Any Ghost-busters, Around?

In my younger bachelor days, I was able to stay alone, like Robinson Crusoe, on an uninhabited island, during the school holidays, to fish, snorkel and enjoy the sea. I was also unafraid, either, to follow timber lorry tracks into remote jungles where I would camp  -  Davy Crockett-like  - alone, and fish throughout the nights. I was not frightened of anything.

However, those bravura days are all gone. I am now extremely afraid of the dark. I am being hounded by horrible nightmares  -  the chasing, crushing and frightening kinds where I would find myself being crushed by a moving heavy load on my chest, struggling and fighting against it and then waking up in the small hours of the mornings. I am terribly afraid to be alone in the evenings when darkness comes.

Are there any ghost-busters  around to help this spectrophobic or phasmophobic soul?

ltbs

One hour's sleep before midnight is worth three after.
George Herbert

An Uninvited Slithering Bedfellow

Coming home from a fortnight-holiday in Japan, we were met by a horrible smell of decaying flesh when we opened the front door of our house. Putting down our luggage, we began searching for the source of the foul odour. It finally led us to our bedroom.

The stench of rotting flesh was very intense in the room. On moving the bed from the side of one of the walls, I found the shrivelled body of a dead snake behind some books in the corner. There was only the skin left as the body had nearly all rotted away. It looked like a cobra. It must have starved to death after we had locked the door to the bedroom when we left for Japan.

That poisonous snake when alive must have been, unknown to me, my bedfellow as I usually slept on the parquet floor beside the bed because of my bad back. It must have been coming in and out of the room without our knowledge. It was fortunate that I had kept all my bedtime-reading books under the bed which had shielded me from the reptile.

I now keep the bedroom door firmly shut at all times for fear of its mate. I will also keep all our doors shut especially the kitchen door which leads to the backyard. I pray that its mate will look for somewhere else to live.

ltbs

No greater hell than to be slave to fear.

Ben Johnson