,
sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, along the underside of the mattress.