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A ghost story for Halloween... ‘If there is an afterlife,’ I remember my mother saying one day, ‘then how come people always look so sad when they die?’ Back then, I wasn’t in a position to answer. To be honest, I didn’t want to know. I was already regretting raising the issue with her at… Continue reading A little place just outside Diss
A ghost story for Christmas... When I was a kid, I made a list of things that scared me. Like a Desert Island Disks list, I got it down to seven: Spiders, especially the really big sod in the attic that my dad insisted on referring to as ‘Sam’. Velociraptor hide and seek. Ghosts Nuclear… Continue reading The Museum of Everything
Despite several theories to the contrary, the priapic spirit that has in the last few years been seen at Stone Henge during the winter solstice is not, in fact, a druid. Accounts of the apparition vary, but common features suggest a tall, emaciated male figure, naked from the waist down and usually described as somewhat… Continue reading Blue Christmas – A Winter Solstice Ghost Story
I do not believe in anything. My dear wife was always more religious than I. That is to say she was more open-minded when it came to matters spiritual and incorporeal, tending towards a polite agnosticism over my own intractable atheism, and general scepticism towards the supernatural beyond the pages of my own fiction.
I first cultivated something like a friendship with Billy, the lonely old boy upstairs, because he reminded me of my dad. But the longer I lived in that little ground floor flat the more he reminded me of myself.
The low-rise flats were red brick and post-war, and I had grown up in one just like it myself, with the same narrow hallway with bedrooms in an inverted ‘T’ shape at one end and a heavy door topped with a single panel of frosted glass at the other.
Stephen Carver 