A strange encounter at the Halfway Cemetery convinced STEVEN TAYLOR he had glimpsed something impossible, black legs and shoes hurrying silently past with no torso
If I waited a long time, if waiting it was, to see my first ghost, I was also naturally used to the legend of their reality in folklore and fiction, as have been and will be many folk, so it was not so shocking or odd to encounter that first uberbrief revenant in a sunlit graveyard at midday.
An open rather than a borderless mind helps apprehension, and it would be fair to say that I, too, was primed for the event which many report as anecdotes and which monotheists and Scientists debunk for different reasons, because they must believe Satan is under every bed in the disguise of the Dead, or because witnesses of ghosts must be victims of pareidolia, a hex or alcoholism. For the bigot Rationalist, folklore may be fiction; for the bigot Monotheist, it may be Satanism.
Thus, while visiting a relative on the Isle of Sheppey in the early 2020s, I felt myself in urgent need of what the Frenchman calls a pissoir. I’ve no wish to be flippant, but that is the truth, and a man can look casual in the urinary act, which very casuality is a behavioural camouflage for what is otherwise indecent exposure, which performance any wise man always tries to avoid, unless a foolish flasher.
I knew there was a graveyard on the way to my brother’s house at Halfway, the Halfway Cemetery, and I was still too far away from his home. Blasphemous though it seems, I knew I had to gift the earth with some of its borrowed chemicals rather quickly, and so I found the hopefully lonely arena.
The sunny day was as good as a giant spotlight. At least the big trees were alive, if seldom overtopping the graves, and offered some modest camouflage.
I spied for witnesses, especially childish or ladylike, and, knowing any average man would likely be more lenient than the former demographics, I chose to risk a public leak in the relative privacy of the quiet, tree-shady deathscape.
I had been careful to let a miniature woman pushing a childful buggy vanish into the hazy distance and out of the grounds, as I hunted for the obscurest spot in what seemed otherwise an empty graveyard, as I hoped. I had no fear of the scorn of indifferent birds or the curiosity of random squirrels. Wasps might have given me concern, butterflies not.
The grounds were crisscrossed with rectangular paths but hosted trees and their camouflage shadows too, so I had a chance to go unseen, indeed like a ghost, who, I believe, seldom haunt graveyards since the Dead do not die in them, albeit they may haunt their own remains. I guess Time murders most folk in their beds. I will be up a mountain, yodelling Bach.
Thus, I eventually found a sepulchral edifice to my right and dove thereat, standing flush with the old stone, and unzipped. After watering, as I zipped up, I noted to my left a man swiftly striding along the path past me. I said something witty to excuse my shifty deed, but glancing back — no one.
What? Gone and so quick, and to where? How?
I was respectable and comfortable now, and stepped onto the path to overlook all the paths in every direction. No one. A lurker? Why? Where? Nobody anywhere, and nobody could have hidden their presence in scant seconds in any direction. How to attend and vanish virtually instantly?
Images also appear in the mind like ghosts, seemingly from nowhere and disappearing back to nowhere. But everything is somewhere.
In fact, I had only seen the woman with the buggy leaving the yard in the whole time since I had entered the grounds. It was middayish. People were at work or home or school, not wandering graveyards, and nor was I, in fact, save frankly to urinate.
Then my mind did a thing which the mind can do, which is to reperceive a perception upon request, which mine duly did, as if to explain this experiential novelty to me: the apparition was faceless because torsoless.
I had seen only a pair of black slacks and shoes hurry past me, not a living person, as if its consequential headlessness were even a disguise. The torso was absent in my playback memory as I reperceived it.
I had read that a ghost might be only peripherally perceivable in some cases, for whatever reason. Perhaps privacy. I had had a virtually instantaneous flashback that showed me no torso, thus no live warm body. Nothing Satanic followed as a result either, nor indeed had foreshadowed it.
However, either my twin outer eyes had transferred an ocular event to my brain, or my one inner eye had partially perceived a semi-real phenomenon where it also might reasonably be foreseen: a graveyard.
I don’t think the old sepulchre could have been the Deadster’s own edifice, but he might have been a former sexton haunting the Dead. A few years later, I wrote my first book about a haunted sexton, though not with any direct inspiration from this doubtful event, at least to my conscious knowledge.
I was not ghost-hunting, to be sure, and ironically was hoping to water unseen. It was a creepy way to be “arrested”, so to speak, but thank God it was not the lone visitors mentioned earlier. The ghost, or a ghost, had hunted me as if I were a vulgar hooligan, which really I was, if haplessly so.
STEVEN TAYLOR is a writer, artist and lifelong student of the strange. Introduced to paranormal subjects as a child, he grew up reading classic ghost stories, exploring folklore and developing a fascination with philosophy, the occult and metaphysical ideas. Over the years he has worked in a wide range of jobs, exhibited his artwork, founded an arts club, performed in a punk band and written poetry. Now retired, he continues to write fiction, philosophy and poetry, having completed his first occult-themed novel and currently working on a second. Find out more at stephenpauldavidtaylor.co.uk and gothscape.com.
