Ghost Stories

The night was so cold that my breath was visible even in the coziness of my room. My best friend Mark and I were talking on the phone, as usual, and in accordance with tradition, I had to pretend to hang up accidentally and fall into a pretend sleep before my mum found out I was using the phone all night.

Instead of sleeping, though, I stayed awake and thought of ways to improve my volleyball team by adding extra exercises to practice. I hoped Mark was thinking of ways he could make his rugby team better; we always shared our sports stories and got a good laugh out of them.

An hour later, I flicked off the light and rolled over to sleep. Dreams took me quickly, but they were interrupted in the middle of the night by what sounded like two men talking right outside my window. Frowning, I rolled back over. How did no one else hear them? I could hear my mum snoring peacefully upstairs.

I slipped out of the covers, shivering, and peered through the slats in the blinds. Two men were standing outside, dressed in light summer clothes despite the cold, gesturing and talking. They were speaking about their long trip, all the way from their home in Apia. I live in Lauli'i, which is a far way from where they seemed to have walked.

I shook my head. Silly tourists, I thought, and was about to get back in the covers and realized it had gone dead silent. Had the men left? I couldn't help but head back to the window to peer back outside.

When I pulled the curtain aside, there were the faces of the men, pressed against the window. There were no eyes in their sockets.

I screamed. My mum was in my room in fifteen seconds flat. "What happened?" she asked, throwing her arms around me.

I buried my face in her shoulder and explained the whole story to her. She sighed. "It's like Grampa's story."

So she told me about how, forty-three years ago, my teenaged grandfather had heard two men outside his window, speaking about their long journey from Apia. My great gramma yelled at them to be quiet, and they muttered but left. However, right before they moved on, they saw a beautiful woman in the house across the street. They went up close and peeped through the window, stalking her for a good hour before finally departing.

Two miles from my house, they had been found dead from an unexplained accident. Their eyes were gone. The beautiful woman was in fact an aitu, or demon-ghost.

"The beautiful woman's house was ours," my mother said, and though I dreaded them, I knew what her next words would be. "And the window they stared through is yours."