The Fly Of Death
Some years ago, working in a nursing home, I passed the open door of a bedroom where an elderly resident was dying.

Her two middle-aged daughters stood either side of the bed, and one seemed to beckon me.

I went in and asked what I could do for them. However, the daughter said that she hadn't been beckoning me. She'd been swatting away that huge black fly that was buzzing around her mother's face.

The other daughter was also waving a hand around, I noticed, and she told me that they'd been trying to get rid of the fly for ages. She said their mother wasn't bothered by it, though, and had laughed and called it her 'pet'.

I looked at the dying woman's face, and she grinned faintly at me.

The weird thing was that there was NO fly. I was standing close beside the bed, looking straight into the dying woman's face where the sisters swore there was a big fly, but I saw nothing except the dying woman's smile and her daughters' hands flapping about.

I mumbled something about making them a nice cup of tea and backed slowly out of the room, leaving the dying woman, her solicitous daughters and their invisible fly to their own devices!

I later read somewhere, by chance, that there is a culture where flies are kept out of rooms where people are dying because the devil sends a fly to collect 'his' souls. Voodoo or something, can't remember.

This family looked like perfectly normal English, white, middle class C of E ladies to me, but brrr, eh. You never know.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Thu 7 Apr 2011, 17:09, 3 replies)

I find deja vu quite creepy

( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 7 Apr 2011, 17:11, closed)

Hahaha, bloody sodding cat leaned on the keyboard and posted before I'd finished!

(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Thu 7 Apr 2011, 17:14, closed)

Out of all of these that I have read
That is the creepiest.
(Document Pocket, Fri 8 Apr 2011, 14:46, closed)

It's completely true, too.
Not the only spooky thing to happen there, either.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Sat 9 Apr 2011, 14:08, closed)