The Ghost Story Episode 3
Peggy the Horse
This is the third instalment of a ghost story told to me by my mother. Please read the previous two episodes first or it will make even less sense.
C: And so when Herbert and the girlfriend went it started up again – the noises and the bangs – they were louder than they were before, the nightmares were worse.
My mother is very sensible and matter of fact. She rolls her eyes at superstition and sentiment (though she is not immune to the temptations of using divining rods to find an old well or rubbing half a potato on warts at midnight under a full moon and burying that half in a hole dug in the earth with her bare hands – stories for another time). She tells this story of a poltergeist in Auribeau with a sense that it is a throwaway anecdote – a bit like she’s recounting a time she had to dispute a parking fine.
I am working from the transcript I first recorded in January this year, my mother is working in her studio and I go to check a fact with her – I have a distant memory of a story of her hearing music that wasn’t there – how does this fit into the story? In asking about that, she volunteers that she had been experiencing ghosts of one kind and another since she was a child.
My mother grew up in a suburb of Sydney, called Paramatta. Her parents owned Strange’s Corner, a meat pie shop in an old council chamber which they lived above, my grandparents, my mum and her brother.
On a visit to Sydney I went to the corner it was on, a small section of green now on a busy crossroads, with a bus stop and gumtrees, which have germinated and matured in the time since my mother and her family left Strange’s Corner. I went and stood on that neat green under the tree with the sound of traffic drowning out the magpies and waited for something to come over me. Eventually I got self-conscious and a sunburn and left having not communed with the spirits of my grandparents or my mum and uncle as children. I sent a photograph of the spot to my mother, which shows The Family Inn opposite, she wrote back, ‘we used to watch the Friday night fights at closing time xx’
In her infuriatingly reasonable way, my mother tells me another story of ghosts, and also horses and old men and here it is:
When she was 11 or 12 an older man, Mr Proudfoot who taught horse riding to kids offered my mother the use of his horse, Peggy, a biting horse who hated everyone other than my mother. Her parents would drive her the 40 minutes from Paramatta to Windsor on the weekend and she would stay over the night with Mr Proudfoot, ride the horse all day, sleep in the dormitory on his property.
‘Why did this man give you a horse?’ I ask - I am deeply suspicious of Mr Proudfoot.
‘I have no idea. I suppose you wouldn’t allow a man to give a child a horse now.’
‘You almost certainly would not drop your kid off to stay the weekend with a man and a horse.’ I am leaning hard on the idea that Mr Proudfoot had an ulterior motive but my mother is having none of it. ‘He wasn’t creepy and was a terrific man.’ She puts an end to my prodding.
‘Mr Proudfoot had a terrible dermatitis problem and he took these drugs for it, which made him bang about the place, and that noise used to wake me up and night and I remember it being very frightening. But it was only Mr Proudfoot on his pills.’
‘Right.’
‘But also, I’d wake up in the dark and there’d be this grey mist hanging above me in the bed.’
The potential for reading into all of this is almost too much and I’m not going to do it. But it is fascinating to me that this story lay tucked away inside my mother and she had never thought to tell me, even as we spoke about the banging happening above her bed in Auribeau, the horror in the night of terrible dreams. It makes me frantic about what else might be hidden away inside the folds of her brain.
‘How long did you have Peggy for?’
‘Oh I’d say about four years. I was at art school when she died.’
‘What happened?’
‘Mr Proudfoot rang and said he’d gone out into the field one morning and she was just laying there dead. Snake bit her.’
This was not the story I came to my mother to confirm, but it’s just like this ghost story to branch off and take me somewhere else. The sound of Mr Proudfoot wheeling about and crashing into things on his medication and the banging on the ceiling above my parents’ bed, and the grey mist floating above my mother’s bed. Memories holding hands with memories.
Back to Auribeau
C: and one night as well as the banging above our bed, the door connecting the old cottage to the new building started banging –like there was a wind going through the house. Your father got up and bolted the door and all the noise stopped. We thought maybe that had been it – a draft was somehow setting all these things off. And we went to sleep. And then in the middle of the night the door crashed open, and the pots and pans all rattled down in the kitchen and the banging above our bed came back, so loud, we packed up our things without talking and walked the quarter mile though the field to our car. That was when it was most frightening, when we were walking through that field in the dark.
