One of the things I missed about Bali was openly talking about ghosts and the supernatural.

While living in New Zealand, there was a time I saved on rent by house-sitting along with a resident ghost that had a habit of sitting on sleepers.

When the owner of the house hinted about a white ghost, I thought he was referring to his five-kilogram white cat that would appear at odd hours and insistently wake me up to feed him or open the door, to the point of dumping his fluffy behind on my face.

Sleep being my drug of choice (second only to dark Belgian chocolate), I have my reasons for not being particularly fond of cats.

I found out much later, after my own confrontations with him, that this particular phantom was a lonely white settler.

According to a sensitive Maori friend, he was still confused at being uprooted from England to find himself dead in one of the many channels that drain the swamp that was the life source of Otahutahi.

That was the Place of chief Tautahi that settlers of Anglican bent renamed as Christchurch.

Monty, a friend who had bought the abandoned house to renovate, subdivide and sell, had moved down from Auckland for the cooler climate. He never acknowledged the ghost. He would lie in bed, keeping his eyelids tightly shut while repeating the mantra "Nothing is happening!" in his mind.

Nothing indeed: just a dead weight crushing his body, at times suffocating him. And the occasional sudden tug of the bedclothes that left the hot-blooded winter-lover shivering.

Initially, I assumed his crankiness was due to staying up late to watch a certain stash of naughty movies that was revealed to me when hidden doors opened at night.

This engineering student was so used to a life with modern concerns that I had a pragmatic answer for all the oddities.

The creaking floors, the shuddering house and the occasional surreptitious opening and closing of doors were attributable to parts of the big, wide, wooden house adjusting differently as it cooled down at night.

The banging? Must be that darned giant cat bumping into things again.

It was when I woke, sensing an intruder in the dark, that I began to realize that this was a similar hair-raising sensation that I had felt while walking home down the slopes of Mount Agung, Bali's highest volcano.

Suspend your disbelief a while and bear with me.

• *

I was 14, still in SMP (junior high school), and was tagging along with my cool, older sister. She was on the committee of her SMA (senior high school) nature lover's group. They were preparing to take the first year's intake up the mountain as part of their initiation to the adult world of SMA.

With jam karet (rubber-time) delays, we completed the seven-hour hike in time to watch the sun set westward over Java's mountain ranges, from Ijen to Semeru.

The caves above the tree line, just below the final ascent, were the designated overnight camp, allowing the keen climbers like my sister and I the chance of going back up to the summit before dawn to watch the sun rise over Lombok's Mount Rinjani.

After sundown, however, we began to realize that something was amiss when the supervising teacher, a jovial, short, mild, moustached gentleman who incidentally taught Hindhu Dharma, began to herd us down in an uncharacteristically pushy manner.

He had even less patience for us, the last ones to be shooed away from the summit. At base camp, he barked, "No stopping, get your bags and go straight down."

This wasn't the plan, but no discussion was allowed.

Tired, cranky and annoyed, we took our marching orders and began to storm down the steep slope in the dark, overtaking the rest of the team.

By the fact that we reached Besakih temple at 2:30 a.m., I would deduce that between the witching hours of 1 a.m. and 2 a.m., a skull was following us.

Walking hand-in-hand to maintain a steady stomp, stomp, stomp, through the bush, once in a while a whitish orb would appear just to the right-hand side of the path in front of us, revealing itself to be a skull as we were passing.

"Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" I asked my dear sister.

She squeezed my hand and we both began reciting the Gayatri mantra out loud. In my mind I acknowledged the presence and apologized for trespassing in such a foul state of temper.

It felt like a period of suspended animation, despite stomp-stomp-stomping faster down the slope. We broke out into a clearing of corn stalks. Our anxiety subsided, tempers extinguished.

• *

We never saw it again.

I never saw the Christchurch ghost either. I sat up in bed, and spoke out loud to the dark.

"I realize you've been living here. Now, I'm living here, too. The house is big enough; I'd appreciate it if you allow me some privacy. I need to sleep."

It behaved. For a while, at least. Like any annoying flatmate, it had to be reminded from time to time to respect some boundaries.

Kadek Krishna Adidharma is a Bali-based environmental engineer who works as a cultural liaison officer and is an interpreter.

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on The Jakarta Post