Uncle Kaspar

When I tell people that we share our house with a ghost, their eyes widen and they usually gasp.  But there’s a lot of weird stuff in my house, and the ghost is one of the more normal things, in a way.

His name is Uncle Kaspar. He’s not my real uncle, but I’ve known him such a long time he feels like one of the family. It took my dog Green (I called him that because he’s green) a long time to like Uncle Kaspar but now they’re really quite good friends. Uncle Kaspar has said that he would like to take Green for a walk, but of course he can’t. Because if he leaves the house in daylight he won’t exist anymore. It’s like that with ghosts.

Uncle Kaspar doesn’t live in the attic, like other ghosts. He can’t stand attics, he says. Full of spiders. There’s a lot that Uncle Kaspar’s afraid of, which I think is funny, him being a ghost and all. Instead he lives in the downstairs cupboard where the boiler is, because he says it’s a fallacy that ghosts like cold damp places. When he was alive he spent quite a lot of time in Africa and he got so used to the heat and sunshine that coming back to England was hard to do.

When I have friends over, Uncle Kaspar likes to join in the games. He says that being with young people makes him feel young again. We play battleships and draughts. We play computer games and pool on my mini-billiards table. When new people come to our house they can get scared of Uncle Kaspar being a ghost, but once we’ve all sat down and had a drink and a biscuit and Uncle Kaspar’s told them about good bits (like walking through walls) and the bad bits (like not being able to eat the biscuits), they’re usually OK and we can get on with the games.

He’s very good at hide and seek.