The drab uneventfulness of Canberra suburban life is an occasional theme of this column. Now to the already long list of Canberra's deprivations of excitements I add, prompted by Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi's Discover story "Why we [Americans] share stories of local ghosts", Canberra's unhappy ghostlessness.

Back to Canberra's too-respectable spectrelessness in a moment. First, though, I make the related point that while Canberrans' famously highly educated sophistication is mostly a fine thing (being displayed yet again, at this moment, by Canberrans' world-best vaccination rates and by Canberra anti-vaxxers being as scarce as hen's teeth) it does have a drab downside.

That downside is that Canberrans are dryly rational and sensible, making for a city in which magic, superstition and make-believe fall on stony ground and have no chance to flavour and colour city life.

To illustrate my thesis, I reminisce that in my decades of gathering and reporting Canberra news not a single Canberran ever contacted our newsroom to claim to have even seen a UFO, let alone to have been abducted and flown away on one.

Similarly, no Canberrans ever report seeing a vision of the Virgin (perhaps at Floriade, in the bathroom and plumbing section at Bunnings, or while playing golf at Royal Canberra), or to have seen and photographed a Lake Burley Griffin monster like the legendary beast that turns Scotland's otherwise unremarkable Loch Ness into a waterway of mystery.

Canberra journalists (who pine and itch for stories like these to report) have always felt badly let down by Canberrans - by their distressingly rational minds and lifestyles. A city without the weird and wonderful hardly feels like a city at all.

Back to my theme in a moment, but a letter to The Canberra Times has praised my columns (I think it was praise) for being "meandering", and so I must meander a little now so as to live up to expectations.

So I meander to say the mention above of Bunnings reminds me of recent days' news of so many Canberrans driving all the way to Goulburn to go to an open Bunnings - the ACT ones being shuttered and only click-and-collect.

Half of me (the pretentious, snobbish half) pretended to scoff at this behaviour, but the other half of me perfectly understood and empathised with these pilgrimages. How I look forward to resuming my own hauntings of Bunnings stores!

But how is one to explain Bunnings' strange allure? What is the strange magnetism Bunnings stores exert even on those of us who never lift a DIY finger (this columnist honestly doesn't know or care what an angle grinder is)?

Somehow, eerily, going to Bunnings feels less like shopping than an outing. So many of us feel almost supernaturally drawn to it. Bunnings' magnetism for me, now in my 70s, reminds me of the magnetism churches and circuses under the big top had for me when I was a child. We seem to sally forth to Bunnings not because we urgently need something, but because we look forward, once there, to perhaps seeing something we'd really like to buy, something we'd never previously given a thought to.

This is the spirit in which extreme book-lovers gambol along to second-hand bookshops, but doesn't really explain the drive that propels us to Bunnings' blokey world of planks, angle grinders, brushless hammer drills (what are they?), orbital sanders (eh?) and glue guns (wot?). In a city and society otherwise generally lacking in mystique, I find the paranormal attraction of Bunnings very welcome.

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But back to my opening theme, to this city's dry normality contrasted with the happy paranormality of American places blessed with community ghosts.

Ms Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi discusses the phenomenon in some absorbing detail, but of course the backdrop to it all is that imaginative Americans are far more open to the occult in all its forms than Australians are. A recent US YouGov poll found almost 45 per cent of Americans have their lives spiritually enriched by a belief in ghosts, and by the belief that ghosts haunt people and/or places. The same poll found Americans have strong beliefs in demons and vampires. What a buzz it would give to Canberra suburban life to live with the thought that while out walking the dog one should be alert to the risk, however slight, of meeting a vampire or demon. The riskless life is hardly worth living.

But the gold standard local paranormal presence would surely be the kind of "local ghost" discussed in Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi's piece. The community ghosts she reports seem to do little harm. They startle, yes, and get pulses and minds racing; but surely that's a good thing.

My sense is that local ghosts would improve, enhance and enrich the life of a suburb in the same ways in which they supernaturally enrich five of Shakespeare's greatest plays.

Shakespeare knew that his playgoers loved (rather as we today love the refreshing terror of a good horror movie) the chilling thrill of a good haunting.

Yes, now I think of it, rational life in a supernaturally barren Canberra suburb is like a production of Hamlet or of Macbeth, from which, for reasons of rational-intellectual correctness, the censors have removed the ghosts and their essential hair-raising, spine-chilling, pulse-quickening contributions.