“Is Peche Island Cursed?”

Last month I brought to light some interesting legends surrounding Detroit’s famous Belle Isle, but just off shore, a little more than a mile east, lies the small untapped wilderness known as Peche Island.

According to descendants of the French family, who once settled the island for nearly 100 years, Peche Island remains untouched even while existing in the middle of urban sprawl for one very good reason: it’s cursed.

The Native inhabitants tell a legend of how Peche Island was formed.

The spirit of the Sand Mountains, along the eastern coastline of Lake Michigan, had a beautiful daughter whom he feared would be abducted. To protect her, he kept her floating in the lake inside a wooden box that was tethered to the shore.

The South, North and West Winds fought over this maiden, eventually creating a huge storm, in which she drifted away to wash up at the shore of the Prophet, the Keeper of the Gates of the Lakes, at the outlet of Lake Huron. Needless to say he was pretty happy to find the beautiful castaway.

The Winds soon found her and conspired to destroy the Prophet’s lodge. The lodge, along with the maiden and the Prophet were pulled into the water eventually drifting through Lake Saint Clair to the Detroit River. The remnants of the lodge formed Belle Isle and the old Prophet became what is now Peche Island.

In 1789, Ontario was comprised of five regulatory districts. The Board of the Land Office for the Windsor region needed title to the island, which happened to be in the hands of the First People. A treaty was reached in 1790 for lands in the western Ontario peninsula, but it excluded Peche- possibly because the Ottawas, Chipewas, and Hurons who signed the treaty wished to retain the island as a fishing ground.

Local businessmen “failed to notice” that the island was not among the lands transferred to the Crown, and began petitioning for grants for ownership. Among them was Alexis Maisonville. He eventually obtained a defacto title to the island and it became known as Maisonville’s Island.

The first permanent residents of the island were a French Canadian family named Laforet dit Teno. Historical documents- primarily the notebook of surveyor John Wilkinson- placed their arrival somewhere between 1800 and 1812.

Direct descendant Irvin Hansen Dit Laforet believes they settled the island even earlier. In his article, “Peche Island: Occupancy and Change of Ownership 1780-1882” he describes how Jean Baptiste Laforest was granted the island in 1780 for his service in the British military as a guide and interpreter. No documents have ever been discovered to confirm the theory, however.

They began raising a family on the eastern shore, while sharing the island with a group of natives inhabiting the western side. According to Laforest family legend, Jean gained ownership of the island along with the exchange of livestock.

By 1834, Charles and Oliver Laforet (the use of an ‘s’ was dropped by later generations) continued the family presence on the island. In 1857, Peche Island was officially transferred to the Crown by the Chippewas, but there no grant applications because most locals believed that the island legally belonged to the Laforet family as evidenced in the official minutes for the Essex County Council in June 1868.

The last Laforets on the island were Leon (Leo) Laforet and his wife Rosalie Drouillard.

Leo, the grandson of Jean Baptiste, was born on the island in 1819. He and Rosalie raised livestock, grew crops, and engaged in commercial fishing. Rosalie also made straw hats that they sold in Detroit. The couple had 12 children, the last being born in 1880.

In 1867, when a deed for the land could not be found, Leon claimed four acres when the island became part of Canada.

In 1870, Benjamin and Damase Laforet, cousins of Leon, contracted with William G. Hall, a Windsor businessman, for commercial fishing. Benjamin filed a quit claim deed giving him squatter’s rights.

Hall applied for a land patent of 106 acres in 1870, basically seizing ownership of the entire island, except for Leo’s four acres, for $2900.

After Hall’s death in 1882, his executor advertised that Hall’s estate would sell the island, with fishing privileges. It was this sale that raised the question of title.

Benjamin Laforet (pictured) became involved in a lawsuit with Hiram Walker over the island.

Walker’s sons purchased the property from the Hall estate on July 30, 1883, as a summer home for their father. Benjamin Laforet filed a claim on August 1st stating that he and his brother Damase had a one-third interest in a certain parcel of land that was described in the patent from the Crown to Hall.

The case was settled and the Hall Estate was authorized by the Supreme Court of Canada to give the Laforets a one-third share of the $7000 that Walker’s sons paid the estate.

Leo Laforet died on September 26 of that same year. According to the Laforet descendants, a group of Walker’s men forced their way into Rosalie’s home and made her and the oldest boys sign the deed over to the Walkers. In Laforet’s article, he states that Walker’s men threw $300 on the table and told Rosalie to be out by spring.

That winter, while Rosalie was in Detroit on business, someone came onto their property and ruined the winter stores. When it was time to leave, Rosalie got down on her knees and cursed the Walkers and the island. “No one will ever do anything with the island!” were her exact words words, according to family lore.

Despite his sons’ hopes that he would retire on the island, Hiram Walker spent years in failed attempts to commercially develop it. He took five years to have canals dug that would allow boats to bring in supplies, and to ensure the inflow of fresh water from Lake Saint Clair. Two yachts were purchased for travelling to the island from Walker’s office and for cruises and parties on the river and lakes.

Walker built what was once a mansion containing some 40-54 rooms by various accounts. He planted hundreds of trees, put in an orchard, and built a greenhouse to cultivate flowers. He also created a golf course, stables, a carriage house, and installed a generator for electric lights.

It was widely thought that this “summer home” in the eyes of his sons was actually Walker’s attempt at opening a resort. His intended market, the high society of Detroit, all spent their time on nearby Belle Isle.

Willis Walker, a lawyer who had handled the purchase of the island, died soon afterwards at the very young age of 28.

In June of 1895, Hiram Walker transferred the land to his daughter, Elizabeth Walker Buhl, due to his declining health. Elizabeth was no philanthropist by any means. Lore tells of an incident where she denied locals from picking the island’s abundant peach crop, a time-honored tradition. She had them dumped into the river, leaving people to collect them by boats.

Hiram suffered a minor stroke before dying in 1899.

Edward Chandler Walker died relatively young in 1915. Prohibition had caused embarrassment for sons and grandsons who were American, but operating a Canadian-based distillery. Not wanting to be seen as bootleggers, they sold their father’s empire in 1926.

Hiram Walker & Sons distillery was purchased by Toronto’s Cliff Hatch in 1926, thus ending the Walker dynasty. The Walker family leaves Walkerville and abandons the town their father founded in 1858. Some remain to this day in the Grosse Pointe area.

The ruins of Hiram Walker’s mansion

Elizabeth Buhl sold the island to the Detroit & Windsor Ferry Company in 1907. The president of the company, Walter E. Campbell, stated that the island would be made into “one of the finest island summer resorts in America,” and that “the big house at the upper end of the island has 40 rooms and will be easily converted into a temporary pavilion at least” according to the Detroit News in the Nov. 11, 1907 edition.

Mr. Campbell apparently died in the home that that same year and the property fell into ruin. In 1929, the house burned to the ground. Some Detroit residents claim that it was directly struck by lightning.

The island legally remained the property to the Belle Isle & Windsor Ferry Company but after 1939 it transferred to the company’s successor, the Bob-Lo Excursion Company. The island remained deserted except for a few picnickers, young lovers, and rumrunners during Prohibition.

It is believed that the Bob-Lo Company bought the island to deter development of competition to the Bob-Lo Island amusement park, which closed down in .

Peche Island was so neglected that in 1955 the employee who guarded the island for the Bob-Lo Company spent his spare time fishing for sturgeon, trapping muskrats, and hunting ducks without care or consequence.

Despite efforts by various local groups to have the island purchased by the government for use as a park, the Bob-Lo Company retained ownership until 1956 when it was sold to Peche Island Ltd. with plans of creating a posh residential area. With this goal in mind, the remains of the Walker house were removed in 1957. The scheme was abandoned that same year, reportedly because of a lack of suitable landfill.

Other proposals for the island followed; and, in 1962, Detroit lawyer and investor E. J. Harris purchased it. His plan included dredging the canals and creating a ski hill and protective islands. A few years later, Sirrah Ltd. purchased the island and its water lot, despite strong resistance by many Windsor groups who wished to see the island turned into a public park. Under the direction of E. J. Harris, Sirrah began work on an elaborate park area for the island. Several buildings, sewage, and water facilities were constructed, and phone lines were installed. The project operated for one season with ferry boats. Due to mismanagement, Sirrah declared bankruptcy in 1969, also losing the 50-acre Greyhaven estate in Detroit.

Riverside Construction purchased the island with the similar idea of developing it into a residential area or commercial recreation park that would have included a marina, but due to financial restrictions, they were forced to sell the island.

In 1971, due to lobbying by local conservationist groups, the island was purchased by Government Services with the department of Lands and Forest as the managing agency to be used by natural science students. The agency planned to spend several million dollars on the installation of nature trails, picnic shelters, and related features, but without funds, in 1974, the property was designated a Provincial park for administrative and budget purposes.

Currently the island is owned by the Canadian city of Windsor as a municipal park; the city has no immediate plans to develop it, apart from bathroom facilities. Other than part of the foundation of Hiram Walker’s mansion, a picturesque bridge, some canals, and random piles of bricks, it looks much the way it was before the Laforets were forced off the island and Rosalie proclaimed her curse.

So, fellow explorers, did Rosalie’s curse come true? Or not?

Sources: The Walkerville Times, The Detroit News

© 2012 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions

“The Ghost of Belle Isle”

Prompted by the unseasonably warm weather scores of people are venturing outdoors, eager to get a jump on summer fun. For many in the Detroit area that also includes picnics and other activities on historic Belle Isle. The park, located in the Detroit River and open to the public, is the largest island city park in the United States. In 2005, the then 101-year old Belle Isle Aquarium was the oldest operating aquarium in the United States but was closed to cut costs in the city.

But unknown to few, besides some lifelong citizens of the Motor City, Belle Isle is much more than a serene picnic experience; as with many locations with such a long and varied past, it also has its share of urban legends and ghost stories.

The story goes that if you drive your car onto a bridge that’s on Belle Isle, turn your engine off and honk your car horn three times, a spirit will appear from the woods, motioning for you to follow her. I should note that there have never been any confirmed reports of anyone following her into the woods.

For generations the tales of the Belle Isle ghost lady, also referred to as the Snake Goddess of Belle Isle, has attracted adventurous midnight riders to drive through the scary woods in hopes of catching a glimpse of a woman in a long white gown. The ghost of Belle Isle has a couple different versions to the story, too. Some say that there is a certain bridge that must be approached, while others claim that any bridge on the island will call this spirit. One version even describes her as an elderly woman.

Belle Isle has historically had a rich Native American heritage that continues to this day, so it is not surprising that most of the well known tales involve local tribes.

Ottawa legend tells of the daughter of chief Sleeping Bear. Her beauty was so striking that he kept her hidden from the eyes of young suitors by hiding her in a covered boat on the Detroit River. One day when bringing her some food, the winds, awed by her beauty, blew the covers off of the boat and it floated down the river. As it floated past the lodge of the keeper of the water gates, he also was stunned by her beauty and retrieved the boat and brought the young beauty into his tent. This angered the winds and the wind knocked him around until he died. The winds, sorry for uncovering her beauty, returned her back to her father and begged the chief not to hide her from them again, but to let them enjoy her beauty. To protect her, and fearful that other men would follow, he placed the princess on an island in the Detroit River and sought the aid of the Great Spirits to protect his beloved daughter by surrounding the island with snakes to protect her from intruders.

There she could run free with the winds around her. The spirits immortalized her by transforming her into a white doe and letting her live out eternity on the island. When settlers learned of the island and the story they named it Rattlesnake Island. Shortly after, it became known as Belle Isle. To this day, the maiden’s spirit can be seen from time to time dancing in the wind on the island, and is often mistaken as a deer by witnesses.

So as you enjoy the sunny skies and warm weather, perhaps those near southeast Michigan might find themselves spending a day on this historic island. Later, as twilight nears, those of you brave enough might stay a while in hopes of catching sight of the island’s famous Lady. If you do, please share your experience.

Until next time, happy hunting to you as you travel across the Great Divide.

© 2012 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions

“Hey Can You Look at This?!”

I am contacted periodically by people and asked my opinion on a variety of paranormal “evidence.” While it really sparks my interest and imagination to find a valid photo, recording, or other bit of data that can lend credence to the field, the sad truth is that these incidents are few and far between. I’ve fallen victim to the excitement myself while on an investigation or training exercise and ‘chimped’ about like a fool thinking I caught something when, in fact, it was unwarranted. Nothing is more disheartening than to present “evidence” to the scientific community only to be laughed out of the room.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Quite the contrary, it sharpens your skills as an investigator and you’ll know what to recognize and what to look out for the next time. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?

Sometimes a person is so convinced that what they hold is worth its weight in gold that they’ll try anything to get you to see their point of view with an endless array of “but… but…buts.” L

It breaks my heart to disappoint these folks, but it happens to me more often than I’d like to admit when I am shown print after print of dust that a person is positive is an “orb.” Ah…the dreaded orb factor. My only advice is to clean your living room more often.

I’ve said it before, and as of late it bears repeating- 99.9% of these so-called “orbs” are dust or other debris being reflected back into the camera. If it is transparent in the slightest measure, then it is dust. Period. If it is generating its own light or energy, is moving in patterns that can’t be explained through chaotic motion, and is solid, then you might have something.

Recordings are a beast unto themselves and are really difficult for me to be conclusive on for a variety of reasons. First of all, I was not present when these were captured so I have no way of knowing who was there, what the environmental conditions were, or many more x factors than I can even comprehend at this time. I have to take all informatio9n at the word of the presenter. That’s why it takes me a long time to properly analyze recordings. I have to backup the originals (remember, you should only work with copies), run them through various filters and analytics to clean up the sound, get consensus and thoughts from my other team members, and sometimes even send them out to third-party forensic labs for clarification.

I’m working on just such a case right now and will be getting the results to the client next week. I’m excited because while one recording was a bust, another did produce something substantial. Once I get the client’s take, I’ll be able to present it on our group’s site and Facebook page.

Speaking of which, last month at a Super Bowl party I was shown an image from someone’s phone of a bonfire in October, 2011. The person admitted that they used some type of filter effect on the iPhone to produce it, so if any iOS users out there can help me with what exactly they did, I’d be much appreciative. I posted the image on our Facebook page to get the public’s take on it. It definitely made me raise an eyebrow, plus I thought it was a damn cool picture.

It would appear that there are humanoid figures in the flames. Call them elementals, demons, what have you, the frustrating part is that the truth may never be known. According to claims it was near, or on, old Native American land- let’s face facts- anywhere you go was once Native American land, but I digress…

After asking, I was not able to get this exact photo in an unaltered state, but I was given another image from that same night and it helped shed a little insight into the situation.

So, what does this tell us?

For one thing, depending on the position of the camera, any of the items in and around the campfire could produce the paranormal effects. Notice the structure in the background to the right of the image. Depending on how the flames and smoke were coming off of the fire and relative to its position, it could cause the odd-shaped humanoid figure present in the first image.

This brings up another point. I was told from the start that the first image was enhanced with what I can only speculate is some kind of spectral color filter.

Okay, take a look again at the figure on the left side of photo #1, then compare that to the smoke just barely present in the same area of photo #2. If color or heat filters where used it would force the smoke to show up in various shades of color depending on the temperature of the smoke. Voila! Instant ghost photo!

So, dear readers, what do you think? Fact or Fiction? The floor is yours.

© 2012 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions

Do We Need Parapsychology?

When one speaks about a topic which is controversial it is important to understand the concept of a paradigm, or underlying worldview. It can be thought of as a framework of beliefs which are so taken for granted that most people are not even aware they have made any assumptions. A paradigm helps us to make sense of the world around us. In terms of science, it not only determines what is true, but how truth itself is determined. There is an obvious “catch 22” to this. If one doesn’t recognize the underlying assumptions made with a paradigm, it has the potential to limit our perception of the world, what we can discover, and how we can determine that knowledge.

The old paradigm, which many have held since the days of Descartes, states that the subjective and objective worlds are completely distinct, with no overlap. Subjective is “here, in the head,” and objective is “there, out in the world.” The Cartesian paradigm presupposes that there are objective ways to define and measure the fixed external world, which the followers of this paradigm would say is the only world that matters.

Writer and philosopher Elbert Hubbard (1857-1915) eloquently quipped that “the supernatural is the natural, just not yet understood.”

The formal scientific study of paranormal phenomena began in 1882 with the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in London, England. Early efforts attempted to dissociate psychical phenomena from the pop culture trend of Spiritualism and superstition, and to investigate mediums and their claims of evoking spirits or apparitions.

But 100 years later most people still think that paranormal research is either a group armed with night-vision tech stumbling around buildings in the dark in search of ghosts and fame, or simply the study of any subject that is weird or bizarre (i.e. Bigfoot and UFOs/aliens). Parapsychology is, and has always been, so much more than the former, and has nothing at all to do with the latter.

Paranormal research does NOT concern itself with UFOs, urban legends, vampires, witchcraft, or mythical creatures (a study known as cryptozoology). What parapsychology DOES study is the seemingly abnormal qualities of the physical universe in a scientific quest to find order and meaning in life. It is the ultimate exploration of the human condition and the discovery of all that the brain is capable of becoming; some of these concepts the legendary Carl Jung touched on with his theories of the collective unconscious and synchronicity.

A lot of people inappropriately use it as a synonym for “paranormal investigators,” such as when referencing the cast of Ghost Hunters or Paranormal Adventures; what’s more, parapsychologists have also been linked with “psychic” entertainers, magicians, and illusionists. Some self-proclaimed “psychic practitioners” even falsely claim to be parapsychologists, going so far as to wave about bogus doctoral credentials.

This is not to say that all psychics are that way. I am personally acquainted with a few very adept and talented psychics here in the Detroit area. Life, however, is rarely as glamorous as Hollywood portrays for them. At best they are ignored or written off as delusional; at worst they are harassed and fired from work. Often psychics are exploited by mainstream media for fluff pieces in October, and mocked by the same the other 11 months of the year.

There are the inevitable frauds, scammers, and crooks. This is an unfortunate truth, and a few bad apples have spoiled it for everyone else. It is inexcusable that these charlatans con money out of vulnerable and naïve people. This is why no respectable group ever charges for its services.

It should be noted that many parapsychologists take an empirical, data-oriented approach to psi phenomena. However, some researchers regard the current findings of parapsychology as having a wide variety of important implications about the spiritual, physical, and psychological nature of humankind.

Parapsychology is fascinating because of the implications it places on society, science, and how we understand the very nature of existence. Psi phenomena suggests that what science knows about the nature of the universe is incomplete; that the accepted limitations of human potential have been underestimated; that western assumptions and philosophical beliefs about the separation of mind and body may be incorrect; and that religious assumptions about the divine nature of miracles might have been misguided.

Physicists have an interest because of the proposition that we have a misunderstanding about space and time, and the transfer of energy and information.

Biologists are interested because psi implies the existence of non-physical methods of sensing the world.

Psychologists are interested in the theories regarding the nature of perception and memory.

Philosophers are interested because psi phenomena specifically address many age-old philosophical debates concerning the role of the mind in the physical world, and the nature of the objective vs. the subjective.

Theologians and the general public tend to be interested because personal psi experiences are often accompanied by feelings of profound, deep meaning.

A cornerstone of the current scientific worldview is that human consciousness is nothing more than a result of the functioning of brain, body, and nervous system. No matter how different the mind may seem from solid matter, it is generated solely by electrochemical functioning and so it is absolutely dependent on it. When the brain dies, so does consciousness.   From this perspective, claims of the survival of bodily death and the resulting apparitions are mere wishful thinking. Furthermore, the limits of material functioning automatically determine the limits of mental functioning, thus ESP and PK are impossible, given the establishment’s understanding of how the world works.

Still, psi phenomena have occurred in all cultures throughout history, and continue to occur; and some of the reported phenomena have been convincingly verified using scientific methods. Because psi seems to transcend the assumed limits of material functioning some interpret psi as supporting the idea that there is something more to the mind than just the firing of neurons and electrochemical reactions.

This “non-physical” aspect, which is not restricted by space or time, might survive bodily death. If so, there may be important truths contained in some spiritual ideas and practices.

The research in parapsychology may have implications for spiritual concepts but parapsychologists are not driven by some hidden spiritual agenda. Some critics of parapsychology seem to believe that all parapsychologists have hidden religious motives, and that they are really out to prove the existence of the soul. This argument is as absurd as claiming that all chemists have a secret agenda in alchemy, and the quest to attain riches by turning lead into gold.

Despite all its claims, there are just some things that mainstream science can’t explain about the universe. Parapsychology really acts as the center of scientific doctrine and theory, with lines leading to and from every branch of the other sciences. Together they form an intricate web of knowledge and understanding that is only limited by the egotistical whimsy of those who think they know all there is to know about the nature of the universe based on their blind obedience to one limited train of thought.

© 2012 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a “baby boomer” – a “child of the fifties”. I am part of that generation whose fathers came home from winning a great war, and then had us. Officially, we are those who were born between the years 1946 and 1959 although there are a few of us on either side of those years. We grew up during the stability and prosperity of the “Eisenhower Years” then looked forward with hope and anticipation to the promised glories of John F. Kennedy’s “Camelot.” I am part of that generation that came to my maturity in a time before our dreams were shattered by the twin debacles of the War in Vietnam and Watergate. I was blessed to grow up in the country, in a small East Texas town called Center and to have spent the vast majority of my life through young adulthood in the heart of the ‘pineywoods’ of East Texas and North Central Louisiana. To what is probably the vast majority of readers I have become what my parents and grandparents once were to me — a member of the “older generation”.

There was a time – a now long ago and mostly forgotten time – when things were different than they are today. It was a simpler time, a safer and less complex time. It wasn’t as technologically advanced as our present day world, but – it was a good time. It was the time of the “baby boomers” – the time of the great boom of expansion in all areas that followed the great tragedy that had been the Second World War. It was the world of Andy Griffith and Donna Reed – It was a great time to be a kid, and a pair of little kids on a roll could really have a blast. It was a time to be remembered, and now, some fifty years gone, a time to be cherished. My girlfriend and I (yes, I had one. I was almost 9 and she had just turned 6). My dad was Southeast Regional Manager for Ford Motor Company and traveled all the time, and her dad was a career Marine… who traveled all the time. Between them and our grandparents, we got a pretty good tour of the rural south of the time – almost always together — and numerous other places. But, we always loved and always returned to our tiny little hometown in East Texas.

They say that you start remembering things when you reach a ‘certain age’ that you’d forgotten long ago. I suppose that’s true. For the most part you remember the good things. Sometimes there are a few tragedies thrown in for good measure. Almost always, they are things that no longer exist in any other place than in your memory. I suppose that’s a sign of getting older. They (whoever ‘they’ are) say that too. I don’t know. Some things are just worth remembering. Some of those things are hard to explain to those who don’t remember them. Life in a small country town in the 1950s and very early 1960s is one of those things.

How do you explain an alien world to those who have never seen it? How do you explain a way of life that is completely foreign to those listening or reading? How do you explain a way of life that once existed but no longer does — and fades farther into the remote past with each passing day? How do you explain experiences, hopes and dreams that, at the time, everyone thought not only ‘could’ come to pass but — ‘would’ eventually come to pass? How do you explain a world so recent as to be within the span of a single lifetime and yet so distant as to have become a fading myth to even the following generation? Do you start it off like a fairly tale with ‘once upon a time’? How do you tell even your own children what it was like to grow up in the same little country town that they grew up in thirty years before the youngest of them was born and now over sixty years ago?

Can we take our cue from that lilting, forlorn and yet hopeful song from the musical ‘Cats’? Can we echo Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice in their hope that the ‘memories’ will ‘live again’? How can those memories ever live again when the only possible people for whom they can live are those who share them… and any to whom they try to relate them to are so removed from the time that it’s impossible for them to relate to even the smallest part of them?

It really was a different world then. I have often wondered what happened to that world. I know they say that things are “better” now, but I wonder. It was a great time to be a kid, it really was. I wish that my kids had grown up in a time like the one that I grew up in – and that theirs could.

I know. There was no air conditioning in homes or cars, no color television — no television at all for most. There were no special effects in movies to speak of. Television was new (we were the first generation to grow up with it). There were cars with standard transmissions (most of them still) and no air conditioning (most of them unless you had one about like my dads or Price Daniels’ or Uncle Earl Long’s and most folks couldn’t afford that. But there were other things.

Of course, we had all of the “childhood” diseases. We had chicken pox, mumps and measles. I had all three and they didn’t kill me. We also had isolated cases of scarlet fever and rheumatic fever still. It was my generation that was the last to see a major polio epidemic hit. I have several friends who had it. One’s still paralyzed from the waist down today. Two have gone on. One of them passed away when she was only six or seven years old. Another spent twenty-odd years of her life in an iron lung. There are already people – and have been for some time — who have never seen or heard of that kind of living death. No, it wasn’t a perfect time by any means.

Rock and Roll was brand new for us and so was FM radio. Cassettes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs, iPods and MP-3s were thirty years in our future at least and none of us even dreamed there’d ever be anything like that. We’d never even seen an ‘eight track’ tape player. Remember them? We were already in our teens when ‘Star Trek’ showed us the ‘communicator’ and even then we never dreamed we’d carry something very similar – the cell phone – in our pockets only thirty or so years later.

We lay on the living room floor and watched flickering images in grainy black and white on a screen not much bigger than a cigarette pack as Bobby Vinton, Elvis and the Shirelles… Sandra Dee and others performed. We watched ‘Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo – and we laughed at ‘Uncle Miltie’.  We sang (and tried to dance) along with the Mouskateers and added our own names to the end of the ‘roll call’ of the singing, dancing kids who were so much like us — or so much the way we saw ourselves as being.

We’d walk or ride our bikes downtown to the theatre, pay our half-dollar (admission for two) and watch terrible ‘B’ grade science fiction movies showing as a Saturday Matinee. Sometimes it was a double feature. There was always a newsreel, cartoon and previews of coming attractions. How do you explain to kids today about a movie theatre showing all that for a quarter — and for years throwing in a ‘short feature’ like Buck Rogers, Captain Video and his Video Ranger, Flash Gordon or a ‘two reel’ comedy like Our Gang or the Three Stooges? How do you explain that a large ‘Cherry Coke’ was a quarter (with two straws of course) or that a large bag of popcorn (likewise enough for two) was a dime?  We’d leave for the movie with a dollar between us and have fifteen cents left over after the show. It cost less than a dollar for two kids to have a whole Saturday afternoon of fun in a tiny little East Texas country town.

After the movie – almost always science fiction on Saturdays — until the ‘beach party’ craze hit a few years later (and we saw all of those movies too) we’d leave the theatre dreaming of one day traveling in space. That theatre and a now long-gone roller rink were the highlights of Saturday entertainment for kids of my generation. They were places that kids could go safely, enjoy themselves and their parents never had to worry about what they saw or were exposed to.

We saw a truly good science fiction movie a few years later and actually dreamed of living in space by the year 2001. It didn’t happen of course. The year 2001 became a year of tragedy. For me, one of those tragedies was extremely personal.  But, long before that, ‘other things’ became more important. There was Vietnam, Watergate and Iran-Contra – a dozen other ‘events’ that managed to mask over the vanishing of an era and possibly cause that disappearance in part. Our world was never the same again. But – we saw the first satellites, a little dog whose name was ‘Liaka’ and chimps named ‘Ham’ and “Able”. We stood on the front porch under the stars and watched a tiny specks float by overhead that contained first Gagarin and then Glenn. We saw ‘all’ of the first men and women in space. We saw man walk on the moon for God’s sake.

We had no metal detectors or guards in schools, no drugs and no violence to speak of. You could go to bed at night with your doors unlocked and your windows open. You could stop on the side of the road and eat at a roadside park, use the toilet or take a nap. Nobody would bother you.  There were no “drive by” shootings. We all walked or rode our bikes to school. We kids rode our bikes or walked just about everywhere and as long as we got home around dark nobody got worried. Even then they didn’t worry about crime, just about accidents and such. We didn’t have fancy electronic toys and games.

There wasn’t a lot of crime, even nationwide. People like Charles Starkweather and Eddie Gein were anomalies – horror stories from far away that were whispered about but thankfully didn’t happen every day and never happened in the place where you lived. We never dreamed there’d be anyone like Manson, Bundy, Gacey or Dahmer. Not quite the same today I’m afraid. It started changing at some point in the mid sixties. Our first real exposure to anything like that in Texas was the infamous ‘bell tower shooter’ but even then it was something truly unbelievable and something ‘far away’ to most of us. Austin was a ‘big city’ after all – nothing like that could happen in our little town. It never did and even though the crime rate now – especially violent crime — would have nauseated any of us fifty years ago or so, it still hasn’t. But — how do you explain to today’s generation, and those to come — growing up in a town that had one Chief of Police and four patrolmen for a population of four thousand? Between the years that I was born and the graduated from high school – that’s 18 years — our county had six murders. Not one of those was premeditated.

There was no vandalism — unless you count ‘class of ’68 graffiti painted on the side of the town water tank or a few fire lookout towers as vandalism. A major theft made ‘big’ news in the weekly paper — maybe once or twice a year. It was the same with any violent crime of any kind. Our jail had a capacity for 20 inmates and usually contained two or three at any given time, for very short times. There was no ‘gang’ or drug culture. The most serious ‘offense’ any teenager was ever charged with was stealing an occasional watermelon from some farmer’s field or crossing the river into Louisiana and bringing a few cans of beer into our ‘dry’ county.  No one ever went to jail for it. The constable would just make who ever he caught with the beer pour it out one can at a time, let them go, and then call their parents. Once or twice a year the highway patrol would catch a few drag racers on some deserted road or out on the old (deserted) airport runway. They did the same thing. No one went to jail. They got sent home and later someone called their parents — end result being ‘grounded’ for a few days or a week. I’m in my seventh decade of life now. Isn’t it amazing just how much difference a few short years — or is it a few all-too-short decades can make?

During hunting season all of the boys old enough to have licenses had a shotgun hanging in the back window of their pick-up trucks or in the trunk of their cars — even when they were parked at school. So did all of the teachers who hunted. As soon as class was over they’d all head for the woods. There was never any thought of crime. Little kids played with toy soldiers and toy guns at recess in elementary school. I don’t recall it causing any sporadic violence of any kind and all that I know of — all 500 who attended my school from grade 1 to 12 — grew up to be responsible adults.

On weekends when our girlfriends were somehow occupied we boys would load up our camping and fishing gear and head off to one of the local lakes for an overnight campout. Lots of people kept flat-bottomed boats at these lakes and they were never locked up. All of the owners knew all of us kids and knew that if we used one of their boats on one of our weekend excursions they’d find it in the same shape, or better, than they’d left it in. We never took any food with us other than cooking oil and maybe a five-pound sack of potatoes. We intended to catch our supper and usually did. Such irresponsible parenting as our folks demonstrated in things like this would cause a huge hue and cry today but as far as I recall, no one ever drowned or managed to get any serious injury — except maybe a case of poison ivy if you weren’t watching what you were doing at times.

Naturally we all had to be home early on Sunday morning. We all went to church back then. There were only seven denominations and about ten churches in Center Texas at the time — Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal, Nazarene,

Christian (Disciples of Christ) and Church of Christ. All of us went to one or the other and most of us visited between them when something ‘special’ was going on. That was just our culture. It was how we expected things to be and how we expected them always to be. There was no  ‘moral majority’ then and no ‘Christian Right’. It didn’t matter which church you went to. We all knew what was ‘moral’ and what was ‘right’ or it certainly seems like far more did then than do now. There weren’t any ‘mega-churches’ then. They were all tiny by today’s standards and every preacher or priest in town knew everyone they passed on the street whether they went to ‘their’ church or not. Two of those preachers and one priest married over half of the kids that I attended school with, including me. That doesn’t happen too often today, does it?

Some of my happiest childhood memories were trips that Sherry and I took with my father and with hers. We’d both been all over the Far East by the time we were ten years old with her folks, and we both knew just about every actor, actress and politician who lived in the South and Southeastern United States, or worked in them by traveling with my folks. I wonder how many people today have ever heard of a pair of professional wrestlers who called themselves “Gorgeous” George and “Sputnik” Monroe?

There was no “terrorism” then and the “twin towers” hadn’t even been built yet. There were no ‘threat levels’. At the airport you just showed your ticket and a passport if you needed one and got on the plane. There were no HLS or TSA goons standing around. There were no ‘full body scans’ even for little kids. If there was ever any trouble at the airport, even at a big one like LaGuardia or LAX –which there never was – they just called the regular cops.

Flying in “Old Connie” — a propeller driven Lockheed “Super Constellation” — was an exciting adventure. There was a galley with ‘real food’. If you were flying overnight they had “sleeper” compartments like on a train. We watched ‘first run’ movies twice a day — long trips even by airplane usually took more than one day back then. For long flights the major airlines had “sleepers” with berths similar to those on a train (but then again, most people today don’t remember passenger trains either). The Airlines always had a ‘stew’ to keep an eye on underage kids traveling without parents — from the age of about five to fifteen. The seats were big and roomy.  “Old Connie” only carried 64 passengers. There was a single wide isle and as long as you didn’t bother anyone no one cared if a couple of kids got up and moved around some as long as the ‘seat belt’ sign was turned off. Since back then you never changed planes, they only refueled the one you were on, serviced it and changed crews if the flight crew’s hours were maxed out, there was no chance of getting lost — or ’snatched’ — in a strange airport. Our folks didn’t think anything of buying us tickets and putting us on the plane. Why should they?

Remember trains that carried people? On trains you had comfortable seats, ‘Pullman’ sleeper cars, a dining car, a ‘club’ car and lots of room to move around. No one would dare bother a couple of little kids traveling alone on a train either. The Railways had stews all kept an eye on kids too. It was part of their job. It was just like riding “Old Connie”. You never changed trains so there was no chance of getting lost or “snatched”. Kids weren’t allowed off the train until their final destination, and even then a stew was with them until their parents or guardians listed on their tickets claimed them.

We made our own fun. We hunted and fished and swam. We swam in creeks, lakes, canals and ponds. If it was really hot we’d just strip off and jump in. Nobody thought anything about it. We certainly didn’t. All of it was outdoors in a place where pollution and deliberate waste hadn’t yet been seen. There weren’t any shopping malls or “super-stores” then but on Saturday kids would walk around the town square — where all of our shopping was located — and dream about some “new” or really ‘cool’ thing that they wanted. Maybe we’d go to one of the two local drug stores and sit at the table they provided and read comic books. They let us do that whether we intended to buy the comic or not. Can’t do that any more either I’m afraid.

I’ve often thought that my idea of “heaven” if there is such a place, would either be one of those prolonged road trips through the south and southeast that we made as kids or to be sitting with Sherry just one more time in the lobby of the old Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans watching my dad, a professional wrestler named ‘Sputnik’ Monroe and a man named Foster Sharrod sitting there seeing just how drunk they could get and playing cards with Uncle Earl Long and Judge Leander Perez while my Dad tried to convince Uncle Earl that the State of Louisiana really ‘did’ need to buy a new one-off Lincoln for the Governor, and that he personally needed to buy one for Miss Blaze. No, it may not be ‘heaven’ but it’s about as close as I’d ever want to get. I would like for both of us to be an adults thought and remember “now” when we’re there as much as I remember “then” today. We’d have a certain “perspective”, no, make that “attitude”.

Oh, I know, all of them were so crooked they had to screw them into the ground when they died, but at least they were open and up front about it and they did some good as well. They didn’t try to hide what they were behind a mask of pomposity and arrogance or religious mumbo-jumbo. When they stole, and they did, they didn’t try to take it all. They at least left something for everyone else.

I remember one speech in which Uncle Earl told a group of people in Alexandria Louisiana, where he’d gotten a particularly cold reception that they could vote against him if they wanted to “but God help you if I get elected anyway”. They did. He kept his promise. It was four years before there was any significant highway or bridge repair in Rapides Parish. We won’t even begin a discussion of Judge Perez. “Noooow Son…”

Uncle Earl died on election night in 1960. He had a major heart attack not five minutes after hearing that JFK had won, but hadn’t heard the news about the latest ‘upset landslide’ that he’d just won in his own race for the US Senate. We were over in Biloxi that next morning with my dad and I remember seeing Senator Bilbo (remember him?) make the announcement of Uncle Earl’s death on one of the local TV stations. I remember I cried and Daddy took Sherry and me with him to the funeral. We sat two seats down from Miss Blaze.

They say that there were a lot of ‘Civil Rights’ problems and issues around the time that I grew up but honestly in a little-bitty East Texas town deep in the ‘piney woods’ we just didn’t notice any. There were as many blacks as whites in our county — practically no other people of any kind — and we all got along fine. We kids played together and no one paid any attention to it. We went to different schools until I was 15 years old or so but they were so close together no one noticed. There were four schools located on two campuses. All of us kids together totaled just over 500. When ‘desegregation’ came, we just shuffled kids around between schools that were all within a few blocks of each other and created a ‘junior high school’ that we’d never had before. Up until then elementary school lasted from grades 1 to 8. There wasn’t any such thing as ‘junior high’. Since all of the schools were built about the same time (around 1901) there really wasn’t any difference in them as far as the facilities went. There was just a different view from the window to break up the usual cases of boredom.

We had no fights other than the usual playground and parking lot scuffles over girlfriends and boyfriends. We had the usual ‘after the game’ fights with our football rivals from time to time. None of them were particularly violent or malicious. There were certainly never any weapons of any kind produced unless you call some little kid squaring off with a much bigger one with a roll of dimes in his fist a ‘weapon’. That might have happened once or twice. No one ever wound up in jail or the hospital.

Remember when boys (and a few girls) would ‘blow’ the gunpowder out of ‘Black Cat’ firecrackers, pack it into model airplane paint bottle and blow up a red ant hill/? If that happened today someone would call the ‘bomb squad, the kid would be locked up and charged with ‘terrorism’ and most likely his or her folks would be locked up as ‘accomplices’.

We all knew where the local ‘lover’s lanes were located and as soon as we boys had cars — that term is applied fairly loosely to some of our vehicles — we managed to find them all a time or two every week. Going ‘parking’ was another standard ‘pastime’. It just didn’t mean quite the same thing that it means now, or meant even a few years later. We were all part of the ‘Eisenhower Years’… we grew up with Annette and Frankie and Sandra Dee. We held hands and kissed and we had fun. Did some of us end up marrying those girls we went ‘parking’ with. Of course we did. I’d say more than half of us did. But — not because we ‘had to’. I’m sure a few did ‘have to’ — positive of it in fact. Don’t kid yourself. Kids know. But, with the society we grew up in and as close as we all were, they would most likely have gotten married eventually anyway. As far as I know, our generation, at least in my little hometown, has one of the lowest divorce rates around. You see, back then things like love, and truth and real devotion meant something, at least to the vast majority of us.

What happened to parades on Veterans’ Day and the 4th of July? What happened to ‘County Fairs’? What happened to sock-hops in the school gym on Friday nights? Where did they go? How could such important things vanish so slowly as to not be noticed until after they were gone — and then only by those who remember them at all? How do you tell even your own children about a time when you personally remember people who couldn’t drive at all or those who simply preferred to still ride a horse or in a buggy? How do you explain to even your own children that you remember some – a few of those long-gone parades in which men who had fought in the US war with Spain actually marched? Most kids today don’t even know that there was such a war or that it was in what we (my generation) called ‘the last century’. Now, my generation and the little town that I grew up in and love still so much are part of ‘the last century’. It’s a strange thing to consider but it’s true. There is now an entire generation of children – born after the turn of the century — who do not and cannot remember a year that did not begin with the number “2”. Some of those are my own grandchildren. In thirty years or so when their parents are the age that I am now, how many of my faded memories will their own faded memories contain to pass along? Who will the strangely dressed people and what will the odd-looking old buildings in the old and faded photographs be to them? Let’s see. Thirty years from now. That will be almost 100 years since the earliest of those photos were taken. I wonder if any of them will still think that they live in a “quaint” little country town. I hope so, but I doubt that it would fit my own definition of that term.

What happened to the local teenage ”’hang-outs” like Center’s ‘Rider’s Roost’ (named after our football team the “Roughriders”) or the Youth Center (where we’d have a dance every Saturday night and some local live group once each month? Where are they? When were the ‘Dairy Queen’ and ‘Handy Andy’s’ replaced by McDonalds and Burger King? When was Mr. Brice’s market on the town square replaced by the “Walmart Superstore”? What happened to the Soda fountain at Roger’s Drug and that nice Miss Jackie Phillips who once took such great care in serving us kids the best ice cream sodas and sundaes ever made? Gone now. All gone.

No, it wasn’t a perfect world back then — not by any means. But, yes, I miss those times – and those people. I miss my hometown. There’s still a town called Center Texas. I suppose there always will be, but where is the town that I call ‘home’? They say it’s experiencing a real ‘boom’ now. I don’t know. It’s been almost 15 years since the last time I went ‘home’ and it was almost unrecognizable to me then. I can’t even imagine what a ‘boom’ would be like.

I was recently told about, and shown some beautiful photos of the restoration of our County Courthouse and the few scattered county buildings around it to their original appearance. Those few buildings in Shelby County are the last examples of ‘Irish Castle’ architecture in the State of Texas – all of them built by J.J.E. Gibson in 1885. They’re beautiful and deserved the care and attention that they were given. But — no one ever goes downtown anymore. There’s no shopping downtown anymore. Even the county and city offices have moved out of downtown. Were it not for the recently renovated movie theatre and one remaining bank no one would have any reason to go to our town square any more at all. So dies a little country town. The town lives, but those things that made it unique — and the best of all possible worlds for a kid of the fifties to grow up in — are gone. Of all the buildings surrounding our courthouse square only three outside the courthouse complex retain their original façade or even the façade that they had when I was growing up in the fifties. Two of those, like the courthouse, have been restored. The third is an empty shell but still recognizable to those who remember when it was the best-stocked hardware store in two counties.

They say that you can ‘take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy’. That’s true. They also say that ‘home is where the heart is’ but that’s not quite correct. Your home is always in your heart — but it’s also in you mind and in your memories. People often ask me why I so rarely go ‘home’. My answer is hard for some of them to understand but to me it’s so crystal clear that it defies further explanation. I tell them all the same thing. I ‘do’ go home. I go home for at least a few minutes almost every day. All I have to do to go home is close my eyes and remember a time and place — and people — who now live only in the recesses of my mind and the very deepest recesses of my heart.

© 2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron. All rights reserved unless granted specifically by the author in writing.

The Harsh Truth about Ghost Boxes

The various ghost hunting “reality” shows that plague the airwaves have given a great deal of attention lately to an amusing new line of gear that merge EMF, audio recorder, and K-II devices all in to one unit; some even assert to turn this data into spoken words that they spout as proof of spirit contact. While in theory this sounds fantastic, in practice it’s a very different, very sobering, reality.

Not only are these devices laughable at best, but these “professional” ghost hunters are actually trying to pass off the data from these devices as legitimate evidence of paranormal activity. These devices are complete crap. Come on, folks- this is supposed to be science, not a scene from the set of Ghostbusters III.

There are numerous versions of these devices readily available for sale on eBay, and YouTube abounds with video clips of their supposed findings. It’s no shock to learn that the fine “professionals” over at Travel Channel’s Paranormal Adventures swear by these toys. That, if anything, is proof enough to discredit these devices and their data.

I first came across this type of device a few years ago when I heard of the Ovilus. Created by Bill Chappell of Digital Dowsing and appropriately labeled “for entertainment only,” it claimed to translate EMF fluctuations into phonetic speech by converting the EMF readings into numbers, and then those numbers into words by sounding them out using text-to-speech algorithms via a vocabulary of 512 words.  Various modes on the device include speech mode, using the environment to pick the words to say; phonetic mode, using the environment to create words phonetically; commutation mode, using speech mode and phonetic mode together, EMF Mode; yes/no mode, to ask questions and get yes or no answers (a digital Ouija board?); level mode, to watch the energy change in the environment; and dowsing mode, to work like a pair of dowsing rods.  It is powered by a battery and is equipped with a headphone jack, a recording jack with attenuated output, and something called the ‘Paranormal Puck.’  The Puck is designed to aid in paranormal research and meant to be the “center” of investigation as a place to gather, log, track and maintain the data.  It also watermarks data to prevent tampering. Users note that it can be “randomly repetitious” at times by stating selected words for every question asked and every environment investigated.

*ahem* Really? Say it isn’t so.

The first question that comes to mind is how can the inventor of this device possibly test the results?  What evidence or reasons are the formulas based on? Whatever method he used to equate EM energy with words would have to start as an arbitrary guess.  It would then need to be tested repeatedly to verify the results. In any case, this makes me think of the dog collars that supposedly turn barking patterns into words like “outside” and “water;” seems to me that this is just another example of wannabe researchers barking up the wrong tree.

The fine folks at Paranormal Research & Resource Society frequent their local Radio Shack for their “ghost boxes.”

Known as the “Radio Shack hack,” it was discovered in 2007 by a retired electrical engineer. These are modified AM/FM radios that continuously scan the various bands to create white noise in the belief that entities can use the audio falloff from broadcasting stations to communicate.     One model, the 12-469, simply produces a clicking sound when scanning through the bands; other models are modified armband FM radios from the likes of Jensen that are common among joggers.

A man named Frank Sumption invented a version of the device after experimenting with software to record EVPs. His device would produce random voltage to create raw audio from an AM tuner, which was then amplified and filtered into an echo chamber for recording.

What makes these boxes unique in terms of EVP analysis is that in addition to being modified to record the sounds, because that they were originally radios they are equipped with external speakers that proponents say can be used for real-time two-way communication with the other side.

Not surprising, many users report that results of the ghost box are affected by the strength of the radio signals in the area; poor signal quality reduced the ability for spirits to make contact (insert facepalm slap here). Furthermore, what conclusive proof do users have that the voices are indeed paranormal in nature and not simply the broadcast of local stations? Depending on the atmospheric conditions one could even pick up a station from great distances. This is not unlike an experience I had with a CB radio some years back. While driving in the northern suburbs of Detroit one clear summer night I ended up in a chat with a trucker outside of Las Vegas!

Anyone with the latest generation of Smartphone can even download an app (often for free or a few bucks) that claims to do the same. Ghost Radar is one that comes to mind that I’ve come across myself from the Microsoft Marketplace. These are toys, nothing more. If that’s your team’s idea of science, stay at home and play Angry Birds instead.

I’m all for inventiveness, and I think some of the reasoning behind these devices has some merit; but these self-made devices are tainted by their very nature. No conclusive proof could ever possibly come from them unless the findings can be proven using other verifiable equipment as a control measure. As with the field of paranormal research itself, the tools and theories behind them need to go through extensive experimentation and testing to prove or disprove their validity for recording and measuring paranormal activity, let alone the resulting data that is collected by them.

One again we have the misguided practice of amateurs do disservice and disrespect to science.  I applaud those who invent these ghost boxes, as necessity is truly the mother of invention; but I must condemn their inept notion that anyone with an intelligence greater than a garden radish take their findings seriously. The Ovilus and the various ghost boxes need to undergo years of intensive experimentation in various settings and controls to not only prove their worth, but decisively identify what sounds or readings mean exactly which words or phrases.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again- it doesn’t matter how new or fancy the technology is, a tool in the hands of the unwitting is just a toy.

As always, happy hunting in your quest for knowledge, and here’s to a very happy new year!

© 2012 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions

The Ghosts beneath the Mistletoe

The days are increasingly shorter, the air chills to the bone, and nature slumbers beneath a blanket of sparkling snow. This is the time of year when we gather with friends and family to talk, share life’s adventures, and relive the year’s memorable moments. If you’re like many folks, you’re also gathered around a television to enjoy classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and Dickens’ immortal A Christmas Carol.

But take a step back and look at these holiday classics through the lens of a seasoned investigator and you’ll begin to see them in an entirely new light. It is, after all, a fairly spooky ghost story wrapped around the morals of giving and sharing.

The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future are similar to the phenomenon of “Anniversary Imprints,” residual hauntings resulting from an emotional, physical, or electrical discharge that “records” an event into the atmosphere of a particular location and which usually manifest around the same time each year.  Such imprints can appear non-conscious and redundant, but since the Spirits were highly interactive with Scrooge, it appears Dickens melded different aspects of the Spiritualist philosophies which were commonplace in the London of his day.

The arrival of Bob Marley on the first anniversary of his death fits the definition of a Revenant. These entities project an appearance of being distressed or misplaced; often a recently departed person who returns very briefly to make contact with loved ones to serve as an act of closure before going on to the afterlife. Perhaps the more appropriate classification for poor Marley is the Guardian, a spirit who returns to warn family members of imminent danger. These entities offer messages or aid during moments of distress to others.

The Ghost of Christmas Future is clearly a Harbinger, a ghost that brings warning of impending events.

Aside from the various spiritual entities throughout the story, some other cornerstones of psychical research play a large role in the adventure. For instance, Scrooge’s journeys are what we refer to as Astral Projection, or Astral Travel. Astral Travel is the theory that a person’s spiritual awareness can temporarily detach itself from the physical body, remaining connected by what is called the “silver cord,” and experience things in other locations, time frames, or dimensional planes; the spiritual body and the physical body are then able to act independently of each other. That is why Scrooge travels through time and space but must return to his bedchamber to await the next spirit- and all within a single night.

But this is all, of course, fiction; so what sort of real-world personal experiences provide similar events? Here are but a few anecdotes that I will share with you.

The Winter Solstice also brings with it a recurring event to residents of Lower Boscaswell (Cornwall). A lady in white holds a red rose in her mouth, then turns and walks into fog. Some say that to see her will bring misfortune.

On Christmas Eve in Kempston (Bedfordshire), England, local legend tells of a child that ran out of Kempston manor to greet his parents who were returning in a horse-drawn coach. He was hit by the horses and died of his injuries. Now, the anniversary of the event is marked by the reoccurring sounds of the tragic incident.

A man’s mother passed away in 1964; that same year he moved from Nova Scotia to Ontario. Christmas Eve, 1971; on the tree, one string of lights, which was supposed to flash, had stopped several days before. According to the witness it was five minutes to midnight when the fireplace suddenly went out, and the string of lights started to flash, and the other lights stopped flashing. He reported the room becoming very chilly when a figure appeared in the recliner- his mother, with a smile on her face. His wife, who had never met her, reported the same thing. It never spoke but at the stroke of midnight the fireplace lit up and the lights on the tree stopped flashing and the others started flashing again. The figure was gone and the lights on the tree never flashed again.

A woman received a call from beyond one Christmas. The phone rang and upon answering it, a familiar voice casually said, “Hello there.” It was her mother’s voice, who had dies three years prior. The line had static noise and it cut in and out.

Lewisham Station, London is the place of a crash in December 1957, caused by fog, that killed ninety people and injured over one hundred. Their cries can be heard on the anniversary of the accident.

So as you take in the many feasts this holiday season and enjoy the company of loved ones, take a moment to reflect on those dear departed and raise a glass in their honor- they just may be celebrating along side you and your kinfolk.

So, dear readers, any experiences of your own you’d like to share?

**I would like to take this moment to thank you all for following along each month as I explore the paranormal. I extend to you- whatever your faith or tradition- a warm blessing for a year well-spent, and a new year well planned. Happy Holidays, best wishes, and see you on New Years Day.

© 2011 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions

Science and Psychics- The Tech of Paranormal Research

Most of the intellectual rhetoric thrown back and forth between skeptics and parapsychologists concerns the types of tools used during investigations; sometimes even those within the field of psychical research will argue among themselves for or against certain techniques and tools.

Since the field is one which attempts to quantify and classify phenomena that are, by definition, cultural, religious, and fundamentally unknown, it is somewhat acceptable to utilize devices and techniques of a more “mystical” nature. Many times the use of arcane devices and psychics can help lead the team to an area of interest or heightened activity, and sometimes even actual contact with the netherworld.

Once these devices or techniques have pointed the way to the presence of activity, the seasoned researcher will switch to more scientific instruments to document any possible activity. Unfortunately, the truth is that at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what kind of personal experiences, thoughts, feelings, intuitions, or psychic imagery is collected, or by whom- if it can’t be verified or quantified through impartial scientific measurement and documentation, then it technically never happened and just becomes yet another account in the mythos of a location’s “ghost stories.”

Tools have been modified or adopted from various sciences and applications over the years to measure and analyze data in a paranormal investigation. Some devices are used specifically to debunk phenomena and establish clear natural causes; while others have the purpose of capturing evidence- such as voice and video recorders. EMF detectors have a unique function of being used both for the debunking and the signifying of paranormal activity.

However, regardless of how expensive or scientific the tools, they are only as scientific as the person using it; a team may boast about owning the most sophisticated thermometer available, but if members are using it as a barometer, the measurements are worthless; Just as using a calculator doesn’t make you a mathematician, using a Geiger counter doesn’t make you a scientist. In the wrong hands the most accurate measurement device is nothing more than an expensive toy.

All paranormal research groups have their own unique procedures and instruments of choice. Some are religiously-based and use age-old tools and techniques; some consider themselves ultra-modern and use only the most expensive and scientific of equipment. Most groups, however, fall somewhere in the middle; and the tools, techniques, and even the very members come from a vast array of backgrounds, philosophies, and religions. The make-up of these groups and the tools they use are contingent on finances, personal preference, and practicality.

We’re all familiar with EMF detectors, and I’ve gone over at length the ins and outs of video and audio equipment; but as I mentioned earlier, some of these tools are of a more arcane nature and we’ll focus on that this time around.

The use of dowsing rods for various functions goes back thousands of years. They have been used to find water in new settlements, material objects, fortune telling, and various religious applications. Essentially, a pair of L-shaped metal rods made of brass or lightweight metal are held loosely in each hand and will remain straight or static during normal conditions, but when in the presence of paranormal activity they will begin to move erratically or cross when directly over, near, or in direct contact with paranormal activity. Interestingly, during the Vietnam War, U.S. Marines even used dowsing to locate weapons and tunnels.

Traditionally, the divining rod was a Y-shaped branch from a tree or bush. Different cultures preferred the branches come from particular trees- hazel twigs in Europe and witch-hazel in the United States. Branches from willow or peach trees are also common. Both skeptics and many of dowsing’s supporters believe that dowsing apparatus have no special powers, but merely amplify unnoticeable movements of the hands resulting from the expectations of the dowser. This psychological phenomenon is known as the ideomotor effect and boils down to basic mind over matter. Your mind is signaling the muscles in your body to make subtle movements that are unnoticeable to the naked eye. Some supporters agree with this explanation, but insist that the dowser has sensitivity to the environment; other dowsers say their powers are paranormal.

The American Society of Dowsers admits that “the reasons the procedures work are entirely unknown.”

Research focusing on possible physical or geophysical explanations for dowsing has been conducted in recent years. For example, Russian geologists have made claims for the abilities of dowsers, which are difficult to account for in terms of the reception of normal sensory cues. Some authors suggest that these abilities may be explained by postulating human sensitivity to small magnetic field gradient changes. One study had even concluded that dowsers “respond” to a 60 Hz electromagnetic field, but this response does not occur if the kidney area or head are shielded.

Whatever the evidence for or against, dowsing will undoubtedly continue to be used in the course of investigations. Those that swear by their results will present evidence to support their claims, and skeptics will chuckle at the “superstitions of ages past.”

Another example of this type of tool is the pendulum. A pendulum is a small dowsing tool composed of a dangling crystal or metal plumb which is used to answer questions or find things through psychic energies. Answers are determined by the direction of movement to preset variables; the most common formation is back and forth for yes, circular for no. Pendulums are used in much the same way as dowsing rods and similar to function and result. Due to its design of both answering specific questions and ability to detect or be affected by paranormal activity, the pendulum can be considered a hybrid between the centuries-old dowsing rod and the Ouija Board of Spiritualist fame. Skeptics also point out the high probability of the ideomotor effect.

One device I have to mention, as it’s come up in conversation a lot lately, is called the Ovilus.

This odd gadget blends the psychic and the scientific into an all-in-one tool- an EMF, audio recorder, dowsing rod, and K-II that turns EMF into phonetic speech by translating the readings into numbers, and those numbers into words, sounding them out using text-to-speech algorithms via a vocabulary of 512 words.  Various modes include speech mode, using the environment to pick the words to say; phonetic mode, using the environment to create words phonetically; commutation mode, using speech mode and phonetic mode together, EMF Mode; yes/no mode, to ask questions and get yes or no answers (a digital Ouija?); level mode, to watch the energy change in the environment; and dowsing mode, to work like a pair of dowsing rods.  It is equipped with something called the Paranormal Puck.  The Puck is designed to aid in paranormal research and meant to be the “center” of investigation.  A place to gather, log, track, and maintain the data it watermarks to prevent tampering.

Every time I try to justify this thing, all I can picture is Dug and the other dogs from Disney’s Up!

Users note that it can be “randomly repetitious” at times by stating selected words for every question asked and every environment investigated.

The first question that comes to mind is how can the inventor of this device possibly test the results?  Whatever formula they use to equate EM energy with words would have to start as an arbitrary guess.  It would then need to be tested repeatedly to verify the results.

In the end, the most important thing to take away from this is that whatever tools or techniques you or your group are using, as long as it is used correctly and truthfully then happy hunting.

So, dear readers, what kind of experiences have you had using these types of tools? As always, the floor is now yours. Please share.

© 2011 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a “baby boomer” – a “child of the fifties”. I am part of that generation whose fathers came home from winning a great war, and then had us. Officially, we are those who were born between the years 1946 and 1959 although there are a few of us on either side of those years. We grew up during the stability and prosperity of the “Eisenhower Years” then looked forward with hope and anticipation to the promised glories of John F. Kennedy’s “Camelot.” I am part of that generation that came to my maturity in a time before our dreams were shattered by the twin debacles of the War in Vietnam and Watergate. I was blessed to grow up in the country, in a small East Texas town called Center and to have spent the vast majority of my life through young adulthood in the heart of the ‘pineywoods’ of East Texas and North Central Louisiana. To what is probably the vast majority of the readers I have become what my parents and grandparents once were to me — a member of the “older generation”.

There was a time – a now long ago and mostly forgotten time – when things were different than they are today. It was a simpler time, a safer and less complex time. It wasn’t as technologically advanced as our present day world, but – it was a good time. It was the time of the “baby boomers” – the time of the great boom of expansion in all areas that followed the great tragedy that had been the Second World War. It was the world of Andy Griffith and Donna Reed – It was a great time to be a kid, and a pair of little kids on a roll could really have a blast. It was a time to be remembered, and now, some fifty years gone, a time to be cherished. My girlfriend and I (yes, I had one. I was almost 9 and she had just turned 6). My dad was Southeast Regional Manager for Ford Motor Company and traveled all the time, and her dad was a career Marine… who traveled all the time. Between them and our grandparents, we got a pretty good tour of the rural south of the time – almost always together — and numerous other places. But, we always loved and always returned to our tiny little hometown in East Texas.

They say that you start remembering things when you reach a ‘certain age’ that you’d forgotten long ago. I suppose that’s true. For the most part you remember the good things. Sometimes there are a few tragedies thrown in for good measure. Almost always, they are things that no longer exist in any other place than in your memory. I suppose that’s a sign of getting older. They (whoever ‘they’ are) say that too. I don’t know. Some things are just worth remembering. Some of those things are hard to explain to those who don’t remember them. Life in a small country town in the 1950s and very early 1960s is one of those things.

How do you explain an alien world to those who have never seen it? How do you explain a way of life that is completely foreign to those listening or reading? How do you explain a way of life that once existed but no longer does — and fades farther into the remote past with each passing day? How do you explain experiences, hopes and dreams that, at the time, everyone thought not only ‘could’ come to pass but ‘would’ eventually come to pass? How do you explain a world so recent as to be within the span of a single lifetime and yet so distant as to have become a fading myth to even the following generation? Do you start it off like a fairly tale with ‘once upon a time’? How do you tell even your own children what it was like to grow up in the same little country town that they grew up in thirty years before the youngest of them was born and almost sixty years ago?

Can we take our cue from that lilting, forlorn and yet hopeful song from the musical ‘Cats’? Can we echo Andrew Lloyd Rice and Tim Webber in their hope that the ‘memories’ will ‘live again’? How can those memories ever live again when the only possible people for who they ‘can’ live are those who share them… and any to whom they try to relate them to are so removed from the time that it’s impossible for them to relate to even the smallest part of them?

It really was a different world then. I have often wondered what happened to that world. I know they say that things are “better” now, but I wonder. It was a great time to be a kid, it really was. I wish that my kids had grown up in a time like the one that I grew up in – and that theirs could.

I know, there was no air conditioning in homes or cars, no color television — no television at all for most. There were no special effects in movies to speak of, television was new (we were the first generation to grow up with it). There were cars with standard transmissions (most of them still) and no air conditioning (most of them unless you had one about like my dads or Price Daniels’ or Uncle Earl Long’s and most folks couldn’t afford that. But there were other things.

Of course, we had all of the “childhood” diseases. We had chicken pox, mumps and measles. I had all three and they didn’t kill me. We also had isolated cases of scarlett fever and rheumatic fever still. It was my generation that was the last to see a major polio epidemic hit. I have several friends who had it. One’s still paralyzed from the waist down today. Two have gone on. One of them passed away when she was only six or seven years old. The other spent twenty-odd years of her life in an iron lung. There are already people – and have been for some time — who have never seen or heard of that kind of living death. No, it wasn’t a perfect time by any means.

Rock and Roll was brand new for us and so was FM radio. Cassettes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs, iPods and MP-3s were thirty years in our future at least and none of us even dreamed there’d ever be anything like that. We lay on the living room floor and watched flickering images in grainy black and white on a screen not much bigger than a cigarette pack as Bobby Vinton, Elvis and the Shirelles… Sandra Dee and others performed. We sand along with the Mouskateers and added our own names to the end of the ‘roll call’ of the singing, dancing kids who were so much like us — or so much the way we saw ourselves.

We’d walk or ride our bikes downtown to the theatre, pay our half-dollar (admission for two) and watch terrible ‘B’ grade science fiction movies showing as a Saturday Matinee. Sometimes it was a double feature. There was always a newsreel, cartoon and previews of coming attractions. How do you explain to kids today about a movie theatre showing all that for a quarter — and for years throwing in a ‘short feature’ like Buck Rogers, Captain Video and his Video Ranger, Flash Gordon or a ‘two reel’ comedy like Our Gang or the Three Stooges? How do you explain that a large ‘Cherry Coke’ was a quarter (with two straws of course) or that a large bag of popcorn (likewise enough for two) was ten cents?  We’d leave for the movie with a dollar between us and have fifteen cents left over after the show. It cost less than a dollar for two kids to have a whole Saturday afternoon of fun in a tiny little East Texas country town.

After the movie – almost always science fiction on Saturdays — until the ‘beach party’ craze hit a few years later (and we saw all of those movies too) we’d leave the theatre dreaming of one day traveling in space. That theatre and a now long-gone roller rink were the highlights of Saturday entertainment for kids of my generation. They were places that kids could go safely, enjoy themselves and their parents never had to worry about what they saw or were exposed to.

We saw a truly good science fiction movie a few years later and actually dreamed of living in space by the year 2001. It didn’t happen of course. The year 2001 became a year of tragedy. For me, one of those tragedies was extremely personal.  But, long before that, ‘other things’ became more important. There was Vietnam, Watergate and Iran-Contra – a dozen other ‘events’ that managed to mask over the vanishing of an era and possibly cause that disappearance in part. Our world was never the same again. But – we saw the first satellites, a little dog named ‘Liaka’ and chimps named ‘Ham’ and “Able”. We stood on the front porch under the stars and watched a tiny specks float by overhead that contained first Gagarin and then Glenn. We saw ‘all’ of the first men and women in space. We saw man walk on the moon for God’s sake.

We had no metal detectors or guards in schools, no drugs and no violence to speak of. You could go to bed at night with your doors unlocked and your windows open. You could stop on the side of the road and eat at a roadside park, use the toilet or take a nap. Nobody would bother you.  There were no “drive by” shootings. We all walked or rode our bikes to school. We kids rode our bikes or walked just about everywhere and as long as we got home around dark nobody got worried. Even then they didn’t worry about crime, just about accidents and such. We didn’t have fancy electronic toys and games.

There wasn’t a lot of crime, even nationwide. People like Charles Starkweather and Eddie Gein were anomalies – horror stories from far away that were whispered about but thankfully didn’t happen every day and never happened in the place where you lived. We never dreamed there’d be anyone like Manson, Bundy, Gacey or Dahmer. Not quite the same today I’m afraid. It started changing at some point in the mid sixties. Our first real exposure to anything like that in Texas was the infamous ‘bell tower shooter’ but even then it was something truly unbelievable and something ‘far away’ to most of us. Austin was a ‘big city’ after all – nothing like that could happen in our little town. It never did and even though the crime rate now – especially violent crime — would have nauseated any of us fifty years ago or so, it still hasn’t. But — how do you explain to today’s generation, and those to come — growing up in a town that had one Chief of Police and four patrolmen for a population of four thousand? Between the years that I was born and the graduated from high school – that’s 18 years — our county had six murders. Not one of those was premeditated.

There was no vandalism — unless you count ‘class of ’70 graffiti painted on the side of the town water tank or a few fire lookout towers as vandalism. A major theft made ‘big’ news in the weekly paper — maybe once or twice a year. It was the same with any violent crime of any kind. Our jail had a capacity for 20 inmates and usually contained two or three at any given time, for very short times for things like public intoxication or ‘disorderly conduct’. There was no ‘gang’ or drug culture. The most serious ‘offense’ any teenager was ever charged with was stealing an occasional watermelon from some farmer’s field or crossing the river into Louisiana and bringing a few cans of beer into our ‘dry’ county.  No one ever went to jail for it. The constable would just make who ever he caught pour it out one can at a time, let them go, and then call their parents. Once or twice a year the highway patrol would catch a few drag racers on some deserted road or out on the old (deserted) airport runway. They did the same thing. No one went to jail. They got sent home and later someone called their parents — end result being ‘grounded’ for a few days or a week. I’ll be entering my seventh decade of life soon — with a little luck. Isn’t it amazing just how much difference just short years — or is it a few all-too-short decades can make?

During hunting season all of the boys old enough to have a license had a shotgun hanging in the back window of their pick-ups — even when they were parked at school. So did all of the teachers who hunted. As soon as class was over they’d all head for the woods. There was never any thought of crime. Little kids played with toy soldiers and toy guns at recess in elementary school. I don’t recall it causing any sporadic violence of any kind and all that I know of — all 500 who attended my school from grade 1 to 12 — grew up to be responsible adults.

On weekends when our girlfriends were somehow occupied we boys would load up our camping and fishing gear and head off to one of the local lakes for an overnight campout. Lots of people kept flat-bottomed boats at these lakes and they were never locked up. All of the owners knew all of us kids and knew that if we used one of their boats on one of our weekend excursions they’d find it in the same shape, or better, than they’d left it in. We never took any food with us other than cooking oil and maybe a five-pound sack of potatoes. We intended to catch our supper and usually did. Such irresponsible parenting as our folks demonstrated in things like this would cause a huge hue and cry today but as far as I recall, no one ever drowned or managed to get any serious injury — except maybe a case of poison ivy if you weren’t watching what you were doing at times.

Naturally we all had to be home early on Sunday morning. We all went to church back then. There were only seven denominations and about ten in Center Texas at the time — Methodist, Baptist, Catholic,

Episcopal, Nazarene, Christian (Disciples of Christ) and Church of Christ. All of us went to one or the other and most of us visited between them when something ‘special’ was going on. That was just our culture. It was how we expected things to be and how we expected them always to be. There was no  ‘moral majority’ then and no ‘Christian Right’. It didn’t matter which church you went to. We all knew what was ‘moral’ and what was ‘right’ or it certainly seems like far more did then than do now. There weren’t any ‘mega-churches’ then. They were all tiny by today’s standards and every preacher or priest in town knew everyone they passed on the street whether they went to ‘their’ church or not. Two of those preachers and one priest married over half of the kids that I attended school with, including my late wife and me. That doesn’t happen too often today, does it?

Some of my happiest childhood memories were trips that Sherry and I took with my father and with hers. We’d both been all over the Far East by the time we were ten years old with her folks, and we both knew just about every actor, actress and politician who lived in the South and Southeastern United States, or worked in them by traveling with my folks.

There was no “terrorism” then and the “twin towers” hadn’t even been built yet. There were no ‘threat levels’. At the airport you just showed your ticket and a passport if you needed one and got on the plane. There were no HLS or TSA goons standing around. There were no ‘full body scans’ even for little kids. If there was ever any trouble at the airport, even at a big one like LaGuardia or LAX –which there never was – they just called the regular cops.

Flying in ‘Old Connie’ — a propeller driven Lockheed ‘Super Constellation’ — was an exciting adventure. There was a galley with ‘real food’. If you were flying overnight they had “sleeper” compartments like on a train. We watched ‘first run’ movies twice a day — long trips even by airplane usually took more than one day back then. The Airlines always had a ‘stew’ to keep an eye on underage kids traveling without parents — from the age of about five to fifteen. The seats were big and roomy.  ‘Old Connie’ only carried 64 passengers. There was a single wide isle and as long as you didn’t bother anyone no one cared if a couple of kids got up and moved around some as long as the ‘seat belt’ sign was turned off. Since back then you never changed planes, they only refueled the one you were on, serviced it and changed crews if the flight crew’s hours were maxed out, there was no chance of getting lost — or ’snatched’ — in a strange airport. Our folks didn’t think anything of buying us tickets and putting us on the plane. Why should they?

Remember trains that carried people? On trains you had comfortable seats, ‘Pullman’ sleeper cars, a dining car, a ‘club’ car and lots of room to move around. No one would dare bother a couple of little kids traveling alone on a train either. The Railways had stews all kept an eye on kids too. It was part of their job. It was just like riding ‘Old Connie’. You never changed trains so there was no chance of getting lost or ‘snatched’. Kids weren’t allowed off the train until their final destination, and even then a stew was with them until their parents or guardians listed on their tickets claimed them.

We made our own fun. We hunted and fished and swam. We swam in creeks, lakes, canals and ponds. If it was really hot we’d just strip off and jump in. Nobody thought anything about it. We certainly didn’t. All of it was outdoors in a place where pollution and deliberate waste hadn’t yet been seen. There weren’t any shopping malls or ‘super-stores’ then but on Saturday kids would walk around the town square — where all of our shopping was located — and dream about some ‘new’ or really ‘cool’ thing that they wanted. Maybe we’d go to one of the two local drug stores and sit at the table they provided and read comic books. They let us do that whether we intended to buy the comic or not. Can’t do that any more either I’m afraid.

I’ve often thought that my idea of ‘heaven’ if there is such a place, would either be one of those prolonged road trips through the south and southeast that we made as kids or to be sitting with Sherry just one more time in the lobby of the old Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans watching my dad, a professional wrestler named ‘Sputnik’ Monroe and a man named Foster Sharrod sitting there seeing just how drunk they could get and playing cards with Uncle Earl Long and Judge Leander Perez while my Dad tried to convince Uncle Earl that the State of Louisiana really ‘did’ need to buy a new one-off Lincoln for the Governor, and that he personally needed to buy one for Miss Blaze. No, it may not be ‘heaven’ but it’s about as close as I’d ever want to get. I would like to be an adult thought and remember “now” when I’m there as much as I remember “then” today. I’d have a certain ‘perspective’, no, make that ‘attitude’.

Oh, I know, all of them were so crooked they had to screw them into the ground when they died, but at least they were open and up front about it and they did some good as well. They didn’t try to hide what they were behind a mask of pomposity and arrogance or religious mumbo-jumbo. When they stole, and they did, they didn’t try to take it all. They at least left something for everyone else.

I remember one speech in which Uncle Earl told a group of people in Alexandria Louisiana, where he’d gotten a particularly cold reception that they could vote against him if they wanted to “but God help you if I get elected anyway”. They did. He kept his promise. It was four years before there was any significant highway or bridge repair in Rapides Parish. We won’t even begin a discussion of Judge Perez.

Uncle Earl died on election night in 1960. He had a major heart attack not five minutes after hearing that JFK had won, but hadn’t heard the news about the latest ‘upset landslide’ that he’d just won in his own race for the US Senate. We were over in Biloxi that next morning with my dad and I remember seeing Senator Bilbo (remember him?) make the announcement of Uncle Earl’s death on one of the local TV stations. I remember I cried and Daddy took Sherry and me with him to the funeral. We sat two seats down from Miss Blaze.

They say that there were a lot of ‘Civil Rights’ problems and issues around the time that I grew up but honestly in a little-bitty East Texas town deep in the ‘piney woods’ we just didn’t notice any. There were as many blacks as whites in our county — practically no other people of any kind — and we all got along fine. We kids played together and no one paid any attention to it. We went to different schools until I was 11 years old or so but they were so close together no one noticed. There were four schools located on two campuses. All of us kids together totaled just over 500. When ‘desegregation’ came, we just shuffled kids around between schools that were all within a few blocks of each other and created a ‘junior high school’ that we’d never had before. Up until then elementary school lasted from grades 1 to 8. There wasn’t any such thing as ‘junior high’. Since all of the schools were built about the same time there really wasn’t any difference in them as far as the facilities went. There was just a different view from the window to break up the usual cases of boredom.

We had no fights other than the usual playground and parking lot scuffles over girlfriends and boyfriends. We had the usual ‘after the game’ fights with our football rivals from time to time. None of them were particularly violent or malicious. There were certainly never any weapons of any kind produced unless you call some little kid squaring off with a much bigger one with a roll of dimes in his fist a ‘weapon’. That might have happened once or twice. No one ever wound up in jail or the hospital.

We all knew where the local ‘lover’s lanes were located and as soon as we boys had cars — that term is applied fairly loosely to some of our vehicles — we managed to find them all a time or two every week. Going ‘parking’ was another standard ‘pastime’. It just didn’t mean quite the same thing that it means now, or meant even a few years later. We were all part of the ‘Eisenhower Years’… we grew up with Annette and Frankie and Sandra Dee. We held hands and kissed and we had fun. Did some of us end up marrying those girls we went ‘parking’ with. Of course we did. I’d say more than half of us did. But — not because we ‘had to’. I’m sure a few did ‘have to’ — positive of it in fact. Don’t kid yourself. Kids know. But, with the society we grew up in and as close as we all were, they would most likely have gotten married eventually anyway. As far as I know, our generation, at least in my little hometown, has one of the lowest divorce rates around. You see, back then things like love, and truth and real devotion meant something, at least to the vast majority of us.

What happened to parades on Veterans’ Day and the 4th of July? What happened to ‘County Fairs’? What happened to sock-hops in the school gym on Friday nights? Where did they go? How could such important things vanish so slowly as to not be noticed until after they were gone — and then only by those who remember them at all? How do you tell even your own children about a time when you personally remember people who couldn’t drive at all or those who simply preferred to still ride a horse or in a buggy? How do you explain to even your own children that you remember some – a few of those long-gone parades in which men who had fought in the US war with Spain actually marched? Most kids today don’t even know that there was such a war or that it was in what we (my generation) called ‘the last century’. Now, my generation and the little town that I grew up in and love still so much are part of ‘the last century’. It’s a strange thing to consider but it’s true. There is now an entire generation of children – born after the turn of the century — who do not and cannot remember a year that did not begin with the number ‘2’. Some of those are my own grandchildren. In thirty years or so when their parents are the age that I am now, how many of my faded memories will their own faded memories contain to pass along? Who will the strangely dressed people and what will the odd-looking old buildings in the old and faded photographs be to them? Let’s see. Thirty years from now. That will be almost 100 years since the earliest of those photos were taken. I wonder if any of them will still think that they live in a ‘quaint’ little country town. I hope so, but I doubt that it would fit my own definition of that term.

What happened to the local teenage ‘hang-outs’ like Center’s ‘Rider’s Roost’ (named after our football team the ‘Roughriders’) or the Youth Center (where we’d have a dance every Saturday night and some local live group once each month? Where are they? When were the ‘Dairy Queen’ and ‘Handy Andy’s’ replaced by McDonalds and Burger King? When was Mr. Brice’s market on the town square replaced by the ‘Walmart Superstore’? What happened to the Soda fountain at Roger’s Drug and that nice Miss Jackie Phillips who once took such great care in serving us kids the best ice cream sodas and sundaes ever made? Gone now. All gone.

No, it wasn’t a perfect world back then — not by any means. But, yes, I miss those times – and those people. I miss my hometown. There’s still a town called Center Texas. I suppose there always will be, but where is the town that I call ‘home’? They say it’s experiencing a real ‘boom’ now. I don’t know. It’s been almost 15 years since the last time I went ‘home’ and it was almost unrecognizable to me then. I can’t even imagine what a ‘boom’ would be like.

I was recently told about, and shown some beautiful photos of the restoration of our County Courthouse and the few scattered county buildings around it to their original appearance. Those few buildings in Shelby County are the last examples of ‘Irish Castle’ architecture in the State of Texas – all of them built by J.J.E. Gibson in 1885. They’re beautiful and deserved the care and attention that they were given. But — no one ever goes downtown anymore. There’s no shopping downtown anymore. Even the county and city offices have moved out of downtown. Were it not for the recently renovated movie theatre and one remaining bank no one would have any reason to go to our town square any more at all. So dies a little country town. The town lives, but those things that made it unique — and the best of all possible worlds for a kid of the fifties to grow up in — are gone. Of all the buildings surrounding our courthouse square only three outside the courthouse complex retain their original façade or even the façade that they had when I was growing up in the fifties. Two of those, like the courthouse, have been restored. The third is an empty shell but still recognizable to those who remember when it was the best-stocked hardware store in two counties.

They say that you can ‘take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy’. That’s true. They also say that ‘home is where the heart is’, but that’s not quite correct. Your home is always in your heart — but it’s also in you mind and in your memories. People often ask me why I so rarely go ‘home’. My answer is hard for some of them to understand but to me it’s so crystal clear that it defies further explanation. I tell them all the same thing. I ‘do’ go home. I go home for at least a few minutes almost every day. All I have to do to go home is close my eyes and remember a time and place — and people — who now live only in the recesses of my mind and the very deepest recesses of my heart.

© 2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron. All rights reserved unless granted specifically