My wife woke me up at 2 a.m. and whispered, “There’s someone in our room.” My eyes were opened a little, indicating I wasn’t fully awake from my sleep. Immediately she finished the statement, the sleep disappeared. I found myself whispering back asking where she saw the person and what was the person doing. She sat in the bed pointing at the hall. Our door was slightly opened ushering my eyes into the dark hall room. I asked, “It’s dark in there so how did you see someone there?” “I saw a heavy shadow tiptoeing into the dark.”

I was scared but as a man in the house, I had to show courage to convince my wife that I could protect her from tiptoeing shadows in the night. She was seven months pregnant. She needed the protection more than ever. I got up from the bed and looked around for anything that could be a weapon. I ended up picking a small hammer I used to fix a photo frame on the wall. I walked to the door, looked into the darkness and with a macho voice queried, “Who’s there? I have a gun. Don’t make me shoot.”

I waited for a response but nothing, not even an echo of my own voice. I stayed there for a while thinking if I should enter the hall or not. I turned on my phone’s light and threw it around. There was no one there. I looked back at my wife, who was physically scared and told her there was no one around. She whispered aloud, “What do you mean there’s no one in there? I saw it. Have you checked the kitchen? What about the porch? Have you checked behind the sofa?”

Out of anger and frustration, I entered the hall, went to the kitchen and screamed, “There’s no one here.” Went to the porch, checked behind the sofa, opened the fridge, lifted the curtains. There was no one around. I assured her it might have been her mind playing tricks on her but she was so sure of what she saw. I didn’t argue. I told her I would get the light in the hall fixed the following morning. I went to lie next to her, she crawled into my arms like a child missing her mother. She asked me to put my hand around her because she was scared. Minutes later, she was snoring while I lay awake counting sheep.

It was a new house we rented just a week ago. When we came in, we realized a lot of things weren’t working. Instead of hiring professionals to handle them, I took it upon myself to do the work myself. We had paid a lot for the single room self-contained and was drained. I couldn’t afford to pay more for repairs so I did them myself.

I painted the walls, fixed the broken sink and chocked drainage. I changed bad sockets and put nails on the wall where we could hang our memories. Because my wife was pregnant, she couldn’t do much to help. I didn’t even encourage it.

We were watching TV in the hall when my wife said, “Do you know what I saw the other night was real? It might have been the ghost of the wife who died here.”

While I was away, she had a conversation with a neighbour who told her how our house became vacant. A young couple were living here. The wife had surgery and got complicated. She died through complications. She suffered a seizure in the house. She was rushed to the hospital and was pronounced D.O.A. Out of broken heart and the desire to escape the memories he had built with his wife in the house, he vacated the place and a few weeks later, we were the couple that walked in.

My wife was convinced the tiptoeing shadow she saw was the ghost of the man’s wife. She asked us to vacate the place before the ghost decides to be violent with us. Every night before we went to bed, she burnt incense to drive the ghost away. She prayed, she sprinkled holy water around and on our bed before we lay on it. We slept with the lights on except the one in the hall.

I thought I was dreaming. The hand on my skin was cold and comforting. It ran on my chest and got to my face. It was gentle, like the crawl of an ant. I was even smiling until I felt a pinch on my cheek. I quickly woke up. My wife was seated on the bed with our bedroom door opened a little. She whispered, “She’s here. Look at the door.”

I watched but it didn’t move. “We closed it when sleeping right?” She asked. “Why is it open? She’s here.”

I got up, slammed the door closed and asked, “Is it OK now? When doors open and you don’t like it, you close it. Come off it, ghosts are not real.”

She said she saw a moving shadow that felt like cold air leaving the room. The door swung but didn’t close properly. Again, I accused her mind of playing tricks on her. She crawled into me and slept. A person who had encountered a ghost shouldn’t have the peace my wife had to sleep. It was all in her head, I concluded.

The next encounter happened right before my eyes. We were in the hall around 11 p.m. when our bedroom light suddenly went off and came back on. My wife looked at my face. Before she could open her mouth to say something, it went off again. we stared hard at each other, thinking whether to run or hide. She whispered (she had done a lot of whispering she had come to have a ghost voice herself.) “She’s in our bedroom.” Before she could complete her statement, the light came back on.

We slept in the hall that night. I didn’t sleep but my wife slept. She was almost nine months pregnant. We’d been in the house for two months and had experienced such encounters more often. I wanted to believe it was the ghost of the woman but the mature side of my brain convinced me ghosts were not real. It could be a faulty light. Remember I fixed them all by myself. It could be that the bedroom light was on a different phase that was experiencing turbulence.

The next morning when my wife talked about it, I told her if it was a ghost, then she really loved us. She had lived with us for two months and hadn’t killed us so we had no reason to be scared. She told me it was because of the pregnancy. She had read somewhere that ghosts don’t hurt pregnant women. She concluded that the ghost hadn’t hurt me because she was with me. I should respect her because she was my protector.

When my wife was in labour at the hospital that evening, I hung around until she delivered. Everything went smoothly and we had a baby boy who didn’t resemble any of us. After a while, the nurses told me I could go home and return in the morning. My wife was sleeping so I nodded and left. While descending the stairs to the main road, the ghost came to mind. All logic left my body. For once in my world, ghosts were real and she could hurt me because my wife wasn’t with me. I stopped midway, climbed back up, sat in the waiting chair and waited for the morning to come.

When my wife saw me again she asked if I slept in the hospital because my dress was unchanged. I lied; “I was in a hurry I didn’t think of what to wear.”

My mom was there. My wife’s mom had also come around. We got discharged and returned home, only to see one photo frame lying on the floor. The nail it was hanging on looked healthy and firm but the photo was on the floor. My wife looked at me with suspicious eyes. I looked back at her with consent but we couldn’t scream ghost because we had visitors.

It Will Be Difficult For Me To Commit To One Person

Our little boy turned three years old not long ago. Since his arrival, we’ve never had any suspicious encounters again. His cries filled up the room every night. We woke up to care for him. We carried him around the house while singing lullabies. From morning till the next morning, our house was filled with life so there was no space for a ghost to come in. Maybe, just maybe ghosts don’t like it when babies cry or ghosts hate it when tenants don’t sleep at night or maybe, everything that happened in our lives to give us the idea of the existence of a ghost was just a mere coincidence.

—Dawson

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