The Boarding House |
| When I lived in Ireland, I rented a room in a tiny boarding house on a little cul-de-sac off of Phoenix Park, on the north side of Dublin. The room I rented was at the top of the stairs in the two-story house, two other rooms were down the corridor. The room directly adjacent to mine was rented by an older man named Paddy (yes, really) who spent most of his evenings drinking and singing in the pub around the corner. The third room remained vacant. Orla, the landlady, slept on the first floor across from the kitchen. |
Summer days in Dublin are long, with daylight sometimes lasting until 9:00 PM. The bed in my
room was right next to a window, a luxury to a someone from southern California (where
sleeping near windows is a no-no because they have a tendency to explode in an earthquake).
It was still light out but the sun was setting quickly and there was not enough light to
ready by, so I had the bedside lamp on and was reading and enjoying the summer breeze wafting in
through the open window. I had just turned the lamp off and rolled over to go to sleep.
The next series of events happened so quickly I didn't have time to react to them until the end.
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| The temperature in the room abruptly dropped. At first I thought a cool breeze had come in the window, but the coldness came from the center of the room, by my feet. It was almost tangible, starting from the end of the mattress and creeping like sludge over my feet and legs. It felt like I was being slowly lowered into a tub of thick ice water. |
| Next, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. That's one of those sensations you always hear or read about but don't often feel. I was twenty years old and this was the first time I'd felt it. It was so curious and prickly and chilling that it held my attention... until I felt the edge of the bed mattress sink, like someone had sat down on it. |
Reason began to kick in. Okay, so maybe Paddy had come home a little more
inebriated than usual and had mistaken my room for his. It was too way early for
the pubs to be closing, though, and you could usually hear Paddy singing as he
came home, and I hadn't heard a thing. Besides, I'm a cautious person, and this
was an old house with big iron keys in the door locks. I always locked my door
before I went to bed.
The room had grown darker while I was pondering all of this out (remember this all happened in a couple of seconds). Suddenly, I felt someone lay down on the bed! They were sort of half on and half off of me, like they didn't even know I was there. Enough was enough! I whirled over as best as I could under the person's weight and flipped the light on. |
| No one was there. |
| The coldness, the hair standing up on my neck, the sensation of the person laying on the bed -- all of it vanished abruptly. I looked across the room and the key was still in the door. I went to check it and found the door still locked from the inside. I stood in the middle of the room for a few moments, my heart pounding, still feeling quite cold, wondering what the heck had just happened. I did my best to write it off as some kind of dream (but I hadn't been sleeping yet!) and lay on the bed with the light on for several hours before I fell asleep. |
| The next morning I went downstairs for breakfast. Orla and a neighbor were sitting in the kitchen having tea. Paddy, true to form, was not up yet. I must have looked even more haggard than I felt, because Orla gaped when she saw me and asked me if I'd slept okay. I told her I had not and related the entire story. The neighbor blanched, excused herself, and left without saying another word. I gave Orla a "What was that about?" look. She looked like she was considering for a moment whether or not to answer, then sighed a little and told me the following story: |
Several months before I'd arrrived, the room I was occupying had been rented by
a man about Paddy's age who was a little down on his luck. (Unemployment
was rampant in Ireland at the time and that wasn't an unusual story.) When he'd
first come, he had spent his days looking for work and his evenings in the pub.
Soon he was in the pub all day. Twice the guardi (police) had picked him up
from where he had passed out on the streets and brought him back to the
boarding house. Despite of his drunkenness, he was a religious man, a Catholic
who was a devout follower of Padre Pio. Pictures of Padre Pio were all over the walls of
his room, and he prayed the rosary daily (when he wasn't too drunk to do so, I guess).
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One night he didn't make it home. Orla called the guardi who found him face-down on
the pavement two blocks from the boarding house. They were too late this time. The man had only
one relative, a drab sister who looked like she really
couldn't have cared less when she came to pick up his belongings
two days later. In her haste to ready the room for another
boarder, Orla had missed cleaning out a drawer in the bedroom
in which she later found the man's black-beaded rosary.
She took it out of a drawer in the
kitchen where she had been keeping it and showed it to me. She suggested that perhaps the
man had come back to get it. She decided to leave the rosary where it was, in the kitchen
drawer, and I never had another unusual experience in that room again.
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�1997, Kelley Collins |
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