Sealed Fates...

Being a paranormal investigator can sometimes become tedious and repetitive to the point that you would love to do nothing more than hang up your EMF meter and never look back. On very rare occasions however, you come across those little investigations where your discoveries are enough to keep you in the game a bit longer and initiating a hunger, a proverbial fuel to the fire, that makes you quest for more. Sometimes the hidden and unknown histories behind the investigation itself can be more intriguing than the actual findings.

If by strange occurrence one day you find yourself heading east of Dallas on a mission to explore the inbreeding capitols of the country, you will come to a town called Greenville. Now, at this point my advice to you, the uninformed reader, is that you roll up your windows and lock your doors for the fear of being sucked in and trapped by the invisible force field that has held me captive here for as long as I can possibly remember. I’ve made it as far west as Los Angeles and was still somehow sucked back into its bloody claws of despair and mediocrity. If that chance should occur, playing the role of the weary traveler, that you become a slave to the needs of the human body known as extreme fatigue or hunger this place looks as though it could be a welcomed beacon in the endless night that is Interstate 30. Don’t let it fool you.

As our tiny group of rag tag paranormal investigators began to grow in popularity and recognition, we were approached by the owners of a small bed and breakfast on the outskirts of this prison of despair that some call a town. It was no longer open to the public and was serving as nothing more than a home for the couple, providing a human being’s necessary requirement for sanctuary and shelter with rooms that had not so much as been slept in for countless years. They told us that they had ghosts in the old home and who were we to deny them the services that we so graciously had wanted to supply to this community since my co-founder and I first concocted this crazy idea of being ghost hunters. In all reality of the situation, the majority of this community fears and hates anything that isn’t represented within the walls of one of it’s hundreds of churches that are contained inside the city limits and it was highly difficult back then to find an investigation. There’s no way we would’ve said ‘no’!
At that particular time in this otherworldly hobby, we didn’t want to know any details about the places we were investigating for fear that it would influence our decisions and results. We entered the house blindly and walked the floors of this home with no agenda, snapping numerous photographs of the countless dust covered antiques and asking questions into the unknown aimed at entities that we knew absolutely nothing about. The owner’s stayed outdoors and gave us total reign of the inside. They were already well aware of what they had there and were just waiting for us to exit the home to fill us in on what they already knew. After a few hours of recorded audio and video data had been collected and we could no longer walk in the same footsteps again for fear of the burnout effect, we packed up our belongings and headed in their direction. This is the story of the “Iron Skillet Inn”.

Way back in the days when the North Texas cotton barons ruled this part of the state, was a young girl that resided here whose lover was one of the founder’s of a very popular soft drink company...which shall remain nameless for the sake of law suits and finger pointing. I will say that this particular beverage is bold enough to carry a prefix at the beginning of it’s title so at least you’ll have the general idea of what I’m talking about while leaving myself a back door clause in case the before mentioned fingers happen to ever find me. The two were eventually married and they lived happily ever after, or so the general public and the local history books would like to have you believe. Not unlike the marriages of today but totally unheard of in the early decades of the 1900’s, the relationship came to a screeching halt when the soda entrepreneur discovered that a young, Jewish business man had bumped him unexpectedly out of the relationship. In an effort to express his undying love for this young woman, the Jewish man built an extravagant home for her, for those times, and everything was kosher, no pun intended. This is where the story gets interesting.

Before small town high society could even blink, the soda heir and the young bride were an item again and the young business man who had built the house was nowhere to be found. To this very day, not a soul is aware of his whereabouts. Passed down from owner to owner over the years, it’s rumored that he was forever quieted by the construction of a fireplace in the home that is made out of materials that are newer in date than the materials used to construct the home itself. The fireplace is grand in its appearance and way too big to be used for a source of heat in the tiny room that it’s contained in. Even today, no fire has ever been built in this room of the house. During the days of the great depression, things were not built that were unnecessary and, in my opinion, an extravagant fireplace in a room that size fits into that category. Years later, in one of the upstairs bedrooms, the young girl was found dead due to a drug overdose. Over the years, the house changed hands time and again and stories were passed from generation to generation regarding the fates of all the people involved since its construction. The current owner’s have never bothered to remove a single brick from the rumored tomb of the young business man for fear of what they might find or unleash. I don’t blame them. With our heads full of buzzing information, we headed for our makeshift HQ to review the photos and analyze the audio we had taken. Sure enough, in the background of the audio taken inside of the room containing the overkill fireplace, a highly unpleasant and insisting voice tells us to “get out”. In my personal experience, this is the way that my father in law would treat me if I were to enter his private sanctuaries and he, too, is Jewish. As we continued to pick apart the audio the word “fate” could be heard being spoken by a female voice in the upstairs bedroom where her life had been taken from her so many years ago. To sum this all up, the word ‘fate’ is definitely the key to this entire occurrence. The young business man built the house in an attempt to trap the heart of a certain young woman and, in turn, he could possibly be trapped behind the walls of the house itself.

The young woman, who insisted on freely partaking the secret sauces of society which eventually led to her premature demise, could also be trapped eternally inside the home itself that was once her coveted and scandalous trophy amidst the shanty’s and cotton fields that once filled this area.

Several decades later, it seems that her body was stolen from an above ground crypt by a drunken group of demented teenagers and made a fixture at a party that was being thrown in the honor of a certain ghost hunter’s high school graduation. Imagine the surprise and horror I felt almost twenty years ago watching the stumbling bunch introduce a dead body to the festivities that were originally meant as a form of celebration and rite of passage for a young man that was about to introduce himself into the slavery that is known as the rest of my life. They were caught, sentenced, and incarcerated but those images are wedged into a place in my mind that can never be erased regardless of how many times I have unsuccessfully tried. Was it ‘fate’ that I ended up in the former bedroom of the deceased party guest in an attempt to discover tangible proof of life after death all these years later? That’s another story completely. Until then…Keep Believing

Homecoming...

For six long years…I lived in a world of darkness. I was never sure if it was something that was triggered by my brutal divorce of if years of repression by worrying so much about outward appearances in the community brought it on…but I would come home every day to a home reminiscent of Dracula’s and love every minute of it. Perhaps it was having my eyes opened to the actual existence of the supernatural from my first unexplainable paranormal experience…who knows. Shortly after the PRINT organization was formed, my wife and I spent every waking moment searching for more darkness. Our free weekends took place in suspected haunted houses and old, country cemeteries during the night. The tingle of fear that occurred while your eyes were trying to adjust to nothingness and not knowing what could possibly be lurking behind the next tree became like a drug that I absolutely had to have or I would go insane. Hell, I even remember one year where we realized in June that we still had a few Halloween decorations up in the home. Very few people outside of our relationship could grasp the concept or even begin to try and understand our views on happiness and the world around us. The closest explanation would rank somewhere up there with watching every episode of the Addams Family back to back on an endless loop. We had very few friends and visitors in our lives…and we liked it that way. Complete strangers would walk the other direction almost as though they could sense the unusualness that was coming their way. It was nice to do in a Wal-Mart line from time to time so it really wasn’t all that bad. Shortly after that, we adopted a forgotten cemetery in the middle of nowhere and began restoration work surrounded by the constant reminder of death…and a few dozen venomous snakes here and there for variety and to keep you on your toes. Our final journey into darkness came at the hands of our wedding where we tied the knot surrounded by friends and family under a cemetery pavilion during a violent thunderstorm as the sun set. I had never seen her look so beautiful in my entire life…illuminated by only candle light while hundreds of potential ghosts gave us their blessing knowing that our union began in exactly the same spot in which it would end. Suddenly, exactly upon the inevitable ‘I do’…the rain stopped falling and the sun shone blindingly through the trees creating a rainbow that stretched from end to end of the once darkened graveyard. I didn’t exactly notice at the time but it was almost as though it was some type of natural metaphor for an awakening within the both of us. Within weeks, our home and dispositions became brighter than ever before. It was as though the darkness in which our relationship was built had gone away to reveal to those around some type of new and improved couple that was altogether unusual to the both of us. Without so much as even a thought towards our achievements regarding the paranormal research field or the non profit work we had accomplished towards the forever residents of the forgotten cemetery, we walked on eggshells hand in hand towards the sun with squinting eyes in the direction to an unknown future. Nature again covered the lonely headstones of Hopewell Cemetery and the PRINT organization sat covered in dust on a book shelf in the form of two published novels below the monument of wedding and honeymoon memorabilia in our now cheery living space. Together, the two of us became simultaneous strangers with nothing much to talk about. In our desperate search for normalcy and illumination, the two of us became nothing more than a symbol of the spirits we had so recently searched for and the historical markers cleared from the hiding spots in a forgotten forest. Technically, we were beginning to die. Why, I now ask myself, did we try so hard to change who we were regardless of the fact that it altered the individualism that the two of us had fell in love with in the first place? In the end, the people we were trying so hard to impress and begging silently for acceptance will end up the inevitable victim of death itself. On a quest for greatness always lies the possibility of endangering your true self at the hands of outsiders. I personally believe that change is the reason why so many marital unions are destined to fail. Most people shoot for bigger things, more money, and social acceptance…forgetting the true reasons why they fell in love in the first place because they’re blinded by the ultimate goal of perfection. In our case, the unusualness of our lives and the darkness that surrounded us was the true attraction towards one another and the adhesive that bonded us together. Ultimately, what does it matter if anyone else in this crazy world ‘gets you’? As long as the one that loves you understands where you’re coming from…who cares what the neighbors think…or your extended families or the general public for that matter? They’re not the ones you lie in bed with, cuddled up for protection against the cold night, or the ones that will sit with you on summer evenings in recollection of youth on a porch swing swapping false teeth and wondering why your children can’t stand to be around you. With this epiphany in mind, we knocked the cob webs off of the equipment and accepted an investigation. A day later, we were fighting the elements so that one more misplaced soul’s marker could again see sunlight and reveal it to a world that had long forgotten them. A darting shadow in a creepy room and a few dodged copperheads later, a sense of normalcy began to sink into my welcoming soul once more. I love my life, my wife, and the future that lies before me…even though it may be in ways that most people could never imagine. My advice to anyone who would listen is to never deny who you truly are regardless of how many attempt to convince you that you’re denying yourself of what you could be. The destination that they’re speaking of is through their eyes only. Your own eyes are what matters. Not everyone is suited to live in the light or be journeying towards it. Sometimes, you yourself may be the illumination in the darkness that is so feared by those that shun and persecute you. Right about now…some of you may be saying to yourself that you don’t understand where I’m heading with this or where I came from to begin with. That’s okay. You’re not supposed to. Now…if you’ll excuse me…it’s May…and my wife and I have some Halloween decorations to dig out of storage. It’s beginning to feel a lot like home again. Our home…

Contrary To Popular Belief...

I remember fondly one summer night in my youth, at the ripe age of thirteen, being left alone in the family home with one of my step father’s packs of cigarettes. I recall staring at it longingly for nearly an hour before I unfortunately decided to reach out and grab one. After all, everyone (and I do mean everyone…with the exception of one or two) in my family were avid smokers and I had to figure out what the calling was to this horrendously aromatic habit. Looking out the doorway for any sign of a parental presence and listening into the wind for the slightest hint of their vehicle’s return, I popped one into my mouth and put a flame to it with the precision of someone that had been doing it for years. After five minutes or so had passed…and I was able to pull my shoes out of my mouth from coughing them up through my ass…I realized that I was officially one of the ‘cool kids’! You know the ones I’m speaking of! The ones that hung out in the junior high school bathroom in between classes and behind the gym during lunch hiding out from educational authority like they were on a black ops mission in which there was little chance of returning…just to get a few drags off of a cigarette. Of course, these guys had failed the eighth grade a few times over and already possessed their own driver’s license in order to drive themselves to school…but they had really cool hair! It was a damn good thing that I wasn’t interested in any type of athletic prowess or the chance to be an Olympic runner of any sort because there was no way whatsoever that I was going to be able to pull off those activities and smoke at the same time. Hooked. Throughout the years that followed, my family warmed up to the fact, at least to my face, that I was a teenage smoker and there was nothing they could say or do that would be able to stop me. Even if they tried, there was no way they could be around me twenty four hours a day to prevent me from partaking in my daily poison. There are times now that I wished they could’ve invented something to make me stop. For years after, I dodged the kings of high school curriculum every chance I got for a miniscule taste of smoke between periods…and I never got caught. I was the cigarette smoking master. Years later, once I landed in Fort Jackson South Carolina, I began to realize that those fiery sticks were demonic in nature and no longer a friend of mine. Running mile after mile and coughing up lung after lung in the name of Uncle Sam…every ounce of nicotine that ever existed within my body was pouring out in the form of sweat before the sun would ever raise its lazy head above the horizon. Eight long weeks without smoking behind me…I graduated a minion of lady liberty and did the one thing that I was not allowed to do nor had any access to during my boot camp. I bought a pack of cigarettes the first chance I got. People say that crack cocaine is hard to quit but two months later…I still couldn’t wait to have that first cigarette. In 2006, I watched my step father die quickly and painfully from lung cancer and it had no affect whatsoever on my plans to make tobacco companies richer than what they already were. As a matter of fact, mere seconds after he took his final breath, I was outside smoking a cigarette as I cried. Evil is alive and well in this world and it comes twenty to a pack. Even in some pagan literature and Wicca texts, tobacco is referred to as a demon. Don’t ask me how I know that but in a strange sort of way…according to some closed minded people’s points of view…that would be like calling the cauldron ‘black’…no witchcraft puns intended. It’s been twenty four years since I stuck the first one in my mouth as a kid and I am finally on a successful mission to quit for good. Not because my wife begged me or my children expressed concern over my health…but because I want to. All those failed attempts throughout my life were from the requests of others instead of me. It’s been a week now…and the multiple voices in my head that usually formulate these little rants of mine are all speaking at once without the slightest hint that they’re going to shut up. I’m not even sure how I’ve gotten this far into the rant without giving up honestly. Food that I have been eating and loving for more than half of my life now is tasty beyond belief…but some of it is downright disgusting. I’m not sure if I remember if it tasted that bad before or if my tongue is simply confused but cream of chicken soup is the cousin of Satan and I’m trying to convince the president that it’s responsible for acts of terrorism and we need to kill it, not take any pictures, and dump it in the ocean before anyone can film it. I used to love it. My sense of smell has begun to return also and that, my friends and enemies, is the purpose and point of this entire rant to begin with. To the middle aged, over weight ladies of this world that are convinced and under the false impression that perfume is an even substitute for bathing…you’re dead wrong. Chances are…your hoo-ha has been wafting up from your lap for so long that your own nose is used to it and has come to accept the fact that you’re not even going to remotely lift that lump of fat out of your lap to give it a good scrubbing. I know it would be heartbreaking to disturb whatever it is you’ve got going on down there whether it be the remnants of a small, furry animal or a collection of chicken bones from years of KFC consumption…but come on…do us, the non smoking public, a big favor and run the fire hose down there from time to time. Honestly…I don’t know who I should put more blame on…the person carrying around the stink pouch and stirring up funk the likes of which I’ve only smelled on prison field trips or the husband/boyfriend that puts up with it and fails to notify them that the crotch brew is boiling over and it might be time to remove the flames. Now, it’s obvious that some of you are going to be offended by this little bit of information and even a little upset that I’m stirring your lunch ever so slightly at the mere thought of people smuggling catfish across the border of their granny panties and may believe that I’m full of myself and my shit doesn’t stink. I beg to differ. It stinks terribly and almost makes me want to start smoking again so I don’t have to experience it. The only difference is…I don’t bring it to the noses of the general public unless you were that unfortunate guy in the stall next to me today who’s ‘Wings To Go’ were trying to leave in a violent and loud fashion…earning their namesake. In an odd sort of way though…perhaps the cigarette companies were trying to help humanity with their product. They were well aware that it dulled the delicate senses to the stinky, nasty tasting world around us and just wanted to lend a hand to make it a little more enjoyable and tolerable. After all, according to them, there is nothing more enjoyable than a hole in the throat that makes you have to speak through one of those hilarious microphone things. Imagine the fun you could have at a drive thru window with one of those. On the bright side…at least you wouldn’t be forced to smell stinky crotch unless it was by choice. That particular choice is a different rant altogether…