A kind of journey.

Being on a train was something John Thurlow could get on board with, so to speak. As a native of Ontario, back home he didn’t catch the train much. In Canada, if you wanted to get the train somewhere, you usually had to drive a good few hundred miles to the nearest station, and even then you’d be lucky to find one that’d take you where you want to go. But here in the UK, pretty much everywhere had a railway station. Even some of the tiny little hamlets that had no business calling themselves a town. You could spend days hopping from one train to another, and that’s what John Thurlow did. He didn’t get why British people complained about it so much.

He liked being back here. After he and his wife separated some years ago, John Thurlow had been in something of a funk. You might even say he had become depressed, not that he liked to dwell on such things. John Thurlow’s grown-up children had long-since left home and started their own families and had busy lives. Like many middle-aged men he’d let friendships slide, wrongly believing they’d always be there, and that the security of his work and family was all he needed. Now he’d belatedly realised friendships needed tending, like a garden, otherwise they’d get overrun by weeds and when you finally picked up your trowel to plant something there’d be nothing much left. John Thurlow didn’t want to get into that situation again.

It was on online community that first got John Thurlow out of his funk. He’d been a prison officer for 30 years, and was two years away from retirement. He looked forward to this with mixed emotions. John Thurlow was well-respected at work. He was what you’d call a burly man. Tall, well-built, reasonably fit for his age, silver-haired, with a thick, bristly moustache in the old style, he was a serious-looking fellow. He didn’t smile much, but that didn’t mean he was never amused. He just had that kind of face. When a joke really tickled him it would manifest as a slight twinkle in his eye, a small smirk concealed beneath his bushy moustache. He wasn’t a laugh-out-loud kind of guy.

The prisoners liked John Thurlow because he commanded respect. He wasn’t the sort to bully anyone, nor did he try to be all pally with the prisoners, not like some of the youngsters that come in these days. Or else they’re all wide-eyed and timid, too afraid to instil some discipline when it was needed. Those sorts didn’t last long. He was well-regarded by his colleagues too, his decades of experience lending a calming presence that helped diffuse any tense situation. John Thurlow didn’t mind his job, although he was always glad to head home at the end of the day. What really interested him was the psychology of it all. He’d taken some Open University courses a while back when he’d seen the same offenders coming through the prison system again and again. He’d got pretty curious about what drove people to reoffend.

It was this curiosity that eventually led him to the paranormal community. He’d always been a little intrigued by the occult. He and his wife used to jokingly read their horoscopes in the paper over breakfast, neither of them actually believing them, of course. But watching shows like Most Haunted made his hair stand on end. He liked the idea that their were some mysteries just beyond our grasp, waiting to be unravelled. So when he came across a Facebook group that organised visits to so-called haunted houses, he thought “Why not?” Now he’d been visiting sites with paranormal goings on for years, even organising a few himself. He loved researching the history of the places, reading about their legends and past unexplained sightings. That’s what brought him to the UK. There was so much history here, so many places to visit. He’d arranged to meet up with a few folks from the paranormal community in Derby, after spending a few days visiting extended family down south, hence the train journey.

John Thurlow really couldn’t be happier to be on a train travelling through the beautiful English countryside. Looking out the window at the cloudless blue sky, he couldn’t resist sighing aloud “What a beautiful day!” The young woman furiously typing on her laptop beside him looked up reflexively. (Well, he supposed she wasn’t that young, but everyone looked young to him these days.) “Oh!”, she exclaimed delightedly as a flash of bright purple caught her eye. “A lavender field!” A small smile escaped John Thurlow at that. It really was far too lovely a day to waste on work, and he was pleased to have distracted this woman’s attention for a moment. She looked like she was only too happy to be distracted too. They got to chatting a little bit. “So what brings you to the UK?”, she asked, detecting his Canadian accent and obvious enthusiasm for British life that, somehow, the British people he met never seemed to share. “Well...”, he paused, not knowing quite how to put it. In his experience, there were two kinds of people when it came to his talking about his paranormal investigations: the ones who couldn’t wait to confess their own experiences with the occult, and the ones who looked like they couldn’t wait to get away from you. It was why John Thurlow rarely brought up his hobby at family gatherings. He was a little afraid of being carted off far too early to the nearest nursing home. From this woman’s slightly raised eyebrows, he suspected she might be in the latter camp.

“To tell you the truth,” she responded cautiously, after he explained the reason for his journey. (John Thurlow wasn’t one for evasiveness.) “I’m a bit of a skeptic”. John Thurlow took a breath before answering. “To tell you the truth,” he confessed, “I am too”. It was something he’d never really admitted to his friends in the paranormal community. “What I really love,” he continued, “is talking to people. Hearing their stories. What they’ve seen, or what they think they’ve seen. Oftentimes there’s some kind of explanation for why they’ve seen or heard a certain thing. People are suggestible, you know?” The woman nodded. “In fact,” he went on, “in the roughly hundreds of paranormal cases I’ve investigated, there’s only ever been two I couldn’t explain. Mostly when people hear weird sounds in an old house, it’s something wrong with the plumbing. Or sometimes there’s some deeper psychological cause that you learn just by talking to people, finding out about their history. A lot of women who’ve suffered traumatic childhoods, domestic abuse, that kind of thing, have the propensity to believe in that kind of stuff. It’s an outlet I guess. Seeking some kind of explanation for a world that’s treated them really badly.”

“Wow, really?” the woman said, eyes wide. He could tell she’d never thought about it that way. He supposed few people had. Being a little kinder and more understanding to people who appeared to believe some pretty crazy stuff was probably a good idea, in his view.

“What about the other two cases?”, the woman asked after a moment. “The ones that couldn’t be explained?” John Thurlow’s eyes twinkled. “Well, life wouldn’t be half the fun if everything could be explained, now would it?” he remarked. “I’m quite happy to let some mysteries go unsolved.” The woman grinned.

“Well, this is my stop”, said John Thurlow, standing up to collect his luggage. “You travel safe now.”

“You too,” replied the woman. “Have a wonderful adventure!” John Thurlow smiled to himself. He certainly would.