Stinky SPOOK...
Our smelly ghost made us too ashamed to have guests in our home!
My daughter, Charlotte, barrelled into my bedroom. ‘I’ve just seen a man in the living room!’ she said, eyes shining. ‘He was wearing a long black coat and a great big hat and he walked into the kitchen and then vanished!’
I chuckled and gave her a hug. Kids and their imaginations…
A few days later Charlotte, then five, mentioned the man again. According to her, he’d walked down the hall before vanishing in the kitchen, same as before. Once again, I assumed she was playing make-believe.
Not long afterwards I was in the hallway when I caught an odd whiff of fish. We hadn’t had fish for days yet the smell lingered all day and the next.
I looked everywhere for the source but for the whole of that month, April, the stench lingered. It was only noticeable in the hallway, which was part of the original house. The minute you stepped into the kitchen, which was a newer extension, you couldn’t smell it.
Weirdly, I’d started catching another smell too, this time in the bedroom – musty tobacco, the odour you get when someone’s smoked a pipe.
At the end of April both smells vanished. ‘Thank goodness!’ I said, relieved.
But when October came…
‘Oh, no,’ I groaned, twitching my nostrils. Fish and tobacco.
Life became a pattern after that. We’d be smell-free all year, except for April and October, when the odour of fish and tobacco would return.
It was baffling. We made sure we only invited guests during the ‘non-fishy’ months. If people came round in April or October, I’d usher them through the hallway to the stench-free kitchen.
After a few years like this we did some research, and something clicked.
We lived in an old fishing village. A smell of fish and pipe tobacco… the figure in a big hat and coat that Charlotte kept seeing...
‘We’re being haunted by a stinky fisherman!’ I declared. I guessed the man had once lived in our house. I could picture him coming home smelling like his catch and lighting up his pipe!
Charlotte said the man she’d seen had looked like a fisherman. I could only guess at why he showed up in April and October.
For 15 years we put up with the twiceyearly assault on our noses.
Then when Charlotte was 20, she moved out and, weirdly, the stinky spook seemed
to leave with her. It came less and less after that until it vanished completely.
‘Maybe he liked me?’ she suggested. ‘After all, I was the only one to actually see him?’
Our stinky spook never harmed us and sometimes I miss having our own resident ghost. That said, I certainly don’t miss the smell!