For those of you who don’t know, today is Halloween.
It is the one time of the year when it is perfectly acceptable to dress up as your favourite superhero, ghoulish character or anything else you can think of without getting some questionable looks when you sit in the food court at the mall.
If you wear a full warlock costume on any regular Tuesday, you might be asked to leave the place altogether.
But not on Halloween, buddy. Everything is fair game today.
Costume hijinks aside, it is also prime time to weave stories of the supernatural experiences.
So, that is what I’m going to do.
It starts with a confession, however. I believe I’ve seen ghosts. Or at least I think I have.
I’ve had a couple of experiences with what you would traditionally call ghosts or spirits.
This is just one of them.
It all seems outlandish when you think about it. Ghosts don’t exist, right?
However, an experience one night in Bay Roberts still makes me question that.
It was just after midnight a couple of years ago when the creak of a floorboard in my room was enough to stir me from my slumber.
With groggy eyes, I lifted my head from the pillow and peered towards the foot of the bed.
What I saw is still really a mystery to this day.
I saw a woman — probably in her mid-20s — in a white dress walking from one corner of the bed to the other.
It was only for a couple of seconds, then whatever it was disappeared.
I won’t say the experience freaked me out. It did ignite some curiosity into what it might have been.
I spoke to my grandparents — it was their home — about it, but they’ve never experienced anything like that in the 50-plus years they’ve been in the home.
I tend to think about that short confrontation with the supernatural a bit more around this time of year.
It also makes me think about what other people have experienced. Out home, there are stories of haunted graveyards, ghost riders and women in white.
Take the story of an apparent haunting of the Western Memorial Regional Hospital in Corner Brook.
As it goes, on certain floors a woman in a floral dress can be seen sitting in one of the break rooms and crying.
At other times, people have reported just hearing sobbing.
Stories like that don’t necessarily make a true believer in ghost stories. But it does give me pause.
Maybe there is something to that bump in the night.
— Nicholas Mercer is the online editor with The Western Star. He lives in Corner Brook and can be reached at [email protected].
