Do you believe in ghosts? This is one of the fundamental questions you were faced with as a child. Well we all know growing up in Jamaica that duppys was one of the most fundamental things that faced us. Especially while growing up in the rural areas that usually had lots of miles between street lights. This is probably one of the reasons that Jamaicans are such fast runners because as a child walking at night actually meant sprinting between street lights.

Now what happened one time was that we had to go on the back roads and this meant passing a cemetery. A Jamaican cemetery is a different case not just because it’s more open and it’s usually in a dark place where there are no houses or lights close by. So we set out and we walked through the back roads coming from primary school after a nice evening of playing cricket which was exceptionally fun except that it made us stay late.

Being that this was Jamaica you had to go home by foot only and being this late it was good we had a group of about 4 people together and this motivated us to go the back route. Otherwise we would have had to run on the main roads. I had never seen a duppy before but my friend shane had said he saw them multiple times. I even had my friend junior say he saw a rolling calf once. Like who even know what that is? I had never seen that before and to this day I still don’t know what it is.

When we were passing the cemetery being the open nature (no gates, no walls) we could see the mass graves and the bushes, and being that there were NO and I mean absolutely NO streetlights we were a bit scared. It was one of the few times you’d see boys running away scared from something because they thought they saw a ghost. Man I tell you… those were good times.