Ghost In The Typewriter

This event happened to me about 15 years ago and I was about 10 years old at the time. I remember not believing what was happening at the time and trying to come up with an explanation as to how these certain things could be happening.

It all started when my Uncle started going out with a new girl. She had several younger sisters who were close to my age and so we all hit it off and they became my best friends. They were renting a house just behind mine so I started spending loads of time there.

One day I went round and they brought out an electric type writer and said they had something to show me. By electric, I mean rather than typing and the letters come up and stamp the page, with this one you typed on the keys and the writing appeared on a little digital screen. I think it may have had a small memory so you could save a small amount onto it as well. Very high tech. For the early-mid 90's!

So they put the type writer down on the table in their conservatory room and let me see what they had to show me. A message started scrolling across the little digital screen. Now really frustratingly I can't remember what the first message said! I think it was a sort of introduction- from a ghost. Now I remember being very sceptical and saying that it must be a joke, they were pulling my leg and had set the whole thing up. Either that or one of their older sisters was pulling a prank on us. They swore they were not pulling a trick on me and had even asked their sisters themselves if they had done it.

So every time I went round to their house after that we would get the type writer out. We discovered that the ghost was a man and that his name had been Jonathan Balgaro (not sure if that is the correct spelling). He wanted us to help him because he had been murdered. He had been a sailor on a ship back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. He wanted us to help because he had known who had killed him and he wanted the truth to be known, I'm sure by whom exactly. He even told us the name of his killer (although annoyingly I can't remember it!). His throat had been cut but as he lay dying he had seen his killer retreating.

He asked us to help him by going to the local churchyard and searching for his headstone in the cemetery. We lived in a seaside town and in the past, periodically bodies would get washed up and buried in the churchyard which is right on the seafront, it is always possible he was one of those unfortunates. We did go to the local cemetery to look for his headstone but we didn't find it, probably because they are all later additions, it is common for earlier headstones to be cleared to make room for later burials in many churchyards.

The thing that makes me certain this was no prank was because we would all be sat around the table in their conservatory room and he would answer our questions and respond to things we said using the little digital screen on the type writer. One particularly poignant moment for me was during one encounter, when asked where he was at that moment; he said he was sat in the chair next to me!

He offered to tell us things that were going to happen in the future but I always said I didn't want to know. My Mum was pregnant at the time and he told me the baby would be a boy and that they would call him David. Sure enough my brother was born shortly afterwards but my parents didn't name him David in the end.

We would often hear noises upstairs in their empty house while we were all downstairs and on inspection there would be nobody there.

These type writer encounters went on for a few months or so and during the summer my friends and I decided to rehearse a dance to a song we liked and we spent more time doing that than talking to Jonathan and so one day we felt the need to explain ourselves. So we put the type writer on and sure enough he was there. So we explained we were going to be speaking to him less at the moment because we were doing other things and he said that it was ok because he was going to go now and he thanked us for our help. And sure enough he went and the type writer went silent.

My friends moved to Devon but I kept in touch with them via letter. They said that he had re-appeared on the type writer a few times asking them why they left but that it was only occasionally. And then we all grew up and they stopped turning the type writer on I suppose!

I'd be interested to know if anyone has any comments. I've had other encounters since then but I'll save those for another post!