Sunday, October 29, 2006

When you buy a lived-in house, you get ghosts in the package

Alone in bed
With dark shadows for company
And the whisper of the fan's blade
....close by

I heard it without warning then
Cutting through my sleep.
From out of nowhere,
A human voice, I am sure of it...
It said just one word:

Shush!

I jerked awake
Heart pumping madly
Fumbling for the light switches
Bolting to the windows to open it wide
And let out whatever or whoever
It is that shouldn't
be in my room

Was it my imagination running away
From me in my sleep?
Or a trapped spirit anxious to keep invisibile noises at bay
while I fitfully slumber?

* We bought our now, 20+ year old house from the 2nd owner. I told my husband, then, that I have slight reservations about buying a house that had been lived in because you never know who had died in it, or gotten murdered or what unhappy secrets or incidents have happened there prior to us buying it over. But buy it we did, because it was everything else that we had wanted with it's spacious interiors and long, airy windows.

And because I have always had weird experiences with hearing supernatural things that should otherwise not be heard, I sometimes do feel uneasy at home when I'm alone. Which is why we ended up having 5 cats, apart from the reason that we love them to bits, cats also do "guard" the home against evil spirits. So anyway, 3 nights ago, I was sleeping in my home, alone, with the cats outside of my bedroom when this incident happened around 12 plus at night. A definite voice that seemed to come a breath away from me. I was already feeling slightly jittery because I had been hearing all kinds of funny sounds of things scraping against each other, so my sleep was hardly easy, I kept waking up every few minutes.
And then that "shush" voice happened. It was loud enough to sound like an admonishment, like the sound a mother makes to her children to turn down the TV. That was the final straw. i just couldnt sleep again after that until the husband came home.

PS: If you have cat/s at home and if you happen to see them growling madly and staring transfixed at seemingly nothing on the wall (as my cats sometimes do), it means that they are either hallucinating or they are actually seeing some presence which the human eye cannot see. Best thing to do then is to leave them alone and dont forget to say your prayers! :)

11 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Creepy.

Old houses give off some strange feelings. When I was a kid, I lived with my great grandma in Cairnhill (near Emerald Hill), and it was an old house -- open kitchen, wooden floorboards, toilets right in the back, that kind of thing. It was usually rather dark inside and it gets worse on rainy days. One time I could've sworn I saw my shadow freeze when I moved. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and see strange shadows. Never can pin down whether I was just dreaming. And I had terrible nightmares in that house. Even after I moved out, for a few years I would have nightmares about that house.

I had wanted to write a poem about it but never could quite approach the subject without sounding like Singapore Ghost Stories. ;)


- Liz

12:47 PM  
Blogger Medusa aka expiringpoet said...

Liz, is it the crumbly house near Cairnhill Mansion? I used to play in that area cos my cousin lives there and I notice this empty house in a garden overrun with weeds. It's been vacant for over 20 years now I think and I always wondered why cos that's prime land. Anyway, you probably did see those things as a child cos children are spiritually more pure of heart and they can see these things much easier than adults can. Then again, I have a young cousin who had a spirit-playmate when she was a child and even until now, she (and her father) can both see wandering spirits/ghosts etc. One time a female ghost flew into and through their car when they were travelling back to Singapore on the Malaysian highway and both father and daughter suddenly stopped talking leaving the mother to wonder what caused the sudden deafening silence :)

1:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I wonder if they ever get used to seeing ghosts. Scary.

Our house was part of a row, behind is Cairnhill hotel and some condo. The row of houses has been mowed down to make way for the present day CTE.

There were quite a few eerie looking old houses along there. There's that castle-like house on the hill. There was also a house across from our road back before CTE existed that had a big garden. I don't recall ever seeing who exactly lived there.

- Liz

3:51 PM  
Blogger dsnake1 said...

creepy, creepy!

i think most people have some encounters with these "unexplained phenomenon" at some point in their lives.

8:02 PM  
Blogger STAG said...

I built my blacksmith shop on the site of an old stable. At night, when the buzzing florescents are turned off, you can hear the stamping of old horse's feet, the jingling of bits and harness, and the prrrrrrrr of expelled breath that horses do.
I find it rather comfy actually. Nice to have company on a lonely evening. I occasionally sleep there, surrounded by the spirits of the gentle animals, much as you are surrounded by the spirits of your very alive cats. I asked the old historian at the museum about it, and he told me that the stable had burned sometime in the 1920's and all the horses burned to death. Well, they stayed together even years later.
My house was built in 1867, and of course has had dozens of people die in it over that time. None of them ever stuck around though, because I would know if there was a malevalent spirit around. I go anywhere in this place alone, and into the shop, but I WON'T go into the "second" back yard after dark. I don't mind it so much when the sun is out, but I refuse to enter it after dark. And I am a guy who reads grave markers after midnight! There is something about that back yard which makes me feel like you did when you were "shushed".

Tomorrow is all saints day. Enjoy!

2:17 AM  
Blogger Medusa aka expiringpoet said...

Hey Bill, great to see you again! wow, so much history on your house, that's so cool...but those poor horses...and people say animals dont have souls. bah!
What strange reason compels you to read grave markers after midnite??? And tell me more about the backyard? Do you think you should bless it with holy water or something? You know, to purify it?

4:30 PM  
Blogger Medusa aka expiringpoet said...

dsnake,
am sure you've definitely got some stories from your NS days ;)
I heard the area around the govt bungalows at Changi beach is also haunted by a flying pontianak. I slept there once but didnt experience anything apart from pesky mosquitoes, thank God!

4:34 PM  
Blogger Medusa aka expiringpoet said...

Liz,
Yes, they are quite used to it already. The dad trains the daughter to not let the presence affect her or let it show that she notices. I dont know how they manage it, if it's me, I'll simply die from fright! hehe

4:42 PM  
Blogger STAG said...

I don't know. Its just a place you don't go in. Its grassy, with tall cedar hedges all around, like a courtyard. The light is a different colour. I do my katas (sword handling exercises) there in the daylight....for some reason, the katas are perfect there, but not in the dojo. Another thing odd is that when I close my eyes and do my katas in the dojo, I know where every wall and every person is, but when I close my eyes and do them in the yard, my sense of direction is shot. I open them, and see a different line of hedges than I expected to see.

Grave markers...well, in the city, the only park is the graveyard. Or should I say, the only "safe" park is the graveyard. On occasion, I had to check on some of the homeless people in the shelter I worked in, they would duck in there to shoot up, or get drunk, and if I didn't drag them out of there, they would freeze to death in their sleep. (as it is, we lose about one in ten every winter).
I never felt anything malevolent in a graveyard...aside from a bully one time who was too drunk to notice that I was not a fellow rummy with pockets full of dole money and pints of cheap whisky. But he was very much alive when I left him.
Graveyards are consecrated ground...nothing creepy can survive there.

10:11 PM  
Blogger STAG said...

Oh, and did you read my Friday the 13th post?
Its fun!

1:19 AM  
Blogger dsnake1 said...

lots of stories, can write a book ah. :D

4:55 PM  

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