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Strange Shadows, Odd
Sounds, and Disturbances in Bedrooms
The "Rickey House"
By RAR
I have always
been a fan of strange stories, as I suppose most of us are. What else
could explain Frank Edwards’ syndicated “Stranger Than
Science” radio program, which aired through the late 1950s and ‘60s
and featured brief spine-tingling stories of the unexplained and just
plain weird. Edwards was a radio pioneer who jumped all over the Roswell
incident of 1947 and probably lost his mainstream radio career by
insisting on airing reports of government cover ups of extraterrestrial
encounters. He finally turned his notoriety into the last phase of his
radio career. I used to hear “Stranger Than Science” every morning
while getting ready for school and it used to "weird out" my entire day,
though I would admit to being easily “weirded”, a helpless victim of my
own fevered imagination.
The house we were
living in at the time contributed to my fear and paranoia. It was a
place in which I hated to be alone, though my invariably inaccurate
recollection is that I was often alone in
the mornings as I readied myself for school after my parents had already
gone off to work. My brother, almost six years younger than myself, must
have been around, but I don’t really remember our before-school
interactions, only that weird radio show that used to play over an
intercom that broadcast throughout our house.
We were living in a
two-story rental that was known to the residents of Atwood, Kansas, the
little farming community in which we lived, as “the Rickey House”. My
name on my birth certificate is “Ricky” – not Richard or Rick, but
Ricky – and so I lived with this weird naming coincidence, though
the reason for the house being known as “the Rickey House” had nothing
to do with me. It was the last name of the man who had built the house,
apparently with his own hands. A hardware store owner, he had reportedly
pieced the thing together for his family over time, as he could, saving
money by supplying his own labor.
“The Rickey House”
was, in all honesty, a mess of cheap materials poorly cobbled together.
There was linoleum throughout, some carpeted over in the living room,
and plywood cabinetry in the laundry area. There was a cement floor
basement with cinderblock walls, unfinished, where we had an inexpensive
pool table I had purchased with income from a summer job, and it was often
topped by a sheet of plywood that allowed it to double as a ping pong
table.
There was a workshop
off this makeshift “game room”, where my dad kept his tools and the
remnants of his career in the space program and the aeronautics
industry. That room also had a cement floor and cinderblock walls, like
the open gaming area, but there was a third room – the furnace room –
that had a sturdy wooden door on it that opened to a room that was
nothing more than a cave dug into the dirt beneath the house. This was
obviously "no-code construction".
The dirt walls
topped off about two feet beneath the flooring beams, so if one were
inclined one could shimmy up the dirt and crawl in under the house.
There would be no reason to do this, so no one ever did, which meant
that these dark recesses remained a mystery to me for the entire time we
lived there. Sometimes, for reasons beyond my comprehension, I would go
down to the “Furnace Room”, open the heavy wooden door, flick on the
naked bulb hanging execution style from the beams above, and just stare
in at the dirt walls and dark recesses as if there were something there,
a mystery of some kind. It seemed so primal and raw, a little like a
room just down the hall from hell, the old furnace dancing flames off
the sculpted walls, carved uneven and catching odd shadows from still
another fire shining fierce from beneath the hot water heater. The place
seemed animated, almost alive, like the quivering innards of some
stirring beast, and occasionally there would be a glint in the shadows,
light momentarily catching on something on which to reflect, and it too
seemed alive.
That's when I would reach my limit and
back away out of the socket, shutting the door and hurrying back up the
stairs, and often right on out of the house.
It was just so easy to
imagine something crawling out of there, from that blackness up under
the beams.
DARK SHADOWS
My bedroom in “the
Rickey House” was on the second floor, which also had its weird spaces.
There was a stairway, covered over with the same awful linoleum that
protected the flooring throughout the house, giving the most certainly
unintended impression that the whole space was designed for easy
washing, like with a high pressure hose as one might an abattoir.
The stairway up to the second floor
led to
a T-shaped hallway. When you reached the top of the stairs you could
turn left and then make a quick left into my brother’s room, or you
could go right and then take another quick right into mine.
There was a third
option that was never used. Straight ahead at the top of the stairs was
a door that opened into an attic area, unfinished and criss-crossed with
ducting and fiberglass insulation. The ceiling in that part of the house
was too low for the space to be developed as living space. It was more
of a utility space that a person could crawl into easily but couldn’t
stand up in. There wasn’t any flooring to stand up on anyway. The
insulated ducting, which crossed just inside the door, was situated in a
way that rendered the space difficult even for
rarely recovered storage.
Because this room was never accessed,
and the door never opened, it maintained an air of mystery; another of
those places you would think about if you happened to be home alone at
night. In your worst nightmare, you might imagine that door knob moving
a bit, the hinges complaining as the old door pushed open...from
inside. In fact, from my bedroom it would occur to me that if I were to
hear a sound in the night, I would need to make it past that door to
reach the stairs and to flee from the house.
The stairs themselves were creepy.
At the bottom of the
unpadded and unforgiving stairway was a window with sheer curtains that
allowed light to flood through and reflect on up the staircase. This play
of light had the useful effect of acting as my early warning system
should someone be coming up the stairs toward my room because I could
see their approaching shadow cast against the door at the top of the
casing. It would grow larger as the visitor mounted the steps.
In those days, I was
often playing my electric guitar at high volume so sounds - one of
my parents hollering up at me from the bottom of the stairs, for
instance - wouldn’t
necessarily get my attention. They used to call me down to dinner by
flicking the light switch on the stairway off and on, because I would
see that visual clue. And, I would watch for shadows - especially if I
was home alone.
STRANGE EVENTS
My
problems with being alone in “the Rickey House”
stemmed only in part from my fervid imagination. I was also afraid of
the place because strange things had happened there.
Back in 1960s, in
Kansas, people still weren’t locking their doors. This had begun to change a
bit after the 1959 murders in Holcomb, Kansas of the Clutter family,
famously documented in Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood, but
rural people have a thing about locking doors, a reluctance to
supplicate themselves to the sort of fearful paranoia they associate
with life in the less civilized urban environments. I don’t know what it
is like in those small towns now – I haven’t lived in these places for
decades – but back in the 1960s leaving your doors unlocked was
practically a point of pride.
We always left the
doors to the Rickey House unlocked and, perhaps as a consequence, we had an intruder,
or perhaps I should say “a visitor”.
My mother was the
first to notice that sometimes she would come home from her job at the
high school to find the beds “disturbed”, as if someone had been in
them and then made some attempt to make them back up. She mentioned this to my father and they began to speculate about
possible explanations.
My own speculations
were that we were being haunted by the ghost of “Mr. Rickey”, who
according to our across the street neighbors, the twins Mike and Pat
Phelps, had died in that house following a harrowing slow death of
cancer. That evil disease may cause dementia in late stages, including
hallucinations, and I heard stories of the nightmarish experiences this
poor family endured as their Patriarch died in agony, haunted by demons
that he could not distinguish from loved ones.
In truth, the Phelps
boys were great story tellers and I have no idea if anything they said
was accurate or true, but as I was the one who was now living in this
former home hospice environment, I was intrigued. And, in truth, a
little
horrified. I understood that ghostly manifestations often
occurred in locations where there had been great pain and suffering.
“The Rickey House”, with its basement cave room, its weird attic, and
the odd ways it played with light, seemed of a piece to me, like some
kind of a doorway to some dimension I wanted nothing to do with.
And now we were
getting these disturbances in the bedrooms.
My parents had a
much more down to earth hypothesis for what was going on.
Next door to us
lived two very old people and their adult daughter, who was a
mongoloid. Her name was Joanne – coincidentally the name of the woman I
would eventually marry – and she and her parents were more or less
shut-ins. They seemed to leave their house only on rare occasions, the
old man opening up a detached garage situated behind their little house,
and starting up an ancient automobile housed there. I recall that it was
a Buick, not that it mattered. His name was Antone and he was a large
man with huge features,
and he seemed to me to be a grumpy guy who bossed Joanne around like she was an
impudent child. She must have
been in her mid-30s at the time.
The house they lived
in and their garage were situated in such a way that I could see them
from my second story window, which looked out east into the little town,
with a view of the horizon largely blocked by the enormous white
mansion-like edifice owned by Ona Mae Radcliffe that was situated on the
east end of our short block. Rising over that, another block in the
distance, was the clock tower of the old brick court house.
Our neighbor Joanne,
who was obese and exhibited the tantrum behavior often associated with
adult mongoloids, was apparently smitten by the sounds she heard coming
from my bedroom window: me singing and playing my electric guitar. I
have had only one entirely devoted fan in my entire musical career, and
she was this volatile retarded woman, my Joanne. That is telling, to be
sure, and either incredibly sad or incredibly funny, depending upon
whether or not you are me.
Maybe it was just
funny. I used to bang away on my Gibson and down below Joanne would
dance around with great enthusiasm, showing a particular fondness for
bumping her considerable derriere up against the old garage in time with the
music. My more targeted attempt had to do with the club girls my own age
who would meet a couple doors down at Ona Mae Radcliffe’s house for
instruction on etiquette, which they paid for by shining Ona Mae’s
considerable collection of silver. It was Joanne, however, who really
enjoyed my musical efforts, if butt bumping means anything.
My parents
determined that it was Joanne who was sneaking into our house while we
were gone, recreating the “Boo Radley” scenario from To Kill A
Mockingbird, but putting her own twist on the visit by testing out
each of our beds.
I suspected that
they were right, that our simple neighbor was just exploring the edges
of her tiny little world, visiting a neighboring domain, dropping in for
a while to see how it might feel to live as these noisy strangers next
door.
That satisfied my
need for an explanation of the disturbed beds, but it didn’t explain the
strange shadows or the sounds on the stairs.
I cannot tell you
how many times it happened that I would be playing my guitar, notice the tell-tale shadows of someone approaching up the stairs, stop
my playing to ask who was there, only to get no answer. I would put
down my instrument and go to the landing to look down the staircase and
find no one there at all.
This would sometimes
unnerve me to the point that I would just leave the house. I would get
in my car and just drive around for awhile until one of my parents
returned home, or I could go back in with a friend. But I didn’t really
talk to anyone about it, because I was pretty much convinced that I was
just being spooky. These, after all, were spooky days, even on afternoon
television. My senior year of high school, my girlfriend and I were
lucky enough to arrange our schedules so that we had a seventh period
study hall that we were not required to attend, so we would slip back to
her house and watch the soap opera “Dark Shadows”, which was all about
vampires and werewolves.
Several years later,
after my family had moved out of “the Rickey House” and in to one of our
own, our extended family was gathered for a reunion and somehow the
subject of the old house came up. My mother talked about how she hated
being alone in that place, because she would hear someone walking up
those linoleum stairs to the second floor, and she would go to see who
was there and there would be no one. It would unnerve her.
She had never
mentioned this the entire time we lived in “the Rickey House” for fear
it would scare me and my brother.
STRANGE SIGHTINGS, WEIRD STORIES
There were numerous stories from when I
was a kid in Atwood that greatly influenced the development of my
imagination.
The aforementioned Phelps twins
introduced me, early in my move from the Denver suburb of Englewood to
this Kansas farming community, to the glowing tombstone called "Jasper",
which is located in the Atwood City Cemetery on a hill west of town.
"Jasper", written in large letters on
the stone, which stands more than three feet tall and curves arc-like to
a gentle point, is the last name of the man buried there. I have aunts
who remember the guy, from their younger years, who was shot to death
over an affair with a married woman. This violent end probably
undergirds the legend of his stone, which glows at night, or such is the
"legend". In truth, "glows" would be an over statement, but the stone
does have a way of reflecting available light, particular that cast by
the head lamps of the cars that visit the old cemetery at night, driven
by teens who, at least when I was a kid in Atwood, found the place
irresistible.
Parking in the cemetery at night and
making out with your girlfriend while leaning against the shining
tombstone offered the kind of tantalizing lust usually reserved for teen
horror movies, which was a welcome break from the monotony of a Kansas
summer night. The other favored alternative, if you didn't happen to
have a girl willing to linger with you in the moonlight, was to brave
Jasper with a group of friends. The trick was to survive a period alone
with the glowing marker. Someone would perch themselves atop "Jasper"
while the others would climb into a car and disappear off down the road,
leaving their brave, partying friend - one wouldn't likely think to do
such a silliness unless there was a lot of beer involved - to ride the
haunted stone alone with the moonlight. If he was still sitting atop
"Jasper" when the others returned...well, there was no particular reward
whatsoever for the bravery, beyond bragging rights. One could tell
others that he had achieved this fine feat, surviving a midnight ride on
the haunted marker. In truth, this carried no lasting cache; just a
memory of being young once, pulling goofy stunts that might have kicked
off a series of horrific events if live were a B-movie, but
unfortunately life isn't even that interesting; more of a "C" or "D"
affair where entertaining drama is concerned.
It is not that Atwood kids didn't have
other weird stuff to imagine.
One of my favorite local legends, again
to the credit of the Phelps twins, was the "Werewolf of Rippe's Pond"
story, which I have used in my Atwood trilogy of novels set in that
Kansas farming community. The story, as it was told to me, had to do
with a spooky, dense growth of trees that grew along an isolated stretch
of road well into the countryside northwest of Atwood. A family named "Rippe"
used to live there and on their property was a spring that locals
occasionally visited for swimming.
At night these woods are dark and
intimidating and I remember being told, as a kid, about a truck driver
who had an unsettling experience there. Now in truth, I cannot imagine
what a truck, other than a farm truck, would ever be doing on the dirt
roads traversing this forested area that rises up around the creek
there, nestled in among a section of undulating hills. There are no
commercial enterprises there for deliveries to be made to, only isolated
farm houses that may not even be seen in the night.
Nevertheless, the story goes that a
truck driver was steering his rig through this dark place one night when
he had a blow out of his right front tire. He drew to a stop, got out of
his cab and, with great difficulty in black of night, set about the task
of changing the flattened tire. Working with a flashlight that
illuminated only the tire and rim, he started to loosen the lug bolts
when he suddenly became aware of a presence behind him, just over his
shoulder. Then he felt hot breath on the back of his neck.
Suddenly shot through with fearful
panic, he wheeled in the darkness, swung his tire wrench at whatever was
there, and felt it thud hard against something.
The story goes that he ran into the
night, fleeing for his very life, though where exactly this could
possibly lead to is an unspecified part of the story. Whatever, the
truck driver fled the scene in terror.
The next morning he returned for his
truck and found his lug wrench on the ground next to his flattened tire.
It had blood on it.
* * * * *
My brother made news
in the Atwood, Kansas Citizen Patriot newspaper once, along with
a classmate named Rick Hesterman, for picking up an "angel" who was
hitch hiking along U.S. 36. They talked to her for awhile, dropped her
off at the park along the lake. Randy, my brother, just recalls that she
was sort of out there, but it was a long time ago. She told them her
name was "Angel" and she disappeared from the area as mysteriously as
she had arrived, seemingly coming out of nowhere and then disappearing
not to be seen again.
You get these
stories of people who seem to be there and then to simply be gone, as if
they vanish.
My kids tell one
such story that occurred just last year. My daughter, son and one of my
daughter’s friends were in our car, driving along Rose Drive in Benicia,
California, where we now live.
There is a deep canyon just to the east of Matthew Turner Elementary and
that day, as we headed down into the canyon, the kids all noticed a lady
standing on the hillside along the road. They all described her as
wearing dark clothing that appeared to be from another time, more 1800s
than now. What makes the story strange is that I didn’t see this lady at
all, but suddenly one of them said “Where did she go?”
“Did you see that?”
one of them asked the other, and all three reported that they had seen
this woman standing there, seeming completely out of place and time, and
then she was just gone.
What struck me about
it, in that moment, was that it was a spontaneous event that seemed to
catch all three of them completely off guard. They noticed this strange
woman, registered in their minds that she was odd, and before they could
say a word about it she simply vanished.
That stretch of
road, down into that untamed canyon that the City of Benicia keeps
trimmed down through the use of a goat herd, is fenced off and I have
never seen anyone in those fields, just occasionally that large herd of
wandering goats. Why anyone would just be standing there,
off the road, I cannot imagine. And dressed in a long, dark
dress, like people haven’t worn in well over a century?
I looked back at the
hillside in question when the kids all got excited, but didn’t see a
thing. To this day we drive through the area with our eyes wide open
looking for “ghosts”.
SHINY SILVER THINGS
There have been a
few incidents in my life in which I have seen – or think I have
seen – things that have remained completely beyond my power to
comprehend.
One of the most
dramatic events took place when I was a grade schooler going to Maddox
Elementary in Englewood, Colorado. I would guess this was around 1962 or
1963. We were living in a modest development of brick homes that had
been constructed to service the large number of people with families
connected with the Martin-Marietta facility in Castle Rock. My dad
worked there on the missile test sites, in the early days of the U.S.
space program, and our neighborhood was thick with the children of young
space industry workers and those in the related services. A large gaggle
of us used to walk to school together, moving north on Inca Street and
on toward Maddox Elementary over on W. Mansfield Avenue, which seemed
many blocks away at the time, but was really only a couple long blocks
from where I lived. It was a walk that became routine for all of us,
until one strange day.
Our walk took us
past an old folks home that was more or less situated at the
intersections of So. Inca Street and West Oxford Avenue. The building,
as I recall, was a single story, almost ranch-like design, that had a
large parking area that was bordered by a row of tall trees along the
east side.
That day, as I was
straggling a bit behind my classmates, I saw something that astonished
me. Rising up from behind the row of trees near the nursing home there
came a shiny sliver cylindrical shaped object that reminded me of a
grain silo.
I stopped in my
tracks and stared, mouth agape.
The object moved
slowly up out of the trees, straight up into the sky, until I could see
a significant part of the object above the tree line against the sky. It
was huge and I wasn’t that far away, just on the other side of the
parking lot.
I turned to holler
out to my classmates, who had walked on ahead of me completely oblivious
to this event taking place there behind the rest home.
I looked back at the
object and it just seemed to disappear into air not far above the
ground, as it it were entering some invisible envelope that accepted the
object so that it just seemed to disappear as it rose up into the air. And then it was gone.
I was so stunned by
this that I turned and ran back home to tell my mother, who was none too
happy to see me show up back at our door. I tried to tell her what I had
seen, but she wouldn’t have any of it, ordering me to get myself on to
school, which I did in a state of utter bewilderment over why my mother
hadn’t given any credibility whatsoever to my “sighting”.
I hurried on to
school, showing up after the bell, and I recall that I ran right into
the Principal, a stern man with shoe-black hair who waited out front to lecture tardy types such as
myself as we straggled in late.
I tried to tell him
what I had seen, but he wasn’t interested either.
In my young life,
this was a turning point, a monumental event. I realized that there were
walls to our perceptions that people would not have challenged or
breached, certainly not by an overly imaginative grade school kid.
Years later, I wrote
these lyrics concerning the incident:
|
Picture me
seven and slightly removed
On my way to
public school
A young boy
lingering behind
When it
occurred
Only I was
there to see
The shining
brightly silver thing
That from
behind the Golden Age Retreat
Transferred |
And slowly
ascending into air
Hovering
slightly as I stared
To my
disbelief
The craft
began to disappear
And looking
to my chums to see
If also they
had got the key
I realized
that I'd been witness solitaire
At
the corner of Jason and Wadsworth*
All alone
Standing there |
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*Poetic license – when I wrote this song I confused my street names, as
well as my age
All that said,
nothing could compare to something I saw in the late fall of 2005. I
can't, to this day, say with certainty that it was real, but I have come
to think of it as...
One
early evening last fall -- I think it was in November -- after being in
the city all day, arriving back in Vallejo on the ferry, in the dark,
and stopping by the house just for a few minutes, I got into our Jeep
and started the cross town trip to pick Gillie up from ballet practice.
It would have been just before 7 p.m.
As I drove west on Florida street, something high in my field of vision
caught my attention. I leaned forward against the steering wheel, so I
could see nearly straight up through the top of the windshield. There in
the sky was a red cross.
Later that evening I did a little internet research, looking for news
accounts of what I had seen. There were none, but I did come across
ideas previously unknown to me that lend a portentous quality to the
event, which I myself can not explain.
The cross appeared to be no more than a thousand feet in the air.
This not very educated guess is based in large part on my perception
that there was a helicopter flying next to it, just a black shape in the
dark, cloudy sky, shining a spotlight on the north side of the already
brightly lighted cross. I could see the light moving, like it was
searching for something, and I could make out the whirling blades of the
chopper at the outer glow of the light. The cross was huge, horizontal
high
above the ground, certainly 10 times longer than how long I perceived
the helicopter, hovering parallel, to be. My immediate sense, based on
the size and shape of the craft, was that this was a military
helicopter. I sensed that it was up there for the purpose of
investigating something.
It looked to me like someone had spent a tremendous amount of money to
build a cross that wouldn't exactly glow, but would appear bright red in
the sky, like tinted plastic lit by interior bulbs. There used to be a
building in Denver, and maybe still is, that had a "plastic" cap top
that would glow alternating colors of red and blue and maybe orange and
green. The cross looked like that technology, very good but not
superhuman. It for some reason hit me that this was no paranormal event,
but was unbelievably odd and exquisitely human. A political cynic, I got
the sense that some rich guy had devised an extraordinary scheme for
rallying the faithful.
My immediate reaction was to look from the cross to the people in the
cars around me to see if they were seeing this. I expected to see
people, like me, craning their necks and wondering what the hell was
going on. But there was none of that. I drove on down Florida Street,
glancing from the sky to the streetscape, the cross becoming obstructed
by clouds passing overhead as I drove. Then I turned
right on Broadway and could no longer get an angle to see what was above. I
tried to open the window and look out, but couldn't see a thing. I
hurried to the ballet studio, where there was a parking lot with only a
half-obstructed view, got out and searched the sky, but there was
nothing. Several times, after getting back to the house, I went out into
the night and looked at the sky, but there was only dark.
I checked the local news stations to see if there were reports of some
odd event or revealed stunt, but there were none. So, I went on line,
Googled "red cross in the sky" and came upon a wild account of signs
related to "the end of days" (which I've always thought to be eerie
sentence construction. Does that come from some Gnostic bible or
something?). Anyway, the story on the Internet is that "the rapture" shall
be foreshadowed by the appearance of a red cross in the sky. Going down
that weird path took me to all sorts of links, including a whole
counterculture of businesses that are openly counting down the years,
months, and days to the end, of what I am not sure. Humankind? Earth?
Our universe? Agnostics? Democrats? I don't know, but I will tell you
that it gave me the creeps! this notion that I saw this unverifiable
screwball thing, accidentally implicating myself in a Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy (which, by the way, is a terrible movie) sort of scenario.
I found the business connection to be amazingly interesting.
They weren't selling Armageddon survival supplies. Mostly they were
selling narcissistic-hedonistic supplies, with ads to guitar players,
for instance, saying things like "time is short -- play the best".
Incredible!
I do sense that there is a strain of thinking running through American
society these days that is truly crazy for this notion of impending
rapture. I believe the Bush people are in that group and I find that
really scary. Also really clumsy, and that's why in that moment it
occurred to me that this thing I was seeing was an obvious, though well
done, fabrication, like it had been jobbed out to someone who knew how
to design and build spectacles.
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this little foray into the X-Files and
hope you'll come back again soon.
Klaatu barata nicto (or Clatu Verada Nicto, depending upon your inner
nerd),
RAR
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