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

Harvests and Hauntings- Autumn in Michigan

It’s autumn again. Breathe it in. The cool air rushes in; and a patchwork of colors dot the landscape, making the world look like an open box of crayons ready to be played with. The pungent smell of dried leaves and wood fires fill the air; and our memories are pulled back to childhood images of candy corn and apples.

With the changing season also comes that carefree holiday that brings excitement and chills to child and adult alike.

Call it what you will- All Hallows Eve, Samhain, Halloween- it is nevertheless a magickal time of year when the veil between worlds is thinnest. That isn’t just a philosophical point, but one of natural science; the Autumnal Equinox that ushers in the arrival of fall is marked by an equal 12 hours of day and night as the fruits of the summer harvest give way to the slumber of winter. This is the halfway point wherein we can look out across the great divide between the world of nature and the world of the paranormal.

Let’s grab our hiking boots and gather our senses as we walk together through the bustling piles of leaves on a journey among Michigan’s most haunted places.

Starting off in Detroit, the General Motors plant is said to be haunted by the spirit of a man who was crushed to death in 1944; one incident recalls a worker who was saved from a similar fate by unseen forces.

Meanwhile, over at the Detroit Coca-Cola plant, a hard lined supervisor, shot by a disgruntled worker in the 1950’s, is sometimes seen or heard yelling to keep the line running when no one from management is around. So much for the mice playing when the cat’s away.

Downriver from there, in Wyandotte, sits the Fifteenth Street House, where reports center on the apparition of a young girl who appears in the front window. As the story goes, there was a man who would leave for work at the same time every day, and so every day his daughter would eagerly wave to him from that window. But one day she was not there, and thinking she just overslept, he went to leave. Upon backing his car out of the driveway he heard a scream. In an unfortunate tragedy, she was running his lunch out to him and was struck by the car.

The Randall’s of Grand Rapids met their end through a series of incidents in 1910 that culminated in a famous murder-suicide. The home immediately played host to unexplained events before being abandoned a few years later. It was eventually torn down and the Michigan Bell phone company built their office on the land in 1924. Workers would soon share tales of apparitions, noises, and doors opening and closing. The residents of Grand Rapids have endured decades of odd late-night phone calls that, when traced, were found to originate from inside the Michigan Bell building.

In Flint, the Cornwall family’s home is now an office but they continue to walk the halls of the building that still carries the family’s name. Witnesses have seen them in the old office window facing 3^rd Street.

What’s a story about haunted places without at least one psychiatric facility on the list?

So the next stop is the Southwest Michigan Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Kalamazoo, which has benefited from a long history of stories associated with it. The abandoned hospital had tales of red lights seen filling the hallways; unexplained noises; and even writing on the walls appearing in empty rooms. Locals claim that different things happen every night including various apparitions in the windows and report hearing muffled screams and cries coming from the buildings at night. All that remains now of the sprawling $2.5-million complex is one building, with its 1895 Queen Anne water tower serving as a 175-foot tombstone for the souls who roam the grounds.

The Battenfield House in Fife Lake was the residence of one of Michigan’s most well-known mass murderers. She loved to attend social events; and to that end she poisoned several family members, using the funerals as a means of providing the social contact she so craved. The reported paranormal goings-on include burning flames seen on a stairwell post, but no burn marks or heat result from the activity.

In a little-known place located at the northeastern tip of the Upper Peninsula, a few miles north of Paradise, Michigan is the town of Sheldrake. It is a ghost town today, figuratively and literally. It’s so small you won’t even find it on a map, and the few people who still reside there do not discuss the hauntings.

The town has suffered an inordinate amount of unexplained fires and boating accidents since being founded in the 1800’s. The last one, in 1926, destroyed the town and today only a few buildings remain.

A visit to here wields results before one even arrives. An old sea captain, wearing a cape and holding a pipe, allegedly appears on the dock when boats pass by. He is first seen from the lake and as boats approach the shore, he slowly fades from the view of passengers.

The Palmer House reportedly has lights that turn on independently and shades open in empty rooms. The Hopkins House involves a glowing apparition walking through at night. A logger with heavy beard and overalls is sometimes seen on the furniture or in the doorways of the Smith House.

The most active building is the Biehl House, the people who owned the main manufacturing plant and most of Sheldrake. Voices are heard and many different apparitions have been sighted on the property, most notably a woman in a blue veil who has been known to walk beside visitors. Pictures will fall off walls, and faucets will turn on by themselves but these can be easily explained in houses so old.

Every State, and nearly every town across America, has similar stories; the locations and events are as numerous as the fallen leaves that speckle the landscape. So as you return from our journey to your quiet, comfortable home town, ask around. It, too, has its own stories to share of forgotten, unseen residents.

As you or your children head out to enjoy hayrides at cider mills and take in the serene settings of the season, look behind you and in between the shedding trees. That chill going down your spine might not be a cool autumn wind, but the hint that you just might not be alone.

© 2011 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions

© 2009

Weiser   ISBN:  978-1578634512

Paperback        192 pages

$14.95 (U.S.)

There are field guide and there are field guides.  Weiser is, apparently, planning to produce a series of field guides on a variety of topics.  This is the second one I have reviewed (see The Weiser Field Guide to Vampires previously).  My only comment on the series, so far, is that it is somewhat inconsistent.  Vampires didn’t really seem to fit the category (although it was technically well-written and interesting), whereas this volume is truer to the format.  Oh, it ranges a bit afield – monsters and vampires being technically beyond the scope of the book – but it concentrates on the various forms of ghosts and what may inspire their appearance.

The book is broken down loosely into types of ghosts, although there is a degree of overlap, as is to be expected.  There are personal anecdotes as well as “official” accounts (newspaper articles, etc.).  The types of ghosts run the gamut from Ancestral to Warning with numerous other divisions along the way.  Mr. Buckland does his best, and that is saying quite a bit, to show the differences between the various types and to explain the origins (both known and conjectured) of the spirits.

Given the current interest in “ghost hunting” (just check your local cable channels for numerous examples) it was inevitable that the author would include a section on practical ghost hunting.  In this chapter he helps you to understand the equipment which will help you in your searches as well as giving you a rough idea of the cost of such equipment.

Considering Mr. Buckland’s lengthy exposure to paranormal phenomena, and his ability to communicate information clearly and without condescension, it would be extremely difficult to do anything other than recommend this book to those interested in apparitions, ghosts, spirits, or whatever other term you would like to use to describe the apparent reappearance of those who have crossed over to the other side of the river Styx.

No doubt in my mind – if the topic of ghosts interests you and you want  more than just a collection of ghost stories, this is the book for you.

First of all, let me say that I am an American, living in Moscow. I am an executive with a major U.S./Multinational company, dealing with imaging technology. I hold a PhD in European History, and am a decorated veteran (officer), and active in my religion. I have lived in the Russian Federation for over ten years, and have lived in my current appartment for that entire time. I am married, and have four children, one of whom is currently “at home”. My wife is Russian, as are our two youngest kids. I say this to establish the fact that I am not prone to exageration, or flights of fancy.

The building that we live in has a “guardian”. Everyone in the building has seen him. He manifests himself as an old man, wearing “workers” clothes, the kind that were worn in the very early days of the century (collarles, belted tunic that pulls over his head and has only three buttons and baggy pants tucked into the tops of his boots, which are the large, heavy looking felt boots that are still common to older, working class people. He has a little visored cap… we’d call it a car cap that he usually carries stuffed in his hip pocket along with a large rag, and he sometimes is seen with a toolbox, broom, mop or some other “implament of destruction”. He looks to be about seventy years old, and his features are quite distinct, even though he is transparent, or almost so. He’s bald on top of his head, and has a van dyke beard and moustashe. His movements are slow and deliberate, just like those of an old person, and he always has a somewhat concerned look on his face. He usually has a home-rolled cigarette dangling from his mouth, and is followed by the smell of the old-fashioned, cheap, black Mikorka tobacco… the kind that hasn’t been sold, in most places, in fifty years or more.  He looks, as my wife says, like the typical “Old Soviet Man”… a phrase that is usually used to describe someone who is “slightly” behind the times… a “lovable eccentric”.

Our building was built in the early 1900′s, around 1905, and it is interesting to note that when it was built, it only had five stories… two upper stories were added in the 1940′s. Our “guardian” is never seen above the fifth floor. It is as though he does not know that the other two stories are there. Ours was one of the first private buildings in the city to have an electric lift, wihch is ome of the most common places to run into our “guardian”. The “Old” lift, which is still working, is one of the open cage variety… a steel cage with an accordion like door, and it is, to say the least, a bit tempermental. Now, getting out of it, when it stops, is easy. You just open the door from the inside and climb or drop to the next floor. It is not wired for a phone or alarm. Still, when it stops, the alarms go off on whichever floor it’s on, in the new lift, which is across the hall. At one time or another, everyone in the building has seen the old man walking away from the lift (the working one) just as the alarm goes off.

Usually, when he is seen, he is “fixing something”, or making an “inspection tour” of the building. It happens both at night and in the daytime. He does not seem to notice people around him, as if he does not see them. Most of us now believe that he was once “Nachalnik”, which is a Russian word for a cross between a building superintendet and maintaince man, and that he is still trying to carry out his job.

Even though he ignores us most of the time, he DOES know that there are people in the building, The old man is truly our “guardian”. On several occassions, the building has been in danger, twice by fire and once with a gas leak, and the alarms went off, well before the danger was noticible to the automatic system, with no one around to trigger them, manually. On one of these occassions, it happened three times before anyone noticed a smoldering fire in our garbage chute, on another, a fire in a nearby dumpster was climbing up a tree which overhung several of our balconies. Gas had filled the sub-basement, and was working it’s way toward the, basement level, furnace, but was still unnoticible to those of us in the ground level, and above floors, when the alarms sounded, and an inspection found the problem.

Children seem to see him more often than adults, although every adult in the building HAS seen him, at least once. Once, a group of us followed him, to see where he was going. He led us to a little room in the basement, near the furnace. The room is now used for storeage, but when the building was originally constructed, it was an appartment for the Nachalnik.

Over the years (I’ve lived in this building since I came to Russia in the mid-eighties) we have all taken to greeting him when we see him and calling him “Tavarich Nachalnik”, which means, “Comarade Building Superintendent”. He seems to appreciate it., and when something happens that no one can explain, or there is a noise that seems to have no detectable source… like banging on pipes in the middle of the night, or an unexpected power surge that doesn’t effect the other buildings in our block, the common comment is “it must be the Tovarich Nachalnik at work”. While I bacame aware of him about ten years ago, many of the residents of our building have lived here their entire lives, and cannot remember a time when he was not present.

On one occassion, about six months ago, I was wakened at three in the morning by someone shaking me (I was alone in the flat) and got up to find a broken water pipe flooding my kitchen. On another occassion, my neighbor, Savanov, was wakened the same way to find his stove still burning… he had forgotten to turn it off, and the wallpaper behind it was hot to the touch. Like I said, everyone in the building has had some sort of experience with him, and he has, in one way or another, helped us all out. Every kid in the building will tell you about seeing him at the door, watching them come in from school. They say he counts them to see that they are all there, and if one is not on time, he stays “on patrol” until the missing kid shows up, or until it’s obvious that they won’t. Anyone who is badly ill can count on several silent, unobtrusive visits a night until the illness passes. Everyone in the building has some story relating to the “Toverich Nachalnik”. The Fabrishnikov children’s missing cat was found locked in the coal bunker when someone pounded on the door… from the inside the densly packed sub-cellar… wifh a hammer or some other kind of heavy object.

We have all tried to find out exactly who the old man is. So far, we have two possibillties. One was a man named Petrov who was Nachalnik of our building in the early 1920′s. He died fighting a fire in the basement. The other is another former Nachalnik named Fabrishnikov (no relationship to the current occupants. It’s a common name, here… He died in 1919, during the great Spanish Influenza epidemic while tending to sick tennants.

Whichever one of them it is, we’re proud of him. We wouldn’t trade our “haunted” building for any other building in Moscow. Our “Nachalnik” is the best. Whether it is a sense of duty of some kind that keeps him on the job, or just the fact that he doesn’t realize he’s dead (which some of us suspect), we’re glad to have him with us. There is much to be said about the “Old Soviet Man”… not all of it is bad.

© 2000/2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron. All rights reserved unless  granted specifically by the author in writing.