My story is from India. I was a foreign service brat, born in Karachi, Pakistan. Apparently, I was a very outgoing, friendly child throughout our time in Pakistan and India, until the last few months before we moved to the United States. After that, I apparently become very shy and quiet. The reason perhaps was that I was visited by a strange apparition several times during that period.

My brother and I slept at night with our nanny in room on the first floor of the house. Never able to sleep right away, I would spend the first hour or so in bed with my day dreams and such. One night, I felt pressure on the foot of my bed, as if a cat were slowly walking toward the head of the bed. We had cats, and they normally slept with my mother upstairs. Thinking one had come downstairs, I was pleased and sat up. Well, it wasn’t a cat.

There was a small child, the size of a cat, crawling toward me on hands and knees. It was white and softly glowing, as if it had its own light inside. It appeared to have a wide grin, which pleased me until I realized that it never changed as it approached. There were no visible eyes, only holes. Frightened, I jumped up and hit at it with my blanket, screaming all the time. Of course everyone woke up and I finished the night with nanny.

I called him “my little man,” and was afraid of him. He came back several times and I tried every night to get nanny to let me sleep with her. Sometimes she gave in. One night, when she did allow it, I was lying in her bed with her between me and my bed across the room. I saw the thing appear at the foot of my bed (without me in it), proceed toward the head of the bed, and disappear. I was glad not to be in my bed and was amazed that it would come only to that bed, with or without me.

Sometime later, I was awakened by dreadful cries of a baby. Pitiful, mournful crying that made me feel very sorry for whatever was in such pain. I crawled to the edge of the bed and saw the thing in a fetal position on the floor, apparently the source of this crying. Feeling sympathetic, I approached it and reached out to touch it. It disappeared and I screamed. It never has come back, but I have since been “haunted” by spirits in every home I have ever lived in. These spirits have been (unlike that one) experienced by other people, and were present when we moved to the U.S., to west Africa, and Thailand, back to the U.S. and now in my home as an adult.

In Thailand (since we’re on Asia), I had a musical ghost. Late at night, I would hear singing, like a choir of women. Not frightening at all, but there were no choirs of women singing in our Bangkok neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning! Once I heard the notes of the scale played next to by bed on some kind of xylophone like instrument-didn’t see a thing.

Then one Sunday, I was in the house alone with my friend from down the street. Sunday was the day that the rest of my family went to the sportsclub and the servants were off. We were playing taped music on a small, portable tape player. Unlike the boom boxes of today, this little machine made a small sound. I had taped some songs that I liked, one which I thought had a spooky introduction. I told my friend about it and played the song from the beginning just to where the lyrics began. We then took that tape out of the machine and played another one. Then we decided to go swimming and turned off the machine. As we started to descend the stairs, we heard the “spooky” introduction to that song FULL BLAST. From the beginning to where the lyrics started and so loud that it shook the windows. My friend’s face turned pale and I knew she had heard it, too. We rushed back to my bedroom and the tape player was as we left it. I was so happy someone else was there that I was laughing hysterically. My friend never visited again!

That’s my haunted experience!

My riding instructor, Mrs. Lee Rhodes, in Bangkok, also had a ghost story. She was a very practical, Prussian woman, not prone to fantastic stories at all. But, she told us the story about how she purchased a large piece of property in Bangkok in the 50’s where the Bangkok Riding and Polo Club was located when I was attending. It was previously a cattle lot owned by an Indian, who obviously wasn’t Hindu. He was apparently a real character who was killed.

The staff at the riding club complained constantly about a white ghost that sat up on the top of one of the barns, laughing at them. Mrs. Rhodes dismissed the complaints. One day, her daughter Puki was in one of the two covered riding rings they had, looking toward the barns. She saw one of the grooms, an older Thai woman, dash out of the first barn toward her quarters, and a white thing chasing her. She ran to get her mother and the raced to the woman’s quarters. When they got there, they found the woman in a violent temper, speaking an Indian dialect with a man’s voice. The woman pushed past them and lead them back to the barn, which was near a clong-or water canal. It took several hours to find someone who could understand the language she was speaking, but when they did, the spirit told them that he wanted his own spirit house just across the clong. You may know that Thais construct special houses for their spirits, so that the spirits won’t haunt the houses. Mrs. Rhodes said that once the house was built, the spirit stopped bothering the staff.