You're a psychic ghost.

I am a psychic. I have some amazing gifts. I can see the past. I can see the future. I can communicate with spirits from the other side. I can even read minds.<br><br>The thing is, I am a spirit myself. It took me a while to figure it out, but I've got an awful lot of evidence, and I'm sure of it.<br><br>Let me explain. I've been dead for as long as I can remember. I don't know how long I've been dead, but I'm pretty sure it's longer than a couple of years. I have almost no memories from my life, besides short, jumbled snippets. It's pretty clear to me that that's a good thing, even if I do find myself pining for my old life on occasion.<br><br>I'm not sure how I died, or how long ago I died, or where I was buried. But I'm sure that I'm a ghost. Now, I know what you're thinking: "Why would you think that you're a ghost?" Well, the answer is simple. I've seen other spirits, spirits I know for a fact are dead, who all accept me as one of their own. I've tried to read the minds of the living, and I can't. And I've caught glimpse of myself in several mirrors, and I don't have a reflection.<br><br>The thing is, I've never actually seen myself. How do I know what I look like? Well, that's the big thing that proves beyond all doubt that I'm a ghost: I can see myself when I close my eyes.<br><br>This took me years to figure out, and years more to hone to the point where I can do it at will. Whenever I close my eyes, I can see myself, as clear as day. It's not even just a picture. I can look around, examine myself from different angles. The first time I discovered I could do this, I spent nearly a quarter of an hour just looking at myself.<br><br>I'm not a rotting corpse, or even a skeleton. I'm an intact body. It's not even particularly pale, with the exception of my face. It's as though my heart stopped beating in my chest while I was still on my feet. I've tried examining my face for any wounds, but I can't see any on my front. I've tried looking somehow, but every time I try to look at my back, I feel a sharp pain in my chest.<br><br>I've figured out another way to bend the rules of my sight. I've found that I can only see things that I can remember seeing before. This is what let me see the past and the future. One day, I remembered my old bedroom. I was lying in bed. I had laid in that bed many, many times, and I had always paid close attention to what was on the walls. I had stared at those walls for hours on end.<br><br>Well, I looked hard at the walls of my childhood bedroom, and I saw something that I did not remember. Two pictures. I had always remembered a poster tacked to my wall, and a sketch tacked on the adjacent wall. But I had never seen a picture of a man in a long, black coat. Or a painting of a large, gothic house.<br><br>I looked at them as hard as I could. When I opened my eyes, I looked at a poster of a man in a long, black coat I had on the wall, and I saw that same coat. I looked at a painting I had, and I saw a large gothic house.<br><br>I've done this on several occasions. I look at something in my memory hard enough, and I see it when I open my eyes. It's great for reading minds. I just think back to seeing my own face in a mirror, and I can see what that person is thinking by the expression on their face.<br><br>But it doesn't work without a memory. I could barely see my bedroom, because I had very few memories of it. But I can see my face very clearly, because I've spent hours staring at it. I've tried using my memories as "shortcuts" of sorts, but that only works when I'm looking at things I remember very clearly. I've tried looking at my back by looking at my front, but I can't see anything. I've tried using my memories of my bedroom and the room I'm in to think of what's in the next room, but I get nothing.<br><br>I've even used this trick to see through walls. Well, one wall, really. I saw a lot of walls when I was alive. And I remember one wall in particular, one that I happened to be very close to when I first figured out my trick. I can't see very far through the wall, but I can get a bit of a view of the next room.<br><br>I'm writing this in the house of an old man. He's a client, and he's paying me a good deal of money to investigate a haunting. Well, he's not paying *me*, really. He's paying the Spiritualist Association. But they pay me, and the more I get paid, the bigger my "report" for them will be. I guess I'm kind of a double agent. I'm giving them some information, but I'm keeping most of it for myself. I've got a lot of information on hauntings, and I'm trying to sever my ties with the Association and go out on my own.<br><br>I'm laying in a twin-sized bed, in the bedroom they've given me. I'm under the blankets, but it's far more than a nap I need. It's a good thing I don't need sleep, because there's no way I could sleep right now. The house is alive. There are so many spirits in here, I could talk to them all day. And I have, for the most part. The pink lady, the little girl, the man in the attic.<br><br>I've spent a fair amount of time talking to the pink lady. Her name is Sylvia, and she's a ghost herself, just like me. She's also a psychic, and she can manipulate the minds of the living. She's the one who's been haunting the house. She's been making the little girl scream, and making the old man hallucinate. She's been playing tricks on the other psychics they've hired to look at the house.<br><br>Sylvia is what they call a residual. She repeats the same actions over and over again, every day. She doesn't interact with anyone outside of herself, and she barely even registers other people's presence. I'm a little different, in that I can interact with other people, but not with the living. Both of us are fully aware that we're dead.<br><br>That's why Sylvia has been trying to contact the Association, and through them, other psychics. She's trying to get someone to figure out why she's a ghost. I'm helping, but it's difficult. I've been here for barely two days, and I can't expect to solve all of her problems in that timeframe. But I've made a fair amount of headway. I'm able to communicate with her because we're both spirits and psychics. I'm psychic enough to see through walls, and find evidence of how she died. I'm also clever enough to piece all of the evidence together.<br><br>I've figured out a great deal, and I've already solved some of her problems. I've figured out who she is. She was one of the daughters of whoever owned this house a couple hundred years ago. She lived in the room where I am now, and she died in it. Sometime after that, the house was abandoned for a time. Eventually, it was lived in again, but it was heavily renovated first. Her room was split in two, and her bed was moved. The new owners didn't know that the house was haunted, and I'm sure they would have moved the bed back if they had.<br><br>This was part of Sylvia's problem. I still haven't figured out the cause of death, but I know that she was standing in front of her bed when she died. So when the owners moved her bed, they moved the location of her death. And that prevented her from moving on. As long as she was prevented from reliving her death, she would have to continue reliving her life.<br><br>I moved the bed back to where it was when she was alive, and she immediately beganreliving her death. I knew this because I could see her face when I looked at where her bed used to be. I could see her face, contorted in pain. And I could see a man, dressed in a long black coat, standing behind her.<br><br>I've been looking for that coat, and I've finally found it. It was hanging in a closet on the other side of the wall where I am. I could see it when I closed my eyes and looked at the wall. I'm going to go get it now. Sylvia's murder is about to be solved.<br><br>I'll be back later.