My first ghost experience was in 1959 in an old foundry near Sydney Harbour.
I was saving money to get married and took a second job cleaning the place when the previous cleaner, an old drunk named Tommy, refused to do it any more. “It’s haunted,” he said. The caretaker had committed suicide on the premises and Tom swore his ghost still walked in the shadows.
It was an eerie building with a couple of offices and a lunch room, the only places I had to clean. The main area was an earthen floor into which mouldings were dug. I emptied the trash into those mouldings where the molten metal disposed of it next day.
One night, I was walking through the foundry, listening to the high shuttered windows crash-banging in the wind and thinking about Tommy and his ghost. With a single dim light high on one wall the whole place was transformed into a scene from a B-Grade horror movie.
Still lost in thought, I threw the trash into the moulding.
That was when the cat that was fossicking through the first bucketful let out a mighty screech and least from the hole. He headed in one direction and I took off in the other.
My legs were still running when my body stopped at the back wall.
