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It is a well-known fact that the city of Dubrovnik has one of the best-preserved archives in Europe. The records are quite detailed. For instance, you could read about neighbors having a feud over some land, etc. These records go back several hundred years.
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From time to time, my family brings up an odd story concerning our next-door neighbor. Yes, our neighbor is a human being, not some ghost or a freak of nature. I will still not name names so as not to inconvenience anyone, though those reading this might recognize him, as his story is well known in certain circles of the city under the mount Srđ (the city of Dubrovnik).
I wouldn’t do justice to the story in the previous article if I were to disregard my own brush with the weirdness in that house. This occurred sometime toward the end of my junior year of high school. when my mother and I went to visit her parents...
After my great-grandmother’s funeral - in the early 60s - the family, except for my grandfather, went back home to bed. They all crammed into the space available: my mother and one uncle shared one bedroom, the other uncle and my grandmother the other. It was summertime, and the air was hot and humid; they left the windows and the doors to the front hall open, to get the air circulating. That particular area of the house was rather large, and the parquet floor squeaked beyond belief. In the middle of the front hall, there was a table. It was actually a 200-year old table with matching chairs. Because it was an antique, my grandmother wouldn’t let anyone near it, afraid that we would damage it.
My grandparents lived in a house built on hallowed ground. The cemetery that was once located there was re-dug and removed before the present structure was built. It’s beyond my comprehension why someone would consider building a house over an ancient cemetery, disturbing the peace of those buried long ago. Regardless of whether or not you believe in ghosts, some things are right and some things are not right. In my opinion, that simply was not the right to do. But, this building went up in the aftermath of WWII, a time of such great turmoil that all sorts of unprecedented things happened. At any rate, the fairly large house built on that land contained seven or eight spacious apartments. In one of them lived my maternal grandparents.
The unbearable pain she felt up to that point started to subside. But this happened in quite an unusual manner. Initially feeling as if her head was a bottle, topsy-turvy and filled with nothing but pain, she started to feel as if someone has uncorked that bottle and the pain simply started to pour down and dissipate slowly downwards. She felt this sensation throughout her entire body. The absence of pain felt so great that she kept relaxing further and further. She finally relaxed so much that she ended up falling asleep! The acupuncturist, seeing her doze off, let her be for a few minutes. That was 25 years ago and, AMAZINGLY, from that day on, she never suffered from another migraine headache.
Most of us accept certain healing methods such as chiropractic therapy, acupuncture, bioenergy seance, hypnotherapy, herbalism, using of crystals, etc. as (leading) alternative medical practices. Some of these methods make sense and yield results. Others are in the same realm as witchcraft and other shady practices. Naturally, one is warned to be cautious and question anything that runs counter to one’s common sense.
When judging the effectiveness of some of these methods, we should consider the impact of the placebo effect - an accepted but not yet fully explained mystery, similar to, say, the mystery of dreams. The notion of a placebo has frequently been used to discredit the results of legitimate research. Mainstream scientific thought is unforgiving and, in this case, crude in its blindness. It is obvious (and unfortunate!) that scientists seeking to expand scientific knowledge, often fail to reach beyond the boundaries of what is considered ‘scientifically, or politically correct’. To be fair, I refer only to those scientific structures that create the theoretical molds that hold all the information we know about us and everything that surrounds us-the structures that cool and stabilize the information poured into those molds-the structures that permit unquestioned one-sided presentation of so-called “knowledge” in public forums, scientific conferences, schools, etc. It is possible to challenge or even overturn the accepted theories, but only within the scope of these limiting structures.
When my aunt was little her friends’ father had died. During his life, the deceased neighbor was known as a nice, good-natured, good-humored family man. When the tragedy struck, the unfortunate children came over to spend the night. My grandmother made the bed, lined up the little kids like sardines and, soon after, they were asleep. Sometime during the night, my aunt awoke. To her horror, she saw the deceased sitting on the edge of the bed, right next to her feet.
When my father was a baby, like the babies do, he enjoyed sleeping in his crib. One day, my grandmother was tending to her bed and also to his crib. Immediately after, she went on to change my father’s dippers. While she was in the midst of this task, her ring slipped off her finger. Not only that she felt the ring slide off, she clearly saw it come off. She can’t recall hearing even the faintest of thuds, but this may have been due to the fact that the ring was light or that it had landed on the bed rather than on the parquet floor. Be that as it may, the ring was never found.
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 Nino Martinović[email protected] Archives
August 2008
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