Something fishy

I was writing up several spooky ghost encounters into a new post and the blog template suddenly froze on me in mid-sentence! I could copy all the sentences I had already written, but it wouldn’t let me paste them into any other document. Eventually, I retyped the whole thing, figuring that my home’s resident ghost was enjoying a snicker at my expense. I didn’t usually think of her as a malevolent presence. It was eerie, but most would say “just coincidence”.

What I had tried to say was:

I love checking out my blog's site meter, which is able to give me a list of URLs from which people have encountered links to my blogspot. Sometimes they are from the ever-mysterious "Unknown", but more often via Google searches, or Google Images links. One post - concerning my dog rolling in ferret poo. Sometimes people reach one of my old blog entries by performing a search on the terms "Jack Russell terriers" and "ghosts+smells". Or "Jack Russells" and "fishy smell".

Now that did seem “fishy”…

Not long after moving into this house in 2000 - it was already 33 years old and built on the site of an old lemon grove — I realised that it came with a ghostly presence in residence. I’m not one to see ghosts in every dark room, but several of my friends have had inexplicable experiences with ghosts in their own houses, and now I had something comparable. (In fact, my dog just went ballistic as I typed up that story, barking at absolutely nothing in the middle of the room… So that particular blog entry is as creepy as it is memorable.)

My first encounter with the ghost mystery was long before the dog was born. We smelt the strong odour of fish. The smell was so strong, I had assumed my housemate had just opened a tin of sardines - except that I know that he hates sardines — and we didn’t have any such tins in the pantry. The smell lasted about ten minutes, and was strongly associated with a vacant section of polished wood floor in the main “open plan” area of the house. We laughed it off as a bizarre happening.

A few weeks later, I became aware of a large, grey shape in the same room. It was standing just inside my field of vision. As soon as I directed my full attention to it, it was gone, of course. Again, we laughed it off.

What stayed with me that night was a sense of the object’s benevolence. I guess I always assumed that I would feel quite scared if I ever met a “ghost”. (I certainly felt creeped out by those computer glitches I mentioned, that had me retyping the whole blog story.) The fishy smell recurred a few times over the next few months. Always in the same place. I still felt nothing nasty from the phenomenon. It was hard to explain but the presence seemed to be female — and definitely benevolent.

Nothing more happened for quite a while, then, although I did once spot something, momentarily, in an old rocking chair we’d inherited and placed in the same room as the smell. One night, my housemate received a strong shove in the back just as he was about to go to sleep. He reappeared, wide-eyed, in the lounge room, where I was watching television, and he said softly, “We have had a visitor.”

I assumed he meant there had been a break-and-enter via his bedroom window but, no, he had been shoved in the back, and was suddenly more believing of my own wacky encounters.

When the new puppy arrived, several years later, we had almost forgotten about the resident fishy ghost. Until there was a particularly weird feeling the night my twelve-week-old Jack Russell walked over to the exact position of the previous fishy smell and stared at a spot just above the floor. And barked wildly, seemingly at nothing at all.

What is it about “Jack Russell terriers” and “fishy smells”? Now the fishy smell was back with a vengeance. Was the ghost disturbed by that arrival of a dog. Or do Jack Russells just fart a lot?

We told these stories to the previous owners when they dropped in to pick up some mail one day. They were quite surprised. In all their years of living here, they’d never noticed anything unearthly. However, they did say they’d had a few unexplained experiences in their new house. We also told a woman in a magic, incense and herbal medicine shop. She listened eagerly, offering to sell us a “smudge stick”, which would supposedly help our ghost to find a path out of the house and into The Other Place. We declined.

We are not curious enough to dig up the earth under our garage floor, lest we find the remains of an orchard-owner’s wife — and her pet goldfish? We had the fishy smell before we had the dog, and yet my blog’s “site meter” suggests that people often associate Jack Russells with fishy smells.

The fishy smell has recurred quite a few more times. Always in the same place. Apart from the odd sighting or sniffing, things have been rather quiet on the ghost front lately. Until I tried to type up the anecdote for the blog. As Dame Edna Everidge would say: "Spooky!"