Manen Ahmed on finding ghosts—and being one—in Berlin…

My first ghost sighting in Berlin was on September 8th, 2009, on the fifth floor inner balcony of a building at the corner of Duisburgerstrasse and Brandenburgerstrasse in Charlottenburg.

It was early afternoon, and I saw her standing in the sun. Her head turned at an un-natural angle, so that the meagre rays of the sun lit her up her neck. On seeing her, I nearly jumped from the balcony from fright.

When I was living in the hot burning sun and society of Doha Qatar, we used to love the thrill of the firangi ghost stories. In that desert, jinns were everywhere, and fairies too. There was the hotel for new immigrants that was run by a family of mean, mean jinns.

There was the puchchal paeri taxi driver you would hail in the late evening ocean mist. There were the black magic witches of Oman with their secret words and chin tattoos. Each of these stories was tied to a specific place: the hotel was on Corniche Drive, the taxi was in al-Thammama, the witches in the old bazaar.

These stories were how we (a group of nine-12 year olds from Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka) made sense of the desert to which our parents had brought us—the place where a houl was jinn.

There I heard, for the first time, a ghost story. It took place in London. In mists and graveyards, and overhanging trees, and it starred a woman, in white, and it had the narrator frozen to the spot, contemplating this other worldly intruder inside his home. I remember being scared out of my wits.

The narrator was the elder brother of my best friend who had lived in London and this was what had happened to his best friend, in a house near where they lived. He swore, he thought, he too was a witness to the ghost, on another occasion. This was terrifying. You flee the jinn. You lash out at the churail. This ghost, this white woman, she turned you into a statue.

I did not see a white people cemetery until I moved to the Midwest of the United States. I did not see a ghost, but I did hear many more ghost stories. They seemed to not tell me anything about the city. They were about houses, rather the interior of the houses. They were inside doors, around the corner, by the bathroom. How was I to understand Dayton, Ohio fro…