A week ago Christmas and I moved into the mansion of a famous dead
author, and in doing research on the estate, I came across discussions about it on various ghost hunter message boards.
One guy reported that the place was haunted because he'd heard there
were weird cold spots in different rooms, which, true, there are,
because the mansion is made of concrete. A certain Clara
confidently stated that, "I have been in the house and it is not
haunted" without offering any further proof or description of her
experience, which I take to mean that she has an amazing version of
whatever the supernatural equivalent of gaydar is. Maybe the ghosts
were just chillin and illin when she happened to sweep through.
Even so, I'm leaning toward siding with Clara, because if a dead author needed to reach out to someone, wouldn't he hit up the living one on his turf? We could dish on our favorite fonts, act as each other's quickie thesauruses, commiserate about the lifestyle. But not a peep nor a whooooooo. I could have used him last week before I went and bought a mirror-- there were none around (those concrete walls), and I learned that I have intense difficulty putting on a bra when I'm not watching the act reflected back to me. I couldn't shake the feeling I was walking around with unevenly plumped boobs, and the dead author might have told me to "lift the right a little."
If I suddenly start churning out westerns, something's up and contact's been made. In the meantime, in a neighborhood of old houses, old trees, and old plastic woodland animals many of my neighbors seem intent upon displaying on their front lawns, the creepiest thing around is either the official Girl Scout playground or the walled headquarters of the society whose founder believed, "humanity had descended from a series of 'Root Races,' naming the fifth root race (out of seven) the Aryan race. The Root Races were evolutionary stages, each new Root Race being more evolved than the previous one. She thought that the Aryans originally came from Atlantis, who were part of the fourth Root Race. The Aryan Root Race was only one more step in the evolutionary progress and it would eventually be superseded by a more spiritual Root Race, the sixth. She believed that Semitic peoples were later Aryans who have become 'degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality'" (courtesy Wikipedia).
Christmas is doing her part, trying to pull a Katie Holmes for spooky effect, and maybe she'll eventually be successful in kicking off "The Legend of the White Lady in the Window" to go down in More Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark XXI and get told someday round Yosemite campfires, but for the time being, things are pretty peaceful around here. And a coyote just howled at the end of the previous sentence, for reals.
Even so, I'm leaning toward siding with Clara, because if a dead author needed to reach out to someone, wouldn't he hit up the living one on his turf? We could dish on our favorite fonts, act as each other's quickie thesauruses, commiserate about the lifestyle. But not a peep nor a whooooooo. I could have used him last week before I went and bought a mirror-- there were none around (those concrete walls), and I learned that I have intense difficulty putting on a bra when I'm not watching the act reflected back to me. I couldn't shake the feeling I was walking around with unevenly plumped boobs, and the dead author might have told me to "lift the right a little."
If I suddenly start churning out westerns, something's up and contact's been made. In the meantime, in a neighborhood of old houses, old trees, and old plastic woodland animals many of my neighbors seem intent upon displaying on their front lawns, the creepiest thing around is either the official Girl Scout playground or the walled headquarters of the society whose founder believed, "humanity had descended from a series of 'Root Races,' naming the fifth root race (out of seven) the Aryan race. The Root Races were evolutionary stages, each new Root Race being more evolved than the previous one. She thought that the Aryans originally came from Atlantis, who were part of the fourth Root Race. The Aryan Root Race was only one more step in the evolutionary progress and it would eventually be superseded by a more spiritual Root Race, the sixth. She believed that Semitic peoples were later Aryans who have become 'degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality'" (courtesy Wikipedia).
Christmas is doing her part, trying to pull a Katie Holmes for spooky effect, and maybe she'll eventually be successful in kicking off "The Legend of the White Lady in the Window" to go down in More Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark XXI and get told someday round Yosemite campfires, but for the time being, things are pretty peaceful around here. And a coyote just howled at the end of the previous sentence, for reals.
