When I was about 3, one of the names used for me was ‘spook’ because I often had this blank expression and ‘blind eyes’ which stared through things and I’d tend to aimlessly wander into rooms and hover on the peripheries. When I was 18 months old I was heard to repeat 2 hours of my grandparents conversation in their voices, yet I appeared otherwise ‘deaf’ to communication and was still being tested for deafness at age nine.

Well the I was born in 1963 and this was the year a blockbuster film, Children of the Damned, was released. By the time I was 2, it was a big film in Australia and I remember a childhood of repeats of this in black and white (yeah, I am that old, colour TV came in in Australia when I was 10 and I stared for hours at the exciting test pattern!).  Anyway, the result was that at least one of my parents was convinced I was ‘possessed’.

Being diagnosed at 2 and a half as a psychotic infant didn’t help, probably confirmed, this. In the 60s, uneducated laypeople sometimes considered the two synonymous. So acquiring a huge scale of stored songs in all the singer’s voices, echolalic regurgitation of entire American TV sit coms and stored lines from overheard blah, didn’t help my cause…. and those staring eyes, that aloof demeanour!

But by late childhood I began to acquire functional one-word-one-meaning language and was both stringing together and finally UNDERSTANDING simple sentences with meaning. By my teens, though, I became consciously aware of ‘sensing’. There was something in people’s ‘music of beingness’ which ‘spoke’ to my body… as if in each reaction, a map was present of all potential responses to things not yet said or done. I experienced ‘daydreams’ in which I ‘saw’ children I knew doing things when at home or in the community – things I had neither been told of nor witnessed. I began to find they had actually done these things. I began to have these ‘daydreams’ about people I’d never met. Then I found some of these people appeared in the newspaper headlines. Things had happened to them. After that, I didn’t want to have ‘daydreams’ any more.

One day I made a teenage friend. She took me to her home and we sat under a tree where I sang and she’d copy me. A man appeared and waved to her. I asked ‘who’s that?’. ‘Who’, she asked. When I looked again, he’d gone. She took me to her mother and had me tell her and describe the man. It had sounded to them like my friend’s grandfather. Three days later, the man died suddenly from a heart attack. The friend’s mother came to call herself my foster mother and got me a bed, clothes, made me lunches, liased with the school where my own family were uncontactable by them. But I was expected to do ‘readings’, to ‘daydream’. I began to feel scared.

In my 20s, my grandmother appeared in a shop I worked in. She was staring at me, I looked away, then realising why she was so familiar I looked up. She was gone. Although she’d died when I was 7, I ran out of the shop, searching frantically for her. I had missed her so much. That day a customer entered whose actions were to propel me 10,000 miles from my country and change my life, a tale told in my book, Nobody Nowhere. But I didn’t believe in ghosts.

In 2007 I went to a rural Bed and Breakfast in Corvallis, Oregon called The Hanson Inn. The house was in a field and looked like in ‘Amityville Horror’. Inside it was rustic and twee and I soon learned that the hosts didn’t live there, they would be present in the morning. Instead, the host was a cat, which greeted guests. I went to my room and found a fan was in there, a blind woman with Asperger’s, named Annie W. “Can you feel it”, she drawled in a broad US accent. ‘What?’, I asked. ‘The ghost’, she replied in the same drawl. I asked for privacy and all left my room. Downstairs I learned there had been people in that room who had sensed ghosts in the past. I told the blind woman, that’s fine, I’ll take her room.

I chatted much of the night with one of the guests, Dora Raymaker, a woman diagnosed with Aspergers in the 90s who had come to Corvallis from Portland. We got along quite well. We looked a bit alike, both of us with long curly mousey colored hair, glasses and we were the same height and build. Dora was diagnosed with Aspergers and me with autism but both of us lived with things like Exposure Anxiety. Both of us were autistic people with functional verbal speech. Dora was about to be on her first panel at an autism conference, amidst others with verbal speech and those who used typed communication. She was anxious about it, afraid, like most new public speakers, that she’d lose track of what she was saying, struggle to keep up with her own verbal speech, afraid Exposure Anxiety would make it hard for her to speak with people watching her. She was going to take her laptop and use that to speak for her instead.

That night, there was a hideous sound in the new room I’d taken, an awful brain-drilling hum. I went searching for it in the now darkened house. I couldn’t find it’s source.  I figured maybe I could sleep down here instead, on the sofa.  Then I heard old-time 1930s style music coming from a distance.  I followed the sound into a small room way in back of the house.  An old 1930s style radio was there playing the music on who knows what sort of station.  Creeped out, I realised I couldn’t sleep down here.

Back upstairs there was no way I could sleep, so I dared to knock on Dora’s door. ‘Yes’, said Dora, “no problem’, we could swap rooms as she had headphones.  So in I went to room 2.  It had three doors and several full length mirrors.  Two doors lead back to the hallway, the other to an adjoining bedroom.  I fell asleep.

I awoke feeling ill and could hear a party in the hallway.  1970s music was playing and it sounded like the house was full of guests.  I went to the door and opened it.  The music and all the sounds stopped.  I laid back down, terrified.  As I closed my eyes, images of faces raced at me.  I turned on the light, my heart racing.  Was I crazy?  Physically ill?  What the hell was this?  I finally willed myself to sleep.  I was awoken by a sharp rap at the door.  I looked at the clock, it was 4am.  ‘Yes?’, I called.  There was no reply.  I didn’t dare check.

In the morning I saw the owner in the kitchen.  She asked how I’d slept.  I asked about ghosts in the house.  She assured me that though they’d been sensed in various rooms, only one room had had actual sightings.  She assured me, however, it was not my room, it was room number 2.

I went on to my lecture and all the residents who’d been there overnight attended it.  After the lecture the weather report forecast thunderstorms and warned of potential power cuts.  My hosts returned me to the house but tonight all residents had returned to their own homes.  I would stay here alone.  The light in the entrance hall was on, the door wide open.  Inside, the house was empty.  I went up the stairs, terrified of this eerie place.  I could bear it no longer.  With all my hair standing on end, I grabbed my suitcase and bolted back to the car, pleading with them to get me to another hotel, somewhere not haunted.

Donna Williams

http://www.donnawilliams.net