Please pat me on the back and agree that ghosts are not real

I don’t believe in ghosts. I want that on the record before I tell you the rest, because by the end you may have doubts about me, and I would like at least one of us to hold the line.

Years ago, Lee and I took our daughter, who was one at the time and blissfully unbothered by adult neuroses, to spend a night in Matjiesfontein. If you have never been, it is a tiny Victorian village dropped into the vast thirst of the Karoo and surrounded by old battlefields and the buried bones of British soldiers and Boer kommandos. In a part of the copuntry this dry, it’s hard to believe that just about 30 kilometres away, Laingsburg had been washed away in a flood. Anyway, our room was in the annexe of the Lord Milner Hotel, a long narrow building raised off the desert floor that had, in a previous life during the Boer War, done a brisk trade as a house of ill repute. We had wanted to stay in the Lord Milner itself, but they didn’t allow children or pets, in that order.

It was off season, so we were the only guests in the annexe that night. The doors at either end of the one long passage were closed and locked. I checked, because I am the sort of schmuck who checks. It was a weird building with an odd vibe, so while our daughter slept, we lay awake.

At around one in the morning, Lee and I stiffened like boards.

Footsteps. Slow, deliberate footsteps coming up the passage on those old sprung wooden floors, each board announcing the next. They were unhurried, and they were heading our way. A shadow passed under the door, and the footsteps stopped.

We waited for a knock, or the night clerk to clear his throat. Something.

We held our breath.

Nothing happened. And it kept not happening, a lot.

Now, I am a rational man, a sceptic who rolls his eyes at the mention of ghosts and chiropractic care and $29.99 oil changes. So I did the rational thing, which was to lie perfectly still and quietly lose my entire mind. Then, Lee insisted one of us had to be the grownup and nominated me. I got out of bed and opened the door.

Nothing. An empty passage, dim and still. And at the either end, the doors exactly as we had left them, closed and locked.

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I would love to tell you I have a tidy explanation. Old buildings settle and pipes knock, and the Karoo plays tricks. Pick whichever you like, they are all more likely than the alternative, and I will nod along to any of them in the clear light of day. But I will also tell you, hand on heart, that in that moment my scepticism packed a small bag and left, smelling vaguely of soiled undies. To put it in the technical language of the field, I am a sceptic, and I shat myself.

That is the thing about ghosts. We do not really want them to be real. We want the delicious few seconds of thinking they might be, the safe little scare we can laugh about over breakfast. A creaking old hotel is the most harmless fright there is, which may be exactly why we go looking for it.

What happened to others at the Lord Milner is a story about a story in my book, Barking at Dogs. But if you have ever lain rigid in the dark, certain you were being visited and equally certain you did not believe in visitors, you already know how it felt.