Haunted Silo

(In honor of Halloween and my favorite show, “Ghost Adventures,” I detail my own brush with spirits.)

In the summer of 2007, St. Pauli Girl and I took a short road trip to get away from the headaches of running a restaurant. We discovered an interesting bed and breakfast housed in an old silo in the middle of an artist colony. Arriving on a Sunday, we found the colony deserted and the restaurant beneath the silo closed. No problem; having the place to ourselves seemed much more fun and enjoyable.

We took a bottle of wine and sat on the spacious patio as the sun set and darkness gathered. The old woman who ran the place eventually wandered by.

“Enjoying your evening, are ye?” she asked, her lips moving around the pipe in her mouth. “You like the room?”

“Yes, it’s very nice,” St. Pauli Girl said.

“I suppose you’re here for the headless artist.”

“What?” I asked.

“Mmm, oh nothing.” She took a long drag on the pipe. “You like the room?”

I became suspicious. “You already asked that. What did you say about a headless artist?”

“I didn’t. You misheard. This is an artist colony. Lots of painters, sculptors and welders. Accidents happen.”

“You distinctly said ‘headless,’” I insisted.

“Ye think so? Ye best be getting the wax blasted from yer ears sir. I be locking the gate now. Enjoy the night.”

We watched as she sauntered off and slowly slammed the iron gate shut. After she locked it, she puffed on her pipe and stared at us for a long moment. Then she got in her car and drove away. It was dark by then and getting chilly so we went back to the silo room. Before going up, I glanced in the empty restaurant and noticed a desk lamp lit on the hostess stand. I didn’t remember it from before but figured it must be on a timer.

We finally went to bed and had no trouble falling asleep. About 4:00 a.m., I suddenly awoke as the overhead light came on. St. Pauli Girl slumbered away. A shiver ran down my spine. Logic took over. I figured I must not have flipped the switch completely, and it just came back on. I got up and looked at the switch. It was still in the off position! More shivers.

“No need to panic,” I thought. “Somebody’s probably coming in early to work in the restaurant and didn’t realize anyone was up here.” I crept down the stairs and looked into the restaurant. It was now completely dark; even the light on the hostess stand was now off. When I heard a loud bang in the kitchen, I ran back upstairs and dove into bed.

“What are you doing?” St. Pauli Girl asked. “Turn off the light.”

“It is off. I don’t know how it came on. Did you hear the bang downstairs?”

“No.”

We lay still and quiet. Everything seemed to return to normal except for the light.

“Maybe we should get out our EVP recorders,” St. Pauli Girl said.

I went to the suitcase, pulled out the recorder and turned it on. Suddenly, we heard a lot of noises coming through the recorder.

“Wow, there’s a lot of paranormal action in here,” I said.

“Really? Can you make out anything?”

“I think it’s saying, ‘Zak.’”

“Give me that!” St. Pauli Girl ripped the EVP from my hand and held it to her ear. “This is strange. I hear, ‘French toast.’”

Then we heard a knock on the door. We dropped the EVP and stared in horror as the dead bolt slid back by itself. Slowly the door swung open. We saw a pale head floating just inside the door. He had long hair and a drawn face with sunken cheeks.

“The headless artist!” St. Pauli Girl gasped.

“Mmmm, you mean body-less,” said the ghoulish voice of the head.

“But the caretaker said headless…”

The eyebrows on the head went up and down. “Headless ghosts can’t talk. They mostly just gurgle. So when I need to talk, I use the head.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Are you familiar with Van Gogh?”

We nodded.

“Let’s just say I took bad advice from a friend who said I could be more famous than Van Gogh.”

“What do you want?” I whispered, trying to sound courageous.

“Well, this is a bed and breakfast. What do you want for breakfast?”

“It’s kind of early for us,” I said.

“I’m a ghost. I don’t do anything after sunrise.”

St. Pauli Girl and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Eggs and sausage would be nice.”

“Do I look like I can cook? Think continental, like muffins and cereal.”

“I like Cap’n Crunch. The peanut butter one, not Crunchberries,” I said.

“We don’t have Cap’n Crunch. We only have Count Chocula.”

“Cocoa Puffs?”

“Count Chocula. It’s is the same thing except scarier and not as cuckoo.”

“Okay, sounds good. Goodnight.”

“Wait a second,” St. Pauli Girl said. “I want an English muffin, lightly toasted, not too dark with orange marmalade, a dab of cream cheese, not a dollop, but a dab, then on the side I want grilled jalapenos. Fresh, not pickled. Plus some butter.”

“How about a PopTart?” the ghost head asked.

“Sounds great! Goodnight!” I said.

St. Pauli Girl leaned forward and shook her finger at the head. “Only if it’s a real Pop Tart and not an off brand. Brown sugar cinnamon.”

“Geez, sorry I asked,” said the ghost.

With a woosh, the head disappeared, the door closed and locked itself, and the light went out. St. Pauli Girl quickly went back to sleep while I stayed awake until sunrise. By the time she got up, I had packed and was ready to check out.

“I put your clothes on the foot of the bed,” I said. “Get dressed, let’s get out of here.”

“Not until we get breakfast, or at least coffee.”

I looked at her and rolled my eyes. “Fine. I’ll see what I can find.” I opened the door to go downstairs and almost tripped over the breakfast tray on the floor. It held a big pot of coffee, a bowl of Count Chocula, and a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon.

Remembering our last room service ordeal in New Mexico, St. Pauli Girl grabbed the salmon and bagel and said with a smile, “Ghost karma.”

(Note: Okay, maybe this was embellished a bit. But the lights did mysteriously go on and off in the middle of the night, and that was pretty creepy.)

Put an X There

I have a secret guilty pleasure which I will now confess to the world. Every Friday night at midnight, I get a snifter of cognac, handcuffs, whip cream, a badminton racket and a pogo stick… oh, no wait, that’s my other addiction. No, on Friday nights, I like to watch “Ghost Adventures” on the Travel Channel.

This show follows the exploits of Zak Bagans and crew as they get locked into some of the scariest places in the world and dare the ghosts to come and get them. If ghosts appear, Zak and crew will record it, and the ghosts get to be on national tv. It seems to me to have been based on a British show called “Most Haunted” where a British crew does the same thing except you can’t understand them. Except for the screaming. Which is really loud. Zak has essentially Americanized the idea by going into haunted houses and taunting the ghosts, saying, “You want a piece of this?”

The first half of the show involves the crew touring the location and interviewing people who have had ghost “sightings.” When they find a ghost hot spot, Zak will say, “put an X there” and the camera guy will put down duct tape in the form of an “X” which will mark where they will place cameras later. I now try to use that phrase in my daily life. During meetings when someone makes a valid point, I exclaim, “Put an X there!”

After getting locked down, the crew sets up cameras, video, recorders, seismographs, MRI’s, X-ray machines, etc. to record ghost footage while Zak taunts the ghosts to come out. My favorite device is the EVP (electronic voice phenomenon), which is, for lack of a better term, ghost-speak translator. For example you might hear a whisper, the wind, or a mouse scurry across the floor, and the EVP will pick it up as “Shhhbrggghgfffttyuitbundesliga.” When this happens on the show, I can never seem to make out the translation, but Zak can. He’ll say, jumping up and down, “Did you hear that? It said, ‘Get out! Get out!’”

But the EVP has really revolutionized ghost hunting. (In fact, I’m thinking about getting a “Scooby Doo Theme” ringtone for my cellphone, then charging people obscene amounts of money to let me walk through their house: “Yep, every time you hear the Scooby Doo song, that means a ghost is present.”)

Some paranormal investigators contacted Zak to let him know they heard the ghosts from one of his previous investigations say, “I want Zak.” The ghosts called him out! Apparently, ghosts watch a lot of tv, especially the Travel Channel (which makes sense for a soul doomed to spend eternity in some old house). Another time, an interviewee from a haunted saloon and brothel reported that some ghosts were having sex upstairs. The afterlife is apparently not so bad: there’s satellite tv and hookers!

Recently, St. Pauli Girl, her son Eduardo, and I were at a pub when the subject of ghosts came up. Eduardo pointed out that he actually had an EVP application on his smart phone and proceeded to show us how it worked. The phone displayed a radar with brown dots which represented numerous ghosts in the bar. We were surrounded, which makes perfect sense; if ghosts exist, they have to be all over the place, not just in dungeons, old houses and television sets.

But I needed more proof. Having watched enough Zak, I knew what to do. I looked around the room and called out, “If there are any spirits here that would like to talk to us, please pay our beer tab.”

St. Pauli girl was not amused. “What are they going to pay with?”

“Hmmm, yes of course. ‘If there are any spirits here that would like to talk to us, order me another beer. A good one, something imported or a microbrew’.”

I never got another beer, but it doesn’t make me any less of a believer. Rest assured, I’ll be watching Ghost Adventures this Friday night, rooting Zak on. “Yeah, Zak, put an x there!”