Early in 1975, when I lived in a humble squat in Camden Town, London, my best friend was a woman who lived next door. She visited often, and we talked about the interests we shared, including the many things we did not see or understand about life, and why things happened the way they did. She worked as a graphic artist, and I barely made ends meet by packaging things in a dank warehouse underneath St. Pancras train station. I found her beautiful and wise, and I still remember many things she said. I don’t want to compromise her privacy, so I will call her Geeta instead of using her real name.
One day, Geeta told me that she knew someone who had recently made an unusual, frightening experience. She had been visited by the ghost of a person who had died in her home many years before. Geeta would be welcome to visit and hear her story, and she could bring me along. We decided to do this and set aside a weekday, which meant both of us had to take time off from work. I don’t remember why we planned the visit this way. Maybe that was the preference of the woman we were going to see.
This happened in late January or early February, when it was quite cold. The day was clear and dry, perfect for a walk. We hiked from Carol Street in Camden Town, up Camden High Street, to Chalk Farm Road, turned onto Adelaide Road going west, rounded Swiss Cottage, and followed Finchley Road northwest. That was in part the route of the bus number 31, which I and some of my neighbors often took to a public bathhouse at Swiss Cottage to clean up. At the time, our squats did not have tubs or showers. I was thrilled and proud to be walking with Geeta.
Not far from the Finchley Road tube station, we went up a quiet side street. Many houses here were squats, but they did not look like the neat rowhouses in Kentish Town or Camden Town. They were a little rougher, wasted, tired, more in need of repair. We stopped in front of a beige-colored place and walked up the front steps. Geeta knocked. A woman opened the door. She didn’t seem surprised or pleased. Nor did she ask any questions. Possibly, she was expecting to see Geeta, who had maybe told her of this visit. Or, their relations were informal and they sometimes visited each other spontaneously. Doing so was more common then — hard to imagine anymore. She invited us to come in.
My first impression of the woman we visited was that she was under a lot of tension, but that could have been just me projecting. She was older than we were, maybe by about six to ten years. That would have put her in her late twenties or early thirties. I will refer to her as Vivian, because I do not recall her name. She was white, pale, tall, thin, and had dark-blond hair. Her sweatshirt and jeans were faded, washed many times, and emphasized her paleness. She looked anxious and exhausted. Once we were in her house and Geeta introduced me, Vivian welcomed us kindly and made tea.
Vivian did not say much until she told the story which had brought us to her, and when she talked, she seemed nervous or afraid, as if volatile, dangerous people might listen and respond violently. Still, she was obviously expecting to speak about her experience and mentioned that sharing it with trusted listeners helped her process it.
We went into the living room, where a yellowish light from a weak lamp made it feel later in the day than it was. Geeta and I sat on floor cushions. Vivian stood most of the time. She rested on an old green armchair when she caught her breath or sipped her tea.
In those days, everybody I knew was friendly and inviting to strangers, but small talk about weather, politics, sports, and the like almost never happened. People exchanged greetings and soon addressed their interests, the burning questions and the ideas, music, writing, and art that moved them. The three of us didn’t say much as we sensed each other, drank our tea, and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes.
I realized that Vivian was preparing herself and waiting for the right moment to start talking. It wasn’t long before Geeta provided her with an opening, asking her to reveal what had happened to her. Geeta voiced her request graciously, aiming to avoid needless tension — far more artfully than I would have been able to at the time. She also assured her that we would keep confidential whatever she shared.
Vivian looked frightened. Her hands were shaking. Maybe she had feared this moment even though she allowed it to happen. It would force her to relive the unsettling event. As I gave her my attention, it seemed obvious that she was living with the echoes of a powerful, disturbing impression. This felt entirely real and honest, free from exaggeration or added drama, and I trusted Vivian to tell her truth. I saw that she was doing her best to manage herself, stay calm, and turn away from any threat of panic. That was something I could respect. I knew fear and what it felt like, and was familiar with the unskillful, desperate behaviors one tended to display when it circled you.
What Vivian told us was this:
On a Saturday evening, a little over a week ago, she was at home. She sat in her green armchair, drank a cup of tea, and smoked a little joint. As she described it, she was not really stoned, she just felt relaxed and a little chilly. She was not doing anything — no reading, writing, listening to music, just following her thoughts. Her cat was with her, but then left shortly after 10 p.m.
That’s when the older woman appeared. Suddenly, she was standing in the room. She had not come through any doors and had not made any noise. She looked at Vivian, who was so surprised that she did not speak or react in any other way. The visitor was maybe around 65 years old. Her hairstyle and dress looked to be from an earlier time. Vivian described her as pale and exhausted-looking, in a way that was not quite material. Apparently, this woman managed to set Vivian enough at ease so she could tell her what she had to say.
Years ago, sometime in the 1940s or 1930s, the visitor had been killed by her husband, who was in a relationship with younger woman. He stabbed her with a knife that she described in detail. Then he buried or left her body somewhere. I don’t remember if we heard that detail or not. He told the police and everybody else that his wife had left the house on an errand and did not return. She was considered missing. The husband was apparently not suspected or accused of a crime, and her remains were never found. Eventually, the unresolved case was closed.
What stands out most for me today, more than fifty years later, was how well Vivian described the visitor’s urgency in making it clear how very important it was to her that people should know what had actually happened. To her, that must have meant justice, and maybe it would allow her to move on. To provide Vivian with proof of her claims, she described a spot in a basement wall and told her to remove the paint and plaster. There, she would find a hollow space with objects that the older woman had hidden there. They would support what she had described. Then she disappeared.
Vivian gathered herself. She knew that astonishing things could happen. In the last few years, she had taken LSD a few times and sometimes smoked marihuana. She understood that people’s minds could play strange tricks and conjure up apparitions that maybe related to a person’s subconscious or to displaced or long-forgotten trauma. It was strange that this would have happened to her, but it did. Maybe, if she let it settle and meditated on it, she would understand it.
However, Vivian wanted to know if there was more to this event than something conjured up by her own mind. Using an old screwdriver and a hammer, she hacked away at the wall where the old lady had told her to look. Indeed, she found a gap that she described as roughly the size of a shoebox. Stuffed into that space were several pages and partial pages of old newspapers that reported on the sudden disappearance of the woman who once lived in this house. They described that the police never found any viable leads, no suspect once the husband was cleared, and no dead body. In the faded pictures, she looked like the woman who had visited that evening. Also, there was a knife that fit the visitor’s description.
Vivian returned these items to their place of concealment and patched the wall back up. She was not ready to open it again and show the knife and newspaper articles to anyone. At least for the time being, she fulfilled the murdered woman’s request by telling her story to people she knew and trusted. Maybe she would understand that this was the best Vivian could do. If the ghost showed herself another time, she could maybe ask her for guidance regarding the possible involvement of other people — the police, the press, maybe even descendants of her family or former neighbors. However, Vivian felt that a second visit was unlikely and, in any case, would unsettle her even more.
Geeta and I did not have much to comment. I had never heard anything like Vivian’s story in real life. It sounded intense, frightening, and unresolved. Vivian apologized for not showing us the spot where she had dug into the wall, and I forget why she did not. We tried to ask a few questions, but Vivian had already told us all she had to say. We had to somehow let this settle so we could accept it for what it was and not reframe it with our own thoughts and fantasies.
Going to the police or the press was out of the question for Vivian. They would not take her seriously. A newspaper might publish a hurtful, cynical article and make her look ridiculous. Both police and press could make her life unpleasant and shame her for squatting illegally in this house owned by the borough council, one of thousands at the time. They might even pressure her to leave, as council representatives going door to door sometimes did already. Soon, we left and wished Vivian well. Geeta told her that she would be back in touch.
When we shared our impressions, we agreed that Vivian had spoken about her experience as truthfully as she could. We understood why she did not take us to see the hiding place in the wall. It was possible that her descriptions were not entirely factual, but neither had she consciously fabricated or misrepresented anything. We were concerned that Vivian, who already seemed fragile and disoriented, was going to suffer more. She wanted to do right by the murdered woman, but did not know how. She had little money and spent most of her time in that house, where she lived alone, reliving the event. In a way, she was as tied to the memory of her visitation as her visitor was to the trauma of her murder. Geeta and I did not have any expertise or insight that would have helped Vivian and didn’t know anyone who did.
We walked home to Carol Street. On the way, we stopped at an Indian bakery and sweets shop and bought some sticky, golden pastries that smelled like sweet incense and tasted wonderful. They were just right after visiting Vivian in her dark, chilly house and listening to her story. We ate them at home, in my place, on the barely used top floor. Because it was cold, we decided to light the fireplace. I had some wood and plenty of paper. It was just a question of getting it started. A few old magazines had been falling about since I moved in the previous summer. We tore them up and arranged them together with the wood. In one of these magazines, I found a full-page picture of a cheetah in black and white. It accompanied an article about the plight of these endangered, marvelous animals. I might have burned it, but Geeta stopped me. “Not the cheetah,” she said. “One doesn’t burn pictures of cats.” I loved her for saying this and knew she was right. The image of the cheetah was still in the house when I left a few years later.
I never heard anything more about Vivian and her ghost. Not long after this day, Geeta and her boyfriend moved out of the squat next door into a rented apartment with a proper bathroom. They also joined an esoteric organization. For a while, Geeta still visited and told me about what she learned there. Then our paths diverged and we lost touch. I had hoped that Geeta and I might have some kind of future together, but this wasn’t to be. The walk to that distant Finchley Road neighborhood to visit Vivian, listening to her, our conversations before and afterwards, the fire and the photo of the cheetah — that was the high point of our friendship. I have gratefully remembered and relived it many times since then, but some details are lost.
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