I don’t want to freak you all out, but, in addition to having Awesome Psychic Powers, I also see dead people.

Sometimes I see shadows flitting past at the edge of my periphery, trying to escape detection. Because the ghost knows that if I catch it, I will stick its ectoplasmatic ass in a jar and then sell it on the internet.
Because I’m evil like that.

I’ve been chasing one all over home for a few days now.

I ain’t afraid of no ghosts. Ha. Like they can somehow hurt me hurt me with their vaporous fingers and their jumping out from behind curtains and going “BOO!”.

What is scary though … something I don’t even want to consider at the moment … is that this may not be a ghost that I keep seeing scurrying past, out the corner of my eye.
That … it may in fact … be … a mouse.

Actually, come to think of it, that’s what happened last time I saw one of these ghostly shadows.

I’d been catching a glimpse of this “ghost” for days, and I thought I was going a little bit crazy. Well, crazier than normal. But then I returned home after a long-weekend away and found that something had gnawed its way through all the food in my pantry.

I then knew that what I had been seeing those days prior was a mouse, thanks to the pile of mouse poo and the little note it had left behind asking why I had to be such a poor-ass and buy only No Frills budget brands.

Now, I’m from a farming background. Death is a fact of life in that world.
My very first paid job was trapping and skinning possums when I was about 10 years old.
Farmers are encouraged to kill anything considered a pest: Possums, rabbits, wild goats, stoats, politicians, bank managers, people who knock on your door trying to sell religion…

But something happened along the way, and I decided I didn’t want to kill any more. But that’s another story for another day.
But what this meant for the mouse, is that instead of getting all Biblical on its ass, I went out of my way to reason with it.
I told it that if it packed its bags up and left now, I would forget about the fact that it has just eaten about a hundred bucks worth of My Food.

But it wouldn’t listen.

A few days later I finally managed to trap the mouse in a spare bedroom. I had him cornered.
But, just as I was about to capture the beast, my telephone rang. It was my boss wanting me to go check out a bus accident about 45 minutes out of town.

“But … but … there’s a mouse …. it’ll get away… it stole all my food and left poos everywhere …I thought I was going crazy … but … but …there’s a mouse …”

I don’t think my boss knew what the hell I was going on about.
But then, just as I was about to jump in the car and go to the accident, my boss rang back. No one had been killed, so it wasn’t considered “interesting” to the outfit I was working for.

So, back to the mouse.

I’d locked him in the spare room.
I snuck back in, where a fierce battle ensued.
The mouse pulled out a lightsaber and I drew mine. We fought Jedi-style for what seemed like hours, but in the end, the stronger creature prevailed. The mouse.
It was about to finish me off, but I somehow managed to kick him in the nuts, and pin him using a half-Nelson wrestling move.

Then, just as I was about to administer the Ninja Turtle Death Touch, the mouse looked up at me with those little mouse eyes and I … couldn’t do it.

Instead, I’m ashamed to admit, I put him in a container, got into my car and drove out into the country, where I released him into the wild. The mouse could live, but he would not longer be of bother to me.

I drove back home, feeling good about myself.

I had the power of life and death over another creature and I chose Life.

I opened my front door, exhausted, but it was a good kind of tired.

And there in the middle of the room … was another mouse.

So I stuck it in a jar and sold it on E-Bay.

If there’s something wrong in your neighbourhood and you are afraid of ghosts, you could always give Ghostgirl a call. She's part of a ghostbusting outfit, which investigates “strange things” down the South East of the United States.