Zayas Legends- Stories my family told me.

Devil Doll On A Rocking Chair

My Father’s mother Beatriz Zayas was a very superstitious woman who believed in good luck charms and Santeria. She kept a life-sized African Nanny doll on a rocking chair in her living room. These kerchief wearing dolls were known as “Madamas” and were believed to bring good luck in exchange for offerings of tobacco smoke. My Grandmother’s daily ritual consisted of waving a lit cigarette around the room and blowing smoke directly into the doll’s face. One evening Grandma Beatrice came home and found the doll rocking itself on the chair. The doll was staring up at Grandma with its black bead-like eyes as it continued to rock itself. My frightened Grandmother lunged at the doll, ripped the stuffing out of it and threw it away. From that day onward, she renounced Santeria and embraced Christianity.

Most people would recognize the allegorical implications of this story and its intentions to keep us good Christians. But this story always frightened me as a child. Even though I knew it sounded implausible, it was told with such conviction that I believed it. As far as I was concerned, my Grandma beat the crap out of that Devil doll on the rocking char. She was a hero and I was staying as far away from creepy dolls and witchcraft as possible. I decided never to get a rocking chair either, just in case.

This tale and many other spooky tales were told and retold around the dinner table, at every family gathering, and on nights when there was no television due to power outages. These were the nights we cherished and feared most. With the mind numbing effects of the television out of the picture, we were forced to interact as a family. We would light candles and huddle around the living room to hear stories from our family’s past.

That is what this book is about: Stories. These are the stories that my family has kept alive in the time worn oral tradition. These are the stories that anyone who has come to one of my family’s parties has probably heard. They probably even heard it told more than once. Some of us have heard the stories over and over again throughout the years. But they never loose the power to amuse, entertain, and even send a shiver down your spine.

My name is David Zayas and I come from a very unusual family. I am the youngest of eight brothers and sisters. We are a family torn between two worlds. Some of my siblings were born in New Jersey and some in Puerto Rico. Some of us were raised in Puerto Rico; while others were raised in New Jersey. Some of us speak perfect English; some of us speak perfect Spanish. But we are all adept at speaking Spanglish.

Spanglish should be the official language of my family. It is a perfect mesh of English and Spanish mixed together in a big cultural blender. Spanglish is all about convenience. You choose your words based on how accurately they convey your meaning regardless of the language it is in. A good example of Spanglish would be: “Oye, Negrita. Dame el cheeseburger que esta in the refrigerator.”

Spanglish was the language in which these stories were told. I will do my best to translate them into English, but once in a while a Spanish word will creep in out of necessity when it captures perfectly the spirit of the story. Sometimes in these tales there is no English counterpart for the Spanish meaning. So, Spanglish will have to do.

My parents Jose and Margarita met and were wed in 1948 in the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. There they conceived my eldest sister Myrna and my brother Jose Jr. Then, they traveled across the sea and settled in New Jersey were they went on a fertility roll which produced Luis, Edward, George, Helen, and Raymond. Then tragedy struck. My next scheduled brother, Milton, was stillborn. My parents were sad and decided to give up the birthing business.

A few years later, my parents were planning to move back to Puerto Rico. Before they could accomplish the move, however, a little miracle occurred. My forty year old mother had the oh-so-familiar feeling of morning sickness and soon I arrived. I snuck in under the radar. She called me her Zurrapita – her special present from God. But, thankfully, she decided to name me David.

My parents moved back to Puerto Rico and took George, Helen, Raymond, and me with them. My other siblings, Myrna, Junior, Luis, and Edward stayed behind in New Jersey to live their adult lives. Even though I came from a huge family, I got to grow up in a small family environment in Puerto Rico. Because of the seven year age gap between me and Raymond, I was always considered the baby. Needless to say, I grew up spoiled and very happy. I also had the added luxury of visiting my New Jersey siblings and looking forward to their yearly visits and the tales of their adventures in the states.

The island of Puerto Rico is beautiful. My brother Raymond and I spent most of our childhood roaming the mountains, woods, and seashores the island has to offer. Together with a group of daring friends, we also explored all the spooky, hidden recesses that were only spoken about in hushed tones. The island, a beautiful paradise during the day, could become a frightening place at night. The lonely roads, ancient graveyards, and hidden caves that dotted the island all had creepy legends associated with them. Two folk tales in particular captured my imagination as a child – Rio Sanamuertos and La Luz Eterna.

Rio Sanamuertos is a river in my mother’s hometown of Orocovis. The name Rio Sanamuertos literally translates to “The River That Heals The Dead.” I don’t know the original name of the river, but I do know how it got its bizarre name. During my mother’s childhood there were no cars in Puerto Rico. So, if a person died in the countryside, the wake was usually held in the dead person’s house and then the casket had to be carried into town for burial. Legend had it that a funeral procession was passing the river when they heard the deceased asking for water from within the casket. The shocked pallbearers dropped the wooden box and it broke open to reveal the formerly dead person alive and well. They believed the river had brought him back to life! It then became local custom for funeral processions to drive past the river on the way to the graveyard. I guess they hope the river will work its miraculous charm again.

The story of “La Luz Eterna” (“The Eternal Light”) is also associated with a river, but it is a somewhat darker tale. There are actually two variations of the legend. In the most common story, a fisherman was having good luck in a particular river. Once the night came, he didn’t want to stop fishing. He began to burn things to create enough light to continue fishing. Soon he ran out of things to burn, until all he had left was his wooden crucifix (in some tales it is a bible). As he burned the crucifix for light, he slipped on a rock, fell into the water, and drowned. It is said that God cursed him to wander up and down the rivers of Puerto Rico, carrying a burning light, until Judgment Day.

(In another version of the story, two brothers-in-law were fishing and began arguing over their catch. The argument escalated into violence and soon they killed each other. It is said that they are cursed to fight up and down the rivers for all eternity.)

Many people claim to see strange lights hovering over the rivers late at night. People have theorized that the lights are ignited gasses, most commonly associated with swamps. But those who have seen them say that is impossible because the lights seem to have intelligence and purpose. Some have been chased by the lights and have heard phantom sounds and splashing as if someone were walking through the water. Others have tried to follow the lights, only to be led to the deeper, more dangerous parts of the river.

My Uncle Abraham owned a house that was literally on the riverbank in the town of Peñuelas. We often spent weekends at his house in the summer. Once my father and my uncle were drinking on the front porch late at night while the rest of the family slept and they decided to have some fun. My father snuck out of the house with a flashlight and hid by the river. My uncle woke us kids up and told us he thought he saw something weird outside. The bedroom window faced the river and we all rushed to it to see what was going on. To our horror we saw “La Luz Eterna” floating toward our window. We freaked! By the time they revealed the joke, they were dealing with a houseful of screaming and crying eight-year-olds. I had to be pried from my hiding spot in the closet, once they found me underneath all the bed sheets!

The same Uncle Abraham is a virtuoso guitar player and he would often entertain us by playing classic folk songs. On one of our many visits, my Mom was begging him to play a song called “Niña Bonita” (“Beautiful Girl”). My Uncle refused, saying: “You know I shouldn’t play that song.” I, being the curious one, asked why. My cousins told me that the song is cursed. They said that whenever my uncle plays it, bad things happen. The bad things have been from trivial (a broken string) to disastrous (a fatal car crash). I was intrigued and I joined my mother in begging my “Tio Abraham” to play it.

Eventually we wore my uncle down and he began to play the opening chords of the song. It was a mid-tempo, typical Puerto Rican folk song with a beautiful, haunting hook. I was really too nervous to pay attention to the lyrics. I stood by him and kept looking around the house, hoping to see something happen.

The song ended and nothing happened.

“Ah! Nothing happened, Tio!” I sighed and sat back down. As I sat back down, my elbow hit a full ashtray and it spilled all over the rug. Everyone laughed and I began to laugh too. Suddenly there was a loud, sustained honking noise outside. We stepped outside and found my dad’s car horn was stuck, blaring at a loud decibel. There was no one near the car. Everyone was in the room during and after the song, and no one had left until after the noise began. The horn had become stuck for no reason and Dad had to go under the hood to shut it off. I respected the song from that day onward.

But I never really learn lessons well. I didn’t hear the song again until a few summers ago when my Tio Abraham came to visit us in the states. He was regaling us with songs and I asked him to play “Niña Bonita.” He looked at me with a weary smile, shook his head, and began to play the haunted melody. He played the entire song and nothing happened… at least that I know of! Maybe the curse of the song only works within the land of Puerto Rico. Maybe Tio Abraham knew this and that is why he had no problem playing it. Maybe that is why he smiled. Or maybe he smiled because I am an idiot, who doesn’t learn his lesson. I should’ve asked him.

Another thing I should have asked about when I was young but I never did was religion. My family was very religious and I was raised Catholic, but I always found some church icons and practices to be slightly creepy. In a religion that is supposed to be centered on Jesus, I found it odd that there were more statues of saints and Virgin Mary in my local parish. It was even spookier that people would place offerings in front of the statues and pray to them. During Sunday school, I would learn that we weren’t supposed to pray to any other gods except God. Yet, throughout the week, I would see so many people praying to the saints and the Madonna.

It was even weirder outside of church, when I would visit my friends’ houses. Some of my friend’s parents were positively obsessed with saints and kept statues in their house. One time, I had to spend the night over my friend’s house and I had to sleep alone in a room with a giant portrait of a dark saint with realistic, watery eyes looking down over the bed. The saint’s eyes followed me no matter where I went in the room. Needless to say, I did not sleep that night.

The dominant religion in Puerto Rico is Christianity, and to any ordinary outsider Puerto Ricans seem like a devout pious people. But a large amount of Puerto Ricans also practice a West African religion named Santeria. Santeria is an amalgam religion that combines Catholic and Pagan beliefs and appears to be unique amongst Hispanic people.

When slaves were captured in Africa and brought to the Americas, they brought along their religious beliefs in nature spirits and ancestor worship. The slaves that came to the mainland USA were divided from their families, spread apart, and not allowed to congregate. Because of this, their religion died out.

This was not the case in the Caribbean Islands known as the West Indies, of which Puerto Rico is a part. In these Islands, whole family clans were kept together in close quarters, so their religious beliefs were handed down through the generations. Stories of their gods and heroes like Shango, Yemaya, and Eleguea were kept alive and the rituals designed to honor them were passed down from parent to child.

As missionaries came in to convert the slaves to Christianity, the slaves co-opted Christian beliefs and assimilated them to their own beliefs. Thus, a new religion was born, where Catholic saints became identified with West African gods. The gods were thought of as wearing the “masks” of Catholic saints. So, for example, Santa Barbara, whose colors are red and white, became the incarnation of the African god/king Shango whose colors were also red and white.

This religion, originally of the Yoruba people of West Africa, continued to grow as the slaves married the native Indians and Spanish conquistadors. As each generation was born, these beliefs were passed on and were assimilated into the Catholic beliefs. So that, in effect, Santeria became sort of an invisible religion within mainstream Catholicism.

Some people who consider themselves true Christians continue to perform Santeria rituals without ever realizing their significance. These people believe they are just honoring the saints, but they are unaware of the saints’ true nature. For example, I visited my aunt’s house in Puerto Rico and I noticed that there was cup of water on the floor near the front door. She explained that it was there to prevent evil spirits from entering the house. The spirits would be drawn to the cup of water and the house would be safe. She considers herself Catholic and knows nothing about Santeria. According to her, the practice was just part of her upbringing. Her mother taught her the ritual and she in turn taught it to her daughters. She is unwittingly perpetuating Santeria beliefs.

People that knowingly practice Santeria, the Santeros, have their own subculture and practices. They believe that if you honor the African Saint Gods, they will help you accomplish your goals. If you please them, they please you. If you scratch their back, they will scratch yours. It’s like praying. They petition their patron saint for a favor and in exchange they do something for the saint.

For example, a Santero will ask his or her patron saint for success in a venture. In Exchange the Santero promises to only wear white from that moment on. In another example, the believer would pray for good grades in exchange for tying a piece of blue lace to the foot of their bed and making an offering of rock soaked in red wine on plate surrounded by coins. In most cases though, the believer would just be required to light a candle to the saint.

What the saints appear to like the most though, are shiny coins and tobacco. I was friends with a family that kept a huge, life-sized statue of Saint Lazarus. He is the saint that is usually depicted in crutches with dogs licking at wounds on his legs. The family had a basket of coins and crushed tobacco at the statues base, and the lady of the house would smoke some tobacco and blow it in the statue’s face. Saint Lazarus was the Christian mask for the Yoruba god Babaluye, and they made offerings to him in order to gain his favor. The saint would protect their home and family and in exchange all they had to do was blow smoke in his face and leave coins at his feet.

To some, these activities would seem to go against Christian teachings. But to them, it makes perfect sense. It is their way of showing their devotion to the gods. By honoring the gods, they are honoring their culture and passing down their traditions to keep them alive. In their belief system God is not a distant figure looking down on us from afar. Their gods are alive, immediate and available for interaction.

It is my belief that these “gods” do exist and not limited to Latin cultures. Every culture has “little gods” that people must respect and appease to gain favor. From the Fairies in the British Isles, to the Spirit Foxes in the Japanese Isles, many cultures believe that there are neutral beings can be appeased to gain favor and to prevent malicious attacks.

The planet is surrounded by energies, both positive and negative. This balance of energies is symbolized by the ancient Ying Yang symbol. Together, the balance of positive and negative energies makes up the whole. These energies are in constant balance with each other and for every positive there is a counter-balanced negative. Viewed in a Judeo-Christian light these energies can be seen as good and evil, or God and the Devil. Caught in-between these extremes are what I believe to be neutral beings. These are beings that are neither positive nor negative or perhaps a balance of both. I believe that these forces are sentient and they are all around us waiting to be acknowledged.

These neutral beings (or spirits) were once worship by a majority of cultures as gods. As Christianity spread across the globe, these older gods became demonized. And as civilizations and cities grew, these gods were relegated to the countryside and became symbols of nature. Along with their shrinking body of followers, they themselves shrank and became “little gods.” Eventually they were all but forgotten, with the exception of a few pockets of believers that kept their memories alive in folk customs.

I believe that these spirits have never had a physical form. They envy us because with our bodies we can enjoy the pleasures of life like eating, smoking, drinking, dancing, and sex. What they want most from us is to get a chance to experience what it is like to be human. They want to be spoken to and paid attention to just like ordinary humans.

That is why in Santeria the way to gain these spirits favor is by allowing them to experience these pleasures. By speaking to them and offering them material things, it makes them feel like they are part of our world. The greatest present a Santero can give to one of these spirits is access to the Santero’s body through the act of possession. Santeros have a ritual “Fiesta Santera” where they dance to wild tribal drum beats and allow the spirits to enter their bodies and enjoy the dance. The act of possession is in this case is known as “riding,” whereby the spirit “rides” the Santero like a horse.

I have actually seen a possession up close and personal. My friend’s grandmother, a powerful septuagenarian Santera, allowed herself to be possessed during a New Year’s Eve party. It was bizarre. As soon as she became possessed, her face completely changed. It was an actual physical transformation. Her voice changed, her mannerisms changed. This was a lady I had known for a while, and she was always a proper, respectable and sober woman. Possessed, however, she became a totally different being. She threw herself on the floor and started banging on her legs with her fists. Her head turned at painfully weird angle and she asked in a strange, guttural voice for some tobacco. She kept saying “Poor favor, dame un tabaquito, un tabaquito” (Please let me have a little tobacco, a little tobacco). They gave her some tobacco and a bottle of rum. Even though the lady didn’t smoke, the spirits that possessed her smoked like a fiend and did shots of rum. All the while the strange voice thanked us over and over again for the gifts.

Whether this possession was real or not, I could not tell you. All I know is that it was a realistic experience and it really freaked me out. Things got a little freakier for me, when in exchange for the gifts, the spirit offered to tell us our fortunes for the coming year. The spirit, “riding” the grandmother’s body, went in turn around the room pointing a finger at everyone and telling each person what will happen to them. Everyone listened intently to what the spirit said, except me. I had no desire to know my future, so I left and hid downstairs in the basement with my friend’s nieces until it was all over.

Later, as my friend drove me home, I asked him what his grandmother had predicted and he told me she warned him to stay out of Jersey City for the next few days because a metal bird was going to fall from the sky. Two days later, in the news, I saw that a helicopter had crashed into a parking lot in Jersey City. No one was killed, but there was a lot of damage. I was totally freaked out! How did she know that was going to happen?

As I stated previously, I believe that these neutral spirits are all around us and assume various guises and names depending on the culture and those who perceive them. Although normally invisible, I believe that they can be felt and sometimes seen under the right circumstances. Some may see them as demons and some as angels. Truly, I believe that their beauty is in the eye of the beholder. They are attracted to those who acknowledge them and become more “real” as your belief in them increases.

An example of this process of belief making the spirits real can be found in the book “Mothman Prophecies.” While author John Keel was investigating the appearance of strange lights in the sky and the titular creature in the West Virginia-Ohio border, he realized that the more he investigated these anomalies, the more they occurred. And the more he focused on figuring them out, the more real and the more confusing it all became. It’s like they wanted his attention, and the more attention he paid to them, the more he perceived them. However, the more he perceived them the less he understood their nature. Eventually John Keel decided to let it go and ignore them. After getting some distance from them, the activities ceased.

Another example of thoughts bridging the gap between the spirit world and reality comes from Nepal. The Nepalese monks have something they call “Tulpas” or “Thought Beings.” They focus in meditation and envision a creature- a being. Over weeks of intense focus and meditation, this being becomes visible and tangible. The book “Strange Stories and Amazing Facts” has a story of a white man that learned the art of calling forth a Tulpa. He found that the more he focused on the creature, the more independent the creature became and the harder it was to control. It was as if the creature wanted to break free from the man’s control and have a life of its own. Eventually the man stopped the intense focus and meditation and the being ceased to be.

Many people believe that there is more to this tangible world that surrounds us. They believe in a higher plane of existence where the tangible meets the intangible. Some believe that this supernatural world is inhabited by these neutral beings that crave our attention and desire to become more tangible. Some people call these beings “Shadow People.” You can often see shadow people out of the corner of your eye. They move too fast for you to get a good long look; but you can catch them at the periphery of your field of vision.

My other grandmother, Grandma Rivera, claimed to be able to see these creatures full-on. She told my mother that these creatures tormented her. She described them as little naked people with coal-black skin. She claimed that when she walked into rooms they would move right out of the room in front of her. She would see them out of the corners of her eyes and when she would turn to face them, they would still be there, sticking their tongues out at her and mocking her. She lived her entire life mocked and bothered by those beings.

Many people within my family have claimed to see these little creatures. I even think that I may have seen something flash out of the edge of my sight on more than one occasion. Elsewhere in the book I will discuss some of my family’s individual encounters with these spirits. And we are not the only ones.

I was on the internet recently and I came across a sight that had actual pictures of the “shadow people” taken using a digital camera at very high speed. Someone had left a camera on, set to take constant pictures in an empty room, and they allegedly captured two of these creatures in a few of the frames. One of the pictures showed a dark shape running right up the middle of the room up to the ceiling. Another picture showed a complete outline of a human-shaped being. It was chilling to finally have a visual reference for the “creatures” which haunted my family for so long.

The book “Monsters” by John Michael Greer expresses an interesting theory concerning these “neutral” beings. Mr. Greer, an initiated Druid of the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids, postulates that our world is surrounded by an invisible ethereal plane that is inhabited by a variety of beings which we collectively call “monsters.” These energy creatures are composed of a substance akin to ectoplasm and can assume a variety of forms and shapes. He believes that these creatures are responsible for sightings of beings such as ghosts, vampires, lycanthropes, and other ghoulies. He also postulates that the reason some people can perceive these creatures while others can’t is that some people are more sensitive and attuned to the ethereal plane and can feel the subtle changes of energy around them. Some people with the right training (like Druids, Sorcerers, and Santeros) can even learn ways to tap into the energy of the ethereal plane and interact with its denizens. In the final part of the book, Mr. Greer offers ways to protect ourselves, should these beings prove to be hostile.

If Mr. Greer’s theories are correct they would go a long way in explaining the sheer number of mysterious events that my family has experienced. Maybe being sensitive and aware of this ethereal plane is something that is hereditary, handed down from generation to generation. Maybe each member of my family has a bit of extra perception that allows them to experience things that most people do not. This would also explain how paranormal events follow my family no matter where they live. From Puerto Rico to New Jersey there was always something weird to experience.

I have had the good fortune of spending the early part of my life growing up in the inner city during the early 70’s. I lived in Newark, New Jersey until I was 5 and would come back to visit many summers thereafter. Just like the folk tales of Puerto Rico I mentioned earlier, I grew up hearing many “Ghetto Folk Tales” in Newark. From ghostly beings such as “The White Lady of Branchbrook Park” and “Mikey-Ikey” (both discussed in later chapters) to the cursed apartment in The Prince Street Projects where nearly every tenant committed suicide, I ate up every tale offered.

I also encountered many tales that went on to become urban legends. The most famous of these was “Bloody Mary” (also known as Mary Yoo-hoo). The legend had it that if you stood in front of a mirror in the dark and repeated her name three times; she will appear in the reflection behind you. (The Encyclopedia Of Urban Legends by Jan Harold Brunvand has an interesting theory about the origins of this legend.) Another mirror related legend states that if you put a mirror under your mattress and look into it at midnight, you will see the face of the person you will marry. The downside to that is that immediately afterward, you will see the devil’s face leering back at you. I, of course, was way too chicken to try either trick.

Some of my childhood trauma was caused by my confusing fantasy and reality. My biggest fear was the Talking Tina doll from a Twilight Zone episode. I pictured her under every bed and inside every closet. Second runner up in my childhood fear factor was “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. I honestly thought the “Iron Man” in the song was coming to get me some day. I was even deathly afraid of one of my brother Eddie’s friends because of his name. I grew up listening to my mother singing a lullaby that warned that if I didn’t get to sleep the “Cuco” would come and eat me. “Cuco” is the equivalent of the boogeyman to Puerto Rican kids. So, imagine my reaction when my brother showed up with a slightly sketchy friend named Cuco. I nearly died. I never did warm up to him, either.

During the early 1980’s I came back to live in New Jersey. I was 13 when I moved to Irvington and encountered the latest urban legend. Apparently a group of clowns were driving around in a white van kidnapping kids. This was one of the worst scenarios I could ever picture. After a particularly horrific dream about it, I developed a lifelong dislike of white vans.

The rest of my family didn’t really understand my fears. They were all much older than me and saw my fears as slightly childish. Because of the seven year gap between me and my closest brother Raymond, most of my siblings were on a whole other level. While I was avoiding white vans, they were avoiding late mortgage payments. They all still gathered and talked about the creepy stories of the old days, or told new ones, but I couldn’t help but feel that I missed out on a lot. All I could do was listen and take it all in because I didn’t really have any stories of my own…yet.

Doing the research for this book has helped me bridge the age gap between me, my siblings, and my parents. It has brought me closer to my family. I have had the opportunity to get to know my brothers and sisters as people just like me. I can see that we are all cut from the same cloth.

Every one of them has a story. They have all experienced something: a touch of the paranormal, a glimpse of the future, even a brush with death. We all share the love of good tale. I enjoyed discovering and recording all their spooky stories. Allow me to share them with you.

Face To Face With Satan

My dad loved cars. At any given time you could find two or three spare cars in our backyard. He loved to tinker with them, take them apart, put them together, and sometimes, even fix them. He loved cars so much that he often said that he wished he had been born in one and hoped that he would die in one. He was a funny man. A bit strange, but funny nonetheless.

In his younger years, my father was quite the hell raiser. He was a notorious womanizer and was fond of the bottle. He was the primary disciplinarian of the house at the time and my brothers where often on the receiving end of his wrath. By the time I came along, the last of eight children, he had mellowed considerably. He was very loving and gave me anything I wanted. He never laid a hand on me in anger. My recollection of him as a quiet, caring man is often at odds with that of my elder brothers and sisters.

We all agree, however, that my dad had a wicked sense of humor. He loved to play practical jokes on his kids and their friends. His jokes ranged from silly (mooning my sister Helen’s newfound gay friend Carlos on his first visit to our house) to vicious (making my “husky” friend Pito run a block after our car when we were supposed to give him a ride to school. “He’s fat. He needs the exercise,” Dad said as I screamed at him to pull over.) His favorite pranks, however, were the ones that scared the crap out of us.

One prank in particular, “The Bedroom Dummy,” got a great reaction. My dad secretly made an elaborate dummy out of clothes and a fright mask and left it lying on his bed, half-covered with a sheet. Hours later, we all sat in the living room watching a horror movie called “The Crawling Hand”. We were all a bit edgy and creeped-out by the movie, when Dad asked me to go to his room and get his slippers. Well you can just imagine how afraid I was. I didn’t want to go alone, so Dad made my brother Raymond go with me. We made our way through the dark house to our parents’ bedroom and opened the door. Our immortal souls nearly jumped out of our mouths when we saw that monster on Dad’s bed. We almost killed each other running back to the living room screaming at the top of our lungs. My Dad kept up the joke long enough to scare the bejezzus out of Mom and Helen too. Once we found out it was just a prank our possibly forming psychological scars were replaced by hysterical laughter. Yeah, Dad was a blast.

My father grew up in a small farmhouse in Puerto Rico. He had many brothers and sisters. His father, my Grandfather Don Pello, was an alcoholic and he and my Grandmother Beatriz were constantly fighting. Although the fights rarely grew physically violent, they were very emotionally abusive. My father and his sister, my Aunt Lule, grew up enveloped in a cloud of domestic violence and shouted oaths.

Ancient Spanish folklore claimed that in a house where there was discord and hatred, Satan reigned supreme. Traditionally, the Spanish image of Satan was not one of a red imp with horns and cloven hooves; but rather that of a tall man dressed head to toe in black, wearing a black cape and a black hat. He was often described as a vampire that fed on negative energies. It was believed that he could be summoned by the calling of his name, as an oath, especially in anger. But legend also has it that once summoned; Satan would only leave of his own accord. And sometimes, if it struck his fancy, he chose to hang around and cause misfortunes. Most of the time Satan himself did not appear and often sent a hellhound in his stead.

These beliefs can be seen as a tool for parents to get their children to stop cursing. They must have surely just been cautionary tales meant to frighten the populace and nothing else. Or, as my father and my aunt experienced, could they have been actual warnings? My dad saw the Devil once when he was 12. And it was very scary.

My grandparents where in the middle of yet another heated argument, when my grandfather began shouting that he wished the Devil would just come and take him away. My father and his sister were cowering in the bedroom as the fight raged on. Eventually the fight fell to silence, one or both of my grandparents having succumbed to slumber.

My dad and his sister lay awake on the same bed, afraid that the fight would begin again. Suddenly they heard a thumping noise coming from the hallway beyond their open bedroom door. They heard the approach of soft footsteps and they assumed that it was one of their parents coming in to check up on them. They pretended to sleep to avoid having to deal with the adult’s problems.

As they both feigned sleep, they heard a sound and then they felt heat and brightness in the room. My aunt chanced a peek and saw what had entered the room. There, at the foot of their bed, stood a huge, black mastiff with red, baleful eyes. As if its visage wasn’t frightening enough, it began vomiting bright orange flame from its snout.

My aunt could not scream. She just nudged her brother, who opened his eyes and was paralyzed with fear. If my aunt thought it was a dream, that notion was destroyed by the fact that my dad saw it too. They cowered in bed and watched as the Hellhound growled at them, spit up a few more flames and turned back toward the door. It disappeared into the darkness of the hallway. The entire encounter lasted less than a minute. But to them it seemed to last an eternity. When they were finally able to move and speak, they confirmed with one another what it was that they saw. The both knew that the Devil was afoot in their house. Neither of them slept that night.

The next morning they told their parents of their encounter. They were met with skepticism and accusations. Their parents dismissed their story as a lie or some sort of ploy to get them to stop fighting. Soon my grandparents were back to their arguments and screaming often-sacrilegious obscenities.

A few nights after the first encounter, my Aunt Lule woke up with an urgent need to heed nature’s call. As she made her way down the hallway to the bathroom, she happened to glance into the living room. She lost control of her bladder when she saw that someone was sitting on the couch. It was a tall man dressed completely in black. She could not make out his features because his ebony hat was pulled low across his face.

She crept back into the room and fetched my father. She told him what she had seen and together they tiptoed back down the hallway to peek into the den. When my father saw the figure, he laughed at Lule. It was obvious to him that it was only a pile of clothes his mother had left out on the couch.

“The shadows of the room had played a trick on your eyes,” he laughed.

His laughter was cut short when the man in black stood up from his sitting position and they saw his cape flutter and wrap itself around him.

They both screamed and ran back to their room. Their parents awoke and rushed into the room to find the siblings trembling under their covers. The pale children told their parents what they had seen and this time my grandparents believed. The searched the house for signs of Satan’s presence and the next morning they called a priest to bless the house and their marriage.

Within days, the momentary truce had been forgotten and the screaming matches began anew. But the blasphemy was suspiciously gone from the shouts and the language was a little less severe. Perhaps my grandparents realized the seriousness of their cursing and successfully warded the Devil. Or it could be that maybe Satan had gotten bored with country life and decided to move on to greener pastures. Either way, The Evil One was never seen in the Zayas house again.

My dad had a long and fruitful life. He sired nine children and throughout his life wore many hats: photographer, jeweler, singer, farmer, tinkerer, and mechanic among others. One constant in his life, however, was smoking. My dad loved to smoke cigarettes and always had one either in his mouth or in his shirt pocket. As he grew older he began to develop health problems and was hospitalized on many occasions with clogged arteries. He didn’t really take care of himself and he hated hospitals. His biggest fear was to die in a hospital, away from the things he loved. As I mentioned at the beginning, he hoped to die behind the wheel of a car. And he got his wish.

My dad had given me one of his cars to drive as my own and I used to get back and forth from our home to Kean College in Union. One day, I came out of class and found that my car wouldn’t start. I hitched a ride home with a classmate and told my dad about the car. The next morning, dad and my brother-in-law Toño went to Kean to fix the car. They got the car going and my dad drove the car while Toño followed in his car. My father had a heart attack behind the wheel on Morris Avenue near the corner of Salem Road, less than a mile from where I write these words tonight.

We were devastated. The guilt I felt was immeasurable. He died while doing me a favor. It took a long time and a lot of talking to get me to realize that he died because he was not taking care of his health. That it wasn’t my fault. He went out the way he wanted to go: driving.

There was a small consolation at his funeral. No one could help commenting on what a good-looking corpse he was. The mortician had made him look ten years younger and had given him a natural, sleeping look. There was even a slight satisfied smile at the edge of his mouth; as if he was remembering all the jokes he played on us.

I miss you Dad. I am glad you got to go out with a smile.

My Mother’s Doppelgangers

What can I say about my mother? She is the greatest person I have ever known. Margarita Zayas is full of love, wisdom, and laughter. She has taken care of me and has taught me how to be as strong as a man and as sensitive as a woman. Mom has made clear in my mind the differences between right and wrong. She has been my link to the past and to my culture and was the greatest source of all the legends that make up this book.

My mother has had her fair share of strange experiences. She has seen what the Germans call “Doppelgangers” on many occasions. In Germanic lore, a doppelganger is a shape-shifting demon that assumes the physical appearance of an individual in order to cause confusion. On some occasions, the doppelganger will even attempt to kill the person it is mimicking and take over that unfortunate one’s life. Thankfully, the doppelgangers my mother has encountered have been of the harmless sort.

When my mother was a young girl in Puerto Rico she had to walk through woodland paths to get to school each day. One morning she was walking along the path when she felt a curious feeling as if she was being watched. She turned and looked behind her and she saw her mother standing atop a huge boulder on the side of the path. Her mother just stood there staring at her with no discernible emotion on her face. My mother could not believe what she saw and she turned momentarily to look at the path ahead of her expecting to see her father. She thought perhaps that something had happened at the house and her parents came to get her. When she turned to look back a second later, her mother was no longer there. The road behind her was empty. Of Course, later that afternoon, her mother denied ever leaving the house.

Her second encounter with a doppelganger happened a few years later, while she still lived at her parent’s farm. There was a local kid who worked as a farmhand for my grandfather and he came up to the house for lunches every day. My mom had developed a small crush on him and would sit and wait by the window, looking out across the field to the gate where he would arrive. She saw him arrive at the gate and watched him walk across the field towards the house. As he got closer, my mom smiled down at him and he looked up at her and smiled back. But there was something wrong with his smile. It just didn’t seem right to my mother. She watched as he turned the corner of the house headed for the front door. My mom told her mother that he was at the door and they went to greet him. When they opened the door, he was nowhere to be found. They called out his name and even looked around the back of the house, but he wasn’t there.

The next day, the farmhand showed up to lunch as usual and apologized for being unable to visit the day before. He had been ill in bed all day and he really wished that he could have stopped by for some chicken soup. My mother and grandmother both blanched and told him about the occurrence. He once again denied having been there and even offered to bring his mother over to attest to his illness. Who had my mother smiled at out in the field and who had smiled back at her?

The last notable doppelganger encounter my mother had was in New Jersey. My family lived on Earl Street in Newark and my mother was cleaning up the apartment while my dad watched TV in the living room. It was laundry day, so my mom was gathering up the clothes in the kids’ room. From her position she had a clear view into the kitchen where the washing machine was. On the other side of the kids’ room was the doorway that led into the living room where my dad was. As she was gathering the clothes into a pile, she glanced over to the kitchen and saw my father bent over the washing machine. He was wearing a white shirt and black pants and he was leaning way over into the machine as if he was fixing something on the inside of it. At first she thought nothing of it, but then she realized that if something were wrong with the machine she wouldn’t be able to get her laundry done. She looked back up into the kitchen, but my dad was no longer leaning over the machine. She went into the kitchen to ask what was wrong with the washer and found that he wasn’t there. She called his name and he responded from the living room. She walked back through the kids’ room into the living room, wondering how he got past her without being seen.

When she questioned him about the washer, he had no idea what she was talking about. She asked if he had been in the kitchen and he replied “no.” She then realized that he was dressed differently from the person she had seen in the kitchen. My dad was wearing a blue shirt and gray pants, whereas the figure she saw in the kitchen was dressed in black pants and a white shirt. My mom, in fear, asked my dad if he was playing a joke on her and he swore that he had been in the living room the entire time. They both checked the entire apartment but found no sign of the phantom washing machine repairman.

Apart from the German demons of confusion, my mother has also seen two UFOs. One of these cases is discussed under Raymond’s story later in the book. But the most notable and incredible experience happened in the summer of 1967.

My family lived in the third floor of an apartment building on Mulberry Street in Newark during that summer. My sister Myrna was 17 and she and my brother Raymond, who was 5 at the time, were sitting on the couch in the living room watching television. My mother was standing at the living room window looking up at the sky and reflecting, a habit she had recently developed.

Mom noticed a bright light in the sky and knew instantly that it could not be a star because she always looked at the particular stretch of night sky and it had never been there. She assumed that it was a helicopter hovering in the distance. She went into the kitchen at the back of the apartment to check on the stove and when she returned to her position at the window she noticed that the light had gotten larger. It fact, she noticed that it was still getting bigger and bigger. It was actually approaching the house.

She called Myrna and Raymond over to have a look. As the three of them watched, the lights got closer until they appeared like the headlights of a car. That’s when they realized that what they were seeing was some sort of craft. It was huge in the night sky. The light went out momentarily and it was replaced by a bright green light that illuminated the living room. The green light switched to white and then to blue as they watched in amazement. The amazement quickly turned into fear as they realized that the occupants of the craft might not be of a friendly nature. My mother grabbed my siblings and they hid beneath the windowsill. Raymond remembers my mom ducking his head down as he continually tried to look up to “the big Christmas lights.”

Myrna still watched from the bottom of the window and saw the craft fly over the building. She got up and ran through the apartment to the kitchen in the back. She was joined at the kitchen window by mom and Raymond and the three of them saw the craft reappear over the top of the building. At this point they could actually see its saucer-like shape. The craft was round and metallic, and its edges where covered in multi-colored lights.

The craft stopped and hovered for a few minutes in the sky behind the apartment building. The craft was gigantic and high in the sky and they watched it float and throw down beams of colored lights for about two or three minutes. Mom does not recall hearing any sound, but Myrna remembers hearing a low humming noise coming from the UFO. Suddenly, the ship rose a bit higher in the sky and zoomed away at a high velocity.

According to Myrna and my mother, the next day there where many reports on the radio about UFO sightings in New Jersey. A high concentration of the reports centered on the Newark and Northern New Jersey area. The three of them still get very excited and emotional when they tell me this story. They swear that what they saw that night could not be explained by conventional means.

There is a funny postscript to my mother’s UFO story. When my mother was twenty, she posed for a photo while holding the recently born Myrna. The photo was taken in Barrio Obrero in Santurce, Puerto Rico. In the upper right hand corner of the old, black and white photo there is what appears to be a mysterious craft floating in the air. It looks like what most people image an alien ship to look like. I always thought that it was a real UFO and made all of my friends come over and see it.

When my mother told me of the UFO that she and Myrna had seen, I made up some elaborate idea in my head that the UFO’s had been watching her since Myrna’s birth. And that they had come back on that night to check up on the progress of their life. My mother didn’t have the heart to tell me the truth until very recently.

The mysterious UFO in the picture was an old fashioned street lamp type that was popular in Puerto Rico during her youth.

Oh, well! There goes my theory!

A Phantom Farewell

Myrna Fortuna is the eldest of my siblings. She has been a teacher for as long as I have lived and is considered by most to be the most rational member of my family. She is a “no nonsense” kind of person and her total objectivity lends her story a credibility that makes it, at least for me, all the more haunting.

The first time I heard the tale of “The Phantom Farewell” was during one of Myrna’s many summer visits to my parent’s house in Puerto Rico. She usually came to visit us once a year and stayed for at least two weeks. During these two weeks she would take us on countless road trips to explore the more exotic aspects of the island that are usually reserved for tourists and are forgotten by those who live there.

I eagerly anticipated her visits, not only because of the fun travelling, but also because I knew that she never came empty handed. She always bore gifts for my brother Raymond and me. Raymond and I loved to search her suitcase, knowing that somewhere in its mysterious depths there lay a shiny, new toy direct from the mainland U.S.A.

Of all the presents Myrna brought with her, however, this story remains one of my all time favorites. She told her story as we sat in the living room on the first night of her arrival in late June of 1976. The incident described in the story took place that past January; my parent’s had obviously already heard the story over the phone. However, they stayed and listened with us kids. My parents were of the philosophy that no ghostly story is too boring to bear repeated listening.

I listened attentively, biting my nails, a habit that was born on that night and persists to this very day. I took it all in and let it work on my impressionable seven-year-old mind. That night I was so frightened that I had to sleep in my parent’s bed.

No one tells the story like my sister does. So, I will let her weave her tale once again for old time’s sake.

“I met Sylvia when I moved to the Columbus Homes in Newark at the age of eleven. One day, I went down to the Recreation Room, which was a room they had for after-school activities and arts & crafts. I didn’t know anyone there, having just recently moved to the projects. I just sat there next to a group of kids and this song came on, I’ll never forget, it was ‘Sherry’ by The Four Seasons. I was singing along to the song and the girl next to me told said: ‘Boy! You sing nice’ and we started a conversation. She introduced herself as Sylvia Martinez and said that she came from a family of five girls and two boys. We became instant friends.

“Sylvia was fifteen when we met. She was a beautiful and outgoing girl but she suffered from many health problems. She was born with Spina Bifida, a condition by which an expectant mother’s lack of folic acid may cause her baby’s spine to grow out through a hole in its back. In addition, one of her legs was four inches shorter than the other one, causing her to walk with a severe limp and forcing her to wear bracers and special boots.

“She didn’t let any of those problems stop her, though. Sylvia was one of the most optimistic people I had ever known and quite possibly the best dancer I had ever seen. She also had a great sense of fashion. Her signature was wearing soft, silky scarves tied around her neck. She always dressed very stylish and was very popular with the boys. One time, she even stole a guy that I liked right up from under my nose!

“I loved and looked up to her and we stayed friends even after I moved out of the projects. We would get together all the time through our teens and into our early twenties. We would go out dancing and flirt with the boys and generally have the good time only girls our age would understand. I considered her my sister. Every now and then, however, she would have to go and stay in the hospital for a few days because she always had health complications of one kind or another.

“Eventually, I met a guy and she met a guy and we didn’t see each other as often. By the time I was twenty-five, my relationship had gotten complicated and difficult and I had little time or presence of mind to keep in touch with her. Three months had passed without a call between us.

“One day I found out that Sylvia was in the hospital. It seems that she had been having major problems with her kidneys and her doctors had put her on dialysis. I went to go see her. She looked great, not as bad as I had expected. We talked and caught up on old times. It was nice. That was the last time I saw her.

“ I was having problems with my boyfriend again and we ended breaking up. It was a time of depression and sadness for me because my parents had moved to Puerto Rico with Raymond, David, Helen, and Georgie and I felt alone. I was just into myself and being alone and sulking. I was living with Patty and Wiso in Irvington and was babysitting their kids all the time. I didn’t even think about Sylvia. Another month or two went by without contact. I feel bad about that. I feel like crying.

“One night I went to sleep and I had a strange dream. To my knowledge, it was a dream. I dreamt that Sylvia had died and I could see myself at her casket. And I was banging on the casket crying ‘Why did you give up? Why did you give up?’ I was real angry with her and kept banging on the casket. ‘You shouldn’t have given up! I don’t know why you gave up!’ I cried

“I struggled up from the nightmare and awoke in sweat. I was sure that I was awake. I sat there contemplating the dream. All of a sudden, I felt a light touch. A silky material, like a scarf, was being slowly dragged across my face! I began to smell a scent that I recognized as Sylvia’s perfume in the still air in my room. Then, I felt a soft kiss on my face. It was a peaceful thing. I was not afraid. A total calm swept over me. I felt like everything was all right. I lay back down and drifted off into sleep.

“ The next day, I came home from work and I sat with Patty and Wiso to have dinner. Someone knocked on the door. Patty went to answer it and Sylvia’s sister Hilda was standing there. I was surprised and happy to see her. She hadn’t visited us in a long time. I said ‘Hi!’ and as I approached her she began to cry ‘Myrna! Sylvia died last night!’

“It felt like I had been punched in the stomach. I couldn’t believe it. It was the weirdest feeling. I had just dreamt that she had died. I had just felt her presence in my room last night!

“I cried. I ran to her and hugged her. The guilt feeling came. I started saying ‘Oh, My God! I am so sorry I hadn’t seen her!’ I felt like I really let her down.

“Then I remembered the kiss. And her little visit in the middle of the night telling me ‘It’s okay’ Her way of saying goodbye. I felt better and stronger. I felt forgiven. I went with Hilda back to her house to comfort the family and help with the funeral preparations.

“I was afraid of seeing her dead in the casket for the first time. It was so hard for me to walk up to her casket at her funeral. I didn’t really know what to expect. Sylvia’s mother, Doña Hina, grabbed me on the way up to the casket. She didn’t want to go by herself to view her daughter’s body. I helped her up and we walked to the casket.

“But, you know what was so nice? When I looked at Sylvia’s corpse, she was smiling! She was the only person I have seen dead, besides Daddy, which was smiling. I’ll never forget that. She was smiling and she looked merely asleep. She had such a beautiful, peaceful smile.

“I told her mother: ‘Look, Doña Hina. She’s smiling’ That brought so much peace to the rest of us. We just stood there and smiled back at her assured in the knowledge that she was in a much better place, far way from all the pain of the physical world. And I bet you that she is up there smiling right back down at us right now.”

Sylvia Martinez died of heart failure after countless operations and dialysis. She died in January of 1976 at the age of thirty-one. Her earthly remains are buried in North Arlington not far from my Grandfather’s remains.

After hearing the story as an adult, I realize that it is actually a quite touching story about forgiveness and a friendship that extends beyond the grave. Of course, I believe this in the safe light of day. At night, however, I still fear the possibility of a dear, departed friend reaching out to me for a final, phantom farewell.

Ghetto Poltergeist

Junior was witness to the only display of paranormal activity in this book that has been researched and documented. His experience was shared by many other people and actually written about in an encyclopedia as well as possibly other books. He saw The Flying Plates On Rowe Street.

Jose Zayas JR., or Junior for short, is my eldest brother and my hero. He saved my life from choking once by holding me up by the legs and shaking me until the threatening candy dislodged from my four-year-old throat. He didn’t know the Heimlich Manouver in those days. Throughout the years I find myself looking up to him and recognizing how much we have in common even though we are on opposite ends of the birth spectrum. I also learned how to do the Heimlich Manouver late in life.

Junior’s encounter with The Flying Plates On Rowe Street was a popular story I heard during my youth. The tale begins when Junior was ten and our family lived at Earl Street in Newark. It was the early sixties and Junior and Wiso went out to play with their neighborhood friends. As they wandered the streets, they came upon a large crowd gathered outside one of the three story apartments on Rowe Street. The people in the crowd looked panicked and some where crying and others were screaming, but they were all looking up at a particular window. Instinctively thinking that a murder or a fire had occurred, the kids pushed forward through the crowd to get a better view.

The window in question was on the first floor, but the way those apartments were designed, the first floor window was almost nine feet off the ground. This placement allowed Junior, Wiso and their friends only a view into the top section of the apartment and the ceiling. The bottom of the room and the floor was not visible to them.

The boys drew back a bit and peered up at the window. The first thing they noticed was that the window curtains were being blown furiously into the apartment, even though they could feel no wind outside where they stood. They heard the sound of rushing wind and heard loud crashing noises coming from the within the room. The screams of the throng among which they stood could not drown out the horrible sounds emanating from that window.

Then they saw something sail by the window in an arc. It was a white plate. Another followed it, this time higher up near the ceiling. Then another flew by a bit lower. Plates, pans, pots, and anything else that could be thrown were flying around in that room. Some of the plates crashed into the walls and shattered, while others continued their circular orbit past the window and back into the room, only to reappear again in seconds. It was as if a small tornado was localized within the room. All the kids could hear was the roar of the wind and the crashing of the plates over the screams of the frightened crowd. The noise was deafening.

Minutes had passed and the police and fire departments arrived at the scene. Junior saw them enter the building and then the crowd was told to disperse. People resisted at first, wanting to see what would happen next. But eventually the officers cleared the area.

Junior and Wiso ran home excitedly to tell the tale that was destined to become a Zayas classic. By the time I was born and heard the tale it had mutated into a saga involving alternately: witches, flying knives, hurricanes, and even a girl named Carrie. Unfortunately, Junior could not remember the exact date or year of the event. He isn’t even sure how old he was at the time. This made verifying the story a bit tricky.

Junior now has a son named Joey who has inherited our family’s thirst for strange phenomena and the unexplained. He loves reading Weird NJ and spent most of his free time in high school scouring the library for books about strange stories. On one of his many excursions at the library, he found a little blue book that mentioned the Flying Plates On Rowe Street. He devoured the words in that book and ran home to tell his Junior about the facts he had uncovered.

The story “Strange Occurrence On Rowe Street” claimed that a young boy named Tom was the center of poltergeist activity. He and his mother lived at the Rowe Street apartments when the poltergeist began to manifest itself. The activity began on a small scale at first. The salt and pepper shakers slid across the table as the twosome sat to dinner and cabinets opened on their own accord causing plates to tumble onto the floor. The phenomenon increased in force, causing plates and cups to fly across the room and smash into walls. It culminated in the main occurrence where a ghostly whirlwind of flying plates, pans, and cutlery held them trapped inside the apartment. Tom and his mother lay huddled on the floor in the center of the kitchen until the police rescued them.

I tried in vain to find this “little blue book” that Joey read. He thought it may have been titled “Weird Happenings and Strange Occurrences,” but he could not remember the author’s name. The librarian at the West Orange High School library was unable to help me locate this book. And a title and keyword search in other libraries was fruitless.

Once again, I turned to my family for help. We all sat around and discussed a possible date or year for what happened. Myrna and Junior both remember that it had happened in the summer on the day before a huge storm or hurricane. They remember that they were wearing shorts and that the very next day the streets of Newark were flooded. They also concluded that it must have happened before 1962, because our family moved to a different apartment on that year.

I began to do research on hurricanes in the early sixties. There were only two on record: Hurricane Donna in 1960 and Hurricane Alma in 1962. My aim was to look into the microfilmed archives of The Star Ledger on the days leading up to the hurricanes. My reasoning was that if the police and fire department had been involved, there would be some sort of report in the local paper. Many hours and partial blindness later, I gave up.

A few days later I was at Kean College visiting a fellow alumnus. He had to do some research at the Nancy Thompson Library, so I went along with him. I wandered over to the Reference Books while he worked. I found the Encyclopedia Of The Unexplained and picked it up intent on flipping through it. I am no stranger to coincidences, but nevertheless I was shaken. Not only had I opened the book to the section on poltergeists, but also my finger rested on an entry eerily reminiscent of the Flying Plates.

A boy named Ernest Rivers shared an apartment with his grandmother in Newark. On May 6^th, 1961, the boy’s thirteenth birthday, poltergeist activities began and they lasted over two months. These events were first researched and documented by Charles D. Wrege; a professor at Rutgers University, and later by celebrated poltergeist researcher W.G. Roll. Both men recorded over sixty incidents, in which household objects moved, flew, and shattered while in the boy’s presence. In one instance, a flying bottle hit Mr. Roll on the head after having declared the poltergeist “harmless.”

The boy was suspected, but though hypnosis and polygraph testing, he was cleared. A psychological test determined that Ernest had repressed strong feelings of anger toward his grandmother. The phenomena ceased after Ernest was placed in a foster home. (Cavendish. Encyclopedia Of The Unexplained. 1974. P.199)

Although the main incident involving the whirlwind is not mentioned in this entry, the similarities between the two cases are uncanny. This case fits the timeframe and location that was concluded by my family, and the characters of a young boy and his caretaker are similar enough to the story in the “little blue book” discovered by Joey. Perhaps what my brother saw was one of the “sixty incidents” mentioned in the article. Or maybe, the kids heard of the incident and through a healthy doe of childhood imagination imagined themselves witnesses.

Junior insists he saw what he saw and swears that the account he gave me was not exaggerated. Joey concedes that the child’s name in the story he read could have been Ernest instead of Tom. Regardless, my mother and sister still recall the look of fright on young Junior’s face when he came home that evening in 1961 and told them the tale that was destined to one day become a Zayas Legend.

Junior grew up as part of the “free society” of the late 60’s and early 70’s, and part of this transition into adulthood involved experimenting with free love and mind expanding drugs. To put it simply, he had a lot of fun as a young adult. He had two further encounters with the unknown during these freewheeling times. The story of his encounter with phantom known as The White Lady is told in the next chapter. The other story is his encounter with the long forgotten ghetto urban legend “Mikey-Ikey.”

Among the drug enthusiasts of the late 60’s “Mikey-Ikey” was a feared phantom that wreaked vengeance on those unfortunate enough to incur his anger. No one really knew who “Mikey-Ikey” was before becoming a specter. Some thought he was a dead drug addict. Others thought he was an agent of Satan himself. But everyone knew that if you dared to sniff Carbona in his turf, you ran the risk of getting attacked. He got his name from the sound that he makes when he attacks: “Ikey! Ikey!Ikey!”

Carbona was a chemical agent that was used to clean rugs back in the day. Bored and bold kids would soak a rag in Carbona and sniff it to get a cheap, quick high. It was akin to the dumb practice of sniffing model airplane glue.

Junior had heard of this “Mikey-Ikey” and Carbona connection and was fascinated. He came home early from school one day and looked through the pantry to find my mother’s rug cleaner. Junior was in luck for the rug cleaner contained the infamous chemical Carbona. He clumsily soaked a rag in the rug cleaner and retired to his room to see what all the fuss was about.

He lay in his bed and brought the rag up to his nose. It smelled horrible, but within minutes he began to feel a bit lightheaded, so he endured it a bit longer. He suddenly felt as if he wasn’t alone in his room. A strong spasm shook his body and an unseen force bent his prone body forward up off the bed. Then he was slammed back into the bed. He began to hear the much-dreaded words: “Ikey! Ikey! Ikey!” They were getting louder in the room and in his head. He knew that Mikey- Ikey had arrived.

He jumped from the bed and began to run through the house heading for the door. He knew that he had to get away from the phantom. He felt the force right behind him screaming its battle cry “Ikey! Ikey! Ikey!” Junior’s heart was pounding as he made it out the door and down the long flight of steps. He could still hear Mikey -Ikey behind him, but it was getting much fainter. By the time he made it outside, Mikey- Ikey no longer followed him.

He stood outside the rest of the afternoon, afraid to go back inside. When our parents got home, they found him shivering on the front steps. He never told them why he looked so afraid as they escorted him back into the house. He did however stay clear from Carbona up until this very day.

The rugs in his house could use some cleaning.

The White Lady

I love visiting Wiso because the music at his house is always blasting. Wiso loves Rock n Roll. At one time he was the drummer in a rock band and has since developed a thirst for loud, fast metal. The harder and heavier the music, the better it is for him. We often sit around and discuss the latest songs and groups. It’s a brotherly bonding thing. I only wish I were old enough to have seen his band play way back in the day.

The nickname Wiso is pronounced “Wee-so” and has a curious history behind it. Wiso’s real name is Luis and when he was a child, my parents called him Luisito, which basically means “Little Luis.” Luisito was later corrupted into Guisito in Puerto Rico and later became Guiso (pronounced “Gwee-so”) as he got older. When he married his Irish wife Patty, she had trouble with the initial G sound in his name, and so it became Wiso. To complicate matters further she began to call him “Wee” for short. Spanish nicknames and Irish pronunciations make for strange bedfellows.

Wiso was born in New York and instantly became Grandma Rosario’s favorite grandson. It was as if Wiso was her own son and his arrival made her overwhelmingly happy. She and Grandpa immediately claimed him and coddled him endlessly. They gave Wiso anything he wanted.

A few years later, upon Grandpa’s death, Grandma, consumed with grief, became even closer to Wiso. In a way, he represented the love she had lost, and, through strange episodes, a link to her dead husband. My mother claims that many times she and Grandma watched Wiso stop and stare into an empty room and begin to wave enthusiastically. “Grandpa! Grandpa!” He smiled. “Grandpa is calling me!” He tried to run into the room and had to be restrained. He still waved and smiled at his invisible Grandpa.

Wiso does not remember the incidents my mother described. He does, however, remember that on many occasions when he was in bed he felt someone sit on the edge of his bed. He looked over, knowing he would see his Grandfather, but no one was there. He could see the indentation in the mattress, though, as if Grandpa was right there next to him.

When Grandma Rosario reached a certain age , she decided that she wanted to spend her remaining years in Puerto Rico. She planned on going back to Orocovis to live with her brother and his wife, but could not bear to leave Wiso behind. She asked my mother if she could take him back with her for a few months or so to ease her loneliness.

It was a tough decision for my mother to make, obviously. On one hand, this was her child she was asked to give up and she wanted to be with him. On the other hand, she wanted to make her mother happy by granting her aging wish. Besides, she knew that the quality of life in Puerto Rico would be much better that the one that awaited Wiso in Newark. Newark was full of danger and a move to the island would help Wiso escape and get in touch with his culture. It was, and in a lot of cases still is, customary for mainland parents to send their children to stay with close family in the island for the summer so that they could have that experience. She knew that her uncle had children his age and this was an opportunity for Wiso to grow and have adventures. She decided to let him go for a while.

Uncle Millo (pronounced “Mee-Yo”) lived on a farm in Orocovis with his wife and three of his nine children. Upon Wiso’s arrival he was welcomed by his newly discovered family and was made to feel at home on the farm. He had to share a bed with his Grandma, but Wiso didn’t mind. He was enrolled in school with his cousin Tite (pronounced “Tee-Tay”) and the two boys, being of the same age, developed a fast friendship. He adjusted well to the change in climate and to all of the daily chores and responsibilities that were expected of him. Wiso learned all the ins and outs of living on a farm and he soon became fluent in Spanish. He also discovered the dark side of Puerto Rico.

One morning, Wiso woke up to shouts outside of the farmhouse. He joined Tite in the hallway and together they ran to investigate the commotion. The rest of the family and a few neighbors had gathered together and everyone was hovering around something large on the ground. Wiso and Tite pushed through the crowd and laid their eyes on something that chilled their blood.

It was a dead cow, but that wasn’t the most terrifying thing. What scared the boys the most was the manner in which the cow had been killed. It had been drained of all its blood. There were two puncture wounds on its neck and not a single drop of blood of the ground. It was determined that it had died overnight because the carcass was still fresh and Uncle Millo had just milked it the previous day. When Uncle Millo split open the carcass, no blood spilled. It was a dry husk.

Tite turned to Wiso and whispered with awe: “El Vampiro De Moca!”

Wiso understood what his cousin said; “The Vampire Of Moca,” but it still didn’t mean much to him. Tite explained that there was a legend about a monster that came from the town of Moca and roamed the land killing animals and drinking their blood. It was said to be a gigantic creature that resembled a vulture that walked like a man and had burning eyes of fire. It swooped down upon cattle in the middle of the night, drank their blood, and flew away leaving no tracks on the ground. Reports often stated that the attacks were preceded by the sound of gigantic flapping wings. Many farmers had seen it and a few claimed to have been attacked.

The next few weeks were lived in mortal fear of the vampire. The kids were warned not to go out after sunset and windows were securely locked. The farmhouse they lived in had no indoor toilet but an outhouse a few yards from the main house. Wiso had to urinate in a bedpan at night. There was no way he would dare to take that night walk to the outhouse. He and Grandma had to sleep under a huge mosquito net to protect themselves from the very real threat of the huge, bloodsucking mosquitoes that were native to the island.

There were no more cattle mutilations during the remainder of his stay. He had even begun to love living in Puerto Rico once again. Then tragedy struck when Grandma passed away. Wiso was devastated. She had raised him for so long that it felt like he had lost his mother. He felt alone in the world.

The family immediately sent a telegram to my mother to inform her of Grandma’s death. Whoever sent the telegram, though, wrote the wrong address and my mother never got it. It was a week after Grandma had died and had been buried that my mother received a letter. They wanted to know why she hadn’t gone to the funeral and what should they do with the boy. My mother was extremely hurt that she had missed her own mother’s funeral. But, she felt worse for poor Wiso alone in Puerto Rico. She sent for him at once.

In the week between Grandma’s death and the arrival of Wiso’s plane ticket home, he had to sleep alone in the bed he once shared with his grandmother Feeling abandoned and left behind, he cried in bed every night. It only got worse when he began to feel that he was not completely alone in the bed. Every night he felt a hand touching his head. He knew it was Grandma, but it still frightened him. The ghostly hand stroked his hair and patted him in a manner that would have been reassuring and comforting had a living person done it. Under those circumstances, however, it was horrifying. He was too afraid to get out of the bed for fear that if he left the safety of the mosquito net the Vampiro De Moca would get him. And during the day he wouldn’t say anything about it because he didn’t want his new family to think that he was crazy and abandon him. So, Wiso lay in bed every night of the week, touched by a phantom, and never complained.

By the time that Wiso arrived back in New Jersey, he was a man at twelve years of age. He was glad to be home; but so much had changed in his life that, in his mind, he had come home to a house full of strangers. He met his brothers Junior and Deadeye as if for the first time and he took a very long time in getting re-acquainted with what he considered to be new life.

He began to hang out with Junior and Deadeye during his teens and together they had many adventures of the kind that were only had by teenagers of the late 60’s and early 70’s. These adventures were of the non-paranormal sort for the most part. There were, however, two major exceptions. Wiso was a part of the Flying Plates story discussed in the last chapter. The last encounter he had with the unknown thus far was truly the most terrifying one. He literally came face to face with the White Lady of Branch Brook Park.

The White Lady at Branch Brook Park in Newark has been an ever-present phantom tale in my family. I have known about this particular specter since I was a child, having been exposed to the story countless times. The story always spooked me as a child, but never quite as much as when I discovered that Wiso and Junior had actually seen the infamous apparition.

The actual history of the White Lady sounds like nothing more than an urban legend. A recently married young couple on the way back from the chapel decided to drive through Branch Brook Park on a rainy Friday night. Mary, the young bride still dressed in her white wedding gown, was the passenger on that fateful trip. Coming around a treacherous bend, the car veered out of control on the wet road and slammed into a huge tree. The groom survived the crash, but Mary was killed instantly.

A couple of weeks after the crash at the tree, there was another one. A few weeks later there was a third crash. Soon rumors began to circulate that the stretch of road was cursed. A month or so afterward there was a story going around that another couple traveling through the park had reportedly seen a young woman dressed in a wedding gown by the side of the road near the tree. This began a flood of reports amongst local people of encounters with The White Lady, as she had become known.

A couple of years after the crash, in 1976 to be exact, my two brothers had a personal encounter with The White Lady. Wiso and Junior were out on a triple date with their friend Tony and three girls. They had just left the old drive-in theatre off Route 1 and 9, and were looking for a good place to make-out with their dates. They decided to drive through the park, knowing that Lover's Lane was not far.

As Junior drove through the park, Wiso was getting a bit frisky with his date in the back seat. Soon, Tony and his date began to make out also. Everyone was getting in the mood for love in the car, so Junior pulled over along side the road, not knowing that he was within sight of the old White Lady tree. Junior left the engine running, turned off the headlights and reached for his date. The music played and the make-out session was underway.

Wiso was overcome by an irresistible urge to urinate. He got out of the car and noticed that it had begun to rain. He saw a huge tree by the other side of the road a few yards ahead. He ran to it and began to relieve himself on its already wet trunk. When he was finished, he got a strange feeling that he was being watched. He turned around, away from the tree, and looked out across the road. From the wet bushes directly in front of him he saw two glowing eyes staring right back at him.

Wiso ran back to the car at full speed. He got in through the driver's side, pushing Junior over on top of his date. He was shaking and everyone was asking him what was wrong. Saying nothing, Wiso put the car into drive and turned on the headlights. Everyone screamed at once at what the saw in the lights of the car. Standing before the car, a couple of feet up the road, was a wedding dress floating in the air. There were no limbs visible, nor was there a head. Underneath the veil, however, could be seen a pair of green, glowing dots. These "eyes" stared at them, chilling their previously hot blood.

The dress just hung in the air for a second, while they all continued to scream. Suddenly, the dress began to turn, as if its ghostly owner were rotating with its arms outstretched. Wiso's paralysis broke then, and he slammed on the gas. The car zoomed toward the apparition, and directly through it, towards the tree. Wiso yanked on the steering wheel and the car lurched sideways, avoiding the tree. As they drove away, Tony looked back and saw the dress still rotating in the air behind them.

They drove straight home, and I remember being awaked by the loud voices of the six of them as they told my parents. I overhead a little too much of their story and I remember not being able to sleep for weeks. In my own way, I became fascinated with this phantom. As I grew older, I always wished that I could see this ghost for myself.

Many years after that incident, and after many car accidents involving the tree, the road that led through the park was closed off for construction. As far as I know, the sightings of the White Lady had ended. My family and I moved away and I pretty much forgot about the old story.

When I turned twenty, I began to hang out with this guy named Steve who was really into strange phenomena and urban legends. We were at a club in Newark called The Pipeline and we began a conversation about local legends and such. I told him of The White Lady story and he had actually heard of it. Excited, I told him that the park was nearby and asked him if he wanted to go check it out. He agreed and off we went to Branch Brook Park in search of the White Lady.

We arrived at the park at about 11:00 p.m. expecting to park outside and walk to where the tree was. We were surprised to find that the road had been reopened, and so we drove in. We drove, but couldn't find the tree anywhere. The road had been re-routed, so that it passed away from the tree line. We drove around the park again, this time looking very carefully at all the trees closest to the road to see if I recognized any of them. Halfway though the park, we came across a huge tree with an "X" etched into it with white paint. My mind clicked and I realized that this was our tree.

We pulled over along the right side of the road and walked across toward the left, where the tree stood. Someone had cut off most of the branches, and what was left was a huge trunk with the bizarre white mark upon it. Steve and I studied the tree and noticed how the road originally led right towards the tree and veered off to the right within five feet of the tree. No wonder there was so many accidents there. Ghost or not, it was a tricky turn.

We hung out by the tree for a while, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. All we heard were dogs barking in the distance. Once in a while, I felt a strange feeling like I was being watched. But when I asked Steve if he felt anything, he said no. After a while, I started getting a bit afraid and Steve was getting a bit bored, so we decided to leave. As we drove away, I once again had the queer feeling that I was being watched. I asked Steve again, and he said that the feeling was disappointment at not seeing anything. I agreed and we drove off.

A few years ago, my wife Tracey and I drove through the road. I told her the story and took her to the location of the tree. When we got there, we saw that the tree had been cut down, leaving only a thick trunk about two feet high. I pulled over and we looked at the tree trunk. I told her everything I knew about the White Lady. She looked away at the spot and turned to me and said that maybe the White Lady's mission in un-death was to warn the passing motorists of the treacherous tree. Perhaps she was trying to prevent any other people from crashing like she did, by appearing yards before the tree causing them to slow down and avoid the tree. She said that since the tree was cut down, the White Lady’s job was now done, and perhaps her soul may finally be at rest. It’s funny. Ever since then, I haven't been afraid of driving through the park at night.

Wiso’s experiences with the unknown have run the gamut from ghosts to vampires in the past, but these last twenty years or so have been relatively normal and quiet. Well, as quiet as it can get with the blazing guitars and drums of Rock N Roll that blasts nightly from Wiso’s speakers. He hasn’t had any more ghostly visitors and these days the only white lady he sees is his wife Patty. Maybe the phantoms of the past don’t appreciate the loud music. It is really of no consequence because I have learned a great secret from Wiso. The only way to stay young is to let the music rock on all night long.

. Update:

Alas, the music plays no more. My brother Wiso has passed away recently. It hurts a lot to loose your brother. I miss him terribly. But I have a few comforts. I got to hang out with him on the evening before he died. It was great to hear him laugh and get his unique point of view on the people he called “Higas.” Even though Wiso is gone, he lives on in his three offspring and his grandchildren. I inherited his collection of vinyl records and as soon as I get a record player, the music will rock on all night in his memory.

By the way- A “Higa” is a person that is always in your way and generally makes a nuisance of themselves. Wiso could not stand them. But really, can anyone?

Deadeye

My brother Deadeye is dead. Deadeye was the rebel of the family. He was the one who was always out there, hanging out on the streets. Deadeye was very brave and had a thirst for adventure. He was always doing exciting things, exploring, and experimenting. Deadeye loved the unknown. If he ever came across unexplored woods, you could count on him to venture in them and see what secrets they held. If there was a spooky lake, you could count on him to go swimming there. He did anything he could to set himself apart from others. Whenever there was a situation that required someone to go on ahead and scout, Deadeye was always there at the front of the line. He was also the first to explore the adventure of death.

Deadeye’s real name was Edward Zayas. He got the nickname Deadeye from a childhood accident that left one of his eyelids slightly droopy. He cherished his nickname, going as far as having it tattooed on his arm. Throughout my early years I never knew him as Eddie – only as Deadeye. I always thought his nickname was cool and it made me long to have a nickname too. Alas, I never came up with a nickname as chillingly appropriate as his.

I never got to interview Deadeye for this book. I do remember, however, Deadeye’s claim that his dog could see ghosts. The dog in question, Whitey, loved to bark at what appeared to be empty spaces. Deadeye told us that often when he was alone in the house, Whitey would stare into an empty hallway and snarl. Its hair would stand on end and he would bark frantically, as if someone was there, taunting it. Sometimes my brother himself would feel a cold chill, as whatever Whitey was barking at would pass near him. I took his spooky stories with a grain of salt, until I had a similar occurrence later in life. Then I believed.

I don’t know of any other strange experiences he might have had, but there are many legends of the things he has done. When my family gets together, and the beers start to flow, many stories about Deadeye emerge and are told and retold throughout the evening. Everyone has a different memory of Deadeye and a different tale to tell. My favorite is the one where Deadeye saved Helen and my Father from drowning at Echo Lake Park.

One summer day in the late 60’s my family had a picnic at Echo Lake. Dad, Mom, Helen, and Raymond were fishing by the lake while George and Deadeye roamed the surrounding hills. Helen, who was only a child at the time, wandered too close to the edge of the lake and fell in. Although she was a strong swimmer, she kept getting pulled under the water by an unseen force.

It seems that the Echo Lake Park Commission had installed a suction filtering system to clean out the lake bottom. This suction caused an underwater whirlpool that had my sister in its grasp. It dragged her deeper toward the lake floor, and the open maw of its filtration pipe.

My father instinctively jumped in after Helen, and managed to grab a hold of her, but he also got sucked down toward the bottom of the lake. It seems the whirlpool that had control of my sister’s legs had also snagged my father. They both began to drown while my Mother screamed her lungs out for someone to help.

Deadeye was deep in the woods when he heard my Mother’s desperate cry. He took off like a bullet in her direction. As he ran, he took of his shirt and kicked off his sneakers. Without hesitation or fear, Deadeye dove headfirst into the waters of the lake leaving a splash and a trail of bubbles in his wake.

Deadeye located them beneath the water and reached them a second later. Grabbing one under each of his arms, he began to kick his legs to reach the surface. He felt the suctioning force grabbing at his legs, but he only kicked harder. The strength of his legs proved greater than the force of the filtering system and Deadeye escaped its clutches. He surfaced with his dazed cargo and dragged them to the safety of the lakeshore.

It’s stories like that, that are so visual, that made me see my brother in a heroic, yet cartoonish fashion. I imagine him like Popeye, gulping his spinach and rushing off to do the impossible. He was always getting away with doing things that the rest of us could just not do. And he always did it with flair.

One occasion that highlights this is the day Deadeye had crossed my Father. Back in those days corporal punishment was a standard in household discipline. So, my Dad was chasing Deadeye around the house with a belt. Deadeye whooped, hooted, and hollered as he climbed over, under, and around the furniture. Dad chased him into his room and saw Deadeye slip under the bed. My dad, knowing that Deadeye was trapped, called out to my brothers to lift the bed. When they did, all they saw was an empty space where Deadeye should have been. They were baffled and wondered where had he gone. It turns out that Deadeye was underneath the bed, his back flush against the underside of the mattress and his arms and legs spread out toward, and held against, the sideboards. When my brothers lifted up the bed, they had lifted Deadeye up with it! Deadeye was the Puerto Rican Harry Houdini.

As I mentioned earlier in this book, my family is very religious. They have all embraced Christianity and believe strongly in the power of faith healing. Faith healing is the belief that when people believe in God so much, they can lay their hands on a sick person and pray, and God uses their body as a conduit for miraculous healing. Deadeye experienced this ability first hand.

My brothers George and Raymond where once in a Latin music band named Orchestra Zayas and they played a gig at Studio One in Newark in 1985. Deadeye, their unofficial roadie, was present and was knocking back a few cold ones by the stage. He had a bit too much to drink and decided to out to George’s car to sleep in the backseat until the show was over.

Outside, Deadeye got confused and located a car he thought was George’s. He found the car was securely locked. Deadeye used the many skills he learned from the street and unlocked the back door. He got in, laid down across the seat and promptly fell asleep for a few hours.

At the end of the night the owner of the car shows up and finds Deadeye asleep in his backseat. He awakens my brother and demands to know what he is doing in the car. Deadeye was still drunk and had difficulty explaining to the guy what the situation was. An argument ensued and the man pulled out a knife. He stabbed Deadeye under the arm, ripped apart the muscles there, and threw him on the ground. He left my brother there to bleed.

Deadeye managed to get up and stagger back into the club where George and Raymond where packing away their instruments. My brothers ran to his aid and rushed him to the hospital. By the time they arrived, Deadeye had lost so much blood that recovery seemed impossible. The hospital performed an emergency blood transfusion, but the doctors didn’t really give him any hope for survival, so the family was called in to say their last goodbyes.

My family gathered around his unconscious body, placed their hands on him and began to pray. They prayed and asked God to work through them and heal Deadeye. They promised that if God would do this, they would see to it that Deadeye turned his life around and followed in the path of righteousness. They all believed that he would be healed.

The next time the doctor came to check up on Deadeye, he couldn’t believe how he had recuperated. The doctor himself declared it a miracle. Deadeye’s arm was healing at an amazing rate and his heart was pumping at a near normal rate. Within a month Deadeye was out of the hospital and was fine.

Deadeye kept my family’s promise to the Lord too. He changed his lifestyle. He left behind drugs and drinking and embraced religion. He even dropped the nickname Deadeye and went back to his birth name of Edward. He found a wonderful woman named Terri and together they bought a house in Pennsylvania. They lived there in bliss for many years.

The past, however, does not rest easily. It always comes back to kick your ass. When Edward got the blood transfusion to save his life, it also infected him with something far more sinister. The blood transfusion happened in the early part of 1985, before donated blood was screened for HIV. He had come so far, had changed his life around, and still he had to face his past. Edward got sick and soon discovered he was HIV positive. He was devastated.

I tried to give him hope by telling him that HIV does not necessarily lead to AIDS. I even told him of some acquaintances of mine who had been diagnosed as positive and yet lived long healthy lives with no symptoms. I also told him of the then-new drug cocktails that were reducing the number of AIDS related deaths. I showed him websites and printed up articles to try to ease his mind.

Edward began to undergo AIDS treatment with a drug cocktail and he seemed to be getting better. His T-Cell count was high and it seemed that there was still a chance for him. That’s when a new monster reared its ugly head. Apparently when he contracted HIV, he had also contracted Hepatitis B. This, combined with his alcoholic consumption had nearly ruined his liver. It seems that the drug cocktail he was on was also having an adverse effect on his liver. If he continued the AIDS therapy, he would die of liver failure. And if he discontinued the therapy, he would die of AIDS-related illness. A rock and a hard place, indeed.

We had gathered at his bedside at the hospital once again to pray for him. I remember him laying there, smiling at me from behind his swollen abdomen. He told me to make sure I took care of myself and I assured him I would. We all lay our hands on him and pleaded with God to save his life. We were hoping for another miracle. We never got it.

Edward died a few nights later of liver failure. He is buried next to my Dad and my cousin Betty in Belleville. His wife lives on healthy and his daughter recently had a child. The rest of my family lives on in loss, missing him at every family function.

I also live on, but in fear. I fear that my past will one day come back to haunt me. I hope that I can escape unscathed from all of my sins. I hope to one day have kids of my own so that I can pass on all my spooky stories and the wacky hijinks of their late great Uncle Deadeye.

Ghost Photography

My brother George is truly a Renaissance man, wearing the hats of a musician, an artist, a baker and a photographer equally well. I always admired him as a child and the older I became I was continually surprised at the different abilities that I discovered in George and the different passions that we have in common. We both love Martial arts, horror movies, the bass guitar, and James Brown. Most notably, we share a thirst to unravel the secrets of the unknown

George’s long time interest in strange phenomena is unmarred by his skepticism regarding the existence of ghosts. He strongly believes that many of our so-called “ghosts” may have more ordinary explanations. Clothes, left on a bedpost at night, can look like specters to a frightened child. And with a little imagination, and some wishful thinking, even the most mundane occurrences can seem phantasmagoric. He still loves a good yarn, however, and I am always willing to re-visit the stories that frightened me as a kid.

George’s early experiences began one night when we lived in Earl Street in Newark. At this time, George was 9 years old and Raymond was still a baby. I was yet to grace the world with my presence. George was sleeping in the same room as Raymond’s crib. He was stirred from sleep at dawn by a noise in the room. He looked over at Raymond’s crib and saw a lady standing over it looking down at the baby. The lady wore a veil and held her head down as if in prayer. George could not see her face, but recognized her as possibly being one the Virgin icons in my mother’s paintings. George watched her silently for about a half an hour until she faded in the rising dawn light.

On another occasion, Myrna and George were sleeping in the same bed when Myrna woke him up in the night and said “Look.” George woke up and looked in the direction that Myrna was pointing. There on the wall George saw an old woman brushing her hair. She seemed to be like a projection from an old movie. She was facing the bed and was running a brush through her hair with an odd expression on her face. George turned to Myrna to see her reaction, but Myrna had fallen back to sleep. He shook her to wake her back up, but she just told him to get back to sleep. George watched the woman until she disappeared. The next morning, Myrna had no recollection of the encounter.

A few years later, when George lived at South 17^th St, he came home with Deadeye from a party and they went to bed in the room that they shared. When George went to bed, he heard the noise of someone expectorating. He was about to sit up in bed to tell Deadeye to cut it out, when he felt someone spit on his face. It came from right above him, as if whomever had spit on him where standing over his bed. He got up furious and went over to Deadeye’s bed and kicked him. Deadeye had no idea what was going on. He claimed that he had not moved from his bed. Surely, George would have seen him getting back into the bed, in the second it took to react to the phantom loogie.

George began to see the shadow creatures later in life after he had been married and fathered three children. Instead of the shadow creatures that most of my family has seen his shadows don’t run around the floor. He sees them as puffs of floating mass out of the corner of his eyes. When he turns to see them properly, they vanish. George became obsessed with trying to capture on film one of these shadow creatures and devised a plan.

He bought 400-speed film for his camera because it would allow him to take pictures in low light and in darkness and went to bed. He woke up at around 3 a.m. and, with the lights still out, he walked all over his house taking pictures. He shot almost an entire roll of film in the dark and he went to bed pleased.

When he developed the film most of it was crap, but one picture was surprising. It was a shot taken from his kitchen looking out to the dinning room. Across the top of the picture, a spiral of light curved from overhead in the kitchen, down in an arc, and back up to the ceiling in the dinning room. George remembers the moment he snapped that picture and there were no sudden flashes of light at all at that time. He had caught something and he was ecstatic!

He showed off his picture to the family and we were all impressed, although some of us thought it could have just been a bit of light somehow getting onto the exposure. When George showed the picture to one of my uncles, he told George that he was being silly and suggested George rip up the picture and stop all the ghost nonsense. They both had a few beers and George ripped up the picture to prove to my uncle that he wasn’t being silly.

George was watching television a few days later and saw a program about ghosts. In a segment on the show featuring ghost photography, they showed a few pictures that had the exact same spiral of light that he had photographed. They called this spiral of light a “Vortex” apparition. He learned that Vortex photography was a common manifestation of ghostly energy. George remembered how he had destroyed his picture and was crushed.

That night George lay in bed thinking about the lost picture. He knew that there was something he could do, but was not sure what it was. He was lying down with his feet sticking out from under the covers when he suddenly felt a slap on his foot. He was in the room alone and something had hit his foot! He looked around the room to make sure there was no one there. He stood up from the bed and it came to him: “The negatives!” The slap on the foot was forgotten as he remembered that he still had the negatives of the Vortex picture. He found them and put them on a shelf in the living room next to his keys, so that he wouldn’t forget to get them developed in the morning.

The next morning George went to reach for his keys and the negatives were gone. He tore the house apart looking for the negatives and interrogated his wife and kids without success. No one had touched his negatives or his keys. He began to think of where else he could have put them, and a memory came into his head. He had seen a Vortex in another picture; In fact he had seen and dismissed quite a few pictures with strange shapes and lights in them.

George dug through bags of old pictures that never quite made it to the photo albums and found a picture that he had taken of his son’s birthday party. From the top of the picture curving downward he saw a spiral Vortex. He also found many other pictures that featured strange flashes of light. One creepy picture shows my uncle and my father on one side of a car, while on the other side a ghostly shape peers into the backseat. George had a found a virtual cornucopia of ghost photography! George has been kind enough to lend me a few of his pictures and has even drawn a reproduction of the original missing Vortex picture to be included here.

I have done some research on Vortex photography and have discovered that skeptics of the phenomenon believe that the effect is created when a dangling camera strap gets into the frame and reflects the light from the flash. This explanation sounds plausible. The camera that George owns, however, has no strap.

George finds ghostly tales to be amusing, but he warns that one should not let the pursuit of these shadowy phantoms get in the way of a developing a strong relationship with God. He tells me one final tale from his childhood. When he was young, there was a bully that began to pick on him at school. The bully claimed that Georgie owed him a dollar. At that time a dollar was a lot of money and there was no way that Georgie could scrounge up enough money to appease the bully. The bully had threatened that the next time he saw George, he would pummel him senseless if he didn’t have the cash. So, Georgie avoided him at all costs. One day, George was walking down the street and saw the bully heading toward him. He knew that there was no escape. He began to pray to God to help him. The bully approached Georgie and demanded his dollar. Georgie tried to stall for time by putting his hands into his pockets, pretending to look for a dollar he knew he didn’t have. Suddenly, George felt a strange papery sensation on his fingertips. He withdrew his hand and he was amazed to see that he held a dollar in it! The bully took the dollar and walked away, never to bother Georgie again. George knew his pockets were previously empty, because he had searched them a few minutes earlier when an ice cream truck had passed him. God had answered his prayers and delivered him from harm by making a dollar materialize in his pocket. “That’s the power of prayer,” says George. “Let’s see Western Union beat that!”

My Sister The Prophet

My sister Helen is a most remarkable person. She is a funny and sensitive person who cares deeply about the needs of others and always seems to have the right words of encouragement when someone really needs them. She is a loving wife; the mother of four boys, and throughout her life has managed to stay hip and looking good. I also admire her because she had the guts to make the transition from housewife to businesswoman, completely reinventing herself, without sacrificing her family.

She is also the one person in my family who has had the most brushes with the unexplained. From divine encounters to foreign phantoms, practically her whole life has been lived in the shadow of the paranormal. From her teenage years to the present day, Helen has seen and felt more strangeness than most people do in their entire lifetime.

Her relationship with the unknown began when she was sixteen and living with our parents in Puerto Rico. We lived on 13^th Street in a section of Caguas named Santo Domingo. Helen had her own room, with the added of luxury of a private bathroom. Raymond and I where jealous because we were forced to share a room and had to use the regular old bathroom in the hallway. I remember being fascinated with her toilet because it featured a huge water fountain in the center of it called a bidet. I loved sneaking into her room and drinking from the fountain until I was caught and told what it was used for. Anyway, Helen loved that room.

One night, Helen went to bed feeling fine as usual, but awoke in the middle of the night feeling feverish. She sat up in bed and, as she was contemplating getting out of bed to use the bathroom, she saw a huge black shadow beginning to fill up the room. It started from the floor and was spreading upwards along the walls. The inky blackness of the shadow looked alive and she sensed evil within it. She was afraid and shrank back against the headboard of the bed.

Her spirits lifted when she saw what she could only describe as a “White Shadow” dart from the wall near her bed and spread out across towards the darkness. Helen watched as the two formless shadows “fought” each other for control of the room. She felt their struggle deep inside of her and prayed that the white shadow would triumph. Eventually, the white shadow overcame and the black shadow retreated back into the floor under Helen’s bed.

The entire room lit up as if it was daylight and she was filled with a deep sense of peace. She leaned back against the headboard and felt a wonderful presence. She looked upwards to the ceiling and saw a blinding light descending down upon her. She knew inside of her soul that it was an aspect of God. She saw what appeared to be a sandal clad foot and the edge of a red robe. It was beautiful. She knew that God had come to take her. She tried to look up at a face but all she saw was pure white light. He seemed to be a being of pure light. Suddenly a hand reached out to her from out of the light. She reached up toward it.

Just as she was about to touch the hand, she changed her mind and pleaded: “Please. I don’t want to leave here. Please! I am young. Let me stay here a little bit longer.”

His hand slowly drew back into the light and the room became dark once again. She fell back into a deep sleep and when she awoke she told my mother what happened. Helen does not regret the choice she made and cherishes the overwhelming feeling of love she felt in God’s presence.

After that first experience things took a more sinister turn. She began seeing the Shadow Creatures that have long plagued my family. When she walked into her room, she caught glimpses of little shadow things running by. They moved too fast for her to get a good look at them, and at first she dismissed them as being part of her imagination. That worked for a while, until she saw them with more frequency all over her room and they began interacting with her.

She sometimes left clothing or a book on the bed and when she would come back into the room, whatever she left on the bed would be on the floor. It happened with an alarming rate of frequency. She began to conduct little experiments to test their existence. She would place an item like an ashtray or a doll on the center of the bed and step out of the room. When she returned the item would always be knocked down to the floor. This occurred even if she just walked out of the room for a single second.

And then, the Shadow Creatures got bolder. She was sitting in the bathroom reading a magazine and something came up and smacked the magazine from her hand. She saw nothing in the bathroom with her. She picked up the magazine again and resumed reading and in a few seconds it was once again slapped out of her hand.

She began to fear the aggression of the Shadow Creatures and told our mother of the situation. Mom told her that our grandmother used to see those little creatures also and that they were little demons. My mother got together several members of her church and they came to pray at the house and bless the room with Holy Water. The Shadow Creatures were no longer seen after that. They had apparently been driven out.

Then her prophetic abilities began to surface. It began with her dreams. She had a dream that she was in Mexico during a major earthquake. The ground was shaking and people where running everywhere. She was running with the people, living the terror that they felt as they tried to stay alive in the chaos. Her dream was so realistic that she could smell the burning fires and feel the ground breaking open beneath her feet. She awoke in a panic and ran to my mother’s room to tell her of the dream.

The next morning over breakfast we heard a repot on the radio that there had been a devastating earthquake in Mexico. Helen and my mother exchanged looks of horror and told us what Helen had dreamt about that night.

On another occasion, she dreamt that she was aboard a plane that was about to crash. She felt the fear of everyone on board and looked around and could even see individual faces of strangers as they cried and prayed. She awoke before the final crash and the next day there was a report of a plane crash. She was not surprised. In her mind, she knew that she had been on board that plane right before it went down.

The dreams occurred only once in a while and the last one she clearly recalls was not as sinister as the rest. She dreamt that she was walking along lush greenery in a warm climate. Impossibly it began to snow. She watched as snow fell all around her, killing the plants. When she woke up. She came to the breakfast table and announced: “Last night it snowed somewhere where it isn’t supposed to snow.” We hurriedly turned on the radio, but heard nothing about it. I remember that we were all disappointed. Until we saw that night’s TV news show that showed a freakish snowfall in Florida. We all regarded Helen with respect.

Her ability to see into the future was honed during her brief career as a card-reading fortuneteller. She began “reading” cards at school one afternoon while playing Briscas with her friend. Briscas are a Spanish deck of cards that are popular in Puerto Rico. They are oversized and colorful and the suits are Swords, Gold Coins, Cups, and huge, phallic Wooden Clubs. To a casual observer these cards could look like a Tarot deck.

Helen was dealing cards for her friend and started to get impressions. She began telling the other girl little tidbits of information about what was going to happen to her later that day. She wasn’t really reading the cards – she had no idea how – she just looked at her friend and knew certain things about her and where she was headed. Soon, a crowd formed around Helen and her friend. All the other kids wanted to get their cards read.

When some of the things that Helen predicted came to pass, word spread quickly. Before long, things snowballed and people began to show up at my house willing to pay to have Helen read their cards. At this point I didn’t really know what was going on. I just thought that my family had become very popular and we just had a lot of parties. My mother frowned upon this, reminding Helen that our religion does not allow for fortune telling.

My mother didn’t really have to worry too much about this business because it was near its conclusion. Helen stopped reading cards for people when she was faced with a prediction she didn’t want to make. Her close friend Rosita came by to have her cards read. She sat across from her as Helen shuffled the deck. When my sister drew the first card she looked up at her friend and gasped. All Helen saw in Rosita’s future was death. She saw her family dressed in black and mourning. Rosita wanted to know what was wrong but Helen just threw the cards on the floor and told her: “I can’t do this.” Rosita begged to know what Helen saw. Helen began to cry and told Rosita that she was surrounded by death. Helen gave up the cards and prayed that her prediction was wrong.

Unfortunately, she was right. Within months of the prediction twelve members of Rosita’s immediate family died, including her baby child. Helen never read fortunes again and she joined my mother in the Catholic Church. She made her first communion and the strangeness in her life began to seem like a distant memory. She married her longtime boyfriend Luis Antonio (better known to us as Toño) and moved to New Jersey. But, she couldn’t escape her past so easily.

Toño and Helen moved into a second floor apartment on Clinton Street in Newark. At this time they had their first child and Helen kept his crib near their bed. She got up sleepwalking one night and walked into the living room where they kept their LP records and selected a 45-rpm record from the rack. She walked back into the room, placed the record on the sleeping baby’s chest, and went back to bed. When she awoke the next morning she had a vague recollection of what she did the previous night. She walked over to the crib and was horrified at the record she had placed on her baby. It was a song named “Evil” by Earth, Wind, and Fire.

This began what was one of the most terrifying days in Helen’s life. Her husband left to go to work and the baby was still sleeping, so Helen sat in the living room watching the television. She heard a noise in the kitchen as if someone had run by and knocked the garbage can over. She ran into the kitchen to check it out and there was nothing amiss. While she was in the kitchen, she heard the same noise in the living room. But this time she heard banging around as if the living room where being destroyed.

She was afraid because she thought someone had broken into the house. She ran into the living room, but noticed that nothing was out of place. She felt a feeling as if someone else was in the house. She knew that she wasn’t alone. But the living room was empty, the television still on at a lower volume. Then she heard the same noise coming from the bedroom. Her heart was racing. The baby was alone in there!

She ran into the bedroom and everything looked normal. She went over to the crib and reached for the baby. At that moment, the closet door flew open and all the hangers and clothes started falling out of it and flying across the floor. She felt and overwhelming sense of evil emanating from the closet. Everything in the closet was shaking, the clothes moving on their own accord. She grabbed the baby and started praying. As she was praying she was backing out slowly from the room, keeping her eyes on that closet.

She walked backwards all the way to the front door and made it down the steps, trying not to panic.

When she got outside, she ran all the way to the corner and called her husband from a pay phone. She begged him to come home. When he get there, he found her still at the corner dressed in her pajamas. Together, they went back into the house and found that the closet was a mess and all the clothes were still strewn over the floor. She told him that they had to get another place. From that day on, until they moved she refused to stay alone in that apartment. She left with him every morning and was dropped off at her sister-in-law’s house until he came from work.

They found another apartment on Columbia Ave in Irvington and they had peace there for a while. Eventually, my parents and I moved from Puerto Rico and came to live with them at this apartment. We moved in downstairs and both my mother and Helen were very happy to have each other’s company once again.

Helen and Toño had three more boys before they decided it was time to get a bigger house. They Looked around and found a house on Jacoby Street in Maplewood. When they went to go see the house, Helen had a strange feeling that they weren’t alone in the house. But she fell in love with the house and its size and location that they decided to take it.

While they were doing repairs in the house Helen found a huge hole inside one of the walls. It was a hole large enough to fit a person. As she was about to explore the hole, her youngest son Alex came in clutching a piece of metal he had found under the floorboards. She looked at it and asked him to show her where he found it. He led her to a section of the floor that was torn up a bit and she looked under the floorboards. There where many more of the same metal objects all around. She turned it over in her hands for a bit, until she realized what it was that she was holding. They were bombs!

She called the cops and they called in the FBI and the Bomb Squad and the house was cleared of all the explosive devices stored throughout the house. It was revealed that the previous occupant of the house was an insane Vietnam Vet who was on the lam from the authorities. This entire incident was in the Star Ledger newspaper in New Jersey. Apparently the former owner of the house was in custody. But Helen can’t help but wonder if it was his presence that she felt when she was first viewing the house.

They debated for a long time, but decided to still keep the house and soon they were living comfortably. We had many family parties there and the big joke after a while was whether or not the house was going to blow up. I even got a chance to house sit for them while they where on vacation, but I only spent one night in the house and I slept with a knife under my pillow. It was a creepy, yet comfortable house.

Helen woke up late one morning to find herself face to face with a little girl staring at her from the foot of the bed. Helen knew that she was alone in the house and had no idea who this child was. The girl appeared to be around thirteen or fourteen years old and was dressed in an old fashioned way. She looked like a pretty country girl from the early part of the century. She had long dirty blonde and was wearing a blue and green flowered dress. The girl looked neither happy nor sad. She just stared at Helen for a while and then disappeared. Helen was a bit spooked, but by this point in her life nothing really surprised her. When her husband got home she told him what she had seen and they both sort of had a laugh about it.

A few days later, Toño’s Mother came from Puerto Rico for a visit and brought along her two-year-old granddaughter, Chandelle. Chandelle is Helen and Toño’s niece and she is a very friendly child. Helen was giving her mother-in-law a tour of the house and she was holding Chandelle’s hand. When they get to the top of the stairs, Chandelle looks excitedly at Helen’s room, let’s go of her hand and runs toward the room screaming “La Nena! La Nena!” which means “The Little Girl! The Little Girl1.” Chandelle ran straight into the room and across the room headed directly for the low bedroom window. Helen ran after her and grabbed her before she could get too far. She picked her up and told her: “There is no Nena here.” She carried her back to her grandmother. Chandelle kept on waving back into the room calling out to the unseen girl. Toño and Helen exchanged knowing looks.

Nothing further was heard or seen of the little girl. But Helen took this occurrence as a sign that maybe she should try to get back in touch with her religion and renew her relationship with God. By this time, most of my family had been going to a new church with a charismatic young pastor named Ted Allman. Helen decided to join them when they next went to Faith Christian Fellowship in Bloomfield. There she saw the presence of God once again.

At the church, Helen sat with my family in the same row of chairs. In the middle of singing a hymn, Helen dropped the hymnbook. She bent over to pick it up and when she came back up her eyes looked up to the altar. There on the wall behind the pastor she saw Jesus’ face. His face covered the entire wall and she could see His features perfectly. She didn’t realize at the time that she was the only one that was seeing Him. She almost flew out of her chair and started panicking because she thought it was the end of the world. She began to cry and my family asked her what was wrong. She told them what she was seeing and asked if they saw it too. None of them saw it. That’s when she realized that it was only there for her to see. She fell down on her knees and began to pray. Every once in a while, she would look up from her prayers at the altar, expecting His face to be gone, but He was still there looking down at her. His image slowly faded away after a long time.

I asked her if it could have been a trick of the light or some super-imposed projection. She said that it definitely wasn’t a trick of the light because other people would have been able to see it. My mother and Myrna sat on either side of her and neither of them could see what she saw. Helen said that it was a three-dimensional face looking down at her. He had dark hair, a dark beard, and beautiful eyes. She knew that the face was the missing part of the vision she had of him when she was younger. He seemed to be welcoming her into the folds of His church.

Helen decided to really focus on her spirituality and finally found some sense of peace in her life. She went to church eagerly and began to study The Bible. She had many wonderful positive experiences in the church, as her faith grew stronger. Some Christian sects have a doctrine where they are infused with The Holy Spirit and begin “Speaking In Tongues,” or speaking an unknown dialect, which is said to be the language of God. Helen was unable to “Speak In Tongues” at first. But then the pastor came to her and placed his hand on her forehead while he was praying in the unknown language. When he touched her, she felt a gag in her throat as if she were going to throw up. She opened her mouth to puke and instead began to “Speak In Tongues.” Furthermore, she was able to understand what the pastor was saying! After the mass, she approached the pastor and told him what had transpired and he told her that only a few of the truly blessed have the gift to be able to understand God’s language.

Her faith grew so strong that when her children got fevers she would “Lay Hands” on them. “Laying Hands” is the same form of faith healing that my family used to save Deadeye’s life when he got stabbed. She would touch her son’s forehead and pray and the fever would disappear. She performed this feat using thermometers in front of my mother and Toño. Because of their faith, my family took her abilities as matter-of-fact. They saw it as one more blessing that God could bestow upon the believers.

Helen’s faith took a severe blow on the day that my father died. That morning, Helen sent out Toño to drop my dad off where my car was so that he could fix it. When Toño had gone, Helen began to clean up the house. She eventually went upstairs to her room and, not knowing why, she opened her drawer and reached deep within it and pulled out a black dress. She unfolded it and held it in her hands. She remembered that the last time she had worn it had been to our cousin Betty’s funeral. She felt a deep sadness and felt like she wanted to cry. She snapped out of it, put the dress away, and headed back downstairs.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, the phone rang. It was her husband calling from the scene of my father’s death. He told her that he had a heart attack a few minutes ago and he was waiting for the police to show up. Helen had held the dress at almost the exact moment of my father’s death. She wore it to his funeral.

Helen found it harder and harder to want to go to church after my dad’s death. She felt a deep sense of hurt that God would allow him to die. Then, when our brother Eddie (Deadeye) died, depression set in and soon it was clear that she would no longer be part of the congregation. Over the past years, she has slowly been feeling better over his passing and has been considering getting back in touch with her spirituality.

Recently, Helen went on a work-related trip to London, England. She and a few of her co-workers stayed at the world famous Langham Hotel, long reputed to be haunted. She had no idea of the hotel’s sinister reputation on the night that she arrived and was shown to her room. But she soon found out.

As soon as she entered the room she knew that something was peculiar about it. Even after the porter left, she felt that she was not alone. Jet lag overcame her fear and she fell asleep for a few hours. When she woke, she felt a presence looming over her in bed, as if someone were standing at the edge of the bed staring down at her. Of course, there was no one there.

She gathered up her clothes for the day and began ironing them. The whole time she was pressing the clothes, she felt that someone was in the room with her, standing right behind her. She could even feel the hairs on the back of neck bristling. A few times, she turned around quickly hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever it was, but she saw nothing.

She laid out her clothes on the bed and went in to take a shower. She locked the bathroom door and got in the shower. A few minutes into it, she saw the shower curtain push in suddenly and violently, as if someone had opened the bathroom door. She peeked around the curtain, but saw that the door was still shut and locked.

She thought that perhaps the maid had entered the hotel room and she called out to her. There was no reply. Helen dried off and stepped out of the bathroom. She could have sworn that the maid was in her bedroom and she called out to her again. Still, there was no reply. She walked over to the bedroom and found it empty. She quickly got dressed and went to meet with her co-worker Evelyn. Together they went to their orientation meeting.

The meeting was pretty standard with one outstanding highlight. The moderator told them of the Langham Hotel’s haunted reputation. She told them that many famous people had felt and sometimes even seen various phantoms. Supposedly the haunting centered in the vicinity of a particular room. Helen realized that that particular room was below hers!

Helen told Evelyn about her experiences in the room after the meeting. They laughed about it and went back to Evelyn’s room to hang out. When they got to her room, they realized that they had no ice for their soda. They went back out into the hallway to look for the ice machine. They saw it at the end of a long hall. As they walked toward it Helen got the feeling that something was not right. It seemed that the further they walked down the hall, the further away the ice machine appeared. It felt as if the hallway itself was extending.

Helen and Evelyn both stopped at the same time and Evelyn turned to Helen and said that they should forget the ice and get out of there. Neither of them had mentioned what they had felt in the hallway. They went back to Evelyn’s room and drank warm soda. Evelyn suggested that Helen spends the night in the room with her, but Helen didn’t want to be a burden. She refused and went back to her room.

Helen went to the next morning’s meeting feeling over-tired after a restless night of sleep. At they meeting, she and Evelyn met up with another of their co-workers, Robyn. Robyn is a deeply religious woman and Helen really liked her company. They all made plans to get together that afternoon and go sightseeing.

After their tour of London, the three ladies retired to Helen’s room to unwind. They all sat in Helen’s living room and talked about the wonder of London’s landmarks. They were having a nice laugh, when Robyn glanced over at the door of the room. She let out a scream. When Helen and Evelyn questioned her, she said that she had just seen the door move in and out as if it was breathing. That was enough for Helen. The girls helped her pack her luggage and she spent the remainder of her stay in Evelyn’s room. Can you really blame her?

Helen believes that God gives people gifts that can be used positively or negatively. She thinks that God’s gift to her is her sensitivity. She is so sensitive that she can pick up many subtle things around her. She can sense evil things, but she can also sense beautiful and spiritual things. Looking back over her stories, it seems that her gift is directly related with how she feels about her relationship with God. The closer she feels, the more positive the experiences. While, the further away she strays, the darker the results. I agree with her that maybe it is time for her to renew her relationship. Because after so many spooky experiences, Lord knows I would!

Talking Tina & The Virgin Mary

I always felt closest to my brother Raymond because, being only seven years older than I was, we grew up together. We had your typical older brother/younger brother relationship. I idolized and imitated him, and he protected me from bullies, taught me how to be “cool”, and influenced my taste in music and fashion. He single-handedly instilled in me a sense of what was “corny” and what was “creepy”.

He also liked to scare the crap out of me once in a while. One incident I remember in particular had a profound impact on my young life. Raymond had stayed up late and watched an episode of Twilight Zone that featured Telly Savalas going up against a killer doll named Talking Tina. The next day he told me all about Talking Tina and warned me that I should always be on the look out because Talking Tina could one day come after me. This, of course, sent me into a panic. I began to look over my shoulder and under my bed for any signs of demonic dolls.

Around this same time, my sister Helen had moved out and left behind a few of her childhood dolls. One doll in particular really freaked me out. It had dark hair, a blue dress, and a friendly smile, but cold and cruel blue eyes. I did not know the doll’s name, but I became suspicious of its motives.

One morning, I awoke a bit late and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. The door was locked and Raymond was taking a shower. I asked him to let me in and he asked me to get lost. I ran to my mom to complain that Raymond wouldn’t let me in and she told me to go use the bathroom in my sister Helen’s old room. Needless to say I was terrified.

I entered Helen’s old room and the first thing I saw was the pile of her old dolls on the far side of the room. I shivered and scurried into the bathroom, which was mercifully close to the doorway. I caught sight of her toilet and memories of my shameful old bidet-drinking days flooded my mind. I left the door open behind me, in case I needed to make a quick escape, and began to brush my teeth. I brushed fast, rinsed, and turned to the door to leave. That’s when my blood froze.

Standing in the right side of the doorway, peeking in at me was the nameless doll in the blue dress with the cruel eyes. It stared up at me and shambled a bit closer into the doorway. “I am Talking Tina,” it said without moving its lips. “And I don’t like you.”

I screamed. And I screamed some more. I felt as if I might have wet myself. Suddenly, something inside of me snapped and I ran at the doll at full speed and I kicked her clear across the room. That’s when I heard the laughter and I noticed my brother holding his bruised hand where it had once been holding the doll just beyond the edge of the doorway.

My brother Raymond is a funny guy but I still don’t like dolls or open doorways.

Raymond’s childhood was filled with unexplained occurrences and strange nightmares. When Ray was 9 he had what could be described as a “Divine Encounter”. At that time we lived in some projects on South 17^th St in Newark and our parents were devout Catholics. Our third floor apartment was filled with various religious paintings of Jesus and The Virgin Mary. Ray found one painting, which depicted an extremely round-faced Madonna with tiny cherubs dancing around her head, particularly striking. The name of the painting was “La Virgen De El Perpetuo Socorro” (“The Virgin Of Perpetual Aid”).

Raymond was outside playing one afternoon when he heard someone call his name. He looked around and on the third call he realized that it was coming from a window in our building. He looked up to our third floor window, expecting to see mom calling out to him, but instead saw a most unexpected sight. There at the window, calling down to Ray, was the Virgin in the painting. Her round face was serene and radiant and surrounded by a golden corona of light. My brother called out to her “Mom, is that you?” but she did not reply to his query. She just called out to him one final time.

Raymond ran upstairs and asked mom if she had just called him. She said no. He then asked if anyone else was home and got the expected negative reply. He told mom that someone had been calling him from our window and then pointed at the painting. “It was her, “ he said. My mother crossed herself and they both stood in front of the enigmatic icon. The Virgin continued to smile silently at her cherubic companions. To this day, Raymond claims that he can still see her face in his mind’s eye.

Ray’s next encounter with the paranormal occurred in Puerto Rico when he was a teenager and was an experienced shared by a few of his friends and our mother. It was early night and he was outside playing (apparently his favorite activity) with his friends when he noticed a huge star in the sky. As Raymond watched, the star moved very fast to the right and suddenly stopped. Raymond called his friends and mom over and together they watched the “star” hang stationary in the sky for approximately 20 minutes. Suddenly, the star began to move back to the left slowly at first and then faster until it disappeared from sight behind a mountain. They began to talk and try to figure out what it was. They decided that it couldn’t have been a helicopter because it was stationary for so long. And it couldn’t have been a shooting star, because of its trajectory. Shooting stars don’t shoot out, stop, hang in the sky, change direction and shoot back. They decided they had seen a UFO.

When my family and I moved to New Jersey once again in the early eighties, Raymond and I had to share a room at 196 Columbia Ave in Irvington. This was a creepy house. The previous tenants had been two elderly sisters who had recently passed away, so Raymond and I were a bit freaked out at having to sleep there. Our room was at the rear of the house and had a huge walk-in closet that was missing its door.

From the night that we moved in there until Raymond moved out on his own, he had nightmares every night.

He always had the same nightmare. He dreamt of dark rivers and alligators. Sometimes, he would awaken and feel an unseen power crushing him down against the bed. He would be awake, but unable to move. He was convinced that there were demons in that room. He finally couldn’t take it anymore and he moved out. I, however, slept there and never once felt a disturbance in that room. We eventually moved also, just in case.

Now Raymond is married and has a beautiful family. But, he still has run-ins with the unexplained. He works at a tool & die company in Florham Park that he fears is haunted. When he is at work alone he hears noises of doors closing and footsteps upstairs in the attic. He usually checks and there is no one around. Even when there are people at work and he is at his computer, he feels a presence in the room with him looking over his shoulder. He can sometimes even feel light breath on his neck. Even at the urinal in the bathroom at his job, he feels the presence looming behind him.

Raymond has had a few more direct experiences with the phantom at his job recently. On the side of his workstation there is a small, screened air vent that connects his room with the larger working space on the other side of the wall. Raymond was working overtime on a Saturday morning alone in the building, when he heard something hit the screen of the air vent. It wasn’t a light tap. He heard five loud, solid hard bangs against the vent. He got up and ran to the door, thinking that someone was there and was playing a trick on him. There was no one in the large work area. He searched the entire building and there was no one there. He even went out to the parking lot and his was the only car on the entire block.

A week later, he was walking down the hall that leads to the employee bathroom and he felt someone walking behind him. He didn’t find this unusual. There are many times when more than one employee walks down that hallway at the same time. He glanced at the wall to his right and even saw the shadow of a person behind him as he approached the urinal. He turned around to glance at whomever had been following him and found himself to be alone in the bathroom. Whose shadow had Raymond seen?

Raymond may have found an answer to that question in his latest sighting. He was working on a project in his workspace during a regular workday, when he realized that he had to go to an adjacent office for another piece of equipment. He had his head down as he left the office and when he looked up he saw that he was definitely not alone. What appeared to be a young boy of about twelve stood in front of him in the hallway. The boy looked surprised at having been seen and immediately moved forward towards the bend in the hallway. The boy bent down and appeared to get smaller and blinked out of existence right before Raymond’s shocked eyes! The entire episode lasted merely a few seconds, but Raymond is almost sure of what he saw. He concedes that it could have been his imagination playing games with the shadows of the hallway. But when he relates it to all the other experiences he has had at his workplace it makes for a pretty intriguing puzzle.

Raymond is no stranger to spooky experiences and so he is not afraid at whatever ghost may haunt his job. He looks at his experiences with a kind of humorous detachment. Which is really too bad. After the Talking Tina joke he played on me, I would like to see him try to kick that ghost across the room.

Running Scared

So, you’ve met my family. You’ve read about my brothers and sisters. You’ve read about my parents and grandparents. You’ve read about everything they have done and all the ghosts they have seen. You’ve read about the U.F.O.s, premonitions, demons, and other misfits they have encountered. And now you’re probably thinking to yourself: With a family this strange, He’s probably seen some really freaky stuff.

I hate to disappoint you, but I have never seen a ghost. As a matter of fact I’m not really even sure that I believe in ghosts. I am surely not convinced that ghosts are the spirits of dead people coming back from beyond. I believe that many of the so-called “ghosts” could be a variety of things- shadows, wind, pressure changes, sub-audible noises, inter-dimensional beings, even psychic impressions recorded into the atmosphere that get played back like a recording under certain circumstances. All these things could be perceived as “ghosts.”

That having been said, I must add that I have felt presences. I have been in situations where I have felt that I was not alone, situations where I felt that I was being watched, and even situations where I have felt a touch. I have been in situations where I knew I was in the presence of something I couldn’t understand. I have felt that cold chill of fear running up my spine.

I am feeling it right now as write these words, all alone in my apartment.

I think the reason I feel these things is due to fear and anxiety. I become aware of the fact that I am alone. Let’s face it, I am writing a book about ghosts, demons, and supernatural phenomena so my mind is already in that freaked out state. So when I realize that I am alone, my overactive imagination starts reinterpreting every little noise and examining every shadow. My hair stands on its end and my eyes tear up because I am expecting to see something.

I just saw something walk by the doorway to my room. I was sitting in my dining room typing and I glanced up just in time to see something step out of my field of vision and into my bedroom. See how the mind works? I was expecting to see something and I think I just did. And I’ll be honest with you; I want to see a “ghost”. I want to see something with my own two eyes that would finally prove (at least to me) that we are not alone in this world. I want to see something that would convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt of the existence of a supernatural plane beyond ours. So, I am going to go walk to the bedroom and see if there is anything there. Be right back!

There was nothing there, as expected. No action in my bedroom, for a change! All I have had are these weird feelings that could have one of many rational explanations. This time I again felt close to seeing something, but as usual I saw nothing.

I think my dog saw something once, though.

When I was in my early teens I lived at a house on Columbia Avenue in Irvington. I lived with Raymond and my parents on the first floor and my sister Helen and her family lived on the second floor. The previous tenants of the apartment where two elderly sisters. One of them died in the apartment and the other was put in a nursing home, where she also passed away.

My brother Raymond claimed that sometimes at night he heard soft footsteps in the hallway outside the door of our shared room. He said it was the ghost of the old lady trying to get back into her bedroom. Even though I had never heard the footsteps I became afraid of being alone in the apartment.

Well, one day I did just that. My sister Helen threw a party upstairs, and Raymond and my parents where up there. I wanted to watch something on T.V. so I stayed downstairs in the living room with my little dog Gizmo. I was a bit apprehensive at first, but once the show started I relaxed down on the couch with the dog lying on my chest.

Fifteen minutes into the show, Gizmo stood up on my chest and stared into the hallway leading to my bedroom. His hair bristled and he began to growl. Whatever he was looking at was moving closer. I watched as the dog’s head turned, following whatever until it seemed to be standing directly over the couch. Then Gizmo went nuts and started barking and snapping at the empty air over my body. That’s when I felt a breeze of cold air brush across my face.

I jumped up from the couch, knocking my poor dog to the floor, and ran screaming upstairs. I wouldn’t come back down until my dad searched the entire house. And even then I stayed upstairs until the party was over. My brother Deadeye, who was at the party, was a big believer in a dog’s ability to see ghosts. He got a big kick out of my story.

In my late teenage years I had another experience, but this time I was not alone. My friend Ronald and I often visited our mutual friend Patty at her family’s house on Florence Avenue. Patty’s grandmother lived on the first floor, her parents lived on the second floor, and Patty’s room was in the attic. The attic consisted of two rooms. One room was Patty’s bedroom and the other room was used for storage.

Patty told us that the storage room in the attic was haunted. She discovered that the previous tenant had hung himself in the attic and she often heard noises and footsteps coming from that adjacent room. She said that she didn’t feel threatened by the presence and she even gave him a name “Ernie.”

One night, after being in Patty’s room for a few hours, she was escorting us down the stairs to the exit. Ronald asked her if she had heard or felt anything new from the ghost lately. She replied that Ernie had been pretty quiet lately and that she even wondered if he was still there. As soon as those words left her lips, the door to the storage room opened and slammed shut with a loud bang. Ronald and I flew down the stairs without touching a single step.

My next brush with the unexplained occurred while I was working at Bunny’s Restaurant in South Orange. The restaurant was on the main floor and the upstairs floor was used for food storage and it housed the meat slicer. It was my freshman year at college and I had been promoted from dishwasher to cook’s assistant. The cook sent me upstairs with some meats he needed sliced. I had never been upstairs before, but I had heard stories from the bartender that there was a ghost up there. I was scared witless but I had to go. I certainly didn’t want to seem incapable of performing the duties that my new position required.

I entered the well-lit storage area and moved past rows of boxes to the slicer in the back. I steeled myself, lit a cigarette, and began to slice. Everything went well for a while until I turned off the slicer. In the new silence I felt the unmistakable sensation that I was not alone. I felt someone or something was up there with me.

And then I heard a weird sound. It was a metallic noise; like ball bearings. All at once, I recognized the sound as that of roller-skates or a skateboard. My blood turned to ice when I saw an actual skateboard rolling slowly from the other end of the room toward me. It passed my frozen form and hit the wall next to the slicer.

The crashing sound broke my paralysis and I ran for the door. Halfway there, I realized I forgot to clean the slicer and grab the meats. I stopped, turned around and ran back to the slicer. I grabbed the meats, all the while staring at the skateboard for further movement. I decided there was no way I was going to clean that slicer. I had decided that I would have rather dealt with the consequences of not cleaning the slicer than deal with whatever rolled that skateboard toward me. My job at Bunny’s did not last long after that.

In my twenties I landed a job as a title searcher in the Essex County courthouse in Newark. I was very excited to have access to the historic building and its underground tunnels. I thought for sure that I would encounter some strange things in such a setting. But, alas, there was nothing lurking in the shadows there for me to see. I did however make some great friends there and one of these friendships led me to another bizarre experience.

My co-worker, Angie, lives in one of the oldest houses in Nutley. When I first met Angie, she informed me that her house was haunted by the ghost of a woman named Rosie. She related to me various encounters that she, her husband Frank and her son had with the phantom. The three of them had felt her presence, seen her shadow, smelt her scent, or, in Frank’s case, heard her whisper his name right next to his ear. The experiences, they said, were not necessarily frightening and they did not perceive her as evil. They just viewed it as a curiosity and part of the house’s charm. I had expressed an interest in investigating the history of the house, but I soon forgot all about it.

Almost a year later, Angie had a small gathering at her house and I was invited. We were having a great time smoking, drinking, and chatting in the kitchen. I excused myself to use the bathroom, and soon discovered that the only bathroom in the house was on the dark, solitary second floor. Keep in mind, that by this point I had totally forgotten the haunted history of the house. So I climbed to the second floor and quickly found the bathroom at the top of the stairs.

The bathroom was weird to me, but must have been quite modern when the house was first built. The bathroom door had a frosted window that went from midway to the top of the door and it had a sliding lock. As I was going about my business, I felt someone jiggle the lock and try to open the door. I called out that the bathroom was occupied and that I would be right out. There was no answer, but I thought I saw the faint outline of someone waiting through the frosted glass. After washing my hands, I opened the door expecting to see the person waiting patiently. I was so sure someone was there, that I began to make a little joke as to why it took me so long. The joke fell silent on my lips when I saw that no one was there. I felt an odd presence, as if someone was watching me from the dark hallway to the right of the bathroom.

I went back downstairs and informed the other six party guests that the bathroom was now free and whoever was at the door could use it. They said that none of them had moved from the kitchen since I left. I asked if they were playing a joke on me, and they swore that they weren’t. Angie then said “Oh, it’s probably just Rosie.” I shuddered as the memory of the stories she had told me came rushing back into my mind. I guess I had just met Rosie.

Awareness of my paranormal interests soon spread throughout my job at the courthouse and people began approaching me with their experiences. I began to establish friendships with people of similar concerns. One of my friends pointed out an ad in the newspaper for a meeting of the New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society. We joined the group and began attending meetings. On one hand, it was great to be surrounded by people with similar interests. But on the other hand, I am a bit of a loner and a skeptic and I found I was distancing myself from what I thought were some of my more “credulous” peers. Was it Woody Allen that said he wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have someone like him as a member? I agree, although I don’t understand why I am of that mindset.

My membership in the New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society (NJGHS) lasted long enough for me to go on an investigation to the “Spy House” at the Jersey shore. The “Spy House,” as it is commonly known, is one of the oldest standing buildings in America. Built in the 1600’s it has been everything from a hotel, to a tavern, to a museum. The house itself was involved in enough cloak and dagger operations during the wars to earn its name. And the building and grounds have seen so many bloody conflicts and controversies to earn its long history of haunting. Many people have seen apparitions of varying kinds at the “Spy House” and its surrounding grounds. I was understandably very excited to be part of this expedition.

I was a bit disappointed to find out that we didn’t have permission to go inside the “Spy House” and that the area was infested with gigantic mosquitoes. We would just be allowed to wander the grounds and peer in through the windows as we swatted at the vampiric legion that danced around our heads.

As soon as we arrived at the “Spy House,” Darryl, one of the directors of the NJGHS, and I ran around to the back to check out an interesting effect produced by one of the rear windows. He told me that the left side window on the second floor had a large number of “orbs” around it. “Orbs” are free floating balls of energy that many people associate with haunting. He took out his digital camera and took a shot of the window. The resulting picture showed a huge ball of light floating in front of the window. He wanted to take as many pictures as he could before other people got off the bus, because orbs, he said, tend to dissipate when there are too many people present. Sure enough, he kept taking pictures and the orb got smaller and smaller in each picture in direct proportion to the amount of people that approached us. Soon there was no energy coming from that window.

Adjacent to the “Spy House” stand two other structures. One is a barn and the other a tiny, one room schoolhouse. Both are also very old and are reputedly haunted. One of the members of the research group is a professional psychic, and he and I paired up and left the group at the “Spy House” to go check out the schoolhouse.

As we approached the dark structure, he said he felt many childish eyes looking out at us from the inside. I left him on one side of the house and walked around to the other side. As I turned the corner I had a distinct impression of a young boy approach me and stand beside me. My eyes got watery and I got goose bumps as I knew in my heart that a little boy was standing next to me about to hold my hand. I knew that if I looked down I would see him there looking up at me with wonder in his eyes. I looked down, but I was alone.

I called out to the psychic and told him to come near me. He came around the corner and when he saw me, he stopped dead in his tracks. He said that standing next to me was the presence of a young boy named Nathaniel. He told me that Nathaniel wanted to communicate with me and that I should speak to him in a soothing voice. I didn’t fully believe him, but I decided to play along.

I said “Hi, Nathaniel. We are just visiting and we mean you no harm.”

Just as I was speaking to him, more people from the group walked over to join us. I felt the presence disappear. A second later, the psychic said that Nathaniel was gone. We guessed that the other people must have scared him away. We hung around a bit to see if the new people would leave, but everyone wanted to chat with the psychic, so I left.

I sat by the bus and re-examined what I had just experienced. The more I thought about it and the more time passed it seemed less and less real. I was so revved up to see or feel something that night, that I let my mind get the best of me. I mean, the psychic was the one that told me the building was a schoolhouse and that he felt the eyes of many children staring right at us. My mind filled in the blanks. So, of course I felt a child next to me. That is what I was expecting to feel. And of course I felt the presence vanish when people approached, because that is what Darryl told me earlier in regards to the orb at the window. It all began to seem a bit too convenient. By the end of the night I had convinced myself that it was probably all just my imagination.

The NJGHS disbanded soon thereafter. And a new internet based group was formed from its ashes. But I haven’t joined that one yet. I sort of lost interest. I am always very wary of group mentality and losing my individual focus if I were to join a group. So I began to do investigations on my own.

Most of the investigations I was called to do ended up having rational explanations. A drafty window, noisy neighbors, a door that didn’t quite fit in its frame, - all these things were being misinterpreted as ghostly activities. I began to think that if you believe hard enough in ghosts, you will encounter them everywhere you turn. You will immediately think of supernatural explanations for mundane events. Your own mind will turn against you.

The last case I investigated was in a colonial era house in Boonton. A single mother of two had recently purchased this historic house and was in the process of remodeling. My wife and I were at a party at the house next door and our host told us of the adjacent property. He said that the lady of the house would like for me to come over and see if I felt any odd presences in this house. A small group of us left the party and formed an impromptu investigation team.

We toured the house starting at the top and working our way down to the basement. We felt nothing unusual around the house, but as soon as we were being shown the basement, I got the distinct mental image of an older woman running out of the basement in a panic. The mental picture came and went in an instant, but I made note of it to my wife and our host. Further in the basement, we approached what I assumed to be a cold storage room. It was dark and very cold. Hooks for meat hung down from the ceiling and it had a foreboding aura around it. By this time we had lost most of our team to the lure of alcohol back at the party. And the home owner had to go back upstairs to check on her children. So, my wife, the host of the party, and I entered the cold storage room and closed the door.

My wife stayed near the door, while our host wandered over to the furthest side of the room. I stood in the middle of the room with no one immediately near me. I opened my mind and tried to see what I could feel in this room. I felt nothing. I opened my mouth to say that I didn’t really feel anything weird, when suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was subtle, but it was there. Tap; tap, on my left shoulder. There was no one within touching distance of me. I called out to the host and my wife and they were still at their locations. Yet, something touched my shoulder. I waited to see if anything else would happen, but nothing further occurred.

Back at the party, I revealed to the crowd my experience. And everyone was bored.

We began to ponder the possible explanations and we determined that there could have been loose plaster or condensation on the ceiling or a bug that could have fallen on my shoulder as the lady of the house walked on the floor above. This could not be refuted because as soon as I felt the tap, I instinctively rubbed my shoulder. I could have unwittingly gotten rid of the evidence there in the darkened room. I agreed with their assertion.

But something was still troubling me.

I returned to the house and asked the lady if she knew any of the history of the house. She said she did not, but she did know that an old lady lived there at some point. And that she had found a picture of the old lady in the attic. I asked to see the picture and was not surprised to recognize the face as the old lady I saw in my vision running out of the basement in a panic. This recognition I kept to myself. I just thanked her again, went back to the party and drank.

After that experience I pretty much gave up on ghost hunting. The topic still fascinates me, but now I take more of a casual approach to it. I figure that ghosts are a mystery that will never be fully explained or understood. So, why waste my energy seeking out and being afraid of the dead? Apart from a few taps, hand-holdings, and sucker punches, ghosts can’t really harm us. All they can do is raise more questions and make us jump at shadows. Ghosts, if they do exist, don’t really frighten me much anymore.

Besides, I had an experience several years ago that frightened me so much that ghosts and demons just cant compete with: I was nearly murdered.

My friends Ron, Mike, Dennis, and I went camping at Spruce Run Lake in the late 80’s. Spruce Run Lake is a large man made lake surrounded by miles of campgrounds and wilderness. It is located off Route 78 west near Farmingdale. When I was younger, my family often spent Saturdays at the lake. So, I thought it would be a good idea to go there with my friends and an older mentality.

We arrived late on a Friday night and were unable to get a camping spot, so we had to sleep out in the car. All of us are notorious for snoring, so you can just imagine the sounds coming from that tiny car parked by the lakeside. At one point, I couldn’t sleep anymore, so I got out and sat by the water looking across its foggy expanse and listened to “Music For The Masses” by Depeche Mode. How gothic of me!

The next morning we awoke nice and early and got a great spot. We spent the day running around the lake having fun and as evening fell, we went back to our campsite to drink and relax. Mike and Dennis, huge sports fans, had a portable television and settled down to watch some baseball game or another. Ron and I, not really into sports, just sat at the edge of the camp and drank Jack Daniels.

Now, before I go on with the tale, I must assure you that we were NOT drunk. We had barely gotten a buzz going when we were nearly killed. But I am getting ahead of myself.

It was approximately 9:00 pm and Ron had just passed me the bottle of Jack when we were approached by an attractive young Spanish woman holding a young boy’s hand. The woman appeared to be in her mid 20’s and had a pleasant smile, while the child seemed to be around 8 and had a blank expression on his face.

“Hi guys,” she said. “Can you tell me where the lake is?”

We explained that the lake was a mile or so away and that it was a pretty long walk to make alone at night. We asked her why she would want to go at night. She told us that she had just gotten there and had not yet had a chance to see the lake. We offered to escort her there and she accepted.

We couldn’t believe our luck. A really cute looking woman was actually going to hang out with us. Ok, so she had a kid. So what? I figured Ron could play with the kid and keep him entertained while I made a play for the mom. The problem was Ron was thinking the same thing about me playing with the kid while he chatted up the mom.

We set off down the dark path away from the campsite. The walk was pleasant and the conversation was mostly about the weather and the stars. The child was quiet the whole time, and I just assumed that he was shy. As soon as we got out of sight of the camp, the conversation took a strange detour.

“Do you guys like horror movies,” she asked. “I love them. I just saw a movie today called ‘Demons.’ It was really good. You guys saw it?”

I told her that I had seen it and that I was a fan of the genre. That was a mistake. Horror movies were all she talked about the rest of the dark, spooky walk to the lake. She seemed to be especially fond of supernatural horror.

All the talk about ghosts and zombies was putting me on edge and I glanced over at Ron. The look in his face told me that he was sharing my feeling of unease. I looked down at the kid to see if he was uncomfortable, but he was still just staring off ahead, oblivious to our conversation.

I had finally managed to steer the conversation away from creepy things and toward the loveliness of the moon, when we arrived at the edge of the lake. The crescent shaped beach lay out before us bathed in moonlight. For one second I was overcome with the beauty of the beach, and I actually let go of my sense of dread.

It didn’t last very long.

“Wow!” she began. “This looks just like Crystal Lake. You know ‘Friday The 13^th’? Hey, I wonder where Jason is. This is really cool.”

Then she started making the Jason breathing noises from the movies: “Ch…Ch…Ch…Ah…Ah…Ah.”

“Uh, let’s not wake him up,” I tried to stop her. “Check out the water. Doesn’t it look cool like that?”

By this point we had walked halfway around the lake. We stopped and looked out over the water. She agreed that the water looked beautiful with the reflection of the moon dancing upon it. She then pointed out that it was a full moon and that we should be careful because werewolves could be lurking around.

This chick does not quit, I thought as we began to walk again.

As we walked the second half of the lake crescent, she looked down at the sand and exclaimed excitedly: “This is where I was buried earlier today!”

For one second, I was fine with that exclamation. Lots of people go to the beach and get buried up to their neck in the sand, usually by a smiling child. But then a thought hit me. She said they had just gotten there and she hadn’t had a chance to see the beach yet. I later found out that Ron had the exact same thought I had at the exact same moment.

Ron and I both wanted to vocalize our question, but before we could do so, things began to happen. The child stopped and turned around to stare behind us. Then the woman stopped and turned around. I felt my stomach drop, and I suddenly knew two things: One, that we were no longer alone on that dark beach; and Two, I did not want to see what was behind us.

Ron and I turned around and standing there behind us was a truly frightening creature. It was a Hispanic man in his early forties. He was tall, shirtless and had long messy hair and a huge beard. He was wearing a pair of cut-off shorts and sneakers and in his hand he held the biggest machete knife I have ever seen. His eyes seemed cruel and full of anger.

He began screaming in Spanish: “You whore! What are you doing with these two guys? I’m gonna kill them!”

Now I would like to say that Ron and I faced the man and explained the situation. But I would be lying. The instant we saw the man, and his machete, we ran. We turned around and hauled ass across the sand toward the low wall that separated the sand from the grassy hill that led back to the main road.

They say running on sand is difficult. I wouldn’t know. I flew across the sand and was over the wall almost instantly.

I heard Ron cry out and turned around to see him struggling to get back on his feet after tripping over the two foot wall. Right behind him, teeth bared and sword raised was the maniac. I reached back and helped Ron get over the wall, all the while staring right into the man’s burning eyes. We made it over the wall and began the long run up the steep hill that led to the road.

All background noise faded and all I could hear was the sound of my pounding heart as it tried to keep up with the demand of my running legs. We didn’t dare to look back for fear he would be right on top of us. We just kept running. I could barely breathe as we finally made it to the road and to supposed safety.

The road was dark as we ran onto the pavement. All of a sudden, we were bathed in light, as twin headlights came on, revealing a black car that had been waiting for us on the road. The engine of the car revved up and we saw the wheels begin to turn, kicking up dirt and asphalt.

We ran across the road as the speeding car approached us. We dove down into the gully on the other side of the road and rolled down the hill into the darkness and safety of the briars and undergrowth. There we lay really still and hid, surrounded by stones, bushes, and bugs. My lungs felt like they would burst, but I dared not breathe too deeply for fear of alerting our pursuers to our location.

From the road above we heard the car come to a halt. We heard a door open and then we heard laughter. The laughter was soon joined in by more laughter. This time we recognized the laughter as that of two men, a woman and a small child. We heard some murmured words in Spanish and then more laughter as a car door closed. We then heard the car turn and shine its headlights high above us. Then the headlights were gone and we heard the car drive away.

We remained in our position for almost another hour to make sure the coast was clear. Even though by this point we had surmised that we had been the victims of a vicious practical joke, we decided to wait a while anyway “just in case.” We were taking no chances.

When we finally left our hiding spot, we were sore, sweaty, and bitten by every bug in a 20 foot radius. We climbed up the hill to the dark, empty road and began the long journey back to our campsite. What a walk that was! We were jumping at every shadow and nearly took off running again when a skunk tried to befriend us.

Mike and Dennis did not believe our story and had no intention of packing up and leaving at 11:30pm. Ron and I had no intention of staying there, however. Dramatic as always, I grabbed a nearby hatchet and threatened them with physical violence if we didn’t leave. I don’t know if it was the hatchet, or just the fact that they got tired of hearing me bitch, but we left that night. The drive back in silent anger was worth it to be able to sleep in the safety of my own bed.

The next day, I told my Mother of the experience. When she eventually calmed down and after making me swear that I would never be so foolish again, she told me something fascinating. It seems she was no stranger to the story that I told her.

She told me that in Puerto Rico, some con artists have a technique by which they send an attractive girl out to the tourist resorts to lure single guys away to solitary places. Once there, an armed man appears playing the role of the “jealous husband”. They then either rob the tourist or intimidate him into paying restitution to make up for the offense of trying to be alone with the man’s wife.

My Mom thinks that Ron and I were singled out in a similar plot. I don’t know. That woman really seemed to be into horror movies. I like to think that it was her and her friends’ idea of a scary practical joke. And I have to be honest, even thought I nearly soiled my pants, it was pretty darn funny.

I have finally figured out that no matter how scary those ghostly experiences I had were they could never compare to the fear of being nearly murdered by a knife wielding psychopath late at night in a deserted campground. Don’t get me wrong. I still have an avid interest in ghosts and strange phenomena (I watch “Ghosthunters” on Sci Fi Network religiously). It’s just that other, real scary concepts began to take my attention – the state of our country, war, injustice, hatred, apathy, cruelty, intolerance. These are the real monsters that could hurt us. Ghosts just don’t seem that scary in comparison to the Bush administration. Once you have experienced the fear of the living, the fear or the dead pales by comparison.