Spooky resident likes to potter
For Black Country electrician Tony Levy there's no place like ohm - even if it just happens to be haunted.
We are watching the latest Harry Potter. I am snuggled up with the good lady wife and all is well in our cosy living room.
Cup of splosh, plate of cakes and biscuits and kids all out mugging pensioners and ram-raiding, or whatever they get up to these days.
Out of the corner of my eye, I am aware of a fleeting black shadow, behind and to one side. I turn around, half-expecting to see one of the children, but see nothing.
The hairs on my neck stand up, and very casually I mention that I have seen our resident visitor:
"Nothing to worry about," says my wife. "He won't harm us. During the day he walks about upstairs on the landing, and sometimes he will come down and potter about in here. Sit and watch the film."
I am gobsmacked. I am out all day working, so it is very rare that I have any contact with our Visitor, the name all the family know him by.
We had an exorcism. The local priest came to the house many years ago and did the holy water and cross thing. I had hoped that that was the last of the visits.
The twins when they were very young had seen him, and asked: "Who was that man with long black hair and a beard standing in the hall last night, Daddy?"
My wife wanted to know why the garage door handle in the laundry room was moving up and down, when all the children were at school and I was at work. When she opened the door to the garage there was nobody there.
The film reaches its climax. Harry Potter has battled the dragons and has entered the maze, but my mind is on the ongoing problem of our spooky visitor.
I cast my mind back 16 years, and our eldest, running into the living room crying and between sobs trying to tell us that one of the cook books flew off the shelf and hit her on the head.
And the time, sitting watching a late night old black-and-white film, I was suddenly kicked in the shins by an unseen assailant. Or the time again in the living room, a swish of air behind me, and turning around, nothing, nobody.
I begin to get slightly agitated. My wife tells me to settle down and enjoy the film. I tell myself that our visitor cannot be all bad.
If he/it wanted us out or wanted to harm anybody, it would have happened years ago.
Unless it does any physical harm to anyone, we will just have to accept that it is here to stay.
The film ends. We clear away empty mugs and crumb-laden plates into the kitchen and start to shut down for the night, lock the back door and the front, switch off the side lights and plod upstairs to bed.
I am the last up. As I switch off the hall light, I catch a fleeting glimpse of movement, a shadow flashing past the bottom of the stairs.
I know that when I descend in the morning, chairs will have been moved and maybe the cutlery drawer will be open and its contents jumbled up. The dead cannot hurt you, it's the living ones you have to watch.
How on earth we will ever sell this haunted house I do not know.
Unless the buyer's name is Addams.
Source: http://www.expressandstar.com/articles/ ... _89262.php
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