Friday, July 24, 2009

Phone Booth Psych

I’m not a psychic. I can’t tell your future, give you winning lottery numbers or read your mind. If I could have seen my future, there’s a hell of a lot I would have changed.

It doesn’t work like that, anyway.

We “read” people and situations, relationships, transactions, all of the time. We observe, catalog and track patterns. First and foremost, we learn social survival. How a cry brings mother, a coo produces a smile, a caress, perhaps a little more food. We observe, analyze and produce these strategies before we learn the words and syntax it takes to articulate them.

We learn these transactions first, and far in front of anything else. Have you ever gone out of your way to impress a stranger, only later to wonder why you even bothered trying? This tracks back to our earliest, most primal survival strategies.

Most of what we would label as “psychic” is nothing more than observation and processing.

Still, occasionally, something else is in play – something that appears beyond the five recognized senses.

For example, when Flo and I were first married, we lived in a tiny third-floor apartment with no phone. We would call friends and family from a pay phone on the corner, a couple of blocks away.

One evening, I was looking forward to a chat with my father. I dressed appropriately for the early fall weather, and on my way to the door, a wave of apprehension and anxiety overwhelmed me. I simply could not make myself go out the door.

This was not something commonplace for me. My relationship with Dad was fine, and I was eager to talk to him. Nor did I feel something was wrong with him. I talked about what was happening, with Flo, and experimented with it for the better part of an hour.

If I stated “I’m not going,” I felt immediately relieved. If I tried to leave, the apprehension hit me again. I could not come up with a plausible “why” – just that my visceral response was strong enough to stop me in my tracks. It was all terribly odd, senseless, silly.

Then, as suddenly as it had come over me, the feeling was gone. Not a trace of it left. I shrugged it off, and left to call my father.

Not far from home, I saw the flashing lights of a police car. A little closer, and I saw a car up on the sidewalk, where the outline of the phone booth should have been.

I asked the cop when this had happened, and he told me, about five minutes before, a drunk driver had hopped the curb and plowed through the phone booth. The driver was in the back of the police cruiser, and while I was there, a tow truck arrived to haul the wrecked car off to the impound lot.

I ran home, loaded my camera, and returned just in time to see the car disappear into the horizon. I snapped the photos below, of the smashed phone booth.

Typically, I stood in the phone booth with my back to traffic, phone pressed against one ear and my finger in the other, to block out the city noise. Also typically, Dad and I would have a lively conversation that often lasted more than an hour. The weather was pleasant, I had been in a great mood, and I definitely would have been in the booth when the driver hammered it.

I can’t explain this away by saying I “heard” the crash or the police car unconsciously and somehow processed the data correctly. The crash occurred at the approximate time I felt that wave of relief.

And, to be honest, I probably would not have believed that this sequence played out exactly in the order told above, had it not happened to me.

To run it back, slow it down and try and make it more clear – what I experienced was an intense physical balking, much like a mule that sits down and refuses to budge. The apprehension, the anxiety, were more of a result of that balking than the cause of it.

Events such as this do pique my curiosity – as to just what we are capable of knowing and doing, outside the constraints of ordinary experience and social convention.

It sure would be handy if I could turn this on when I need it. Whatever “it” is, it certainly doesn’t seem to work that way. “It” seems to assert itself before or during a disaster, but not point the way to things happy or positive, indicative of it being a primal survival mechanism. “It” happens to me mostly in dreams, and when it does, events generally play out according to the dream, without any efforts on my part having any effect. Providing, of course, that the obtuse dream symbolism is decipherable at all to my conscious mind – more often than not, the meaning becomes crystal clear ex post facto. And that can be explained by the tendency to morph the ambiguous to fit the specific.

If there is a point here, it is this: the gypsy with the crystal ball, the dude in a turban with intense eyes, the gifts and curses of gods and demons – the way society has stylized the phenomena and trained us to respond to the strange and the unknown – is functionally pointless, and serves generally to set us up for the astute predator.

Still, we are remarkable creatures who have only recently become aware… adrift in a universe of possibility beyond the best efforts of our imagination.

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Yet…

If I’m lucky, if I’m aware, I might occasionally snag an insight that will be useful to me or someone I care for. You might, too.

 
 
* April 9, 2021 - a few days ago, I came across a letter that dated this as Friday, September 21, 1973.
 

Saturday, July 18, 2009

A Letter from Charles Fort




I found the above letter, in the envelope below, glued to the inside back cover of a third-printing (Feb. 1931) of “The Book of the Damned,” at a used book store, for $4. (That was in 1979)



Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The Avon, IN Haunted Bridge


(Click on photos for larger versions)

If you live in Indiana, this is THE Haunted Bridge. The triple-arch railroad trestle spans a rural road and White Lick Creek in Avon, a short distance west of Indianapolis.

A crumbling, weathered antiquity from 1907, this brooding expanse would inspire gloom and legend even if no true stories were attributed to it. A number of reputable publications have claimed that a worker was entombed in the concrete while it was being built – an urban legend, sure – but it is supposed to have happened here. There is another story of a young woman and her infant who plunged to their deaths – versions range from accident to suicide; visitors claim to hear the screams of the worker at sundown, and see the mother looking for her child atop the bridge late at night.

On a short trip one night with my folks, we stopped by the bridge for a look. My mother stayed in the car, not the least interested in such creepy nonsense, while my father, Flo and I strolled up for a closer view. Upon our return, mom was irate; how could we have let Flo climb up and walk across the tracks? She blanched when we told her Flo had stayed at ground level with us, and we saw no one at all atop the bridge. Mom had never heard of the legends of the bridge – yet she saw a woman walking across the railroad tracks, pausing to look down as if looking for something – as the ghost story goes.

Previously, I had taken infrared shots of the bridge after midnight – and in one, a misty form appeared where the ghost is supposedly seen.

I’ve never heard the screams, nor seen the apparition, but I understand the fascination and the foreboding this bridge inspires. Many of the most common urban legends have been falsely attributed to it – the first version I ever heard of “The Hook” was set here. Once, when I was a guest on a radio talk show, a caller insisted he saw a three-eyed hellhound guarding the bridge. It might have been a tad bit more convincing if he wasn’t piss-drunk when he told his story.

Isolated for generations, only recently has the area been developed. Avon holds an annual “Haunted Bridge Festival,” and an image of it is featured on the Avon city web site. Its macabre appeal, and recent restoration efforts, has prevented the bridge from being demolished and replaced.

One legend of the Haunted Bridge I believe without reservation is that, over the decades, young couples have conceived countless children while parked hoping to catch a glimpse of the ghost.

Rusty iron plates now prevent access to the inner workings of the bridge – the tunnels cut through all of the arches. I’ve been through those tunnels, and in its guts, the bridge subtly undulates and shudders as if alive. Haunted, whether by tragedy and death or the focused imagination of generations, it is still one of the most eerie experiences you could hope for.

(This shot was an infrared time exposure, later tinted sepia)

There are a couple of 3D stereo pairs of the bridge, over at my Flickr gallery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnstanton/

And another shot of the bridge, this time for the cover of Indiana Horror Review 2014.

The iron door mentioned above:


Beneath the Haunted Bridge:




Finally, the infrared shot from 1973, one that barely survived a fire: