'Ghost Strike'

“Right everyone, can we all please settle down so we can get this meeting started,” I said addressing a large hall full to capacity. “Can you hear me okay at the back?” I called out to be greeted with various mumbled yeahs, whats? and get on with its.

“There is still a load of them outside,” said a voice to my left, “there’s no more room inside.”

“Nothing we can do, they will have to try to squeeze in somewhere. If we don’t get started we will have an ugly crowd on our hands.”

“We already have, just look at the state of them out there.”

“Umm yes, see what you mean,” I said, looking around at the faces all looking back at me. “Someone had a field-day with the ugly stick with this lot didn’t they?”

“Yeah, they look like they all fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

“’ere; they can’t hear us can they?” I said, suddenly aware that everyone was looking at us, to Eric, the owner of the voice on my left, who just grinned at me and winked as he switched on the microphone clipped to the stand in front of me. “That was close.”

“Listen up everybody,” I said to the assembled crowd. “Let’s get started. Welcome everyone to this emergency general meeting of the Hertfordshire branch of Spirits, Phantoms and Ghosts Society…SPAGS.”

I have been the chairman of SPAGS for more years than I care to remember. I took over the chair when the last chairman, Bob, somehow managed to get himself exorcised by a priest from Stevenage of all places. How anyone would think that Bob was an evil spirit is totally beyond me. Beelzebub, who often pops over to our affiliated SPAGS in Essex, I can understand, but not our Bob. A simple case of ‘being in the wrong place at the wrong time’ I’d say. Poor old Bob condemned for eternity in the fiery depths of hell, just because he called in to borrow some sugar for his morning cup of tea in the middle of an exorcism.

I'm Harry; I became a ghost in 1917 during the battle of Passchendaele along with my pal Eric, my right-hand man, even though he is on my left-hand side at this moment in time. We were both blown up by the same Jerry shell and for some reason, unbeknown to the pair of us; we have been destined to walk the Earth until the end of time. It could have been a possibility that, as so many people got killed during the Great War, and that day was a practically busy one, that by the time Eric and I received our final marching orders to the great upstairs, Heaven was full up, or it was some kind of clerical error due to the vast amount of dead queuing up at the entrance, who knows? So to relieve some of the boredom I became chairman of SPAGS and Eric took on the position of Society Secretary. We still do all the haunting stuff, but of late haunting has become a bit of a bone of contention with all us ghosts. Which brings me, very nicely, to the reason as to why so many of us are gathered here this evening in this old hall.

“You all know why we are here this evening, on what is usually our busiest night of the year, Halloween. We have been asked by several members of the society to call for a general strike of all Spirits, Phantoms and Ghosts,” I said to the gathering, a gathering of ghosts if that is the correct collective noun…I doubt it, I think it could be a ‘congress of ghosts’. “Has anyone got anything to say to start the ball rolling?” With that a few hands went up in the air, a few more fell off, mainly from the zombie community standing over by the toilets. We like to keep them over there because, to be frank, they stink. “Yes, you, the lady in white,” I said pointing the lady in white standing directly in front of me. “Would you like to start?”

“I would. I am known as the Lady in White…”

“No kidding.” I heard Eric whisper to my left. I tried to ignore him.

“…and I have been haunting several churchyards in Hertfordshire for getting on for three centuries now,” The Lady in White continued. There were some mumbles and nods of recognition from the crowd. "Over the last few years, it has been getting more and more difficult to scare the living people. They, quite honestly, do not believe in us anymore. They have got so used to ghosts on TV or in films they don't take a blind bit of notice of us."

“I agree," said a seaweed and dead crab covered, one-legged old pirate with a parrot skeleton hanging off his right shoulder. "It is telly programmes like Britain’s Most Haunted, or something like that. You know, the one where they spend an hour looking for ghosts in a haunted castle, but never actually find one.”

“That’s because we all keep well away when they are filming,” a voice called from within the hall.

“They don’t pay us, they expect us to work for nothing, the tight buggers.” another voice chipped in.

“Why is there a pirate ghost in Hertfordshire? We are nowhere near the sea,” I whispered to Eric.

“Actually he is not a real pirate,” Eric said as I gave him a quizzical look. “No, when he was alive he was a high-flying banker from Harpenden. The silly sod was on his way to a fancy dress party one night when he got himself run over by a bus.”

“Blimey, that was unfortunate. So he has to spend eternity dressed as a scabby old sea-dog?”

“Yep. He was the society’s treasurer for a while, back in the eighties, not long after he was killed, but because he was dressed as a pirate no one trusted him and he had to be replaced.”

“That’s a shame,” I said.

“Yeah, he was good, brilliant at accounts. He was replaced by Walter Clibbon, the pie man from Hertford.”

“The pie man turned highwayman?”

“Yeah…go figure…?”

“So,” the old pirate banker continued, “the living folk never get to see a ghost on that show and as a result, they just stopped believing we exist." More mumbles from the crowd and a few hear, hears followed by an almighty crash from the back of the room. Everyone turned sharply to look at what had created that god-awful noise.

“Will someone please help the Headless Horseman find a seat before he wrecks anything else,” I called out. The Headless Horseman had just blindly walked straight into the trolley holding the refreshments for later, and scattered the entire contents all over the floor.

“I don’t know why he comes to these meetings, he hasn’t got a head, and he can’t hear anything that is being said. His bloody horse always poops in the car park as well!” said Eric.

“Let’s continue,” I said after I had waited for one of the zombies to find his head after it flew off after he turned too quickly to see what the commotion was at the back of the hall.

“Pity the Headless Horseman can’t find his head. Whatever happened to it? Do we know?” said Eric.

“I think he lost it in a poker game, or so the story goes,” I replied. “Let’s continue,” I said again. “Has anyone else got something to say?”

“I have been successfully haunting a public house since the English civil war,” said a Roundhead soldier, “but the other week the pub got a new landlord, and do you know what he said to me the first time I went to haunt him one night?” The ghouls said no, and shook their heads, except the zombie who was still trying to refit his back onto his rotting shoulders. “We do not serve spirits after hours!” Everyone laughed. “It’s not funny,” protested the Roundhead. “How’s a ghost supposed to make a living if no one takes us seriously?”

“We don’t make a ‘living’, we are all dead, haven’t you noticed,” came a voice in the hall, which just made everyone laugh even more.

“Shut-up you lot,” said the now very agitated Roundhead.

“If we don’t make a living, do we make a ‘deading’?” More laughter.

“Shut-up, shut-up, or I’m going!”

“What? Back to the pub to buy a Round….head?” called out the laughing cavalier.

“Right that’s it, I’m off.” The Roundhead stormed off straight through the nearest wall to the sound of the whole place roaring with laughter at him.

“Settle down now, that was not fair,” I said stifling my own laugh fairly unsuccessfully. “The Roundhead has made a valid point; no one is taking us seriously anymore. We need to up our game somehow.”

“Children, we need to start with the children,” said, what I can only describe as a shrivelled up old prune with skinny legs wearing a battered black top hat and a tattered and torn tailed coat.

“Good evening and you are?”

“Ebenezer the Prune, I am usually known by. A specialist in ‘under the bed’ and ‘open wardrobe door haunting’,” said the Prune wringing his stained and twisted hands.

“Pleased to meet you Mr Prune,” I said.

“Call me Ebenezer,” he said sniffing hard.

“What do you mean, ‘start with the children’ Ebenezer?”

“The trouble is the kids today do not believe in ghosts for very long. They start off being scared of their own shadows and sleeping with light on, but then their lovely mummies and daddies soon convince them that ‘there is no such thing as ghosty-whosties darling.’” Ebenezer said in a mocking voice. “We need to scare the little beasts… uh, poppets for a lot longer so that they carry it through to adulthood.”

“How do you suggest we go about doing that?” I said.

“I don’t know, perhaps we could…” Ebenezer paused for effect, shifting his squinty eyes around the crowd, “…kill one or two as an example. Frighten them to death and leave their rotting carcases hanging up for all to see,” He said with the evilest grin you could imagine. There came a few gasps of shock from the crowd, but equally came ‘yeah, great idea and let’s do it’. The zombie community grunted and started to salivate.

“That sounds a bit drastic don’t you think?” I said screwing my nose up in disgust.

“Drastic times mean drastic measures, my friend. Besides that’s what we do, we’re scary.”

“Some of us maybe,” I shivered at the thought of being ‘his friend’. “Some of us got killed fighting for our country; we don’t go around killing little children for the fun of it.”

“You should try it, you never know, you might enjoy it,” Ebenezer said noisily clearing the back of his throat.

Quickly trying to change the subject. “Getting back to why we are here tonight, should we or should we not consider strike action?” I asked.

“Last year the SPAGS in Poland, the DIDS as they call it over there, went on strike because they were being worked too hard,” Eric said. “Too many people believed in ghosts and were constantly summoning the spirits using Ouija boards, especially late at night when they were drunk, and asking stupid questions like, ‘Is Elvis there? Has my granny grown her leg back?’ That sort of thing. They were expected to haunt for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and it became too much for them. So they started importing ghosts in from the rest of Europe to help out. Unfortunately a ghost gang from Germany, Die Geistergang, I believe they are called, muscled their way in and left a lot of the poor Polish DIDS completely out of the haunting game. Those that still managed to get a bit of haunting work went out on strike in the hope that it would overload the Geistergang.”

“Did it work?” I asked

“It did, but it had a knock-on effect. When the Polish Ghosts found themselves with nowhere to haunt in their own country, a great deal of them came over here to Britain looking for vacancies in haunting, and they ended up do the haunting gigs that the British couldn’t be bothered to do. So now that the Geistergang have gone back to Germany and the DIDS are fully occupied over here, Poland is in the middle of a major ghost shortage.”

“We could go over to Poland then to fill the vacancies, couldn’t we? If they believe in ghosts that much over there.”

“It’s not that easy with Brexit going on, we don’t know where we stand at the moment with ‘free spirit movement’ anymore.”

“But surely as ghosts Brexit shouldn’t affect us that way.”

“I’m afraid it does. SPAGS come under EU regulations just the same as the Living. We never get away from red-tape and bureaucracy, even when we are long dead, politicians and Civil Servants become ghosts too. It’s the same if we wanted to go and haunt in Australia. There has to a specific need for a haunting and we would have to be sponsored by a resident Aussie ghost.”

“Blimey, I never knew that. I met an Australian ghost once…”

“Did you?”

“Yeah, he threw a boomerang, but I knew it would come back to haunt him one day.”

“Twit.”

“Thanks.”

“Kill the children!” shouted out the Prune.

“Shut up Prune, that’s not helping is it?” I said.

“We need to teach the little darlings a lesson if we are to survive. Striking is no good unless it's striking little children to death.”

“What about the vampires, how are they doing?” a ghost in a police uniform asked.

"The undead are doing okay for themselves, TV has given them a boost of late, just the opposite to us ‘full dead’, everyone believes in vampires and they’re portrayed on telly and in films as glamorous,” Eric said.

“Were you a Chief in-Spectre?” I asked the police officer ghost.

“Twit,” he replied.

“Dick.”

“No need for that,” The police officer ghost said reaching into his top pocket for his notebook.

“No, not you, I was speaking to Dick…Dick Turpin,” I said. Dick Turpin, the notorious highwayman had raised his hand. Dick always goes to all the SPAGS meetings between London and York, he is reputed to haunt just about every pub between the two cities.

“Dick, what have you got to say?” I asked the highwayman.

“Well, why don’t we all stop for tea? I’m parched,” he replied. Not quite what I was expecting, but why not?

Well, that was that the SPAGS meeting of last Halloween ended with us all drinking tea, eating digestive biscuits and telling Ghost stories. I say all, the Headless Horseman obviously couldn’t, but then he did upset the tea trolley earlier in the proceedings so he went home early. None of us went on strike, in the end, the Prune, as far as I’m aware, didn’t kill any children in their beds, and we all went off to carry on haunting as usual. It was decided that one or two of us would appear on the Most Haunted TV shows occasionally, on some kind of rota system, just to boost the living people’s interest in ghosts again. Look out for us on the TV, in fact, look out for us wherever you are, we are everywhere…in fact, I am RIGHT BEHIND YOU NOW!...just kidding…I’m looking through your bedroom window.

The End

#Ghost #strike #zombies