Caution: As the title somewhat implies, what follows is a creepy true ghost story.
*****
I was 21 and I didn’t believe in ghosts. I believed in science and all the wonderful things that science could prove. Then one day my brother-in-law, Greg, told me a “true story” about his youngest sister Caroline. According to Greg, when Caroline was seventeen, she woke up one morning to find a mysterious entry in the diary she kept on her bedside table. Not only was the handwriting unfamiliar, the subject matter spoke intimately about an affair her older sister Alison was having with a well-respected married man in the community. Why and how this scandalous information had ended up in Caroline’s diary, she hadn’t a clue. Even more importantly, was it true? Caroline immediately went to Alison, handed her the diary, and was soon the target of angry accusations. How dare she take (Alison's) personal diary and read it. And how dare she copy one particularly intimate passage (of Alison's diary) word for word into her own diary. Of course, Caroline had no idea what her sister was ranting about -- in fact, she hadn’t done anything of the sort, although circumstantial evidence certainly suggested that she had. Thankfully though, over the days and weeks that followed, Caroline’s innocence was ultimately borne out as many new entries appeared in her diary. All were written in the same distinctive handwriting and all spoke in the first person about a woman who gradually introduced herself as having last lived in England during the late 1800's (as well as making the claim that she was Caroline's spirit guide). Well, I suppose Greg could have easily been having me on. But that wasn't the kind of guy he was. He swore up and down that the story was true, and as much as I was a skeptic and a self-professed agnostic, I had to believe him.
Two days later, in the privacy of my apartment, I had just sat down to conduct a little ghost research of my own when I was suddenly compelled to say the following words out loud: “If there is good and evil in the world of ghosts, I would like to make contact with a good ghost; not a bad or an evil ghost, just a good ghost.” As much as I hadn't planned on saying anything to the walls of my bedroom, I did so anyway because of something my mother had said to me the day before (as soon as I told her I was thinking about trying to contact a ghost). My mother had always been a spiritual person, having been a member of Subud since the 1960's, however, rather than encouraging me to contact a ghost (as I expected she would), she tried to talk me out of it, telling me it was dangerous, telling me I had no idea what kind of trouble I could get into. Furthermore, although I no longer have any memory of this, my mother claims that I told her the reason for my intended experiment was that I didn't believe in God. My alleged reasoning was that if I could prove the existence of a ghost, then perhaps I would be more inclined to believe in God. Whether I actually said this or not, like I already said, I don't remember. What I do remember however, is the sting of my mother's negative reaction. Nevertheless, not one to be deterred, her warnings simply influenced me to state my intentions -- a precautionary interlude if you will -- then it was right back to the original plan.
Sitting at my desk, eyes closed, a ball point pen loosely held in my right hand, the tip resting gently on a blank sheet of paper, I tried as best I could to clear my mind. And for five minutes or so, I did a pretty good job until I suddenly began to feel a bit foolish and self-conscious and to think that I was wasting my time, that nothing was going to happen, that I should probably give up -- and that's precisely what was going through my mind when all of a sudden a wave of pins and needles entered at the top of my head and rushed down into the rest of my body like a waterfall of chills. At the same time, an unseen force literally propelled me to sit upright and rigid in my chair while my heart began to pound wildly in my chest. With symptoms like that, you'd think I might have stopped. But I was much too curious; if ghosts were real, I had to know. So I stayed the course for a few more seconds until I was suddenly unnerved by a painful shock-like sensation that jolted my right bicep, causing me to immediately push myself away from the desk and scramble to my feet. What the hell was that, I wondered, as I paced my bedroom floor. Although I had no idea, I was pretty sure that with a little courage I just might find out.
A few minutes later, having returned to my desk, placed pen to paper and closed my eyes, I immediately experienced a peculiar sensation as if my physical nature was different; as if I was taller. Of course, I knew I had experienced similar feelings several minutes earlier, however, I was surprised to still be feeling those same sensations after having spent several minutes regaining my composure. Was it possible that the pins and needles I had earlier felt was direct evidence of a ghost entering my body? I had no way of knowing for sure, however, while I was wondering, for a passing moment I thought I felt a twitch in my right arm. It was so subtle however, I easily convinced myself I had simply imagined it until a few seconds later, another one happened. Then another. And another still. A minute later, the twitches were then occurring with such frequency, it felt as if my arm (and the pen in hand) was somehow moving. I say "felt" because my eyes were closed and because I was determined not to open them, the only thing I could tell for sure was that my emotions were wreaking havoc on my nervous system. Nevertheless, fifteen seconds of astonishment, exhilaration, amazement and confusion later, when the twitches suddenly stopped, I opened my eyes and was astonished to see a two inch circle drawn on the paper. I was also astonished to see that the circle had been perfectly retraced three or four times -- the sudden realization of which only caused me to feel even more amazed and more confused -- how was I able to make such a precise drawing with my eyes closed? Dumbstruck, I sat there marvelling at the drawing -- with the pen tip still resting gently on the perimeter of the circle -- when all of a sudden my arm began to twitch and move. Unlike the first occasion, however, the distracting emotions were absent. I suppose I had acclimated to the unusual sensations, thus, as the pen began to miraculously move under the direction of an unseen force, I looked on with an almost detached sense of curiosity as it slowly and purposely retraced the circle three more times before suddenly spiraling around and around the interior of the circle in a gradulally diminishing radius -- eventually coming to a dead stop in the center. After several seconds of inactivity, I decided to use my free will to move the pen to a new area of the page where almost immediately, my arm responded by slowly and deliberately moving the pen to create a two inch circle that for all intents and purposes was an exact duplication of the first.
Thirty minutes later, four sheets of paper were completely filled with these strange little circles when a fifth sheet of paper was introduced. By this time, given all the repetition I had experienced, I fully expected more circles. However, the pen surprised me by slowly moving off to the right in a straight line, right off the page and onto the surface of the desk where I immediatly stopped it, and set it back on the paper. Nevertheless, like a willfull child, off it went to the right again, off the page and onto the desk as before. Although I was totally unprepared for this sudden turn of events, the next time the pen reached the edge of the paper, it occurred to me to stop it in its tracks while I placed a new sheet of paper beside the first. Then, surrendering my arm to the invisible force, off went the pen to the right again, across the new sheet of paper where once again I stopped it at at the edge while I put down another piece of paper. Well, as you can imagine, it wasn’t long before page after page accumulated. It also wasn't long before it seemed kind of obvious that whatever it was that was happening would work a whole lot better on the floor.
Gathering up the pages, I laid them out in order on the hardwood floor and tacked the corners together with clear tape. I then knelt down, relaxed my arm and continued to watch as the pen (and my arm) moved across the paper and onto the floor, where I immediately stopped it and continued as before until eventually, after about fifteen minutes, I was surprised to see that what was taking shape was more than a random abstraction. (In all, perhaps forty sheets of 8 ½ by 11 inch paper were taped together.) Another six sheets of paper later and the drawing was complete -- a strangely large mushroom-shaped head sat perched atop an eerily distorted spirit-like body.
As I stood up, stretched and marvelled at the strange spirit portrait, I suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to show my mother (after all, it was she who had tried to talk me out of the experience in the first place). Picking up the phone, I dialed my parent's phone number and was disappointed when my eldest sister Anne told me that mother was out for the day. Being far too excited to keep the experience to myself, I decided to tell Anne what had happened. And I asked her if she wanted to see the drawings.
It was around two o’clock in the afternoon when I made the ten minute drive to my parent’s house. A few minutes into the journey, I stopped at a red light and for a few passing moments I watched as pedestrians crossed the street in front of my car. It was precisely then that I later remembered having a sudden awareness that the ghost was still inside me, somehow affecting my thoughts and my feelings. Most significantly, I remember the powerful feeling of my hands clutching the steering wheel, and this sick feeling as if I was all-powerful and indestructible. I felt strangely different and superior. And I wasn’t the least bit alarmed by these feelings until later that night, upon reflection of the day’s events, when I suddenly remembered this moment and felt terribly disturbed. But now I am getting ahead of myself.
My parent’s house was a turn of the century red brick home that sat on a short tree-lined side street in a central neighborhood of Toronto. It was oddly tall for its width and was set back from the road on a fifteen foot rise. All in all, I always thought there was something spooky about the look of that house. I parked in the driveway and bounded out of the car with drawings in hand. A few minutes later, having shown the drawings to Anne, I felt immense disappointment. I had been so amazed and awestruck by the experience of receiving the drawings, I had expected my sister to be equally amazed. But that wasn't the case. In fact, even the large portrait failed to elicit much of anything. Consequently, I headed back to my apartment feeling dejected. But not before I placed all the drawings in a neat pile on a table in my mother’s sitting room where she would be sure to see them when she came home, whenever that might be.
9:30 that night, I was already asleep in bed when I woke up to the sound of a ringing telephone. Picking up the phone with a groggy "Hello?", I was greeted at the other end by the sound of my mother’s upset voice.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Were you in my house today?”
“Yes.”
“Did you leave some drawings in my room?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’ve brought something into my bedroom and I can’t get it out!”
"What? What do you mean -- 'something?'"
As my mother went on to explain, no sooner did she arrive home that night and open the door to her sitting room, she was immediately assaulted by a foul-smelling odor that she described as a nauseating combination of feces and burning rubber. Calling Anne downstairs from her third floor bedroom, Anne was equally shocked by the sickening smell. And there was no logical explanation either until Anne remembered my visit earlier in the day and the drawings I had left on the table. My mother and sister immediately inspected the drawings and determined them not to be the source of the odor. However, Anne suddenly remembered that during the time of my visit, my breath had smelled noticeably bad (although Anne hadn’t said anything to me at the time). Nevertheless, now that she was remembering the afternoon, the smell in the room somehow reminded her of the scent that had been coming off my breath six hours earlier.
Before the thought occurred to call me, my mother decided that she and Anne should do a Subud Latihan in the room. During a Latihan, people move, speak, or sing in accordance with the individual connection one has to the God-force that resides within. This connection is awakened when one joins Subud and is "opened". In any event, I had heard my mother and sister doing their Latihan on many occasions. They often sang and the sounds they made were beautiful, like a choir of angels. However, on this occasion, when my mother and Anne tried to do their Latihan in the midst of the horrible smell, my mother told me that strange and incoherent mumbling sounds came out of their mouths. And something else – Anne remembered something significant that had happened earlier in the day.
After I had left that afternoon, Anne had decided to take a nap in my parent’s bed. This was not an uncommon occurrence as my parent’s bed was the largest and most comfortable in the house. What was uncommon, however, was that Anne had woken up from her nap because she had heard strange incoherent mumbling sounds as if someone, a male voice in this case, was trying to say something. In her semi-conscious state, Anne strained to understand the mumbling until the unintelligible sounds suddenly became an unmistakably clear command to “Get out. Get Out! GET OUT!!” at which point, Anne immediately woke up and left the room, quickly shrugging off the experience as a strange dream.
Over the phone, I asked my mother what could possibly smell so bad. Without pause, she informed me that the smell was caused by a malevolent male spirit. If it had been a female spirit, she said, she and Anne would have been able to clear it by doing their Latihan. The fact that the smell had gotten worse during the Latihan led my mother to believe that it was male and it was evil and that I needed to get over there right away and get rid of it.
“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked incredulously.
“You’re going to join Anne and me in my room and the three of us are going to pray to God that this thing goes away.”
“But I don’t believe in God.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said with absolute conviction. “As it is, we can't go to sleep with this thing in the house. So how long will it take you to get here?”
Fifteen minutes later, my mother and Anne were waiting for me outside on the front porch. I recall the house never looked as ominously frightening as it did at 10:05 that cool March night. Years earlier I had seen the movie “The Exorcist.” I also knew the story of the Amityville horror; the one where you can’t believe the people are so stupid that they don’t leave the house. I remember thinking about this as I climbed the front steps for the second time that day: Was I willingly about to commit a similar act of stupidity?
Before we entered the house, the three of us stood together outside and reviewed the events of the day. As we did, I couldn't help but wonder what could possibly smell so bad. In fact, part of me didn’t believe I would smell anything unusual at all. Was it not possible that my mother and sister had spiritually attuned noses that could detect odors that an agnostic such as me could not? I feel I should also mention at this point that my mother’s house was always immaculately clean. Even though she had a full time housekeeper, my mother could most always be found doing one of two things: cooking, which she exquisitely excelled at, or cleaning, an activity that I always thought bordered on obsessive. To me, I was convinced my mother could see dirt where mere mortal eyes could not. I suddenly wondered if the same could be said about odor detection. Not only was my mother’s decorating taste inspired, her house had a perpetually revolving door where people would show up unannounced and stay for hours. It wasn't a house of knick-knacks and odor-causing clutter but a comfortable spare blend of modern and antique furniture, warm painted walls and a well-placed arrangement of original art and sculpture. My parents had many artists in their fold of friends. If indeed there was a bad smell emanating from their bedroom, it was most assuredly a smell from another dimension as opposed to some wayward chicken sandwich spontaneously decomposing beneath a piece of furniture.
Call it what you will but to me it was rational skepticism that got me through the front door and up the stairs to the second floor where the three of us momentarily paused to gather our thoughts. I then opened the sitting room door and was immediately assaulted by a truly thick and repugnant smell; to my mind, if there had been a month’s old rotting corpse in that room, it probably would have smelled better than whatever it was that was causing that hideously foul stench. Regardless, the three of us stepped forward into the room which caused Anne and I to immediately begin cursing out loud at the unseen presence. This continued for a few moments until my mother and sister knelt down to pray in the adjoining master bedroom while I remained standing in the sitting room. I didn’t believe in God so I wasn’t about to pray; but I felt betrayed by the ghost. I had trusted him and look where that trust had got me. After a few minutes, when the smell wasn’t getting any better, my mother stated the obvious by saying there was nothing more we could do. We then left the room and shut the door behind us, and as we did, I remember feeling the gravity of the situation on my shoulders for the very first time. It was my naïve actions that had precipitated the whole shocking affair, and yet, I didn’t know how to undo what I had started. As a result, my mother had a frightful houseguest and there wasn’t a darn thing any one of us could do to make him leave.
That night the three of us slept in Anne’s bedroom. Mother and Anne shared the bed while I slept on a make-shift bed on the floor. Although I didn’t want to stay in the house, the thought of being alone in my apartment filled me with even more fear and dread than the proposition of staying. The lingering memory of that horrid smell having lodged itself deep into my nose, I recall it took a long time before I allowed myself to fall sleep. In the meantime, my ears were hyper-trained on every creak in the house as I fully expected to hear a mumble or a groan from the world of the dead.
Fortunately for all concerned, the night was completely uneventful. When we awoke the next morning, the three of us cautiously approached the sitting room door. Unlike my skepticism of the previous night, this time it was fear that raced through my mind. Will the room be a shambles? Will we find strange symbols etched in blood on the walls? Opening the door, at first glance (and smell), everything appeared normal. After a thorough search of the two adjoining rooms we all came to the same conclusion: the ghost was gone – but would it be back?
Mother decided to take no chances. In the Subud Latihan, men worship together in one group while women worship together in another. Mother called Dahlan, one of the men from Subud and told him about our harrowing experience. Dahlan was a soft-spoken man in his mid thirties – at the time, he’d already been associated with Subud for many years. At my mother’s suggestion, he organized a group of six men who arrived at my parent’s house later that morning and proceeded to conduct a Latihan in the sitting room.
Mother asked me to be present in the house when the Subud men came to do their Latihan. For her, a bit of added insurance in case my latest friend was planning an unwanted comeback. Of course, I acquiesced without complaint. I was way over my head and I was particularly ashamed of the fact that in spite of my mother’s warnings, I had brought something vile and disgusting into her personal sanctuary.
While I sat quietly in the large foyer of my parent’s home, the Subud men did their Latihan. They had only been doing it for a few minutes when my throat suddenly began to itch and my eyes began to well-up with tears. Although I didn’t have any allergies to speak of, for the next ten minutes I uncontrollably hacked and coughed while tears streamed down my cheeks. Soon after I started to cough, my mother showed up with a box of Kleenex. By the time the men had finished, I seem to recall having used up most of the box.
A half hour later, the Latihan was finished and the men descended the stairs. I remember my mother being right there to ask them how their Latihan had been. “Very peaceful,” was the unanimous reply.
Later that day, following my mother’s instructions, I burned all the ghostly drawings in the living room fireplace. As for the smelly ghost, it never did return. As for strange happenings, a year later, the saga continued.
Two days later, in the privacy of my apartment, I had just sat down to conduct a little ghost research of my own when I was suddenly compelled to say the following words out loud: “If there is good and evil in the world of ghosts, I would like to make contact with a good ghost; not a bad or an evil ghost, just a good ghost.” As much as I hadn't planned on saying anything to the walls of my bedroom, I did so anyway because of something my mother had said to me the day before (as soon as I told her I was thinking about trying to contact a ghost). My mother had always been a spiritual person, having been a member of Subud since the 1960's, however, rather than encouraging me to contact a ghost (as I expected she would), she tried to talk me out of it, telling me it was dangerous, telling me I had no idea what kind of trouble I could get into. Furthermore, although I no longer have any memory of this, my mother claims that I told her the reason for my intended experiment was that I didn't believe in God. My alleged reasoning was that if I could prove the existence of a ghost, then perhaps I would be more inclined to believe in God. Whether I actually said this or not, like I already said, I don't remember. What I do remember however, is the sting of my mother's negative reaction. Nevertheless, not one to be deterred, her warnings simply influenced me to state my intentions -- a precautionary interlude if you will -- then it was right back to the original plan.
Sitting at my desk, eyes closed, a ball point pen loosely held in my right hand, the tip resting gently on a blank sheet of paper, I tried as best I could to clear my mind. And for five minutes or so, I did a pretty good job until I suddenly began to feel a bit foolish and self-conscious and to think that I was wasting my time, that nothing was going to happen, that I should probably give up -- and that's precisely what was going through my mind when all of a sudden a wave of pins and needles entered at the top of my head and rushed down into the rest of my body like a waterfall of chills. At the same time, an unseen force literally propelled me to sit upright and rigid in my chair while my heart began to pound wildly in my chest. With symptoms like that, you'd think I might have stopped. But I was much too curious; if ghosts were real, I had to know. So I stayed the course for a few more seconds until I was suddenly unnerved by a painful shock-like sensation that jolted my right bicep, causing me to immediately push myself away from the desk and scramble to my feet. What the hell was that, I wondered, as I paced my bedroom floor. Although I had no idea, I was pretty sure that with a little courage I just might find out.
A few minutes later, having returned to my desk, placed pen to paper and closed my eyes, I immediately experienced a peculiar sensation as if my physical nature was different; as if I was taller. Of course, I knew I had experienced similar feelings several minutes earlier, however, I was surprised to still be feeling those same sensations after having spent several minutes regaining my composure. Was it possible that the pins and needles I had earlier felt was direct evidence of a ghost entering my body? I had no way of knowing for sure, however, while I was wondering, for a passing moment I thought I felt a twitch in my right arm. It was so subtle however, I easily convinced myself I had simply imagined it until a few seconds later, another one happened. Then another. And another still. A minute later, the twitches were then occurring with such frequency, it felt as if my arm (and the pen in hand) was somehow moving. I say "felt" because my eyes were closed and because I was determined not to open them, the only thing I could tell for sure was that my emotions were wreaking havoc on my nervous system. Nevertheless, fifteen seconds of astonishment, exhilaration, amazement and confusion later, when the twitches suddenly stopped, I opened my eyes and was astonished to see a two inch circle drawn on the paper. I was also astonished to see that the circle had been perfectly retraced three or four times -- the sudden realization of which only caused me to feel even more amazed and more confused -- how was I able to make such a precise drawing with my eyes closed? Dumbstruck, I sat there marvelling at the drawing -- with the pen tip still resting gently on the perimeter of the circle -- when all of a sudden my arm began to twitch and move. Unlike the first occasion, however, the distracting emotions were absent. I suppose I had acclimated to the unusual sensations, thus, as the pen began to miraculously move under the direction of an unseen force, I looked on with an almost detached sense of curiosity as it slowly and purposely retraced the circle three more times before suddenly spiraling around and around the interior of the circle in a gradulally diminishing radius -- eventually coming to a dead stop in the center. After several seconds of inactivity, I decided to use my free will to move the pen to a new area of the page where almost immediately, my arm responded by slowly and deliberately moving the pen to create a two inch circle that for all intents and purposes was an exact duplication of the first.
Thirty minutes later, four sheets of paper were completely filled with these strange little circles when a fifth sheet of paper was introduced. By this time, given all the repetition I had experienced, I fully expected more circles. However, the pen surprised me by slowly moving off to the right in a straight line, right off the page and onto the surface of the desk where I immediatly stopped it, and set it back on the paper. Nevertheless, like a willfull child, off it went to the right again, off the page and onto the desk as before. Although I was totally unprepared for this sudden turn of events, the next time the pen reached the edge of the paper, it occurred to me to stop it in its tracks while I placed a new sheet of paper beside the first. Then, surrendering my arm to the invisible force, off went the pen to the right again, across the new sheet of paper where once again I stopped it at at the edge while I put down another piece of paper. Well, as you can imagine, it wasn’t long before page after page accumulated. It also wasn't long before it seemed kind of obvious that whatever it was that was happening would work a whole lot better on the floor.
Gathering up the pages, I laid them out in order on the hardwood floor and tacked the corners together with clear tape. I then knelt down, relaxed my arm and continued to watch as the pen (and my arm) moved across the paper and onto the floor, where I immediately stopped it and continued as before until eventually, after about fifteen minutes, I was surprised to see that what was taking shape was more than a random abstraction. (In all, perhaps forty sheets of 8 ½ by 11 inch paper were taped together.) Another six sheets of paper later and the drawing was complete -- a strangely large mushroom-shaped head sat perched atop an eerily distorted spirit-like body.
As I stood up, stretched and marvelled at the strange spirit portrait, I suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to show my mother (after all, it was she who had tried to talk me out of the experience in the first place). Picking up the phone, I dialed my parent's phone number and was disappointed when my eldest sister Anne told me that mother was out for the day. Being far too excited to keep the experience to myself, I decided to tell Anne what had happened. And I asked her if she wanted to see the drawings.
It was around two o’clock in the afternoon when I made the ten minute drive to my parent’s house. A few minutes into the journey, I stopped at a red light and for a few passing moments I watched as pedestrians crossed the street in front of my car. It was precisely then that I later remembered having a sudden awareness that the ghost was still inside me, somehow affecting my thoughts and my feelings. Most significantly, I remember the powerful feeling of my hands clutching the steering wheel, and this sick feeling as if I was all-powerful and indestructible. I felt strangely different and superior. And I wasn’t the least bit alarmed by these feelings until later that night, upon reflection of the day’s events, when I suddenly remembered this moment and felt terribly disturbed. But now I am getting ahead of myself.
My parent’s house was a turn of the century red brick home that sat on a short tree-lined side street in a central neighborhood of Toronto. It was oddly tall for its width and was set back from the road on a fifteen foot rise. All in all, I always thought there was something spooky about the look of that house. I parked in the driveway and bounded out of the car with drawings in hand. A few minutes later, having shown the drawings to Anne, I felt immense disappointment. I had been so amazed and awestruck by the experience of receiving the drawings, I had expected my sister to be equally amazed. But that wasn't the case. In fact, even the large portrait failed to elicit much of anything. Consequently, I headed back to my apartment feeling dejected. But not before I placed all the drawings in a neat pile on a table in my mother’s sitting room where she would be sure to see them when she came home, whenever that might be.
9:30 that night, I was already asleep in bed when I woke up to the sound of a ringing telephone. Picking up the phone with a groggy "Hello?", I was greeted at the other end by the sound of my mother’s upset voice.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Were you in my house today?”
“Yes.”
“Did you leave some drawings in my room?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’ve brought something into my bedroom and I can’t get it out!”
"What? What do you mean -- 'something?'"
As my mother went on to explain, no sooner did she arrive home that night and open the door to her sitting room, she was immediately assaulted by a foul-smelling odor that she described as a nauseating combination of feces and burning rubber. Calling Anne downstairs from her third floor bedroom, Anne was equally shocked by the sickening smell. And there was no logical explanation either until Anne remembered my visit earlier in the day and the drawings I had left on the table. My mother and sister immediately inspected the drawings and determined them not to be the source of the odor. However, Anne suddenly remembered that during the time of my visit, my breath had smelled noticeably bad (although Anne hadn’t said anything to me at the time). Nevertheless, now that she was remembering the afternoon, the smell in the room somehow reminded her of the scent that had been coming off my breath six hours earlier.
Before the thought occurred to call me, my mother decided that she and Anne should do a Subud Latihan in the room. During a Latihan, people move, speak, or sing in accordance with the individual connection one has to the God-force that resides within. This connection is awakened when one joins Subud and is "opened". In any event, I had heard my mother and sister doing their Latihan on many occasions. They often sang and the sounds they made were beautiful, like a choir of angels. However, on this occasion, when my mother and Anne tried to do their Latihan in the midst of the horrible smell, my mother told me that strange and incoherent mumbling sounds came out of their mouths. And something else – Anne remembered something significant that had happened earlier in the day.
After I had left that afternoon, Anne had decided to take a nap in my parent’s bed. This was not an uncommon occurrence as my parent’s bed was the largest and most comfortable in the house. What was uncommon, however, was that Anne had woken up from her nap because she had heard strange incoherent mumbling sounds as if someone, a male voice in this case, was trying to say something. In her semi-conscious state, Anne strained to understand the mumbling until the unintelligible sounds suddenly became an unmistakably clear command to “Get out. Get Out! GET OUT!!” at which point, Anne immediately woke up and left the room, quickly shrugging off the experience as a strange dream.
Over the phone, I asked my mother what could possibly smell so bad. Without pause, she informed me that the smell was caused by a malevolent male spirit. If it had been a female spirit, she said, she and Anne would have been able to clear it by doing their Latihan. The fact that the smell had gotten worse during the Latihan led my mother to believe that it was male and it was evil and that I needed to get over there right away and get rid of it.
“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked incredulously.
“You’re going to join Anne and me in my room and the three of us are going to pray to God that this thing goes away.”
“But I don’t believe in God.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said with absolute conviction. “As it is, we can't go to sleep with this thing in the house. So how long will it take you to get here?”
Fifteen minutes later, my mother and Anne were waiting for me outside on the front porch. I recall the house never looked as ominously frightening as it did at 10:05 that cool March night. Years earlier I had seen the movie “The Exorcist.” I also knew the story of the Amityville horror; the one where you can’t believe the people are so stupid that they don’t leave the house. I remember thinking about this as I climbed the front steps for the second time that day: Was I willingly about to commit a similar act of stupidity?
Before we entered the house, the three of us stood together outside and reviewed the events of the day. As we did, I couldn't help but wonder what could possibly smell so bad. In fact, part of me didn’t believe I would smell anything unusual at all. Was it not possible that my mother and sister had spiritually attuned noses that could detect odors that an agnostic such as me could not? I feel I should also mention at this point that my mother’s house was always immaculately clean. Even though she had a full time housekeeper, my mother could most always be found doing one of two things: cooking, which she exquisitely excelled at, or cleaning, an activity that I always thought bordered on obsessive. To me, I was convinced my mother could see dirt where mere mortal eyes could not. I suddenly wondered if the same could be said about odor detection. Not only was my mother’s decorating taste inspired, her house had a perpetually revolving door where people would show up unannounced and stay for hours. It wasn't a house of knick-knacks and odor-causing clutter but a comfortable spare blend of modern and antique furniture, warm painted walls and a well-placed arrangement of original art and sculpture. My parents had many artists in their fold of friends. If indeed there was a bad smell emanating from their bedroom, it was most assuredly a smell from another dimension as opposed to some wayward chicken sandwich spontaneously decomposing beneath a piece of furniture.
Call it what you will but to me it was rational skepticism that got me through the front door and up the stairs to the second floor where the three of us momentarily paused to gather our thoughts. I then opened the sitting room door and was immediately assaulted by a truly thick and repugnant smell; to my mind, if there had been a month’s old rotting corpse in that room, it probably would have smelled better than whatever it was that was causing that hideously foul stench. Regardless, the three of us stepped forward into the room which caused Anne and I to immediately begin cursing out loud at the unseen presence. This continued for a few moments until my mother and sister knelt down to pray in the adjoining master bedroom while I remained standing in the sitting room. I didn’t believe in God so I wasn’t about to pray; but I felt betrayed by the ghost. I had trusted him and look where that trust had got me. After a few minutes, when the smell wasn’t getting any better, my mother stated the obvious by saying there was nothing more we could do. We then left the room and shut the door behind us, and as we did, I remember feeling the gravity of the situation on my shoulders for the very first time. It was my naïve actions that had precipitated the whole shocking affair, and yet, I didn’t know how to undo what I had started. As a result, my mother had a frightful houseguest and there wasn’t a darn thing any one of us could do to make him leave.
That night the three of us slept in Anne’s bedroom. Mother and Anne shared the bed while I slept on a make-shift bed on the floor. Although I didn’t want to stay in the house, the thought of being alone in my apartment filled me with even more fear and dread than the proposition of staying. The lingering memory of that horrid smell having lodged itself deep into my nose, I recall it took a long time before I allowed myself to fall sleep. In the meantime, my ears were hyper-trained on every creak in the house as I fully expected to hear a mumble or a groan from the world of the dead.
Fortunately for all concerned, the night was completely uneventful. When we awoke the next morning, the three of us cautiously approached the sitting room door. Unlike my skepticism of the previous night, this time it was fear that raced through my mind. Will the room be a shambles? Will we find strange symbols etched in blood on the walls? Opening the door, at first glance (and smell), everything appeared normal. After a thorough search of the two adjoining rooms we all came to the same conclusion: the ghost was gone – but would it be back?
Mother decided to take no chances. In the Subud Latihan, men worship together in one group while women worship together in another. Mother called Dahlan, one of the men from Subud and told him about our harrowing experience. Dahlan was a soft-spoken man in his mid thirties – at the time, he’d already been associated with Subud for many years. At my mother’s suggestion, he organized a group of six men who arrived at my parent’s house later that morning and proceeded to conduct a Latihan in the sitting room.
Mother asked me to be present in the house when the Subud men came to do their Latihan. For her, a bit of added insurance in case my latest friend was planning an unwanted comeback. Of course, I acquiesced without complaint. I was way over my head and I was particularly ashamed of the fact that in spite of my mother’s warnings, I had brought something vile and disgusting into her personal sanctuary.
While I sat quietly in the large foyer of my parent’s home, the Subud men did their Latihan. They had only been doing it for a few minutes when my throat suddenly began to itch and my eyes began to well-up with tears. Although I didn’t have any allergies to speak of, for the next ten minutes I uncontrollably hacked and coughed while tears streamed down my cheeks. Soon after I started to cough, my mother showed up with a box of Kleenex. By the time the men had finished, I seem to recall having used up most of the box.
A half hour later, the Latihan was finished and the men descended the stairs. I remember my mother being right there to ask them how their Latihan had been. “Very peaceful,” was the unanimous reply.
Later that day, following my mother’s instructions, I burned all the ghostly drawings in the living room fireplace. As for the smelly ghost, it never did return. As for strange happenings, a year later, the saga continued.
2 comments:
Very interesting. Very well told.
I am sorry that that happened to your family.
Thank you, Jorge. For a long time I was sorry too. And then I found forgiveness -- for myself, for my family, and for the spirit being that graced us with a visit. Today, I feel grateful for the experience, and have learned (with time and more experience) to be loving, helpful and tolerant towards spirit beings rather than showing them fear and anger.
Namaste,
Mathew
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