Wes and I moved from our little haunted domicile in the Twin Peaks VG (Very Gay) area of San Francisco in 1984. At that point, we betrayed the city and moved to the eastern suburbs, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay. Our employer had built a massive business park in San Ramon and was offering attractive ($$$$) incentives for employees like us to move. After almost 2 years of Fred’s tedious presence, we were ready to move. Housing in the East Bay was brand new, and so we moved from a typical 1945 city house of 975 square feet to a new house in upscale San Ramon with 3000 square feet, a Scarlet O’Hara style circular staircase in the foyer crowned by a huge crystal chandelier. This was quite a house, loaded with oak paneling and ornamentation. One gay guest, upon seeing the house for the first time said “It appears that Liberace is alive and well in San Ramon”.
Our lovely new home was located on a hillside overlooking our employer’s business park, a huge earthbound Star Ship Enterprise that housed 7000 employees, had the largest cafeteria west of the Rockies, and was surrounded by manmade lakes filled with trout and white swans. We had very deluxe accommodations at work to mask a huge amount of human pain. But that’s the general story of corporate America today.
Allow me to digress, as usual! I had a boss so ruthless during my last year with AT&T that after staff meetings, I would hold my own “recovery” meetings where people would cry and yell before returning to their desks. Our boss was an ex-marine who was evidently taught that the way to get things done by PHD white collar professionals was to threaten them with being fired constantly. Under the year of his terrorist regime, I lost 40 pounds and developed painful TMJ. Many of our best software engineers quit. Women were often in tears – it became so common that we became hardened to it.
But the universe has a way of balancing things out. A year after I retired, this same boss (who had the same respect for women as Viking invaders) told a meeting of female clients that their breasts were really big and just begging to be squeezed like ripe melons. The outrage from the clients was so profound that he rushed out to get nondisclosure agreements, urging them to sign so that no one would find out about his mammary gland comments. But one of the clients stormed over to our Legal Department and threatened to sue AT&T if he was not terminated. Well, he wasn’t killed, but he was immediately fired. I heard many employees took the rest of the day off to dance in the halls of the building and hold impromptu bring-your-own-celebratory-libation to the parking lot!
Well, during the reign of terror, Wes and I would often flee from the suburbs back to the old gay neighborhood of San Francisco on weekends, where it was common for us to hold hands while walking down the street (without some religious thug threatening to kill us), and we were no longer invisible. You see, the suburbs eat gay people alive, taking away their individuality and leaving droids in their place in golf shirts and golf carts.
One such Sunday as we drove around the old neighborhood, we decided to check out our old house and wave to Fred as we drove by. This was about 10 years after we had sold the house. We were surprised to see a huge sign proclaiming that the house was FOR SALE and that there was an OPEN HOUSE that very day.
Our curiosity got the better of us, since we knew that the couple that bought the place had big remodeling plans. We were surprised to find the Open House realtor sitting at a card table outside the house. Usually, the realtor is standing by within the house to pass out sales information. We toured the house (and true to their word, the couple who bought the house had taken our ceiling and used it as the floor for more renovation). The interior was STUNNING, and could easily have been chosen for Architectural Digest magazine or San Francisco Yuppie Living magazine. The bedrooms were set up as if someone was just about to turn in for the night, with an opened book on the bed. The kitchen had a lovely display of freshly cut vegetables on a cutting board. Everything was simply STUNNING.
However, beneath the picture was a different story. The couple had died in the house from severe health problems even though they were in their 20’s. Neither set of surviving parents wanted anything to do with the house or the contents. They removed the clothing and personal toiletry items, and then put the house up for sale with contents included. Very strange.
We pretended initially to be typical open house looky-loos, but then got a bit chummy with the realtor. She confessed that she was frightened to be in the house alone. The house felt clammy and sinister to her. She apologized for such nonlogical thought, but she thought perhaps one of the previous owners was haunting the place. She said that several clients had felt the same way about the house, and that it had been on the market for over a year with out a single offer. She felt that subconsciously people just felt a sense of “wrongness” about the house.
We then came clean and told her about our adventures with Fred as previous owners. Evidently, Fred’s charm was making itself felt on the realtor and her clients. We can only theorize what the couple may have experienced and why the surviving families wanted nothing to do with the house. When we walked through the house, Fred didn’t make an appearance (perhaps he was checking our credit ratings as potential buyers). We took a chance, in that I feared the old fart might follow us home to our new suburban house, but he seemed tied to that spot.
My supernatural life after this was relatively calm, except I did have one very strange experience in the new San Ramon house. One night as I was sitting in the kitchen with our two dogs, I strongly felt a presence enter the house. At that exact moment, the dogs jumped up, growled and rushed to the door of the kitchen starring out at the foyer. Yet they would not leave the kitchen. Most odd. I decided to say nothing to Wes about it and we went to bed. But no sooner had Wes’ head hit the pillow than he sat up and said “There is something very wrong with this house. It does not feel right. Stay here.” And with a dramatic flourish and reached behind the bed and retrieved a gun and began to search the house, while I (your brave author) had my head under the pillow along with our 2 dogs. Wes returned in about 10 minutes and this was his experience.
He checked all the upstairs rooms and they were “clean”. Then he descended our sweeping foyer staircase and went into the family room. There he encountered a black form that could only be described as a Shadow Person. A pitch black form was standing in the family room….was it waiting for us to fall asleep before ascending the staircase to wave a feather under our noses to make us sneeze?
Wes said “Who are you?” This seemed to startle the figure, which perhaps was not accustomed to being seen by mere humans. With a speed that turned the figure into a black blur, it fled out of the family room and through the locked front door. Was it an earthbound spirit looking for a place to crash for the night?
This third installment of my tale is perhaps the least dramatic, and I am so pleased about that. If people on reality shows like Ghost Hunters (which I understand is staged) want to go into ratty old insane asylums and old hotels to seek out ghosts, bless them. But I am glad to live my life without such spiritual red herrings in my life.
The truth again is that God is within each of us, and this is the greatest possible adventure to uncover on earth as a human. As the Bible says, let the dead bury the dead.
However, the logical part of my mind sometimes becomes really annoyed, and I wish I knew where to lodge a cosmic complaint. If there is any order to this “set up” of many dimensions, how do people seem to just fall through the cracks? Is no one in charge? Why is Fred allowed to wander around a little row house in San Francisco in farmer overalls? Are there no Rescue Squads on the other side of the ever popular BIG WHITE LIGHT?
Who are these shadow people? Who are “elemental spirits”? What next, fairies living at the bottom of my garden?
There’s a great line in the great stage play and movie with Jimmy Stewart called HARVEY. In this movie, Jimmy Stewart chills out with his best friend, an invisible 7 foot tall rabbit known in Celt mythology as a pooka (an animal spirit). At one point, Jimmy Stewart’s niece says “Oh, mother! Will you please stop talking about this thing as if it really exists!!!?” With tired and compassionate eyes, her mother (Jimmy Stewart’s sister in the movie) says something to the effect of “There is so much you don’t know, and I hope you never have to learn it”. In other words, there are people on this planet that have experienced the inexplicable and know in their minds and hearts that it exists. Then there is the vast majority that may use such subjects for entertainment, e.g., HARRY POTTER, but would run screaming from the theater if even the slightest indication was given that anything supernatural was real.
I’ve been one of those people who has experienced the supernatural at close range. But now I am retired. I’ve hopefully passed on my baton to a younger generation to deal with Fred, possessing spirits, and Shadow People.
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