Weird
Of all the people in the world who should believe in ghosts and flying saucers and stuff like that… well it should be me – but I don’t. I have had several encounters of the weird kind but sill can’t bring myself to believe that it is more than just natural phenomena. I used to work in a radio station where, Charlie, as we called him inhabited the nightly realms. You could hear him walk round the place, and sometimes open doors and on a good night he would play the church organ, which we didn’t have, but no one actually ever saw him. I suppose I can thank him for The Curse of Valdi, a ghostly story, I very loosely based on truth.
As for flying saucers, well, I’ve had two encounters, and I’m still not convinced. The first – I observed for probably five minutes as it surveyed the railway close to where I used to live. I called several other people out of the house and they saw it too. Eventually it shot off into the distance at unbelievable speed. It looked like a great orange ball that hovered noiselessly over the rail yard. The second one was downtown Hamilton, this one looked like coloured lights rotating in a circle. No one will convince me that a highly advanced race would waste years and million of his own money to travel across the galaxy to come and look at British Rail. I suppose the reason ghosts and stuff like that do not frighten me is because as a kid I met the spook of spooks. Have you ever heard of Shuck? It’s a farm legend from the flatlands of the East Anglican Fens of England. Brenda and her sister Betty went carol singing with me on this particular night. Towards the end I decided to count our ill-gotten gains, to do this I climbed up onto the top of a pile of Stanton pipes. They were at the time building a new sewer system. Suddenly Brenda screamed and then yelled some garbled message about a man chasing us. She used to do that – thought it was funny. I took no notice, but then a feeling of intense coldness swept over me. I looked up, and there stood a dark blob of no particular form. It had eyes that glowed somewhere near the top of the almost shapeless silhouette. In the wink of an eye I made Roger Banister’s four-minute mile look like a Sunday stroll. The thing was not finished with us and silently it drifted towards us. Being children we made the wrong decision and headed east instead of west. The only refuge at that time was a farm; we quickly rushed to the farmhouse and tried to wake the occupants. No one was at home. The thing continued its gentle drift toward us. We were trapped with no way to go. With a heartbeat approaching 200 I peered round the hedge, and ‘poof’ whatever it was had gone. Taking the opportunity we ran back in the direction of home only to find it blocking our way. Quickly we rushed down behind a row of houses. There were at least three opportunities for the monster to catch us, but it never tried it just moved slowly towards us. Terrified, we called on one of the houses and the occupant took his shotgun and went after the monster. He saw it and chased it, but… it mysteriously vanished. Four other people saw it that same week, but it was never apprehended. Although it gave me nightmares, I have never been afraid of the dark since. Shuck has given me the urge to write ghostly happenings, but I doubt if he was really a ghost.
