The Mystery of the Haunted Portrait

There’s a haunted portrait hanging in the church next door.

I hope you appreciate the matter-of-fact, almost blasé manner in which I deliver the news. I’m not exactly a novice when it comes to encountering ghosts, however. In fact—and I say this with a considerable amount of modesty—I’m kind of an old hand when it comes to spirits. A spook wrangler, you might even say.

I grew up, of course, on the same ghost stories as everybody else my age. You know the ones. They end with someone shrieking “GIVE ME BACK MY GOLDEN ARM!” or “. . . and when she stepped out of her car, hanging from the door handle was a bloody hook!” These stories use to send a thrill up my spine, particularly when we’d swap them at church youth group overnighters after midnight, or in the long evenings leading up to Halloween. (This would have been in the days before the web, naturally, when we fifth graders didn’t have online gambling and internet porn to keep us occupied.)

But did I believe them? Not whole-heartedly. I believed there was something compelling about the power of a story told by whisper in the dark. I believed we all enjoy the sensation of giggling at the end of a gruesome tale and pinching ourselves to make sure all of our parts were still there. Even at a young age I believed that the world is full of scary things, and that channeling our fears into storytelling was a way to cope with the darkness. But in actual, ectoplasmic, wafting-around harbingers of another world? Listen, a golden arm would’ve had to have weighed a ton. Nah. I didn’t believe.

Not, that is, until the great misadventure of The Rapping Ghost of Williamsburg.

The College of William and Mary had ghost stories. Hoo boy, did they ever. The theater department alone had enough spirits haunting its hallways to have cast all the supernatural scenes in both the original Ghostbusters and its (less original) sequel. The specter of a lonely senior, mowed down by a car before her premiere as Emily in the college production of Our Town, was said to walk the stage of the Phi Beta Kappa Theater, searching for the spotlight she never enjoyed. Upperclassmen in the program passed down to incoming freshmen warnings not to linger alone in the scene shop after dark, where another unidentified spirit would graze the necks of the hapless with an icy-cold kiss. There were dozens more, but they all tended to blend together in a hotpot of spookiness.

I found these stories about as credible as the notion that the pretty male theater majors with perfectly-moussed hair telling them all had ‘girlfriends’ who conveniently went to ‘some other college out of state.’ Nor did I buy the story I heard from others around campus that the cemetery out by the law school had a rapping ghost.

Wait. I can see how easily this story could head down the wrong path and lead only to inevitable disappointment. You’ve now probably got an image in your mind of a hip-hop apparition wearing big ol’ earphones as he hovers over a phantom turntable, scratching rhythmically about how it’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes him wonder how he keeps it six feet under. The Rapping Ghost of Williamsburg was not that kind of rapping ghost.

I wish.

This ghost just lay there quietly in his coffin until midnight, when it would rap three times and—well, that’s all. I’m not even sure there was a story behind it—like some kind of demented Avon Lady denied her chance to make commission in life, attempting to sell that one last case of Skin-So-Soft after her untimely demise. Nope. Kind of boring, actually. And I know you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Oh, but Colonial Williamsburg! The cemetery was probably straight out of Sleepy Hollow with enormous gothic crypts and weeping angels and skulls rolling around on the ground like acorns in autumn, right?” But no. The cemetery by the law school was outside the colonial district. Its grounds were modern and dull and treeless, a grid of marble slabs rendered dull, regimented, and sterile.

One night during my junior year, though, my friends Perry and Melinda and I had been studying for finals in some of our psychology classes out at the law school. Back in the day, smart upperclassmen in the know scorned studying in the Swem Library on the main campus during finals; the law school library a quarter-mile away from the Old Campus was the place to be. The atmosphere was cosmopolitan, the seating was plentiful, and most important of all, I seem to recall they had a snack bar. We missed the bus back, or else stayed after the last return trip to campus. Either way, we decided to return to campus up South Henry Street, past the graveyard.

I don’t know whose bright idea it was to make the detour. We joked about the rapping ghost as we did it, though. Thought it would be ‘fun’ to prove the legend wasn’t real. Had we but known! The cemetery wasn’t lit at night, back then; there weren’t really any streetlights beyond its boundaries to illuminate the paths. The moon’s bright light made the asphalt driveway sparkle as we wended our way along the low, plain tombstones. I remember being in a particularly giddy mood brought on by too much sugar and the prospect of the semester’s end, combined with the silly bravado we all felt.

Then we heard it. Tap-tap-tap. Three rapid, but very distinct knocking sounds. “That was a woodpecker,” Perry said, uncertainly. None of us had really that much experience with woodpeckers, though. We heard it again. Tap-tap-tap. It sounded like someone rapping his knuckles on a wooden door. Which, to our imaginations at that late hour, was close enough to a coffin to make any differences negligible.

Now I can’t say, from a purely empirical standpoint, that it was exactly at midnight that we heard the rapping. (It probably wasn’t.) Nor can I say for certain that the noise wasn’t a woodpecker. Or a tree frog. Or some other fauna of Williamsburg. Or a distant hammer in a house on the other side of the graveyard. All I can really say is that it was late at night, it was very dark, we all heard it, and we all practically crapped our pants trying to clamber over each other and sprint the hell out of that godforsaken place. Then we made a solemn pact never to speak of it again.

Or study at the law school, for that matter.

It wasn’t until we moved to Connecticut that I had my second encounter with ghosts—this time with The Parsonage Kitchen Ghost. I might’ve mentioned that the first-floor flat in which we currently live is in an historic house that used to be the church’s old parsonage. It’s old. Very old. Not so old that staunch old New Englanders probably sat on its front porch drinking Cape Cods while watching the village burn witches on the green across the street, but just about.

Well, very early on in our stay here, I woke up at four-thirty one morning to hear noises in the kitchen. It sounded like a fan, followed by a beeping noise. Craig was snoring beside me, and the cats were both snoozing on the bed. Nobody likes to leave the bed at four-thirty in the morning, particularly to investigate a noise, but I got on my robe and padded down the hallway through the dining room and into the kitchen, where I looked around. Nothing was happening. I went back to bed.

It was maybe two days later that I heard it again. The sound of a fan from across the house. It was very early in the morning, but light enough that I could see. “That,” I said to Craig, waking him up from his sleep, “is the microwave.”

“Okay,” Craig said, then immediately conked out again.

I raced into the kitchen naked, where I saw the microwave oven’s light shining. When I walked through the door, the oven beeped at me and shut down. I opened it up. There was nothing inside. I don’t know why I thought there would be. It’s not as if ghosts need a quick baked potato or a couple of Hot Pockets.

Back in the bedroom, I announced to Craig, “A ghost turned on our microwave.”

“Okay,” Craig mumbled, drool running from the corner of his mouth into the pillow.

“FINE.” I harumphed under the sheets with a flounce. “If you don’t care that a malevolent entity is turning on the microwave and will probably burn down the house, I don’t either.”

The next time it happened, we both heard it. It was still very early in the morning, before dawn, but we were both woken up when we heard the sound of beeping, as if someone were punching a time into the microwave oven’s keypad. Then we heard the oven itself start up with a hum. Both of us ran naked into the kitchen, where the microwave was turning around and lit up. Where normally the time would’ve displayed was a digital mumbo jumbo. I’m not saying it actually read 666 4EVAH upside-down or anything, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“It’s the ghost,” I said, as we both stared at it.

“I think it’s just broken,” said Craig.

“Definitely the ghost,” I agreed.

There’s been some dispute ever since over which of us was correct, but both of us agreed it was probably better to dispose of the microwave oven in the dumpster. Sprinkled with, you know, a little holy water. I try to ignore the fact that from time to time still, water glasses in the cupboard over where the microwave used to sit have a tendency to fall out when the doors have been open for a while, even when the glasses been sitting there undisturbed, flat on their bottoms. It’s as if someone is pulling at them. My reflexes are pretty good, though, and so far the poltergeist hasn’t broken a single one.

But this business with the painting, now. That’s just creepy. At the top of the stairs right inside the church office entrance sat, for the longest time, a portrait of a former minister. I’m told it’s haunted. I don’t know why, or with what, or frankly even how a picture can be haunted. Frankly, if I were a spirit, I’d certainly find a better place to park my keister than some garage-sale quality rubbishy daub without much of a view or, for that matter, access to a room with a flat-screen and cable. All I know is that one of the associate ministers told Craig that he was walking after dark through the church auditorium where the portrait now sits and he felt something grabbing at his legs . . . even though there was nobody there with him.

We walk through the church hall after dark all the time, on the way from the parking lot to the back door of our home. At night it’s already dark, echoing, and creepy in there. Knowing there’s a bored haunted minister waiting to grab at my legs doesn’t make me relish the trip any more, let me tell you. I scurry through as quickly as possible, trying not to cast my eyes up the stairs in case I see those in the painting glowing back at me.

Post-mortem leg-pinching still seems like an unusual kind of hobby in which a minister well past his retirement could engage, but hey. Maybe my parsonage ghost could invite him over for a cup of microwaved coffee and they can compare notes sometime.

The Real (Dream) World

After a half-century of falling asleep at night and managing to wake up again in the mornings, I’ve finally become an expert on my dreams. I don’t always comprehend them, mind you—though there are times I understand them with more clarity than I’d like to admit. But I’ve reached a jaded point at which I can rummage through my nighttime musings over breakfast and think to myself, “Oh, it was one of those.”

My sick dreams, for example. No, not the ones involving a pony tail and a whip. I mean the dreams I have when I’m actually ill, perverts. They’re always mathematical in nature, or else involve me having to solve some kind of complicated puzzle. I’ll run imaginary math problems in my head for what seems like hours, or attempt to fit into a finite puzzle box a limited number of complicated shapes. Then I’ll start all over again. And over again. And over some more. I’ve actually gotten to the point at which if I find myself having dreams involving vast quantities of sums or complicated problem-solving that never seems to end, I’ll regard it as a harbinger of an illness to come and I’ll wake myself up, get out of bed, pop a couple of aspirin, and keep an eye out for cold symptoms over the next couple of days.

Then there are my reality show dreams. Although my nighttime fantasies usually have about as much of a life as a soap bubble, the reality show dreams exist in some kind of persistent alternate universe in which I’ve been a television star several times over. It all started in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when I started having recurring dreams about having appeared in the first season of MTV’s The Real World. Oh yes. I was part of the original cast! I lived in New York City with them for several months during filming. Heather was my best friend; we were inseparable during those long-vanished days. Julie and I got into some kind of feud right at the beginning and didn’t really have much to do with each other, even though Heather was trying to get us to reconcile. Eric Nies and I would stay up late at night and play cards.

But here’s the thing about that cruel experience, which has been verified time after time in that weirdly persistent alternate world, while I’ve slumbered: after I packed up my bags and moved back to Detroit to resume my life, I turned on the TV when the final cut of the show started to make its premiere and discovered that I’d been utterly edited out. The Real World wasn’t the true story (troooooue storrrrry!) of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped. IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE EIGHT. Apparently I was just too BORING to make the final show. Ooo girl, Heather was upset about it too, when we all found out. But it was done, and there was no turning back: I was just an odd little footnote to those in the know, the eighth stranger left on the cutting room floor while everyone else went on to make history.

Like I said, sometimes I can understand my dreams more than I care to admit, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this one.

However, because of my small notoriety, in my alternate universe I managed to get cast on a couple of other dream reality TV shows over the years. The first was Survivor, in which I managed to be the first male contestant to make it through the season without having ever removed his shirt, yo. Because that’s the way I play, y’all. I came in sixth place, having been voted off the island when one of my alliances went sour. However, in a subsequent Survivor All-Stars I managed to place third, which was fairly respectable. The gigs on Survivor directly led to my appearance on The Amazing Race, about five years ago. In the persistent dream universe there’s a very popular clip (over 3 million views on dream YouTube) in which I am in a Tokyo subway and say to Craig, who was racing with me:

ME: Which way are we supposed to go?
HIM (pointing south): I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to head this way.
ME: Are you ‘pretty sure’ or ‘one hundred percent sure’?
HIM: I’m one hundred percent sure.
ME (heading north instead): Okay. Then we’re going this way.

We finished fifth. It’s because of the popularity of that clip that within the last three months we were cast in the dream version of The Amazing Race All-Stars, and at least once a show the editors include a little flashback to our most popular moment. And believe you me, since we’re savvy about why we were invited back, we play up the comedy.

Just don’t ask me where we placed, yet. The season’s apparently not over.

Of all my recurring dreams, though, the two most vivid have to do with my school days. The first involves a persistent reality in which it’s discovered that I missed a couple of credits in high school, not only invalidating my high school diploma, but my college and graduate degrees as well—unless, in the inexorable absurdity of dream logic, I go back to my old high school as an adult and matriculate again. You’d think that’d be nightmare enough, but there’s always a point in this dream in which finally the school day is over and I’m anxious to get home, but it dawns on me that I no longer remember the number of my school bus. This dream always ends with me not only trying to race from the back of the school to get to the school busses on time (apparently the lack of a math credit has invalidated my driver’s license as well, I guess), but trying to find the one bus among dozens that will take me home again and not leave me stranded.

Then finally is my most persistent recurring dream. In it, I’m usually an adult. Sometimes I’m younger again. I’m involved in a play. Sometimes it’s a play in which I actually appeared in my waking life, either from college or middle school. Sometimes it’s a play I’ve never seen. The point of the dream is that I’m inadequately prepared, and due to step onto the stage very, very soon. There are times in these dreams in which I’ve never seen the play’s script, and it’s floating around backstage always just out of reach so that I don’t have the ability to review it; in other instances I’ve got a vague memory of the lines I used to have, but I don’t at all remember my cues, or all the details. I’m always in a panic in these dreams. Will the lines come back to me? Will I just have to wing it? Or will I freeze and be exposed as a charlatan to the audience just on the other side of the footlights, staring at me?

I was thinking about this last dream in particular, a week ago. Craig and I accompanied my friend and former college roommate Eric to a local production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. Eric had been involved with the troupe in years past; like the good supporter of the arts he is, he wanted to make an appearance in the audience in order to visit old chums and evaluate just how far they’d fallen since his departure. The production itself was fine. The woman playing Mabel was terrific. The fellow playing Frederic had a weird and awesome tendency, when he wasn’t singing his own parts, of very clearly mouthing the words of everyone else’s songs while onstage. Watching him broadly articulate the consonants of “Poor Wand’ring One” with his lips while Mabel was warbling away made him look like a master ventriloquist.

But there was one woman in the cast who was utterly out of her element. She looked as if she’d been pressed into service mere minutes before the show—like she’d been pulled into the auditorium parking lot to drop off her kids at the soccer field nearby and had been kidnapped, stuffed into leg o’mutton sleeves and a bonnet, and forced onstage in some kind of perform-this-goddamn-operetta-or-we’ll-kill-your-family-and-little-dog-too hostage situation. Her eyes had the wide look of terror of someone who absolutely had no idea what she was doing. When she danced and sang, it wasn’t merely with her eyes glued to her feet as amateurs in community theater sometimes do; she was absolutely and utterly clueless about what she was supposed to be doing at any and every point of the production.

During “Climbing Over Rocky Mountain,” for example, her increasingly-panicky inner thoughts were projected all over her face as plainly as the opening credits of Star Wars on a giant screen. Do I walk forward? She’s walking forward. I’ll walk forward. Not too far forward. Okay. Are we swaying? I guess we’re sway. I’ll sway. Shit! We stopped swaying! Is this one of those things where we join hands and swing our arms? Okay. I’ll grab those hands on either side of . . . SHIT! Hands back down! Hands back down! Did anyone see that? OH MY GOD AM I SUPPOSED TO BE SPINNING MY UMBRELLA?

Craig and I were in tears and hysterics. Eric is too cultured and highbrow to notice these things. He’s basically Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess steadfastly refusing to comment during high tea upon the fact that a footman’s next-to-bottom button has a fleck of tarnish.

For two hours that poor woman looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Even though Craig and I both were helplessly giggling over her discomfort, I felt for her. Every single moment of her distress took me back to those silly dreams of mine in which I’m wearing some foppish Restoration costume or the rags of some old man, and I’m trying to chase down a copy of the script so I can figure out what the heck I’m supposed to be doing before I make a fool of myself in front of an audience.

It’ll be just desserts, next time I enter one of my persistent dream universes, that to atone for my blatant and unrepentant schadenfreude over that poor woman’s stage fright, I’ll be edited right out of that The Real World: New York original cast reunion show.

Conversations with My Father: The Great French Fry Boycott of 2014 Edition

MY FATHER: I’m glad you called. I was going to call you to tell you about my boycott.
ME: Oh dear. What are you boycotting?
MY FATHER: Your favorite restaurant.
ME: What in the world do you think is my favorite restaurant?
MY FATHER: It’s your favorite restaurant. You tell me.
ME: A restaurant that you would visit? Gosh. I don’t know. Is it that Thai restaurant we go to when I visit Richmond?
MY FATHER: No! I like that one.
ME: That barbecue sandwich place we tried that serves Cheerwine?
MY FATHER [with scorn]: No.
ME: My favorite restaurant? I admit, you’ve stumped me. All the restaurants I like are up here.
MY FATHER: Red Robin.
ME: Red Robin?! Red Robin is not my favorite restaurant.
MY FATHER: Don’t you want to know why I’m boycotting it?
ME: I could write down the names of a hundred restaurants and I wouldn’t even place Red Robin remotely close to. . . .
MY FATHER: I said, don’t you want to know why I’m boycotting it?
ME: I mean, we went there once, but I can’t imagine I said anything that could possibly have given you any indication that it was one of my favorite. . . .
MY FATHER: ANYWAY.
ME [sighing]: Go on.
MY FATHER: I went and had dinner there the other day. And do you know how they served the fries?
ME: Vertically.
MY FATHER: They had them in a fancy ring that looked like a fancy napkin holder. . . .
ME: Yes, vertically. Craig and I had lunch there a few months ago at a mall and that’s how they served them.
MY FATHER [outraged]: . . . and they were stood up on their ENDS.
ME: Vertically.
MY FATHER: Vertically! Did you say that?
ME: Several times. So you’re boycotting Red Robin because they served their French fries vertically?
MY FATHER: They used to serve them lying down, like normal fries.
ME: I’m . . . sorry? You know, you are allowed to take off the ring and allow them to lie down flat.
MY FATHER: But then they go in different directions.
ME: In a recent ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court decided unanimously that it was constitutional for Red Robin patrons to align their fries in any direction they want.
MY FATHER: But the real problem. . . .
ME: Oh good, there’s more.
MY FATHER: . . . the real problem is that there aren’t as many as there used to be. The portions are smaller.
ME: But Red Robin is the place where you can have as many servings of fries as you want. Bottomless fries. It’s in all their ads.
MY FATHER: Yes, but.
ME: Yes, but, as in yes, but all you have to do is ask the wait person for more?
MY FATHER: No. Yes, but as in yes, but then I have to hurry and eat them all before I can ask for more, and then I have to wait for them.
ME: Why is that a problem? You don’t have to wait. Grab the waiter when you’re down to the last two or three and they’ll have them out to you by the time you’re done. It’s not a big deal.
MY FATHER: It is a big deal! If you ask for more before you’re finished, the waiter thinks you’re trying to be greedy and take the second portion home.
ME: But . . . but they offer you bottomless fries.
MY FATHER: From an economic standpoint it would be ruinous if everyone ordered extra fries just so they could take the second portion home.
ME: If it were that ruinous, they wouldn’t offer their patrons an extra fifteen cents’ worth of fries.
MY FATHER [loftily]: You know nothing of economics.
ME: So if theoretically the waiter brought you more fries, would you immediately ask him to box them up so you could take them home?
MY FATHER [offended]: No! I’d eat what I wanted.
ME: Okay then!
MY FATHER: And then take the rest home.
ME: I . . . I . . . I honestly don’t know what to say. Why do you care what the waiter thinks, anyway?
MY FATHER: The portions used to be bigger.
ME: Okay. When the portions were bigger, did you ever order more fries?
MY FATHER [even more offended]: I don’t need to eat that many fries!
ME: So you should be happy the portions are smaller! Good god, man!
MY FATHER [with affronted dignity]: This is a very serious boycott and you are deliberately belittling my problem.
ME: You are correct.
MY FATHER: I’m correct? That this is a very serious boycott?
ME: No. That I’m deliberately belittling your problem.