Things that go bump in the night

It's a Dad's Life: There may be a ghost in our house. Or unsettled spirits, or stray energy lines cutting through our living space. There may just be creepy shadows in the girls' bedroom, but something is spooking the younger these past few nights.

She has no problem getting ready for bed, having her teeth washed, nappy changed and bedclothes on, but once we approach the bedroom door she tenses and starts to howl. It's not a cry, or a sob, or a yowl, as in "yowl, don't put me to bed"; it's a blood-letting howl.

It's from the pit of herself and has a fear in it I don't understand. This is a child who never had a problem with getting to sleep. Often, she let us know it was time to go. She was good with the hints - kicking us in the shins, grabbing her blanket and curling up into a ball on the floor. Eventually we get it, she's tired.

All that has changed; her energy becomes a little manic after dinner, she fights sleep and, for the first time, wants to come into our bed.

The elder is the opposite. She has cut a groove of her own in our mattress from day one, one perpendicular to us so we are pushed further to the margins as she grows. That's our fault, we gave in at the first hint of upset with her, but we were strong with the younger. We prevailed through the screams and had ourselves a baby that slept, for the most part, pretty well in her own cot. Now, suddenly, you would think we were giving her up to the child-catcher every night.

We're wondering what's stressing her because she's still a little chilled bunny the rest of the day. Our musings stretch from her being frightened by the thunder a few days back, to her having a delayed reaction to moving back into her own room a fortnight ago.

When I'm feeling particularly psychological I wonder is she remembering some sort of birth trauma in the darkness of her bedroom, particularly with the humidity we've been suffering recently.

But mostly I think she's spooked by ghosts. You see, just before she was born we were given a pre-birth present by the Good Witch of the West (as in Dublin 6W), aka my mother-in-law (Mil). The Good Witch does not follow the normal set of rules. Where we explore alternative therapies and practices and good middle-class, anxiety-relieving hoodoo, she has already ditched our "new alternatives" and grasped the nettle of the alternatives' alternatives. So, instead of a batch of new babygrows, we got our house expunged of the presence of transitory spirits and its energy lines mapped. All done by the seventh son of a seventh son with a gift for the old energy divining, complete with his energy-divining rod. The Good Witch paid and we were grateful for this thoughtful, if slightly odd, gift.

I chose not to be there when our seventh son arrived, and hoped he would be gone by the time I got home. But he waited for me, because he wanted to tell me about the proprietary spirit of an energetic young man who kept an eye out for me. This was the spirit of a man who had died prematurely a few years previously, who was content where he was but liked to check in with me occasionally.

I had never crossed paths with the seventh son before, nor had anyone among my friends or family. I am also a cynical old git, but he was speaking about one of my closest friends who died of an overdose in 1998. How the seventh son knew, I don't know.

So, when he said that the kids' room was the meeting point of two energy lines which, although not harmful in themselves, could be detrimental to health if slept in, I filed the information under "utterly crazy but probably true". Now the kid is spooked and I'm thinking it's just not fair.

It's hard enough raising nippers with all the modern-day pressures, without the spirit world sticking its oar in too. If the younger doesn't calm down in the next day or two, I'm getting the exorcist out. Damn you, seventh son, I was blissful in my ignorance.