For most of my life I have had the sensation of being at least slightly haunted, exactly who by and why, it is not always obvious.

It is uneccesary to go into the precise details, though it is interesting to add that as obviously the sensation is usually terrifying sometimes it is comforting, like that sometimes the entities are there to guide me.

Of course this could all be put down to me just being slightly silly or mildly psychotic or whatever, but it is associated with certain dreams and visions that intersect reality at very interesting angles.
It could be my subconciouses way of processing information, or it could be something else.

Obviously how I envision these ghosts is related to what is on my mind at the time, but certain subjects are much more powerful than others, and not always only for me.

There are certain places widely thought to be haunted or spooky whose ghosts I have seen in dreams after visting those places, not all of them I had thought of as being haunted before hand, it is a fact certain places just seem to exert some form of energy, possibly just psychological.
Some individuals after death seem to maintain a presence among those they knew to a degree that others don't.
The ghosts always seem very intertwined with my family, even though they are usually not my family sometimes they seem to merge with them and even myself in a particalurly alarming way, this could be because the presense of ghosts usually reflects some deep underlying tension, this seems to be particularly the case with poltergeists if you believe in such things (of course you do!).

The most famous ghost in England is the ghost of Anne Boleyn, who is famously seen at Hampton Court and at the Tower of London, sometimes headless, sometimes with her head tucked underneath her arm (as the famous song says), she also haunts Windsor castle and atleast four other locations, perhaps a uniquely unquiet spirit, from a more than usually turbulent time.

Interestingly the shade of Catherine of Aragon inhabits Kimbolton Castle in Cambridgeshire where she spent her last years, Jane Seymour is seen at Hampton Court and Marwell Hall, Catherine Howard also makes her presense felt at Hampton Court while Catherine Parr lives at Snape Castle and Sudley Castle.
Henry VIII himself sticks to haunting Windsor Castle and Hampton Court.

If you count the ghosts of the monks inhabiting the ruins of the monastries and abbeys, Henry is responsible for a very fair proportion of England's ghost sightings, of course it was a very tense time of great upheaval and brutality that changed the course of history very drastically.

The other main source of ghosts in this country is the Civil War, like the civil war in America at certain places at certain times it still can be seen going on, but in a way it does still go on, Cavaliers became Tories and Roundheads became Whigs, Whigs became Liberals and Tories became Conservatives, the division never wholly disappeared and persists especially in America.

The ghosts that I feel most consistently, are the ghosts of the Twentieth Century:

The spirit of the slums and the workhouses for example has a lingering friendly sort of presense.

Near me there is a village that I have for various reasons associated with the 1910's, it is very easy to picture it as it was as many of the locals left to fight in the war and the thought always makes me instantly very cold and can lead to surpisingly violent nightmares.

And then there is the second world war and especially the holocaust, the holocaust casts a very particular shadow.

It always bothered me reading textbooks about the holocaust at school, that I could look at the faded black and white pictures of the aftermath of the Holocaust and feel nothing, as if it wasn't really real, I felt like I needed to understand what it was like to have been there, naturally you cannot think like this for too long without invoking very deep things, which in fact have been known to destroy people.

No doubt it is a difficult subject to talk about, it's better to let others do so:


Anna Odi has lived her entire life in Aushwitz, her parents were survivors who became caretakers of the site and she has lived and worked there since she was born, in an interview she said "I think I am simply a hostage to the stories of people who experienced this hell, I continue what my parents started. I owe it to the victims." 

 "This land is soaked with the blood of victims, it demands truth. It requires us to shout the truth about what happened here to the world."
 
"It's not a haunting, but a guidance. I feel they help me uncover their stories, connecting photos to names and objects to lives. It's as if they want to ensure they're not forgotten."


One strange coincidence is I remember looking at a one of the famous pictures from the Holocaust of starving skeltal figures lying in wooden bunks and asking myself what it would be like to be one of those people, I did not know until much later that one of the people it that phtograph was a young Elie Wiesel, who wrote Night, the most famous Holocaust memoir who also spoke extensively about his experiences, so in a way I did find out a little bit.

That which Elie Wiesel said describing the experience of survivors probably goes for the souls of the victims as well, he said: 'All of us know that there was a tragedy, and we also know that we must be honest about it... There are no words... Only those who were there know what it meant being there, and yet we are duty bound, to try, and not to bury our memories in silence...'
'We never try to tell the tale to make people weep, it's too easy, we didn't want pity, if we decided to tell the tale it is because we wanted the world to be a better world... There is a frightening character in all of Kafka's stories. It is always the messenger who tries to deliver the message and is unable to do so. We feel sorry for the poor messenger, but there is something more tragic than that: When the messenger has delivered the message and nothing has changed.
You heard tonight those who spoke here with elegance, with compassion, and they spoke about anti-Semitism and intolerance. Now, sixty years later, when the messenger has tried to deliver the message, why should there be anti-Semitism? But there is. Why should there be suicide killers? But there are. Why should that be hatred? But there is fanaticism. Yes, it's gone. No, it's here. The messenger has delivered the message. What is our role? We must become the messengers. Messengers."

On another occasion he said "Whatever happened we must know, and especially of course we must know - what the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto felt when they went to Treblinka, the young children who were taken from Hungary to Birkenau - What they felt in the train, what a father felt when he couldn't feed his son, what a son felt, watching his father die, they must find the words. In the struggle for language is already a mystery, and that mystery in a very strange and cursed way, perhaps - that mystery of pain can become, must become, a source of hope."

The holocaust was an extreme event, and it's ghosts are eloquent in a way because of it, but I think what they are trying to express is very much what many or most of the other ghosts are trying to express, from the traumas and fires and bloodshed of history they are trying to direct us to a future where we don't make the same mistakes, sometimes we listen, but not enough, which is why they have unfinished business and why we are haunted, though some are more malevolent than others.

The effects of trauma are passed from generation to generation, memories less so or not at all, that by itself is a sort of haunting, events from long ago still effect us profoundly and we don't even know it, we still live in the shadows of the past and in the shadows of what may be the future.

Maybe for some of us 'It's only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted', does it really matter?

But in these shadows are a strange sort of hope, fires that illuminated the darkest hours, iron forged in the furnace of history, proof that we can still go on and maybe owe it to those who lived and died through it all.