by G L Davies
I slowly made my way upstairs, one slow step at a time, terrified that it would be up there, just waiting for me. I was in a daze, shock I guess. I went into the bathroom, ran the shower and sat under the hot water. I wanted to wash it away from me, the experience, and the feelings. It was like every drop of warm water was removing the iciness of its touch. I guess, I hoped that this would wash away the memory. I don’t know how long I was in there for, but I was startled to hear the door handle turning. I thought no, not again, just get away and I screamed LEAVE ME ALONE, JUST FUCKING LEAVE ME ALONE!!!
There was a silence and then a familiar voice called through the door; Mum, Mum is everything O.K.? It was Tyler. I have never been so happy in my life to hear someone’s voice. I calmed myself, I was relieved and told him I was being sick and I would be out in a minute, bless him he asked if he could get me anything, he even asked if I wanted him to hold my hair. I don’t think I could have loved him more at that point. I might have been abused and I might have lost my dignity but I still had my baby boy and my love for him.
I noticed that the light was bright outside. I had no idea how long I had been in the bathroom for. The water was freezing cold which I hadn’t even noticed. The time was 9 a.m. I had sat in the bath under the shower for nearly eight hours. I clambered out of the bath. My head was aching, probably from the effects of the drink and the shock of what happened. I dried myself. I took off my knickers from the night before and put them in the bin in there. I never wanted to wear them or see them again as every time would remind me of the assault. I wrapped myself in a towel and headed onto the landing, bright and warm with the sun streaming in through the window. Tyler was in his room talking to someone on the phone; I darted into my bedroom, took the sheets and duvet off the bed and opened the windows wide to let the air and sunlight in. I wanted this room cleansed. I wanted the memory gone. While I was in there tidying I still, in some fucked up way, hoped to find some evidence that there had been a real physical intruder in the house, you know? So I could call the police and have someone deal with this. If I could find some evidence that a man had been here, then maybe I could prove that I wasn’t going mad. There was no evidence. This ghost had been patient all those years, watching and lusting over me, gathering energy to abuse and frighten me, to sexually assault me, to treat me like a piece of meat. I hated its cowardice, that it paralysed me, used powers we can’t comprehend, to rape me.
Broken, confused, violated and fighting the tears, I called Mum.
Judith
This paranormal account would not be complete without an interview with Lisa’s mother herself. At this juncture of the investigation I need her insight on what she believed was happening to her only surviving daughter. Judith is a slight lady in her early sixties with long silver hair and a tremendous bright orange sun tan. She sits in her wicker chair staring at me. Her living room is a majestic spectacle of brightness, paintings, mirrors and a plethora of plants, all of which display colour and scent. The aroma of patchouli incense fills the room mingled with a hint of some herbal remedy perhaps tucked away in the roll up cigarette she drags on. Judith stares at me with a knowing gleam in her eye. She assumes I am sport. She bluntly challenges that I am a non-believer. She believes that I have come to her family to denounce the truth of supernatural existence. In her eyes I am a sceptic, with little regard for the reality of the events, here to chronicle the account for fun and ridicule for other non-believers.
She stares me in the eye and questions me regarding the validity of my knowledge of the supernatural. She asks what experience I have gained from hiding behind my notepad and typewriter. I sip on my green tea and I tell her. I tell her in a frank and candid manner. I explain to her that I have experienced and seen things in the last twenty five years that would send a sane person to an asylum. I explain to her that ninety five percent of the investigations I have conducted since I was eleven, had a perfectly rational explanation, however, it was the remaining five percent which haunted me, that lived in my dreams, waking me in the night gasping for breath and in the grips of panic. These unexplainable events fuelled me in my quest for the truth, to use my time on this Earth to try and find light in the darkness. I look her straight in the eye and tell her I have seen good and I have seen evil in this world. Whatever science thinks it knows, what we are told to believe, the simple fact of the matter is; mankind has no control over what passes from other dimensions, and planes of existence, into our world. I tell her this frightens me. I bluntly remind her not to confuse my objectivity for scepticism.
Satisfied she laughs and says you’re O.K. in my book, she is now more than happy to speak to me. She muses that you cannot be sure in this day and age and claims that she knew I would be here and I had an important part to play in all this. She rolls another cigarette and our journey into her daughter’s truly disturbing paranormal violation continues.
Judith: When Lisa called me the first time this all started to happen, I wasn’t surprised at all. Our family is very close to the spirit world. Rose, my other daughter, who passed over thirty years ago, I still hear. Lisa has shut herself off so she does not see or hear these things. I think Tyler may be more in tune with the spirit world than he realises.
Rose’s death at the time wracked me with such guilt and despair. You look back at that moment and you re-live it over and over in slow motion, always wishing I could have just held onto her hand, just spotted the car sooner, there are a million things you wish you can change but you can’t. I blamed myself for my daughter being run over and killed.
Lisa had been sick that day, and stayed at home. Her father Paul was rarely home, but he was home that day, and I went out to pick up Rose. I walked to the school, as it was a glorious sunny day, and on my way picked up a bit of shopping. I met Rose at the school gates and there were lots of other mothers and children there, I enjoyed chatting to them and the bag of shopping I had started to tear and rip so I let go of Rose for one minute while I tried to sort it out. Her friend called her from the other side of the road, she ran across to see her and that was enough for her to be hit by a car. The stupid thing is, the car wasn’t even going that fast. It hit her and she hit her head on the kerb. My baby girl was dead at eight and it was entirely my fault. People have said that it wasn’t, but whose responsibility was it to get her home, and get her home safe? Whose responsibility is it to look after their own children?
Paul, my husband, was so cold towards me about it. He literally blamed me. When she was pronounced dead he slapped me in the face and said I had killed our little girl. He said I was not fit to have children and that they were not mere objects, not things that you lose or discard. I cried so hard and I can still feel the sting of pain on my face when he hit me, like a constant reminder of my failure as a mother. I ask any parent out there who reads this if they fully understand the grief and anguish of seeing your child on a cold metal slab? People have said that it is like they are sleeping. Not Rose, the wounds to her head and face were horrifying. The guilt, the pain, the anguish you feel, well nothing compares to that, nothing.
I must have near suffocated Lisa after that. I could not bear to let go of her, I am blessed that we still live as close as we do and I cherish the time I spend with her and Tyler. I was afraid they would leave and move up north with Leon, but thankfully that never happened. I wouldn’t have let it happen. There are ways in life of stopping things, you know?
Paul left me not long after Rose’s death. He left the air force and took a job away. I knew he had been having an affair for years, he took her with him and abandoned me and Lisa, alone with my grief and shame. Things had not been the same for us since the twins had been born. He said to me one night while he was drinking, that seeing me give birth to the twins had been the most disgusting thing he had ever witnessed. He couldn’t bear to touch me or to have sex with me after that. He said to me that it made him wretch to think that he orally pleasured me and that my body was a mess afterwards, he said seeing me breast fee
d made him feel ill. I know the body is ravaged by childbirth but he was really disgusted by it all. I lied to Lisa for many years telling her how her Dad was not there to witness her birth, as the truth hurt me too much. I will tell her, not you, before this is all done. Childbirth is the most wondrous gift of nature and I was blessed to bring not just one life but two into this world, despite Paul’s cruel words it was love that brought them into this world. When a relationship ends it is always easy to remember how it ended, how much you despise each other and have a hatred or loathing of that person. We often forget how good it is when we first meet, when we connect, and how great it feels the first night we make love.
I had fancied Paul for so long and when we had our first night together I just felt like pinching myself, I couldn’t believe we were together. It was beautiful and some aspects of our time together have left a bitter taste in my mouth and a pain in my heart. I still hold on to those early times when we were truly in love and the fact that I had two beautiful girls.
About a year after Paul left, I was putting the washing out on the line. At this time I was exceptionally depressed. I had taken up drinking a huge amount, mainly rum, when Lisa had gone to bed I would just sit there in silence poring over old photo albums. Albums of my wedding day, shotgun of course as it was the done thing back in those days and pictures of the twins. From the day there were born to the last ever picture taken of Lisa and Rose, I kept them all. It’s sad because when you see the picture of me holding the girls after they were born, you can see the exhaustion in my face, but also the true and incredible look of love and pride. Anyway, I was out putting the washing on the line and had an incredible hangover and I saw Lisa hiding behind a bed sheet I had put up. She was playing hide and seek with me and I could hear her giggling and see fleeting glimpses of her. I had left Lisa in the house and I thought the little monkey had snuck out, it did make me smile and it did cheer me up. I chased her around the washing, I was laughing my head off, it was such a tonic. I actually got caught up in some sheets and fell over. I lay there laughing and I could hear Lisa laughing too. I got up. Lisa was stood looking at me from the kitchen window smiling and waving at me. I was baffled and I looked around the washing expecting to see a neighbour’s child, I thought they must have somehow climbed the fence and got into the garden, but there was no one there. I could have sworn it was Lisa, I went into the house and asked Lisa if she had been outside. She looked puzzled and said no, she said that she had been watching me running around with the washing on my own and it had made her laugh. She said I was silly and it was good to see me laugh, which just made me want to cry so much, I must have been such a shadow of a person back then.
Of course I had been through some traumatic times with Roses death and Paul leaving me. I was of course drinking rather a lot so it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that it was in my head, that perhaps I had a breakdown or an ‘episode’. To be honest, I thought the same thing, but it lingered in me how could it be so vivid. How could I be so convinced that I played with Lisa in the garden? I thought that maybe it was a guilt reaction to not being there enough for Lisa, perhaps I created a fantasy to make up for the emotional neglect perhaps I was responsible for.
I went to the Doctor, I had to be careful what I told him for I didn’t want to come across as an unfit parent and have Lisa taken away from me. He prescribed me some tricyclic antidepressants, which were fine in terms of coping with life, but not so fine with the weight gain, drowsiness, and constipation. It did wean me of the drink as I was so tired in the evenings, too tired to get pissed all the time. The weight gain didn’t bother me at all as I never felt sexy or attractive anyway, at this time of my life, after Paul’s cruel words. I felt like my only purpose was to be as good a mother as I could to Lisa. I didn’t get huge, but I went from about nine stone to about twelve, I guess a positive, looking back, was that I got curvier.
One night I was in bed and I heard footsteps on the landing, little footsteps padding across the carpet. I thought it was Lisa up to use the loo, I always kept the landing light on so we could see when we woke up, also, I got a bit scared and lonely living on my own with Lisa when she was younger. I lay there and listened and I heard soft breathing outside my bedroom door. By the time I sat up the door was open and Lisa was just stood there in the doorway. I thought is she ok? Has she had a bad dream or maybe she can’t sleep? Lisa hated thunder and lightning and she would get into bed with me if she was scared by it. I don’t blame anyone for being frightened by a thunderstorm, especially if you have been asleep and it rolls close to your home, it can be quite a shock. I said something like are you ok baby? she just stood there, her silhouette in the door frame with light behind her and she said nothing. She stood there, breathing softly and I thought maybe she was sleepwalking, I hear it’s dangerous to wake up a sleep walker, I started to gently get out of bed and she quietly said “It’s not your fault mummy, it really isn’t, I’m ok, I promise.” And with that she vanished, completely vanished in a blink of an eye. I was confused to say the least and I hopped out of bed and out onto the empty landing. There was no one there, I checked the bathroom and again no one there, I checked in Lisa’s room she was fast asleep in her bed.
I went back to bed and wondered what had happened, I knew I was awake, I was certain of that. I thought about the medication I was on, I thought maybe I had hallucinated, maybe I had ‘tripped’ on them and imagined Lisa getting up. I thought nothing more of it and went back to bed with no incident.
In the morning over breakfast I asked Lisa if she had slept O.K., she said yes and told me she’d had a lovely dream, in which her and Rose were playing hide and seek in the house last night. Lisa very rarely spoke about Rose, in the eighteen months or so since the accident, Lisa had barely spoken about her. Over the following months Lisa had many sessions with a school counsellor, but Lisa had been adamant that she was O.K. and that Rose was happy and playing with her friends in Heaven. I still have the counsellor’s reports somewhere and apart from the initial period when Rose was killed Lisa had just been calm about it all. She had handled it in a very mature fashion, which psychologically can be very worrying when a child of that age is involved. They say it can create deep rooted mental and emotional issues later in life, but you can’t make a child grieve can you? You cannot force them to react to it. I did talk to Lisa about it on the anniversary of Rose’s death. On her ninth birthday Lisa had told off a girl in school for only putting her name on her birthday card and not her sisters. I had sat down with her and explained how the poor girl was only trying to be nice. I explained how once someone had gone to heaven, although we still thought about them and missed them and remembered the time they had on the earth with us, that people tended not to send them a card anymore. Lisa asked why that was, she said that we should still keep celebrating their birthday regardless, whether they were here or not. At the time I believed that once you were dead you were dead, but I wasn’t going to tell a nine year old that, she would make her own conclusions in life and what happened next, after death. Looking back it was a very loving attitude expressed by Lisa; we should keep celebrating the dead’s birthday. Some cultures do.
One night I was in bed and again I heard the soft footsteps on the landing, the door opened and there was Lisa, stood there with the light pouring in behind her. I was convinced it was Lisa and that it wasn’t some strange random girl that had decided to break in. That would be ludicrous. I got out of bed this time and as I got closer to her she said “Mummy, I’ve just been sat with Lisa, she’s having nice dreams.” A chill went through my entire body in a wave, from the top of my scalp all the way to my feet. As I got close to the girl, I saw her face which was badly and horrifically injured. I remember the sound I made, it haunts me to this day, I made a sound like an injured animal, a sound I cannot replicate and I crashed to my knees. I was shaking uncontrollably and wet myself. I lost all control. It wasn’t Lisa in front of me stood in my door way. It was Rose.
Spiritualit
y
Judith: When something like that happens you just think you have gone insane. I can’t remember much of that night; I guess I was in shock. Lisa said nothing in the morning and I said nothing about the experience. I needed time to try and understand what had happened, I needed time to work out if I had indeed had a breakdown. You ask yourself questions like are you a fit mother? Society happily tells us that seeing dead people is not appropriate. Such people are to be frowned upon, seen as mad or as charlatans.
For the next few days I don’t think I got any sleep. I lay at the bottom of the bed with the door open, expecting to see her again. To see little rose stood there disfigured and mutilated as the day I saw her dead body for the first time. I didn’t see her.
Lisa just got on with life, I felt she had a knowing about her and I just needed her to say something like “Mum, did you see Rose last night?” or “I dreamt Rose was talking to us.” I needed her to say anything that would perhaps make sense of what had happened. Lisa said nothing.
About a week after the appearance of Rose I was parked at the supermarket at the top of Haverfordwest, I was returning my trolley and was in a daze still. I hadn’t slept or eaten much since and I was running on fumes. I was just about to put my trolley in the bay and this very beautiful smiling young lady asked if she could have my trolley, I was almost oblivious to her and I said she could. She took the trolley from me and said “Your little girl is sorry she scared you, she’s been too scared to say hello again.”
I was taken back, angry and shocked in fact that a complete stranger had said this. Was this some practical joke? I asked the woman to explain herself, she smiled and apologised, said she did not mean offense and sometimes she forgot herself. She told me there was a little girl running around the parked cars, playing hide and seek, it was my daughter, she said that even now the girl had no fear of cars.