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I hadn’t thought much about hauntings from the perspective of time before. The idea being that hauntings are a kind of time slip. When we see ghosts, it’s because something from the past is intruding on the present. And that maybe time is not the linear phenomena that we think it is.
I might not have thought about this had it not been for some of the unexpected correlations that have cropped up during these ongoing monthly podcasts. Stories that were originally published and worked on in one order are being presented in a new order, and this throws up certain correlations that I’d never noticed before.
Case no. 282, The Accident, was told to me several years ago now. Yet there are interesting correlations between this episode and our festive episode, The Self-Isolated Christmas (I’d listen to that before reading further). Both cases relate to the actions of men. And in both these cases, these men seem only in part to be able to fully comprehend the consequences of their actions; they are in denial.
The supernatural phenomena they experience manifests itself as a kind of warning sign, a red alert somehow triggered to show them that they’re travelling down a dangerous path.
The hauntings are not exactly the same. The Self-Isolated Christmas relates to a premonition of things to come. The Accident, relates to a secret hidden or denied from many years ago. What they both certainly do is provide a warning to the subject about what lies ahead if they do not change their ways.
The settling of scores has always been a popular subject of ghost stories in fiction. It is a satisfying narrative trope to see the wrongs of the past return and for those who caused those wrongs to get their comeuppance. These narratives are perhaps at their most satisfying when the twist at the end is that the ghost was never there – and that the guilty haunted and condemned themselves.
Maybe these stories are more than just popular fiction. We’ve discussed the potential for disrupted, distressed minds making contact with strange forces. Maybe the subconsciousness is even more powerful than we realise. That it can even, in some way, shift us through time when it knows we’re at risk, when our survival is under threat.
There remains a question, however, as to whether once warned, that anyone will listen…
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The Accident | New Ghost Stories Podcast 27