#14 Ghost Stories - Olivia

This October has been jam packed.

I meticiously filled the month with seasonal delicacies, long walks down leaf-littered streets, jackets and scarves, and of course, Halloween movies, the cream of the scary movie genre.  But even after watching old cult classics like House on Haunted Hill and new thrillers like Paranormal Activity, I was unsatisfied.  So I picked up an addiction to ghost shows. 

I think I've already confessed this to the blog, but I don't think I've clarified the extent of my appreciation.  Ghost shows are so awesome.  The Travel Channel, The History Channel, The Sci-Fi Channel, and the Discovery Channel have all offered me great moments of intrigue with their shows.  Make fun of me if you will, but regardless of whether you're a believer or not, it's downright fascinating. 

The best part of those shows is the gadgetry.

To sniff out the dead, these dudes use heat sensors (which boggles my mind), voice recorders for EVPs (electronic voice phenomenon), motion sensor cameras, and these machines that let spirits choose words to further communications.  Some of the evidence is hokey.  Some of it is boring.  It's surprising that they can create shows out of some of it.  But on the occasion, these shows produce the unexplainable, or atleast thought provoking questions. 

Do I believe in ghosts?  In short, yes.  I believe in spirits and I believe that some things cannot be explained. But I don't buy a lot of what gets passed around as ghost stories or "evidence."

I have had one personal ghost experience myself.  It happened in my bedroom in my house in Ohio.  My sister and I have always felt uncomfortable in that room.  When we were little, we would run out of that room terrified of a "moose" ... although we all know that's silly.   As we grew older, it became my sister's bedroom and then eventually, it became my room. 

One night, I awoke to a bright light in my room.  It was small and moved around my room.  I couldn't focus on it, thinking it was just headlights from the road, but it lit up the pictures in my room in a strange way.  I sat up, trying to focus on it and it darted behind the television sitting on my dresser, silhouetting it.  That's when I realized this wasn't normal.  With my heartbeat creeping up the walls of my chest to my throat, I groped for the overhead light.  As soon as it hit the switch, flooding the room with electric light, the other light disappeared.

I spent the rest of that night on the couch.

I can't explain that night.  I don't know what it was, but I do know how it made me feel.

I don't think most ghosts, like most people, are here to scare people.  I think we're just uncomfortable with things we're not familiar.  For the most part, ghosts don't scare me. 

And I don't scare ghosts.  It's mutal respect.

Don Replies:
My favorite scary movie is "Poltergeist." I still get chills when the little girl has disappeared into the TV.  By the way, I didn't tell the story in my post about the time I woke up as a young teenager to see this ghostly white form floating at the foot of my bed.  I shook under the covers for an hour or so, but it was still there every time I looked up at it.  Eventually I worked up the nerve to touch it, and it turned out I had turned 180 degrees around in my bed when I was asleep and it the curtains above the head of my bed and not the spirit of some restless soul waiting at the end of my bed.


That's probably what happens with most ghosts.  They turn out to be something else.  Just like that light that moved around your room.  Where was that ghost coming from anyway, a rave?


Love Ya,  and don't forget to turn your clock back this weekend.  Being late for work on Monday?  Now that's scary!

#14 Ghost Stories -- Don

Today is Halloween.  Tradition holds that after dark tonight, the wall between the land of the living and the domain of the dead becomes paper thin so some unfortunates living on our side may find themselves temporarily in the Great Beyond and some of the departed may find themselves once again walking this earth.  The whole “Trick or Treat” thing came about because people used to leave food out for ghosts to bribe them into leaving them alone.  Furthermore, a lot of our superstitious ancestors had the bright idea that “if you can’t beat’em, join’em” so they would dress up as ghosts and wander around thinking that the dead would leave them alone if they thought they were just some other ghosts walking about.

Naturally, having a lot of people costuming as ghosts led to more and more ghost sightings and reifying the belief that there sure were a lot ghosts wandering about the night before All Saints Day.  I’ve never met a ghost, myself.  But I’ve had my run ins with the supernatural so I’m happy to tell you folks about them here.

When I was a kid, there was a few years when Ouija boards were popular.  They were sold in the toy section of Sears or J.C. Penny’s alongside Monopoly and Twister.

I think my parent’s generation didn’t see them as any different as any other board game that kept the kids out of their hair for a few hours.  I’m pretty sure that my parents thought the odds of their children actually conversing with the dead was about as likely as the corner drugstore actually accepting Monopoly money as real cash.

Another thing we used to do in addition to using Ouija boards was to hold séances to try to scare the heebie-jeebies out of ourselves.  Basically, we’d sit in a mostly dark room (not completely dark because we didn’t want to hurt ourselves when we finally ran for the door) and chant the name of the dead person we wanted to contact.  I don’t know why but typically it was Houdini or Amelia Earhart.  One time during one of our séances, we were doing this trick where we would lift someone off the floor by surrounding them and lifting them with just two fingers; we had my brother Dan about four feet off the floor when someone broke wind and the sound scared us so badly that we all jerked our hands away at once.  My brother was nearly knocked out when he went crashing into the floor and he ended up with a knot on the back of his head the size of a goose egg.

Now as an adult, I don’t think Ouija boards have a ghost of chance of actually contacting the dead, but I don’t think I’d want children playing with them anyway.  The whole idea seems a bit shaky; you wouldn’t let your children just go talk with random strangers so why would it be any different for talking with random dead strangers?

Okay, now here are a few of my “real encounters” with the supernatural (or, at least, the ones I’m aware of anyway).

Once about 25 years ago, I was looking to buy an old house in Racine, Ohio (where I teach).  The house had been empty for a few years and was in need of a lot of fixing up, but the price was right because the people who owned it had been left the place when their parents died, and they had no intention of ever fixing it up or moving back to Racine.  It has sat empty long enough that they had cut the price to where I could afford it even on a starting teacher’s salary.  It was a big place, and it was before I was married.  I had the idea that I could work on fixing the house up basically one room at a time and restore it over several years.

I got to the point where I was about to say “I’ll take it,” and the realtor said, “You’re pretty serious about this place, huh?” and I said something like “Yes, it’s a lot of work, but at least I think I can afford it.”

At that point, the realtor got a funny look on his face, drew a deep breath, and said, “Well, I feel obligated to tell you something, but if you ever repeat this, I’ll deny it.  I just want you to know what you’re getting into.”

“Okay,” I said.  I had no idea what he was going to tell me.

“I’m just going to come out with it,” he said.  “The first time I was in this house checking it out, I was standing at the top of the stairs on the second floor and I saw a civil war soldier standing at the bottom of the stairs as clearly as I’m looking at you now.”

“Wow,” I said.  “What happened?”

“He looked at me, and I looked at him,” the realtor said.  “It couldn’t have been more than 10 seconds but it felt like an eternity.  He turned and walked into the next room.   It took me awhile to go down those stairs, but the house was completely empty when I looked around.”

I didn’t buy the place.  If I had someone to live with me, I might have changed my mind, but I didn’t want to move into a haunted house all by myself.  Now, I know it’s possible that the realtor was pulling my leg, but he certainly didn’t have a financial motive to do so.  If he had kept quiet, he would have made a decent commission that day, and I watched the place after that; it stood empty for another year and a half before someone finally bought the place and fixed it up.  I’ve often wondered when I drive by the place if the people living there have seen anything, but there’s no way to ask, I reckon.

My other couple of ghost stories, to make them brief since I’ve already run on too long, involve the time as a college student when a wallet I owned went missing for two weeks only to reappear in the middle of my bedroom floor in plain sight (and this after I had numerous other people search my place for the wallet).

And my mother-in-law, Pat, owns a mantel clock that doesn’t work at all, but somehow on holidays (Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving), the clock knows what days it is and will randomly start to chime.  I was standing next to it one Easter when it started chiming and I know no other person was around to tamper with this clock.

Happy Halloween.  Until next week, keep in good spirits.

Olivia says:


Ouija boards are creeeeeeeeeepy.  And creepiest of all, is who thought of that?  Actually, I don't want to know.


The part about the wallet story that is particularly haunting is the fact that the forces that be seemed to know what would really get your goat the most.  If doors were slamming, or things falling off shelves, I don't think it would really phase you.  I think you would shrug to yourself and find some perfectly reasonable excuse and skip through the rest of your day.  But when they tampered with your things like your wallet, well shoot, that's personal.  


I mean, I've seen your keys misplaced non-paranormally, and you're a little still shaken up.  The mystery of your wallet wandering out from it's hiding place weeks after the fact is strange.  Like temporary paranormal identity theft.  Creeeeeeeepy.  


And Grandma's clock, somehow, though I've totally seen the haunted holiday clock in action myself, it's less creepy than the Ouija board.  Go figure.

#13 Social Networking - Olivia

The phrase "social networking" sounds redundant to me.  And like it's trying too hard.

I mean, what is networking without a social aspect?  Even with the technological element removed, striking up a conversation with someone because of the mutual benefits one could assume from such a relation, be it connections, job offers, free stuff, or even good advice, isn't that social?  Doesn't it require a smidgen of social graces at least?

And don't tell me when you're casually social that you're not getting anything out of it.

I don't know who makes up this new age media jargon.  But I agree that the shift in communication values has begun with my generation.

The internet has been forged from the fires as a modern day Swiss Army knife of sorts.  Once the ultimate tool of basic survival, the ironically neutral Swiss could make a mean knife.  It kept people alive.

The only difference in the analogy would be that instead of keeping people alive, the knife played by the part of the internet enables a very dependent lifestyle instead.  The internet becomes a survival crutch instead of a survival tool.

It's become that product you can't believe you lived without.

Within the last decade alone, we have seen writing letters, making phone calls, paying for music, and reading the newspaper fall out of normalcy.  Now, it's expected to engage in facebook, texting, downloading, and general internet surfing.

I have always been slightly leery of the changes of technology, only because I know more will come.  Nothing is permanent.  But a greater concern has stepped forward.  I call it the real life social application gap.

Essentially, despite hundreds of ways to contact people these days, it's become increasingly difficult to actually communicate - especially in person.

I recently became friends with someone who teaches seventh grade English.  She told me she was struggling with having her students edit "texting jargon" from their essays.

I hate to say it, but I feel like an old person when I say that those kind of conflicts with general writing boggle my mind.  But if we've learned anything, it's language is a fluid growing thing, so ... maybe they're on to something?  I shudder when I consider the possibilities.

It's one thing to not be able to understand your kids and something else when your kids are speaking a completely different language.

 As a communications major, I feel like I have some real concern for the future of social networking.  If there is no communication, progress stops.  I fear I hear the brakes grinding yet.

I always want to understand people and be personally understood.  I hope that we can progress to a place where expression is once again revered for quality and not efficiency.

And if not, theres always urbandictionary.com.

#13 Social Networking -- Don

A couple of weeks ago I saw the movie about the guy who founded Facebook.  It was a pretty good movie, but it’s one of those films where the conversation is so rapid and barbed that you know you’re listening to the screenwriter who had days to think about how he wanted to phrase things instead of the meager seconds the characters would have had.

I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, it’s just that when a movie is supposed to be based on real events, it’s usually the special effects that make you go, “Hmmm,  that would never happen” instead of the dialogue. 

In this movie, the film makers wanted to portray the kid who founded Facebook as a real backstabbing SOB.  The way it’s laid out in this movie, just as the stock was about to be worth millions, he duped his first partner into signing some legal documents that reduced his share from a third of the company to less than one one-hundredth of the company.  Of course, eventually he had to give his former partner (and roommate) a settlement that was worth millions, but the message of the movie is basically that the young billionaire who started the whole Facebook phenomenon needed to be sued by one of the only real friends he ever had.

It’s ironic, see, the guy who made counting your virtual friends trendy (and made himself filthy rich in the process) didn’t know how to treat his own friends in real life.  I’m not saying what happened in the movie didn’t happen, but when film makers decide to bludgeon you over the head with their message, it’s hard not to wonder what the other guy’s perspective is on how things went down.  In one review I read of the film, the screenwriter admitted that he had never met the guy he was writing about because he based the script on a book that had been written about the whole sorted story.  Perhaps if he had known the guy, maybe the main character wouldn’t have come off as both a historically astute businessman and a monumentally inept friend to his former roommate.

As for me, I have to admit that I’ve been slacking on my Facebook reading lately.  There was a time when I was a bit compulsive about checking people’s status updates, and for more than a year, I worked at have having particularly clever things to say in my own updates everyday.  Lately, however, I’ve been going for the better part of a week before checking in, and I rarely find myself reading more than the comments that show up on my first page.

So what has cured my Facebook addiction?  Another addiction, of course.  It’s odd that the time I used to spend on the computer catching up with high school friends, cousins, college buddies, and former students, I’ve been using instead to play a new video game called “Minecraft.”

Minecraft is a video game that drops the player into a world that is basically built out blocks, and the player manipulates the blocks into building shelter before the monsters arrive.  It’s both a creative “let’s see what we can build” type of game and a “on no, here’s comes the zombies again!” kind of game meshed into one.

The irony of this, of course, is that instead of using the computer to connect with other people; I’m using the computer to escape to my own deserted island.  But I guess after a year or so of doing the social networking thing, I was ready for a break.

Don’t get me wrong, I love (well, at least tolerate) all the people on my friends list; it’s just lately the amount of cognitive noise it was generating with “I’m sleeping in today,” or “I’m cooking beans for dinner,” or “I’m about to watch television” type of posts made me long for a place where I could get off and be alone with my own thoughts for awhile.

Of course, my infatuation with Minecraft is not going to really last all that long.  First, there’s only so many castles a guy can build before he’s had enough (even with arrow shooting skeleton’s banging on the door), and second, very soon the multiplayer version of the game is going to take over my life, and I think I’ll find myself back in the virtual loop again.

Up till now I’ve been adamant about skipping the Farmville and other games that people play on Facebook.  I’m not so sure I’ll be able to resist the urge to build castles and kill zombies with my friends.

Who are my real friends?   They’re the ones who care about me even when I go days and days on my lonely tropical island before I get back to them on Facebook.