I am a rational man. I believe in science. And in my present phase of life, I am almost an atheist. Anti-spiritual. There is only the world. And my thoughts about it. And I’m comfortable with that.
But I wasn’t always this way. I was raised a Christian. With all the charming myths of that faith. My brain was reared in a world with a Devil. Angels. Spirits. Life after death. Good. And Evil. And all that believing in the supernatural in church on Sunday, meant also that the folk tales of ghosties and ghoulies and monsters and the like. They were all possible.
And in the trap doors of my mind, those spaces where I have not exorcised all things irrational, these concepts lurk. Who among us hasn’t lived a full-life and encountered something difficult to explain in rational terms. A miracle. An unexplained phenomenon. A chill in the night.
Yesterday, in the spirit of the season, I remembered a wonderful tale read to me in grade school. Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Scarcely had the memory materialized before I was out the door and at the book shop, snapping up a collection of Irving’s works, so that I might read the story to my own daughters as a Halloween treat.
An hour later, my wife and youngest daughter were sound asleep on the couch, as I intoned on. Irving’s prose is by no means modern. But the story is enthralling. And I was pleased that my oldest shares my appreciation for the delights of the English language. And a tale designed, not only to frighten, but to enlighten the human spirit at the same time.
The Legend whetted my appetite. Today, with my nephew staying over for Devil’s night, we decided to go out for a few more frights. We went to the local scout-sponsored haunted house. And it was pretty good this year. A true maze. Dark. With strobe lights and masked-scouts doing their best to make our hearts beat faster. Sneaking behind us. Jumping out. Cheap thrills. Good old fashioned fun in the heartland.
But my wife and I wanted to give our nephew an even bigger scare. So we decided to take him to the most haunted place in Lansing.
About eighty years ago, a crazed mass-murderer blew up a local school. The scene of the school is now a memorial. And it is known to locals to be something of a local haunt. Legend has it that restless spirits roam the place.
Five or so years ago we visited the site on Halloween. And it was pretty spooky. It was a cold night. And we had creepy crawly skin just being there. We took a couple of photos at the scene. And when we got them back, we were pretty freaked when one of the photos had a whitish blur of light. We didn’t see or feel anything at the memorial that night, other than a scary atmosphere we had created ourselves. But the picture kind of freaked us out a bit.
So we had mostly forgotten about the place. Never visited it again. Until tonight. We wanted to give our visiting kin a fright to remember. So we built up the tale a bit. Embellished the legend, with our own flourishes about how the spirits of the restless particularly come out on Devil’s night. How they can sometimes be seen in photographs after the fact.
We spun such a frightening tale on the drive to the haunted school yard, that our youngest daughter, five, refused to get out of the van. She was scared. I stayed with her. While my wife, oldest daughter, and nephew went to satisfy their Halloween craving for fear.
I watched them in the shadows. Reading the memorial plaque. Walking to the steeple which had been salvaged from the original explosion, and sits on the site like a landmark of the horror that had occurred. My youngest eventually grew brave and joined her older playmates. Romping in the night. My wife snapped a few photos. I stayed in the van. Not really wanting to get out. It is a bit morbid. The lengths to which I would go to build a Halloween memory.
My wife made it back to the van first. And though I was unable to see it in the manner of her walk in the shadows, when I could finally see her face, she was visibly shaken.
“I’m so freaked out,” she whispered. Her voice was frightened. Such that it gave me a chill.
“Why? What?” I said. My rational mind so willing to give way.
“I could smell fires burning,” she said. “Just in certain spots. Did you see me stopping? They were like little spots of fire.”
I had in fact seen her stop in her evening jaunt across the haunted school yard, but hadn’t known the reason.
The kids made it back right on her heels. They were laughing and giggling. A giddiness. A bit of fright. But all in good fun. I laughed with my wife. Shaking away the fright. We live in a rational world, after all. Small fires do not burn. School children blown up before the Great Depression do not haunt memorial grounds.
Still, we went straight to the one-hour photo lab. My wife even begged the counter girl to stay and develop our pictures, as it was coming to the end of her shift. And the counter girl agreed, only after my wife told her our silly, scary tale.
We grabbed a bite to eat. My nephew is a charming young man. At eight, he has already won a state wrestling title, and he is the pride of our family — a long line of wrestlers. But he has so much more to offer the world. Just a delight. Young people. All of them. Hard to imagine a world where a man would deliberately blow up an entire school full of children like those with whom I dined.
We scooted to the one-hour photo. I stayed in the van with the kids as my wife ran in. We all laughed and joked about a plastic bag that skimmed its way across the asphalt lot, as if on small feet. Sneaking stealthily toward our van. It was a ghost we giggled. A ghost. Something to laugh at.
My wife came out just as the plastic bag scurried across her path, to hide under a car, awaiting smaller prey. As my wife approached, I could see she looked a bit quizzical. But smiling. She jumped in the car.
“So?” I said.
“She said there were lights,” my wife said. Giddy. She was ripping the photos out of the packet as I drove from the lot. The children were clamoring in the back seat. “She said there were no ghosts, but when I told her we had seen lights before, she said, ‘Oh! There were definitely lights.’ “
We all flipped out. There are red lights. White lights. Things that should not be there. My skin crawls even as I write. Were my children alone in that school yard. Or were they surrounded by dozens of those faded to some twilight, visible only to our little gizmos.
I’ll let you judge. If I can figure out how to post these photos. But I’ll tell you my verdict. The children were sufficiently weirded out that they needed to be calmed. And I fell back to something pulled right out of a deep corner of my mind. I’m not sure if what I said was bullshit, made up just to allow them to try to go to sleep, or if it has some basis in legends of old. But I told them, “You don’t have to worry about spirits like that. As long as that Jack O’ Lantern is still burning when we get home, those spirits can’t follow us. That’s what it’s for. It keeps the spirits away on Halloween night.”
The pumpkin was burning. And the kids are settling down for bed. And I am a rational man.
