Just a Small Town Ghost Story

An old house in a small town in eastern North Dakota.

The house was once a boarding house for railroad workers, so I am told, as well a private home through the second half of the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first.

When I go grouse and duck-hunting with my friend G., who has lived there for the decade past, I usually sleep in the enclosed front porch, which is about 8 x 12 feet in size. That room contains a single bed, a desk and chair, a lamp, and a disassembled bookcase — nothing more. (I like that room because I can take my dog outside easily.)

In 2011, I left for the 1,000-mile drive home, went about five miles down North Dakota 200, and wondered where my cell phone was. I stopped the truck and looked — no phone. I went back and with G.’s help searched the 8 x 12 room and the lawn between the front door and where I parked.

“Clarence must have taken it,” he said.

Once home, I went through the truck like a drug agent looking for contraband. No telephone. Nor did it ever appear at G.’s house.

This year, my fifth visit to the house, I kept a close watch on my telephone, and it came home with me safely.

But then I walked into my temporary bedroom and smelled cigarette smoke—a strong smell, as though someone had just finished their cigarette in the little room.

I asked G. about it. He was blasé. He had smelled it, his wife had smelled it, his teenage stepkids had smelled it. (No one in the family smoked cigarettes.)

And I smelled it four or five times more, at odd intervals, not connected with time of day or humidity or anything like that.

G. attributes it to one Clarence Bolz, who owned the house a couple of decades ago. Mostly he haunts the workshop attached to the garage, G. said. Small items sometimes disappear, and now and again G. smells Clarence’s cigarettes.

Such a ghost story would be too minor even for Fate magazine’s reader-submissions column. But it was the first smell-linked haunting that I had encountered.

The ‘Occult Chicago’ Event

Looking forward to this event a lot. It should fortify me for the hard business of a confrontation with a certain publisher’s editorial director.

And keep an eye on Rik Garrett’s Occult Chicago blog. Why don’t you start one for your town?

Gandalf Style?


No, you can’t fool me. This is just Oberon Zell on his way to the supermarket in Santa Rosa.

A Dream, a Dog, and a Forest Fire

A forest fire burning above Hardscrabble Creek.

Last Monday, the 22nd, I came home from a week-long trip. On Tuesday, I was temporarily homeless, a condition that persisted until Friday.

Tuesday’s weather was warm and windy, with the highest gust in the area clocked at 79 mph. Somehow — I still have not heard the definitive story — a tree hit a power line or a power line hit a tree . . . or something — and a raging forest fire began.

Within an hour, fourteen houses plus barns, sheds, etc., near mine had been erased. Eventually that night the fire burned 2,100 acres (850 ha).

M. and I were 45 minutes’ drive away when we saw the smoke. I brandished my county-issued volunteer firefighter ID card, and we passed through four road blocks.

When we arrived home, she quickly left again with the dogs, her favorite faux leather jacket, her laptop computer, a sack of dog food, a bag of apples, a bottle of wine, and the clothes on her back.

She was not sure where she was going, since the road to town was closed to “civilian” traffic.

I left home dressed in my wildland-fire gear, with my laptop too, and also my bunker gear in case I had to face a structure fire. As it happened, it was too late to save any houses — I ended up working until about 9 p.m. chasing spot fires that kept multiplying in the trees along the dry stream bed of Hardscrabble Creek.

I talk about the experience at Southern Rockies Nature Blog here, here, and here.

But there is a part that I left out in that blog.

On the night of the 19th, I believe it was, sleeping my friend’s slightly haunted house* in a small North Dakota prairie town, I had a dream.  In the dream, M. and I were at a house in the woods, although it was not our house and not our woods.

The house had a long gravel driveway (as does ours), and M. was setting up a card table beside it in order to eat a meal out in the sunshine (as we sometimes do). Standing on the steps, I looked down the driveway past her and saw a large tawny animal.

“Wow, that’s a big coyote,” I thought. Then I realized that it was a sort of bleached-out-looking tiger. I wanted her to come to the house right away.

In the morning, I tried to think about associations with tigers. True, we had recently watched the “Siberian Tiger Quest” episode of Nature. (It is excellent.) Otherwise, the only thing that came to mind was William Blake’s poem that starts,

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,

Burning. Forests.

I told M. about my dream during the time when we were staying at a motel 15 miles away, me commuting to the fire house, and she spoke of something that struck her oddly.

At a house about 250 yards away lives a chocolate Lab named Boone. We hear him bark now and then. But on Monday night he bayed all night long, so persistently that M. shut the bedroom window, turned on a fan, and muttered about his stupid owners who would not bring him indoors.  If I ever hear him bay through the night again, I am going to be very nervous.

I do think that events cast their shadows before them, but it is so hard sometimes to know what the shadows signify.

* I will discuss the “haunted” part soon. It was a post that I had meant to write this week.

Pagans in Winnipeg

The trailer to a new documentary, The WinniPagans, focusing on the (largely Wiccan, I think) Pagan scene in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It will be available as video-on-demand — details at the website

Complete with a cute Pagan puppy and a nice shot of Boletus edulis.

Rhetoric: It’s “Classical” Because It Works

“Back to the basics” works if you chose the right basics. (We could debate that.)

“The Writing Revolution,” an article in The Atlantic, argues that attention to basic rhetorical principles — as opposed to expressing your feelings or writing in order to become a better person— helps disadvantaged high school students to succeed.

And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects. Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page. If nothing else, DeAngelis and her teachers decided, beginning in the fall of 2009, New Dorp students would learn to write well.

Walk Past that Eagle Feather?

Some of the people who sell items made with wild-animal parts know the law, and some do not, based on what I have seen at festivals and on websites.

So here is a reminder. Possession of raptor parts in the United States is federally regulated, and possession of eagle feathers or parts are highly regulated.

Basically, unless you are a registered member of an American Indian tribe, you can’t have it. And for them there are rules, summarized at the article linked above.

If you find that feather on the ground and you pick it up . . . just don’t say that you were not aware.

(Somehow this train of thought reminds me of one of my big sister’s favorite sayings: “Don’t forget to put a quarter in the parking meter before you go in to rob the bank.”)

 

Kennewick Man Was Buff

How buff? Five foot-seven,  170 pounds, and all muscle, according to recent skeletal analysis. He also had eaten a lot of seal meat.

(Hat tip to Peculiar.)

Following Up the Hint of Jesus’ Wife

The  recent announcement of a bit of Coptic writing that apparently referred to Jesus’ wife has stirred up plenty of controversy. Was the inscription really as old as claimed? Was it a forgery? Did it really mean “wife”?

At the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog, Ian Brown will bring you up to speed.

But whether or not GosJesWife was written in the 4th century or the 20th century is not actually all that interesting to me (for the record, I suspect it is 4th century, although here I defer to the papyrologists and paleographers who have also drawn that conclusion). Yes, I do Christian origins and am always happy with more data. But I am more interested in the ways in which the initial story was taken-up by the media, particularly the conservative reaction arguing it to be a modern forgery. Regarding the former, it seems we are still standing in the shadow of the Jesus Seminar. Popular interest is focused almost exclusively on the possibility that the historical Jesus was married, and not at all interested in the fact that, assuming its authenticity, people in the 4th century were telling stories about a married Jesus—a detail which I, for one, think is pretty neat! Regarding the latter, well, we are still in the shadow of the Jesus Seminar, only here we feel echoes of the conservative reaction against its version of the historical Jesus.

At Heterodoxology, Egil Asprem passes along some more commentary, focusing on the paleographic questions.

And the reaction of the Vatican is predictable.

Tempest in a Pointy Hat

Organizers of this year’s Pagan Pride Day in Denver, Colorado, want to set a Guinness World Record for the largest number of people dressed as pointy-hat witches.  One of the organizers posted to a statewide mailing list,

I think that we should let witches in non-black hats participate, too…I was thinking we would have the black hat witches as requested per the Guinness guidelines for our official count, but then in the front row we can have witches wearing other colors of hats—holding a banner that says “Real Witches Come in All Colors”. This way, we would be combatting the stereoptype rather than supporting it, and maybe we can persuade the Guinness folks into dropping or renaming the “dressed as witches” category—as a wise witchy lady pointed out, this is really just as offensive as having a “largest number of people dressed like Native Americans” or “largest number of people dressed like Jewish people” category…Definitely NOT what we’re going for with the Pagan Pride message! So please spread the word that the hat does not have to be black after all. We all know of course that not all witches even wear pointy hats, but let’s ease the Guinness folks into it slowly and start this year with our hats in many colors to help get the point across.

I am a little confused here, because I searched the Guinness site and cannot find anything about witches in an existing category—please let me know if I overlooked it.

Of course, someone else immediately replied,

I still think this is offensive.    The last thing I would think we want to do is to promote the stereotypical image of the classic wicked “witch” in an event that is trying to promote us to the public. . . .  My spiritual path is far more sacred to me than trying to break a world record for pointy hats.   I don’t see where that is honoring the Lady and Lord at all.

So will witches-in-pointy-hats end up in Guinness next to the “world’s fastest toilet“?  We have a long way to go to catch up with “Sikhs in turbans” or “Orthodox Jew with sidelocks,” after all. Is it worth the bother?