100 Ghost Stories Counting Down To Halloween! 75 Nights Left! "Hamau (Silence)"

Silence is defined as the complete absence of sound. People are unaware as to how accustomed they are to the ambient noises in their life; it is only when all of the background static is muted that they realize silence is filled with maddening fear. The resonance without the walls of my home comes from the deluge of rain, which closely mimics the cadence of bacon frying bacon in a skillet. The likened popping of grease and fat give off an acoustic impression so strong that you can almost smell the aroma of it as it fills the house with its tempting savory essence. At its core, however, it is only rain.

An ancient wind that once made the plains of Pili grass an orchestral playground in this area now stirs the tall brown and green tops of sedge beneath my window to move about like supple waves on a vast, endless ocean. I hear it rustle the branches of the tall mango tree in my neighbor's yard, and the sound of it is reminiscent of my father, who would unfold sheets of newspaper all at once before he would fashion them into makeshift kites for my brother and myself.

The silence that I require at this hour of the morning is one that opens the psychic fontanel at the top of my head and allows me to receive the unfiltered inspiration that will eventually transpose itself from my fingertips to the screen of my laptop. That quiet moment is undone by the sound of weeping; I lift my eyes to gaze across the length of my yard, and I see her.

All of 10 years old and daily, she weeps at the foot of her former home, imploring her mother to let her in. Her mother lives in a self-imposed silence where she has conditioned herself not to see the apparition of her dead child who was killed in a car accident. To acknowledge the ghost is to recognize the pain, and to recognize the pain is to relive a horrible memory. Silence and muted eyesight were the only courses; otherwise insanity would have been the result.

I must remain silent and cast my eyes down to my keyboard, for if the ghost of the dead girl sees that I perceive her, she will plead for my mercy and ask of me to be her proxy or, worse, possess me. The sound of nothing is maddening to some, but for myself, it is inspiration and salvation.