Today, a man told me about his ghost and strange creature pictures. I just wanted you to know, because his stories were so simple and clear and convincing, and he was utterly comfortable with the telling.
He didn’t tell me about his ghosts as if he thought I would not believe him; neither did he tell me as if he felt a need to make me believe him. His attitude was straightforward and calm: he sees interesting things that, obviously, other people will also find interesting.
He drew me a diagram of how the footprints looked the night he saw the werewolf. It was cold and starlit, early winter, fresh snow, and he was working a late shift. He looked out his office window and saw the creature some yards away, walking slowly, and shifting, he said, shifting from human to wolf to human shape as it walked.
The place where he works is old enough, and it’s always had a few ghost stories of its own. A fire about a century ago nearly destroyed the great church next to his haunted building, gravestones and their long moonlit shadows on the snow create fantastic shapes, and the heavy wooden doors creak.
It’s the kind of place where you don’t struggle at all to believe your eyes when you think you see a night animal pausing in conversation with a moving statue. (Even when your less mystically-inclined friends prove it to be a trick of light and shadows.)
So, when he saw the werewolf walking towards his window, pausing to sniff at his carefully placed camera and unknowingly trip the switch, he knew what he was looking at. (If he has less mystically-inclined friends, they were not there that night to ruin his story.)
The werewolf left sharp-edged footprints in the snow, human, four wolf, another human. It stopped by the window and peered at the shiny glass. It turned and walked away. Human print, four wolf prints, human print, changing its massive shape, flowing from one to the other on the bright moonlit snow.
He has thousands of photos of ghostly, weird, and otherworld creatures. Some of them smoke pipes. Some fidget and are hard to photograph. Some are very, very old. Some are very, very odd. He told me that the ones with the great, large, wide eyes are among us now, if you look.
That, to me, is the point.
I don’t know what he sees. Perhaps his thousands of photos are blurred, fuzzy-edged, shapeless darkness to other eyes.
But he looks. All the time, he looks around, undoes the bars and locks of impossible, and he sees wonderful things.
I’m pretty sure, nearly certain, almost absolutely assured, that if I start looking, I’ll see wonderful things too.
[Featured Image by Raindrop, quote by James Thurber]