A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven (11 page)

That was until I found something that could not be explained.

In some of the rooms, out of nowhere, the recorders picked up soft humming. This was not electric in any way; this was musical, the sound of a child walking around with a song stuck in his or her head. It showed up on several different recorders, almost like this kid was casually strolling through the halls from room to room singing for anyone who could hear. It made me wonder if this was the kid that The Boss heard when we were sitting around in a circle. I also found breathing in the boys’ bathroom where we all felt sick. This was a recorder we had set up and left to see what we could get. The breathing appears hours after anyone has been in there. It starts, lasts a few seconds, and then it just stops. It is another thirty minutes before anyone comes in, and his or her presence is announced and punctuated by the heavy door opening and slamming shut.

The stuff that we witnessed and heard is also there: the file cabinet slamming shut is heard on several devices. More chilling was the shape I caught on one of the cameras. Upstairs, in what used to be the principal’s office, a shape blocks one of the lights for a full ten seconds, and then you can see it move away to the left. It disappeared into a storage closet that has no exit and nothing comes out the entire time afterward. Of course, there are things that can be explained right away. The moaning or crying that Kennedy and I heard most assuredly was a dog howling outside. There are whines that slowly materialize into car engines. Nine times out of ten, footsteps turn out to be Stubs—that boy has the heaviest feet of any person alive; he sounds like Frankenstein rolling out for a morning jog. There is a glorious moment on one of the devices when someone—and I will not say who—is sitting in a room alone and they cut one of the raunchiest farts known to all recorded history. This was a Roman fart, a fart that could conquer territories and topple governments. It was fucking funnier than hell and was made even more hilarious because that person not only says “excuse me” to no one in particular, but they also start to giggle uncontrollably. Someone else ends up coming in the room, and they must have gotten a whiff, because you hear a quiet little “what the fuck . . . ?” and the perpetrator loses control altogether. I laughed out loud myself when I came to that bit. It made my fucking night.

My analysis for the Farrar schoolhouse is simple but complicated, to say the least. I believe something is there. But I also believe that it has nothing to do with a murder or a death. I just think this building has become a home, a safe place, for a wayward spirit. I will explain it like this: aside from the dark feeling we felt in that second-floor bathroom, none of us had the impression that something bad had happened in that building. There is something to be said about that, because many people can really tell when a location has that kind of sinister feeling—places like Dachau and Neely Plaza in Dallas have those vibes, like the violent events cause something to change in the very environment, giving it an edge and a sadness that was not there before. My team did not feel that anywhere other than that bathroom. So my opinion is that, yes, there is something there, but it could easily be a spirit who resides in the cemetery across the street and has returned to the schoolhouse because that was where it was the happiest. It could also be the spirit of the child who had something happen in that bathroom and that torment has tied it inexplicably to this building in the middle of nowhere. It could be a shadow of someone’s life, like a teacher who both attended and taught at the school and returned because so much of their life was spent treading those hallways. Who knows, really? To me, it would most likely take someone from that same time to find out exactly who or what that person is and why its soul has chosen this place to replay and relive its days. I may never know, and quite frankly it will not cause me to lose sleep. But someone has that knowledge. Who knows if that question will ever be answered to the best of our abilities?

As I sit here months later thinking about it, I am struck by several notions. That schoolhouse felt like it had a personality unto itself. The more we spent time in it, the more we got to know it and to appreciate the adventures and the experiences beheld during our stay there. I remember walking around outside by myself, getting the lay of the land and just taking it all in. The sky still had that ominous hue about it, and all the playground equipment was rusty and dark, threatening us more with tetanus than anything resembling a good time. The trees around the place definitely helped set the mood; their limbs hung low around your head like hands reaching for fistfuls of your hair, wanting to drag you up into their leaves and digest you at their leisure. So maybe these factors set the tone for that evening and the things we felt and saw. But I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent and levelheaded chap; I do not panic easily and I do not run from danger or the unexpected. All I really know is that I have a handful of memories that I share in some way with the people I was there with, and we were all involved. Make your own mind up as far as I am concerned.

Some people might say we wanted to find something there. Others might say we left before anything else fascinating could happen. This debate will rage long after I am finished typing it up—who saw what and what was real, and so on. Personally, I feel like these rich visions are what they appear to be: a collision of data and stimuli that occurred in an environment to instill belief and satisfactory contemplation. You can try to figure it out all you want, like dissecting a magic trick behind the master’s back. You can twist it around forever, and maybe you will have varying conclusions each time. But those are rare privileges for the ones who did not make the journey. For those who stood watch and tested our mettle, we know the score better than the team who was playing. It is a matter of knowing and believing, like I have said before. I know because I was there. You can believe what you want, but because you were absent on the day in question, I rest my case gladly.

I guess the best way to tie this all up is to tell you about the last bit of evidence I found in the Farrar files. Here is the scene: we had all been camped in the Theater Room talking. After a while we all decided we needed to smoke our asses off again (like we ever needed any convincing), so we left the room. Kennedy stayed behind, quietly sitting and listening for anything that we might miss. The recorder was in the middle of the room, and it picked up our exit. For ten minutes there is nothing but Kennedy’s breathing. Finally, he says out loud, “Well, I think I am going to go outside with everyone else. We might be gone for a little bit, so if there is anything you want to say or do before I go, here is your chance. Can you make a noise, or a sound, or anything?” Silence reigned. You eventually hear Kennedy stand up and head toward the door, saying, “Well, it was worth a shot . . .” The words trail away, falling into silence, along with his footsteps. The room is left empty. It is very obvious that no one is in the room.

Out of nowhere, something knocks on a metal folding chair three times.

Paranormal Paralysis and Paranoid Parameters

S
POILER
ALERT
: this chapter is full of fantastic claims, biting commentary, and other things that will piss off cynics, atheists, and malcontents alike. It has a bunch of nonsense known as “scientific law” and other shit known simply as “the great halls of my memory palace.” Some of you might actually—dare I say it—learn something in this chapter that you may not have been privy to before you bought this foul piece of wood pulp. So my condolences to those of you who pride yourself on “keeping it real” or running your life according to horse pucky you picked up on the Bravo Network. Their motto is “Watch What Happens”—the only problem is that when you do watch what happens, you end up dumber than a bag of brand new hammers. So this chapter is full of shit that might make you smarter, even if the conjecture on my part turns out to be ridiculous and implausible. I warned you. Read with a helmet and at your own discretion.

Numbers have always interested me. I love rhythms and figures and calculations. Even though I am a very right-brained fellow, I have this bizarre left-brain bend that is fascinated with statistics, math, and symmetry. I have explained in other forms of literary drivel that I am obsessed with even numbers. This transfers to everything in my life. I can only chew pieces of gum in even numbers: two, four, or, in the case of long commercial flights where smoking is not an option, eight. This permeates my adult life like a phantom waiting to snatch the girl at the end of her sonata. I do not know why and I cannot help it—even therapy would have no affect on this tendency, or as my wife The Boss calls it, “my cute little neurosis.” That’s fine: she has the same thing with odd numbers—detests the number three. I think that shit is funny. I will also be sleeping on the couch for a while, seeing as I just told you all about it.

The minutia of datum, facts, and figures—these things envelop my screaming id and give me a sense of stability, a grounded line in all this faulty wiring. I become engrossed in finding a solution instantly, causing many people to ask me “if I am all right” and members of my own family to question whether or not I am psychotic. I get absorbed in different ideas and solving problems, losing all concepts of time and presence to the point at which, when I come to, I find I have not shaved, I am missing my pants, and I am stranded at a bus station somewhere in New Mexico. Jesus, if I had a nickel for every time I was stranded at a bus station in New Mexico . . .

Maybe it is because I like to grab hold of the structure of any given concept, to get a grip on it and therefore some understanding. As lovely as chaos can be sometimes, especially when you are stranded at a bus station in New Mexico, to me order is the warm blanket waiting for you when you get home, along with a cup of coffee and the sports page. Chaos has no meaning without order and vice versa; there is no basis for relativity when there is nothing to use for comparison. A clean house is always going to look cleaner if the place next door is Hoarder’s Hideaway, but you would not know it if the two were not sitting right next to each other. So chaos and order are necessary bedfellows, allowing freaks like me to embrace both and hop to and from each individual bouncy castle whenever the mood takes me.

Anyway, while I was researching this book I wanted to get a feel for where the national and international psyches are on the subject of the paranormal. Obviously, movies like Paranormal Activity and shows like Ghost Hunters have given even the most ardent skeptics a moment of pause and have heightened our awareness. But I wanted to know how many hombres and fillies in the herd of the Earth were on the spooky schooner with me. So I surfed around the Net gathering data on the subject. You know what I found out? Either people are more fucked than I thought or the minds behind these surveys are sitting in their own toiled soil, so to speak.

On average, it seems 48 percent of people believe in the existence of ghosts. This is based on several websites I traversed, including wiki.answers.com. That being said, this is the Internet we are talking about, and the same website said that 62 percent of people are skeptical of the existence of ghosts. I am not a doctor, but even I can add: 48 plus 62 is 110. You cannot have 110 percent in a survey. What are you saying—that most people believe in ghosts and most people deny their existence? You cannot have more than one most. Your choices are none, some, more, most, and all—end of list. Even if you use the phrase “more than most,” it still does not make any fucking sense. By the way, there is another word for the phrase “more than most”: it is called “all.”

So half the population believes in ghosts, if you believe the skewed numbers on this site and others. According to the same poll, 22 percent of those people have had an actual experience or a sighting. Another poll says that most of the people who do not believe in ghosts are over the age of sixty-five. That right there says a lot to me. Does it mean that the younger generation is more open-minded? Does it mean that the older generation will rationalize away altercations when they can? I will not allow an assumption on my part, but I can say this: I know more young people who are Democrats than are Republicans, and of those young Republicans, most of the ones I know refer to themselves as conservatives. They agree with my notion that “the R word” carries the stigma of ignorance, bigotry, and stubborn prejudices, not to mention the airs of the upper 1 percent. The same can be said for racism and the attitudes toward civil rights. So there is a tendency for the young to weed out and let go of tired philosophies.

I think it is safe to say I have established that not only do I believe in the existence of spirits, but I also am unabashedly realistic about my experiences. I am not going to sit here and tell you I believe in shit like magic, although there was a guy I met backstage once who had some serious tricks up his sleeve. How do you manage to get the card I chose from the deck into my back pocket? That is some Merlin shit right there—to this day I check my underwear before I take a shower to make sure I do not have an eight of spades stuffed in my male box. There is nothing worse than cleaning soggy tattered bits of paper out of your can. Shit, where was I?