For a year, it seemed as though my family had pissed off the Roman Goddess of Fortune, Fortuna, because we had been the victims of 12 months of intensely bad luck. That’s when, in a desperate attempt for some answers, we went to see a man who could communicate with supernatural forces – a fully developed ‘receiver’, who told my mother and I that we had the gift as well. A ‘receiver’ is not someone who is born with the ability to communicate with ghosts on a regular basis or who can tell the future, or any of that cool movie-level stuff. A ‘receiver’ is someone who has an innate sense, which allows them to experience and perceive things others can’t – things from the supernatural world. It’s a gift; you can choose to build on or ignore it. The more you build on it, the more you can do. I never developed it, but I definitely couldn’t ignore the strange occurrences I’d been privy to my whole life. The only difference was that it all made sense now.
Some of my fondest childhood memories were the weekends I spent at my bungalow in Juhu. It was nothing short of a dream – right on the beach, outdoor jacuzzi, a mini theatre, a fully-equipped gym, the works! But something didn’t feel quite right.
As I said, I’ve never been one to be afraid of ghosts, but I can’t deny what happened there shook me up a little. It would do that to any ten-year-old.
On the top floor of the three-story house, I kept seeing a lady in white hovering around the stairs, and after a moment, she would disappear. My parents blamed it on my obsession with horror films, and I blamed it on my vivid imagination (which also stemmed from my horror movie craze). I considered the possibility that I was imagining things, or that my sister was trying to mess with me. (She was averse to the genre and was constantly trying to convince me to watch something else.) I mean, I don’t blame them. Who would believe everything a ten-year-old had to say?
That was, until what happened to my grandmother.
She was unwell and decided to stay at home, while the rest of the family went out for lunch. Let me remind you that she was the only one in the bungalow for those few hours. Halfway through lunch, we got a frantic call.
She was sleeping, when the television turned itself on. Fair enough, the switch could have tripped, or she could have accidentally sat on the remote. My grandmother, however, is what you could call a neat freak. Her slippers would invariably lie at the foot of her bed if she were taking a nap. She woke up to the sound of static and a sudden sensation of cold air, and found one of her slippers flung near the window, and the other lying overturned at the opposite end of the room. Sister to the Ramsay brothers, she knew the difference between real and reel. This, she was convinced, was real.
Living the horror nightmare. Image source: YouTube.com
After a few weeks of incomprehensible instances (which only my mother, grandmother and I were experiencing, probably because of our ‘receiver’ sense that we weren’t aware of at the time), we decided to inquire into the history of the house. We discovered 2 very, and I mean very eerie things. The house had been built on that part of the beach where people used to be cremated. Yep, we were literally living ABOVE where dead people were incinerated. Dead people. The second, was that while living there, all the previous owners had gone broke- every single one of them.
Since I loved horror stories so much, life did me one better. I was living in one. part 2 coming soon
