In a previous blog I mentioned my own experience with what might have been a ghost a short time after losing my grandmother. I also mentioned my uncle and his experiences with otherworldly phenomena. And that he was a spiritualist minister (and a fantasy-driven personality) and ran a spiritualist “church” out of his house every Friday night. I’ll get into some of the things that went on during those “services” in later blogs.
But for now, as an addendum to my own experience, I should add my uncle and his family’s supposed encounter with my grandmother’s “ghost”.
My paternal grandmother, who died in 1973, had lived with my uncle, Dr. Herbert Hopkins, since the late 60s (my grandfather having passed away only a few months before I was born in 1961.) The house very large, old,with three levels, and she had a room upstairs. (and fitted with those old steam radiators in every room that could make anyone think a house was haunted in the dead of night—no fictional ghost ever made as much clanking noise as came out of those things.)
Not long after my grandmother passed on, my uncle and various members of his family started claiming her ghost was doing peculiar things. The TV in her room would suddenly come on while everyone was downstairs; they would find her butt imprint in the cushion of her favorite rocking chair in her room. The scent of a flowery perfume she wore would suddenly reek throughout the upstairs hallway. And of course the usual assortment of whispers, creaking rocking chairs and ghostly coughs. I think once he even claimed he discovered the upstairs bathtub filled with water (now that happens sometimes in this area but there’s a perfectly natural explanation—which is neither pretty nor fragrant.)
As I mentioned in the Men in Black blog, I spent a lot of time at my uncle’s house as a kid, especially that summer when I practically lived there because my mother was experiencing health problems that required hospital stays and my father worked 12-hour days. I have to admit, being barely twelve I was pretty nervous about going into my grandmother’s room after she passed, and the ghost stories coming from my relatives didn’t help that much.
And while I was there I never heard the TV come on by itself, though I did see the imaginary imprint in the chair cushion (which was pretty much always there and larger than my grandmother’s rear-end, so I am fairly certain my uncle was doing it late at night after he’d spent a few hours with Captain Hooch.) I did smell the perfume too, but that one is even easier to explain than the imprint. I have only their claims on the TV, but being a fan of the Ghost Hunters series, I also tend to go into these things with an attitude of debunking, especially if it is something I don’t experience myself.
Did these things happen to them? Based on what I know of him, his family (and this is intimate knowledge) and his Men in Black episode, I have strong doubts, despite my own “might-have-experience” with her ghost.
I sometimes wonder why, for all his claims of experiences with the supernatural, my uncle’s ghost hasn’t come back to haunt me. How do I know he hasn’t? Well, if he had I’m pretty sure his spook would have kicked my ass for writing these articles about him by now…
Showing posts with label spirits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spirits. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
The Truth About a Man in Black
I got a phone call the other day, from an interviewer for an Internet show dealing with unusual occurrences and the supernatural. The person I spoke with was interested in a member of my family who’d passed away a couple years back and a certain experience that relative had reported. I hadn’t thought about the story in ages, but it was an interesting conversation and dispelled something that probably had gone on for too long.
My uncle’s name was Dr. Herbert Hopkins. Most of you will say “huh?” and rightly so. A few of you, who are, like me, interested in studying legitimate unusual phenomena may recognize the name, and a handful really into investigating strange occurrences may know exactly who I am talking about. Those who don’t, stayed tuned and I’ll fill you in.
First, a bit of background in a couple areas, on my uncle himself, and on the peculiar phenomena known as the Men in Black (no, not the movie with Will Smith or Johnny Cash clones with bad attitudes).
My uncle was well-known locally and somewhat nationally for a couple reasons. He was a renowned allergist and made WHO’S WHO for his pioneering work with MS. He had a genius level IQ, and knew it, and as is the case sometimes with folks like that (nothing I’ll personally ever have to worry about) had trouble relating to people he thought beneath him in intellectual ability (though conversely he constantly craved an audience, no matter what level). He was often very cold and distant, clinical, the exact opposite of my aunt, who was a lovely, caring woman, if easily deluded. I spent nearly an entire summer living with them while my mother was going through a number of operations, and for the most part I loved every minute of it. Some of my best memories are of the holiday times we spent there, at least with my aunt and cousins, because relating to Uncle Herb was difficult on the best of days (God forbid you did something stupid because you would be belittled for it, and at times I was stupidity-prone). He was vehement in his opinions, strident in expressing them, and unforgiving of those who dared to disagree. And if he caught you, you were in for literally hours of enduring those opinions. Then usually a neck brace from nodding the whole time (if you knew what was good for you). But he could build an electronic organ from scratch, damn near cure the common cold sometimes and his house was a child’s wonderland of passages and an entire wall of speakers (and believe me once those were fired up the whole house shuddered with sound.) He was brilliant and the world was better for him. But sometimes that brilliance has its price, or takes its toll.
He also, for a time in the 1970s, ran a psychic “church”. I have some stories about that, but I’ll save those for another day.
Men in Black. Those enigmatic dudes dressed in, um, black, who show up after a UFO encounter to give some poor soul a bucket load of grief. Them of pasty faces, no lips and all the warmth of Martha Stewart.
And unfortunately the second thing my uncle is known for.
The story originally appeared in the tabloid rag The Star (though I clearly recall the night he first told it. I had just entered high school and my grandparents were up from Florida. They were the ones who my aunt was out with that fateful night and who brought the story back to me.) It was later picked up, with minor variations (or embellishments) in Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown, the excellent encyclopedia set Mysteries of Mind, Space & Time and Jenny Randles’ book, The Truth Behind the Men in Black, among others.
The story goes like this: On a balmy September night in 1976 here in Old Orchard Beach, Dr. Herbert Hopkins, then 58, was home alone (he rarely went anywhere at that point) when he got a mysterious phone call from somebody purporting to be from the New Jersey UFO Research Organization, asking to stop by and discuss a recent case my uncle had been working on. My uncle was a fairly well-known hypnotherapist who had been assisting with the David Stephens abduction case (somewhat famous for the Oxford, Maine, sighting and abduction incident. Stephens and a friend had encountered floating lights on a night drive, experienced hallucinogenic after-effects and missing time.) This person from the NJ-UFO-RO wanted to discuss the case, so my uncle agreed. No sooner did he hang up and switch on the living room light (there were three doors to this place, one from the street, two from the side, one of those entering the shed leading to the kitchen and the other leading directly into the living room. A fourth door actually lay between those, leading to the underground doctor’s office and waiting room. So why the Man in Black (MIB) picked the living room instead of the front door is unknown.) than did this MIB appear at the door. The man had said he was calling from a phone booth, but the distance to the closest booth was many blocks away. (In one version I personally got from my uncle they had a big black car. The story grew quite a bit over time.)
The man had a bald head, drawn-on lips (he wore some sort of lipstick that rubbed off on his glove) and the usual deadpan, monotoned attitude associated with MIBs. I won’t go too deep into the actual story because you can read about it in numerous places, but in a nutshell, this MIB made a coin dematerialize to another “plane”, claimed to have done the same to the heart of another abductee nearby (he was referring to Barney Hill, whose heart, is indeed still intact) and threatened to do the same to my uncle if he did not erase all the tapes from the hypnotic session interviews of David Stephens (anyone wonder why a being who can makes hearts and coins vanish didn’t just simply make the tapes vanish? Tapes that were already public knowledge, incidentally, so why bother?)
At the end of the meeting the MIB’s voice slowed like a battery running down and he staggered away. Which is a pretty intimidating thing to do when you are threatening someone…
There is a related incident a bit later with my uncle’s oldest son and wife (who lived in an apartment on the property), but I will leave that one alone for now. Suffice to say, take it with a huge grain of salt. (As an aside, my cousin was later murdered by that very same wife, so that probably tells you something of the family dynamics there.)
Anyway, like I said, the whole thing was sold to the Star and propagated throughout many legitimate journals devoted to psychic and unusual phenomena investigation. Mostly based on a Dr.’s reputation, despite the obvious inconsistencies of the tale and inherent 50s paranoia overtones (which was exactly where the tale came from. My uncle was an avid reader of 50s horror and sci fi comics, paperbacks and old pulps and minimal research will turn up the parallels.)
My uncle was, unfortunately, a fantasy-prone individual, craved the center of attention and limelight and on a base level he sometimes just made things up—no matter how hyperbolic—to top everybody else. As brilliant as he was in many areas, however, he was unskilled at fiction.
And for much of the ‘70s and 80s, he was an alcoholic. Every night was spent alone with a magnum of wine (he made his own wine, too, in a still in the basement). He would stumble up the stairs at about 5am, tripping over the “invisible dog”. How did I know about the invisible dog? Well, a handful of times when I was sleeping over I would be awake and hear that tripping and the inevitable curse, “goddamn dog!” The real dog, incidentally, was next to me on the bed, staring out at the hall, wondering what the hell the thud had been.
The bottom line for this particular Man in Black tale is unfortunately pretty mundane. This mysterious being in black, inspired by cheap fiction and alcohol, probably less of malicious intent and more from some sad need for attention, was, alas, a simple lie, one that needs to be corrected for those into serious research in this area.
And y’all thought your relatives were weird?
My uncle’s name was Dr. Herbert Hopkins. Most of you will say “huh?” and rightly so. A few of you, who are, like me, interested in studying legitimate unusual phenomena may recognize the name, and a handful really into investigating strange occurrences may know exactly who I am talking about. Those who don’t, stayed tuned and I’ll fill you in.
First, a bit of background in a couple areas, on my uncle himself, and on the peculiar phenomena known as the Men in Black (no, not the movie with Will Smith or Johnny Cash clones with bad attitudes).
My uncle was well-known locally and somewhat nationally for a couple reasons. He was a renowned allergist and made WHO’S WHO for his pioneering work with MS. He had a genius level IQ, and knew it, and as is the case sometimes with folks like that (nothing I’ll personally ever have to worry about) had trouble relating to people he thought beneath him in intellectual ability (though conversely he constantly craved an audience, no matter what level). He was often very cold and distant, clinical, the exact opposite of my aunt, who was a lovely, caring woman, if easily deluded. I spent nearly an entire summer living with them while my mother was going through a number of operations, and for the most part I loved every minute of it. Some of my best memories are of the holiday times we spent there, at least with my aunt and cousins, because relating to Uncle Herb was difficult on the best of days (God forbid you did something stupid because you would be belittled for it, and at times I was stupidity-prone). He was vehement in his opinions, strident in expressing them, and unforgiving of those who dared to disagree. And if he caught you, you were in for literally hours of enduring those opinions. Then usually a neck brace from nodding the whole time (if you knew what was good for you). But he could build an electronic organ from scratch, damn near cure the common cold sometimes and his house was a child’s wonderland of passages and an entire wall of speakers (and believe me once those were fired up the whole house shuddered with sound.) He was brilliant and the world was better for him. But sometimes that brilliance has its price, or takes its toll.
He also, for a time in the 1970s, ran a psychic “church”. I have some stories about that, but I’ll save those for another day.
Men in Black. Those enigmatic dudes dressed in, um, black, who show up after a UFO encounter to give some poor soul a bucket load of grief. Them of pasty faces, no lips and all the warmth of Martha Stewart.
And unfortunately the second thing my uncle is known for.
The story originally appeared in the tabloid rag The Star (though I clearly recall the night he first told it. I had just entered high school and my grandparents were up from Florida. They were the ones who my aunt was out with that fateful night and who brought the story back to me.) It was later picked up, with minor variations (or embellishments) in Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown, the excellent encyclopedia set Mysteries of Mind, Space & Time and Jenny Randles’ book, The Truth Behind the Men in Black, among others.
The story goes like this: On a balmy September night in 1976 here in Old Orchard Beach, Dr. Herbert Hopkins, then 58, was home alone (he rarely went anywhere at that point) when he got a mysterious phone call from somebody purporting to be from the New Jersey UFO Research Organization, asking to stop by and discuss a recent case my uncle had been working on. My uncle was a fairly well-known hypnotherapist who had been assisting with the David Stephens abduction case (somewhat famous for the Oxford, Maine, sighting and abduction incident. Stephens and a friend had encountered floating lights on a night drive, experienced hallucinogenic after-effects and missing time.) This person from the NJ-UFO-RO wanted to discuss the case, so my uncle agreed. No sooner did he hang up and switch on the living room light (there were three doors to this place, one from the street, two from the side, one of those entering the shed leading to the kitchen and the other leading directly into the living room. A fourth door actually lay between those, leading to the underground doctor’s office and waiting room. So why the Man in Black (MIB) picked the living room instead of the front door is unknown.) than did this MIB appear at the door. The man had said he was calling from a phone booth, but the distance to the closest booth was many blocks away. (In one version I personally got from my uncle they had a big black car. The story grew quite a bit over time.)
The man had a bald head, drawn-on lips (he wore some sort of lipstick that rubbed off on his glove) and the usual deadpan, monotoned attitude associated with MIBs. I won’t go too deep into the actual story because you can read about it in numerous places, but in a nutshell, this MIB made a coin dematerialize to another “plane”, claimed to have done the same to the heart of another abductee nearby (he was referring to Barney Hill, whose heart, is indeed still intact) and threatened to do the same to my uncle if he did not erase all the tapes from the hypnotic session interviews of David Stephens (anyone wonder why a being who can makes hearts and coins vanish didn’t just simply make the tapes vanish? Tapes that were already public knowledge, incidentally, so why bother?)
At the end of the meeting the MIB’s voice slowed like a battery running down and he staggered away. Which is a pretty intimidating thing to do when you are threatening someone…
There is a related incident a bit later with my uncle’s oldest son and wife (who lived in an apartment on the property), but I will leave that one alone for now. Suffice to say, take it with a huge grain of salt. (As an aside, my cousin was later murdered by that very same wife, so that probably tells you something of the family dynamics there.)
Anyway, like I said, the whole thing was sold to the Star and propagated throughout many legitimate journals devoted to psychic and unusual phenomena investigation. Mostly based on a Dr.’s reputation, despite the obvious inconsistencies of the tale and inherent 50s paranoia overtones (which was exactly where the tale came from. My uncle was an avid reader of 50s horror and sci fi comics, paperbacks and old pulps and minimal research will turn up the parallels.)
My uncle was, unfortunately, a fantasy-prone individual, craved the center of attention and limelight and on a base level he sometimes just made things up—no matter how hyperbolic—to top everybody else. As brilliant as he was in many areas, however, he was unskilled at fiction.
And for much of the ‘70s and 80s, he was an alcoholic. Every night was spent alone with a magnum of wine (he made his own wine, too, in a still in the basement). He would stumble up the stairs at about 5am, tripping over the “invisible dog”. How did I know about the invisible dog? Well, a handful of times when I was sleeping over I would be awake and hear that tripping and the inevitable curse, “goddamn dog!” The real dog, incidentally, was next to me on the bed, staring out at the hall, wondering what the hell the thud had been.
The bottom line for this particular Man in Black tale is unfortunately pretty mundane. This mysterious being in black, inspired by cheap fiction and alcohol, probably less of malicious intent and more from some sad need for attention, was, alas, a simple lie, one that needs to be corrected for those into serious research in this area.
And y’all thought your relatives were weird?
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Do You Believe in Ghosts?
I have never met a real live ghost. Or real dead ghost, as the case might be. I would really like to. I know others who say they have seen or even talked to ghosts. Me, well, there was that one guy at the DMV…um, hold on, that might have been a zombie, not a ghost.
I have always been interested in ghost-hunting and things that go bump in the night. I suppose I wouldn’t write ghost stories if I weren’t. I can thank Scooby Doo and Dark Shadows for that. (The scariest thing I remember as a child was seeing the ghost of Quentin Collins roaming the halls of Collinwood—ok, that was the second scariest thing because the guy without a head grabbing young women in the woods comes in first, or third if you count a date I had with this girl—we’ll call her Lizzie ‘cause she had this thing about sharp objects—in high school who part-timed at K-Mart. Who knew Blue Light Special had anything to do with auto-erotica and the color your face turned after five minutes alone with this girl? FYI: even plastic handcuffs can be pretty had to break. Um, so I’ve heard.
Anyway…
I had a relative who claimed to see and talk to ghosts. Unfortunately 99.9 percent of them came out of the magnum bottle of wine he polished off each night. There was an invisible dog involved with that, too. Trust me on that one.
Something odd did happen to me as a child (ok, ok, don’t even go there!) It was about a year after my grandmother died, Christmas Eve. Despite all the holiday cheer, I went to bed feeling depressed, something that never happened to me. It wasn’t long after I had turned off all the lights—except the night light—and yeah, yeah, even horror writers can be afraid of the dark as a kid—when I heard a heavy wheezing breathing type thing, considerably like the sound my grandmother was making for a time before she passed away. She was very attached to me, so it was the first thing I thought of upon hearing that sound—check that, second thing, because running was the first thing. Just because horror writers like writing about creepy things doesn’t mean we want to experience most of them personally. I wasn’t even close to falling asleep and might have thought I was imagining it if not for the fact my Dachshund, Schnapsie, who slept with me started acting peculiar. By peculiar I mean staring off at something I couldn’t see and whining. At that point, being the brave child I was, I bolted, dog and all (I loved that dog and even if I was a scaredy-cat I had a certain amount of loyalty!)
About six months later, on a summer night, I experienced the same thing, along with the dog, for the last time. Was my grandmother trying to reach me? I don’t know and could never make myself accept that explanation. Which is why I enjoy ghost-hunting and want a definitive experience of my own.
Of course, I want my ghost to look like Jessica Alba, not some guy with a hanging eyeball and really bad corpse breath. But let’s not go back to the auto-erotica thing…
How ‘bout y’all? Anybody had a definitive experience with a ghost? Or want to have one?
I have always been interested in ghost-hunting and things that go bump in the night. I suppose I wouldn’t write ghost stories if I weren’t. I can thank Scooby Doo and Dark Shadows for that. (The scariest thing I remember as a child was seeing the ghost of Quentin Collins roaming the halls of Collinwood—ok, that was the second scariest thing because the guy without a head grabbing young women in the woods comes in first, or third if you count a date I had with this girl—we’ll call her Lizzie ‘cause she had this thing about sharp objects—in high school who part-timed at K-Mart. Who knew Blue Light Special had anything to do with auto-erotica and the color your face turned after five minutes alone with this girl? FYI: even plastic handcuffs can be pretty had to break. Um, so I’ve heard.
Anyway…
I had a relative who claimed to see and talk to ghosts. Unfortunately 99.9 percent of them came out of the magnum bottle of wine he polished off each night. There was an invisible dog involved with that, too. Trust me on that one.
Something odd did happen to me as a child (ok, ok, don’t even go there!) It was about a year after my grandmother died, Christmas Eve. Despite all the holiday cheer, I went to bed feeling depressed, something that never happened to me. It wasn’t long after I had turned off all the lights—except the night light—and yeah, yeah, even horror writers can be afraid of the dark as a kid—when I heard a heavy wheezing breathing type thing, considerably like the sound my grandmother was making for a time before she passed away. She was very attached to me, so it was the first thing I thought of upon hearing that sound—check that, second thing, because running was the first thing. Just because horror writers like writing about creepy things doesn’t mean we want to experience most of them personally. I wasn’t even close to falling asleep and might have thought I was imagining it if not for the fact my Dachshund, Schnapsie, who slept with me started acting peculiar. By peculiar I mean staring off at something I couldn’t see and whining. At that point, being the brave child I was, I bolted, dog and all (I loved that dog and even if I was a scaredy-cat I had a certain amount of loyalty!)
About six months later, on a summer night, I experienced the same thing, along with the dog, for the last time. Was my grandmother trying to reach me? I don’t know and could never make myself accept that explanation. Which is why I enjoy ghost-hunting and want a definitive experience of my own.
Of course, I want my ghost to look like Jessica Alba, not some guy with a hanging eyeball and really bad corpse breath. But let’s not go back to the auto-erotica thing…
How ‘bout y’all? Anybody had a definitive experience with a ghost? Or want to have one?
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