Ghosts – Part Two

midtownhomesm.jpg“What was the worst thing you’ve ever done? I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me…the most dreadful thing…” – Peter Straub Ghost Story

For a short time after college I worked as a night security officer. The city of Minneapolis had spent several hundred million dollars remodeling the old Sears complex, turning it into The Midtown Exchange. Part of that money included the hiring of several security officers. It was our job to monitor the facilities, which included patrolling the building and the grounds. As the new guy, I spent the first 3 nights tailing two other officers until I got familiar with the place. It was a BIG place:

“The Midtown Exchange contains 88 for-sale historic lofts, 219 rental units and 52 for-sale condos; the headquarters of Allina Hospitals and Clinics; a Hennepin County service center; the Sheraton® Midtown Minneapolis Hotel; and the Midtown Global Market, which will be the city’s largest public market. The development also includes a new transit facility.” –Midtown Exchange website

All of this (minus the hotel) was inside one massive building (like I said, BIG). We took turns patrolling the building and grounds; it took one hour for a person walking quickly to complete one patrol, and we did this twice each night. After a few weeks of this (getting turned around often, you can imagine), I became familiar to the point of boredom. The graveyard shift in security is a combination of near total freedom with the constant challenge to remain awake. But there were two places in the building where I never worried about falling asleep.

The first was in the basement. Our patrol required walking down a long corridor, ending in a set of stairs that led to an open furnace room. The corridor had a high ceiling but was well lit. This meant that from the time I stepped into the basement and rounded the corner, I could see the stairway opening at the far end, except the furnace room was dark. There was a light inside, but we kept it off. The walk to the stairs took three minutes, the inspection took about 30 seconds, and then I would turn off the light and head back. And every single time I walked back down that hallway, I felt like a little girl was watching me. Why a little girl, I could not say. But for three terrifying minutes I resisted the urge to look back, sometimes managing not to, often not. I never saw anybody, but there was always that feeling that I had just missed seeing something.

The second place was the $1,000,000 condo.  This was in the top of the tower (I believe it was the 29th floor). This was also part of our patrol, only because the building managers had sold the other three tower condos but hadn’t managed to sell this one. At first this was great. The condo had the best view of the city with 3-story windows looking out over both the downtown and the river. But then I felt it… something terrifyingly threatening. A feeling like something wanted very badly to take the nightstick off my belt and bash my head in. I would try and fight this feeling, taking out my nightstick and rushing through the condo, turning on all the lights and peeking into each room, but even with the lights on (and there weren’t enough lights) the feeling lingered. There was something wrong with the place, and I finally decided it wasn’t worth the bother. On my patrols, I got in and got the hell out of there, almost running from the elevator to the stairwell.

One night back at base I struck up a conversation with the other guards. It went something like this.

“You guys ever get freaked out on your patrols?”

“Oh hell yeah.” Everyone agreed.

“Where?” I asked.

The first person to answer my question was Dave (Dave of the bushy mustache, the sailor’s tongue, and the not-so-subtle hoops and hollers to passing ladies. I think Dave was in his sixties).

His answer scared the hell out of me.

“Well, there is the girl down in the basement,” he said. “She hangs out around the stairs; she’s scary, got killed down there, you know, but she mostly just likes to look. Then there’s the wandering guy. He gets around the building, but he’ll mostly just give you a jump. The guy you got to watch out for is up in the suite. The big suite, you know the one?” We all nodded. I was bug-eyed, trying not to smear my Hanes.

“Yeah, he’s one angry sonabitch. You don’t want to fuck around with that guy,” Dave finished.

I was stunned. I was petrified. I may have smeared my Hanes.

What was this? I don’t believe in ghosts – Dead people wandering around old Sears’ buildings, I just don’t buy it. But I had asked a vague question and gotten a terrifyingly precise answer. And I wasn’t the only one; I could see fear on the faces of my co-workers.

My response was something straight out of The Exorcist: I prayed my guts out. I walked down that hallway praying loudly, “Jesus is Lord here.” “Perfect love casts out fear.” “Greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world.” And lots of others like it (I’m not big on mantras, but I may have said a few “The power of Christ compels you!” as well). I sang songs of praise and thanked God for his protection. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” and so forth.

I did this for a week in the hallway and the furnace room. At first it didn’t help much. I felt a little better because I was making a lot of noise. Then something started to change. I felt fear being replaced with peace; I felt love and the presence of God in the furnace room, and when I walked down the hallway, I did not feel like somebody was watching me.

With this confidence I went up to the suite – and prayed and sang for another week until I was able to stay there for several minutes, in the dark, without feeling afraid. The view was better in peace.

What do I conclude from this?

I won’t presume to understand exactly. What was I experiencing? What were we experiencing? I won’t answer this because I don’t know. What I know is that prayer drove it off. Whatever it was, I felt fear not love, threat not peace. After two weeks of consistent prayer, I was able to sit on the suite’s stairs and pray prayers to God high above Minneapolis. There was a change. That place became those places:

altar stones set in worship, a tabernacle of praise, and a table in the midst of enemies.

 

 

 

Published in: on January 30, 2008 at 7:52 am  Comments (4)  
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Ghosts – Part One

“What was the worst thing you’ve ever done? I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me…the most dreadful thing…” – Peter Straub Ghost Story

Growing up in the hillbilly neighborhood of New Richmond, an out-of-the-way corner of Fennville, Michigan, I was familiar with a rich lore of haunted houses and ghost stories. We lived in what is now known as “The New Richmond House.” It is part of the historical district of New Richmond. They even have a website:  http://www.newrichmondhouse.com. Apparently someone spruced it up since we lived in it (for those who care to know, it used to be blue without a wraparound deck up top…and a lot more hillbilly…). Here’s a pic of its current state.

newrichmondhouse3.jpg 

It gives you some sense of the great old houses strewn about the area, waiting for a young child’s imagination to grab a hold of.  

There was, for example, the abandoned church next door to my friend’s house. It was a rundown Methodist building, unused long before I was born. Visiting my friend, we would play upstairs in the hallway. At the end of the hallway was a large window with no blinds that looked onto the church. We played in the hallway because it had the most space, but I never liked being close to the window; it looked right into the church and I always felt like someone was watching me.

One time I looked out the window and saw the back of a man wearing a brown trench coat with a wide brimmed hat. He was a ghost, and somehow I knew he was a ghost. I ran into my friend’s room. I didn’t play in the hallway anymore.

There was also the house on Haunted Hill. It was where we used to go sledding. It overlooked the Kalamazoo River, and though people sometimes rented it during the summer, it was mostly uninhabited. I never saw anyone in the house, unlike the man in the brown coat, but I had that same feeling of being watched. I never played around the house by myself, and even with friends around, the moment lost its frivolity. One of my friends swore he saw an old woman in the window once, but we mocked him till he recanted – We wanted a good place to sled, ghost or not. I suppose there were other places to sled, but none as good as that one.

And that was our problem: there were other places, but then there was that place. It was the best, but it was that place. That place was haunted. I never worried that the ghost woman was going to sneak out of her house and creep under my bed (for starters, most of my early life I had a waterbed with no room for her; and secondly, by the time I had a different bed with room underneath, it was already inhabited by other monsters, sorry ghost lady). When I was next to the church window, I was terrified. When I was sledding on the hill, terrified. When I was home, well, I had monsters in the closet to deal with, but no ghosts. The ghosts of the haunted places were very much out of sight out of mind.

I think this is a big part of the traditional ghost story, out of sight out of mind. Whether it is the old church, the old graveyard, the old house, or the old hospital (ad “old” infinitum), it is a place of fear, that spine-creeping reminder that something be amiss. Spinal radar, I call it. “Here there be monsters,” it says. And the “here” is important. It is that haunted place; that haunted room, house, graveyard, etc.

Ok, we get it! What’s the point?

If you will indulge me another story…

 

 

Published in: on January 29, 2008 at 4:51 am  Comments (1)  
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Nightmares

dream.jpg “A nightmare created to be the darkness, and the fear of darkness in every human heart.” -Dream (Neil Gaiman – quote and illustration from Sandman)

I rarely dream. I know experts tell me that I always dream, whether I remember it or not, but I say if I remember not, I dream not.

I believe dreams are temporary gateways into the deepest parts of our hearts. They are kaleidoscopes of what drives us, what inspires us, what attracts us, and what terrifies us.

Their power is in what they say, and if they speak not they are but hollow shells of our psyche, abstract concepts of memory and the explanation of sleep – not dreams. An unknown dream is no dream at all, but a forgotten dream…

That is something else entirely.

An unknown dream is like knowing freedom is possible, but not knowing where to find it. A forgotten dream is the itching bane of waking. It lingers in the mind, and we scratch it till we bleed. We scratch for meaning, we scratch for truth; we believe in the power of our dreams, especially the ones that got away. How sad it is we hunt for dreams, but rarely forget our nightmares.

By their very nature nightmares are remembered fears. They tear us from our sleep, sometimes with sweaty sheets, sometimes with yells and fearful noises, and sometimes – the worst times – we cannot be torn out, and we linger between the world of nightmare and the world of waking, and our wills are not strong enough to bring us back.

There are also waking nightmares. These are the fears that keep us from sleep, too afraid to place ourselves defenseless to our psyche.

I read recently of a child soldier that experienced both waking and sleeping nightmares:

“I had a tent to myself, which I never slept in because sleep never came to me. Sometimes late in the night, the quiet wind brought to my ears the humming of Lansana. It seemed as if the trees whispered the tunes of the song he had sung. I would listen for a bit, and then fire a few rounds into the night, driving the humming away.” -Ishmael Beah (A Long Way Gone)

The songs of a dead friend haunted him. His friend’s ghost whispered through tree branches, and was driven off by AK47 rounds. The shots split the night, tore him from the nightmare, and kept him sane…

until the next time the whispered trees brought it back, and then more rounds (and drugs, and movies, and killing) were needed to drive it away. He would not face his nightmare, but it would not stop haunting. The longer he fought it, the colder his heart became, and the more it took to tear himself out.

Time went by, and a decision he did not make forced him to confront his fears. He would face his ghosts, his fears, nolens volens.

Nightmares remind us of the fears we shun. They will hold our attention in dream or in waking, or anytime they find us weak and running, not willing to stand up against them. They are the darkness. Truth is the light. They will be faced, willingly or not; yet only willingly will they be truly faced, and restored to the place of Dreaming once again.

 

 

Published in: on January 25, 2008 at 5:09 am  Comments (2)  
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“Terrible and Blasphemous”

cthulhuresized.jpg(Illustration by John Coulhart)

“…Summoned back from those terrible, blasphemous spaces Outside to begin again the horror…” The Lurker at the Threshold H.P. Lovecraft

The foreboding words of Dr. Seneca Lapham, spoken to his skeptical protégé Winfield Phillips, are at the core of H.P. Lovecraft’s mythology, here detailed in The Lurker at the Threshold, part of his over-arching Cthulhu-mythos. Here are the malevolent Outsiders that lurk always on the edge of our reasoned understanding, waiting their opportunity to break restraints and take hold of a universe once theirs. 

I love it.

For all its morbidity, for all its stark gazing into nether regions, accursed depths, forbidden knowledge, and beings with such ridiculous names as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” (The Village, anyone?), I truly enjoy Lovecraft’s Lurker. 

I say my love of Lovecraft began with another of his works, “At the Mountains of Madness,” a novella in length, about a group of scientists journeying to the Antarctic, and the “terrible and blasphemous” discoveries that await them.

I say it began with “Mountains” … but I lie. I dislike this piece. I find its storytelling too detached, its focus on archeology and history too laborious, and its ability to just, well, scare me, too lacking. In my opinion, it is not a great horror story (possibly a re-read will change my mind?), which is interesting because even then I considered Lovecraft an authority on the genre. In the same book as “Mountains” is his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” And I cannot lavish praise enough on this work.

In 72 short pages, Lovecraft references nearly 275 separate novels and short stories, from Macbeth to The Man-Wolf , The Arabian Nights to the short story “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal.” The entire essay vibrates with Lovecraft’s incredible depth of knowledge. It is no wonder Stephen King says of him, “H.P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” (Though I wonder if King added that qualifier “classic” in hopes of edging him out towards the end of the millennium!) 

I finished “Supernatural Horror” with a clearer grasp of why I like the genre in the first place. Having always liked authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, it was refreshing to read Lovecraft’s explanation of how Poe “…knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove – good or evil, attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing-” 

Yes! I agreed. There is no glory in calling evil good, but great good in drawing someone into a world where the reader feels the sensations, motivations, and responses of the characters. Horror understands that it is not enough to explain; good stories must be felt. Even the words, “terrible and blasphemous,” are meant to strike a chord of disgust, of loathing, of irrepressible dread. 

I shudder with Ambrose. I revile with Phillips. I become Frankenstein cursing the product of my hands, and yet the monster himself, cursing his creator.

It is terrible and blasphemous to pronounce as good the evil portrayed in horror. But like a mirror, placed in discernment’s wise grasp, it can become a vehicle of repugnance; a stark reminder that not all knowledge is desirable; and a constant reminder to “never invite him that lurks at the threshold!”  

Published in: on January 22, 2008 at 11:59 pm  Leave a Comment  
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