I don’t believe in ghosts, but sometimes I see them. This is a contradiction Maria has pointed out a number of times, she does believe in ghosts.

Ghosts do not fit into my view of the universe, otherwise we would all see a lot more of them.

I remember walking on the path near the first Bedlam Farm, I saw a man dressed on leather leggings and wearing a slough hat walking towards me, and I was startled to see that I could see the red barn right through his chest.

Rose, my fearless border collie, who started down coyotes, bears and rams, froze in her tracks, the hair on her back stood straight up and she would not move an inch forward on the path. In a moment the man was gone, and Rose would never again set foot on the spot where he stood.

I think I know who he was and why he was there, I wrote about it then, but I imagine he must have been a ghost, although I do not believe in ghosts. Rose believed in ghosts. I acknowledge that there are things about the world that I do not know or see, that does not mean they are not there. That is as far as I have gotten.

Lately, when I am in the big barn moving hay around or getting rakes or shovels, I have this sensation that I am not alone, I feel a chill up and down my spine, there is just the oddest feeling of a presence nearby. The old farmers always say that barns are where the ghosts love to live and appear, they are so dark, the light is so shifting, there is so much history there. The light is always dancing on the rafters and the hay.

Sometimes, I dream of ghosts dancing with the barn cats, leaping from one hay bale to the other, leaping up to the eaves.

I was drawn into the barn after the hay-feeding to get a photo of the light striking the hay, it looked so evocative to me. I took the photo, and was puzzled, then, I came out of the barn and it was cloudy, it was  raining lightly and there was no bright light or sunlight. There really could not have been a beam of light on the haystacks like this one in the picture.

I came back into the barn and took the same photo, but it was far too dark, and showed up black on the camera viewer, even when I changed the settings, it was just dark. Since I don’t believe in ghosts, I must either have been dreaming or confused, or the sun must have popped out briefly.

Looking at the rear of the barn, I see light coming into the barn through those slats, but it is not bright, and it is not sunlight and it casts no shadows.

Or there might be ghosts. What, after all, do I know?

As I stood in the barn trying to take a photo without light – I often can with my camera – I thought I heard Chloe the pony whinny outside the barn window, she often whinnies out me. But when I got outside she was not there, she was out in the back pasture grazing.

Okay, I said, enough. I needed to get to the computer and write, where the world always makes senses to me.

I don’t believe in ghosts. So maybe I am overthinking things.