It’s almost All Hallows’ Eve and the possibility of a spectacularly
spooky ghost story from the lake was more than I could bare. So I did a little
research and talked to a few elders on the street but came up completely empty
handed. It seems there is nothing creepy or scary about this lake whatsoever.
So instead of a lake ghost story, I’m going to tell my own
true ghost story. This is the story of the Ghost of Me.
I’m not exactly sure where her origins are from, it’s likely
she came into existence from certain horror movies past and a young girl’s
over-stimulated imagination. Regardless, she has haunted me for what seems like
my entire life.
As a young child she hid in the closet of my bedroom in the
form of a “boogeyman” and often I would hear her clumsy footsteps on the
creaky floorboards upstairs, especially when I was home alone. Sometimes she
took the form of an evil witch, identical to the wicked one in the Wizard of Oz.
In this form she would lie in wait for me under my bed, tormenting my sleep and
sending me shrieking to my parent’s bed on a nightly basis.
My auntie Madge, who I spent most weekends with, fed my love
of demons, witches, and the paranormal. She was a devout movie fan who kept me
up until the wee hours to watch 'The Brides of Dracula’, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘The
Haunting’, and the ‘Village of the Damned’ to name a few.
As a teenager she took the form of a poltergeist, flinging
objects across my bedroom in the dark of the night and on the odd harrowing
occasion even shaking my bed. During this time she loved gadgets such as
washing machines and hair dryers and would delight in terrorizing me by turning
them on when I was home alone. At the time, I was told I was under a lot of
duress as my mother was very sick with cancer and the stress was likely the
cause of the disturbances.
During my years as a young mother she took on another form,
that of a shadowy entity that hovered just below the ceiling in my bedroom. Her
evil motive then was to guide my soul from my body while I slept with the
intent of taking it with her or making it her own. During this period she
regularly opened doors for me and made several visual appearances (much to the delight of
visitors) dressed in a wedding gown.
My thirties were a period of low activity, her presence only
made known occasionally in dreams maybe once a month or so. During this time, I
thought I could actually see the light at the end of the tunnel and a time when
I would be free of her.
Then I hit my forties.
Her presence came back with a vengeance in the form of night terrors and
sleep paralysis. During this time she took the form of a deranged woman
possessed with unearthly strength. She would come to my bedroom, always around
3 a.m., with the intentions of dragging me physically from my bed to take me to
God knows where.
Then something interesting happened. I found myself alone, and
oddly enough this is where I began to gain some understanding of her. I took
this time to get inside myself and to analyze my life to that point and the
ghost that had followed me.
I looked back at my adolescence; at the premature death of my
mother and its effect on me; I got deep inside the head of the girl I used to
be. I went all the way back to what seemed like before time itself—to another
life. I discovered that something had gone seriously amiss when my adolescence was snatched abruptly away and the
stark realities of real life was thrust full force upon me. I should have gained confidence through this
period, but in reality the scars of puberty ran much deeper than they should
have, painfully sitting beneath the surface of my new-found adulthood.
I always thought if I just appeared confident enough, my
shortcomings and insecurities would magically disappear. To some degree it worked—the
old “fake it ‘til you make it” trick. But faking it is not enough in itself.
Fixing the surface of you does nothing for your foundation. It’s not that I
didn’t feel valued for my intelligence, or respected by my peers, I did, but
there was always the hollowness deep inside me where self-confidence, amongst
other things, was supposed to be.
The eventual truth
didn’t come quickly, or easily, but it did sting when it eventually slapped me
in the face—insecurity (in one form or another) will always be present in my
life, so deal with it.
I learned to exorcise the things that plague me—my insecurities,
shortcomings, and the sneaking suspicion that maybe I'm not as good a person
as I make myself out to be. Taking stock of myself, so to speak, was not easy but not
such a bad thing either. I learned that to be really happy, I needed to become more self-aware...to know what exactly makes me happy inside, what really makes me tick, otherwise my existence
would remain meaningless.
The real problem with modern society is that it puts too much of a
premium on perfection. This more often than not keeps us from delving too deep, for fear of uncovering something bad or ugly down below. So instead, we keep our heads
in the sand, never dealing with the things that keep us down.
I know now I can’t hide who I am, or was. And the good truth
is I have looked myself in the eye and uncovered my demon, my ghost. Quite
simply, she is me and I am her; nothing more, nothing less. Regardless of the
missing sum of my parts, my life has value and I am finally able to give myself
credit for the gift that I am.
She still comes around once in a while when the opportunity strikes—when I’m
alone, or feeling particularly vulnerable. But for the most part I’m done with
her, tired of her, bored even of her old tricks. But still, she can be
persistent—scratching at the door and clawing at the window.
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