GHOST STORY

Oban, Scotland. June 1997

I had been touring Scotland that month - it had rained almost every day. I never removed my leather jacket for the whole month of June. I decided to take the morning ferry across the Irish Sea to Belfat but first had to overnight in Oban. The youth hostel was in a 18th century stone building and had a converted stable out back.

I was asleep in my top bunk when I heard the three Swedish girls who shared the room come in around midnight. The tall metal bed swayed as one of them climbed into the bunk below me. I drifted back to sleep but half woke again to more shaking - I was having a waking dream of a woman climbing the ladder and hauling herself over the railing into my upper bunk but it wasn't the Swedish girl. It was a voluptuous redhead in lowcut dress festooned with flounces. The strange part was, she seemed to know me even though I wass facing the wall with my back to the ladder as she squeezed in behind and threw her arm across my shoulder, hissing through her teeth "So, you're back!"

I had a sudden flash that in a past life I had been a Scots or Irish sailor and she was my girlfriend but I had abandoned her. Her life hadn't ended well and she was still here as a ghost, waiting for me to return. Several reincarnations later, in this lifetime I am tall but I'm not a man.

For a minute there, though, I felt like one. Frozen with terror that her womanly passions had become twisted by hate over the centuries, I tried to shove her off but she clung like a barnacle. From somewhere she pulled out a comb made of fishbone and jammed it into my mouth. In the struggle I called on Jesus to make her disappear, and it worked. Try it next time this happens to you. Th apparition let go and I fell back to sleep.

The next morning at checkout I asked the desk clerk if guests had reported any ghosts back there. He asked me to describe my visitor.

"Oh, yes,” he agreed. “She'd be one of the servants from 300 years ago when it was their quarters."

"So this happens often?"

"Fairly often," he said, very matter of factly.

The next day after landing in Ireland I visited a museum. In a display case was an old fishbone comb like the one she had attacked me with the night before.

Love never dies, I guess.

Which is scary.