Stories please mr whitehead
I'm not sure that the narratives would impress
as stories - they tend to be very generic. The power tends to derive from the witnesses and their personalities. The circumstances in which tales are wrested from the witnesses also counts a lot, as some are very reluctant to tell of things which had spooked them.
I was friends with a teacher, whose husband had left the profession to pursue full-time their hobby of buying and upgrading properties. He had been a maths teacher and I had always found him rather hard work, when it came to socialising, which was infrequent. At one departmental supper in a local bistro, we were seated together and Kath. could see our conversation was flagging. I had asked about their latest project and how things were going. Truth to tell, I detest property-talk. It's why I gave up on dinner parties, so raising the question was a sign of desperation on my part!
It turned out the project had stalled and "Tony" - I forget his actual name - implied that they needed to hire more professionals, leading to his looking-out for some supply-work. Kath. had had a few by then and prodded "Tony" to tell me the real reason work had stopped. "James loves weird stuff. He writes about it on the Internet!"
That was enough, I should have thought, to put anyone off!
Maybe "Tony" had had a few by then, as well. I hadn't - I was driving!
What he described was utterly berserk. He was convinced that the actual lay-out of the house he owned and worked on, changed day by day. He had inspected a loft-space to which there was later no hatch! He had found out-houses and an overgrown greenhouse in a place where there was nothing the next day. His tools went missing and reappeared all the time, in a country house with no other signs of intruders. He had spent a whole day covering the walls of one room with white emulsion, returning the next day to find one wall had returned to its previous state. He had found jugs of odd weeds left, like presents, in the kitchen and dining room.
I did note that "Tony" was tense and humourless in his narrative, as if, having started reluctantly, he was determined to finish what might be the only time he would tell the tale. I do know that the relationship was on its last legs and things got messy.
I have come to feel that many ghost stories are nine tenths context.
