Terry Prone: Not the ghost of a chance of sleep as things go bump in the night

You don’t sleep through the heavy footfall sound of an arrival on the landing. Followed by its progress down the spiral staircase. This happened at the weekend. 

What was particularly eerie about the progress in the dark down the spiral staircase was that it was one-footed, not two. 

Not suggesting a ghostly connection, but this tower was once manned by invalided soldiers guarding the coast against smugglers. 

Lads who’d lost a leg, among other things, so would have made precisely that one-bump noise on the staircase.

Specs the cat leaped out of coiled sleep and alerted. The two cats have different approaches to threat. Dino takes a claws-out, directly confrontational attitude, as the local vet’s scars testify. Specs works out lines of retreat. She never saw a fight she didn’t want to get away from.

Me, I lay in the dark debating switching on the light, which, logic told me, would lead the invader to where I am, whereas allowing them to wander around in the dark, downstairs would at least give me time to work out how I would fight them. 

I was cognizant of the fact that the law allows me to use violence to defend my person or property, but cognizant too of the need to avoid unnecessary force when repelling them. 

Now, me being a card-carrying little old lady held together with tin as a result of a car crash and wheezing like a hoover as a result of asthma, I’m not sure I could work up unnecessary force, but you have to be judicious when fighting intruders. 

I also couldn’t work out why the intruder had started on the first floor, rather than downstairs. Or how.

Specs came down off alert and went back to sleep, first doing that infuriating thing cats do of conducting a general survey of the terrain before settling. 

I asked her what the hell was likely to have changed in five minutes, but I did it in a whisper, so the intruder wouldn’t decide I was loopy. 

Why I should want to give the intruder a good first impression I don’t know, but old habits die hard. 

At this point, the small door leading to the roof unbolted itself with a crash and started swinging rhythmically so as to allow it to sound like a battering ram. 

Specs went back on alert, giving me a filthy look indicative of her conviction that I had caused all this spooky stuff.

In between the booming noises from overhead, I could hear a more immediate noise. 

It sounded like a rat dancing in miniature wooden clogs at the end of my bed, and this generated a separate internal debate about the advisability of braving a rat, never mind engage in hand-to-hand combat with the intruder who went down the stairs. 

The roof door was not just making a terrifying racket but had let the wind in, so the temperature had dropped the way it reputedly drops with the arrival of a chain-dragging ghost. The noise at the end of the bed continued.

“One of us has to show courage,” I whispered to Specs whose mute response left no doubt as to which of us that was going to be. 

I took my phone and – slithering quietly out of bed – investigated the end of the bed. No clog-wearing rat. No rat of any kind. 

But the noise continued and eventually I realised that, like referred pain, it was coming from somewhere other than where it seemed to be coming from. I shone the phone’s torch out the window and found the source. 

One of the many security lights had been ripped off its moorings and was doing a wind-driven dance against the wall. Maybe it would terrify the intruder? You think? Me, neither.

I considered going out on the landing and yelling a warning that a) I had a weapon and b) The Guards were on their way. Were I an intruder, would I believe me? We’re back to the “me, neither” situation. 

The nearest thing to a weapon of which I am possessed is the latest Robert Galbraith, which, at 1,011 pages, might have an impact on the intruder. 

If I could throw it effectively (which I wouldn’t mind doing because reading it was so unrewardingly exhausting.) And if I was throwing it at a human intruder, rather than a peg-legged ghost out for the Hallowe’en weekend.

It was encouraging that, while I was doing all of this strategic planning, no further noise had come from downstairs. Which could mean the intruder was lying in wait for me – or standing on his ghostly stump ready to scare the bejaysus out of me. 

Best get it over with, I figured, and turned on lights, right, left and center, which gave Dino and Specs the idea I was good for a food donation.

I followed the two cats down the stairs and found the intruder. A big lump of masonry that had fallen out of the roof and then down the stairs. 

Once that was sorted, I climbed to the roof through the full gale and rain to close the door up there and lamented that I don’t own noise-cancelling headphones to exclude the constant rattling of the unmoored light.

What struck me afterwards was how little consideration I’d given to the possibility of the intruder being a ghost. 

Growing up, I collected “investigations” of ghost-ridden castles, wondered about the ghost that was supposed to own a particular seat in a Dublin theatre, and worshipped Colin Wilson, a writer who alternated between crafting books about serial killers and books about there being Something Mysterious out there. 

I went back to those saved volumes in the run-up to Hallowe’en, to recapture the mystery and magic of the contemporaneous semi-scientific explanations for ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. The books, revisited, turned out to be the greatest load of bilge. 

They might still appeal to those idiots who describe themselves as not belonging to any faith, not really believing in God (‘as such”) but who then claim, in a vaguely virtuous way, to be “very spiritual.” 

Which, translated, means “I don’t have the discipline to go to church, synagogue or mosque, but I have this vague reverence for something out there that might sometime bite me in the ass if I disregarded it completely.” 

These “very spiritual” atheists tell me I must encounter ghostly representatives of a grim past in my tower, particularly during Hallowe’en. It must be so scary, no? No. 

In fact, the biggest danger of living in an old fortress – even at Hallowe’en - is not ghosts, but bricks falling out of the ceiling.