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| Sunday, 23 April 2006 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Horror
tales:
Hey, I must be dead! by Aditha Dissanayake "It's that time of the day when the feverish sun succumbs to the unquiet sleep of the night - when the dead find the time to appear once more amongst the living. On such a night in a dark,isolated bungalow in Thalawakelle..."
Yet, why won't ghost stories go away? And, why has trying to outdo each other by telling the spookiest stories ever told, become the most recent trend in town? Eavesdrop on the conversations in most bars or restaurants in the city to find yourself rooted to the spot at the graphic descriptions of mouths dripping with blood, glaring eye-balls, doors opening on their own, rugs with blood steins and figures who speak with you as if they are alive but when you show them their graves, say "Hey I must be dead". Recalling the ghosts and skulls in "Hamlet" and beating the talents of Poe or Stephen King when it comes to telling a horror story, a retired planter brags of a room in his bungalow in a tea estate in Lindula in which Appu the butler had committed suicide by hanging himself. "No one could sleep in that room. The moment you fall asleep someone starts to shake the bed, and when you open your eyes you see Appu standing at the foot of the bed." 'A friend of mine used to live in a bungalow where there was a bath tub with a blood stain on it. Nothing could erase the stain from the white porcelain", says his companion. "These are nothing compared to one of the Manager's bungalows in Thalawakelle," says another. "The last British planter to live on the estate had shot himself in the cloakroom. The bullet mark which pierced his skull and went through the ceiling is still there. One of my friends who slept in the room next to the cloakroom felt someone squeezing his neck in the middle of the night. He says he will never sleep there again". A lecturer from the Post Graduate Institute of Archaeology has his own tale to add to this series of stories. "Students of archaeology who work on the sites at Sigiriya have told me that the security guards have seen a figure dressed in coat and tie standing near the Mirror Wall at night". "I used not to believe in ghost stories" says the Manager of a furniture manufacturing firm in Kelaniya. 'But one day when I was driving to Badulla on a deserted stretch of the road an attractive woman dressed in a sari suddenly crossed the road and vanished into the scrubland on the other side. There were no houses around. What could she be doing during the late evening on a deserted road? She couldn't have been real". Making one recall that the root meaning of the word "horrid" after all is "bristly" the stories make your hairs stand up. They also give a new meaning to death. Death no longer seems like a void feared by those who are happy, and sought after by those who are in misery as a blessed final anaesthesia. Could the stories mean that the flat line on the EEG screen, signifying the cessation of the heartbeat and brain activity is not true? Whether this is so, or not, ghost stories will continue to flourish, revealing the bleaker facets of the imagination because they evoke a basic animal instinct - fear, but fear with a limited life-span and above all fear which can be cherished, because this is fear which is artificial. |
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| Produced by Lake House |
Let's face it. As sensible people we know that ghost stories like the
above have as little credibility as the promises made by politicians to woo
the voters before an election. Some idiot, who at first refuses to believe
in ghosts stays overnight in an isolated old house, manifest with forbidden
chambers, ghosts and pools of blood and finds his scepticism chastened
before the night and before the story ends. 
