The Sun-Herald

Reflections on a haunted toilet

My favourite bar is haunted by a female ghost. At least, we assume she's female because she lives in the ladies' toilets.

Mainly, she gets her kicks out of switching the hand dryer on and off when no-one else is in there, but occasionally she ventures out of the bathroom and down the main staircase to startle staff by blowing on the back of their necks. Even the doorman's a bit nervous of this spook, although he also admits she's not half as scary as some of the creatures he turns away after 1am.
We're pleased though, that she seems to be having some fun in the afterlife because most spectres (or whatever the politically correct name for them is - materially challenged? Ghoulishly abled?) don't. It seems a shame they always stay in places where they had an utterly rotten time in life.
If you subscribe to the theory that ghosts are imprints of emotions seared into places by their intensity, it makes sense. I think sad feelings leave stronger imprints than happy ones. Which would explain why you always hear of bedrooms containing melancholy ghosts, instead of whooping, lusty ones setting the sheets on fire and why places like the Quarantine Station have so many.
The only ghosts I've ever seen are love-related ones. I have a friend who cannot enter a certain bar. It was where a relationship died horribly, and he says the place still brings him out in a cold sweat. He remembers exactly where he sat (opposite the Ladies') and what he was drinking (unoaked Chardonnay) and how the table was wet where the embarrassed waiter splashed the drinks in his haste to escape the bickering, stricken couple. Years later, he talks as if part of him is still there. Perhaps it is.
After heartbreak, I used to do the opposite. I returned to places where happy times occured: our favourite balcony restaurant table, our park bench, the exact spot at the bar where we met. I was younger then and had a taste for melodrama, but these places also provided weird comfort. Your senses are so alive in those early, delirious stages of a romance, you absorb tiny details - a notch on your seat, a bump in the wall, a particular odour. Perhaps those physical things really do hold the memories of feelings, because they would bring the good times rushing back in full, 3D technicolour. Gradually, my friends and I would rewrite the story to suit ourselves ("He was never any good," they'd say. "I never cared about him anyway," I'd claim), but I kept going back for a fix of that feeling until the man was history. Maybe that's why sad ghosts haunt happy places.
If there's one compulsion dominating our mating behaviour, it's repetition. We return to the scene of the crime, replay mistakes and chase the hair of the dog that bit us. We fall for types, and we have familiar arguments with new partners and call it 'baggage'. Then, at the extreme end of refusing to let go, there are those living, breathing poltergeists: stalkers. They're suckers for punishment, hanging round people who don't want them, compelled to re-experience rejection, often in denial and desperately seeking 'closure'. We shouldn't laugh at them. They embody the extreme of a pain we all feel at some time.
I wonder if this is how ghosts are created, both in life and maybe afterwards, too. We're driven by a need to understand our actions, find a happy ending, answer old questions. And in doing so, we tread unhappy ground again and again.
Whatever ghosts are, I doubt they're any different from the rest of us. None of us are trapped; we just choose not to move on.