Hauntings
A Retrospective
Ghosts are a part of life in Thailand in a way that most in the West are far too naive or rational to really comprehend. Of course, not everyone is a believer. But man, let me tell you …
I have seen some shit.
I have seen a lot of shit. The scientist in me once wanted to chalk it up to medications, drugs, hallucinations, lack of sleep, etc.
And it may very well have been those things. But intrinsically, that doesn’t make it any less real, or less impactful.
What we take in with our senses, especially that which we have difficulty rationalizing or explaining with certainty, that which falls into irrationality, and the occult, must be reckoned with vis a vis in irrational terms. These aspects of liminality can only be addressed properly through the confines of the trickster. To do otherwise provides an incomplete, and largely unsatisfactory answer that tells us nothing about the occurrence itself but that which robs it of its purpose.
My first ‘ghost’ sighting was when I was a child. I awoke one night to look out from the top of a bunk bed and see a hooded blue figure shambling slowly out the door. I dived back beneath the covers in fear, and did not come out until daybreak.
Again I would meet this figure upon a deep meditative state while living in Long Beach. A day later, my landlord in Long Beach passed away. I assumed then that this was some avatar of death, or something like it.
Another time in childhood, I awoke to see a crusader standing at the ready, at the foot of my bed. Again, back to sleep until morning.
And in my teenage years, at times angry apparitions seem to haunt in those twilight hours, when the medication wore thin. They were filled with anger. Sometimes, over the years, when I have upset someone, I might experience a similar presence. Always just before sleep.
As for voices, they come in that small stage between wakefulness and dream. Sometimes people I know, communicating full, nonsensical sentences.
You can call it mental illness if you like. But that doesn’t satisfy what it is. And it doesn’t determine its use to the afflicted.
And these things, they do have a use. These subconscious hallucinations, whether auditory or visual, do serve a purpose. As they strike when the mind is attempting to turn off most commonly, they are like dreams in wakeful hours. In a sense, they are even more valuable than dreams, because they communicate both conscious and subconscious impulses simultaneously, and reveal how these impulses interact.
Out-of-body experiences I know well. I used to get them more often. In my mother’s old house, I would walk as far as the kitchen before toppling down, and finding myself paralyzed in bed. On one occasion here in Bangkok, I took a powerful antihistamine and wandered all about my apartment in a stupor, banging into things, until suddenly I was lying upon my bed, again paralyzed. When I came to wakefulness in the morning, it was clear to me that I never had left the bed at all.
So I would describe these as paranormal experiences. And they are but an inkling of the types of things that I have experienced that have made me a believer that reality, as we know it through scientific laws, is only half of the story.
More on this at a later date.
So let’s bring it back to the real world—let’s talk about those things that happen that haunt us for years that the living do.
When in High School, I had the ill-fortune of being dropped from the Water Polo team for reasons still largely unknown to me. Yes, its true I was lagging in swim speed, and the blonde girl and her vicious friends were wearing away on my ability to care about much of anything at all, so maybe I instilled a sense of apathy in others. The coach at the time was a new guy who was fat and rather unpleasant. He gave me the talk that he was cutting me. I couldn’t have felt less than that it was an inevitable outcome of my continuously worsening luck that year.
The next year, I found myself in this coach’s computer lab class. Coincidentally, by ill fortune, a girl I had the hots for was in the room next door, that I had to pass through to get there. And by ill fortune, she was good friends with the Eris-inspired blonde that had made my life rather unpleasant in general.
I did what most stupid people do, and tried to communicate with her through social media to express my feelings. I must have come off as an Axe murderer, because when she finally responded, it was to scare me off.
So I would walk to that room, look down dejectedly, and not speak to her. I was haunted. Perhaps she could see the same specters that I could.
One day, the fellow sitting next to me called her in. She sat on his lap and he flirted with her. I tried to ignore them both, and focus on my work. But I have to say that the whole thing haunted me. Here’s the person you thought was someone important to you, it all seemed to say, and here’s why they are not important in the way you wanted them to be.
Ghosts must have danced upon her bedroom walls that day. The final day of school, she glared at me as though I was the devil himself.
I sat upon the grass, as the school-bus pulled away, and I looked to the ground.
It doesn’t take a ghost to really haunt someone.
Bringing things back to surreality, I’ll share a final ghost story, this time from Thailand.
While sitting in a boat upon the Chao Phraya river, I looked down to see a woman in traditional Thai dress floating beneath the waves. I rubbed my eyes. She was gone. Nothing but a large black shadow in her place.
I exited the boat, went into my apartment, and fell asleep. I had a dream about crocodiles.
As the woman looked like someone I once knew, I chalked it up to not getting enough sleep, and admittedly, I had smoked some dodgy ganja a few hours before.
So I know who that woman was, in a sense. It was a sort of emanation of something from that realm between life and death, that unexplainable part of our psyche, that communicates hidden lessons.
Not surprisingly, I didn’t feel haunted, or in anyway scared, upon the sight of the woman.
In a sense, I felt seen. I felt heard. And above all else, I felt known and validated. As though this ghost was here to tell me that I was on the right path, and that there was nothing at all to fear; not even from the dead.
So the moral, I guess, is that some people can haunt, and some ghosts can bless.
