A Near Ghost Story

A Near Ghost Story
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This happened a couple of months back… I had my sister on the phone, again, but this time, she was in quite a state. She had just moved houses in Sydney and was under a bit of pressure to sort all the furniture out, discard all the boxes and basically put everything in the right order. Excited as she was with her new place, she kept phoning me every other evening to inform me on her progress or pester me for some advice to the extent that my wife started to get a little annoyed.

Just to note: Jackie, my sister, had been single for about a year and buying her own place was something of a substitute for her personal life’s shortcomings.  When she called me that evening, she sounded hysterical. Apparently, she could feel the presence of something or someone in certain areas in the house. Jackie actually admitted that she had not slept properly for a couple of nights. Always interested in the paranormal and never doubting anything that she read on the topic, she now sounded totally convinced that her new house had come with some unwanted extras.

What happened was that when she woke up, the previous morning, she noticed a strange and unusually elongated scrawny looking handmark on the French windows in her living room. She of course, immediately scurried to fetch something to clean the stain off. In her own words, she waffled on about the two types of window sprays, she had to use, then, how she tried the magic potion with vinegar and lukewarm water, but to no avail. My sister could swear that the house was in immaculate condition when she moved in, but at the same time, noted that she never paid attention to the windows. That day, she called, at short notice, some local guys to do the windows professionally and apparently, she swore again, they did a fantastic job. To her amazement, all the same, when she was sipping her first coffee on the following morning, she spotted the same bony mark of a hand, but this time, it was on the left side of the window.

And from that unfortunate evening for me, it all started…

My sister got obsessed with hunting after the ghost in her house. Jackie went to libraries to search for old archives, related to the property; visited the local Police department to enquire about whether there were any recorded homicides or suspicious deaths that happened in or around the property. She also joined a ghost-hunting group and organised Friday gatherings in the same living room in her house, where she and her fellow participants sat watchfully for hours, waving around EVP recorders, EMF meters and DVRs, in attempt to catch a glimpse of spookiness, while nibbling on cakes and cookies.

Jackie also went to the Blue Mountains, a couple of weeks ago, on a paranormal workshop for beginners and is planning to go in June to a paranormal boot camp to learn how to start her very own investigation team.

I tried to be as supportive as I could, while she was on this new quest. The whole thing looked to me more like a mad wild-goose chase, especially because nothing much out of the ordinary was taking place in her house. There was also something iffy about the handmark on her window, although, I did see it with my own eyes. How come she could not get rid of it and the cleaners did! Still, I did not want to bring her wrath upon me, so I never really questioned her story. She kept phoning me several times a week, wanting to talk about her ghost, as if it was her pet.

Well, last night, Jackie called again:

“I got it! I got it! I can’t believe it, but I got it!”

“What did you get?”, I asked feeling strangely disheartened by her enthusiasm - “The ghost?”

“No, you, fool, I got the role! I won the role on the second auditioning!”

I forgot to mention that my sister is a small-time actress. It turned out that she had been getting into character all this time, in the hope to play an eccentric investigator in an Indie Horror film, which I knew nothing about.

“Well done! I thought, though, actors embodied their character offscreen after they got the part, not before…” - I managed to mutter, feeling rather irked by her gleeful loud chuckle.