The Battery That Wouldn't Die

According to this story, this battery has been producing electricity since 1950. I have a story that is slightly different. This is the story of the zombie battery that came back from the dead.

My grandmother had a simple, battery-operated wall clock in her house. When she died in the late 70s, my mom took it to our house and hung it on the wall. Not long after, it's pair of Eveready D batteries died and the clock stopped. She never replaced the batteries, nor got rid of the clock. It just hung on the wall, I suppose as a reminder of her deceased mother.

I'm guessing around 1990 or 91, one night mom called me, breathless and a little scared. She said, do you remember Mamaw's old clock?

Yes, I said.

It's running, she said.

She just happened to notice that the time had changed, and upon closer examination saw that the second hand was moving. No telling how long it had been running, but the old clock continued running for several more hours on 15 year old dead D batteries, before stopping again. It's still on her wall, but it has never run since.

Common sense says that batteries that have been dead for 15 or so years don't just suddenly recharge themselves. Yet that's what they did. There's no rational scientific explanation for it. E pur si muove.

Halloween Ghost Stories

I used to live in a haunted house. Not a house where you hear the occassional bump in the night or get a prickly feeling on the back of your neck. I'm talking about a house where you'd lay in bed and listen to the people talking in the hall, and you'd stay in bed even though your bladder was about to burst just to not have to walk into a dark bathroom. It was the sort of house where you didn't want to spend the night alone. When you had to, you slept with the television on so you didn't hear people shouting your name.

This was the house I grew up in. We moved there when I was in sixth grade and I lived there, off an on, until I was 26. A few years after I got married, my wife and I moved back into this house. It's the house where my first son was born. I suspect that when I die, I'll end up haunting that house. I can't escape it, not even in my dreams.

We always had pets when we were living there. Sometimes our old dog Frisky would stop and stare into a corner, hackles raised, growling. Then he'd relax and go on like nothing had happened, leaving you sitting on the couch staring into the corner, afraid to move.

One night, I was in the back bedroom digging for something in the closet, when I heard a little girl scream in the den. She was screaming like she was being murdered. I ran down the hall and found the cat crouched in the middle of the floor. As I entered the room, he threw up. No little girl.

But later, my wife's niece was at the house. We were in the kitchen and we heard her playing by herself in the den. I walked in and said, hey, whatcha doing?

Playing with my new friend.

Who is your new friend?

The little girl who lives in the fireplace.

Happy Halloween

I Hear Dead People

According to a new study, nearly 1-in-10 children, ages 7-8, hears disembodied voices on a regular basis, but there is no evidence that this is a signal of impending schizophrenia, according to the scientists.

Uh. That's good to know. However, it does leave unanswered the question, why are they hearing voices?

It is proven that, like dogs, children can hear sounds that adults can't hear. If it's perfectly reasonable that kids can hear a ring tone that adults can't hear, why is it suggestive of possible mental illness that they hear voices that other people can't?

Maybe they really are hearing voices. Did anyone ever consider that possibility? 

I suggest an experiment. Give these kids electronic audio recording devices, disguised as event counters, and tell them to press the counter button any time they hear voices. When the button is pressed, the recorder turns on for 60 seconds. After a month, collect the recorders, play back the devices and see if they picked up anything.

Seems a worthwhile experiment if you aren't in the least interested in the future of your scientific career.

Wooooooooooo! Wooooooooooo!

Go Back to Bed

If you haven't checked out The Paranormal Pastor blog, you ought to, because the man knows how to tell a good ghost story.

What I'm offering today isn't really a ghost story. But let me preface this by saying that I grew up in a haunted house. Ask anybody who ever visited, much less spent the night there, and they will tell you hell yes that was one spooky-ass place.

When I was about 22, I was living at home and working nights, so I would sleep through the day. One afternoon I woke up to the sound of voices. Nothing particularly unusual about that, as we heard voices there quite often. But these were the voices of two men having a conversation. I got out of bed and walked to the den, where I found two men standing by the door to the sunroom talking about something. I don't know what they were saying.

One of them saw me and said, "He's awake."

The other man turned to me and said, "Go back to bed."

So I did. I went back to bed and fell asleep without a second thought. Only when I woke up a couple of hours later did it occur to me how strange this was.

This isn't a ghost story. I'm not sure what kind of story it is. I may have been dreaming, but it doesn't feel like a dream. The memory is vivid because of its high strangeness.

Here We Go Again

In Perils of House Hunting, I told you about my experiences with the paranormal while shopping for a new house.

Having lived in haunted houses before, finding an unhaunted house was high on my list of priorities when looking for a new place to live. When we found our new house, one of the reasons I liked it so much was because it seemed to be something of a clean slate. The house is only 13 years old (which is no guarantee) but I couldn't sense anything negative or positive about it, and my youngest son never expressed any uneasy feelings, either. It seemed to be the perfect place.

Not long after moving in, my wife told me she had been seeing movement out of the corner of her eye quite a bit, but I still hadn't experienced anything unusual until the other day when I saw a chihuahua walking toward me from the dining room. We don't have a chihuahua, but the previous owners had five or six.

If the ghost of a chihuahua is the worst I have to deal with, I can live with that. But this past Saturday morning, something even more strange happened. My work ID disappeared right out of my hand. Seriously. I was holding it one minute, and the next minute I wasn't. I couldn't remember where I had set it down. I searched the house top to bottom. I looked everywhere I had been since I picked it up. It was gone.

Sunday night I found it at the bottom of the kitchen junk drawer. I don't remember putting it there. I'm pretty sure I didn't put it there. So, apparently my prankster spirit has finally tracked me down. This is how it began last time - when my car keys disappeared for a day.

Alas.

Treasure Hunting

I've just gone through all 200-odd posts and added tags so my loyal readers can more easily search for the little nougets of wisdom hidden throughout this sucky blog.

In doing so, I've also noticed some areas of weakness on my part. Clearly, I'm not writing enough about sex or ghosts, so I need to work on that. Also, I've got more Harry Potter posts than Lord of the Rings posts, and that ain't right. Things that suck (at #2) is blowing the pants off Things that don't suck (just 3 posts!), and I've got way too many People are stupid posts, so I need to work on my attitude and try to be more positive. It would help if people weren't so stupid.

Now, I'm completely exhausted. I think I'll take a nap and maybe have sex with a ghost while watching Lord of the Rings.

The Unexpected Perils of House Hunting

Lately, I've been researching paranormal investigation methods as part of the rewrite for my new novel. In so doing, I am reminded of something that happened to me summer of '07 while shopping for houses.

I met my real estate agent, Angela (not her real name) at a foreclosure house in Olive Branch. As we approached the door, Angela told me that she had stopped by the house the day before to check it out, because it was such a good house in a good location and she hadn't known that it was for sale until I mentioned it to her. So while she's trying to unlock the door, she tells me that the day before she was having a hard time getting the door open and had the distinct impression that somebody was on the other side of the door trying to keep her out. As she's saying this, she can't get the door unlocked, so I step up to help and I can't get it unlocked. Finally, the key works for her and the door unlocks.

We enter the house and it's in a state. Not the worst I'd ever seen (that came a couple of weeks later, in the house with no cabinet doors and a pile of shit on the stairs), but still pretty bad. So Angela tells me that she didn't even look at the upstairs because once she got in the house, she could have sworn somebody was upstairs, so she left after a quick walk through.

Now she heads for the kitchen, while I take a turn through the dining room. Just as I walk around the corner, a toilet upstairs flushes. I get into the kitchen and say, is that a toilet? She says, I think so, and then we both hear somebody walking around upstairs.

Discretion being the better part of valor, we decide this house won't work for me and hightail it. But on the way out the door, I glance into the downstairs half bath and it looks like something out of Amityville - wallpaper peeling in strips down the walls.

We get outside and I photograph all the upstairs windows, hoping to get a glimpse of the intruder peering out, but nothing shows up in my pictures. We move on and I see about a billion other houses ove the following year until finally, in August '08, we pick out the house we will eventually buy. I turn around and there, kittycorner across the street from our new house, is that haunted foreclosure from last summer.

All I can say is, I am damn glad I didn't move there. But I wonder if I should tell the current owners. I figure sooner or later we'll see them leave in the middle of the night.

Another house hunting ghost story:

Last spring, a fine old house came up for sale in old town Olive Branch, on Pigeon Roost Road three doors down from the elementary school. It was an interesting old place, sitting on an acre and a half of land right there in the middle of the city, and the price was within reason, provided it didn't need too much immediate work. After looking it over and talking it over with my father, we were almost on the point of buying it. We thought we could move in and do a little bit at a time and end up with a real showpiece.

With a house that old, though, you have to expect there will be some residue. There's going to be a ghost, or repeating phantasms, or something. I was very conscious of this every time I looked at the place. I tried to feel for it, because I can usually tell a haunted house just by looking at it. But my impressions about this place were ambiguous at best. I thought the house could work for us.

So I was over there one afternoon with my youngest - the ghost attractor. Remember him?

We're looking around, checking out the barn and stuff. We're there about twenty minutes when all of a sudden, with no obvious outside stimulus, he says, Daddy I want to go home now. I don't like this house. It's scary. And he heads for the car. I open the door and he climbs inside by himself, which he almost never does, and asks me to shut the door and can we please go NOW!

So over the next few days, I drive by the house a few times with him in the car, just to see if his opinion will change. Every time he sees it, he says, that's a scary house. I ask, do you want to stop and look at it and he says, in no uncertain terms, no he doesn't want to stop, he doesn't want to live there.

I've read The Shining. We didn't buy the house.

Don't Leave Me Here All Alone

Excellent Memphis ghost story from our local scholar of the obscure, Mr. Vance Lauderdale.

I'm Looking Through You

I'm Looking Through You by Jennifer Finney Boylan

In my capacity as editor of Southern Gothic and Postcards From..., I see a lot of ghost stories. It's damned hard to write a good ghost story without slipping into cliche, because the ghost is the very unliving embodiment of horror cliche. Even great writers find themselves struggling with ghost stories.

Jennifer Finney Boylan can write ghosts, Jack. I don't often get a chill reading a book , but I definitely suffered a few chills reading this one. Funny thing, it's non-fiction, but it reads like the best fiction, which, coming from me, is a compliment. Funnier thing, it's not a horror story, which is why it makes a great ghost story.

Just to make a completely unfair comparison, we could probably agree that Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is one of the great ghost stories of all time (along with Peter Straub's Ghost Story). You can certainly see the early chapters of Hill House in Boylan's description of the Astrid Hotel and environs. But I would suggest that Hill House isn't nearly as good a story as I'm Looking Through You, which also beats Ghost Story hands down. True, they are completely different works of genre - horror fiction versus memoir, but if horror fiction can't achieve the believability of memoir, it fails entirely. And although the final chapter of Looking Through You might verge ever so slightly into sentimentality (but what memoir doesn't?), at least she doesn't plow her car into a tree at the end of the tale.

You've got to appreciate that.

Who You Gonna Call?

See the ghost?





A couple of weekends ago, my econowife, OfJeff, was looking through some old photos she had found at her grandparents' house, when she came across this early 1950s photo of her mother and uncle.


Her mother's face, as you can see, is almost completely obscured by what appears to be the ghost of a man.


Of course, this is simply a double exposure. We're not sure who "the ghost" is. OfJeff's first impulse was to call him "the milkman" for reasons she was unable to explain. The fact that he's so small pretty much assures that it is a double exposure, because you'd think a ghost would be in proportion to the other people in the picture. But then again, who knows?


It's still kind of creepy, though.