The Ghost of Malabar House

People generally scoff, if you ask them whether they believe in ghosts, yet as a child, the memory of the night a ghost entered my room lives vividly in my memory. I had no idea, that there was anything unusual about my bedroom, yet this night I experienced an unusual event. Although the house was not very old, most probably Edwardian, that my parents had extended, and named Malabar after a Burns Philp cargo freighter, my grandfather had captain in South-East Asia. Not, that I think for one moment that Indian mythology had anything to do with our resident ghost.

The night in question, occurred during the early war years, when we were subjected to continual bombing raids night after night, as the German air force tried to flatten the nearby RAF base a couple of miles outside the village. It occurred in the middle of the night, when else, when I awoke feeling a tremendous sense of cold come over the room. It was a though I had walked into a butcher's cold room, my teeth started to chatter. I was so scared, that I pulled the blankets over my head hopeing no one would know I was there, I was not game to  look . I felt the presence of someone standing next to the bed, in that way, many people feel someone is standing behind them.

Then, I heard a sewing machine working away under the window, someone drop an armful of wood near the fire place. Next, there was a piecing scream,  I too started  screaming , until my mother arrived to carm me down. During the rest of my childhood I refused to sleep in that room again. It was only in later life, that I learned that the previous owner's wife had been a dressmaker, and one night her husband had come in from chopping wood, and struck her on the head with an ax. My mother seemed to know quite a lot about the murder, which was why the house had sold cheaply.

I know a lot of my readers will believe I'm pulling their leg, but believe me the story is true. What brought this to mind was talking about the vandalism at the Royal Derwent Mental Hospital at New Norfolk yesterday,a complex with its own horrow stories, that had been subjected to some twelve fires over the last year. I used to hear some horrific stories from ex inmates, while living up at New Norfolk about their experiences. When the Tasmanian Government closed the hospital , they turned the patients out into cheap accommodation to fend for themselves. Many of these lost souls would walk up and down the street all day, often coming into the shop simply to find a person to talk to. Heather and I spent many hours trying to carm them down.