Ghost Stories

All ghost stories are bullshit. I know, because I have seen real ghosts in my life and it is nothing like what people describe.

See, in ghost stories, people see an apparition emerging from the wall, or something moving in the dark, or perhaps objects flying across the room. In reality, this world and the next one are too far apart for things like that.

When I see a ghost, it is always only late at night, and it always hurts. It is a searing headache, a flash of bright lights, a deathly glow, loud noise. There are sometimes people in the other room, or neighbors above and below, and they never hear or see anything. That is because I am aligned to see it and they are not.

And the ghost is not a dead person, or at least not quite. It is pieces of a dead person, memories, still images, happenings. Ghosts are like wild animals or deep-sea invertebrates. They only pretend to be quasi-human. They are nothing like us.

A girl often appears to me. Her name is Barbara. Sometimes, it is only one eyeball filling the entire room. Bloodshot, tired, frantic, it searches until it finds me in my bed and then penetrates me with its dead light. Judges me.

My uncle sometimes appears, or what is left of him and my cousin. They died a few years apart, must have morphed in the afterlife. They behave like a spider. I do not know how else to describe it.

Sometimes I see the ghosts of organs they cut out of people and threw away, or the ghost of a Thursday last month. I know the sky is full of giant ghosts of nations and institutions, monstrous creations of the human mind. I am glad they do not care to appear to me, but just to be safe, I never sleep outside.

Sometimes, ghosts have a purpose. They ask me for a prayer, ask to hear a story, or even a single word. Other times, they just torture me, or do something that leads to their own destruction.

The sexual ghosts are the worst because they make me do things that are forbidden by the Bible. I tremble at the thought of righteous ghosts coming to take revenge. I am terrified of dying and meeting God. He must be the worst of them all.

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk