Category Archives: So that happened…

Tales of woe, wonderment, self deprication and mockery from the life and times of Hope.

A Ghost at My Sister’s House

The story of Miss Hanes begins when my sister Julie Anne and her young family moved from a small apartment above a Toledo wicker shop to a charming old house in the suburb of Point Place.

It was a very pretty first home for Julie Anne, her husband Brett, their toddler Brenna, and their sweet but excitable Dalmatian, Gonzo. It offered a homey neighborhood and plenty of room for the family to grow. But there was always something off about the place.

Immediately upon moving in, my sweet baby niece Brenna began to take on odd qualities.

Odd, even for my family.

Brenna’d always had an almost eerie calm about her, even as a toddler, quietly observing with the hint of judgment. But somehow, in the new house, she seemed almost otherworldly.

Need an example? One of Brenna’s more unsettling games during this particular period was called Magic Fingers. It was a game of her own creation, where she’d cast a spell by wiggling her fingers above her head, chanting. After calling on the power of the magic fingers, Brenna would utter a command.

“Magic Fingers, make Hope be dead,” for instance.

At that time, I didn’t know whether to fear that some demon intended to steal my beloved niece or take comfort in the more realistic notion that Brenna would be the child who could summon and command the spirit world.

It wasn’t just Brenna’s unusual playtime antics, though. Things moved around the house. Not before your eyes, but objects just didn’t remain in the spot you remembered putting them or seeing them last.

This was particularly problematic for Brett.

Not long after they’d taken residence, Brett’s wedding ring came up missing. After an exhaustive search and a little drama, they replaced it.

He lost that one, too.

It was an ugly time until Julie Anne – doing laundry down the basement – found both rings on the floor under a pile of clothes. She handed one to her husband, who promptly lost it again. Julie Anne returned to the basement to check and found the ring right where she had spied it the last time – in the center of the basement floor under a pile of dirty laundry.

Had it been only the ring, well that would have been weird enough, but it wasn’t.

Items moved around Brenna’s room as well, winding up on surfaces too high for her to reach. The front and back door would be standing open, even if you were certain you’d closed and locked them. And worst of all, the dog refused to go into the nursery.

That is never a good sign.

Fascinated, Julie Anne talked to neighbors, who spun a yarn about a tragedy in the Hanes family, who’d lived in Julie Anne’s house a few years before.

A story emerged. The teenage daughter babysat all around the neighborhood one summer. She was well-liked by the area kids and their parents. She had a nice enough family, herself, although maybe a little strict, overprotective.

That might be why she decided to sneak out her bedroom window, across the porch roof and down the tree one night to meet a boy at the little wooded patch beyond the cul de sac.

Neighbors couldn’t remember whether her father claimed to suspect an intruder, or if he thought he was catching that boyfriend sneaking into his daughter’s room.

Or if Mr. Hanes was just a psycho.

Whatever he was thinking, Mr. Hanes shot his daughter. She never left the house again.

Now the troubled, lovesick teen wandered Julie Anne’s halls, stealing wedding rings and hiding them where Brett would never find them – under a pile of work needing to be done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Little evidences of Miss Hanes’s presence filled Julie Anne’s house, from the bedazzled basement floor to the little knickknacks that moved around Brenna’s room – all harmless enough reminders that we were not alone in Point Place.

And then one night I would have more of a one-on-one run in.

My twin sister Joy and I were sleeping over, sharing Julie Anne’s bed upstairs. Julie Anne was sleeping with Brenna, and Brett was working the night shift.

It was late and Joy and I were both long asleep when I was roused by a stomping sound.

It didn’t wake Joy up. I lay there a while in the dark. The house was quiet.

Then I heard it again – it sounded like footsteps from above, which was odd because I hadn’t even realized that Julie Anne had an attic. Certainly, no one was walking around in the attic at this hour, but by now I was absolutely awake and a clear footfall could be heard coming from beyond the ceiling above me.

What could it be? I considered.

Squirrels?

Nope, squirrels scurry.

Deer.

Now that’s just idiotic.

How would a deer get into Julie Anne’s attic? 

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.

Ooooooh. I did not care for this. I shook Joy.

Nothing.

“Joy! Joy!”

Nothing. A sound sleeper, that one.

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.

I decided to ignore it. Maybe block it out. I landed on the age-old, truly courageous plan to roll over and pull the covers over my head.

I rolled to my side, facing Joy, covers in hand.

I tugged.

The covers would not move.

I really yanked them toward my head, but they wouldn’t reach. They were held firmly in place.

I tugged and tugged, but it was as if someone was sitting on the bed with me, sitting on top of the blankets.

I imagined her there, right behind me. Her bloody nightgown, her mournful face…

I looked at the peacefully sleeping Joy, the sister I was about to abandon to a ghost.

Then, without a thought to her safety or so much as a peek over my shoulder at whatever was back there sitting on the bed with us, I hopped up, stood on the bed, stepped over Joy and toward the bedroom door, and fled to the TV room downstairs.

And, like big, dumb Gonzo, I never went back upstairs.

Listening for Banjos

When our son Riley was young, sometimes – well, often – my husband George and I were those parents who had no idea what was going on.

We never quite figured out how other parents always knew about picture day, field trips, permission slips and other school-related whatnot. I’d have found those in-the-know parents irritating if they weren’t so helpful.

Usually, we’d be made aware of some impending deadline or event when somebody else’s mom brought it up at a baseball game. Such was the case with 4th-grade camp.

It was little second baseman Joe Trapp’s mom who asked, “So, is Riley excited about camp?”

Ick. What?

“Camp. It’s coming up. Don’t you have your paperwork filled out?”

I believe my disgusted face said more than just, No, I haven’t seen any paperwork.

“Oh, it’s so fun. He’ll love it.”

I couldn’t imagine why that mattered.

As an unwritten, shameful rule, George and I never let Riley do anything that kept him away from home for more than a single night. It wasn’t an overprotective instinct, really. We were just kind of sad when he wasn’t around. Life beams brighter when he’s on hand.

My oldest sister had harassed me for years to let Riley stay with her for a few days each summer. Her house is six whole hours from mine.

Screw that!

We were to relent in our smothering territoriality for 4th-grade camp, though. It was a mandatory excursion.

Still, there was a hiccup. Because of our situational ignorance, we’d let Riley audition for a play that rehearsed right through the week of camp. He was the lead in James and the Giant Peach, and he was not going to be allowed to miss a full week’s rehearsals.

So, he’d go to camp for two days, come home overnight (allowing for two rehearsals), and then return.

I’d fetch him.

The camp was situated in Hocking Hills, Southern Ohio’s little patch of Appalachia. For an awful lot of Ohioans, the word “Appalachia” conjures images of serene rolling hills, green and peaceful valleys, a restful vacation spot. But for those of us who log too many hours watching horror films, it means something entirely different.

So it wasn’t visions of sugarplums filling my head as I took the Grandview School bus driver’s directions in hand and set off to fetch Riley in time for rehearsal.

As a rule, I dislike any road that lacks the common decency to bedeck itself with streetlights. Sure, this trip into the holler back in the pre-GPS days took place in broad daylight, but that matters not.

It’s not just the dark that I hate.

It’s this type of street – invariably flanked by fields or forest or some other overwhelming, claustrophobic presence of nature where anyone or anything can hide and watch and wait and play a banjo.

Little did I know as I started off that late spring morn that the bus driver who’d written my directions prefers a scenic route.

I would later learn that a good old, reliable highway runs directly from Columbus to Hocking Hills. But I didn’t know that yet, so I was stuck with Bussy’s rural landscape map.

I followed one country road after another rural route and then back across the sticks when, without warning, the road closed. There was no detour, nary a two-story building in the town where the thoroughfare ended, and I had very few bars left on my cell phone.

I pulled into an abandoned Blockbuster Video parking lot and called the school. Time and bars were wasted as the school secretary found me a phone number for the camp, which I dialed promptly. It rang and rang without end.

Why was no one answering?

I called George, who jumped online to google map me up a new route. I could have turned around and looked for the highway, but I was so far away from Columbus by this point that he thought we should try to find a detour that put me back on Bussy’s route.

George began directing, but my brain filled with flies and wax at all these unmarked turns being recommended.

I wrote down his directions, but I panicked.

I called the camp again. Ring, ring, ring, ring….

Panic, panic, panic, panic….

I tried to push the image of a 4th-grade camp overrun with bears or hillbillies or hillbilly bears out of my brain and decided to walk into the intersection to get some thoughts from the cop directing traffic.

“Ma’am, you can’t just walk out here.”

“Yes, I know. I’m lost.”

“I can’t help you right now,” he told me, arms waving rhythmically so this pick-up truck or that would know who had the right of way at the construction-handicapped intersection.

“Right. But here’s the thing. I have to pick my son up from camp, and the only directions I have say I need to stay on this closed road for another few miles, until it crosses 97. Do you know another route to 97?”

He did not know, but he guessed that if I took the next rural route and drove a while, I might be able to find a country road that cut back across to this closed road before it intersected with 97.

Guessing, meandering, wandering, and hoping are not things I am prepared to do on rural routes.

I would rather be eaten alive by sharks.

I called George back, who, taking my own crippling handicaps into consideration (it’s kind of surprising I am legally allowed on the road, really, given that most of Ohio is rural), said the best thing to do was just turn around, come almost all the way back to Columbus, and then take I71 to Athens county, where I could stop at a gas station to determine the whereabouts of the camp.

I felt sure I’d seen that movie, too, but I love me some highway, so I did it.

I won’t say things went smoothly once I hit Athens County, or that I was in my most sound and socially adjusted mind when I found the camp and collected my boy, but the mission was accomplished and James made it to his Giant Peach on time.

How I Invented Catfishing in 1991

When I was a kid in the ‘90s, we used to receive disks in the mail containing access to free hours of America Online. My father, an early adopter of the home PC would not, at first, commit to signing the family up for dial-up Internet service, but he’d gladly hand over the free disks and allow me to hole up on the living room couch with a laptop that had the approximate heft and thickness of the era’s yellow pages.

I’d slide the disk in, and after a series of clicks and high-pitched whines, be connected to a world wide web of shit I did not understand. At least until someone called the land line and I got kicked off.

Dungeon and Dragons-based chatrooms with a degree of etiquette and formatting requirement that baffled me. Rooms of people complaining about their children. And a seemingly infinite amount of rooms where people introduced themselves with details about the size and appearance of their own personal genitals (or at least what they pretended were their own personal genitals).

I’d gamely try to play along, typing by hunting and pecking, misspelling almost every word and failing to keep up with the rapid-fire conversation of experienced typists all trying to find someone to bone or to at least facilitate some sort of masturbatory fantasy.

That is, until I was banned from the Internet.

When I was in the fifth grade, my mom decided to go back to school to get her teaching degree. As part of the curriculum, she had to take a class on educational technology.

Back in the ‘90s, I guess it wasn’t common for folks to have their own computer or access to the Internet, so the good folks at the education department of Northern Kentucky University gave all the students in the class their own Macintosh Classic IIs and access to Tristate Online—a local mini version of the Web provided by the area telephone company that consisted mainly of a series of bulletin boards on various topics.

As my parents were aware of my desperation to immerse myself in cyberspace, my mom granted me permission to use her computer and access Tristate Online, provided I waited until she was done with her homework.

Big mistake.

I invented myself a new persona. I’d be 25, since that was the oldest age at which a person could still claim to be somewhat cool. I would be the older sister and roommate of the person the computer had been loaned to. I’d be lonely (this part was true) and looking for love.

And I put myself out there. I found a guy (at least I assumed it was a guy) who was in college (at least he claimed to be in college) who was also looking for someone. And we fell into a fraught series of chats conducted asynchronously via a bulletin board.

He liked me and seemed to buy into the persona I had created despite the rather glaring evidence that I was a child, or at least someone who lacked basic spelling skills. (This was before spell check and I honestly believed that the word sugar had an h in it.)

Meanwhile, at my day job, I was an elementary school student at a Catholic school so cliquish that my only friend had been lured away from me with the promise of joining the popular girl’s group…if she was willing to hold one of the scrawny and unpopular boys down on the playground and bite his ear until it bled.

Much to my horror, she went for it, leaving me with a chip on my shoulder and a tendency to take my lunch in the nurse’s office rather than sit at a table alone.

I wanted revenge against these chicks, and the sad boy on the bulletin board seemed like the best way to do it.

I was in the middle of arranging our first date when my mom had to turn the computer back in. But I’d given out “my” address, or rather the address of the head popular girl. And “my” name, or rather, her name, and set the date for our first rendezvous.

And I went to school, eagerly awaiting the gossip of how her parents reacted to the grown man showing up at their house to pick up their fifth-grade daughter.

I was unprepared for the fact that I was going to be the kid getting in trouble.

One afternoon my mom stormed into my room and slammed the door behind her, her eyes already watering from a barely repressed desire to rage-cry.

“What did you do?” she seethed.

My eyes slanted toward the cushion under which I tended to stash bits of candy for later consumption under the covers after bedtime while reading illicit Stephen King novels.

“What?” I asked, all innocence.

“I got a call from my professor today.”

I may have quirked an eyebrow here. I can’t be sure. I don’t exactly remember at what point I developed the talent of the one raised eyebrow although I do know it was something I consciously worked at for hours in front of the bathroom mirror. Anyhow, I’m sure there was some sort of quizzical look shot in her direction.

“Some man contacted her trying to find my,” big pause here, “sister.”

“That’s weird,” I squeaked.

“As you know, I don’t have a sister.”

“Maybe they mean Kathleen?” I offered, her childhood friend.

“Apparently I have a 25-year old sister who is my roommate. This, this man was trying to find her. To. Go. On. A. Date. I had to tell my professor that the only other person who has access to my school computer is my 11-year-old.”

There was a lot of screaming and crying after this.

The downside was that I was banned from the Internet for approximately five years.

The upside was that I invented Internet catfishing in 1991.

Thanks to Rory Sheridan for the kick-ass illustration.

Vermonsters

My twin sister Joy and I have much in common aside from a birth date and pasty legs – we love her kids and mine; we love Pee-wee Herman; we enjoy a lovely nap and we eat soft boiled eggs over dry cereal – the important things. But our differences become more pronounced as we age.

She lived in Boston for maybe a decade, just a couple minutes’ drive from the greatest video rental place on the globe, Video Oasis.

Truly, it was an oasis of all things horror movie. It had everything. I would search the internet, compile lists, plot out every inaccessible horror film in creation and take said list with me to this glorious font of B-movies, where the overweight smoker of an owner always, always had what I was looking for.

1974 Blaxploitation classic Abby (aka The Blaxorcist)? Yep.

Martin Landau’s lost 1982 insane asylum flick Alone in the Dark? Got it.

Often I’d have to settle for VHS, sometimes for what was clearly a handmade, pirated copy, but what did I care? Sisters of Satan (noted by Satanist and film critic Nikolas Schreck as “the best soft core Satanic lesbian nun film that Mexico has ever produced”) wasn’t just going to find its own way onto my TV screen.

Alas, city life grew tiresome for my sister and her burgeoning family, and they uprooted to the wilds of Vermont. Only about three hours from Boston and its magnificent pool of schlock horror, Hinesberg, Vermont may as well have been another planet.

A heavily wooded planet.

They searched out their dream home, nestled in the woods on a lake. Technically – and by that I mean, if you ask Joy – they don’t live in a log cabin in the woods. For my purposes, it’s a log cabin. It is definitely in the woods.

I am not one with the woods.

In fact, of all my countless and paralyzing fears, nothing evokes the kind of panic in me that the woods does. The forest fills me with a pathological, deep and abiding, blind terror.

And yet—as if to get away from me—Joy moved her clan into one of my nightmares.

Joy’s family adapted quickly. I was on the phone with her and her wee one Vivian, then two, when Viv caught a fat frog. From my end of the phone I could make out Joy’s side of the conversation.

“Wow, it’s a big one. He has orange marks on his belly, can you see that? He won’t let you pick him up, though. Oh, look at that, he did let you pick him up. Be gentle. Be careful with him.”

“Don’t squeeze. Don’t Squeeze. DON’T SQUEEZE!”

The wildlife didn’t bother my little Vermonsters one iota. Ruby, Vivian’s older sister and bunkmate, came nonchalantly down the stairs one morning to announce on her way to eat breakfast, “There’s a bat in my room.”

“It’s black with a gray head,” she clarified as her dad Jeff made his way upstairs, as if he might mistake this bat with some other.

Given her utterly nonplussed response to the invader, Jeff assumed it was something else – a big moth, maybe. Ruby sleeps on the top bunk. Surely if an actual bat were flying around that close to her sweet little head, she’d be a bit more excited about it.

It was indeed a bat.

A good sized bat, which only made it all the more embarrassing for Jeff and Joy when they freaked right the hell out while their baby girls yawned and ate their morning granola.

But you have to get used to critters if you’re going to live where Joy and Jeff live.

At one point, their neighbors’ chickens were being picked off one by one.

“I think it’s a fisher cat,” Jeff said.

What’s a fisher cat?

fisher_th

“It’s not a wolverine,” Joy explained to me.

Wait, what?!! Is that supposed to be calming?

She has seen bears.

There are fucking predators in Joy’s yard.

Forgive me my ignorance. These are not worries we have at my house.

Off the deck out back Joy often sees woodchucks (according to Ruby, their babies are called chucklings), a fox or two, any number of birds – all of which possess a rustic charm when I can see them through the safety of a securely locked window.

At night, though, when these critters become nothing but glinting eyeballs, I prefer the comfort of the basement.

That’s where I stay when I visit, and that’s A-OK with me.

There are no windows in the basement.

In fact, I kid you not, the basement is so dark that Joy keeps a plastic miner’s helmet equipped with a light near the futon so guests can find their way around at night.

Whenever I visit the Family Vermonster I bring with me horror films set in the woods. I don’t know if it’s masochism or a clumsy attempt to face my fears, but it has become a ritual.

On one visit, after the girls went to bed, Joy, Jeff, and I lounged around the basement guest quarters and watched the sub-par Aussie camping nightmare Lost Weekend.

You know it? Fools dumb enough to spend time in the woods are unceremoniously picked off by angry animals.

Afterward, Jeff retired and Joy and I sat up making fun of people, as is our way.

We were interrupted by the sound of critters.

Joy kept talking, though through a nervous smile.

I silenced up and waited for Joy to share some comforting words about what that noise was and how it meant me no harm.

The noise came again.

It wasn’t a mouse, wasn’t even mice. It sounded like a multitude of medium sized mammals with claws skittering across the first-floor hardwood.

“What the fuck?” I queried.

She smiled again, shrugged her shoulders and held her hands out in a ‘kids do the darndest things’ kind of expression.

“What does that mean?!!”

“I don’t know,” she offered anxiously. “Maybe keep the basement door closed?”

AAaaaaaahhhhhhh!

That night I naturally lay awake until images of rodents and scurrying varmints overcame me, their glinting eyeballs creeping toward me from every dark recess in the basement.

Slowly the beings morphed with my dreamier brain into furry little beasties. Some were feline and fanged. Some had orange markings on their bellies, others, gray heads.

They dashed in and out of the shadows, under furniture, around corners, looking for what – meat?

It seems to me they were searching for meat.

I swear some of them were wearing miners’ helmets.

Adventure Day

“Christie, why are we doing this?” my companion asked.

I wiggled in my restraints a bit until I could see him in my peripheral vision. “I dunno. What’s that German word that means love-of-death?”

Then we plunged 140 feet down and attempts at conversation were superseded by screaming.

The next day, I woke up, slung my feet over the edge of the bed, toes grazing the floor for a second. I stood and just managed to avoid pitching myself out through the screen of my bedroom window as lightning bolts of pain exploded from my toes, up through my legs, and into my back.

Turns out that wearing heels, even sensible wedge sandal heels, around Kings Island all day is murder on a body that’s knocking on middle age.

As is, potentially, the fast lane pass—which allowed us to conceive a quest: to ride all 12 roller coasters in the front seat in one day.

Much had changed since the first time the companion and I had visited the park over 20 years ago. This time, mom didn’t drop me off and a pager wasn’t clipped to my waistband.

Also, the Hanna Barbera characters I remember have been replaced by the Peanuts gang. The Paramount movie-themed rides (Top Gun, Italian Job, Face/Off) have been rechristened. I can legally drink now. (Hell, my ability to drive can legally drink now.) And, somewhat crushingly, there is a 90s-themed gift shop directly on your right once you step through the turnstile.

But there is also the ability to purchase a wristband that lets you line jump. Legally.

Every. Single. Ride.

A fiendishly good idea pioneered by Disney, the “fast pass”creates a class system where spendy people can hand over a wad of cash and avoid broiling in the sun. The park gets more money and you get an opportunity to spend former line time sitting in the shade, drinking ten-dollar beers and avoiding making accidental and awkward eye contact with the teenagers groping each other in line.

Which is good, because my companion for the day was my first-ever boyfriend, with whom I once spent time in line engaging in more PDA than I can remember without going red in the face.

We started with the Vortex, the new coaster when we first got enough height on us to ride the real rides. Then the Racer, which instead of racing a backward car against a frontward car, now races a fast lane car against a regular lane car (both facing forward) and makes the economic divide a little too apparent.

At this point, my companion regressed and proceeded to taunt the teenagers riding in the second-class train.

They won. They wanted it more.

And around the park we went, pointing out the absence of beloved old attractions (RIP Screaming Eagles), lamenting the loss of the former movie soundtrack playlist, and psyching each other up for the newer, scarier rides. Mystic Timbers (16 hills and an ambitious shed experience), Diamondback (215-foot drop, flying over hills at 80 miles an hour) and Firehawk.

Firehawk required more ten-dollar beer. This thing starts you off on your back and drags you up the hill facing the clouds, before—at the apex—turning you over so all your weight is on the harness and you fly around on your belly like Superman.

This thing made me tense all my muscles in an attempt to burrow physically into the seat behind me.

“Trust the harness!” my companion screamed at me over the wind.

And I let go, soaring through the air. Maybe I’m wasn’t outstretched in languorous flight. My arms might have twisted into a shape more reminiscent of an anxious t-rex then the man of steel, but it was fun.

By the time we hit the last ride of the day, the tragically renamed Invertigo, we’d been at Kings Island for longer than the average workday. Feet were screaming. Brains had been repeatedly banged against the hard cases of our skulls. The ten-dollar beers had shaken up in my guts to the point where I was continually nauseous. We’d stopped talking and leaned against the metal bars of the first seat line, vacantly staring at the teenagers playing grab ass.

Still, when I wordlessly did the face waterfall from Face/Off at my companion, he smiled.

After the closing fireworks, mission complete, all roller coasters bested, I drove back up 71 to Columbus to my husband and daughter—a road on which every single skunk seemed to have committed suicide by car, where they were refreshing the blacktop in stretches with something that smelled suspiciously like pee, and where the sewage treatment plant on the south side was very much actively working. I sipped water, trying not to vomit, and eyed the dinner plate-sized-and- growing bruise on my right thigh under the intermittent flash of the streetlamps.

Totally worth it though, to hang out with someone whose early memories are much the same as yours. To point out the absence of something and have them fill in what was there. To have a shorthand conversation with a gesture. Feels like flying.

If we do this again, though, I’ll pre-game with a preemptive strike of Advil.

And prioritize getting matching airbrushed T-shirts.

Satanism Happens. (No it doesn’t.)

When my son was about 8, our eye doctor retired and we inherited a newer, better version. The new eye doctor was explaining some of the specifics of Riley’s condition to him, and mentioned that he had astigmatism. To which Riley naturally replied, “And how is that related to stigmata?”

Perplexed and maybe a little frightened, our ophthalmologist looked to me.

I explained to the boy:

“Well, there’s a lot less blood.”

Why was my 8-year-old already familiar with the term stigmata – the spontaneous appearance of wounds corresponding to the wounds of the crucifixion? Well, why isn’t yours?

I myself was trained in the gorier aspects of the Catholic faith when I was very young, so why not my boy? Though I doubt I could provide the appropriate tutelage on the darker edges of Catholicism that I’d received from Sister Cleofa.

Sister Cleofa was my first grade teacher. Back in those days, twins were separated in school to encourage individual development, so my sister Joy was across the hall in Sr. Angela’s class.

Ah, Sr. Angela’s – the envy of all Sr. Cleofa’s pupils. Sr. Angela was youngish. She wore the more lightweight habit, sometimes in a jaunty pale blue. She played acoustic guitar. She smiled routinely.

Sister Cleofa, she was not.

No, my teacher wore the full black garb, boasted heavy facial hair, and never smiled once. (I promise you I could not vouch for the fact that she had teeth at all, though I would predict fangs.)

And while the 6-year-olds across the hall drew pictures of angels and learned folk gospel tunes, we studied the Stations of the Cross.

If you’re unfamiliar, these are the pivotal steps of Christ’s condemnation, death, and – if you’re brave enough to make it through the tale of innocent blood and carnage without sobbing so loudly you drown out that final station – resurrection.

My mustachioed teacher terrified us all. Catholicism had been utterly run of the mill for me up until then: my dad worked for the Catholic church and my mother was deeply devoted in an unadorned, tight lipped way. We gave up meat during lent. We genuflected as we entered pews. We made the sign of the cross with holy water. We never missed Mass.

Even when we went on vacation, my dad may not have been able to find a public restroom, but by God he’d find a Catholic church.

But Sr. Cleofa’s obstinate devotion to the darkest, ugliest, most purple robed and mysterious elements of the religion began to fester in my young mind. And though Satan was never studied outright, he always seemed present in her teaching, hiding just beyond all that blood, misery and fear. Maybe that’s why the great devil worship scare of ’88 felt so natural, obvious even.

What great devil worship scare of ’88, you ask?

You probably didn’t know what stigmata meant, either.

Let me introduce you to my hometown sheriff, Dale Griffis. In the Eighties, Griffis was considered an expert in Satanism. I swear this is true. Look it up.

He claimed that the rural counties of Ohio were home to dozens of covens, and that ritualistic human sacrifice was commonplace out among our heartland corn rows.

A lot of people think the Necronomicon is a pretend anti-bible used in movies like Evil Dead, but Griffis claimed to own a copy.

He witnessed on all the talk shows – Geraldo, in particular. He even appeared on 20/20 at least once. Naturally, this suggested to us in Tiffin that our hometown and its outlying agriculture was the hotbed of Satan.

And there was proof!

Rossford, Ohio’s telephone exchange is 666 – I swear to God!

The streets in the town of Gallipolis take the form of sixes, and townsfolk chase outlanders to the town center for sacrifice. (This is unverified, but so obvious if you know anyone from Gallipolis, which you probably do not.)

Plus, our town founder was killed as he camped in what would one day be called Hedges Boyer Park. He was skinned alive, his bones all that was left of him, because he’d disturbed a coven.

(Note: This may not be true. My brother-in-law Brett told this story to my sister and me at bedtime one night. This makes him a likely liar, and an undeniably poor babysitter.)

OK, maybe we were looking for evidence where none existed, but we were only following Griffis’s lead.

His tales of rural demons were eventually uncovered as an overripe paranoid frenzy. For a truly horrific example of the damage done, though, Griffis was the prosecution’s “expert on the occult” in the trial of the West Memphis Three – you remember, those teenage boys wrongly convicted of child murder?

The court ruled they were Satanists, based largely on expert witness testimony, but would later find that they’d been wrongfully imprisoned for 18+ years based on superstition, ignorance and poor police work.

Between Griffis’s stories and Cleofa’s grim teachings, I’m lucky all I have to show for their influence is a keen interest in horror films and a son with unusual questions about vocabulary.

I’m lucky I didn’t end up with repressed memory syndrome or some other lasting stigma.

Now, how again is that related to stigmata?

 

Thanks to James Garze for the kick ass illustration!

Quack Addicts

by Hope Madden

We were starting to think we had new pets. We had one already – a cat named Zappa. She’d been with us forever, rescued from Cat Welfare years ago when we were apartment dwellers and couldn’t have a dog. At the time, we felt like our 2-year-old son Riley needed a buddy.

A million years later, we still didn’t have a dog because Zappa was a 16-year old deaf, toothless cat who refused to eat anything but scrambled eggs and lunchmeat and really wasn’t adaptable enough for a sibling.

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Since she was allergic to fleas, however, Zappa never went outdoors, so an outside pet or two would be OK.

But the heartbreak of outdoor pets, especially those that choose you rather than those you purchase, is that sometimes they waddle around in your pool and eat your store-bought feed and then fly away, never to return.

Like our ducks.

A mallard couple began hanging around our street in Grandview one spring.

They’d show up in the morning, loiter all afternoon, then fly away at night. There were sightings all over the neighborhood, and then, little by little, the waddling twosome zeroed in on a single yard for passing their daylight hours. Ours.

We have a small front yard far from any known body of water, so we hadn’t a clue s to why the ducks kept returning. We tried not to disturb them too much – made sure we entered and exited by way of the back door, scattered some birdseed for them. They seemed to appreciate it day after day, week after week, and we got used to seeing them.

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The female would hide between two little bushes, and the male would sit in the middle of our front yard. We took it that he was guarding her, and we hoped she was making a nest.

We had become too attached. In fact, my husband, George, went the wild bird store to find out what was the best kind of feed for Gary and Fiona.

Yes, our son gave them names.

Once you name them, you’re doomed.

They seemed to like us, too. I think their favorite was George, who would approach them gently, shaking his jug of wild duck feed, and Gary would waddle right up to him.

George was utterly smitten.

In fact, I came home from work once to find a blue Scooby-Doo wading pool in my small front yard. Some might consider it unusual for a grown man whose only child was in high school to buy a toddler’s pool; others might find the thing an eyesore.

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Nonetheless, there it was, and Fiona seemed pleased. So much so, the couple threw a few pool parties. We began to see a second female, Simone, who would show up to splash around.

We became mildly famous in the neighborhood- like those people who string too many Christmas lights, causing mild traffic jams.

We occasionally found children in our front yard trying to pet or catch Gary. We shooed them away, sometimes unpleasantly. As it turns out, we liked Gary and Fiona better than the neighbor kids.

I came home one day to find a teenage girl sitting in my front lawn, trying to coax Gary onto her lap. Her embarrassed boyfriend waited on the sidewalk. When he saw me, he said nervously, “My girlfriend likes your ducks.”

I told him thanks, but they weren’t my ducks. They just hung out in my yard. Like his girlfriend.

Shockingly oblivious and absorbed in her commune with nature, she asked me where I’d gotten them. I said again that they weren’t mine, to which she replied, “So I could just take on?”

“Get out of my yard, kids.”

I was nicer than George, though, who found this menacing neighbor boy chasing Gary around the yard. George shouted and then chased him down the street. It was outstanding.

We even received a complaint from a concerned citizen who told us we had no business keeping wild animals. Of course, we weren’t keeping them at all. They didn’t live with us; they were just well-liked squatters.

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Then, they flew off one evening never to return.

For weeks George would listen for their quacking in the morning when he got up for work, but all we had left was a half-empty Scooby-Doo pool in the front yard and a half-full jug of duck feed on the back porch – and the memory of the heartbreakers who decided suburban life was not for them.

But we’re keeping an eye on this possum we’ve seen hanging around the garbage cans.

Maybe he could love us.

We’re thinking of calling him Craig.

It’s Not a Vibrator

My First B&E

by Hope Madden

When my sister Joy and I were about eight, our next door neighbors, the Manns, went on vacation. (I’ve changed their names in case the statute of limitation on breaking and entering is longer than I realize.)

They unwisely entrusted another neighbor up the block, Vickie Carmen (also a totally fake and not entirely convincing name), with the key to the house.

Vickie was to pick up the mail and feed the cats. Instead, she chose to bring her older sister Heather, as well as Joy and me, into the house for snooping, eating, and the stealing of coins from a giant container on the washing machine.

Heather was two years older than Vickie, Joy and myself, and we considered it a terrifying honor that she played with us. She also smacked and bullied us, bossed us around, mocked us without pity, and tricked us into doing dangerous and idiotic things that would land us in hot water.

But it was Vickie you had to look out for.

Together one afternoon, we four wandered through the neighbors’ home as some might an archeological find, examining everything. We ate their chips. We thumbed through their records. We opened cabinets. We stole Corey Mann’s Barbie clothes.

We went into the basement.

It was with starry eyes that we spied that jug o’coins, and promptly filled our pockets, fantasizing about the booty we’d buy at Cook’s Food Store down the block.

I looked forward to Caramel Creams or a Milky Way bar – or both! – since I was now a professional larcenist and could live it up bigger than I ever had.

Vickie would undoubtedly begin by hiding beyond the freezers eating baby food with her fingers, as was her Cook’s food-shopping tradition. Then, who knows what that freak would buy.

I once caught her eating the skin she’d peeled from a sunburn. I swear to God.

Before plunging headfirst into our illegally appropriated candy binge, we eyeballed the rest of the basement. Eager as we were for a sugar rush, we nearly overlooked an antique piece of exercise equipment.

Unfortunately, I did notice it. Indeed, it took my fancy and I recommended that we investigate.

Connie Mann was the youngest mom in the neighborhood and she insisted on being called by her first name. She was different. She was better. Not unlike Amy Poehler’s character in Mean Girls, but I can’t remember whether she had the same affinity for velour.

Connie had one of those weight-loss machines you’d see in old sit-coms. It was the kind of thing that resembles a doctor’s office scale, but at the top is a big, white belt that loops around your middle and vibrates away the fat.

I don’t know what you call this piece of equipment.

I’m sure you don’t call it a vibrator.

Whatever you call it, we turned it on.

Heather took the first tour. The knobs rotated furiously back and forth, back and forth, causing the movement in the belt that would make you sound like you were talking through the blades of a fan but would not, I felt sure, whittle away belly fat. Only a proper diet and sensible exercise regimen can do that.

The mistake I made – I mean, beside the mistake of breaking into a neighbor’s house and wandering around the dark and potentially dangerous basement of a home that would remain vacant for another week at least – was in examining the knobs too closely.

As I looked down, one tenaciously rotating gear grabbed the tips of my waist-length hair, yanked, and almost immediately my scalp was pressing cold metal.

“Turn it off! Turn if off! TURN IF OFF!”

They turned it off. My hair was already knotted around the knob, my head tugged so tight against the machine I thought the scalp would tear away from my skull. I was trapped.

My friends’ faces were ashen.

There was a long silence, and then Vickie, inching up the basement steps, whispered, “Let’s go. Come on. Let’s just go.”

Attached by the head to a machine at least twice my weight, stooped to one side and crying, I couldn’t even clearly conceive of my plight. My mind swam in terror.

And they did leave.

I didn’t scream or even slump to my knees looking for a more comfortable way to situate myself around my new anchor. I stared at the concrete block wall and did nothing at all. My brain ceased to function.

I know me, and I am terrified of everything. It’s hard to imagine that I didn’t stare into some dark corner, sure I’d seen movement or heard growls – human growls – coming from the darkness behind me.

It’s hard to believe I didn’t tear myself free, running bloody and half-hairless back to my house.

I honestly believe I was more afraid of my mom’s reaction to my breaking and entering than I was to dying alone in a basement.

Lucky for me, though the Carmens may have been the kind of bitches who’d abandon you to rot in the basement of your neighbor’s temporarily unoccupied home, my sister isn’t.

She strode somberly up to my father – likely relaxing with a cup of coffee and an episode of M*A*S*H – and told him, “Come with me. Bring your tools.”

Simple as that. My hero.

Dad dismantled the machine and freed my head. The hair on the left side tangled to about 1/3 its natural length, and the scalp remained raised and bumpy for months. To this day my hair does not lay flat on the left side. But we never told my mom, never narced on the Carmens, never fixed the machine.

Maybe the mysteriously broken equipment drew the Manns’ attention away from all that missing change.

Face Off

by Cat McAlpine

I have many fears.

I am afraid of heights. I am afraid of the dark. I am afraid of deep water. I am afraid I will never realize my potential, or that the car I just passed on the side of the road really did need my help, or that I’ll never get out of debt. I am afraid of how big the universe is and how small I am. The usual.

But the fear I encounter the most is my fear of small spaces.

I’m not afraid of being crushed. I’m afraid of not being able to get out of a small space, and then being probably crushed. Or suffocating.

This fear manifests in many places. On the tube in London, a crowded car would remind me that all of those hot, sweating bodies were stuffed in a tiny tin can, that was then stuffed into a cement tunnel.

Concerts are typically a non-starter. There’s nothing worse than being mocked by a glowing exit sign from the middle of a writhing crowd of bodies.

Given my litany of fears, you’d think I’d never leave the house. But I endure. And I push myself to confront my fears. I swim in lakes and cross rooms without turning on the light.

I just do it all while a very loud voice in my head screams “OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD YOU’RE GONNA DIE”.

When my friend, and local filmmaker, Michelle Hanson asked me if I’d be willing to be decapitated for her upcoming horror film, I didn’t realize I’d be confronting my greatest fear.

“A cast of my head?”

“Yeah!”

“Oh my god yes! Can I keep it?”

A few weeks before we were set to do the live face cast, (They call it this. Is there a dead face cast? Don’t tell me.) Michelle sent me a video via email. “Here’s the process. Watch this and let me know if you have any questions.”

I didn’t watch the video. I worried it might freak me out.

A few days before the cast, a friend asked me who was coming with me. I had planned to just meet Michelle there.

My friend looked nervous. “I’m NOT claustrophobic and I had to hold someone’s hand the whole time I got mine done.”

“I’m sure it will be fine” I told myself. The little voice had started to whisper “But what if you diiiieeeee?”

When I entered the prosthetics space, a small rented room lined with monster heads and spare limbs, I gave myself a few minutes to settle in. Then I dropped my bomb.

“Hey, I didn’t want to freak anybody out, but super casually I’m actually really claustrophobic.”

The room went silent as Michelle, and the two face-technicians (sure) stared at me in horror. Then there was a flurry of questions and pointers.

“Didn’t you watch the video I sent you?”

“It will probably be fine, most people are fine.”

“Let us know if you start panicking.”

“How claustrophobic?”

“It will take 30 minutes, tops.”

And then one of the technicians said something truly terrifying.

“Here’s the thing. If you freak out, its gonna take us just as long to get the thing off of you as it will to sit and wait until it’s dry. So you might as well just wait and not ruin the mold.” This man clearly had no fears.

No way out.

I tried to play it cool. I am not sure if this was successful or not. But I smiled and lightly joked as they taped a trashbag to my shoulders, glued on a bald cap, and vaselined my eyebrows.

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“Okay, so we’re gonna cover your face in this goo-“ I don’t remember what any of it was called now, my inner voice was screaming, “- and then we’re going to put this cast material over that. As soon as it’s dry, we’ll take it off. When we cover your nose, just take one deep breath, and then blow air out of your nose really hard, and you should be able to breathe.”

Should. Be. Able. To. Breathe.

So I played it cool up to that point. And I played it cool as the technicians smeared by face with goo the consistency of clay. They covered my ears and I realized I couldn’t really hear. They covered my forehead. And then they covered my eyes. And the thick goo started to roll down my face. As the sludge crested my cheeks I lost it.

“Okay, uh, I’m gonna need to hold someone’s hand.”

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I heard a distant, under water “How you doing?”

I couldn’t move above my elbows, so I simply gave a weak thumbs up. Michelle’s small hand had found me, and was giving a reassuring pat.

And then my mouth was sealed. And my cheeks. And my nose.

“Are you gonna cover the nostrils?” One technician asked.

“Uh…. No. I think I’m just going to fill in around it.” The other answered.

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I’d been snorting out air like a wild horse, in a desperate attempt to keep clay from blocking my airway.

I realized I hadn’t asked how I was going to get out, but it was too late. I was buried alive. Every once in a while a technician would come by and tap on the cast to see if it had dried. I couldn’t hear them approach, but when they tapped on my face, it sounded like dirt thudding on the lid of a coffin.

“HELP!” the voice screamed. “I’M STILL ALIVE IN HERE.”

They told me the whole process would take about 30 minutes. I was there for an hour and a half. I didn’t ask how long I was entombed. I don’t think I want to know. But eventually, after many weak thumbs up and hundreds of nostrils-only breaths, I heard tearing.

They were cutting away my fake face.

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I want to say that when they peeled away the cast and goo, I was reborn. I was without fear or doubt. I had conquered claustrophobia.

But I’m sweating right now just thinking about it.

I don’t know if you can conquer a fear. Maybe you just have a string of terrifying experiences in mosh-pits and crowded elevators. Maybe you just have to find someone to hold your hand, and live to tell the tale.

That head better look fucking awesome.

Magic Mushrooms

by Hope Madden

There was a time when, for at least a second or two, my boss thought I might have a severed human appendage in a filthy Kroger bag under my desk.

How did get myself into this mess?

I blame the mushrooms.

Each fall and spring I look into my yard to find that everything’s coming up fungi. During the moist, temperate seasons my lawn becomes home to the most heinous mushrooms you have ever seen. Their white 5 – 6 inch shafts end with a helmet-like, purplish brown tip.

Sound like anything to you?

Picture it, if you will.

Yes, it’s that bad.

And then picture a few dozen standing at attention throughout my lawn.

I never have seen this particular brand of fungus anywhere else on earth but in my yard. Lucky me.

They are upsetting to look at. Their unseemly appearance drives my neighbor kids crazy. One boy – normally sweet and smiley – cannot abide them. The minute he sees a bloom he gives it a swift kick.

Do you know what looks worse than a yard full of erect mushrooms?

A lawn littered with amputees.

I’m surprised the mailman will even deliver to our house.

I’ve tried to find out what type of mushroom they might be, hoping in vain to eliminate the fungus without killing my lawn. But they’re hard to describe if you’re looking for a serious answer.

The internet is no help at all. Type “mushrooms” into Google and you’ll come up with 15.1 million possible links. Narrow the search terms and you’ll likely get descriptions like “sexy science,” which, at first blush, looks like it actually might have the information you seek, until you realize the mushroom they’re talking about is only two inches long.

My mushroom is bigger than your mushroom.

Meanwhile, my husband, George, was doing his own sleuthing. He works for a radio station and, at that time, the station ran a gardening show on Saturday mornings. George emailed a picture of the plant to the show’s host for an explanation.

The host sternly responded, “I do not do that type of counseling. Try Dr. Ruth.”

I once had a colleague who believed, sight unseen, that these were the pre-bloom stage of a spectacular orchid. She advised me to dig them up and keep them in clear glass jars in my basement.

I appreciated the suggestion, but I feared what would happen on the holidays when all our nieces and nephews go downstairs to play ping pong and find a large collection of these severed appendages on my cellar shelves.

Merry Christmas, kids!

I’m creepy enough as it is.

Another colleague had run a landscaping business years ago and offered to take a look. She thought she’d dealt with the same lawn care menace once in a Dublin neighborhood. I bet it went over really well there.

So I dug up a sample and put it in a plastic bag to bring to work. But the stench! I hadn’t known about the odor – this is not the kind of plant you bend down to sniff – until I had one in hand.

It smelled exactly as I would imagine a severed body part left too long in a filthy plastic bag might.

My colleague was late to work and I simply couldn’t tolerate the odor, so I grabbed the bag to take it to the restroom garbage. Unfortunately, I ran into my boss.

“What have you got there?”

I wasn’t sure what would be more jarring and inappropriate, describing it or showing it to him.

I decided the least suspicious thing I could do was dash past him to flee to the ladies’ room, leaving behind a hideous stench. His horrified expression suggested that he got a glimpse of the package.

So that happened.