A Ghosts Purpose

A Story by Matthew Hontz

Tale of a spirit trying to find out how and why he is here.

A Ghost’s Purpose

Matthew Hontz

I am dead. It’s really not quite as bad as you might think. I mean, its bad. You might say that it is worse than being alive. There is no physical pain but it’s a little difficult to just drift along like I do. Now, I obviously have some explaining to do because you are probably asking yourself how I am currently writing this out if I have no body. Quite simply, possession exists. I possess this body when I want to communicate with the world. I am not certain why this body is more open to this little trick than most. Maybe it is because we are rather similar when it comes down to it. He had an extreme case of PTSD and is pretty much just an empty shell these days. I think he is open to me because he is lonely. We sort of share this body. I love him. Granted, most of the time I am not in this body, but I am almost always nearby. He knows that I possess him and sometimes when life gets to be too much for him, he calls on me. He calls me Gabriel. That was not my name when I was alive but I have come to like being called it. I believe I have been dead for a few years now. I have come across several other souls wandering this world. Several of these beings were an absolute joy to interact with but most are actually what mortal men would think of as insane. I don’t know how these things happen. They sometimes just seem to be echoes of the past and have no real intelligence. I have tried to talk to these beings but they don’t even seem to see me. I've asked the few intelligent beings I have come into contact with about what we can do about our existence. About God, Hell, Heaven, or whatever. The general consensus is that most spirits pass on to another plane after death but a few stick around in one form or another. Most souls that stick around here can’t seem to handle this new existence and just go mad. It seems like these are the source of your haunted houses and whatnot. There is a certain amount of power that we can pull together to move objects and such but it takes a lot out of us. When we use up all of our energy, we go into a dormant state it seems. Weeks will pass before we are able to re-form our bodies. I think that this dormant state is the closest thing to a break that we get in this world so I believe that is why the mad souls use up their energy throwing stuff around. This also explains why haunted houses will sometimes just not be haunted. The spirit is sleeping.

Now I cannot say that I know all of this stuff for sure but being a ghost or whatever, I am probably the leading authority on this. Normally possession is also extremely exhausting but it is much easier when the body is willing to facilitate your soul. I can stay in this body for days before I have to leave it and pull my strength together. I believe the more I do it the more I can stay in the flesh. I want to say right now that I do not wish to take this man’s body over forever. Not only do I not know if it is possible but I don’t really have any want to be alive again. I like being what I am at the moment. I hated my life as a man. I have significantly less personal problems now. I mean, I was never very good at being a man. Indeed, I actually killed myself to be done with it. Yes, I am a product of suicide. I dealt with depression and pain for years before I gave in to it but I did. Now, I am certainly not a proponent of killing yourself to become what I am because there is seemingly no real way to know where you will end up. Again, I want to stress that the vast majority of people who die do not stick around on this plane and I do not know where they go to. I once spoke to a soul who seemed a bit off. He told me that soon after he died, he saw a light but did not go to it. The light faded and disappeared as he stayed in this world. He regrets not moving into that light. I’m quite certain that he was just going mad but I cannot be sure.

When I first realized that I was not alive, I felt a bit of panic. I believe that there is always just a bit of doubt when people finally decide to commit suicide. A small bit of the psyche that always thinks that you will survive no matter how many pills you take, how big the caliber of bullet you put in your brain. It is so strange. I adapted quickly after looking around for some time and not seeing a door to heaven or hell. Getting used to moving as a spirit is very uncomfortable at first. Walking like a normal man seems to work, but you will often look down and realize that your feet are indeed not touching the ground. I’ve found that the best way to move is just looking at a destination and going there. It’s hard to describe, we sort of just go where we wish to go. In fact, when I finally found out how to possess a body, I found it very hard to control at first. It was like roller skating for the first time. You sort of just move your legs and hope you don’t fall. I do like to avoid damaging the body I possess not only because I care deeply about this man but because pain can shoot me out of a body very quickly. Once I occupied a body that belonged to an older man. He was easy to take over because he had dementia. I learned these facts from his mind. It horrified that that deep in his mind was a small room where what was left of the rational man lay dormant. I opened this door when I was walking down the street, just to see what would happen. As soon as I did, he took control of his limbs from me and threw himself into traffic. I felt all the bones break, the pain immense. I also felt the sweet relief that he felt, controlling himself for one final act. I left the dying body and tried to see the spirit leave the body. I saw nothing. No light, nothing. Just an empty husk of a body.

This made my form incredibly weak for some time. The shock of the body dying that I was in at the time almost made me had to go dormant, but I held on to my form and stayed near the body when it was moved, even when it was interred into the ground, but again, I saw nothing. I moved on from town to town. I can travel quite quickly and have no real limitations. In death, I have seen the country. In life, I never went anywhere. And while I cannot feel the changes in territories I roam, I have seen many wondrous things. I feel attraction to people like I always have but can’t act on these feelings unless I am possessing a body. I do not do this when in the driver’s seat though. I do not want to force the people I possess to do anything they would not normally want to do. Sometimes I think of stupid decisions I made in life and wonder if perhaps I was being controlled by a spirit. Unlikely, I was probably just an idiot. I feel it is likely important to have some sort of code while being what I am. I don’t imagine that there are any real repercussions for me in doing anything illegal or harmful in another’s body, but I have met enough mad spirits and I believe that they went mad doing these things. Maybe they got too attached. I feel attached to the man who owns the body I am now using to write this. In a very real way, I love him. I feel his pain and I try to make it easier on him by taking over and giving his mind a break. Recently, I have taken to paying his bills for him as he is not good with finances. I was never that good at paying the bills either but I suppose I have learned the value of a dollar by never having to use them.

Either way, I have a bit of a story to tell you about the short amount of time that I was not anchored to a depressed man in a small apartment. I can freely move around space as I please. It’s a bit strange to do because it reminds me of driving a car while very tired. When you are moving, you kind of just coast. Sometimes, you look around to find that you have been in your destination for some time. Time is a weird thing these days so I cannot exactly say how long this little trip took me but it was definitely less than a year. I know this because I occasionally stop in to check up on my ex-girlfriend and not much has changed with her. Didn’t really seem surprised with my death but she seemed sad enough so I guess that’s okay. I started my journey in Egypt. I’ve always wanted to see the pyramids so it seemed like a good first move. It was a terrible first move. You see, something about the ritual mummification actually ties spirits into the body. The spirt cannot move a body that has no life so the spirts within began to scream as soon as I entered. I believe they all went mad and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the confinement or simply the age of the spirits themselves. I know that there is some sort of afterlife or something because I don’t run into many spirits. I have no idea why I am still here. There was certainly no special ceremony to my death or burial.

The reaction of the mad spirits in Egypt sort of freaked me out but it was also a bit intriguing. I decided to try possessing a security guards body right as the exhibits closed for the night. Within this body I went inside and used a knife to cut into the body of one of the corpses. The screaming stopped when I was cutting. I felt the spirit rush from the body in a torrent and push my spirit out of the body I was inhabiting. I looked on as the guard, possessed by a mad spirit ran around cutting open the other corpses and setting them free from their earthly remains. Then I watched in horror as he plunged the knife into his own chest. I did not see either the mad spirit or the spirit of the man leave the body. They were both just gone. Perhaps the mad spirit clung to the guard’s soul as it left this plane. I wish I knew.

Maybe souls have a weak point I thought. So, admittedly, I did a bit of a bad thing for some time. I possessed bodies and killed them in different ways. Several dozen people must have died this way but I couldn’t seem to find any sort of weakness in myself. The people I was in died and their souls just disappeared all of a sudden. Most of the people I did this to were convicted murderers in a pretty nasty prison in Afghanistan if that makes you feel better. It doesn’t make me feel much of anything. I have been looking for other spirits or even living people who can help me look into this a bit more scientifically than I have been. After that little excursion, I made my way over to Germany. I saw the sights and moved on to Ireland, where I found quite a few spirits out and about. Several were a bit mad but others I had quite lengthy conversations with. Apparently, a few spirits there were trying to figure out answers and left the country a few hundred years ago. I had a new mission. I needed to find these people who had the same goal as me and had been working on it for centuries. I will admit, it was temping to just stay in Ireland. It’s such an endlessly beautiful place and having people who could interact with me freely was a fine thing. It’s like people with alike struggles flock to each other and these people could understand me. I moved on in time, searching for the group of researchers.

I was informed before I left that I should try going to the Easter Islands. That was where the group had gone before. They didn’t say why but when I arrived I found several mad spirits of highly advanced age and one that was not mad. He told me to move on to Australia where I found nothing. I picked up the trail again in London by talking to a spirit of a woman who claimed to have been killed by Jack the Ripper. She told me to head over to a crypt in a great cemetery. There I found a man, not a spirit, pouring over several books and talking on a cell phone. He looked at me and said into the receiver “Got another one.” Then I felt a massive force on my soul, pulling me towards him. In my confusion I lashed out with all of my strength and felt the hold loosen just enough for me to slam through the wall and out.

I possessed a body outside and found a small gun inside a holster at the small of her back. I walked back towards the cemetery, feeling a bit awkward in this body, the weight of her breasts foreign and feeling the lack of a phallus much more than I thought I would. I had to get answers from this guy though. The man had hung up the phone and was leaving the crypt when I pointed the gun at him and demanded he explain himself. He stammered that his task was to cleanse places when a certain group of troublesome spirits had been. I asked him how he did that. Inside the crypt was a small machine designed centuries ago that apparently rips souls apart. When I found out that he didn’t know anything else, I put him down. I then dragged him into the crypt (difficult for a five foot three woman who is one hundred twenty pounds soaking wet). I ditched the gun in a nearby creek and searched the woman’s memories for where she lived. I made my way to her home. It was a small flat where she apparently lived alone. I took the time to look into the mirror. She was a pretty little thing. I stripped the dirty clothes off of her and threw them in the garbage. I took a nice warm shower, enjoying the sensation on her skin. Moving her hands slowly and deliberately, I searched her body, finding the places that felt the best. After I had her cleaned and took the garbage out, I put her to bed and left her.

So at this point, I knew that I was looking for a group of spirits that was being pursued by some group of humans with some ancient technology designed to destroy souls. I thought about just giving up and going back to Ireland but then I realized that if I didn’t figure this out, those souls could be in danger. I decided to continue. I moved on.

The next stop was Africa. There I found several caves that had disabled machines much like the one that had almost killed me. Again. But a quick sweep told me that no one was around. However, I did find a note left by the previous residents that had an address on it. I went into the town where it was and looked through the ceiling. I saw several of the devices around the walls. There were several men and women in the room discussing the group that I was looking for. They had last been seen in Germany and moved on to the US. They had men out looking for them but had no idea which state they were in. I pondered this for a while until they mentioned that they were heading out tomorrow and started dismantling the machines. I waited for them to be done with that and have them packed away. One went to bed and the other four got a bottle of whisky and started drinking. I possessed the sleeper. I killed them all and set the place on fire, destroying the machines in the process.

I continued doing this, the group of ghosts moved quickly out of necessity because there were always people after them. The killings got more difficult as well because they always had more machines and more people. Apparently killing people of a group puts that group on guard. Who would have thought? People learn over time. Well so do I. When they took turns sleeping, I made to possess the watch man, when they got two people to watch, it was an innocent person driving by that for reasons unknown to anyone, slammed his car into the building holding them. By the time I made it back to the US, the whole organization was on high alert and it became very difficult indeed to destroy them, even more so to get any relevant information out of them. Although the numbers of agents went up, it seemed like their skills went down. I could tell I was hurting this organization greatly.

Eventually, I ran into one of the group that I was looking for. I went to the next place and started scoping out the spirit hunters there, when one of the humans turned to me, said an address and turned away. I was not visible, but he saw me. He was possessed. I left the location and went on to the place he spoke of to find a female spirit there. Her features were constantly changing and I could not describe her now if I wanted to. She asked me why I was killing the men. I told her that they were hunting her. She informed me that they were actually employed by the group to get rid of spirits that were trying to stop them from finding their answers. I was destroying the group that I was trying to find. Killing countless people that were employed by spirits to help the cause. I was ashamed. She told me that a young spirit like me would never be accepted into the group and that I should go peacefully or be destroyed. I was about to protest when she rushed at me full force. I was dematerialized. I had thought, but could not manage to pull matter together. I was just there, floating in the world but unable to do anything. I stayed this way for what I am certain was months, because when I was finally able to pull myself together, there was no sign of the group. That’s where I am now. My body mate and I are just living the best we can. I will wait. I exist. I am here.

For the first time in my life, I have a purpose. I am happy here. Sometimes, the thing you need the most is a good friend.