Monsters In The Closet: Ghosts

I’m a believer.

You don’t have to convince me that spirits or ghosts or entities or whatever you want to call them exist, and sometimes interact with us. I’m already there.

As far as my own experiences with the paranormal go, there aren’t many, and nothing that is real direct contact, but a couple of times I had the feeling that someone or something was trying to communicate with me or had a presence near me.

For instance, maybe two years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to the TV playing downstairs. My first thought was that my sister (who was my roommate at the time) had either 1) fallen asleep downstairs with the TV on or 2) couldn’t sleep and so had gotten out of bed to watch TV for a while.  Both possibilities, but both a little unlikely. Long story short, I got out of bed, went downstairs and turned the TV off with no sign of my sister. Okay…

When I got back up to my room, I went into the bathroom and as I flicked the light switch the bulb flashed and then burned out. Now bulbs burn out all the time, but in combination with the TV seemingly turning itself on downstairs something struck me, and I had the immediate feeling that the two events were related and that maybe someone was trying to communicate with me.

Anyways, I went back to bed and fell asleep quickly, not seeing or hearing anything else for the rest of the night. I’m not sure what was being communicated with me except maybe, “Hey! Here I am. I’m present here!”

And why is it that ghosts always want to communicate at night and never during the day? Maybe it just gets our attention more (because it’s scarier!) or maybe there’s some other reason.

In my (free) short story, Ghost Coach, Ghost (yes, that’s the character’s name) tries to get Sarah’s attention in the middle of the night because he’s trying to scare her, which is also his problem as he’s just not good at scaring people. Maybe more ghosts are like Ghost than we realize—really not very scary at all. Whenever I watch one of those ghost shows on TV, it’s often the case that the spirit in question is trying to get a message across to whomever they are haunting, not trying to scare anyone. Maybe ghosts are scary because they are from the beyond, and it’s really death or things unseen that we are scared of, not the spirit itself.

So to recap the Monsters In The Closet series so far: Vampires—not real and we’re really not that scared of them anyways; Ghosts—real (as far as some of us are concerned) and scare the shit out of us even if they don’t mean to. 🙂

Amanda Linehan is the author of North, about a young woman on the run from her past, the law and an old adversary out to get her. Her newest release is Bored To Death: A Vampire Thriller, about a 300-year-old vampire trying to restore the balance between life and death. She has published five novels.