It is the season of sharing spookiness once more, that moment in our calendars when we seek out the thrill of fear.
Today, I am sharing this story—I shared a version of this before, some years ago, but I am now privileged enough to have thousands more followers and subscribers here, so it seems wise to lightly edit and send again.
I am sending it a bit before Halloween, as I shall also be sharing another such true story, and would like to space out the letters. This will also give you, the reader, time to share this, if you wish, in advance of October the 31st.
The original version of this can be found here, on my Substack page:
This is a Hallowe’en story I reworked from an older piece and it is important to repeat: it really did happen to me, thirty-something years ago in Orkney, the archipelago of islands off the north of Scotland.
(I prefer the spelling Hallowe’en, but algorithms being what they are, I have to think about these things…)
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Please do share this as widely as you can in the run up to Halloween. This post is not paywalled, and sharing is free. Or hit that little heart button, or restack on Notes, if you frequent the place. I will soon send another seasonal, spooky tale from the period of months I spent living out in the woods alone, the whole story of which I am sharing here. (Like the story above, it also weaves in place and time, history and people.)
Finally, have you your own ghostly tales? Do you live in an old house with strange, unexplained happenings? How does that make you feel?
(What is real is a topic for another day, but I will say this—some of what we perceive as real might not actually be as real as we believe. For example, what colour are the blue feathers on either a Eurasian jay (Garrulus glandarius) or a Blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata)? Answer: as with many other blue-appearing birds, they are not actually blue at all, but brown. The structure of the feathers is such that our human eyes only see them as blue—all other wavelengths of light are scattered in such a way that they appear to be something other than what they really are. Isn’t that just incredible? And doesn’t it make you wonder what else we see which might, in fact, be something absolutely different? )
Many thanks for listening. I greatly appreciate each and every one of you who does.
Alex
