This is a continuation of the story
of feeling my grandmother come to me prior to her 100th birthday
this year. That was a powerful moment, and you can re-read about it HERE.
After writing about the feelings gained from the moment of connection to my Gram, this brings me back to real life. Here, I remain willing to believe in an afterlife (religious or ghostly), cryptids, aliens, and evil forces, but I need reason to believe, and I don't believe in every situation down the pike. Even those in my own house, which I will describe experiences of, I need objective or empirical proof. Just like Fox Muldur on the X-Files (which was a great show until the last 2 seasons of its resurrection, though truth be told, I didn’t watch the last season before its death), I am also skeptical because that's what any research requires.
As I wrote in the story of my Gram, I felt a strong feeling she was communicating with me to see her to talk about the family and me. I feel, just like my wife said, that her Alzheimer’s is connecting her to protect me in my days of Parkinson’s.
That said, I can’t deny that fluctuating dopamine levels in a Parkinson’s person create hallucinations as well as our crazy dreams, which I write about both in non-fiction and fiction. Like Jodie Foster in Contact, I must concede this.
If you'd like to read a great, really accessible article on experiences with this, see Perky Parkie at this link..
However, something in me wants to believe in the same way that I want to believe that the ghost torching I filmed at Chadd’s Ford was also real (though my students, even the paranormal believers, have given me reason to be skeptical).
So what’s the deal? What is real and true? I’d like to say I know my truth, but I’m not sure. I know that later in my house’s history, we had more weird things come back after we thought we had fixed them (more about the earlier things later). My wife experienced these, and we feel that it could have been her mom. However, on her moment's command, we also brought a friend’s husband at the time in so that he could sage the place. It worked since we’ve had nothing since then. We were thankful, and they got dinner for their trouble.
But what of my other experiences?
On November 5, 2009, my Heather
and I were given the keys to our new house. While we wouldn’t sign the papers
for it until the following Tuesday, we were able to start moving stuff in on
that day. That day, we transferred our things into the house in an attempt to
make the house our own. However, it wasn’t until the following weekend that we
were able to sleep in the bed overnight. That night, Friday the 13th,
we went to bed knowing that paying $150,000 plus interest would make the house
our own – or so we thought. Instead, the blind on the bedroom window right
beside us flew up into the air at 2am.
We both
woke up startled; however, we went back to bed.
The next day,
Heather looked at the blind and found nothing wrong with it, but she threw it
away all the same.
If it was
broken, we didn’t need a scare like this again.
If it was
ghosts, then we just needed to play dumb to whatever he or she or they were
trying to do to our stay in this house on Park Avenue.
A few
months later, Heather had been redoing large sections of the house. I had been
working a lot, so this was her project to keep busy. For those who don’t know, renovation
is something that is said to stir up the memories of a house. By this time, she
had reworked 1 bathroom, the room that became my office, and the laundry room
downstairs. We were also in the process of tearing down the wallpaper in the
dining room and the hallway up through to the second floor as well as the wrap
around hallway that exists in the upstairs. Unlike actual home repairs that
take skill, we found that I was pretty OK at tearing down wallpaper, so that
became my job.
Let me just
say, it was some God awful wallpaper.
Together, we had also begun to tear
out the wallpaper in the upstairs bedroom as well, so it’s clear that we
definitely were in a major house renovation mode. Maybe it was the painting and the fumes (another scientific conclusion),
but one night in early February, I woke up half awake / half asleep and thought
I saw ghost cats on her pillow. When I told Heather about it at our early
Valentine’s Day hibachi dinner a few nights later, she had confessed that she
thought she saw someone standing over on the same night.
There was
now a very real fear that something was going on in the house. We commenced to
praying for our safety and a peaceful night’s sleep each night. Maybe this
finding God in the midst of conflict seems like the last refuge of a scoundrel
(as Lisa Simpson would say), but there was something unsettling in whatever was
going on. As a result, we prayed for our happy lives from that moment forward.
Whether it started out of desperation or true faith, we have never stopped
praying since we began this act over 2 years ago, so it’s now a ritual and an
important part of our lives in that it has brought us to be in a place that is
more spiritual and right with the universe.
That said,
we weren’t going to chance that it was just paint fumes affecting us. We were
completely acknowledging the reality that this could be a very real ghost that
was choosing to live with us. That said, we did try to ventilate the house a
little better, even though it was winter, to ensure no fumes might hurt us.
It’s
important to go scientific when possible.
Nevertheless,
we also responded by writing a Bible
verse to bless this house on one of the walls we were about to paint over.
While we heard creaking noises in the house since then, it is an old house, it
was a long time before we had any incidents.
From my
time as a kid, I have always been interested in certain science fiction,
monster, and hero movies. For this, it’s no surprise that I traverse the line
of believing in ghosts to being skeptical of what I see. In my top 5 movies, I
would place Carl Sagan’s Contact in
the same way I would declare his Demon
Haunted World and its “Baloney Detection Kit” one of my favorite works of
literature, which I excerpt in part here (his work is in red).
My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still
miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence,
their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are—really and
truly—still in existence somewhere. I wouldn’t ask very much, just five or ten
minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them up
on the latest news, to remind them that I love them. There’s a part of me—no
matter how childish it sounds—that wonders how they are. “Is everything all
right?” I want to ask. The last words I found myself saying to my father, at
the moment of his death, were “Take care.” Sometimes I dream that I’m talking
to my parents, and suddenly—still immersed in the dreamwork—I’m seized by the
overpowering realization that they didn’t really die, that it’s all been some
kind of horrible mistake. Why, here they are, alive and well, my father making
wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising me to wear a muffler because the
weather is chilly. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of
mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to
believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether
there’s any sober evidence for it. So I don’t guffaw at the woman who visits
her husband’s grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the
anniversary of his death. It’s not hard to understand. And if I have
difficulties with the ontological status of who she’s talking to, that’s all
right. That’s not what this is about. This is about humans being human. More
than a third of American adults believe that on some level they’ve made contact
with the dead. The number seems to have jumped by 15 percent between and 1988.
A quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation. But that doesn’t mean I’d be
willing to accept the pretensions of a “medium,” who claims to channel the
spirits of the dear departed, when I’m aware the practice is rife with fraud. I
know how much I want to believe that my parents have just abandoned the husks
of their bodies, like insects or snakes molting, and gone somewhere else. I
understand that those very feelings might make me easy prey even for an
unclever con, or for normal people unfamiliar with their unconscious minds, or
for those suffering from a dissociative psychiatric disorder. Reluctantly, I
rouse some reserves of skepticism. How is it, I ask myself, that channelers
never give us verifiable information otherwise unavailable? Why does Alexander
the Great never tell us about the exact location of his tomb, Fermat about his
Last Theorem, John Wilkes Booth about the Lincoln assassination conspiracy,
Hermann Goring about the Reichstag fire? Why don’t Sophocles, Democritus, and
Aristarchus dictate their lost books? Don’t they wish future generations to
have access to their masterpieces? If some good evidence for life after death
were announced, I’d be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real
scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien
abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in
the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than
the fantasy. The fundamental premise of “channeling,” spiritualism, and other
forms of necromancy is that when we die we don’t. Not exactly. Some thinking,
feeling, and remembering part of us continues. That whatever-it-is—a soul or
spirit, neither matter nor energy, but something else—can, we are told,
re-enter the bodies of human and other beings in the future, and so death loses
much of its sting. What’s more, we have an opportunity, if the spiritualist or
channeling contentions are true, to make contact with loved ones who have died.
J. Z. Knight of the State of Washington claims to be in touch with a
35,000-year-old somebody called “Ramtha.” He speaks English very well, using
Knight’s tongue, lips and vocal chords, producing what sounds to me to be an accent
from the Indian Raj. Since most people know how to talk, and many—from children
to professional actors—have a repertoire of voices at their command, the
simplest hypothesis is that Ms. Knight makes “Ramtha” speak all by herself, and
that she has no contact with disembodied entities from the Pleistocene Ice Age.
If there’s evidence to the contrary, I’d love to hear it. It would be
considerably more impressive if Ramtha could speak by himself, without the
assistance of Ms. Knight’s mouth. Failing that, how might we test the claim?
(The actress Shirley MacLaine attests that Ramtha was her brother in Atlantis,
but that’s another story.) Suppose Ramtha were available for questioning. Could
we verify whether he is who he says he is? How does he know that he lived
35,000 years ago, even approximately? What calendar does he employ? Who is
keeping track of the intervening millennia? Thirty-five thousand plus or minus
what? What were things like 35,000 years ago? Either Ramtha really is 35,000
years old, in which case we discover something about that period, or he’s a
phony and he’ll (or rather she’ll) slip up. Where did Ramtha live? (I know he
speaks English with an Indian accent, but where 35,000 years ago did they do
that?) What was the climate? What did Ramtha eat? (Archaeologists know
something about what people ate back then.) What were the indigenous languages,
and social structure? Who else did Ramtha live with—wife, wives, children,
grandchildren? What was the life cycle, the infant mortality rate, the life
expectancy? Did they have birth control? What clothes did they wear? How were
the clothes manufactured? What were the most dangerous predators? Hunting and
fishing implements and strategies? Weapons? Endemic sexism? Xenophobia and
ethnocentrism? And if Ramtha came from the “high civilization” of Atlantis,
where are the linguistic, technological, historical and other details? What was
their writing like? Tell us. Instead, all we are offered are banal homilies.
I love the archaeological search
for treasure of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I also am enthralled with the aliens of Close
Encounters of the Third Kind and Independence
Day. Weird movies like Altered States
and Jacob’s Ladder are fantastic.
I grew up a Star Wars kid (so I never
felt anything for Star Trek). I
watched Creature Double Feature at my
Gram’s house. I moved on to the action movies of the 1980s, and experienced
lots of exciting movies, eschewing the bloody gore porn for movies like Signs,
Avatar, and The Mummy (the one without Tom Cruise). Now, I live on Destination
America, Ancient Aliens, and the
James Wan Conjuring / Insidious
movies. In between, I also got my degree in teaching English, so I read many of
the classics. For this, I need character building. Here, origin movies like the
first Captain America, Wonder Woman, and
even Ant Man work well to give the
character life and purpose instead of just showing up. The first Rambo and Jaws also do this well.
Comic book action like the first
Avengers movie is a lot of fun. However, by the time we get to Civil War, it’s fighting for the hell of
it. Nobody can be shuffled off this mortal coil, so why bother? For a while,
Walking Dead has been the same, though they did send Carl to college after his
zombie bites. I’m not saying we need to go Game
of Thrones because the blood and nudity just overshadow what I’ve seen of
it (I quit at the beginning of Season 2), but characters just need to be
expendable in that battles against evil create suspense.
Writing with purpose is good, too,
and I hope that I have done that in my own books as the characters of Blackrock
Canyon take on a life of their own. For as much as I extol the virtue of the
serious and academic while I teach, I also like books, whose pages turn
quickly. I hope I’ve been able to mix them up well in my own works of fiction, which I share HERE (2 of which are out already in complete form, and one more is out today).
On a night
in early October of 2011, I woke up at 530a.m. to the sound of the ornaments on
our Halloween tree singing Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me.” I had no idea
what was going on. Had the motion sensor picked up an intruder? Was there a
ghost downstairs? I went downstairs to check on the situation and I found
nothing. There was no open door. There were no people in the house. I even went
to the basement, which is theoretically the scariest place in our abode.
This is a fact because our house
used to belong to an elderly woman named Hazel, who fell down in the basement
and died. Apparently, her body gave out from either a stroke or a heart attack,
and she was found a day or so later by her daughter. I can imagine how scary it
must have been for her since she too had Alzheimer’s. Life can be cruel like
that.
For a few years after that, the
house belonged to this daughter and her husband. They left the area after they
sold it to us, so we were never able to ask them about any incidents in the
house – not that we would have been able to broach the subject very easily, but
still. There really is no good way to ask how I met your ghost mother (probably a better story than a lot of the CBS show of almost the same name). Heather
learned this when her former sister in law drunkenly explained to her family
that she was now communicating spiritually with the mother in law that didn’t
think much of her. If the family hated her before, they really hated her now.
These things just don’t go over well, even in a family that believes in ghosts
due to many of the younger girls claiming to have had visions of things that
were not quite alive.
Because of the inability to broach
the subject with anyone knowledgeable and the decorum, tact, and general fear
of being thought that I’m not right in the head, I asked my neighbor Shirley
questions that confirmed things such as the presence of cats having lived here.
In this, I did it in such a way that we could have just been talking about
lingering pet odors instead of some evil harbingers of death.
In addition to this incident, it
seems that more pain has existed at this house. The man who Hazel was married
to lost a limb in an accident in the backyard. There isn’t much detail on that,
but it’s something that seemed to have happened. Apparently, something fell on
his leg and it got infected, so it was chopped off. It’s just something that
happened. Nevertheless, we have never seen a phantom limb floating through our
Siesta Zone or chanced upon a one-legged ghost telling us to get out of his
house.
I’m glad for that.
All in all, we never think about it
much except at times when things are going bump in the night. Those times have
a way of making us remember stories of limbs that succumb to gangrene and the
presence of deceased women.
Back on that October night in 2011 when Rockwell's lone hit permeated my house,
I was now forced to confront whether I had an intruder in the dining room or whether
something from the other side was in my house as the muffled sounds of an
eighties classic played out from my downstairs. I went into the basement, but
nothing was there. A bug might have scurried across the floor, but that’s not
something that would set off a motion detector. It takes loud thumps or
dropping things to do this. Thus, I went back to sleep, but it was interrupted
again with the sound of Michael Jackson’s voice keeping me from my sleep.
I
went downstairs again, and I did my same checks again, but this time, I took
out the battery from the lights and unplugged them as well. Now, I couldn’t get
back to sleep and the fire alarm was occasionally chirping.
Did I have something else to worry
about? Was my home going to be reduced to ashes? The answer was obviously “no.”
It just meant that the batteries needed changed and that the motion detector
downstairs was so sensitive that it was picking up on the sound of chirping
from up above them.
Nevertheless, for one morning only,
it felt like we had ghosts in our house all over again. And with that, I
breathed a sigh of relief that nothing was watching me.
I’d like to
think that our protection comes from Heather following the advice of the
goofballs from Paranormal State that
seem to think that by telling a ghost clearly and directly that the house
doesn’t belong to them anymore that there will be no issues with said ghosts. One time while she was alone in the house,
Heather declared to that which might have been or might not have been that the
house was ours. Whether this did the trick or not, I can’t say, but I can say
that the house has been quiet since then.
Personally,
I think sage helped more, but that’s just me. If something / someone ever comes
back, I hope it’s either able to be pushed away that easily or it shows itself
as her mother or my Gram / Nana, who I feel have tried to look after me.
Spookily
enough, in my life, there has always been some paranormal force out there
looking to interact with me.
I can
remember bumps in the night while I was living on Southgate Street in Bury St.
Edmunds. It was an old row home that definitely had about one hundred years of
history to it. Nevertheless, it was a time I never thought much about ghosts
despite the fact that I was creating ghosts in my life with all of the actions
I was doing stumbling around my early twenties and obsessing over my past. Even
with those bumps and thumps in the night, this dead world kingdom of England
only brings the ghosts that possess people in mental ways that they can’t leave
behind. For this reason, no exorcism can remove these demons. Instead, it takes
stabilizing life actions and / or little pills that go with therapeutic
expressions of understanding to make them go away or at least to diminish their
presence. Over time, I’ve left some of these behind, but still, I keep so many
more.
As a child, I was first introduced
to paranormal ghosts by my dad who told me that Reggie Rothenerger, a person
who once lived at the house that we were living in while we resided at 627 Vester
Place in Sinking Spring, fell off of my enclosed porch and died. His ghost was
living in the cooby hole in the attic, which was a crawl in closet on the side
of the house. For years, I never went in the cooby hole or close to the edge of
the enclosed porch. On one hand, it seemed to serve a need to keep me away from
falling off of the 2nd floor dusty and dirty porch. On the other
hand, it created paranoia for edges that I can’t shake to this day. In the same
respect, it kept me away from the cooby hole, which was right next to where my
dad kept his old Playboys stashed. I
only found this out because a childhood friend of mine found them while we were
playing in that room. He told me that I could come and look at them whenever I
wanted to, but whenever I did, I would always feel nervous about being in the
ghost room. Somehow, ghosts and naked women became engrained together in mind.
Both of them became elusive to approach and to touch for the longest time
despite the fact that it was a Holy Grail quest to see all of the things that
were associated with them.
The house
at Sinking Spring was an older house. It was also the place where all of my
childhood memories came together to make me who I was. Some of these were
humorous, some of these were typical in their childhood nature. Some of these
are held close to my chest in a place where I can keep them hidden and never
have to think about them again. These memories, like the memories of an odd
painted bird that was decorating the dining room wall, are the things that make
the house I lived in from 1977 to 1988 so unique and eerie at the same time.
No matter
which of these memories exist, be they the romanticized good or the painful
past, I still dream about them in all of their actuality. I say this as a fact
despite the fact that I haven’t seen the rooms since 1988 and despite the fact
that we don’t have pictures of much of the house.
Nevertheless, my mind is completely
certain to what is there. In the backyard, we once had a shed that was old and
decrepit. I always felt that it was haunted, too, but that seemed to come more
from the cover image of a mystery book that I had as a kid. Nevertheless, the
shed was completely removed to make way for a newer shed sometime after we got
there. I didn’t have anything to do with it, but I was glad that all of its
rotting gray boards and black roofing were gone.
Since we
left, much has changed. It’s no longer the same house as it was when I was a
kid. The concrete wall that we had between our yard and the neighboring yards
down below us fell and was replaced with timbers. The cherry tree that grew in
the yard was cut down because it was so big and messy with big black cherries
dropping everywhere in the midst of its growing season. Now, there is a chain
link fence between the front yard and the street. There is a deck that was
constructed in the back and a new tree now fills the yard. I’m sure there are
other changes internally, too, but I haven’t seen them.
Across the
street, we would see the Sinking Spring Elementary School. It used to be open
when we lived there, but now it’s an apartment complex. The playground was
where I learned to drive a bicycle. I got my first kiss on the left side of the
school when I was in high school. On the right side of the school, we would
play baseball. Behind the school, there was always a kickball game happening.
We also played dodge ball in a circle that was painted onto the back of the
schoolyard. In addition, there were basketball poles and a rim, but there was
never a net. It was a great place to be a kid, even if the train whistle blew
incessantly from the locomotives moving down the tracks that were behind it.
Eventually, like so many other things in life, we got used to it. It became the
place that we became who we were, for better or for worse, but now Old Sinking
Spring is no more. In fact, the traffic pattern in front of the school has been
reversed as well so that nothing exists as it did in that glorious time that
was the eighties.
I can still
feel the ghost that is Old Sinking Spring though. There’s no denying that it
was once there because its spectral force is still here. Sure, much of it was
vanishing to new housing developments that all looked the same. The fields we
played in were replaced with middle class houses and communities that weren’t
part of the world that we grew up in. This has nothing to do with
socio-economics; rather, it has to do with the fact that these people didn’t
live in row homes and the community existence that we did. Instead, they live
in comfortable cocoons that were even more subdivided by their not knowing the
neighbors that moved there to be in their comfortable cocoons. Community was
gone. Nobody knew anyone. There was just a house to live in.
There was
no home.
Eventually,
we too moved to a new neighborhood, and despite its age being much older than
the new housing developments, there was no community there either. It just was.
Nobody cared to know anyone. We just lived our lives in our homes and
backyards. Instead of being a part of something, we were just a part of
ourselves.
And so Sinking
Spring is now another ghost in my life.
Occasionally, I still walk through
it in dreams and deliver my papers like I did in my teenage years. I used to
dream of home as being in the house that we lived in. Prior to coming home to
this house in Ephrata, it’s been a long time since I felt that way.
With this
house we live in now, I feel like we have made it our own. We have established
our lives. Heather has used her art to make the rooms special. We have memories
here. Maybe someday after I move on, I’ll dream about its ghosts the way I do
that house on Montieth Avenue and the apartment in Mount Penn.
Some things
just stay with us and haunt us forever, for better or worse.
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