Pickle and ketchup sandwiches, mayonnaise on white bread sandwiches, these were a few of my favorite things. Back in the day it was common for children to ask for unusual sandwiches. Conformity wasn't even in my vocabulary yet, although I would learn. I probably got a D-minus in Conformity 101, whatever. I was a weird kid, but I was fed on monster movies.


Those were two of my snacks in my childhood days when I had a cast iron stomach. That ended in the sixth grade. The event, the gastronomic catalyst was buttered popcorn at the movie theater while I watched The Day The Earth Caught Fire. Suddenly grease became indigestible and made me queasy, and I have never really loved anything greasy after that. Well,yes, I loved it but was unable to digest it.

I used to watch Shock Theater on Friday Nights and listen to ghost stories like Whispering Pines and Thump Thump Drag as other weekend fare.. Why do kids scare themselves silly with these things?

Imagine watching Shock Theater featuring I Was A Teenage Werewolf (I wasn't.) and eating a pickle and ketchup sandwich. I did that once when I was in second grade. My parents were both asleep.

Sometimes, Little Bird would watch the horror films with me, although I think she may have passed on the P&K sandwich option. Up alone at night while my parents slept, the adult world of monsters became all too obvious. This is what we had to look forward to as we someday took our place in the "real world".

Even today, I can't pass up a really good paranormal article, although I have to say my main motive is to see how quickly I can debunk the myth. I could de-bunk in a single bound as a child, out of my bunk bed, but that is a different story.

It takes a little longer to find the flaw in a haunting.

My father habitually wanted (past was imperfect) to build separate quarters in our house for Little Bird and myself, as if we were too dangerous in some unspecified way to live close to the rest of the family. Or maybe they were slave quarters to go with our permanent waves, or it might just have been to satisfy some craving of his to hew out spaces and hammer nails in lumber-wilderness within the too civilized confines of a suburban home.

My father liked working with his hands. He would go down into his laboratory in the basement and make a frankenphone or some other gadget by rigging up cast-off parts of once useful appliances to make a new and jagged version of the real deal.

I ran across an article about a haunted town in Connecticut. There were a lot of related sites on the Internet, some featuring photos. There were smudgy and blotchy marks on the photographs. Sketchy shapes on your film cannot convince me that the paranormal is real.

I have a lot of haunted photographs too, with funny discoloring and bubbly, moon shaped orbs. I blame the haunted demonic photo lab technician for all of it, except for the Polaroids.

Why do people want to sleep in haunted rooms with wall banging and moving furniture and whatnot's? My father died in his room less than six months ago. It was not a surprise. He was a patched up and glued together, a nearly bionic version of the human he once was. There was even some metal left after he was cremated.

I was not there when he died. He had already given me a farewell present a few weeks before: a leather suitcase. My mother had given him a luggage set of three a long time ago as a gift. Two were stolen in a hotel in Chicago when he was on a business trip. I got what was left and have since put most of my writing notebooks in it. When he presented the suitcase to me, I opened it. Inside was a wad of hideous and outdated ties, which he was going to toss into the trash. I told him not to throw them away, that people made quilts from them, that I would drop them off at a thrift shop. I now have them tied up in a little plastic bag in one of my storage boxes. I will burn them one day.

I don't think of him as dead so much as on a lengthy business trip.

Since he died, three people have moved in and out of that room, all related to him. Furniture moving all over the place. What infernal urge is causing this? I was one of those who slept in the haunted room for a few days. He would have been irked about it if he had known. He was a territorial animal. Never that close to us in life, weirdly bonkers after death.

There are a lot of funny and unaccounted for noises in the night when you sleep in that room, but I think they are coming from the neighbors and Little Bird.