The main problem for me had not been in experiencing the 'phenomena' but in dealing with something that nobody seemed to understand. But away from organisations, institutions and other 'reality experts' and in bedsits like the one at Poinciana Street, people like Karen and I felt safe enough to come out and speak of our experiences to each other. Karen told me that she was psychic. I listened to her stories. Unlike mine, they were more about consciousness than any physical 'phenomena'. "But does the stuff happen physically around you?" I persisted.
"No, not really. Not like that anyway!"
She couldn't think of anything, aside from being able to know things about people and to read the future. But she told me that she'd seen a counsellor who had levitated several feet off a couch in front of her. I picked Karen as intelligent and intuitive, but at the same time I could see that she lacked self esteem, since she was allowing her drunken partner Clayton to continually dominate and verbally abuse her. I ended up telling her about the streetlights going on and off. She then sparked up, "Yes! Streetlights are always going on and off over my head!"
"Really?" I said. "Outside Darwin?"
"Yes, all over."
"Really? And how many, like just one?"
"No," she said, "Sometimes whole rows of lights will switch themselves on and off. Oh, I've got the goose bumps now." She then added, "Don't you go telling Clayton about any of this. He doesn't believe in it."
Over the next few months Karen would come into the bedsit to share chai tea and many stories of a 'psychic nature', along with the latest horrors of dealing with the locals at the Bagot Road McDonalds. I would then speak of the streetlight and bedsit incidents. Karen then told me that lights had been dimming up and down in her unit. "Yeah," I said to her, "It's contagious."
One morning at 5.30am, I woke to Karen pounding at the security doors of the bedsit. She was mouthing behind the glass and pointing back behind her, "The lights! The lights!"
"What's happened now?" I asked, as I quickly unlocked the security screen door.
"Oh my God," she said, "They all went off. The streetlights all went off along the whole street, one by one, just then!"
"Yeah," I said, "they're on timers. They're meant to turn off now. It's five-thirty. It's dawn."
"No," she said, "That's not it!"
"Then what?" I made my way over to the kettle.
"Well," she said, "Then they all came back on, one after the other, until they were all on again."
"And are they still on?" I asked.
"No," she said, "Then they all went off again!"
"And now they're off, right?"
She nodded. I made us both a chai tea and she stayed in the bedsit while she waited for her friend to pick her up for work.
"Wow," I said, "That one hasn't happened to me yet."
Often when Karen visited there would be the gentle flicker of lights in the bedsit. Then a few things started to happen. The first one involved a didgeridoo. Maria had told me on the phone that 'Poinciana' was the name of a local indigenous woman who haunted East Point and that the streetlight episode that Karen had experienced at dawn might mean that the whole street after which she was named was haunted. In Maria's version of the story, Poinciana had been raped and murdered by a man at East Point, so that now when local couples went down to that beach, together they would see the ghost of Poincianna.
