Pillowgeist

There is something about a pillow on a bed, one that has just been slept on, its pressed-flower-embroidered pillowcase still in the midst of ‘pillowfight’ with its own soft sinkable innards ... ripe for turning or plumping-up before going back to bed. Earlier, by chance, it had too easily slipped out from supporting the head thanks to the sleeper’s tossing and turning. Or lively dreaming.

There are many incidents of pillows being used for suffocation and, so, it is strange that there are not more ear-marked pillowgeists roaming the haunted bedrooms of our world. Or perhaps they are the many floaters upon the eyesight that the mind blanks out.

A particular white-and-blue striped double bolster-pillow was kept in a Crime Museum in Bucharest as the one used by the most notorious pillow-suffocator of modern times. It had been a dastardly act as he had used it upon the wife with whom he had shared the same pillow for a lifetime of erstwhile happy marriage.  Happy, even though it still bore the yellow tearstains of both parties, marks that had been induced by the sadder moments of the night that we all (in our own way) share-in-suffering, whatever our frame of mind during daylight hours. 

The bolster-pillow was old ... so old, many museum visitors took the tearstains for a pillow’s version of an old book’s foxing. 

I once toyed with buying a pillow that I saw in a Krakow antique shop as opposed to in the more customary bedding store.

“Do you want it for sleeping on?” the shopkeeper asked in good English.

I nodded, fingering the texture of the starched pillowcase. It gave off late-night dormitory horseplay.  But everyone has their own feel for pillows. Somebody else may have sensed something quite different, like, for example, a sexual act that the smell of mothballs did well to conceal.

“I’d advise not using it for sleeping,” the shopkeeper continued. “The owner told me it is haunted with a member of ancient Austro-Hungarian royalty who died while trying to transfer from this pillow to his bed-companion’s pillow by force rather than by suitable negotiation, suitable, that is, for a shared night...and now it creates similar dreams for anyone who sleeps on it, dreams that are too real ... too close for comfort.”

What a bizarre statement, I thought. Folklore was one thing, but such superstitious pillowtalk was quite beyond the pale, as far as I was concerned.

But what did I expect, as a serious collector of pillows? I, too, had glibly slipped into pillowtalk myself earlier, by use of the word ‘pillowgeist’, a term that was only known to experts in the field. Ordinary collectors did, it is true, refer to ‘pillowghost’, or more obliquely, ‘pillowguest’, (in each case one word, not two) but ended up laughing off such concepts as mere salestalk inducements.  Only a few collectors had the gumption then to connect pillowghosts &c. with ‘candle-dreaming’ (the legend that one’s last dream is eternal as betokened by the simple sight, within the dream, of a single lit candle).

I did not buy that pillow.  If I had, there may have been a proper story to tell.

(above written today and first published here)

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Just as a final aside, I think I had a lucky escape. That night, in my Budapest hotel, I did have a singular dream connected with the pillow I had nearly bought in that Krakow antique shop. Amid the craziness of dreams that many of you will recognise, that pillow somehow merged with the white-and-blue double bolster-pillow I told you about earlier – forming a discrete pillow that was not single or double, but somewhere between ... for two small people or one giant person? I saw it wriggling – thank goodness I hadn’t already laid my head on it – and noisily tearing first through its inner substance then through its outer starched texture were pincers or claws. In the dream, I jumped off the balcony of my hotel room.

The Last Balcony

Pillowghost

In The Post-War City

Intowards