Happy Hauntings, Or Not

I was an imaginative kid. I've always been an explorer by nature, tantalized by the idea that there was more yet to discover, fascinated by wondering what might lie outside our current view.

For that reason, I had all the fascinations you'd expect of a kid with those proclivities growing up in the 1970s, the era of "Star Trek", "In Search Of", Doug Henning on Broadway, and "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind". I also grew up reading Ray Bradbury, Dr. Strange comic books, and more than my share of stories about ghosts and monsters, most especially in "The World's Most Intriguing True Mysteries" by Rupert Furneaux, a book I acquired so young, probably second or third grade, that I cannot possibly recall how it came into my possession. I wasn't content to squint at grainy footage of Bigfoot that turned up occasionally on black and white TV specials, and Furneaux filled my imagination with wonder about the Monster of Glamis Castle, the mystery of the Chase Vault, the Tunguska Event, disappeared aviators, lost children nobody could identify, and much more. My childhood was filled with occasional seances, attempts at astral projection, and similar esoteric pursuits. I suppose I was an unusual child in some ways.

So, of course, as I got older, besides the more prosaic explorations of walking too far and getting lost in the woods, breaking into abandoned buildings and underground bunkers, climbing tall trees and rocks to see the view from up high, and similar such earthbound explorations, I did what I could to see if I could find evidence of... The Other Side [cue spooky music].

And so I at various times found myself going to lengths: camping out alone overnight in the walled gardens of supposed haunted houses, driving especially late down lonely desert highways in southern Utah to hopefully be conspicuous to any passing UFO, sitting in a stone circle to see if I could feel something, and more.

Despite collecting a few strange and difficult-to-explain stories, I never found much, with the end result that I'm not terribly convinced of the supernatural. But I'm still curious, fascinated to know what's around the next bend in the road, literally or metaphorically.

I'm staying home tonight. The city has a way of reducing everything to a party, and my friends aren't here, and this isn't a desert highway or the garden of a supposedly haunted mansion.

I do think my friends wishing each other a blessed Samhain tonight, the ones with altars in their homes, even the more conventional ones who go to mass or observe shabbos, are putting themselves a little closer to the realm I'd choose to inhabit, if I could, than the people putting on costumes to go to the same bar or club they always go to on the same streetcorner of this unhaunted world.

I'll be on my back porch, smoking my pipe, probably with a small cup of vodka. Looking up at the sky.

Enjoy your night. Those of you stirring something up, send a couple of spirits in my direction. And if you find yourself on the Other Side, send me a sign, would you?