My Life as a Ghostbuster (TooWrite Story 1)

This is the first in a set of three stories I submitted to a website called TooWrite. I forget what the challenge was, but I think the users of the website voted on your story, and if it finished the week in first place you won £100. It must have been true life tales because they were all stories that happened to me, with very little artistic licence to provide a fig leaf.

I suppose I could keep them back for some future autobiography, but for the fact they've been somewhere in the ether for eight or nine years and nobody's seen fit to flesh them out into a blockbuster. This one's about when I was a Ghostbuster, believe it or not.

One thing I would mention is that the incident at the end affected me for years in terms of confidence. I don't want to blame my adult troubles on something that happened when I was a kid, but what can I tell you?

My Life as a Ghostbuster

by Chris Stanley

I want to tell you about the time I had a job as a Ghostbuster. I was never paid, you understand. It was a vocation. It was my job to keep any ghouls firmly in their other-worldly plane of existence. My house was definitely safe, it was just as shame about the rest of the country. Well, what do you expect? I was only eight at the time.

   In 1984 Columbia Pictures released Ghostbusters onto this nation’s cinema screens. I know this because a year later, at the age of four, I was in the room when my parents put their rented copy into the Ferguson Videostar. I remember being attracted by the cartoon on the front cover – the ghost trapped behind the red ‘No Smoking’ circle.

   Then, in the opening scenes, you may remember a librarian at Manhattan Central Library goes down into the eerie stacks to look something up. Those fiendish ghoulies make a real mess of her day, flinging the draws open and making the card indexes spray into the air around the terrified assistant.

   Well, that did it for me, and I was off. Screaming the place down, I was hyperventilating for my country, and it took a few hours to get me off to sleep. Not that it helped, of course – I had nightmares for days, maybe even weeks afterwards, and had to sleep with the light on. That didn’t help – I got night terrors too, about flying bats and creepy crawlies. I look back at the film now and cringe with how mediocre it is. Ghostbusters is, after all, ostensibly a comedy.

   Incidentally, don’t judge my parents too harshly. They weren’t to know, and it is a PG. They bought me a pirate copy of Robocop in 1988, when I was seven, and I’ve never caused crime or death of any kind, although I do swear more than I should. When I told my friends about the Ghostbusters incident, they laughed, and almost doubled up in pain when I told them my father had banned me from watching the Willie Rushton-narrated Trap Door as a preventative measure.

   But by the time the sequel was released, in 1989, I was a fully-fledged disciple of Peter, Egon, Ray and Winston. I loved them, thanks largely in part to the cartoon series The Real Ghostbusters. I had all the action figures, and the car, and a Slimer mask. You name it, I had it (except the fire station; that was too expensive).

   This fixation coincided with a school trip to Tamworth Castle, where one of the main attractions was a room that saw a brutal murder of an aristocrat. Before my student days as a class warrior, I was entranced by the waxwork of the poor victim, the sheets covered in red gloss paint. The castle was supposed to be haunted, which stuck in my mind.

   After we’d finished, and we all bought cheap, nasty nick-nacks in the gift shop, my eye wandered to the books for sale. I chose the thinnest one there, called Ghost Stories of Staffordshire, and though I struggled with a lot of the words I read and re-read it endlessly.

   A particular favourite was the story of a couple who moved into a haunted bungalow. It was unfurnished, with a concrete floor. One night, after going to bed, the couple heard a scratching on the floor. Investigating, but finding nothing, the husband assumed it was the dog messing about and went back to bed. In the morning, they awoke to sheer, spell-binding terror. In the living room, the furniture had been rearranged until it stood in the middle of the room, while deep scratches radiated out in straight lines to form a circle. They were too wide to have been made by the dog.

   That’s what I wanted to be – a ghost buster. Previously, I’d wanted to drive a train, but that seemed childish now next to such important work. But how to do it?

   Around this time, a kid called Tom Smith joined our school. He was a bit of a loner, despite having a brother there called Duncan. They hadn’t been in the area long, and they appeared to be poor. Tom also smelled a lot and brought beans in for lunch in a thermos, which he’d dip cheese sandwiches into. Everyone made fun of him.

   When I found out he was a big fan of Ghostbusters, I started to hang out with him more and more. This wasn’t a “cool kid takes nerd under wing” story, because I wasn’t that kind of kid, and the dinnertimes I spent with him mainly coincided with the times our class football was periodically confiscated because of over-zealous play.

   I showed him my book and he was impressed, and then told me a few ghost stories of his own. His old house (I think it was Bromsgrove) had a den made of corrugated iron and brick in the garden, and Tom had found an old tin box in there, which he claimed used to contain ammunition (Tom was a bit of a military nut, too, but he had flat feet.)

   Anyway, one night, Tom took the box to his room. In the middle of the night, he was woken by an ethereal light and was astonished to find a World War Two aeroplane pilot at the end of his bed, who proceeded to pick up the tin. In the morning, Tom looked for the tin, and it was nowhere to be found. His parents pleaded innocence, even though they probably chucked the tetanus-ridden thing away.

   He also told me that he’d camped out on the local playing fields, the woods of which were full of devil-worshippers, or so we thought. There was an anti aircraft battery in the shape of a cross, and the locals used to claim sacrifices were made on it. Even now, I don’t like to be in those woods on my own. Tom claimed he and Duncan camped on the field, and found themselves in the middle of a satanic ceremony, and barely escaped with their souls.

   Whatever the truth, it interested the hell out of me, and so we came to the conclusion that as we were so well versed, we should set up our own ghost busting agency. I would get my mum to make us overalls like the film, and my father would rope in his computer club mates to make us proton packs and ghost traps.

   The only X factor was how to get around. Lord knows our parents didn’t have time (his didn’t even stop him camping out in the middle of human sacrifices!), so we ummed and aahed, and in the end had an idea.

   By pooling our pocket money, we’d buy a second hand car, and get Duncan to remove the engine and replace it with a bicycle. Then he would pedal us, in our car covered in logos, to whoever was willing to pay us for a ghost-free life. We made plans to start with Tamworth Castle, just as soon as Duncan had made our Ghostmobile. Bear in mind, Duncan was eleven at the time.

   Needless to say, our plans stalled. Tom still gave me a present at Christmas to keep my spirits up (arf arf): a target practice game made up of screwed up paper and cartoon ghouls cut out of a Shreddies packet. Eventually, the football came back and I left the nation to be terrorised.

   It was a shame what happened after that, really. Like most boys, I wanted to belong and got turned to the dark side by less understanding lads. I started to ignore Tom, call him names, make fun. Once, me and two boys from my cub six tied him to a tree with a skipping rope, using about fifty reef knots. The dinnerladies sawed through the rope through the whole of that dinner hour, a hot summer’s day.

   Tom took years of jibes, and I dealt my fair share, and one winter we were walking home at dinner when he popped me on the nose. Despite my warnings of retribution, I never had the courage to touch him, and I knew that I deserved it. In fact, the only ghosts we laid to rest were ones of enmity, when we had a conversation on the bus three years ago. Neither of us can drive yet.