Doppelgänger

No, not my Doppelganger - this just happened to be the only picture handy that might illustrate the concept. It was actually my brother's Doppelganger who made an appearance last week.

It's not rare to see (or even more commonly, hear) my brother when he's not there. Flashes of clothes or beard around the corner, his disembodied footsteps in the hall. It's long been a family joke. My brother is so grouchily cynical, yet the paranormal follows him like Pigpen's dust cloud on Peanuts. I swear it's trying to take pokes at him. I'm just surprised it hasn't rained stones or fish on him by now

Even my youngest son isn't exempt from being tricked by his uncle's shade. "Here comes uncle Igneous up the walkway!" he shouts, only to find no one there and that his uncle is out of town. And there was that entire week when we all heard him come in and flop down on the couch every day about noon, when he was really at work the whole time.  It's not a new issue; it's just his thing.

What happened a couple of days ago was new, however. 

Last Thursday, about 6 PM, I see my brother get out of his truck in the driveway and head toward the carport. (yes, by Jove, he is still living in our carport. His latest plot is building one of those tiny houses to move to his land. Anyway...) I was standing on the lawn maybe 30 feet away, wondering who was following behind him. For a moment I thought it might have been my elder son, but that didn't seem right. They have a similar build, but a different walk, and besides, the following figure was dressed like my brother. I blinked. Could I be seeing double? But my vision was otherwise fine, and what's more, the follower was moving at a different speed. That's when things get weird...

My brother was walking the way he normally does, but the figure behind him was trailing much slower. Indeed, I was put in mind of frames of a film being cranked slowly through a projector, with the figure seeming to fade out just toward the end of the frame before appearing in the next. It was very, very odd. I watched their progress into the carport, then had to go think it over. Despite the jokes about my brother bi-locating, I'd never seen anything like this before, let alone the Doppelganger appearing in the same place at the same time.

What to make of this? Well, there is a medical condition that can make things appear in slow motion, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't isolate one object, nor does it come and go in an instant. Not very likely the explanation in this case. No more likely than something popping in from another dimension. Or an honest-to-goodness Doppelganger, for that matter.

To see one's Doppelganger is a bad sign. To see it following your footsteps is even worse. I decided to say nothing to my brother - no sense in alarming him if it did turn out to be some quirk of my vision.  

Early the next morning, though, he had a strange story to tell

About 5 AM, he was awoken by someone opening the door to his trailer and motioning to him to come with them. He thought it must be one of us, but it was dark and he couldn't see well. He told the person he'd be a minute, got dressed and came into the house. But we were all asleep. It was none of us who'd done it. 

Perhaps it was just a dream. 

Perhaps. 

But I have my own ideas about who came to his door that night.

The Topiary Angel

I was the last to notice that something was wrong about the woman in the corner apartment. She was only very aged, I thought, and maybe a bit out of touch with reality. Lawrence said she gave him the creeps, though, he didn't like walking past her door. Angela said she was crazy, but when I asked how she knew, she just said, "I know."

The first time I understood was when the topiary angel appeared, set up in the garden facing the woman's windows. I should say, it was once a topiary angel. Now it was something else, and we felt cold when we walked by. It still had the vague shape of wings at its back, covered in ragged greenery like the rest, but its face was greyish with mold.and its crown was a triad of spikes. It was no longer the thing it was meant to be, but had become something chilling and strange.

We could see the angel's dark shape beyond the ash trees, and learned to circumvent that part of the garden. Sometimes we'd forget though, and realize too late that we would have to cross its path.We'd hurry as quickly as we could, feeling the gaze from its eyeless, moldering face.

The woman watched from the window. At night, she would creep into the garden to talk to the shape in a low voice. Sometimes she would place objects inside its frame; marbles or bits of colored foil. Then she would take them away again.

Stephanie said, I want to get rid of it, just run by and snatch it and hurl it into the nearest dumpster. But I can't stand the thought of touching it.

The woman on the corner muttered and whispered. She talked about poison, how they all wanted to poison her. There was a strange smell in her apartment, in the vents. They had killed her dog, she said. But the angel was watching them.

She disappeared one night, the woman, along with the angel. Only the crown of spikes remained, wedged in the boughs of the ash tree. We all stood, staring, wanting to take it away but too afraid. Eventually, the crown disappeared too, and the fear at last began to fade from the garden.

This is the last I know of the topiary angel.

What Once Was (Or, Guess What, Victoria Is Still Creepy)

(note: I wrote this back in December. I'm just now dragging it out of draft.)

Last month, I went back to Victoria, returning to a house I once stayed in many years ago. It was a bit sad and nostalgic, because it was at a major turning point that I had come to stay back then, on the eve of starting a new life in a new place. Now that time has long passed, the couple who lived in that house are gone, the people we worked with are gone, everything is irrevocably changed.  

Well, one thing is the same, something I'd forgotten after being away for over a year. In my current town, you couldn't take a spooky-looking picture if you tried. In Victoria, all you have to do is point your camera at random and snap:

See? Which was really the idea behind this blog - my wish to document what made that particular town so very strange, even if the strangeness went unnoticed - or at least unmentioned - by the majority of people (the minority who did mention it admitted to being spooked as all hell). 

It did catch me by surprise, though, after all this time. Snapping away with the camera, mostly out of boredom,.and seeing something very different turning up in the viewfinder than what I'd seen with my own eyes.

Case in point - 

 I don't like posting my own photo on this blog in any recognizable fashion, but it's kind of necessary here. I had entered the bedroom I once slept in, nigh on twenty years ago when I was but a young thing, and I thought, ah, let me take a picture for memory's sake. Here is the mirror I once gazed at, the daybed I once slept in, exactly as I remember it, an ordinary little room in an ordinary little frame house, nothing special or unique outside of personal attachment...

Oh, no, wait a minute. Apparently I had been sleeping in Dr. Dread's Mausoleum of Doom without realizing it. (enlarge to get the full effect)

Sadly, there are no non-creepy photos to compare these against. I took plenty, but some things are just too terrible to bear looking at.

This was all very interesting, so I got a little curious about how the rest of the house would photograph. How would I, product of the 70's, look in the 70's era kitchen? The 70's weren't creepy. They were tacky, but not creepy.

Well, it was fine, except in the photo it looks like a potential crime scene: Or like that bit in a movie right before something bad happens:

After that, I ventured into the room in the house that I did find overtly creepy, the den everyone had always seemed to avoid. I would soon find out why.

While setting up the camera and finding a suitably dramatic pose, I think I manged to tick off whatever was in there, because I definitely began to feel a presence. It was not pleased. The self-timer was set to take three shots, but I was so spooked that I couldn't manage to stay long enough for all three.

I'm normally more curious than afraid when it comes to haunted houses and mysterious presences, but this was a truly awful feeling.

There is something really wrong with these photos, something besides bad lighting and noise. I often take photos with poor light experimentally, to better understand how lighting affects the image. No, it's something else. Something looks wrong with my shadow, like it's someone else, standing behind me...

And another thing, harder to pinpoint. It's as if I don't want to look too hard, because there might be something there I don't want to see hiding in the image. It's like that with all of the photos I took that night, the sense of another presence there, watching the camera watching me.

Maybe that's the thing about Victoria, for those who notice it  - it's not just the sodden air and the swollen ground, the isolation or the tension and angst swirling like a low-lying fog - those things are obvious, only those in deepest denial could miss them. It's something else there - the spirit of the place, immaterial, watching, just out of sight.

Or maybe it's just all those bloody clowns...

Lone Oak Cemetery, Part 3

It was nearly 17 years ago that my brother told me of something strange at Lone Oak. He had been visiting our aunt's grave late one afternoon, when his attention was caught by a headstone with a woman's photograph. The year of her death was 1919. He was completely alone in the cemetery, so I suppose he was unconcerned about being overheard when he spoke aloud: "Huh. I wonder if she died in the flu epidemic."

According to him, he immediately heard a buzzing in the air. It sounded like a lot of people whispering at once..Out of these sounds, he said, a distinct voice said "yes". It came from the left, from the grave of the woman's daughter. The whispering died away, and he was suddenly aware that the sun was very low in the sky and the wind was picking up. To hear him tell it, he couldn't get out of there fast enough.

It certainly sounded creepy. "Well, if you go out there, just don't go at sunset" he said.

It really was happenstance that the sun was beginning to set when my cousin and I wound our way to the cemetery gates later that year. It had been a long trip, we had spent hours at the library doing research and come all this way. It was less than fortunate timing, but we weren't going to not stop just because of that. Besides, we had  fresh cut roses to bring to our aunt, it would be a shame to waste them.

It was June, the grain was high in the fields. It felt so isolated, with only a few houses and a church across the road. The sun was on the horizon, but never mind, there was plenty of light left to do what we came to do. We laid the flowers for our aunt and decided to search out the grave where my brother heard the voice. It wasn't far - the grave of  a woman named Elsa, next to her daughter, Alma. Alma's photo plaque was sadly broken, but Elsa looked to be a sensible lady, not so scary. We heard no voices, but perhaps it  was at that point I began to feel a little strange.

I said nothing to my cousin, but  kept seeing movement out of the corner of my eye. There was nothing there of course, but even seeing nothing I could swear there was something.. I turned it over in my mind - the movements of trees, shadows? Perhaps those little flags placed on veteran's graves being whipped about in the wind. Nerves. Then again, this cemetery was peaceful. It didn't feel threatening. But why did I keep mistaking the shape of the headstones for people? Why did I feel so sure we were being watched?

We continued walking, my cousin reading out the women's names on the headstones: Mitta, Lille, Alamina.... "such pretty, old-fashioned names"  she said. It was dark enough that we noticed that the cross on the church opposite was lighted. We were nervous enough to feel comforted by it. The wind was really picking up.

              The lighted cross on the church opposite, July, 2012

We were walking toward the west corner - drawn by its relative isolation - when a car sped down  the narrow road through the cornfields. A young man out for a joyride perhaps. The car disappeared into the distance. We kept walking, but my cousin had become remarkably quiet. I wasn't feeling so chatty either. I wasn't scared exactly, but something was becoming very wrong. A strange thought came to me: "That was the first alarm."

 The sky was still streaked with pink but the sun had set.. The sound of the wind in the fields was not comforting. I hadn't realized the way wind can blow across flat land, that constant hollow rushing. It went on and on.

The man in the car sped past again. We saw him through the gates. That was the second alarm, I thought. My cousin kept looking  toward the lighted cross. I was beginning to feel real fear now, the kind that was like an outside pressure forcing my body to move. Five minutes later, the man in the car sped by again, and my cousin who looked  very white in the face, said. "I think we'd better go now." As we started to move toward the gate, the fear came upon us so strong that we began to run. It was a blind panic, terror. It seemed more than the fear that some guy might harass us on a country road at twilight, though that was bad enough. It seemed like something else. It was as if something had begun to yell at us to run.

We didn't speak for a while. When we did, we tried to think what happened. Well, that man in the car was unsettling, no? It could have been him who caused us to panic. But maybe not. There was something else there. We could feel it. That lighted cross on the church seemed almost as if it had a specific purpose, facing the graveyard that way. The next time we went, we made sure we brought a male friend, so we wouldn't have to worry about strange men on country roads. We went even later, at night. We wanted to know what it was that frightened us- maybe it was just that man, after all. Our friend was very jovial, out for a lark. I can't even say what happened - only that one moment we were walking down the lane in the pitch darkness, Jeff chuckling that we'd need a guardian for this - and the next we were all scrambling into the car, scared out of our minds. Even Jeff  was so frightened he couldn't open the simple latch on the gate - we jumped it instead.

A year later, I gave it another try, with another companion this time. I had brought him to show him this place where my some of my family had settled. Once again, we didn't mean to come at sunset, it was bad timing. Again, I felt safe enough not to forgo the visit. Probably I had exaggerated the fear in my mind. We walked about as the sun was setting. It was he who first pointed out the cradle boards around the grave in the west corner - I hadn't yet had the nerve to make it back there on my own. We crisscrossed the grounds, splitting up to examine things on our own. The sun had dropped below the horizon and the wind had begun to pick up the way it always seemed to do as night was falling. Again, I was amazed at how far sound carried there. There was no one to be seen for miles, but I could hear the sound of people working, building something perhaps, shouting to each other and banging away on something metal. .The sounds made it feel less lonely. It was getting quite dark and the wind was howling by then. I was back in the west corner, taking a closer look at those odd, out of place burial sites. They really were intriguing. The fear I'd felt must have been my imagination, it wasn't bad here at all....

I hear a faint sound - my companion is shouting my name into the wind. He's coming across the grounds, very fast, and says come on, we have to go, we have to go. I ask him what's up and he only  takes my arm and says "we have to go right now."  He's taking me back to the car - is prepared to carry me bodily if he has to, he says - when the fear hits me full on. My knees are so weak that I can barely get myself into the passengers seat. We go as fast as possible away from there. Finally my companion says "everything was fine one minute, the next there was a voice in my ear saying "get her out of here, now, run, RUN!'" It wasn't the sort of voice you could argue with.

On the long drive home, I said, "it surprises me the way sound carries - those people working must have been miles away". He looked puzzled. I said, "all those people shouting and banging; it was pretty loud. didn't you hear it?' He says, appalled, "honey, there wasn't any sound out there but the wind"

It would be a long time before any of us went back, but finally, we did. At twilight again, but this time on purpose.

.

Left-Hand Angel

Left-hand angel

So, I was driving through Victoria last week and noticed that the creepy, ever-present angels looming near the cemetery gates seemed a bit different....

Okay, I'm pretty sure the missing head of the right-hand angel was an accident - there is a broken tree nearby and a chip in one wing as well. The burning question remains, however - Where is the head? No, really. Where is it? It was certainly not in evidence nearby. Did someone abscond with it? Do they have it in their bedroom where it stares at them in the night? I mean, those angels always seemed about to turn and look at you, even when they had both their heads....*

 * "Oh, I have an animation program that can make them do that, easy!" said my brother happily, thinking he was being helpful in that special way he has. Erm...no, I prefer not to see my recurring nightmares come to life on screen, but thanks anyway, bro. :p

This Church Doesn't Want To Be Photographed...

Though I kept trying anyway.

Allow me to explain.

Searching my neighborhood for something interesting to draw, paint or photograph isn't easy. Well, the roaming is fine, if you don't mind suspicious people constantly asking what you're doing and the cops circling you in their patrol cars. :p But as for interesting, that's a toughie. Sometimes I find myself looking for grafitti or new piles of rubble near the crackhouse in desperation. Often I find myself scouting out the church down the block, hoping for some new, previously unseen angle that might make a nice picture.

I've been doing this for about three years and still haven't managed it. Every time I think I've got a shot - this Gothic archway here, or that stained glass window there, it turns out I've got nada. Just a mess. The one time I almost got a good shot, the lens was covered in pollen, so it just seemed to be surrounded by ghostly orbs. Typical. :/ And it was definitely pollen, not ghosts. If I had to choose the local church most likely to be haunted, it would not be this one.

It's a Lutheran church, not especially old, as these things go. It's fairly plain, with a mishmash of styles, thanks to the additions and annexes that just aren't in keeping with the original structure.

My brother tells me that this is because whichever minister is in charge at the time chooses the designs, and there might be a number of ministers with differing taste over the years...hence the muddle one often sees in sprawling American churches.

Anyway, there is nothing at all spooky or unnerving about this place. Especially as I was raised (sort of) Lutheran and associate Lutherans with our hippie guitar-playing minister, who sang folk songs and went around cheerfully shouting "peace" and "shalom!" to everyone. There is nothing sinister to me about Lutherans. And there are a few other churches in the neighborhood that are far more imposing than this one. I never had a problem getting great pics of those, either.

I came to the conclusion that the church simply doesn't want to be photographed a few weeks ago, when I went down specially to try again. I was going to get a half-decent, somewhat interesting shot of this church. It was a matter of pride. It was a challenge.

I came back with some of the worst photos I'd ever taken. I hadn't even managed to capture the back steps or the service entrance door. It was a humbling moment.The church had won. I began to wonder if the church didn't like me and was showing its displeasure by refusing to cooperate. (If you had seen these photos, dear reader, you would understand why I had begun to take this personally. :p) After all, my parents had lapsed from the church and we children had all wandered on to different faiths in time.

Leave it to me to find religious guilt in some failed photographs. Ha.

Well, there wasn't much more to do about it, I had tried my best and failed. I wasn't going to bother trying again. However, it so happened the other night that my companion and I had to pass this church on the way to our destination, and he said, "hey, what's that in the window?" so of course I looked and the urge to grab the camera overcame me once again. Maybe just a picture of the window? Just so we could possibly make out what that odd shape was?

When I uploaded the pics later, all of them looked entirely black. Typical. :/

Seriously, this was beginning to seem supernatural. No one sucks at photography that bad!

I was bored though, and started playing with different photo effects just to see what would happen. And that's how I got this:

Now I kind of wish I hadn't. O Lutheran Church, I totally underestimated your ability to creep me out.

Spookiness Is Afoot Downtown

Late last night, while taking a walk with the family in this nice cooler weather, I snapped these pics outside the newspaper building . They did not come out as anticipated - to say the least!

One may wonder why take pictures of the newpaper building in the first place. It's not exactly a wonder of great beauty and architechture. Simple answer - the area gives me the creeps. And I haven't called my project "Victoria Phantasmagoria" for nothing. Still, I was unnerved to see what look like playful little shades lurking around the perimeter of the fence on the last pic. Sure, lots of mistakes must have gone into creating this image, but...none of the other photos I took even a few feet away look like this.

It's kind of appropriate that not far from that spot is a bit of graffitti on the sidewalk that says "not here".

(I posted the third photo to my Tumblr last night but wanted to place all three together here)