085IS RADIO

I’m standing at the end of a hallway. It’s midnight, I just turned off the last light behind me. I know I’m the only one in the building. So why do I feel like I’m being watched? Tonight, I’d like to explore that feeling, and perhaps take a step down that dark hallway…

You are sitting at your desk, head down, eyes locked to the soft glow of your computer screen. For a time, there is nothing else, just an exchange of information between neurons and transistors facilitated by fast moving fingers on a dark keyboard. The room, and the world outside it, has evaporated into irrelevance. Until you feel a presence behind you. Suddenly it all snaps back into place, your body, the room, the person hovering in the doorway. They have said nothing, made no noise, shook no floor, yet you knew they were there. Luckily for you, after the initial shock has worn off, you realize this is no home invasion. The person is your roommate, partner, or sibling. You should have expected them to be there, and yet, while entranced you allowed yourself to believe you were alone. The fear you felt seems misplaced, an overaction at best. But entertain this thought: how would you react if, after feeling someone standing behind you, you turned to find an empty room?

Back in the old world it was not uncommon for me to drift into spells of extreme isolation. I have never been great at sleeping, a condition that was exacerbated by my time with the boots. This made me adept at the kind of jobs that attract people who typically avoid crowds. I’m talking about the night work, the graveyard shifts. The kind of job that forces you to become a creature, with black-out windows and strained relationships. The loneliness could be crippling, but there’s an entire world you can have to yourself if you are brave enough to wander the sodium lit streets in the twilight hours. These are human spaces, yet it may be rare to find another outside yourself. Still, as you pass the recessed doorway you can’t help but to imagine a silhouette looming in the corner of your vision.

These late gigs tended to leave me alone in a building overnight, often with more time than work. There is no greater danger to a person’s bravery than to be left with time to think and an overactive mind. One of these jobs was the kind I can’t really talk about, in a building that doesn’t officially exist. But that was before the fracture, and I live in no-man’s land. Let’s see them find me now.

I was stationed at the back of the building, at the end of that very same long hallway from the start of our broadcast. A part of the job was clearing the place, ensuring no one had broken in to ogle the dirty secrets tucked away in filing cabinets. I would secure one room at a time, open the door, turn on the lights, stick my head in all the nooks and crannies, turn off the lights, shut the door. In the year I spent on this job, not once did I find anything. Not a person, not a ghoul, not even a roach. And yet every night when I finally finished the last room at the front of the building, I would turn and face the hallway.

I could see the glow emanating from my station, the safe room, the place where I would sequester until relief arrived at dawn. Between that door and myself was one hundred feet of hallway, and at the center a dark junction splitting off to my right. The further I walked the more ominous that intersection felt. It was a blind spot, before which my pace would slacken reflexively.

There, that feeling would rise up like a cold tide, the dread of having to walk with your back turned to the darkness. In that moment logic was lost. I knew I was alone. The knowledge that I would need to make this walk every night inspired me to perform my checks with extreme diligence. And yet I could never shake the feeling that somewhere beyond the veil of my senses there was a voyeur, waiting for the right moment to make themselves known.

What is that feeling? How can we be afraid of something with no evidence of its existence? Maybe I’m being unfair, the feeling itself is the evidence we sense something, however minute, is wrong. Fish have a lateral line organ that detects pressure differences in the surrounding water. Some migratory animals are thought to be able to sense small changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, to aid in long distance travel. None of these abilities place comfortably within our recognized five senses, yet perhaps humans possess some vestigial sensory system long since abandoned by our ancestors, but present enough to spawn the occasional confused signal.

Perhaps there is something in the darkness, too small or faint to be resolved with our primary senses, yet, present enough to rise above the hum of background noise. I imagine our brain, desperate to place a name to the face, without the ability to truly perceive what it is, defaults to the worst-case scenario. A form of high stakes gambling meant to protect us from the unknown, wherein our subconscious places a bet on what it perceives to be the most dangerous possibility, which for whatever reason, takes a human form.

It’s also clear that context rules our subconscious, because a real person encountered in the same places does nothing in the daylight. But those are human spaces, and most humans prefer the sun. So, what would you do if under the protection of the sun’s rays, far from the comfort of civilization, when you believe you should be alone, you feel someone’s presence nearby?

Before coming west, I was a walker. When I made it to the land of mountains and deserts, though the activity changed little, the verb became hiking. Though some hikes were attempted at night, I was most comfortable scaling the rocky bits with my full range of vision. Any solo hiker can attest to the extreme serenity of being truly alone in nature. I’m sure the honest ones can also tell you that every so often, something doesn’t feel right. It could be noon with not a cloud in the sky and yet you become overwhelmed by the unnerving feeling that something is watching you. Unlike the urban setting, this comes with the added fear that now you must hike out, possibly passing close to whatever gave you this feeling.

Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. In the wild, you always have eyes on you. Millions of them. Every bug, bird, lizard and toad watch you pass with focus, each one deciding if you are a threat, or maybe food. But I suspect that isn’t the complete source. I don’t think most people look at the lesser creatures and feel an intelligent being looking back. Even so, if the eyes are concealed well enough, maybe those ancient senses start to kick in. Then, as you struggle to resolve the feeling of not being alone to its source, the thoughts of someone, just out of sight, holding their breath, manifest.

Why so often do the thoughts settle on another person? Perhaps it’s just a face in the clouds. It could just as easily have been a snake, spider, or a man-eating lion. But the most prolific killers of humans are humans. Pareidolia evolved to defend us against attacks from our own kind. In the absence of good data, your mind invents what it predicts is there, erring on the side of caution. Starving your brain of sufficient input may be the key to seeing what some describe as the otherworld.

I believe this is what a ghost is. A collection of data points with a blur filter applied, that lead your mind to invent a being from the void. I am not a skeptic in the traditional sense, I believe that what you experience is real, though it may not be objectively true.

In our lifetimes, with a slightly devious alteration to a few key definitions it’s not untrue to state that we are never truly alone. Even in the remotest cabin of the hedge witch, one could never escape the presence of other life. Perhaps that is the simplest answer to the mystery, we are never alone, and our subconscious knows it. Maybe we put a human face on it to make the reality a little more friendly.