I see dead people...

I don’t quite get what the deal is here but I’ve found the British to be absolutely obsessed with ghosts. Every place you go to has some sort of ghost story attributed to it. Even our hometown of Hastings has ghost tours around it in the evenings. At first I thought that it must be because everything is so old and being so old by default places have seen a lot of death. But it can’t be just the age of the places as strangely our school has got one (and it was built in the1940s).

The ghost story of our school revolves around the large clock tower that dominates the school. Currently the clock is broken and the cost to repair it is £20000 but apparently it’s not worth the money. The reasons why there is a ghost in the tower are sketchy at best (I reckon it was a murdered teacher- ha, ha, ha). Anyway, every time the clock gets fixed it breaks down soon after…. The spooky part is that the three clock faces always break down with the same times on their faces (12.00; 4.15; and some other time I can’t remember).

Back onto the national obsession of ghosts were the Halloween celebrations. In Australia Halloween comes and goes without much of a blip on the social calendar (except for maybe a few dodgy decorations in shop windows). Here Halloween is massive and unfortunately for us Halloween fell on a Tuesday so our kids were just jumping off the walls (quite literally and very Exorcist-like). All they could talk about was going out and trick or treating (even the Year 11’s).

While we were sitting at home on Tuesday evening (with the doorbell turned off to prevent Trick or Treaters- how bah humbug of us) we heard the distinctive noise of drumming coming up the street. We looked out the window to see a procession of ghouls, ghosts, zombies and demons marching with their drums. It was actually quite eerie as it was dark and the lighting in our street is Ye Olde lampposts. The funny thing is that I must be becoming a bit British too as I see (brain) dead people five times a week.