|
page-9
This occurred as soon as I walked through the front door. I stopped in my tracks and Denise turned around and started giggling, as though she thought it was funny, or at least that my facial expression was, since she obviously knew that it was her 'spirits'. After turning the volume back down with the remote control, that was left sitting on the coffee table, I turned to her and said (half joking around), "Whoever you have brought with you, you can take them back with you!" This very same incident happened again a second time, only a few days later.
On another occasion Denise, myself and the first creative resident of 'the retreat', a sound artist, were having a relaxed lunch on the front verandah outside. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw what I thought was a huge man on the second step from the top of the verandah. "Shit!" I jumped in my chair, turning to the area. But there was no one there. Nor did Denise or the sound artist see what I had. At the time I was not expecting that anything should occur. Nor were we talking about anything of this nature. Then for around eight months the stomping continued up the front steps on a regular basis. I would hear between three and five heavy thumps at a time. I heard it, when sitting in the study while working on the laptop late at night, since the window faced out onto the stairway with a view to the front driveway. The bedroom floor would vibrate.
The stomping up the stairs nearly always occurred late at night, often after 11.30pm. The first of my local friends to feel something on the stairs was Maria. I hadn't said anything to her, but she had always considered herself to be a bit 'psychic'. One night after visiting the house, she paused at the top of the stairs and looked down into the darkness. The house got very dark and closed in at night, since it was surrounded by palms with only one streetlight on this section of the street. Thankfully the streetlight was outside the front of the premises, since I had taken to sleeping with all the house lights on. I thought, the more lights that are on at this place after dark, the better.
Feeling afraid, Maria refused to walk down the stairs without me. One night she said that she felt something down there and asked me to see her and her two daughters to the car. I said, "There has been a pounding up the stairs like someone is coming up them. But when I go to the door no one's there."
"I know Darling, I can feel it," she said.
Maria told me to 'send him to the light'. She also said that she saw 'an angel hovering around the ceiling in the loungeroom' one night. I was reluctant to do anything about 'the thing on the steps', when I didn't know what it actually was. So I didn't follow her advice to 'send him to the light'. However, I made a decision to leave the downstairs fluorescent light on at night.
My other friend, Tricia, also admitted to hearing the stomping one night when she and her son Martin had been over for dinner. I told her that Maria had felt something there. She said, "Yeah, I know Coral!" in her agitated and high-pitched voice. That same night the chair she was sitting on collapsed beneath her, as its steel legs snapped off. Tricia ended up on the floor. She had also fallen down the stairs on a previous visit. She was beginning to think that the house had something against her.
Once the stomping was heard in the middle of the day, when a volunteer called Jodie, associated with the NT Writers Centre was in the loungeroom. She looked up and said, "You've got a visitor." But no one was there. Again, it had sounded and felt like someone stomping up the stairs a few at a time, very heavily, until they got to the top where it stopped. Then it repeated when you least expected it too. What really used to scare me was if I was in the study late at night and the stomping occurred, when I knew I had left the double sliding glass door open. I did this so that Binda and Kindi could go outside if they needed to. The stomping was so loud that I had raced out into the loungeroom holding my breath on several occasions, quickly shutting the door and fully expecting to see an intruder. |
