A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven (2 page)

It was July when my friends and I decided to sneak out of my apartment and go explore Cold House.

There were six of us: I was basically the ringleader, and then there was my first real best friend, Henry, along with Matt, Joe, Tina, and Brock. Henry and Matt lived a few blocks away and were the only ones technically staying overnight with me. Joe, Tina, and Brock lived in other buildings in the complex. The plan came together earlier that day while we were roaming around looking for shit to do. When kids are starving in the brain, their heads seek out mischievous fun. There is the old adage “idle hands are the devil’s playthings.” No truer words have ever been said: I almost got my family evicted from that apartment complex because I broke into one of the storage garages—and by “break in” I mean I went through the wall with a used iron bar.

For a long time I had wanted to go into Cold House and see what was there. We had heard it was haunted since we had first started taking the trails to school. The thought of a potentially real haunted house not two blocks away from where I slept was too much for me to contemplate, and I was bound and determined to get inside and see what I could see. My cohorts were of course a bit more reticent than I was. Tina did not want to have anything to do with it; the others only wanted to go during the day. I wanted to go at night, possessed by the idea that the only time we would see anything was after midnight. No one had to go who did not wish to—this was “Join Us at Your Own Risk.” Finally we found ourselves on the same scary page and went to work.

The plan was this: we would meet behind the work shed near my building at 12 a.m. Henry, Matt, and I would sneak out of my bedroom window, which I had done countless times before. The rest would find a way to get there, if they were indeed going to come along. Tina, Joe, and Brock still hummed and hawed at the idea, but at midnight, when my group was safely behind the shed, the other three soon met us and we were on our way. We had managed to smuggle four flashlights into our bedrooms that day. We walked down 14th, crossed at the lights, and, making sure to keep out of sight of adults who might try to send us back home, proceeded into the South Side Woods, waving the flashlights around like Jedis to keep the jitters at bay.

Before we go any further, let me tell you first that, as always, I have changed my friends’ names out of respect to what happened and because, even though I have not seen them since shortly after this incident, they will forever be tied to me as friends and as people who got through this unscathed. I doubt they would even admit remembering this night if pressed. But my profession has a way of keeping youthful exuberance fresh and, therefore, my recollection of the following events are as vivid as yesterday. So this is my book, my obsession, and my quandary; to call them out would mean making them question shit from the past they have probably done their best to forget. Make no mistake though: these are actual events; I was not by myself, and I have the scars to prove it.

The six of us found ourselves fairly jovial, even though we were traipsing through the darkness toward something that frightened us to death. Even when we tripped on the wires draped over the path, we laughed and helped each other up. We kept moving, each of us certain we were going to see something “so fucking cool!” Then, before we knew it and a lot sooner than we expected, we were there.

I cannot tell you how much more terrifying Cold House looked in the dark. Years later, watching the end of Blair Witch Project, I experienced a horrendous and violent flashback. I felt petrified because it took me directly back to that night. It was like someone had been with us filming. Of course that was a movie designed to make you piss your pants and give you motion sickness—memory and reality can be so much more vicious.

Casting our flashlights across its dilapidated façade, it had the appearance of a killer. It was like discovering an alligator in the water next to you. All of the windows were gone of course, targets for teens throwing rocks and those hard green things that smelled like Pine-Sol that fell from the trees everywhere. In fact, the trees around the house looked like ghoulish fingers, either holding it in place or pointing at us, the interlopers, seeming to tell us to keep away. The front door hung on one hinge at an awful angle, and the steps up onto the front porch looked so weak that even Indiana Jones would have found another way inside. We all stood there, kind of frozen in excitement and fear. Were we really going to fucking do this? It seemed like I was the only one ready and willing to make this happen. With a fire I still cannot describe or explain from whence it came, I left the path and took four steps toward the house—the closest I had ever come to going inside in my life. My legs were rubber and my heart was threatening to escape from my chest, but I moved even closer. The sound of feet sliding through tall grass let me know my comrades were following, although not too closely.

I moved cautiously on the porch steps. Each one that took my weight complained loudly, and even though there was city noise not too far away, in the dark and silence of the woods, those creaking sounds were like needles sliding across your ears. We might as well have been in Romania—home seemed a million miles away. The porch itself was a little more stable, and we gathered there before I reached out with inactive fingers to move the front door and gain access to Cold House. One by one, we crossed its threshold.

Then all our flashlights went dead.

Studying the paranormal as I have over the years, I have read about spirits draining batteries and power sources for the energy to manifest. I found this to be true when, in 2003 and part of 2004, I experienced similar activity at the fabled mansion on Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles. But we will talk about that later. Back in 1983 I did not know about this phenomenon. I was just a nine-year-old kid suddenly plunged into pitch black in an abandoned house. We were shaking the flashlights, trying to get them to turn back on, wondering what the hell could have killed them all at once—I think Tina had even put fresh batteries in hers before leaving her apartment. That is when I noticed a sort of glow coming from the second floor. By that time my eyes had adjusted a bit, and I was vaguely able to make out blobs and shapes in the dark, like the walls, a broken chair, and the stairs leading up to the floor above us, and it was there, on those stairs, that a hint of light was reflecting primitively for all to see. We shut up immediately. I took a step toward the staircase, but there was a hand on my arm. It was Henry—he whispered something like “Do not be stupid—where are you going?” but I kind of shuffled out of his grip and, with a deep breath, I placed one foot on the bottom step.

Before I took another step, the glow had gotten brighter. So I turned my eyes to the top of the stairs. That is when I saw the shape.

I assumed it was a man—it was definitely man looking. It was the craziest thing we had ever seen. Here was this silhouette of a giant man, backlit so you could not see his face, but apparently casting the very light it was silhouetted against. It was like a blue-white nightmare. I remember its hands clenching and unclenching. I remember it heaving like it was gasping for air. I remember the hands of my friends pulling on my clothing trying to get me to join their escape. I remember the sight of what looked like blood on the walls. The last thing I saw before I screamed was that thing, seemingly without moving a muscle, coming toward us.

We almost killed each other running out of Cold House. The front door, now a hindrance, was finally torn from its last hinge by running children. I was the last one out of the house. As I took the porch steps, my left leg plunged through old wood, tearing into my shin. I looked behind me, and that thing was framed in the doorway—menacing, unnatural. I could feel its light on my face, understand? I was utterly shell-shocked and I could not move. For some reason I knew it wanted me. This had been my plan, my idea, and this thing knew it. And it was going to punish me. I closed my eyes.

Then Henry was pulling me from the steps. He dragged me behind him, and I limped to keep up. We did not stop until we saw the lights of the streetlamps, shedding illumination and a bit of safety on our tiny bodies as we collapsed with the others next to the entrance to the woods. Nobody spoke. Someone was crying.

After a long time we all sort of stood as one and shambled quietly back toward the apartments. We were almost a walking funeral procession. As we came upon my building, Tina, Joe, and Brock silently peeled off to slip back into their own homes. Matt, Henry, and I crawled back into my room and, without another word, did our best to fall asleep. The next day we crawled out into the afternoon sunlight and sat against the wall of the complex, suddenly very vocal about what we had seen. Henry asked me if it had said anything to me, and I shook my head. Matt was convinced the thing had a hook for a hand, and nothing I said could change his mind. After a while Joe stopped over, and he was overly excited. He wanted to go back. I said I was in—so did Matt. Henry did not say anything. When we went to Tina’s house, she said she was not feeling well and did not want to go. Brock’s mother said he refused to even come to the door and asked us if we had been fighting. He never hung out with us again and avoided us around the complex.

As Matt, Joe, and I headed toward 14th, Henry suddenly had to go home. He said he would call me the next day after baseball practice. We were never very close after that day; I became more interested in music and comics, and he got more involved with sports. Tina still came around, but she flat-out refused to talk about Cold House. She even went as far as to say it never happened, that our imaginations had gotten the best of us.

The three of us who were left refused to pretend that it did not happen, and that afternoon we made our way back to the trails, leaping over the tripwires that now seemed pedestrian compared to what we had seen the night before. We came up on the house quickly and only really paused to take our time on the steps. As Matt and Joe bounded inside, I stopped for a second to look at the hole where my leg had broken through. I had cleaned up the gash without alerting my mother, who would have asked too many questions. I stood beside the hole, and immediately my mind went back to the moment when I was face to face with that supernatural spectacle, and I studied it a long time. So by the time I entered the house, the other two were already upstairs. I did not even notice that the front door was missing until I heard Matt and Joe shouting for me to “get up here NOW!” Moving to the bottom of the stairwell, I saw that there was nothing on the walls. No blood, but nothing that would have reminded me of blood in that ghostly light either. It was just gone.

As I came up the stairs—careful not to fall through anything again—I saw what they were going on and on about and could not believe it. The front door, which we had all smashed into in our haste to escape, eventually pulling it from the doorframe, was lying on the floor in an upstairs room. We recognized it from walking past it every day on our way to school. We recognized it from the split second we had seen it illuminated in the light of our torches before they had gone dead. It was the front door, and it was lying inexplicably in the middle of a room many feet away from where we had left it. However, we were not so interested in how it had gotten up the stairs into this room or who had put it up there in the first place. No, our attention was focused squarely on the word that was scrawled on its visage, almost scrubbed into the filth and grime that had built up on the door over the years:

“GO.”

We ran like hell.

After school started that fall, I kept taking the trails through South Side Woods. Occasionally Matt and Joe did as well. Tina avoided it altogether. Brock in turn avoided us everywhere else. Henry waved at me at school, but by the time I moved away, we just were not best friends anymore, and that really kind of broke my heart. I left Iowa for Florida a few months later. I never saw any of them again, even after I moved back to Des Moines when I was sixteen. They had really just disappeared. Over the years I have forgotten their last names. If you asked me to imagine what they looked like as adults, I would not be able to pick them out of a random police lineup.

But I remember that night. I eventually told new friends about that night, and some of them made faces like I am sure you are making faces right now as you read about this. And yet most had had experiences as wild as mine. It was wonderful having friends who had gone through circumstances so close to my own, and we talked about what had happened and what we believed in. We believed in ghosts: real deal, holy-shit ghosts. We explored other abandoned houses together, never really finding anything as extreme as the incidents we had gone through before on our own. But our belief was strong—mine has never been stronger, for over the years I have seen things and heard things that are not only insane but also very real. I have a few pieces of proof that I have gathered, but much of what I have experienced is really just eyewitness accounts, and I will share them all right here. Before we go anywhere, though, before I start telling you these ghost stories, let me hit you with why I am writing this book in the first place.

You see, I am fairly famous—or infamous in most circles—for being, if you can excuse the term, a “devout atheist,” which in a lot of ways can come off as a contradiction in terms. Cutting to the chase, I do not believe in god. Honestly, I really never have. I did not when I was too young to get out of going to church, and that continues right up until this moment, sitting in this chair, writing on this computer. I do not believe in God. I do not chastise or regard with disdain those who do, but my reaction to those who purportedly do terrible things disguised as “God’s work” is acidic and maligned, to put it politely. I am just quick to judge those who are quick to judge, really.

So here is the question: How can I believe in ghosts . . . and not in God? How can I mock the very existence of Jehovah and his creepy winged minions while straight-facedly maintaining that there are ghosts, spirits, poltergeists, and haunts among us? How can I go on record with a whole book for that matter, dedicated to my version of the various events of my life, knowing full well that I might be regarded as a hypocrite at best, a nutcase at worst?