11. Not The First Time And Won’t Be The Last
When I was younger, I attended boarding school in the north of England, and the house I was assigned to was actually on the upper floors of one of the oldest buildings (built c.1909) on campus.
The building was actually a series of interconnected ones. At one end was the school chapel which was connected by a long hallway (with classrooms on each side) to the building I was housed in. There was a day house on the ground floors and basement with boarding house on the upper floors. The campus refectory was also off the ground floor of this building.
I hated the first few weeks – I was young, away from home and friends, knew almost no-one and to cap it all off, I couldn’t sleep on the bed, so I spent many night just lying awake in bed after lights out.
One night in what I think was my third week there, I was lying awake in bed when I thought I heard a door creak open and close again. It wasn’t the door to my dorm, but I looked over and saw a faint light under the door that slowly moved from one side to the other and heard faint footsteps. I thought it was another kid from one of the other dorms, so I got out of bed and went to go look.
I didn’t see anything in the hallway, but heard the stairs that led down to the refectory – I’d heard stories of kids sneaking downstairs to grab food at night, so I followed. When I got to the bottom of the stairs however, there was nobody there, and no-one in the refectory.
I’m not sure what possessed me but instead of going back to the dorm, I went around the corner and looked down the hallway that led to the chapel where I saw a figure about 2/3rds of the way down, so I followed and called out for them.
By the time I’d caught up to them, they were ascending the stairs that led to where the chapel’s organ was, and I heard the door above me close. I thought of going up there to find them, but I heard a loud banging noise in the chapel itself. The doors were unlocked, but they were heavy and it took me a few moments to open them.
The chapel was a traditional stone chapel, and was cold at the best of times. However when I went in, it was ice cold. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. I saw a faint light up where the organist would sit, and this wave of terror passed over me and I ran back to my dorm as fast as I could, and remained under the blankets until the Housemaster practically dragged me down to breakfast the next morning.
I never told anyone what happened to me that night.
Fast forward a few years, and my Housemaster shuffled tutors around when one of the teachers left. My new tutor was one of the Music teachers, he’d been at the school for many years (he died a few years ago, and had been teaching for over 50 years at the same school). He was the organist in chapel, and was a really awesome guy. He was also my music teacher for my music appreciation class for General Studies, where we’d look at different instruments and see how they worked – he owned a harpsichord – including the organ in the chapel.
He told us why the paint on the barrier was a slightly different shade than the rest of the paint around the organ. Originally there was no barrier behind where the organist sat, and they were open to the congregation below. The barrier was built after one of the music students (which were regularly asked to be a page-turner for the organist) was sleepwalking one night up to the organ, fell off and broke his neck.
If I hadn’t have been sitting down when he said this, I probably would have fallen down.
Shortly afterwards after one of these music classes, I asked him if the story was true – he said it was, and I told him that I thought I’d seen the ghost of the boy. My teacher said that I wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last.
12. A “Being Standing Over Me”
To start off, I was always a hardened skeptic. I grew up in a religious home, and my experience led me to reject any and all religion and spirituality around 8 or 9 yo. I also suffered from depression, anxiety, and hallucinations that started getting strong around 10 yo. I started seeing a therapist when I was 11 (I knew I needed help before then, my mother insisted nothing was wrong), started medication at 13. By 14 I was taking antipsychotics, but still had never received a diagnosis that me or my doctors were satisfied with. I had Major Depression, GAD, and OCD all thrown in my file but they never really covered my symptoms. At this time I was seeing two psychologists, a psychiatrist and my GP, all constantly exchanging notes. I asked about schizophrenia or other kinds of psychosis but I was told I was “too lucid”, and from talking to me and my family extensively determined I “show no paranoid or delusional behavior”.
Basically I had none of the unique symptoms of schizophrenia except for hallucinations, mostly audio. I was always aware which ones weren’t “there” so to speak, how they didn’t fit, and my awareness was so separate from them, that psychosis apparently didn’t make sense somehow. Now, the one voice in particular is important. This one I heard the most often, the clearest, and I’d see it in my minds eye, in my dreams, out of the corner of my eye. It constantly told me to kill myself, and convince me life in general was not worth living. It had no triggers, was not attached to any trauma in my past, it didn’t even talk about things I’d done or said, it was just there constantly trying to convince me to kill myself. The more I explained this voice in particular to professionals, the less it made sense, to me and them.
