By Jeff Guy
Every house is haunted by its own pain. I know it to the blood, bone and marrow of my mortal being and no man, woman or child will ever convince me otherwise. But that didn’t enter my mind then. No. Not at first.
Summertime and livin’ as easy as “Porgy and Bess.” The air was good back in my hometown of Jett, Kan. (pop. 4,000 in the ‘70s) This was the town of Little League games at Garvin Park -teams sponsored by the local merchants who collectively comprised Lion’s Club, Rotary and the Kiwanis – and parties at the local Pizza Hut. The place where I first heard Joan Jett and the Blackhearts doing “I Love Rock n’ Roll” when someone played it on the jukebox one fleeting night with my cousin, Fred, and some older junior high girl he had a crush on. Yeah, life would be good again. The pieces fit like Lego toys, making sense. I was working in journalism again even if it was at the place where I’d started back in high school. The Jett Journal-Dispatch. It was okay, I’d work my way back up.
Garfield Elementary was across the fat street. The softball diamonds of my grade school days had been supplanted in popularity by teams of cherubic-faced kids playing soccer. It was alright. This was my kids’ time. They’d make the world what they wanted. The Holiday Bowling Alley. Roundabout. (My kids would see those Christmas lights as fall faded to winter.) Miller’s Five Drive-In. For a moment, I remembered childhood as a time when life made sense.
But memories can trick you.
The flower garden and red brick path led to the wrap-around porch. We placed easy chairs there and my wife insisted on placing a porch swing in the space. It would be a good life for my kids, a few rungs above anything I’d ever had.
I can only describe the house as structural. A monument, an old ship. Erected in 1918 when things were built to last, it was a solid home. Wood floors. Flat screen TV and Nintendo Wii in a living room that almost reminded me of the parlor at the Murdock House at Wichita’s Old Cowtown Museum. The wooden floor led to the capacious dining room, white tiled kitchen with a pantry in back. The kids’ rooms were upstairs. Parents’ bedroom downstairs. There was only one one bathroom in the house, but man, it was early 20th century. Nearly 100 years old. What are you to expect? We could add a bathroom upstairs later. There was room. And time. There’d always be time, right?
The crown jewel was a little den that I’d turned into my office, my study. My books were on shelves and in a minuscule cabinet by a window where the tree branches would freak me out at night when the blinds were drawn, but it was okay. I had my Audio-Technica turntable, records and a desk where both my typewriter and laptop were set. The perfect place to work on my blog and various writing projects. When friends came by to see me, drink a few beers, my wife, Maria, could tell them, “He’ll meet you in The Library.”
An old couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy lived next door. They had a son who lived in New York and would send them copies of the New Yorker in the mail. Mrs. Kennedy knew I liked to read it so she would fling the copies from her porch to mine. She must’ve been an athlete when she was young because with one deft flick of her wrist, she’d land that magazine from her porch to our front door.
“I’m related to the Kennedy’s,” Mr. Kennedy told me one Sunday while we were kicking back on his front porch with glasses of lemonade.
The old guy was born in Colorado, but it could’ve been a distant family connection to the illustrious, yet star-crossed political dynasty of Massachusetts. I figured there was a kernel of truth in it somewhere.
Here it was 2012 and the next door neighbors, the Kennedys, were old. Nearly 50 years earlier, they were a young couple in the kitchen with the realtor, closing on the house, when a voice on the television set in the living room interrupted The Guiding Light for a special CBS News Bulletin. Walter Cronkite announced that Pres. Kennedy had been shot while riding in an open motorcade in Dallas. Despite all the good small town vibes, I had this lingering feeling that something wasn’t right. Maybe it started with the JFK assassination and the National Loss of Innocence.
No. It started before that.
Presence
“Don’t ask Sam about it,” Maria said. “He’s real sensitive about Plaid Pants man.”
That’s the name we took to calling this apparition my 10-year-old son, Sam, said he saw. “I don’t believe in that crap,” I told Maria. Ghosts were the stuff of fantasy. The imagination. “There has to be a logical explanation to it. He may have just had a mirage.”
Once when I was a kid, around my son’s age, I thought I saw a dark haired girl standing in the hallway outside my sister’s bedroom, talking to her. I later found out my sister hadn’t been in her room and there was no girl in the hallway. The psychiatrists jumped on that hallucinatory story. Yep, I saw a psychiatrist or two on occasion when I was a kid.
“He said he saw it in your office,” Maria said.
A few weeks later she said to me, “You sure have been steering clear of your office lately.”
Jesus, it was still in me. The old fear. I remembered being 6-years-old and when the pastor prayed in The Bible Baptist Church in “the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” I was fearful as holy hell that God was a ghost. I wasn’t conscious of it, the feeling sort of crept up on me. One night around that time, I was telling my mom and grandma a scary story and I wound up crying because I scared myself. Yeah, it was still in me, alright. Way deep inside my soul.
But what I lacked as a kid that I had as a grown man was rationality. I had to get out of my head and walk in that room. I made it easy on myself, going in there in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon when the whole family was in. I forced myself to sit at my desk and write, becoming so engrossed in blogging that I forgot about the earlier fears and even wound up taking a weekend nap, slumped over the desk.
But it was just a game.
A few days later I came home late from work. Maria and the kids were having dinner at Mickey Dees with her parents. I was off guard, lackadaisical about the house and study. I felt a chill when I entered the room, yet I shrugged it off to irrationality. Sitting at my desk, I felt breathing down my neck and it smelled like whiskey. The hands on the wall clock rapidly spun like a hay baler, The light switch flicked on and off. All this happened within a nano-second as I sprinted from the room, yelling.
Shell-shocked
The bastard Ghost may have flirted, teased a little. My wire framed son and an almost invisible vision of an odd plaid pants wearing nightstalker creeper. Then Ghostly Man sort of left the kid alone. Kenzie only cared about wearing “princess dresses” and petting the oatmeal colored cat, Peanut. The wife, almost oblivious to the shaking wine bottles in the cellar. The cannon pop of the oven door slamming in the kitchen – never happened when she was around.
Afraid to sleep in my bed. Clutching my wife’s zaftig body and hoping it doesn’t grow cold and turn into a corpse of some ancient mariner. Afraid to go to the bathroom. Some force was pulling the chain from the old toilet tank on the wall, but it wasn’t mortal hands doing the flushing. I recall sprinting – and screaming – out the bathroom doorway, pulling up my pants in flight, as the chain hit a haunted cathedral pitch.
But goddammit, I was still a journalist. I may had been slipping at work but my reporter body led itself on its personal journey. Flipping through bound volumes at the county Historical Society building. The stone engraving, Carnegie Library, in front, harkening to 1906 when the structure was erected – as far as erections go – one of many small town grants from the ruthless steel magnate turned philanthropist. Anyhow Jett was on its second or third library building and bond issue since the original building was vacated and converted into a historical museum.
I combed through old books, letters, the county Register of Deeds office and I ide- ident - went through old newspaper articles and identified the bastard occupying the house.
The ghost of a reporter.
Some long dead daddy from the USA. Name was Preston Baily.
That’s who occupied my house in the Roaring ‘20s – a shell shocked veteran of The Great War, setting up columns and inked copy in between moonshine and bathtub gin. He worked for the Jett Journal. The paper wouldn’t merge with the competing Jett Dispatch until the ‘60s, a few years after The Journalist died alone with his depression in a Veterans Home at age 65.
Dodging mustard gas. Rats. Eaten flesh of dead soldiers, vibrant young men only a minute ago. Blown to the Great Soldiers Home in the Sky. This guy’d seen some shit.
This man had demons
that Preston dude the dead man the Ghostly Man
I read accounts of him shooting dice and drinking whiskey and gin with the Chief of Police in an underground speakeasy, its cavernous walls whiskey-stained to this day beneath the Mason’s Lodge. And when he wasn’t flouting Prohibition law and cheating on his wife with some sleezy flapper – or maybe while he was – he was writing like a demon.”
The body of a known Missouri bootlegger was discovered with knife cuts to his face and innards, bound and bagged with a cotton cloth, his mutilated body beside an inflamed model T at the corner of Fifth Street and State, Saturday night – Jett Journal, August 20, 1921.
A 17-year-old Wichita youth, beaten and bludgeoned by local police force authorities, straight away, confessed to the bludgeoning and axe murders of the Ospert family between Jett and Marshallville in a cottage off County Road 3. The youth confided to authorities that he set the cottage ablaze. The savage butchery was discovered by the local Fire Batallion 5 as their senses were attacked by the stench of corpses and murderous death among the embers – Jett Journal, March 28, 1925.
Meanwhile I was tottering along the brink of abyss. What my grandpappy Mac used to call a nervous shakedown. I went to Dr. West’s office next to Grene Vision near Blue Eagle Credit Union where my dwindling savings lived and died.
Babbs, the physician’s assistant, saw me for the uncontrollable hand shaking and facial tics I’d recently taken to.
“I grew up terrified of hellfire and global genocide,” I said tearfully. “Religion fucked me up.”
“You were a kid,” she said in her most compassionate voice. “Listen. It’s not your fault.”
I was prescribed some good drugs. Picked up the prescription at Kappleman’s Pharmacy. She referred me to a psychiatrist for further treatment.
Just as the equilibrium hit, just as I was about to maintain again, I heard a voi —
Help me
“Brace yourself, J. Guy,” I said. “You got this.”
I looked across from the dining room to the darkened open door of my study. A faint white light, heat seaking and thermal-like, melted into the room. One of the Antique 78’s I’d bought at House of Vinyl on Downtown 7th Street flew into the air. I thought it would smash into the wall. But there it was set, playing, needle down from my Audio-Technica.
Hoagy Carmichael, backed by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, singing “Washboard Blues.” Strangely everyone else in the house remained asleep, deep in slumber, as some psychic force of energy committed 78s from my record collection onto the turntable. “Dippermouth Blues” by the King Oliver Orchestra. “St. Louis Blues,” the Dixieland Jazz Band.
And an old 1906 recording of “You’re a Grand Old Flag” by the “Denver Nightingale,” Billy Murray.
“Bill Murray?” I said to my friend Hanz when he introduced me to the record at his store.
“No. Billy Murray. He sang tenor into a big bullhorn and that was pressed to wax. He ran away from home at 16 back in the nineties. Performed in vaudeville and minstrel shows.”
It was a galaxy far far away from the first album I’d bought when Hanz opened his shop – Frampton Comes Alive for four bucks.
The music shut down. Someone turned the lights out down on State Street where my whole damn family lived and died. Someone needed a friend.
Help me
I found out the voice was mine.
i’ve been known to have demons
Well, what the hell? This Preston Plaid Pants Man PTSD case alcoholic reporter
He liked to mess with our cabinets. Dishwasher. Glasses. My Leinenkugel beer bottles.
i thought about all the haunted places in town my house the kennedy’s next door the Jett Journal-Dispatch newspaper office Kappleman’s Pharmacy the deserted speakeasy underneath the Mason’s Lodge St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church the Bijou Movie Theater the old Carnegie Library …
every house is haunted by its own pain
Let’s do it. Two whiskey glasses on the dining room table and an untouched bottle of Jameson. I poured two glasses sitting a distance apart. Heard the screeching of the wooden chair legs across the polished wood floor. Two glasses come together.
Cheers
In the chair? Plaid pants i could see through
"I'll See You in C-U-B-A" -- Billy Murray, 1920
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