I called various handymen to do the odd jobs and used the last of a small bank loan to partition off the downstairs, turning it into two more bedrooms, a storage area for shop items and a general living area. As part of lightening up the place, I filled it with gentle pastel colours and light wood furniture that was still being delivered from Sydney with glass, lights, lamps, candles, mirrors, reflective surfaces and wind chimes that reflected light from the palms back into the house. When I wasn't out in the garden I was in the study typing on the laptop late into the night. It wasn't long after the dogs and I moved in that I began to hear what sounded like someone stomping up the front stairs.
This immediately struck me as odd, because it seemed to happen very heavily, so as to make the floor in the study vibrate with each thud. There were around fifteen stairs and I heard four to five thuds, as if someone was stomping quickly up the stairs towards the double glass front door on the verandah. Once it had roused Binda from his sleep. The concrete steps had a wrought iron rail and were located directly outside the study window leading onto the front verandah. Often, when I was on the phone to my mother at night, the stomping would start up. Whenever it happened it would give me a scare, since I thought it was someone physically coming up the stairs in the dark.
I soon decided that I needed extra help with setting up the retreat. I was a left-handed one-fingered typist and, being so pushed for time, I needed someone to do some typing, filing and computer work. The first artists and writers would be arriving soon. So I advertised in the NT NEWS and found Denise. Denise was a local, down-to-earth and bright natured woman, who came to work at Ridgehaven Circuit for a while.
Denise claimed that she was a medium. She then told me that her baby daughter had died of cot death. This would be a devastating experience for any parent and Denise appeared to want to talk about the incident at length. Aside from the all-consuming grief, she mainly focused on the spiritual side of things. She said that since her daughter had died, the lights and touch lamps intermittently 'danced' at her house, with the focal point appearing to be the touch lamp by her deceased baby daughter's bedside table. She spoke of the room having been left as it had been when her daughter was alive. Barbara, who was also a friend of hers, confirmed this to be true and so we began to share a few of our ghost stories from over the years. My own contribution was always those incidents I could never forget.
The first one being, when I was a child my mother had began to talk about a ghost in her bedroom. If someone else was hanging out in my mother's room besides my father, then I wanted to know about it. "What is it mum? What is it?" I pestered her.
"Nothing," she said.
"No, tell me? What does it do?"
"It sits on the end of my bed," she said.
"Does it touch you?"
"It pushes down on the bedcovers around my legs on the end of the bed. I don't know what it is. It feels creepy. That's all."
"Is it a man or a woman?" I insisted.
"A man," she said. "It's like a shadow. I don't want to talk about it anymore."
We had many similar conversations that usually ended up the same way.
"Is it a ghost?"
"I don't know what it is. It's just creepy, that's all."
It became known to my brothers and I that my mother's bedroom was haunted. For me it was haunted by many ghosts, both the living and the dead. It was haunted by my tormented alcoholic father who wouldn't allow my mother to sleep. It was also haunted by my mother's own sorrow, so that I thought I heard her crying in the furniture. The house was dark, with navy blue carpets, deep sky blue walls, a black vinyl lounge, a chocolate coloured bathroom and thick purple bedspreads. While not old, it always seemed to be half lit, and the venetian blinds and purple curtains were prone to carrying heavy dust.
