Giving Up the Ghost (13 page)

As we walk into the mailroom, Joe points up to a painting.

“There she is,” he says with an empathetic smile on his face.

It is a young girl. Blond hair. Blue dress.

I take a deep, long look at the picture.

“It isn’t Her,” I say.

“What? Are you sure?” Joe says.

“Yes,” I reply. “The hair is wrong; her face is too round. It isn’t Her.”

We stand there for a moment.

“Now think about this for a minute,” he says slowly. “Are you sure?”

I don’t question Joe’s sincerity or intentions, but there is
no doubt he is enabling. All it would take is one small leap over some minor inconvenient truths to make my good story into, literally, a fantastic story—one with an unthinkable conclusion and new direction. I’m sure Joe is just trying to help me find an answer.

“No,” I say. “I am absolutely positive. This is not the Little Girl I saw in my dreams.”

Joe sticks out his lip and shrugs.

“Just keep that image in your mind,” he says. “Don’t close yourself off to possibilities. You never know, you may wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘That’s her!’ Or maybe you’ll have another dream and notice more of a similarity.”

I can’t help but wonder how many times similar things have happened. People come to Lily Dale looking for answers, and if they don’t find one, they kind of hammer one into place.

“Now, I’d suggest you just be patient,” he says. “I get the feeling that all the pieces of the puzzle are in front of you; you just need to put them together. Try different arrangements, different orders. Just keep an open mind.”

The Wednesday-night Lily Dale Ghost Walk is a big deal for tourists. People flock into town to take part in the popular tour, and by the time it starts at nine o’clock, the firehouse is packed. A stretch limousine arrives with about twenty middle-aged women here to take the tour as part of a fiftieth birthday party or something. T-shirts are sold. Everyone gets a commemorative Lily Dale Ghost Walk flashlight.

The tour is hosted by Neal and Joe. After welcoming everyone, Neal shares a PowerPoint presentation covering some complex and confusing explanations of ghosts and spirits.

“There are several different types of ghosts,” explains Neal. “They all have different traits and are here for different reasons.
Some are ‘Halloween ghosts’—those are simply an evaporation of the ethers—or the spirit from when the body had life. Seeing them is like watching a film loop. They can’t interact with you—they are simply an image. There are also spirits that are astral beings; those are the kind that try to communicate with someone who is mediumistic, like the people of Lily Dale.”

Neal goes on to explain that many Spiritualists believe that there are different planes of existence and, frankly, offers a bit more detail than the tour attendees seem interested in. They want visceral freaky ghost stuff. They want Lily Dale to be like walking through a haunted house.

“You know, you can actually see your spirit form—we call it the ‘prana aura,’ ” Neal says. “If you look at your hand and defocus a little, you can see it. It’s an energy field that is about a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch around your finger. A healthy prana aura looks like fur sticking out—like static electricity. If the ‘fur’ looks wet or flattened, there is a lack of energy.”

All of the tour attendees start looking at their hands, hoping for fuzzy, and comparing notes with their friends or fellow birthday celebrants.

Then Neal shares a bunch of photos taken on previous Ghost Walks—spirit orbs floating overhead, ethereal fog in the distance. The attendees are getting a bit restless, so Neal breaks us up into three groups. I end up in Joe’s group.

“I bet you went back to the office to look at that painting again, didn’t you?” Joe asks me as the tour heads out into the night.

I did, I admit. Even though I am dead certain that it isn’t Her, the whole notion is simply too weird to let go without at least taking a second peek. Under the guise of taking a better
photograph, I asked the office secretary if I could go back and look again. With a wave of her hand, I was again standing in front of a spirit-guided painting of a little girl in a blue dress. Just not
the
Little Girl in a Blue Dress.

Joe just smiles, nodding, and winks.

The Ghost Walk itself is a pretty cut-and-dry walking tour, except it takes place in the middle of the night. We walk by the historic places of Lily Dale and learn lots of trivial things about them. We see the homes of famous Lily Dale mediums and hear stories about their wild séances and works of spirit mastery. We learn about what it’s like to live in a place like Lily Dale (turns out the church owns all the land underneath the businesses and homes and leases it to property holders, thus making it impossible to get a mortgage for a home in Lily Dale—homes have to be bought with cash). One of the last stops on the tour is the Maplewood Hotel, where I’m staying. During this stop, I learn that all the bad art in the hallways that I’d been cringing at all week is, in fact, spirit art. After explaining the concept of spirit art to the other tour attendees, Joe stops in front of a large red tapestry. He says the Spiritualist woman who created it was a quadriplegic, blind, and mute and that she stitched the tapestry with her mouth.

“Her mouth?” I ask.

“Yes,” Joe replies. “She was in a trance state for the nine years she spent working on it, and she embroidered it with her mouth.”

I stand there for a moment letting that sink in.

“Her mouth,” I repeat.

“Yes,” Joe repeats.

“How is that possible?” I ask.

“With the help of Spirit …,” he says, trailing off to what he assumes is an obvious conclusion.

“I’m not even sure I can grasp the physics of how that would work,” I say.

Joe just smiles.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Talking to dead people … I’m willing to accept that. Hearing voices that others can’t hear—I’ll go there with you. Astral projection—I’m skeptical but willing to listen. But creating a queen-sized tapestry only with your mouth—that’s too much. That falls outside what I’m willing to accept.”

“Well, being skeptical is good,” Joe offers. “Questioning things is good. When it all comes down to it, it is simply a matter of whether or not you choose to believe. And I choose to believe.

“But then again,” he continues, “I also believe I can talk to dead people.”

True, Joe. Very true.

I notice a small framed paper to the left of the tapestry. It’s the official Lily Dale version of the tapestry’s history, which, as it turns out, is even
weirder
than Joe’s.

While the official version makes no mention of her creating the embroidery with her mouth, it does say that Mollie Francher, the stitcher, “suffered a severe accident which resulted in a development of inflammation of the lungs, paralysis, blindness, periods of deafness, occasional loss of speech, then spasms, followed by a trance condition.”

Mollie stayed this way for nine years, supposedly refusing all food and drink, saying, “I receive nourishment from a source of which you are all ignorant.” And not only did Mollie manage to embroider the tapestry during that time, but she also wrote more than sixty-five hundred letters of encouragement and support to other Spiritualists. Instead of making a tapestry, Mollie should have written a book on time management.

As we head out of the hotel to the next tour stop, I walk up to Joe again.

“You do realize that when you say, ‘I also believe I can talk to dead people,’ you are providing someone with the ultimate trump card against any argument you make,” I say.

“What do you mean?” he replies.

“Well, let’s say we’re having an argument over who was the director of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. I could say it was Sidney Pollack. You would say, ‘No, it was Milos Forman.’ Then I would say, ‘Yeah, but you also think you can talk to dead people.’ Then I automatically win the argument.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because there would be a third dude with us,” I say. “And when he heard all this, he would say, ‘Wow, I’m gonna believe the guy who
doesn’t
think he can talk to dead people.’ And side with me, two to one.”

“But who directed the movie?” Joe asks.

“Milos Forman.”

“Then I’d be right after all,” Joe says.

I decide it’s better to let it go.

After visiting a few more Lily Dale sites, we head out to Inspiration Stump. The capper on the Lily Dale Ghost Walk is a special midnight service at the Stump, completely and totally in the dark. As we work our way through the forest, we almost don’t need flashlights. This is due to the paparazzi-like explosion of camera flashes. Earlier, Joe had said that many people capture orbs in photos taken in the woods—or their cameras stop working entirely—and everyone is taking pictures into the darkness, hoping to capture a spook.

I settle in on the front bench at the Stump, surrounded by some women whom I don’t recognize and assume are with the birthday party group.

Neal leads us in some silent meditation to align ourselves with the spirits and open ourselves up to communication. As we sit there, the woman on my left starts crying. I’m clueless about what to do. Should I comfort her? I mean, I don’t even know her. Should I just leave her alone and ignore it?

“Now that we’ve become in tune with the Stump and the spirit energy, does anyone have anything to share?”

“I was just touched on the arm by my grandmother!” the woman at my left yells. Even though it’s pitch-dark, I look at the people around me, I guess to make sure they understand that it was Grandma touching her, not me.

“I’d know her touch anywhere!” she cries out. “I can feel my grandfather, too. It’s like they are standing right here with me.”

Then the woman sitting on my right starts to sob. Again unsure as to what I should do, I lean in toward her in a gesture meant to ask “Are you okay?”

“Can’t you see him?” she whispers through her tears.

“Um, who?” I say.

“He’s sitting right there on the Stump,” she replies.

Even at night, I can clearly see the entire Stump in the moonlight, just eight feet in front of us.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t see anything on the Stump.”

“The boy,” she insists. “He is sitting right there in front of you.”

I just sit up straight again. Probably best to leave the two of them alone.

Neal and Joe both offer a few messages, then everyone gets up to walk out of the woods and head back to town. On the way, my fellow tour takers are aflutter over what happened and what they experienced. Several of them are pretty freaked out. However, I’m not at all, which surprises me.

It’s something I came to understand about myself in Lily Dale, but I’d felt it on Clinton Road as well. While these places are scary at first, the more time I spend around them, the less frightened I am. Even though there is no less of a reason for being afraid, I kind of get used to them. For the first time, I catch myself wondering if perhaps it isn’t the ghosts I’m scared of.

Nine days after my return from Lily Dale, a few friends and I are going to a movie. I’m driving and my friend Joe (of Clinton Road fame) is giving me directions. Bad directions. After turning the wrong way, I attempt a three-point turn to head back the other way. In the middle of my second turn, I bump up against a curb and hear a loud
pop
.

A flat tire.

We get it fixed and still make it in time for the movie, but it’s close.

The mechanic later told me the tire blew because it was only half full.

I should have checked my tire pressure, he says.

“You! I would. Die for. You!”

Two women at the end of the bath-towels aisle stood open-mouthed, watching as a young woman sang a Prince song in front of the T.J. Maxx layaway counter.

I, myself, was paying little attention to her. I was too preoccupied trying to figure out if 316 came after 276 or before 276.

The singing was accompanied by a rusty bump and grind while she outlined her lower back and rear end with a freshly licked forefinger. I think this was supposed to look alluring or something.

The lip-syncer was my co-worker Annette. She’d taken to quoting lyrics and occasional pieces of dialogue from the movie
Purple Rain
every time she saw me.

I had a mild crush on Annette almost as soon as I started working at T.J. Maxx. She was the women’s fitting-room attendant, and I was the janitor. Had you been there when we were both working, you might have noticed that the floors around the fitting room were always spotless and her trash can was always empty. Soon after I started there,
Purple Rain
came out and I tried unsuccessfully to get her to come with me to
see it. In Canton, Ohio, at the time
Purple Rain
was released, Prince was seen as some unknown bizarre alien creature. Annette didn’t want to go. In truth, Annette used Prince as a convenient excuse to turn me down, just as she had declined my invitation to go out to dinner, and lunch, and one or two other invitations I’d offered over the previous few weeks.

Even though Laura and I were together a lot of the time, she took every opportunity to subtly reinforce that we were not “together” together. I was actually okay with this—or at least I pretended I was. I didn’t want to do anything to upset the balance. It was the one thing in my life that wasn’t completely fucked up, and despite my lack of concern about anything else, I would go to great pains to keep it not fucked up. To help demonstrate that I didn’t consider Laura to be my girlfriend, and to forward the illusion that I didn’t want Laura to be my girlfriend, I went out with other girls (or tried to).

Those girls who did take me up on a date were scared off when they’d learn about all the time I spent with this other girl I supposedly wasn’t dating. Well, a lot of them were put off when they realized that my fun demeanor was chemically driven and could swing into unpredictable chaos at pretty much any moment, but my relationship with Laura didn’t help.

By that time, Laura and I were spending two or three evenings a week together. One of us would call the other, proclaim our boredom, and then feign a mild interest in getting together. We’d usually just spend the night driving around or finding someplace to just sit, drink, smoke, and talk for hours.