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A (true) Ghost Story [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-21
Prior to this event, I was a staunch disbeliever in ghosts and anything paranormal. And I am always ready to disbelieve my own senses when science and logic tell me they’re likely to be in error. But I’ve had this event on my mind for many years. I still have no rational explanation to offer, so I will leave it up to you to decide.
In 1981 I and my second engineer Tim were living in The Gambia while installing radio transmitters for the government. We had rooms in a tourist hotel and made friends with our neighbour, a Scandinavian doctor. He must have been aged about 48.
He lived two doors away from us on the same floor (one up from ground level) and worked for the W.H.O., the World Health Organization. Single-handedly he was battling a meningitis outbreak in some villages. Going by what I had experienced upriver at Basse, I could imagine the hellish conditions he’d be working in.
One evening we found him in the bar across the road. The doctor left a little while before we did.
Tim and I finished our drinks, left the bar, and walked the short distance to the hotel. As we approached the steps that lead to the first-floor apartments, I was shocked to see our friend lying in a heap on the steps.
We ran up.
At first I thought, ‘perhaps he's had a few too many’.
I shook his shoulder and tried to rouse him but got no response.
Becoming really alarmed, I tried to find his pulse.
I couldn't find his pulse and he didn’t seem to be breathing so we began trying to revive him.
It was too late. He made a sort of groaning sound but it was just air escaping.
I guess that he had probably suffered a heart attack. I remember being very angry that such a decent and dedicated person had died so young.
We alerted the hotel staff, who didn’t seem to know what to do, so we decided to contact the police ourselves. This proved more difficult than we expected. Finally we tracked down the chief of police to a cinema, which stopped the showing and made an announcement. After giving brief statements we went to bed somewhat disturbed.
Two or three weeks later we were coming back from the same bar in more or less the same circumstances.
As we approached the stairs I clearly saw him lying there in the same position as we had found him.
I stopped and looked at Tim. While I was wondering what to say, Tim said, "I can see him, too."
We walked on, towards the apparition, and as we got nearer, the image, that at first had seemed as solid as a real person, faded.
We arrived and there was nothing to see. I put my hands down into the place where the image had been and, despite the fact that this was a tropical evening, the air felt icy.
I assumed that this was a hallucination brought on by delayed shock. However, neither of us could explain why both of us had seen the image. It seemed very improbable that we would experience an identical hallucination at the same time.
We did not feel much like discussing what had happened. It seemed best not to talk about it to the management back in England, because they might think we’d gone crazy. And so we continued living on that floor, as we completed our project, until a few weeks later, we experienced a repeat of the visualization. And then yet another. It got to the point that, if I was returning at dusk or during the evening, I half expected to see him there.
We found the situation so disturbing that we moved to another hotel.
Can anyone explain this? Because I sure as hell can’t.
[END]
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