The Haunted Hot Water Bottle

"Perhaps it’s time to sleep without having danger right next to me in bed."

Thank you for reading Life after Trauma. This edition is about childhood sexual violence and its long shadow. If you don’t feel like reading about that today, please feel free to skip it!

I wrote this piece, The Haunted Hot Water Bottle, in January 2022 and it finally found its audience 16 months later in May 2023. It was published in the fourth edition of Púca magazine and I was delighted to read at the launch event in Dublin. Púca is the Irish word for ghosts or spirits, so this piece felt like a natural fit.

Prior to publication, this piece was rejected many, many times. As I’ve said before, half of the work of writing is persistence. For the writers among you, I hope you’ll keep going. Many pieces you love likely followed a similar trajectory - rejected everywhere until someone said yes. All you need is one person to say yes.

The Haunted Hot Water Bottle

Every evening, my mother set a big silver kettle on the range to warm. With it, she filled a hot water bottle for each child’s bed. The house I grew up in was cold, poorly insulated. In some rooms, you could hear the wind whistling through the cracks in the building’s structure. Many mornings, I woke up and saw the cloud of my exhalation hanging in the air.  One night, she wasn’t home to fill the bottles. I was small, less than ten. I stood next to the range and positioned the heavy kettle toward the edge so I could tip it over and fill the bottle. It was too heavy for me to lift. There were adults in the kitchen watching. One man, a friend of the family, stood and filled the bottle for me. I imagine he was horrified by the sight of a small child trying to lift a steaming kettle.

My littlest sister is very creative. Her mind grabs disparate ideas and snaps them together into sharp, funny stories. When she was young, she had a winning streak in her school's Write A Book contest. Every student in her class wrote and illustrated a book. The ‘books’ - usually about 10 A4 pages held together with a staple - were sent to a partner school where another class read and critiqued the stories. Collectively, they agreed on a winner. My sister came first several years in a row. One year, she had to accept second place because a classmate had written a story which climaxed with a kiss between two boys. The teachers wilted with shame.  Queer love was a taboo topic in rural Ireland. But the children didn’t know that. They were thrilled by the story and awarded it the first place ribbon. Another year, my sister wrote a horror story about a haunted hot water bottle. The hot water bottle contained a spirit that dwelled in the water and came out to do its mischief while its unsuspecting owner slept soundly beside it. 

Unknowingly, my sister tapped into a long history of water spirits from Celtic folklore. The each-uisge is a supernatural water horse found in the Scottish Highlands. In its human form it appears as a handsome man, recognisable as a mythological creature only by the sand in his hair. The each-uisge had a particular desire for women, feigning love to entrap them. With a potential victim in his grasp, the each-uisge’s skin becomes adhesive. He drags the woman’s body to the deepest part of the water before tearing apart and devouring her body. 

A few years ago, a friend came to stay and inadvertently brought bed bugs. 

I called an exterminator. I piled my belongings into black plastic bags. I cleaned incessantly. I washed every shred of fabric with hot water. I googled. I learned that bed bugs can crawl out the nozzle of the hoover at night and begin their lives of torment anew. I sourced a specially made mattress protector with a thin, tight zip they couldn’t pass through. The exterminators arrived a few days later and puffed toxic clouds of gas in every room. They instructed me to sleep on the mattress, my warm flesh enticing the bed bugs out of hiding to walk on the poison. I thought of these microscopic insects, marching toward their dinner like happy ants. Their dinner was my flesh. I set myself as prey. I lay there, trying to force myself to sleep in a poisonous place. This was familiar to me. My flesh as prey, lying in a bed waiting to be consumed. As a child, a man preyed my body - preyed upon me - while I slept in my bed. He pretended it was nothing. He made sure I knew I was nothing. 

This week, my hot water bottle died. It was nothing dramatic - no serious burns, no frantically spraying water. I was sitting on the couch, wrapped in blankets and felt damp under my seat. I examined its rubber body and found nothing wrong. But when I set it on a tea towel for an hour, I returned to find a shallow puddle. The passage of time made clear that a rupture had taken place, a rupture which could not be repaired. 

Hot water bottles are dangerous. Not because they contain supernatural creatures, but because their boiling water can burn the skin. You’re not supposed to use boiling water, though I always did. You are not supposed to sleep alongside one either. They’re designed to heat the bed before you get in, not to warm you through the night. Manufacturers advise that you replace it every 2 years. My hot water bottle was likely more than 20 years old. I took it from the home I grew up in, a few years after my mother died. It comforted me to have the hot water bottle that kept her warm next to me. As a child, the house was cold because we were poor. What money we had my mother saved in the vain hope that she might one day be free. That never happened, she died in the trap set for her. 

As an adult, I fight with myself about turning the heating on. I can’t bear to think of money floating out the door for something as fanciful as temporarily warmed air. Instead, I sit at my desk wearing many layers. I work with a hot water bottle in my lap and a blanket around my shoulders. Over the years, I have tried alternatives to the traditional hot water bottle. I bought an electric version which you plug in to heat. Within a few months, it started leaking its chemical innards. I tried a bag of wheat, designed to be warmed in the microwave. It smells like fresh bread but begins to cool almost immediately. In truth, I enjoy the daily punctuation of rising from my desk every few hours to boil the kettle, refill my hot water bottle and make fresh tea. But perhaps it’s time to let it go. Perhaps it’s time to sleep without having danger right next to me in bed.

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💬 In the comments, I’d love to hear your reflections on childhood rituals and how they have shaped the way you think about your past.