THERE was this house in Hague in Region Three (Essequibo Islands-West Demerara) that became a legendary tale of the power of life after death. Most Guyanese in Region Four who grew up after the 1940s would know about the Hague haunted house. The home was said to be haunted because people would die suddenly inside of it. From the 1950s no one wanted to live inside the place so it was left abandoned until it was renovated in the 1990s to be the home of a Caribbean company. But even the new tenants did not want to live inside of it.

The haunted building at Hague was demolished. It is doubtful it would be rebuilt because the eerie tale behind it would never die. When I taught philosophy at UG, I took my students in the night for them to experience for themselves how the mind works and how the mind can be shaped by what the mind believes while shutting out reality.
The format was for the minibus that took us to Hague to stay a bit far from the house and each student would walk by himelf/herself into the house. The first student came back and was afraid. He said, “Mr. Kissoon something was wrong from the time I went onto the steps.” No other student volunteered so the trip was a waste of time. But to prove how a mind can be shaped, I told them I would go.

They all persuaded me not to. I waded into the darkness of the building where the weakened steps leading to the upper flat made the usual creepy noise. I looked out onto the Atlantic Ocean from one of the rooms that, no doubt, was the room in which the first person fell dead while gazing at the Atlantic, and it was much more pleasant than the wind piecing my face that I get from my home that faces the same ocean in Turkeyen on the East Coast of Demerara.
It was interesting to see the reaction I got from my students. They said the “jumbies” knew who were not afraid of them so they went out of sight when I went into the building. These students were dead serious in that explanation. They all believed that ghosts exist.

Ghosts exist in people’s minds and it is the mind that brings them into your presence. The “jumbies” were always present in the house because those who moved in after they heard the tales brought the specters into the house because the apparitions were living inside their imaginations.
I dealt two weeks ago with how the mind creates false constructs when I looked at the political ambition of Mr. Glen Lall, the owner of Kaieteur News. My point was that when Lall enters politics with the birth of his political party later this year, he will be unmoved by the penetrating, relentless criticism of his faults. In his mind those faults do not exist and they are created by others to harm him.

This is the same methodology that I now apply to those people I refer to as The Usual Suspects (TUS) in relation to the letters they write every fortnight in the newspapers with 20 signatures attached.
Their subjects include the bizarre, the incredible, the unbelievable. Among their demands the past three years were/are – the rejection of the visit of Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo; a similar rejection of the visit of President Bolsonaro of Brazil; the immediate end to oil production; the dropping of the 20 murder charges against the Mahdia dormitory fire accused; the police must investigate who is threatening Red Thread, among others.

The list is too long to highlight but the question that tantalizes one is why TUS would demand things that no elected government would accept much less bow to. If one were to add the demands on the government the past three years by the Stabroek News then the government would simply become a rubber stamp.

The answer is in the mind of TUS. In their minds, these people feel the society wants them to make these demands, the people of Guyana support them, the society admires them and they themselves have implanted on the walls of their mind that they are a superior species with superior knowledge and they expect the government to listen to them. I think these people genuinely believe that the directions they want the government to go in are better pathways for the Guyanese people because they are a cut above the rest and they know what the Guyanese people want. Yes, they genuinely believe these things. These things though have no basis in reality. The mind does that to you. Your own mind can deceive you.