Oorgo

Daaaaviiiid

Fear of the dark, or Lygophobia, yeah I've got it, just like Shank apparently has it. It's not so bad now that I've grown up and have kids etc. but every once and awhile when I'm sleep deprived it seems to rear it's ugly head, it's definitely not as bad as Ted's appararent fear of household appliances.

The root of my fears probably stems from my 2 older sisters, one 5 one 7 years older. When I was say... about 4 or so, I distinctly remember them torturing me on "babysitting" nights. I'd be doing something, who knows what, and suddenly all the lights would go out and they'd be running around saying "Daaaaaviiiid..... DaaAAAAaaaviiiid"... (Funny... I get the sudden urge to punch someone right in the kisser). And of course that would result me yelling, screaming "I know you're there" "I know you're there" etc. etc. until either I frantically found the light switch or they gave in and turned the lights back on. They apologized many many years later for it, or at least my oldest sister did, but I still wanna give them a swift kick.

The house we lived in when first moving to Alberta was another contributor to the fear. It was about 60 years old or more, and many local people new it was haunted when we moved in. Not until we had been living there for a good 10 years did we find out that about 4 people had died in the house, one in a not so natural death. Both parents who built the house died in it, one son apparently didn't want to go to war or something, so he hung himself in the attic, and the other died of a heart attack in the room that would be my parents. They didn't find the last one for a good 2 week or more, in July. An odd nasty odor could be smelled in my parents room when the wind was right.

We noticed the ghostly housemates early on, things like books falling off the music holder on the upright piano down onto keys while we're eating supper in the next room (no-one in the piano room). Mom had a guitar hanging in their bedroom, we were all sitting in an adjacent room and heard it strumming, we all went to look, no one there. My oldest sister slept on the second floor, one of the bedrooms under the attic, she used to hear footsteps upstairs all the time, like someone walking around.

My own personal experiences were bizarre. I was almost asleep one night (I also slept on the second floor) I turned over and noticed kind of a fuzzy figure tiptoeing into my room, then disappearing into the window. My parents told me that it sounded like I jumped from the top step to the bottom, and came skittering into their room, I didn't sleep in my bed that night. One morning I got up earlier than everyone else, in our stairs down to the kitchen there was a sliding peephole so you could look down into the kitchen, I looked through it and saw something I denied for a long time. The cupboard doors were swinging, and not just a couple but almost all of them. I ran back to bed in disbelief and tried to go back to sleep.

You can imagine why my lygophobia was so strong. The fear of the dark was still alive and well in our trip back home from Victoria, at about 2 in the morning we stopped at a roadside stop for a nap, at some point I woke up to relieve myself, got out of the car, started my business, thought I heard something in the bush, hurriedly finished, got in the car and drove the rest of the way home... it being something like 5 in the morning, bleary eyed and delirious. Of course that time of day in Jasper National Park is scary because the wildlife take back the road, they are everywhere, it's like mountain goat slalom with your car.

Posted by Oorgo at August 11, 2005 06:56 PM Permalink - Category: Best of Me | TrackBack