As a final story for The Ghosts of Winter, it seems only right that I tell you a ghost story.
A personal one.
It was 2010, shortly after my grandma died. Her funeral had passed and the world settled back into its ordinary rhythm.
Then I had a dream.
At least, I think it was a dream.
In it, I was standing outside my aunt’s house in the dead of night. The windows were black and uninviting. There was no streetlight, no moon and no sound. Just a thick, wintery stillness, the sort that feels weighted.
Once inside, the house was all wrong. It was dark with the kind of quiet that presses against your eardrums. And in the living room, sitting rigidly in the window bay, was my grandma.
She didn’t move. Didn’t say a thing. But she was unmistakably there, and she was undeniably unhappy.
And the worst part wasn’t that she’d returned in this awful nightmarish dreamscape, it was the simple wrongness of whereshe was sitting.
In life, when my grandma used to visit my aunt’s house each weekend, she had never sat in that bay window. She had her own designated armchair in the cosy alcove opposite the television, where she’d sit and chat and watch Saturday night television.
Seeing her in this wrong place by the window was like a distortion of some sort. The atmosphere pulsed with wrongness.
When I woke up, disturbed by whatever my subconscious (or grandma) was trying to tell me, I called my mother and relayed my dream. She, in turn, rang my aunt.
And here’s where the story stops being ‘just a dream.’
It turned out my aunt had picked up my grandma’s ashes the day before and had placed them on a small table in the window bay.
Exactly where I’d seen my grandma sitting in my dream.
‘I think she’d rather be in her usual spot,’ I suggested.
So her ashes were moved to the cosy alcove opposite the television.
And there were no more disturbing dreams of my grandma after that, just a vague feeling, impossible to articulate, that something had been put right.
Winter ghosts don’t always come with the intent to scare, sometimes they simply ask to be remembered… and to be put back where they belong.
R. H. DIXON 