Someone To Watch Over Me

I am the Spook in my family.  I love anything to do with ghosts, vampires and things that go ‘wooo ha ha!!’ in the night.  So why is it that it’s my brother, of all people, who seems to have encountered all the weird stuff?  Stuart is a gentle soul who would rather have his nose buried in the latest Terry Pratchett novel than creep around in the dark looking for ghosts, but it so often seems to be the way that people who aren’t looking for ghosts are the people who find them.

Stuart was critically ill when he was born in 1977 and I don’t think my parents slept a wink for the first couple of months of my brother’s life.

One night when Stuart was finally on the mend and contentedly gurgling away in his cot after having been changed and fed, my parents stood together gazing down at their little boy.

“Goodnight, young man,” my mum said with a smile as she patted his full tummy.  Dad adjusted Stuart’s tiny bed covers and then stood up with a frown:

“We settled Stuart down,” my mother told me, “but just as we said goodnight his face took on the look of someone very much older.  It happened so suddenly that I wondered if I’d imagined it but when I mentioned it to your father a couple of weeks later he said he had seen the same thing but hadn’t said anything to me at the time as he thought he had imagined it, too.  It was quite a surreal moment, but it wasn’t frightening, at least I didn’t think so.  Your father thought whoever it was looking back at us from the cot was laughing at us, but I just saw a loving, peaceful but knowing face.  Perhaps one of his grandfathers came to say hello.  Stuart went to sleep looking quite content.”

What with Stuart having been so poorly and my parents being so anxious, who’s to say that someone from the other side didn’t decide to make themselves known via my brother and offer a little reassurance to my parents that their son was being looked after.

Although, knowing my brother, it could have been wind.

Nicola

Weirdworld@hotmail.co.uk

©Nicola Kirk and http://www.nicolakirk.wordpress.com 2010