A Wraith Fondly Remembered.

Talking of ghosts (which I seem to be doing a lot lately), I don’t remember whether I ever told the story of the strange woman I used to see walking along a road close to where I lived as a child. She had long black hair, a white face, and wore an ankle-length coat of the sort which had gone out of fashion decades earlier.

I always used to walk on the opposite side of the road and watch her intensely until there was distance between us, and I swear that if she’d looked back at me I would have either leapt up the nearest tree or collapsed in a heap and gibbered. She never did. She always walked slowly in a straight line with her hands hanging loosely at her side, and she never looked anywhere but dead ahead. I always assumed she was the embodiment of the mad woman I so feared and frequently dreamt about, but I wondered later whether she might have been a ghost.

And this is especially so now that I watch a lot of Japanese horror films. The fact isn’t lost on me that this woman bore an uncanny resemblance to the stereotypical female Japanese ghost, which is probably why I like their films. There’s a comfy sense of nostalgia about them because I lived in one as a kid.