Ghosts of Christmas Past

The boys enjoyed their Christmas; it was pretty casual, but the gifts were well-received -- B1 absolutely loved the telescope I got him, and we promptly used it to scope Venus last night. He was really tickled about that, kept saying how Venus was the first planet we'd seen with his telescope. The Moon was just a crescent, but when it's full, he's going to love seeing it. I could tell he was enjoying it, just how he kept revisiting it, and talking about it.

B2 enjoyed the Lego Garbage Truck and the General Grievous Starfighter I got him, among other things. He's all about General Grievous these days, so he dug that. He also enjoyed some other knick-knacks I got for him.

Exene is going to have the boys with her for the next few days, as she travels to Ohio with them. I'm a little anxious about that, since they're taking the bus. I just hope it goes smoothly, without incident, and the boys make it back home safe and sound. Exene won't drive, so she tends to opt for the bus (back in the day, any time there was any traveling to be done, I would invariably be the driver). I almost wish she'd opted for a plane trip for the boys and her, since it would probably have cost as much as the bus, and be far faster, but she'll do what she'll do. The bus station is the Mos Eisley of Chicago -- never will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. I told the boys (without wanting them to be nervous) to stay together and stick by their mom when they're there. Having caught buses there a few times in the 90s, I know it used to really suck. Hopefully they renovated it and made it better, but I doubt it. Anyway, I am seeing the boys off this morning, will miss their sweet selves.

Gonna take advantage of the boys' absence to clean the hell out of the apartment, so when they return, it'll be all clean and pristine, ready for them to mess it up again. Haha!

The ghost I don't believe in rang jingle bells outside our windows yesterday morning. B2 had gotten up, was rifling through his presents, and while we were sitting there, we heard these bells outside our window. B2 looked at me in wonder and surprise, like "Did you hear that, Daddy?" and I said "Yep. Uh, must be Santa and his sleigh." and then the bells sounded again, and B2 ran into the boys' room, told B1 about it. Meanwhile, I'm thinking "Uh, okay, so the kid heard those, too, so it wasn't just me." and B1 said he heard them, too, only that they sounded like they were in the room with him! So, I just rolled with it, said "Yeah, Santa's just doing a fly-by before heading back to the North Pole." It was surreal, though -- the Ghost of Christmas Past!

Another Ghost Walks These Halls

The traumatic thing I alluded to the other day (10/17), well, the person who had triggered that died. I found out late yesterday. So, she died two days after I saw her. Out of respect for the person's privacy, I won't go into details, but I definitely can say that having been in the same room with that person two days ago, death was very clearly in the room. And a bad death it was. My stepdad would always say that death was either the fulfillment of your dreams (assuming paradise and afterlife) or, if nothing else, the cessation of pain and suffering. In the case of this person, I can only assume the latter, but it sucks, because that person was suffering pain for months before her end, and the collective failure of her significant other and her family to take care of her in that time hangs like a shadow over her last days. She was semi-friends with Exene, and had called Exene for help the other day, and Exene had done so, but had needed my help, too, because she wasn't strong enough to move the dying woman, so I helped. I ran into her significant other the day before yesterday, and he'd thanked me for helping out in an "Aw, shucks" kind of way, and I just choked out "Yes, it's a terrible scene." I wanted to ask him why he wasn't there, but didn't. The whole situation was bad, and I can't talk about it without going into a lot of context and back story, but I couldn't help but feel like the building had gotten itself another ghost with the passing of this woman. I don't believe in ghosts, but the pain and suffering of that woman haunts the hallways, all the same. I walk by their apartment and I grimace, because I can feel that. And since they have a child who is a year older than B1, who used to be a playmate of his, it compounds the suffering -- I can only imagine what that kid is feeling, how much emotional damage she's suffered from her father's criminal neglect (or, at best grotesque bungling) of the welfare of her mother, and how that all shakes out. The woman is dead, and I imagine they'll move out of there; I can't imagine them staying in that tiny apartment, now, in the wake of this.

I'm a compassionate soul, and my heart bleeds. I freely admit that. I feel every emotion keenly; I think it's part of my own artistic temperament. It informs my work, the ability to feel things keenly. But in matters of suffering and anguish, it's a double-edged blade, because I feel agony as much as the rest of the emotional palette. And to see what I saw the other day, to know that a person was in such dire straits, and with only so much I could do, it's haunting. Like I said, a ghost. Ghosts haunt that way.

Ghost!

I'm reading Susan Casey's, "The Devil's Teeth" -- an account of the Farallone Islands, a noted Great White Shark hunting area frequented by researchers, with a long and unusual history, and on page 111, there's a ghost story in it, which is especially interesting because of the concentration of scientists on the island who believe they witnessed things there, and the amusingly named room that appears to be the worst of the allegedly-haunted areas...

"Peter and Scot informed me that the Jane Fonda bedroom was notoriously haunted.  'There's a ghost there,' Peter said matter-of-factly, after a few beers. 'It's a woman.'

'In the house?' I'm not sure why I found this surprising. If any place deserved to be infested with ghosts, it was the Farallones.

'Around the island. There was a body found in a cave.' He went on to explain that a century ago, a well-preserved skeleton of a woman had been found in Rabbit Cave, down by East Landing, close to the site of the original Russian settlement. Most people assumed she was an Aleut slave; it was their custom to entomb their dead. But others believed she was a Caucasian, a claim they insisted could be confirmed by her dental work. The truth is that no one really knows, and there is no record of her death. Her bones remain on the island, buried near the cave's entrance.

In the years since there had been reports of odd, ghostlike encounters: trouble breathing was commonly cited, as were chills, whispering voices, glimpses of shadowy silhouettes moving across the cart path, footsteps and doors slamming in the night. Now, it's one thing for a few people sitting around on heebie-jeebie island to wind themselves up thinking about ghosts. It's another thing altogether for that group to be composed entirely of scientists, most of whom would rather eat dirt than admit to any sort of belief in the paranormal. But at the Farallones some very logical minds had been flummoxed and terrified by unexplainable encounters.

In the mid-eighties, Peter told me, a biologist was walking back to the house in the last, foggy light of day when he noticed a woman with long dark hair standing on the marine terrace in a filmy white dress. Figuring it was one of the two female biologists on the island, albeit in a fairly strange getup, he continued on his way into the house -- where he immediately encountered the two women, sitting on the living room couch. He turned on his heel and ran back outside, but the woman in the white dress had vanished, though there was really no place she could have vanished to, short of jumping into the ocean. 'And he was Mr. Science!' Peter recounted, snickering. 'A guy who would do things like rebuild the transmitter. He said it made a believer out of him.'

On another occasion, a visiting botanist was intercepted sleepwalking out the front door in the middle of the night, screaming, "NO! I'm NOT going up there!" When someone tugged on his arm and woke him, he explained that a dark-haired woman was trying to entice him to climb to the lighthouse with her.

'What about you?' I asked them. 'Had any ghost action out there personally?'

They both nodded vigorously.

'Oh, I've had scary experiences,' Scot said. 'You get the creeps. It's the feeling of a presence around you. It usually happens when you're alone. At night.'

For Peter, one incident in particular stood out: he awoke to loud, thudding footsteps on the stairs, followed by the front door slamming, an attic trap door in the Jane Fonda bedroom stuttering rapidly, and a chill wind that blew through the house, rattling the windows from the inside, after the door shut. At the time he was one of four people on the island, all of whom were cowering together in one bedroom, scared witless. There was no extra set of human feet that could possibly have been pounding up and down the stairs that night -- they all knew it, and they all felt it. This had occurred more than a decade ago, and I could see that telling the story still gave him a chill.

'Certain rooms are scarier than others,' Scot said, fingering his glass. 'That Jane Fonda Room...the one you stayed in...'

'Yeah, that's the one where most things happen,' Peter agreed. 'I've never liked that room, either.'

'I stayed there for awhile. Man, I couldn't wait to get out of that room.'"

Things that go THUMP in the night

Thumper, the ghost I don't believe in, has been more active of late. The other night, in a cold apartment, I laid down and felt a throw pillow with my foot that was warm to the touch. Odd, because it wasn't anywhere near any heat source, but it was tangibly warmer.

A few nights, the computer switched on. It actually turned on, waking up from sleep mode. That's happened a couple of times, now.

Two nights ago, I went to sit in my favorite chair, and heard a creak of the cushion on the futon, like somebody was sitting down in it.

The other night, I woke with a start and slugged the wall beside the bed. I don't know what made me jolt like that, can't remember the dream context of it, but it hurt like hell, since I really nailed the wall -- and then, while rubbing my sore hand, I saw that the computer was on.

And just last night, in my left ear, I heard a woman's voice whisper "Daddy," right in my ear. Clear as can be. It was extra-weird, because B1 had been asking me questions earlier, saying "Daddy?" and then asking me his question. And then came that whisper in my left ear, even though I knew B1 was to my right, and I said "[B1], did you just say 'Daddy?'" and he said "No, why?" and I said "I thought I heard you."

We'll see what, if anything, Thumper does next.

I put up the Christmas tree tonight. It looks nice.