MELLOW CORN

Reuben: Sliced Corned Beef, Russian Dressing, Kraut, Swiss, Marbled Rye

One of the reasons we moved to Hillsborough was that it has a small, tightly controlled historic district. If you were lucky enough to find a home within this district, you are pretty much assured you can walk to the “downtown” area. One of my prime directives to our real estate agent when we were looking for a house was that I could walk to the several excellent bars and restaurants on the main street and crawl home after having a couple or more drinks. For the last thirty-plus years, living in Maryland, I put up with the possibility of getting nailed with a DWI on the drive home after having a drink or two. This happened to several of my friends, and the result is costly in many different ways. For years I have carried the business card of a DWI lawyer in my wallet in case the police ever picked me up. I have never used it, but it was always a comfort to know that Lenny the DWI lawyer was only a phone call away.

Understand, I am not in favor of drunk driving. Understand, I have little sympathy with those who drink beyond the legal limit and climb into their cars and drive home. Understand, there have been times I have had too much to drink and was probably legally drunk and have driven, and I was just lucky that nothing untoward happened. Lucky, lucky, lucky. There but for the grace of God go I.

So I walked down to the Penny.

My route takes me right by the Ashburn School historic property, and as I passed I looked up the hill to the gardens, searching for the mysterious Rafe. I couldn’t see anyone, so rather than loiter I continued on. I soloed at the Penny for an afternoon drink. Elsewhere I have noted that drinking alone in the afternoon is probably not a good idea, but as long as one doesn’t make it a habit I think I’ll be all right. I believe the kids call this Day Drinking. The Big Guy behind the bar recommended a shot of Mellow Corn, which he explained was their house whiskey, 100 proof. It sounded ok to me. If it’s on the list, it sounds ok to me.

While waiting for the drink to arrive, I Googled “Mellow Corn” because I had never heard of it before. It turns out it’s a corn whiskey, a lesser label from Heavenly Hill, the distillery that also makes the brands Elijah Craig and Pikesville Rye. Corn whiskey is not a commonly known distilling process. The whiskey must contain at least 80% corn in its mash and must be aged at least two years. These scant requirements do not usually lead to a well-regarded whiskey. Mellow Corn, according to the Heavenly Hill website, is extra-aged to four years in used oak barrels that have previously held the distillery’s more expensive, more highly regarded labels. I checked a few other sites and found that the bottle sports a garish yellow label and an economical $12 price tag, which is probably the reason it’s the house whiskey here at the Penny. Most people don’t drink their whiskey straight, so once you mix it with pretty much anything else who’s going to notice the quality?

The Big Guy put a shot glass with a generous pour on the battle-scarred table in front of me. I tasted it. To my uncultured palette, it tasted like a perfectly respectable example of the bourbon genre. A bit harsh, yes, but that’s the way I like my liquor as often as not. In fact, if you blindfolded me I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Mellow Corn and many of the other examples I’ve tasted over the last months. Actually, I probably could tell the difference, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. A few more hits and it still went down just fine. I’ve never seen it in a liquor store, but if I do I’m going to pick up a couple of bottles. You sure as hell can’t beat the price.

I finished up my drink, made sure the Big Guy had initialed Mellow Corn on my list of 69 drinks, and moseyed back up the hill toward home.

As noted earlier, the Ashburn School residence is directly on my route, situated atop a long grassy hill easily visible from the street. The local garden club, of which my wife Sherry is a proud member, has placed a very nice wrought-iron bench in front of the residence at the bottom of the hill where stumblebums like me can stop and rest while making their trek home from the Penny. So it didn’t look odd for me to be sitting on the bench, casually gazing up the hill at the school property.

After about an hour, just when I was about to fall asleep, I noticed someone working in the garden at the side of the house. Since the worker looked to be male, I knew it wasn’t Betty, and could only assume this was Rafe of whom Betty had spoken. I walked up Union Street and cut over behind the Ashburn residence. A pleasant-looking African American fellow of maybe early middle-aged years looked up from where he was digging and smiled at me.

I introduced myself and he said, “You live in the house over on Orange Street that was built around the original schoolhouse.” Mildly surprised, I said that indeed I did, and that I was interested in the history of the house and that Betty had said he was something of an expert on the Ashburn House and its early origins.

“If I’m an expert it’s only because I’ve worked here for a couple of years. I’m interested in history and slavery days in Hillsborough, focusing on the period right before the Civil War. And this is as good a place as any to get a feel for the way it was. Because the Ashburn School was well-known, then and now, there are materials that exist that give evidence that might have been lost otherwise.”

He was dressed in kind of a uniform, in that he was wearing a matching shirt and pants, chino in color, the sort of outfit that a guy wielding a professional weed whacker might be sporting. With the logo of his company and the name Joe stitched under it. Or in this case, Rafe, except there was no name patch. He was soft-spoken and had a scholarly demeanor. When he spoke, you could tell there was more to him than appeared on the surface. I liked him.

“Do you know where my inner house was built?” I asked. “When it was part of the school, on this property?” He nodded and motioned me to walk with him. He put down his spade and we walked around the far side of the house, the side that faces Union Street. The Ashburn residence was large, much larger than my house. It was essentially rectangular; the width in the front looked from the outside to be about as wide as a large sitting room, a hall, and a dining room, side by side. Rafe gestured to the exterior wall of the house in front of where we were standing.

“This is an addition,” he said. “They expanded the original house in the early 1850’s. At that time the original two-room schoolhouse, your schoolhouse, was right here where we’re standing, with just a walkway between the main house and the entrance to the school house. I don’t know why they sold the house and moved it, but it was bought by a man named Lemuel Lynch, a well-respected silversmith. He was also the Mayor of Hillsborough at one time and was well known for restoring the clock in the tower of the town hall. That’s the general wisdom on the origin of your house.” He frowned. “Except I’m not sure that’s the way it went, at least not exactly. I believe the schoolhouse was given to the architect/builder who did the renovations, a local man named John Berry, maybe to settle part of the cost of doing the renovations. Then he sold it to Lemual Lynch.”

I asked him how he knew this. Ted the top man at the Ashburn School hadn’t bothered to tell me any of it.

“I Googled your address. I used a computer at the library. There’s a book of historical plats, deeds that have been registered over the years, it goes way back to the early 1800s. Lemuel Lynch’s name is the first one to show up on the property that is now your address.”

I was about to ask him more about the original structure when we heard a rapping on the window from inside the house. It was Ted Jackson. He was pointing at Rafe and gesturing for him to come inside.

“Ah, good old Ted,” I said. “He’s probably pissed that I’ve taken you away from your work.”

Rafe gave a little laugh and shook his head. “I’ll go see what he wants.”

“Could you come over to the house?” I asked. “Maybe you could tell me more if you could see it inside. Can I get your cell number?”

“Sure. But I don’t have a cell phone. I can’t do it today, but just come by. If I’m here I’ll come over.”

“If Ted approves,” I said.

“Mr. Ted’s not so bad. There’s been worse here.” He wasn’t laughing now. He gave me a long look, as if he were measuring something in me. “There’s been men here who were terrible. Who did terrible things.”

He went up the steps to the porch and inside.

I walked home, thinking about what Rafe had said. His parting words: Men who did terrible things. So far I’ve been pretty successful at compartmentalizing the several aspects of my house: the interesting historical pieces on the one hand and the falling, animated rag dolls on the other. I certainly wasn’t going to tell Rafe my story of nightly lights, nocturnal digging, the falling doll, the doll hiding in the shed, the doll who spoke to me through sewed-up lips. He’d think I was crazy.

I wouldn’t blame him. It sounded crazy. I wondered, not for the first time, if this is what crazy feels like, trying to keep two disparate realities together in your head at the same time: the real and the unreal. I feel like if I try to justify the two, force them together, believe them both equally, I will, well, you know. Drive myself crazy.

NO DRINK

No Special of the Day

Remember the plan? No Drinking. No visit to the Penny. No Drinking at home.

When it was time to go to bed, I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. This was the first effect of the No Drinking rule. No alcohol to lull, or, on some nights, club me to sleep. Not that I ever made it through an entire night’s sleep in one seven or eight hour session; I usually fall asleep quickly for a couple of hours before waking up. The choice is always either lay there and try to outlast the wakefulness, which can take up to a couple of hours, or get up, put on my robe, do some work or read, and fall asleep in my comfortable chair in the TV room. For years as a kid I watched my father fall asleep in his recliner while watching TV and later watched my father-in-law fall asleep in a chair at my house while watching TV, and always I fought back the urge to yell at them, If you’re going to sleep, go to bed! Now I do the same thing: fall asleep in my chair in the evening while watching TV. Shameful. At least I don’t own a recliner.

So I’m lying in bed awake; Sherry is sleeping beside me. This was the plan, an experiment to see if my visions or hallucinations or whatever they are come to me when I’m not drinking. I thought I would sleep for at least a couple of hours before climbing out of bed and going downstairs to see if there was anything unusual happening. But it didn’t feel at all likely that I was going to fall asleep anytime soon. In a few minutes, I was bored.

I got up. Usually I wear just my fabulous thick blue Polo brand robe (a gift from my wife) when I’m wandering around, but tonight it was especially cold in the house. I threw an extra quilt over Sherry, pulled on my Puma sweatpants and a tee shirt. The robe went on over the ensemble. I pushed into my fleece-lined moccasin slippers and crept down the stairs.

Everything was quiet in Sherry’s office. Not a creature was stirring, not even a squirrel in the back yard. I had a drink of water and settled into my chair in the TV room with a clear view of Sherry’s desk, chair and file cabinet. If it was cool in the upstairs bedroom, it was positively frigid downstairs. I pulled one of the fleece lap rugs off the couch and over myself and fell asleep.

3:10. I could see the time on the cable box underneath the TV. I had snapped awake, unaware that I had ever fallen asleep. I sat in the chair, organizing my jumbled thoughts. Stick to the plan. Time to explore.

I stood up. It’s only a matter of 10 or so steps from my chair to the area of the floor in Sherry’s office where I had seen the light coming up from below. But those 10 steps are a minefield of creaking floorboards; I wanted to be stealthy this evening. Halfway there, three slow steps and I could see light glinting up through the cracks between the floorboards. More disturbing than that — after all, the light function could easily be tied to an electrical short — was the sound of digging. I wasn’t even down on the floor with my ear pressed against the boards, and I could hear the sound of blade on soil. I half expected to hear the sounds of a full-blown party emanating up. It was as if my taking time off from my nocturnal wanderings had encouraged whatever, spirits? what should I call them? apparitions to proceed with their agenda undisturbed by me.

A board creaked as I took my next step. The digging stopped. Silence. The light went off. I drew the logical conclusion: someone was under my house digging. After a minute spent getting my nerve up, I walked normally the rest of the way into the office. It was as dark and as quiet — oh hell, go ahead and say it — as a grave. It felt like the room was holding its breath. More silence. Whoever was under there wasn’t going to do anything as long as he/she knew I was standing overhead. Let me assure you, knowing someone was lying on the ground only a few feet beneath me was very disturbing. But just standing there wasn’t going to resolve anything. Time to check out the back yard.

I went into the kitchen. The backyard was brightly lit by one of those moons the weatherman on TV is always telling us viewers to look out for, a harvest moon, blue moon, hunters moon, a moon so clear it cast sharp shadows from the trees onto the grass. So bright I could see that the door to the shed was partially open. I always keep the door to the shed closed.

Always.

The shed is one of those wooden storage units that you see for sale outside Home Depot. Mine holds lawn equipment, old cans of paint, storm windows, a ladder, extension cords and various other tools and odds and ends that you don’t want to keep in the house. Oh, yeah, it also is where I stashed the old shovel that Mark found under the house. I wondered if it was still there.

If it wasn’t, that might answer some questions.

Well, maybe not answer some questions, and in fact it would pose even more questions, but it would help me decide if I was going crazy! If someone had taken the shovel out of the shed and was now under the house digging away, I would know I wasn’t just imagining it. I had two choices, open the door to the crawl space and shine my flashlight under there and take a look, though I’d probably have to climb in and take a good look around to be absolutely sure there was no one in there, even though I was pretty sure there was someone under there. Or, I could go outside, walk to the shed and see if the shovel was there. I needed to close the shed door anyway. Which would you choose?

The shed, of course. It wasn’t even close.

I cinched my robe tighter, unlocked the sliding glass door and edged it open. Warm air poured in over me. Hesitantly, I stepped out onto the small outside deck. It was at least thirty degrees warmer outside. What’s up with that? Why was it so cold in the house? I closed the door behind me. The mosquitos are murder in North Carolina, I didn’t want them getting into the house. I almost laughed. Mosquitos? I was worried about mosquitos?

I padded across the backyard in my slippers and pulled open the shed door. I checked in the corner on my left. There’s no light in the shed, but there was more than enough moonlight to see. The shovel was gone.

Case closed, I thought.

As I turned back to leave, I heard something move in the back of the shed.

I didn’t even think about it because I knew if I did I would have leapt outside, slammed the shed door shut and run like hell for the house.

Groundhog? Squirrel? Possum?

I tried to calm myself, but I was ready to run. I took a couple of deep breaths. I thought about what a chicken-shit coward I was being. I turned back and lifted a piece of tin roofing off the pile where the storm windows were stacked. There was a natural little hidey-hole in the back there. I looked inside.

There was the little girl. Raggedy Ann. She with the no nose, no fingers and the sewed-up lips. My heart lurched, and I would have run, would have loved to run, but my legs were locked. I was so scared I couldn’t move.

She was looking at me. “He say I should hide here,” she said in a little girl’s voice. Clearly.

CLEARLY!

She leapt out of her hole and ran by me, out the door. I felt her brush my leg. By the time I got my breathing under control and was sure I hadn’t crapped in my pants, I looked out the doorway toward the house. She was gone. I didn’t know where.

In Which I make You an Offer

I call the bar in my town The Lead Penny. This is not the bar’s real name. In several places in this continuing blog I change the names of various people and places. I do so because after many years in the writing business I have learned that you can never tell what is going to make people angry when you are writing about them. You can point out one amusing and endearing trait that might be construed as the tiniest bit unflattering, (in an amusing and endearing way) and the person referred to will sometimes complain bitterly that you have compared him to Adolph Hitler, ruined his life and embarrassed him in front of his wife and children. So sometimes I change the names because you just never know what’s going to upset someone.

Why the Lead Penny? Because it’s almost like the bar’s real name and anyone who knows my town would guess it immediately. So what good does that do me as far as protecting myself against people getting mad at me? I dunno. Let’s move this along. I have an offer to make.

When I was a kid my father collected coins. This was a common activity among adults at the time. You bought folding coin holders that held five years of coins — the folders were dark blue — and you put the coins into slots that had the correct dates and where the coins were minted underneath the slots. The idea was to fill the holders. Since my dad traveled a lot, he figured that he came across a varied cross-section of coins, and maybe he could fill up the blue folders. He wasn’t looking for a rare coin, something that would make him rich beyond his wildest dreams, he just wanted to see if he could fill up his folders.

As a little boy, I could see that dad got a lot of pleasure out of going through his change on the weekend and putting any new finds into the folders. I asked if I could start a collection, so he assigned me 1943 pennies. Most of you out there either don’t remember these coins or are too young to have ever seen one, but during the Second World War pennies were made of copper, as they are now, except for the year 1943. That year they were made of steel coated with zinc, which infused them a dull grey color. The copper was needed for shell cases. We called them lead pennies because of the color, and by the time I started collecting them around 1951 you could still find them sprinkled among the regular copper pennies when you received change. I haven’t seen one in a handful of change in many years.

I have a couple of hundred of these pennies left from my original collection, most of which seemed to have gone astray over the years. I keep them on my writing desk in an old mayonnaise jar. Now you’re probably asking yourselves, what are these unusual pennies worth? A quick trip to the Internet says that they are worth the grand total of 6 to 20 cents, depending on the mint markings. That’s a little S or D you will see beneath the date on some of these pennies. But some people are offering these pennies for up to a couple of hundred dollars apiece. Why? I don’t know and I quickly became bored trying to figure this out. Maybe you can figure out why some of them are worth several hundred dollars.

But wait! There’s more!

Here’s some information about a spectacularly rare version of this penny that I lifted off a coin collector website.

“Valuable 1943 Pennies

There are a few very valuable error coins produced in 1943. Since the mint produces billions of coins in an average year, they use huge totes to move them around the mint facility. As the totes moved from machine to machine, sometimes a blank from the last batch would get stuck in a crevice. Most numismatists believe that a few copper planchets from 1942 got caught in a crevice in the tote. The coining press struck the copper planchets with the 1943 date. Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco all produced these ultra rare 1943 copper pennies.

If you think you might have a 1943 copper penny here’s how to find out if your 1943 copper penny is genuine. In fact, it may be one of the most valuable pennies ever!

Copper Plated 1943 Fakes

But beware. At one time genuine 1943 Steel pennies were copper plated and sold as novelty items at coin shows and flea markets. Many of these coins were then spent and ended up in circulation alongside genuine Lincoln cents. Over time, people would find these copperplated steel pennies and think that they found a rare mint error.

When they took these coins to a coin dealer, the coin dealer would hold a magnet over the penny, and the steel underneath the copper plating would attract the penny to the magnet. This process is the easiest way to tell if your penny is solid copper or copperplated.”

All my pennies are dated 1943. It’s possible you might get a fake 1943 copper-appearing penny. Many of mine are so corroded it’s difficult to tell what the finish is or was. Is there a rare copper one in my jar? If you can’t tell just by looking at it, (if it looks steel it is steel), you can test your penny yourself by seeing if it sticks to a magnet. If it does, your penny is worth about 15 cents as a novelty item. And if it doesn’t, MAYBE YOU”VE HIT THE MOTHERLOAD! See the chart above for the true worth.

So here’s my offer. To show my appreciation for Following this blog or even just reading it regularly, I’m going to send you one or two of my “lead” pennies. If you are a Follower of the blog, I will send you two lead pennies. If you are a regular reader and switch to being a Follower, I’ll send you two pennies. All you have to do to become a Follower is find and click on the Follow button (word) on the blog page. All this means is you will be alerted when I put up a new post on the blog.

If you email me your land address at appelworks@gmail.com , I’ll put one or two pennies in the mail back to you. I’m just going to stick my hand in the jar and fish one out without looking at it or running it by a magnet. Some of them are really “roached” meaning beat up, and rusty, (that’s a word I learned while watching the TV show Pickers) and some of them are in pretty good condition for an old circulated penny. I’m not going to choose, I’m just going to grab. I haven’t ever looked at any of them to see if there’s a valuable one in there, and if fact I haven’t touched them for 65 years. Once you get your penny if you’re interested you can look for further info. Just Google something on the order of… worth of 1943 lead pennies and figure it out for yourself.

And if you end up with one of the rare ones, well, drinks are on me.

CROWN ROYAL

Italian Melt/ Provolone Cheese, fresh Mozz, Onion, Salami, Capicola, Roasted Red Pepper

It was the middle of the day, but I was back at the Penny. It’s easier to find a place to sit and easier to think there during the day rather than in the evening, but it’s also easier to slip into the warm clutches of alcoholism and public drunkenness if one starts tossing drinks down in the afternoon rather than after five PM, which has always been my standard personal rule. I’m limiting myself to one drink per session at the bar from now on, at least when I’m there before five.

I had lots of notes to go over. I’ve written in earlier posts some of the interesting history of my old house, which is known as the Daisy Lynch house. How the two center rooms were originally the two rooms of the Ashburn School, located just a block from my house. Over the last 170 years the rest of the house – 6 rooms downstairs and four rooms upstairs – have been added on room by room. So, sometime in the early 1850s, the two-room schoolhouse was dragged one block north over what would have then been empty land to my lot. This had to have been done with a team of horses or mules and must have been difficult.

The Ashburn’s private residence still stands, part of the Ashburn School property, which is an historic landmark complete with public programs and an operating officer and board of trustees. The CEO of the Ashburn School Trust is Ted Jackson. I interviewed him today, and Ted is not a fan of the legend about the original Ashburn Schoolhouse now residing in the interior of my house. He says it’s just that, a legend, and has never been proven.

I can think of a few reasons he’s so adamant about this. If his schoolhouse is in my house, he’s going to have to change some of his history, which he doesn’t want to do, and maybe he’s worried that I’ll claim the schoolhouse, put a sign up outside my home declaring it part of the original school and begin charging admission, leading tours and giving lectures. Not that I have any interest in doing that.

When he was selling the house, the last owner made a video, showing his research into the Ashburn Schoolhouse controversy, pretty much proving that it’s just what everyone except Ted thinks is true. I’ll put a link up to that video at the end of this post.

Back at the Penny, Janet brought me my drink. I’m still going easy on Janet vis-à-vis making her climb to the top shelf to fumble down a bottle (see last post), so I ordered a Crown Royal, which is on my list. This is a Canadian blended whiskey that we thought was pretty second rate even when I was young. Its singular claim to fame was and is that it came in a crown-shaped bottle nestled in a little blue velvet bag with a gold-colored drawstring. I guess the manufacturers thought the packaging would instill some elegance to the whiskey; it doesn’t, though something has kept this particularly ordinary whiskey in the marketplace for a lot of years. It’s bland and undistinguished, but it’s one more drink to be crossed off my 69.

After I left my interview with Ted, (he didn’t kick me out, but he made it clear he had better things to do), I walked around the grounds and the gardens of the Ashburn property. That’s where I met Betty.

I saw her in the garden of the School hacking away at a giant wisteria vine. She’s old, (Betty, not the vine) but vigorous, wielding pruners with savage precision. I introduced myself and told her I lived in the house that had swallowed the original two-room schoolhouse. I asked her if she thought that was true. She scoffed and said everyone in town knew it was true. She spoke as if she’d been there to witness the event. I asked why Ted, a few yards away ruling his fiefdom from his office in the house, didn’t believe it. She said she had no idea, put the pruners down and gave me a short tour of the garden, explaining that she didn’t really work for the school but had just taken to keeping the garden in good shape years ago so everyone, probably even Ted, just assumed she belonged there. I asked her some more questions about my house but she made it clear she had wisteria to prune.

“Ask Rafe,” she said, waving a hand in the general direction of the back of the garden where the original outhouse still stood. There was no one back there that I could see.

“He’s around somewhere, or if not, he’ll be back soon enough. He works here the way I work here. Off the books.” With that, she went back to her trimming, and I headed down the hill to the Lead Penny. And my notebook.

And now I’m back home writing this up so I can post it. In my eleventh post I said three possibilities could account for my recent unusual experiences. One, I’m mentally unbalanced and have been having visions; two, I’m a drunk and have been having hallucinations; three, it’s all happening just as I’m reporting.

Here’s a thought: I can test the drunkenness theory by simply not having anything to drink for a few days, then get up in the middle of the night and see what happens downstairs. This means putting my 69 drinks quest on hold, but that’s a small price to pay to prove to myself that it’s drink that is or is not fueling the visions/hallucinations. But here’s the problem.

If I don’t drink, and I still see the weirdness, that means I’m crazy. Because it can’t be the third possibility. Can it?

Here’s the link to the short video about the Daisy Lynch house. The owner at the time, Craig Perrin, was and is a good guy who patiently answers my email questions about the house. In the video you can see a bit of the crawlspace. You will note they refer to the school as the Burwell School. I call it the Ashburn School.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1JJzkQdMJ4

KNOB CREEK

Passion Fruit Marinated NC Amberjack Tacos w/Red Cabbage, Cilantro, Smoked Jalapeno, Ranch Dressing

 I was at the Penny, on my own, just me and my trusty notebook. I love my Field Brand notebooks; I always have one in my back pocket to write down the stray thoughts that float into my head when I’m working on a project. For the last few days I’ve been researching ghosts and the paranormal on the Internet and keeping notes.

I was drinking a Knob Creek bourbon. My choice on the list came not because of any taste considerations, but because I wanted something that was easily reachable behind the bar. There seems to have been some sort of a firing blood-bath at the Penny, and my usual server, Josh, is out and they’ve hired two newbies. Janet is my waitress, and she doesn’t know the drill when it comes to the 69 drinks, so I’ve been schooling her. It seems a little unfair to send her up on the rickety plastic crate to reach the more exotic liquor choices that are high up on the back wall. I could see the Knob Creek was in easy reach on the back bar, so that’s what I’m drinking. It’s pretty smooth, even at 100 proof, one of Jim Beam’s excellent small batch whiskies. When I look Knob Creek up on the Internet I find that it is very popular with the hip hop community. I have no idea why.

The hot burn of quality bourbon settles into the background of the usual Penny uproar as I go through my notes.

I expected the Internet to be awash in crazy blogs written by people who firmly believed in ghosts, or at least believed in the ghosts they have personally experienced. Blogs penned by paranoid paranormal conspiracy theorists. It turns out that while those types are certainly in evidence, most of the sites up at the top of my searches are about why certain people “see” ghosts; the “scientific” reasons: rational, informative but unexciting articles. I thought the number one reason people saw ghosts would be insanity, as discussed in my last entry, but that hardly made the various lists. I’ll give you the most widely accepted explanations, in no particular order.

Carbon monoxide poisoning was sited in a number of examples. One extended family that lived in a large old house reported feeling weak, being held down in bed, hearing strange voices in the night, among other strange phenomena. After calling in experts they found that the furnace in their haunted home was pumping out carbon monoxide. After it was fixed, they were fine. This sounded reasonable to me, so I logged off the computer and went to Home Depot and bought a few carbon monoxide detectors. After a couple of days, they found no evidence that we have a problem.

Mold. A few experts report finding toxic molds in some reportedly haunted houses, molds that produce symptoms such as irrational fear and dementia, but there was no universal conclusion. My crawlspace is dry and I have never seen evidence of mold in our house, so I’m crossing this one off the list.

Infrasound — sounds just below the typical human hearing threshold of 20 hertz. A number of citations for infrasound circulate in ghostbusting circles. “Other environmental explanations for ghostly phenomenon include low-frequency sound waves (infrasound), said to cause feelings of nervousness and discomfort and vibrations in the eye which can produce illusions.” I walked around the house trying to find something that might operate in the ultrasound range. Other than the furnace or the air conditioner, which were not running when I experienced my visions, were the only possibilities. Take it off the list.

Fluctuations in the electronic field. “Persinger and his colleagues reported on the strange case of a teenage girl who said she’d been impregnated by the Holy Spirit and felt the invisible presence of a baby on her left shoulder. The girl had experienced a brain injury earlier in her life, the researchers wrote, but the trauma wasn’t the sole reason for the religious visitation: Next to the girl’s bed was an electric clock that generated magnetic pulses similar to those used to trigger seizures in epileptic rats. Once the clock was removed, the feelings of a presence vanished.” I unplugged my bedside alarm clock for several nights. I noticed no difference in anything other than I had no idea what time it was when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.

Those were the most oft-cited possibilities, aside from this catch-all line: “They are also associated with mental conditions that affect the brain, including epilepsy, stroke, migraine and cancer.” Well, I guess I could be afflicted with any of these possibilities, but rather than check into the Mayo Clinic for an evaluation, I’m going to take these physical conditions off the list as well.

I’m crazy. That seems to be the most reasonable possibility (other than drunkenness) but until someone tells me I need to wash my hair (see last entry, number 11, for an explanation) I’m going to reject that one as well.

I finished up my drink, put away my notebook and walked home. So much for finding any answers on the Internet. Next step: leave the house and do some primary research. I have always been aware of the limitations of secondary research, reading what other people have to say about something rather than asking the questions myself. So, it’s time to talk to some people who might have some answers. Living people, not ghosts. But wouldn’t that be interesting? Finding a ghost or two to interview.

And for those of you who want to engage in some personal ghostbusting, check out this nifty ghost hunting kit for sale on Amazon for only $159.95. Nifty ghost busting kit

BOOKER

Local Burger w/Swiss, Pork Belly, Sweet ‘n Spicy Sauce, Tomato and Onion

 I blame this all on my son, Charlie. When he was a very little boy, he used to sleepwalk at night. I would find him standing in the bathroom taking a pee into the wastebasket, or trying to get outdoors, dressed in his little one-piece footy pajamas. With his eyes open. Fast asleep. I learned to carefully herd him back to his bed and tuck him in, all without waking him. This sleepwalking gave me nightmares. I envisioned various scenarios like him going into the basement and deciding to tackle a building project, one that required the use of a power saw. All while he was fast asleep.

I learned to lay in bed with one fist under the side of my head, so my ear wasn’t pressed against the pillow, so I would be sleeping with both ears functioning, so I could hear him the second his tiny feet hit the floor and he began his peregrinations. Charlie left home for college pretty much for good more than ten years ago, yet I still sleep so I can hear out of both ears, with my fist under my head; if a mouse farts in the living room a floor below, I wake up. Once I’m awake I feel impelled to get up and investigate. I have trained myself well; too well. I haven’t had an uninterrupted night’s sleep in more than 25 years.

The thing is, if I slept soundly, I wouldn’t be aware of any of this. I wouldn’t have the slightest clue that there was something going on under my house. No lights, no digging, no children falling out of the sky.

For the last week I have made it a point to stay in bed, every night, all night long. I get up to go to the bathroom and resist any urge to take a stroll around the house to see if any animated dolls with cut-off noses and sewn together lips are in evidence, maybe sitting in the family room in the dark, staring at the turned-off TV. I can see, in my imagination, that little rag doll head swiveling toward me, and those sad lips attempting to twist into that ghastly smile. No, I have stayed in my bed where I lie awake for hours, but where I am safe. I am safe there, aren’t I? I tell myself that I am.

I’m sitting at the bar, at the Penny, nursing my drink of the evening, a pour of Booker, a bourbon that runs anywhere from 120 to 130 proof, which makes it strong, which is what I like. I should throw in some water to calm it down, but I’m not into such niceties. I’m looking for some mind-numbing this evening. This is number 21 of my 69 drinks. I’m alone, Mark having gone off on a trip to Boston where he is attending a bookseller’s convention. Mark has a business selling rare poetry books that he operates out of his house, which means he’s out of town for weeks at a time over the course of a year. So I’m drinking my drinks, writing my blog entries, trying to stay in bed all night, trying not to think about what’s under my house, wanting to know, not wanting to know.

I still haven’t told Sherry. It’s funny, she could simply read this blog and she’d know what was going on under her nose, or rather under her house. But she stopped reading my blogs years ago; they don’t usually have anything that’s of interest to her or her friends. I would ask the rest of you from refraining from contacting her and saying, hey, you want to know what’s living, if living is the right word, under the floorboards of your office? If you feel the urge to do so, please don’t, because knowing what seems to be going on would drive her nuts.

Or maybe I’m the one who’s nuts. There are only a few distinct possibilities: one, I’m mentally unbalanced and have been having visions; two, I’m a drunk and have been having visions; three, it’s all happening just as I’m reporting.

I don’t think I’m crazy, and I don’t think I’m a drunk. Yes, the evidence on the second possibility is mildly damning. After all, I write a blog about my systematic drinking at the Penny, and I’ve logged plenty of instances of my overall liquor consumption, which is significant. But do I stagger around at night running into the furniture, hallucinating goblins and gremlins, lying on the floor listening to unusual goings-on under my house? Well, yes to the last one. But I’m not drunk when I’m doing so.

I’m not the sort of guy who normally would believe in the supernatural. I’m a science guy. I deplore religious thinking, both the good and the evil aspects, meaning both God and the Devil. I’ve never been faced with the kind of eyewitness “evidence” that I have been seeing. My recent coping strategy is to push it all to the back of my mind and very carefully not consider it. And stay in bed all night long. But, alas, that no longer seems to be working, at least the not-thinking-about-it part.

What to do, what to do?

I’ve decided to tackle this just like I deal with any of the subjects that arise when I’m starting to write a book: I’m going to research the hell out of it. I’ve been mooning around all week; it’s time to take a more proactive approach. I’m going to work the Internet, and I’m going to get out of the house and ask some questions and see what turns up.

I’ve thought about closing down the blog. Obviously the 69 drinks have morphed into something else. And what is this “something else?” An investigation, I guess. For what purpose? Maybe just to see if I’m going crazy. I don’t think I am, or at least it doesn’t feel like it to me. Which is probably a symptom of being crazy. During my 72 years I have had friends who did exactly that — went nuts. (I know, there are better, kinder, terms for this condition.) Some of them ended up killing themselves. Some of them heard voices, some of them saw “ghosts,” many of them were under the care of trained professionals, all of them seemed, well, crazy to me. And there was nothing I could do to talk them out of their convictions.

What I’ve noticed over these years, is that they all had one thing in common: they stopped washing their hair. I’m not kidding. So, do me a favor, if you see me on the street, or more likely down at the Penny and I’m looking kind of rough around the edges, in particular if my hair is long and greasy, tell my wife it’s time to take me to Duke Medical and get some professional help.

One more thing. You know how private detectives and investigative journalists always, when involved in something dangerous, package up their research and send it to their lawyers or The Washington Post with instructions to Open only in the event of my death. The blog will be my contingency plan, my fail-safe. If there is a sudden silence from my end, if there is no entry for a week or two, call my wife and ask her to alert the authorities.

Thanks.

NIKKA COFFEY

Local Beef Chili w/Smoked Poblanos, Pepper Jack, Black Beans

Two nights later Mark and I were back at the Penny. I didn’t even think about my drink. I told Josh to bring me anything on the list. He explained that the Nikka Coffey he brought me was a Japanese grain whiskey, but I wasn’t really listening. The glass he set in front of me was the usual dark amber color; I could smell the sweetness of the liquor.

The squirrel and nut attack had been, as I said, two nights ago, although the squirrels had done nothing more than passively observe. Last night I spent the entire night in our bedroom. Sherry slept in the guest room again, claiming she hadn’t heard the nut bombast. I didn’t mention the squirrels or the child/doll. I decided to forgo my usual nightly perambulations. I had seen enough the night before to keep me from peering into the backyard with my flashlight, looking for trouble.

For trouble I had surely found.

I hadn’t slept much the night before. We have a cool-looking Federalist couch in our bedroom, which is where I tried to sleep. The back is to the window, so I wasn’t looking out. That was why I was sleeping on the couch. The bed faces the window. I didn’t want to see again what I had seen before.

“OK, tell me again what this rag doll looked like,” Mark said. I walked over to his house this morning to see how he was doing. After getting little help from his doctor, he’d consulted the Internet and found that washing his bug-bitten body with dandruff shampoo would take care much of his itching problem. It did. The various welts were fading. He’s an easy-going guy anyway, he wasn’t angry with me anymore.

“She looked like a rag doll when she bounced off the roof and fell into the yard, but when she started crawling toward me it was obvious this was no doll. She was definitely alive,” I said.

“Describe her.”

It’s not like I hadn’t been thinking about this girl-creature for the last couple of days. “Easier said than done, though I couldn’t tell you why it’s so hard to describe her.” I thought about it while I took a sip of my Japanese whisky. It tasted like a great bourbon even though Josh said it was a grain whisky. I didn’t know what the difference was. I could look it up, but I’ve got other things on my mind.

I went on. “She had short limbs, and looked around seven or eight-years old, though she would have been very small for her age. I’m not good at guessing the ages of children. She was black, as in African, with hair in braids or dreads. She looked very dirty.”

“Dirty because she’d been digging around under your house?”

That thought gave me no comfort. “I guess, though I’ve been trying to avoid that conclusion. There’s something else I’ve been trying to avoid. The reason I’ve been thinking of her as a rag doll, is because of a video I used to watch with my daughter Leah when she was little. It was an animated film called Raggedly Ann and Andy. In the film, the classic Raggedy Ann doll has lots of adventures. Leah loved it. She probably watched it fifty times, and I was there for most of those viewings. It was actually well done and not that painful to watch, even after you had most of the dialogue committed to memory. My backyard doll looked like Raggedy Ann, only a black version.”

I was speaking slowly because I didn’t really want to get to the next part. Mark waited patiently. He was drinking a sour beer, a style of brewing that was edging out IPAs in the hipster world.

“Go on,” he said.

“If you can, try to remember what a classic Raggedy Ann doll looks like. Red yarn for hair, buttons for eyes. A red triangle for a nose. Thick hands. But in this case, the doll was African.”

“Got it. Your classic rag doll, only black.” He took out his cell phone and began keying in text.

“Yes. Here’s the thing,” I said. “It was night. I had been drinking. There were a hundred fucking squirrels staring at me, and walnuts were slamming down on my house. A child/doll body had just bounced off the roof into my back yard and started crawling toward me. I wish I could say I couldn’t really see her, but I could.”

“Of course you could see her, you were using the World’s Most Powerful Flashlight.” He was making a joke, but I wasn’t smiling. He turned his phone toward me to show me a picture. It was a photograph of a doll, a black doll. It certainly resembled the child who had fallen in my back yard, only this was clearly a doll. Not a real person. “They’re called Topsy dolls,” he said. “Named after the little slave girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. They were popular in the late nineteenth century.”

I nodded, but I wasn’t really focusing on the picture. I was focusing on the scene in my head. I went on.

“When she reached about two feet from the base of the house, she looked up at me. All told she was about five feet away from where I was standing. I could see her face quite clearly. Here’s the thing, Mark, the really terrible thing. This was no doll, this was a real person. Her nose was a little red triangle because it had been cut off. Her mouth looked made of thread because her lips had been sewn shut, very crudely, with thick black thread. Up-and-down stiches, like a railroad track.” Mark had his beer half-lifted toward his mouth. “And she had no fingers. She had Raggedy Ann hands because all her fingers had been cut off. And here’s the worst part, Mark.” I leaned across the table and spoke quietly. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to keep anyone else from hearing, or I didn’t want to hear what I was saying.

“She smiled at me, Mark, not that she could really smile, not with her lips sewn shut. But she gave it a try nonetheless, and it was truly horrible.”

Josh appeared at our side.

“You want another one?”

“Sure. You pick,” I said, just wanting to get rid of him. Josh turned to Mark.

“I’ll have whatever he’s having,” Mark said. “No more beer.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute while Josh went back behind the bar.

“You don’t look so good,” I said. Mark had gone a faint grey color. He nodded. Josh came back and put two glasses on the table. “Four Roses,” he said. We each picked up a glass and drank. After a few more minutes of silence, Mark started looking a little better. He leaned toward me, the way I had leaned toward him. When he spoke it was just loud enough for me to hear.

“Tell me you were drunk. Or that this is one of your jokes.”

I shook my head. He sat back in his chair.

“It’s all true?”

“True? True? Are you asking me if I’m bullshitting you?”

“Have you told Sherry any of this?”

“No. And not because I don’t think she’ll believe me. I’m not going to tell her because I think she will believe me. I don’t think there’s any physical harm in it at this point. Even though I don’t understand it. She’ll just worry.”

“And rightly so,” Mark said. “No harm in it?” he asked, sarcastically. He shook his head. His voice was grim. Good old easygoing Mark. “OK, I’ve just got one question.” He turned his drink glass precisely one-quarter turn of a revolution and folded his hands in front of him.

“Just what the hell is next?”