One night during my adolescence, as I was on my stomach trying to get to sleep, I felt all the sheets in my bed moving up around my shoulders and neck. I could feel someone or something tugging on them on either side of the bed but close to my body. Whatever it was seemed like it was trying to tuck me into bed! This was followed by what appeared to be a chuckle in the centre of the room. I sprang out of my bed, darting from that bedroom and into my mother's room across the hallway. I was unable to sleep in my own bed for many nights after that.
Then, some years later, when my mother had came to visit me in Collett Street in Melbourne, and I was questioning her on the creepy presence at Rose Street, I was to find out that it had been happening to her as well. My mother had already dissociated from these experiences, saying to me that she couldn't remember anything and not to dwell in the past. But suddenly she did remember something. "Oh," she said. "You mean the thing that used to pull the bedclothes up around your neck!"
I looked at her. "Yeah. What about it?"
"Well, it did it to me too."
"Really? How any times did it happen to you?"
"Oh, about five or six times. It's like it tugs the bedclothes up around your neck."
"Right. Well, thanks for letting me know!"
The fact was that my life, and that of my mother, had been filled with odd occurrences for as far back as I could remember.
In the case of Denise, I believed that she had a psychological need to keep the 'phenomena' alive in her own house, as a way of keeping her baby daughter alive. Or at least as a way of knowing that her daughter lived on within the universe and was therefore safe from harm. Not having this same need, I tended to dismiss the 'phenomena', as coincidence or hallucination. I often forgot about it soon after it occurred, making no connections between events. Only the most obvious things stood out and were told to others as a way of coping, and only if the subject arose or was initiated by others in conversation.
While I was always interested in such things, I never went out of my way to look for them. I had shut down any possibility of the unexplained ever happening to me. The main reason for this was that, in not knowing what I was dealing with, I felt better not dealing with it at all. As a result I had developed what I believed to be a healthy scepticism towards anything I heard from others on this subject. Nevertheless, I was always prepared to talk about several strange incidents that I had experienced over the years, then leave it at that. While I listened to Denise's stories about her daughter and attempted to sympathise, I had no hope of understanding what it must be like to lose a baby. I wasn't sure if there was life after death. Like a lot of people, I hoped there was, but I thought that perhaps there wasn't, so I didn't want to think about it. We would all find out one day.
It wasn't long after Denise started volunteering at Ridgehaven Circuit that some odd things began to happen. While 'the thing on the stairs' had been active before the arrival of Denise, the lamp and light activity only began to occur after she had been working at the premises on the second computer and with stock for several weeks. Unlike myself, Denise was quite comfortable with, even desirous of, the 'phenomena' and told me that she enjoyed all the 'spirits' and that she had invited them into her place. She even insisted that her three children were quite relaxed that the family shared the house with these 'dancing lights' and unseen others. Meanwhile, I still did not know whether there were even such things as 'spirits'. While not dabbling in this area, I was prepared to keep an open mind.
One day I went out of the premises on several errands, leaving Denise to work at the retreat computer on her own. On the way out, at the front gate, I had what appeared to be a mental flash that there were three men standing around me. A couple appeared to be in suits. I put these flashes down to involuntary thoughts coming into awareness from the unconscious mind. I referred to them as 'hallucinations'. After a couple of hours of running errands around Darwin I returned. As I walked up the front stairs onto the verandah and in through the double glass sliding door, the volume of the television turned itself up to the highest volume it could go, without either Denise or myself touching it. The computer that Denise was working on in the main living area flickered on and off a couple of times.
