Ghost-bait
I ignored them for months, but the paranormal investigators insisted on my attention. It was not entirely unflattering. First came the emails I dismissed as spam, then a slew of bizarrely worded DMs which appeared among sex-bots in Instagram’s ominous ‘message requests’ folder. Finally, on a rainy afternoon in January, I received a call from an unknown number. At the other end of the line was a man who introduced himself as Patrick, ‘a supernatural specialist’. He was, he assured me, a consummate professional – my privacy would be respected, my personal safety paramount. I was about to hang up, but lately the suspicion that nothing strange or extraordinary would ever befall my life again had grown stronger, and the possibility that I might continue living bereft of more unorthodox experiences filled me with great distress. Days were passing with nothing new in them. I sighed, I listened.
Patrick had heard some rumours. Like me, he was susceptible to gossip of an esoteric kind. He had heard that I had recently spent some time as an artist-in-residence in an old coastal building long-rumoured to be malignantly haunted, and that while there I had experienced a series of unusual happenings that one might, if one was so inclined, attribute to supernatural origin. I never imagined paranormal investigators would be the reason I’d never be publicly unserious on the internet again, but there we were. They had tracked me down and now Patrick was convinced I was gifted.
My art had not been going well. For weeks, every email I’d received had been another rejection and I was experiencing a period of creative block so intense I had taken to crouching on the floor of my studio in child’s pose, third eye pressed to the ground, chanting: creativity is flowing through me. Creativity IS flowing through ME. Listlessness had worn down my defences, so when Patrick told me they’d already made several unsuccessful attempts to contact the restless dead at the residency and, bearing in mind that my presence had drawn the spirits out in the past, asked if I might help lure them out one last time, I thought, oh well, why not?
‘One last question,’ Patrick continued, ‘would you say that what you experienced was a residual haunting, an intelligent haunting, or even ... a poltergeist?’
‘I’m not sure I know the difference,’ I said.
‘I assumed you would have done your research,’ Patrick said curtly.
This man thought I was special, and already I was letting him down. He spoke very slowly, as if explaining something to a small child. ‘A residual haunting is when the dead don’t realise they’re dead, you know?’
I did not know.
‘They’re stuck,’ he continued, ‘trapped in endless limbo. An intelligent ghost knows they’ve died but doesn’t want to leave. They’ve got unfinished business, revenge maybe. Both kinds usually died in a way that was traumatic and untimely.’ His voice rose quite performatively. ‘A poltergeist is the most extreme, the most demonic. They cause chaos and trouble, even violence. Do you think that what you experienced could have been a poltergeist – an agent of Satan?’
I paused. Rain was sliding down the kitchen window, and my socially maladjusted housemate was watching me from the doorway, listening open-mouthed. This was so far from the kind of work I imagined I’d be doing in my life by then, but I was poor and no one had paid me to do anything for months. My sanity was already feeling like something that had grown perilously remote, and now paranormal investigators who’d tracked me down on the internet wanted to pay me to lure some restless spirits to a séance.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think what I experienced was necessarily an agent of Satan, but yes, possibly it could be classified as intelligent.’
Plans were made. We’d have to wait a few months. It would need to be when a high tide at midnight coincided with the full moon. Naturally. These conditions would next align on a date in mid-April. He’d book the hotel. Someone would meet me off the train, and then as it got dark, we’d return to the scene of the haunting.
The building under investigation was a three-hundred-year-old disused colonial yacht club that now functioned as an arts centre. Perched on the edge of a pier, it had a sinister history: it was the last point from which the ‘coffin ships’ set sail for America during the height of the Famine, and just across the harbour was an island that once housed an infamously brutal prison but is now a base for the Irish Navy. It’s the same spot from which a well-known ocean liner collected the last of her passengers before meeting a devastating, icy end, and the place where hundreds of drowning bodies were dragged to shore after a cruise ship was torpedoed and sunk during the First World War.
I had spent the previous winter there alone, after what was supposed to be a two-week stay became three solitary months, dragged out by an unexpected reboot of pandemic lockdown conditions. In many ways, I couldn’t believe my luck – I had manifested what I’d always wanted: a gloomy mansion all to myself, with a grand balcony on the edge of the ocean, where I could drink my morning coffee in the unseasonably bright winter light and wave unrequitedly, every day, to the soldiers on small boats as they sailed out to do whatever it is they do in the Irish Navy.
It’s true that before I even arrived, a number of sane and rational artist friends who’d previously stayed there had warned me of an unsettling energy about the place, of chills in the air that no amount of portable space heaters could dispel, and even one case of disembodied singing floating through the walls. I had spent a lifetime being superstitious and easily spooked, but I couldn’t allow such whimsical leanings to prevent me from experiencing, even if just for three luxurious months, the kind of living space that Dublin’s rental market had always denied me.
Even so, I had arrived on edge. The first floor of the building hosts a contemporary gallery that one enters through a vast stone doorway off the street. The artist’s lodgings are below, at the bottom of a narrow stairway, where a statue of a naked boy is eerily lit up all in green due to his unfortunate placement under the emergency exit sign. The floor is black and white Twin Peaks-style tiles, and another door leads into the apartment, full of wide, cold rooms with big windows looking out onto the sea, which felt so close that I could never be sure it wasn’t lapping against the walls.
By April, I was back in that part of the country, coincidentally on another rural artist’s residency which I’d agreed to join because I was desperate to get a break from my damp-riddled house-share in Dublin and the man who kept showing up outside it at odd hours of the night, drunk and banging the door, insisting he wanted to marry me. At the residency, I tried to make it seem as if I was working, as if creativity was, in fact, flowing through me, but most days all I did was put my laptop on the floor of the studio, play Yoga with Adriene videos and stretch myself out on the carpet.
The afternoon when the tidal and lunar conditions fortuitously aligned at last, I took the only bus running into the city. From there I took a train across the causeway out to the island. It was light outside as the train pulled in, but only just. The gallery director met me at the station. He was the one who had passed my number on to the investigators; he found it amusing. A séance, he said, was really more of a performance piece. How interesting, the hauntological impulses of the twenty-first-century artist, ghosts as residual memory, as inherited spectre of colonial histories. Yes, I said, nodding, I was interested in haunting merely as concept. Yes.
In reality, I have no immunity to whimsy. At best, my interest in matters of the occult resides in aesthetic sensibility, a mild and passing curiosity. During phases of my life when the dread looms heavy, this sensibility more closely resembles a neurosis, in which I have been known to frequent tarot readers and cultivate habits like obsessing over coincidences or reading the astrological chart of anyone who enters my bedroom. I’m also gullible – scepticism rarely comes intuitively and my barometer for deception is, at times, appallingly low. Generally, I take people at their word, so when Patrick and his band of ghostbusters greeted me by saying they’d met an agent of Satan in the form of a particularly low-hanging cloud while crossing the bridge that evening, what could I do but believe them?
The sunset was making shadows across the harbour. In the water, a seal the size of a cow bobbed its head above and below the surface, and cormorants like shredded bin bags were beating their wings against the sky. Inside the gallery, Patrick and his crew stood in a line, watching me. They looked suspicious. All their ghost-hunting gadgets were carefully arranged on the table. There was Orla (‘She also has the gift!’), the token medium whose role was to act as mouthpiece for any spirits who might deign to channel through her. My role was passive: I was bait, a body to attract the ghosts, to draw them out the way salt pulls moisture from the air. There were three other men of varying ages. All of them wore matching hoodies that said ‘CSI’ on the front and ‘[TOWN REDACTED] Supernatural Investigators’ on the back. I was, honestly, thrilled.
Patrick was clearly the leader, a completely normal-looking man aside from the fact that he was holding what looked like a small radio with a long aerial and waving it around in the air. He seemed impatient that I didn’t know more about the task at hand, and began explaining the many pieces of equipment, holding each one up and speaking not to me but directly into the camera, which was livestreaming everything to Facebook. What looked like several television remotes were electromagnetic-field metres, to monitor any changes in the ‘energy field’ that might occur. There was an infrared camera to record otherwise imperceptible images, head-torches, Dictaphones, and the little radio, which turned out to be a ‘spirit box’ – a device that rapidly sweeps through various frequencies in hope of catching supernatural signals. ‘Ghosts love radio waves,’ Patrick explained, waving it around again. ‘It’s like having a direct line to the otherside.’ Maybe this actually was performance art, I thought. It was clear he enjoyed having an audience.
Patrick wanted to start with the bathroom, the one down the end of the narrowest corridor. It was decided I’d be the best one to hold the spirit box, and so I stood on the chequerboard tiles, holding it aloft, waiting for the crackle to be intercepted by a voice. The three other men circled the perimeter with the EMF metres, crouching on their knees or leaning above. When the EMF was altered, lights flickered in a semicircle at the tip, from green to orange to red. The men pointed them at the ceiling, at the floor, at the corners and the crevices between walls and pieces of furniture. The more confined the space, it seemed, the higher the likelihood of phantasmic lurking.
During my residency, for the first time ever I became a non-believer. I tuned out and attributed any intrusive eeriness to drafts or faulty plumbing. All the ways that winter gets into an old house. I would not succumb. Even the morning I was lying in the bath reading and the shower head above me spontaneously turned on, dousing my face in cold water – I stood up and calmly turned it back off. Even the freak gust of wind that threw open the bedroom window, rattled the doors in their hinges and shook all the papers on my desk up into the air like confetti – it was fine, it was daylight. It was just an excess of solitude making me grow weirder by the day. Every night, I fell asleep watching Gilmore Girls with all the lights left on.
When I did sleep, it was restless and beset by heavy dreams. I was keeping odd hours. When I woke in the night, the dream atmospheres would still linger in the room with me. Sleep paralysis is a condition that strikes somewhere between wakefulness and deep REM sleep, where the mind becomes conscious but the body remains temporarily paralysed. During this state it is common for the paralysed to experience auditory hallucinations – a hissing static sound, perhaps, or disembodied voices. During such episodes, it is not uncommon to see a hooded hag-like figure in the corner of the room or to feel a predatory incubus-like creature perched heavily on one’s chest. All of these phenomena occurred during my experiences of sleep paralysis that winter.
One night, after the loneliness had set in just about as deeply as it ever has, I spent the evening curled in foetal position, phone in hand, swiping endlessly through a dating app’s catalogue of sailors – seemingly the only category of man picked up in my 30 km radius – hoping one of them might fall in the sweet spot between horny enough to break lockdown regulations but conscientious enough not to murder me during the process. It was hopeless. I matched with one wholesome-looking man whose photo was a selfie of him in hiking gear on top of a mountain; his first message – ‘u up?’ – was closely followed by a detailed explanation of what he’d like to do to me should he spin round right now and pick me up in his car. I sighed dramatically, cast my phone aside and fell asleep.
Sometime during the night, I woke and was immediately aware that my body was frozen. I was lying on my back and the room was filled with deafening white noise. It was getting louder; I felt that my body was the aerial through which the sound was being transmitted. I began wondering why there were other people in the room with me: a man at the foot of my bed and a woman standing very close to my right. I felt the woman’s hot breath tickling my right ear, then I heard a high, cruel laugh that made my ear feel wet. I was gripped by the acute conviction that something evil was trying to access my being. I was convinced coarse hands were grabbing my ankles and that my body was being pulled downward. I understood that there was a potent demonic being in my room, trying to drag me down with them into hell. Then I did what I often involuntarily do during states of active dread and began internally reciting the words of every Catholic prayer I’ve ever learned. It stopped. I was awake and snapped out of my paralysis – I could move again. The room, of course, was empty and silent, except for the lull of the waves lapping against the wall outside. It was only once I steadied my breath and landed myself back into time and reality that I realised my head was several feet down from the headboard, the duvet had fallen to the floor, and my ankles were dangling down over the edge of the mattress. When I looked at my phone, it was almost four in the morning.
Patrick decided the bathroom was fruitless, he wanted to enter the bedroom. Orla the medium went in first, closed her eyes and said ‘Yes, oh Jesus, yes,’ and the men all looked at me expectantly.
‘Well,’ Patrick said, ‘did anything happen in here?’
For some reason, I wanted these zany men to approve of me. I didn’t want to let them down. And I couldn’t help it, I was getting into it. I recounted the story of my sleep paralysis and Patrick began to look so aroused I thought he might start frothing at the mouth. The men gripped each other’s arms, laughed gleefully and waved their blinking EMF metres in the air like they were glowsticks at a rave. ‘Demonic entity!’ they said. ‘Demonic entity!!!’
‘Well, I don’t know about demonic,’ I replied. It was possible I had to draw the line somewhere.
Patrick flung his hands into the air, looked at me like I was completely insane and said, ‘Well, it wasn’t Casper the Friendly Ghost dragging you down by your ankles into HELL.’
‘No,’ I conceded, ‘I suppose not.’
They instructed me to lie on the bed, in the same position I had that night, and to hold the spirit box aloft towards the corner. We waited patiently, listening, straining to make voices out of noise in the shifting static. I stayed still, aware of everyone holding their breath. We heard a break in the crackle, for a split second, a single syllable, a man’s voice. Everyone gasped and shrieked, and Patrick clapped his hand down on my shoulder as if congratulating me for winning a match.
‘John,’ Orla said with grave seriousness, ‘the spirit’s name is John!’
‘John!’ we all said aloud. ‘John!’
We hushed again. All we heard was more static. At two in the morning, I decided to call it a night. By then, we were in the basement of the building in complete darkness, footsteps echoing over the flagstones, only the lights of the EMF metres visible, like those weird fish that glow in the darkest part of the ocean. The novelty had deflated. I was so tired. I was, I realised, completely overwhelmed by loneliness. I wanted to take each one of the investigators and shake them and say, What the hell happened to you? I held my spirit box towards the ceiling one last time. Every now and then, something like a voice came through, but never any discernible words. What the hell had happened to me? They all seemed so defeated, disappointed and possibly even resentful as I insisted it really was time for me to go. Yes, I had let them down. I know they wanted me to have a fit or start speaking in tongues, but I couldn’t deliver.
I crossed the rainy street in the dark and walked quietly across the carpeted hotel lobby and into the lift. I tried not to dwell on the fact that the same hotel had once been turned into a temporary morgue, when hundreds of drowned bodies pulled in from the First World War shipwreck needed to be kept somewhere before burial. I fell asleep slowly in one of two twin beds, the one closest to the window. During the night, I woke to the sound of a foghorn coming in from the harbour. I had left the curtains open, and a pale light, moon or streetlamp, was coming in. The sound was both distant and very close, but sound always moves strangely across water, I knew that.
A few days later, back in the new residency, I told a local sound artist that I had heard the foghorn at night, that it sounded so evocative and melancholy and I wanted to go back to record it for a new project. He looked at me, confused. ‘You couldn’t have,’ he said slowly. ‘The last foghorn was switched off years ago –it’s never been played since.’
‘Ghost-bait’ was first published in Issue Nine of Tolka (May 2025). You can also subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
Maija Makela is a writer, poet, and researcher from Galway. Her work has previously appeared in The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee and elsewhere. She has also released two albums and toured internationally as a musician.
