18 – Do you believe in ghosts?

I believe that people believe they have seen ghosts, but I think the existence of ghosts unlikely.

When I was at secondary school our English teacher disappeared shortly after the start of the school year. From the few lessons she managed to dole out to us it was clear that she intended to fill our heads with grammar so our tongues and pens didn't err into something that only looked or sounded like english. It was therefore a relief to see her replaced by a string of eccentric supply teachers. From Mrs P (who was widely believed - for reasons connected to her disconcertingly confessional style of teaching - to have had carnal knowledge of Sting and who cried on the day she left us) to the teacher whose name escapes me and who would, like the rest, have vanished into the memory hole were it not for two things: her uncanny American-accent rendition of Tom Sawyer, and second for the day that ghosts died.

I'm not sure even now that it was wholly proper for an English teacher to take it upon herself to crush in every member of her class the nascent belief in some of the superstitious yet picturesque adornments of life. And yet she did, with a gusto entirely appropriate to the occasion.

"Who here has seen a ghost?"

Hands went up.

"No you haven't" she said "They don't exist. Who thinks they've seen a ghost?" I note now, from my more mature and less forgiving perspective, that the hands that remained up belonged to those members of the class of a particular and fragile disposition: the hysterics. She pointed out one girl whose raised hand vibrated with the desperate need to tell her story.

"I was in the living room and I heard a baby crying, but there wasn't a baby in the house."

"It was a cat, miaowing. That can sound like a baby crying or a person talking. You." She trained the howitzer of rationality on the next gullible naif. Even then I could see that psychologically speaking this might not have been a good tactic. The cat/baby girl sat there with the religious look of someone who intends to continue believing something no matter what. You know the look: the person goes very still, the lips purse slightly as if dedicated to an absorbing task like balancing a large wicker basket on their head, which is, metaphorically, what they are doing . Balancing a whole hundredweight of belief on the tiny fulcrum of this one instance.