I have given into temptation and started watching the latest home renovation show where teams renovate each others' houses. I was being good for a while, only watching the end-of-week round-up episode but now I've weakened, and have started recording and watching all the episodes late at night when my will is weakest.
I don't like watching these shows because I don't like not knowing what is true and what is being edited. I would rather read one very short story that is entirely fictional because there is more truth in that fiction than in an entire century of reality TV.
Nevertheless, there I was watching this week's first foray into the 150-year old New South Wales farmhouse of Toad and Emily. The farmhouse has its own ghost, Mrs Miller, who lived there decades and decades ago. Toad and Emily are salt-of-the-earth types, with Toad especially not seeming to be inclined to woo-woo, but they both matter-of-factly report that sticky doors that are hard to open regularly slam themselves shut and objects move around the house and Mrs Miller regularly makes herself known. The first day the teams come in to renovate, one of the team members reports the distinct feeling of someone breathing in their ear and everyone's hairs rise up on their arms. A door slams, and I can't tell how much of it is real (Mrs Miller wants to be on House Rules too) or whether it's just the production team slamming the doors themselves like big fat liars.
I wonder what Mrs Miller thinks of the renovated art deco ensuite. I absolutely love its deep green art deco tiles and the basin and silver mirrors but then they clash horridly with the floor tiles and the fancy metal bath surround. Altogether too much. Weaponised art deco, one of the judges calls it.
Will Mrs Miller haunt the house now it's renovated, or has she been released now her house has been largely internally dismantled?
There is a tale of a woman called the Pilliga Princess. In life, she often hitchhiked down the Newell Highway in New South Wales. She was one of the few Aboriginal people to live in the area. Apparently it was a place that attracted bad spirits. The Pilliga Princess was tragically killed in 2003 by a truck that didn't see her crossing the road. Since then, there have been lots of sightings of her, pushing a shopping trolley down the highway, as she did in life.
I have already written this post fully one and half times, and accidentally deleted them both. Now I'm typing it all up again (on the laptop this time instead of the tablet, which is much easier to lose stuff on, I find). Now I'm finally typing it up for the third bloody time but this time, on the TV as I write this is a show where different people, mostly Aboriginal, are talking about their real-life experiences meeting ghosts. There are also several accounts of white people, one who sees a whole group of Aboriginal people who were maybe massacred. One which person while in a group meditation goes into a trance and sees an Aboriginal man and the rainbow serpent. When she comes out of her trance she mentions what happens to an Aboriginal woman who is there. The woman knows, she says. The Aboriginal man she met was her grandfather.
I don't feel quite so resentful now having to type this again, coinciding like this with what is on the TV. This is those moments of connection with the whole wider world that I live for.
I must say, I tend to be biased towards the existence of ghosts. I guess because I like to think of us continuing on. It makes me sad though to think of people trapped in their own trauma loops. It would be nice, if ghosts exist, to be the kind of person who would help them to move on, wouldn't it.
Miles south from the haunted dairy farm, in Straws Lane in Woodend, in Victoria, is a road that may well make you feel spooky but which is not due to spirits but to disorientated senses.
If you lay a spirit level on the road there, you won't see any ghosts but you will see the spirit level pointing downwards. But when you look with your eyes, it looks for all the world like the road is going uphill. And so it has become popular for people to stop their cars, put them in neutral and watch them roll uphill.
I don't know what all that's about. Maybe it just is an optical illusion, a disordering of the senses. Some people say that believing in a spirit world, or in the human sixth sense, is an optical illusion of the brain type, a disordering of the mind. I'm not so quick to think that. It's much easier to be open to this side of life living on a land as ancient as this.