When I was young, around six years old, I knew for a fact that there existed in the world a population of
ghosts as numerous as we humans.
Ghosts, I believed, are the people of the night, and they resent this. They envy humans' ownership of daylight, and this is the reason they are so frightening. Otherwise they would just be other beings sharing the world with us. Night is their prison, but also their refuge and preserve, so they pose a threat to any humans foolish enough to trespass on their domain. What this threat is I have no idea, but this is the real reason humans are afraid of them. This is also the reason it is so important for humans to be asleep at night, why my parents spent so much time and effort trying to make sure I was asleep; because if ghosts perceive that a human is awake and, even worse, watching them, they will attack.
Ghosts come in several main sorts. The traditional white Casper from horror movies exists, nothing to be too afraid of. They used to gather in large groups in our back yard. They would have been visible if I had dared to sit up and look out the window, but I wasn't stupid enough to do that. I used to lie awake with my eyes closed, desperately trying not to screw them up in a way that would indicate that I was actually feigning sleep, because if a ghost looked in the window and saw this it might be tempted to stay there, looking in, waiting for me to take a peek and catch sight of the presence. That would be deadly. Like bullies trying to pick a fight, they used to toy with humans in this way. So I lay, breathing shallowly, even sometimes turning over in a casual manner, hoping never to catch a glimpse of something white at the window.
Far worse than this was the black one. The black ghost was so bad that his evil spread out like a miasma that travelled through walls. So I could perceive him as he stood in the paved sideway of our house, leaning against the wall directly beneath the small eastern window of my bedroom. I knew he was there, smiling his big white crescent smile in the dark, a perfect black silhouette of a man, leaning casually against the wall. Secure in the knowledge of his strength and ability to somehow ruin any human who might dare to peer outside. Strange, because as he was black as shadow, he couldn't even be seen.
Possums lived in the old trees around our house. They threatened each other with a hideous croaking snarl that used to freeze my marrow. Even when I was satisfied that it was a harmless mammal and not some crawling terror from the beyond, the sound of a possum hissing at his rivals still makes my heart skip a beat. Later, when I had conquered my fear of ghosts somewhat, and could look out the window with only minor trepidation, I would watch them run and jump amongst the bare winter branches of our liquidambar tree. I used to hoist buckets of chokos up that tree and leave them for the possums to eat, which they did. They also used to suck the seeds out of the prickly balls of the seed pods.
I had a crystal radio, a gift from my grandfather, which I used to listen to late at night, with an earphone in each ear. Later my father gave me a multi use electronics kit, and one of the configurations of that kit was a better kind of crystal radio. It was a beautiful kit, a sheet of clear Perspex with various electrical components mounted on it's surface with small springs as the contacts. It came with plans on paper sheets, and lengths of wire. You put the plan on top of the stack in the box, laid the Perspex unit on top, then wired it up following the lines on the plan. There were dozens of plans, including solar powered radio, several different types of transistor radio, AM and FM, and the crystal radio. I bought a length of plain copper core wire from a boy at school for 60 cents, and strung it from that tree as an aerial. If lightning struck that aerial it would have run straight down, completely ignored the diode in the radio, and fried my brain. And all the time I was scared stiff of ghosts.