Your True Tales
April 2006 – Page 31

The Ghost's Coins
by Junita Smith

As a child I lived in a boarding school in Africa. My parents were military people and were stationed a place known as South West Africa at the time. We were placed in boarding school as they were always out doing whatever is is military people do. The boarding school I was in was situated on a hill. At the time there was nothing else around it, except bare, yellow dried-out grassy fields.

It was an eerie place at the best of times. I enjoyed exploring and while scratching around in some soft stone (called fool's gold) in an area behind our boarding school where a construction company had just blown a hole to start digging foundations, I found a dozen coins embedded in the soft stone! For my 12 year-old mind this was treasure second to none! I dug and dug until I'd found all of them and hid them in our "box room" (the area where we stored our suitcases). However, a few weeks later two teachers were clearing out some old goods in the box room and found my coins. They mentioned that they would take them to a museum. I seem to recall overhearing them some time later saying that the school had been built on the site of an old graveyard.

About a year later, I was appointed a "prefect" and on Fridays all the kids had to go up to the school hall to watch movies. It was my job to ensure that all the rooms were empty. As I went upstairs, I clearly saw a brown-skinned girl in a green dress walking toward my bedroom. I thought she looked like one of the Portuguese girls in our school and called out to her. She was way down the other end of the corridor and didn't seem to hear me. She turned the handle of my bedroom door – a room that I shared with three other girls – and went inside. Annoyed, I ran down the corridor just as my door closed.

I flung it open just as the other prefect on duty joined me and asked, "Is somebody still here?" "Yes, it's Fatima," I replied, just as we saw one of the cupboard doors move ever so slightly. It was my cupboard. We through open all the doors – nothing! It was then that Kim, the other prefect, said she'd actually seen my door open as she came up the flight of stairs closest to it, and I had still been running from the other side of the corridor yelling to whom we thought was Fatima.

As we backed out, the door slammed. Noises came from inside the room like cupboard doors slamming as somebody searched frantically. We did not wait for a second invitation to investigate our missing fellow pupil's whereabouts but took off in terror to the school hall where we saw Fatima sitting, not in a green dress, but in pink shorts and t-shirt. We told a handful of kids whom we thought would believe us, but never spoke of the strange girl in the green dress again after that. Fortunately, it was end of term and we both went to High School after that, which meant a new boarding school.

I've always wondered if the ghost of that brown girl with her tight curly short-cropped hair was not one of the Herero nation of South West Africa.... looking for her lost coins. I wish I could've returned them.

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