Angella Johnson VIEW FROM A BROAD
I have done some stupid things in my time. But spending the night alone in a haunted office building must rank way up there as one of my dumbest and most bizarre ideas yet. Yes, you heard right. I did say haunted and alone.
It was so spooky. Every bit of noise made me jump – from the creaking of the wooden beams overhead to the rustle of the window blinds behind me. I could have sworn I heard footsteps and a door closing somewhere in the building.
Why did I, the scaredy-cat who can’t even watch old Dracula movies, do this? I wish I knew.
It all started soon after this august publication moved into swanky refurbished premises in Milpark, west Johannesburg.
The building used to house the Blue Ribbon Bakery and stood derelict for years. More importantly, it also happens to be next door to the massive Avbob funeral parlour.
We had been here just more than a month when colleagues working late at night started to hear strange noises. They ranged from footsteps along empty corridors, to doors opening and closing and chunks of masonry flying from out of nowhere.
Trish Murphy, a mature and sober- minded woman, was the first to realise we had ghostly squatters. “I was in the ladies’ toilet when I heard heavy breathing coming from the booth next door. It sounded like someone was suffering from a drug overdose.”
When she checked, the booth was empty.
At first no one believed her. Then one by one cynics began to complain as well about mysterious crashes in the toilet and kitchen, fridge doors opening, milk disappearing and shadowy figures drifting in and out of their peripheral vision.
Murphy glibly suggested that residents from the funeral parlour could be using the building as their personal playground. This was greeted by many of us with chest-heaving hilarity and a generous amount of faux fright.
Matters came to a head last week when Gavin Dudley, the most hardened sceptic amongst us, was tapping away on his computer at about 1.30am. Initially, he rationalised the noise as rats in the roof and the building settling for the night.
Some 30 minutes later he heard shuffling footsteps behind him and laboured breathing over his left shoulder. It was far too much reality for Mr Sceptic to dismiss. Turning to find no one there, he barely paused long enough to grab his belongings and fled.
The next morning he discovered that his electronic watch had lost exactly one hour.
This is where I came in. “Why not call in an exorcist?” another colleague suggested on hearing Dudley’s tale. “It would make a great column.” I suspect he was really freaked out and wanted me to get help, but was too proud to ask outright. But I did not want to dabble in the supernatural. I declined.
“Don’t you think ghosts have rights too?” complained one hardline liberal colleague on hearing what she clearly deemed to be an infringement of unhuman rights. “If there is something, it was here before us. We are invading his space.”
This was the kind of talk to put me in a bullish mood. “Puleeze, he’s had his turn; now it’s time to bugger off and let us have ours,” I snapped. Ghostbuster Johnson was ready to fix things.
The Catholic church was my first port of call. But I was rebuffed by a huffy priest who declined to do an exorcism because, he said, “This is not entertainment. It is a serious business.”
What’s his problem? My sister saw The Exorcist – it is entertainment!
My search for an exorcist led to Harry Knowles, an elderly psychic and medium. He explained that an earthbound entity was probably disgruntled with our trespassing.
“You need to get someone like a transmedium to make contact and carry out what we call rescue work,” he said. Unfortunately, it was not his thing.
Someone suggested spirit medium Nan Abbott. “It’s very frightening, I’m sure,” she said empathetically. “Someone probably died very suddenly and is still hanging around. They will need to be released.”
Yeah, I know all that. But would she do it? Unfortunately, at 70-odd years old, Abbott did not feel up to the job. Honestly, I was beginning to feel like someone with a blocked drain trying to get a plumber to come out in the evening.
“Don’t worry, I’ll know a man from the church who used to lift up poltergeists. I’ll try and find him for you,” Abbott assured me. Sadly, she later telephoned to say that her man had retired to other ghostly pursuits in Cape Town.
By now my curiosity (and maybe feeling a little sympathetic) about this wandering earthbound spirit – some colleagues insisted there were several – had peaked. I wanted to hold a seance.
“You don’t want to do that,” scoffed clairvoyant Cally Tungstall. “You want to do a clearing. People don’t hold seances any more. We’ve moved on. [Well, excuse me…] In any case, you can do it yourself and you don’t even have to be in the building.”
“And pray just how does one do this?” I asked.
“Just imagine you have a fireman-type hose jetting crystal-clear water,” continued Tungstall. “Work your way through the building, going from office to office, hosing down the walls and floors as you go.
“Create an imaginary drain in one corner where this dirty water will go and ask the universe to change any negativity in that water into positive energy, to be used by the angels.”
For good measure, she added that I should visualise each room being filled with white light and loudly ask that any lost soul present be taken up to the light. It sounded like hocus- pocus to me.
Maybe I was looking at the wrong racial end of the paranormal world. “There’s a native boy called Selby Gumbi who does this kind of work,” suggested a helpful Daphne Knowles (wife of Harry).
Er, how young is he then?
“About 30 to 40 and very respectable,” she replied.
Gumbi, she said, had assisted an elderly Pretoria woman whose “native girl” had put a sweaty, foul-breathed spirit on her. Unfortunately, his cellphone message box was full. Several other sangomas said they were too busy for the job.
Who would have thought getting someone to tackle a wayward ghost could be so difficult? In desperation I landed up with mystic Janet Chadderton, a hard- talking Mancunian who agreed to tackle our noisy poltergeist.
“The heavy breathing suggests this is a male presence. I’ll just make contact and tell him to piss off,” she said.
But on the night of the “clearing”, Chadderton decided that two of the three spirits she supposedly encountered here, an old nightwatchman called Joe and a coloured woman called Adeli, were “friendly”. So we’ve let them stay.
The third, an old woman who had died of tuberculosis Chadderton allegedly “sent to the light” with a remarkable display of third-rate acting.
Now I still don’t know if ghosts exist, although the number of individual testimonials from workers in my company seems to indicate there is something in it. But I’ve learned one thing from the experience: there’s room on the planet for all of us. I hope ghosts feel the same way.