| The following is an excerpt from my interview on Literary Kicks: Ever since I was a kid, I’ve read countless books on unexplained mysteries -- all the supposedly documented stuff about ghosts, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, spontaneous human combustion, the devil’'s footprints in Devon, the Bell Witch, and so on. But what a lot of people don’t get is that I am fascinated in equal measure by the stories themselves and in the mechanics of documentation. This goes to my interest in meta-fiction, which includes devices of writing as part of the story, like the poem and footnotes in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the books within books of VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen, or the complete text of Aylett’s Lint. I sometimes find unintended humor in the way paranormal investigators use some facts and omit others. Take the Bell Witch legend. There is a house in Adams, Tennessee where in 1817 a man named John Bell and his family experienced poltergeist activity. The word spread until even General Andrew Jackson heard about it. This part is true. Jackson, his wife, and some friends actually traveled by covered wagon to Adams, Tennessee to spend the night in the Bell house. By all accounts, nobody got much sleep that night. People were pinched and slapped in the dark, covers got pulled off of beds, weird noises were heard. Andrew Jackson is widely quoted as saying, "I would rather fight the British than to deal with the Bell Witch!" But what he actually said was, "I saw nothing, but I heard enough to convince me that I would rather fight the British than to deal with this torment they call the Bell Witch!" I tried, in Tamper, to capture some of the humorous aspect of paranormal documentation. To convey the fun of it. Having said that, I don't mean to imply that all paranormal activity bogus. I seriously believe that magic and science are both flowing wide-open at the same time, like two parallel river currents that converge briefly at points. When we really tune in to it, we see that it’s the same river, but if you look too close, it diverges again. I think Tamper will appeal to the pulp science fiction fans and the Forteans - folks who know that Richard Shaver was an actual writer for Amazing Stories Magazine in the 1940s, as well as people who like offbeat historical fiction. My first draft had Richard Shaver as one of the central characters, in the manner that James Morrow includes Ben Franklin as a character in his novel The Last Witchfinder, but I wasn’t sure how far I should go that, so I invented Olsen Archer, a friend and colleague of Shaver, to fill out the plot. |
| Chapter One: The photograph showed a procession of ghostly orbs floating through an eerily lit room toward the camera. One explanation for the glowing spheres is that dust particles, stirred by my presence, had reflected the bright flash from the camera, causing an optical illusion. Roger and I didn’t accept that cop-out any more than we believed a few scraps of aluminum foil weather balloon could account for the plethora of witnesses to the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. As far as we were concerned, this was going into our newspaper, The Astral Beat, as a ghostly manifestation. I had taken the mysterious photographs with my 35mm camera in the pitch-dark basement of an old, abandoned church. In the summer of 1972, a few days after graduating from high school, I entered the church through a side door, stepped over rat droppings and busted pews bearing rusted screws, and crept down the dank concrete steps. Extinguishing my hand-held light, I aimed at nothing and clicked the shutter a few times, each flash illuminating a desolate array of dusty angular junk for a lingering microsecond. After developing the film, we were amazed to see spectral orbs of light floating in the church basement. Roger and I were enthusiastic fans of anything involving unexplained mysteries. This was before the actual television shows, Unexplained Mysteries, Ghost Hunters, or In Search Of. There were plenty of books and magazines on the subject, but reading other people’s accounts of strange phenomena was not enough for us. We wanted to be a part of it. At least one psychiatrist has labeled my lifelong thirst for a genuine supernatural experience obsessive. This obsession, or as I prefer to call it, field of study, would eventually carry me across the ocean and, some would say, propel me into insanity. Others say I was insane from the get-go. Looking back, I always did have a secret morbid side, even as a child. Roger said he believed in the paranormal as much as I did, but he always told me, “Whit, I know we are convinced, but we have to construe it for our readers.” We had developed a system of presenting supernatural phenomena that we called the “three-point construct.” There always had to be at least three points. The ghostly orbs floating in the church basement is a perfect example. We looked up the history of the church to see if we could dig up any dirt. According to the archives at the public library, the abandoned Gothic structure had once been Grace Lutheran Church until the Lutherans built a bigger, more modern facility, and sold the old church to the city. Some people wanted to tear it down and build a parking garage for City Hall. Others voted to preserve the church as a historical landmark due to its 19th Century Gothic architecture, with the high pointed steeple, stone archways, stained glass windows, and bell tower. The Town Council formed a committee to avoid doing anything for a while. That was two years ago. We scanned the obituaries for people who had died under the Lutherans’ tenure. A man named Crebnor Miles had died from tuberculosis on August 3, 1912 at the age of forty. The wife, son, and daughter that survived him held a memorial service at Grace Lutheran Church, where they were members. We looked up the church in an old book about our small town, called A History of Hansburg, Virginia. “This is perfect!” said Roger in a loud whisper. “Look.” Back in 1910, the book said, a fire destroyed several buildings and apartments in the downtown area. The Lutheran church didn’t burn, so it provided temporary shelter to all the people who lost their homes to the fire. Neighbors donated clothing, blankets, pillows, and food. The assemblage soon discovered that one man among them had tuberculosis. Fearing that his wife and children might also be infected, they quarantined the whole family in the basement of the church. Could that man have been Crebnor Miles? We had our three-point construct. If anyone questioned the connection between Crebnor Miles and the Lutheran church, we had (1) the obituary, officially documenting his memorial service at said place of worship. If anyone doubted that people had ever been (2) quarantined in the church basement, we had a record of that. While there was no record that Crebnor Miles had been among that group, or for that matter, that anyone actually died in the church basement, I had (3) a photograph of disembodied spirits floating in that very place! “I have a good feeling about this one,” I said. “I think there’s something to it!” “Oh, me too,” Roger agreed. “Me, too. What we need is a quote. We need to visit Old Baxter.” Old Baxter lived across town at the end of a dirt road. His mobile home, ensconced under a shady chestnut tree amid briars, vines, and wildflowers, was actually a 1946 Airfloat travel trailer, made of aluminum and magnesium from refurbished World War II airplane parts. The trailer looked like a space-age moon rover, something out of Buck Rogers. Looking back, I would call it retro, with the clean stylish lines of a solid-state art deco radio. A horizontal red stripe ran along the side, under the windows and across the door. I almost expected to see tailfins. The forward curve on the front end of the trailer held a convex observation window, flanked by two convex vent panels, textured with silvery ridges. Baxter usually needed a couple of dollars for some tonic. “I mix it with sassafras root for my arthritis,” he explained. We gave Baxter enough money to get two bottles of whiskey, one for him and one for us. It was a good way to score alcohol until we were old enough to buy it ourselves. “What you boys want to know?” he asked. “Do you remember something about people being put in the basement of the Lutheran Church after the big fire?” “Oh, I know what you’re talking about,” said Baxter in a vague tone. “I was just a little feller, but I’ll never forget it.” “In 1912?” I said. “That’s right,” said Baxter. “I’ll never forget my daddy tellin’ me about it. ‘Course I was only, uh, not born yet, but yeah. Human beings herded into a cold stone basement like cattle. A terrible chapter in the history of Hansburg . . .” |
| 1946 Airfloat Camper Trailer |
| Bill's Commentary “The Rosetta Stone of American Culture,” is how Jean Shepherd described the Johnson Smith Catalog in his introduction to the 1929 edition. It was basically a novelty catalog featuring the standard whoopee cushions, hand buzzers, X-ray specs, and sea monkeys, but when I was a kid, I gravitated toward the mysterious and mystical sections. While a part of me knew that these items were probably not as profound as they seemed, I used to pour over these pages for hours, for weeks, saving my money to purchase access to other worlds. It was like getting lost on the street where Harry Potter shops for magic wands, long before Harry Potter existed. |
One of the many books on unexplained phenomena
that I read as a kid was The World's Strangest
Mysteries (1961) by Ruper Furneaux. The chapters in
this book fluctuated from well-researched to wildly
speculative.
that I read as a kid was The World's Strangest
Mysteries (1961) by Ruper Furneaux. The chapters in
this book fluctuated from well-researched to wildly
speculative.
| Chapter One: 1972 |
| Tamper |