ghosts

This face-in-a-wall is just down the road from where I live and it reminds me of two ghostly things.

Firstly, it reminds me of a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper published in 1891.

The narrator has been confined to a yellow room which she hates, in an isolated country house where she has been taken as a "rest cure" for her "mental fragility". Denied contact with family, friends, even her baby - and denied the chance to work at her writing - she begins to see movement under the wallpaper, a figure writhing around the room.
"There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit."

A woman, trapped under the yellow, creeping like the women who creep around in the garden outside. Were they ghosts? or were they figments and symptoms of her growing madness?

Its a great story which you can read here, based on the writer's own experience of being prescribed a "rest cure" for her post-natal depression. It was a critique of the way Victorian women were treated as hysterical and unstable because of their biology. She sent a copy to the leading doctor who had pioneered this treatment and though he never replied to her, he did actually change his practice after reading the story.

Which also reminds me of Gaslight, what a great film, with similar themes of haunting and female madness.

Secondly, thinking of ghosts and creepy women reminds me of a night when as a child I was sleeping in my sister's room and woke to see the figure of a woman, standing motionless in the doorway. Her hair up, in a bun maybe, her arms crossed in front of her. Not my mother. Not anyone I knew. No one who belonged in our house. She didn't respond to my whisper. She simply stood.

My sister, sleeping the sleep of the unhaunted, would not stir.

The woman standing there would not stir or speak.

My terrified whispered calls to my mother must have become quite loud in the end. I recall the agony of needing to cry for help but not wanting to attract the attention of this silent, still but threatening figure.

After an interminable period of fear, my mother appeared and, pushing open the door, revealed the ghostly figure to be a dressing gown hung on the doo

I can still feel and remember my frozen panic.

a Thursday Theme post