once again

i'm totally going to rip off JJ. he posted a terrific scary narrative today, telling of his close encounters with the supernatural. i think i'll tell of a couple of mine. i was going to write about why i dropped out of school, but i can summarize: it's expensive.

once upon a time, i lived in lovely downtown lawrence, kansas. famed for it's basketball team and local shopping, there's another reason to know lawrence: stull. stull is a little bitty town about six miles outside of lawrence, unincorporated, and purportedly home to one of the seven gates to hell on earth. that is, on certain days of the year, there are apparently "gates" to the netherworld that open up, and all the baddies can convort for one night. the only other one i know the location of is supposed to be outside of new york somewhere.

there was a church, decrepit and abandoned, in stull, which had a cemetary behind. there was some controversy as to whether the gate was somehow attached to the church itself, or was in the cemetary. fittingly, the church and cemetary were atop a hill, and visible from the road as you drove by. the church has since been demolished, as the local curiosity was drawing entirely too many visitors, and many of these would swill beer and dump their trash while waiting for the dark prince or marilyn manson, or whoever they were waiting for. moreover, it was still the private property of the town, and being there was trespassing.

the rumors were such that on rainy nights, the rain would hit a roof where there wasn't one anymore, and run down where the roof should be, leaving the interior of the church dry. that you could throw things into the shadows against the walls and that these things would simply disappear into said shadows. that glass wouldn't break. this was supposed to have been a place where they hanged witches, and was therefore a dark place, a cursed place.

offered as evidence, it's said that when pope john paul II flew over the united states, he would have the flight path changed to avoid kansas altogether.

while i must doubt the veracity of the people who said they'd seen "something", i do not doubt that there are things that we do not see or cannot sense that inhabit this world with us. i believe in ghosts, aliens, the loch ness monster (i'd have been a shoo-in for the ghostbusters). but something happened one night to me, that scared the shit out of me.

i'd been out for a drive in the country around lawrence, just to get some quiet and some me-time. i decided on a lark to go look at the old church, just to get that delicious shiver of fear that comes with hauntings. it's pretty night, with clear skies and luminous moon, and yet driving by in fun left me with that cold clamminess inside. i figure i've got the jibblies, or the heebie jeebies, or perhaps even the utz, and try to blow it off. continue with my drive. unable to shake the feeling, though, i start to decide that alone in a car is not where i want to be. head home.

and damn my navigational skills, i have to drive by the church again on my way home, and this only intensifies the feeling, as if something knew my cockiness and disbelief needed just one more shot to fall entirely. something hitched a ride back into lawrence with me. i sped up. turned the radio up, and sang along to dispell the feeling. it's not working, and i start to freeze a little inside with anxiety. the interior of the car seems colder, and fuller. you know that feeling you get when someone's staring at you, and you know it? (is there a word for that?) the sound in my car seems to be bouncing not off the back window anymore, but from something closer, somewhere in the backseat.

i know this is only paranoia, only a product of my imagination, and i told my invisible passenger so. i told it that i wasn't going to turn around and look, and grant it that reality. if i have to turn around and look, then i give it more of a foothold in my mind than it already held. and with this in mind, i only focus on my driving, narrow the range of my vision. and then something touches my hair.

approaching the lights on the west side of lawrence, i speed up more, and sing louder with the radio to mask any noises there *might* be emanating from anywhere else. i'm near to screaming. i arrive back at my house and run inside to the warmth and light and company of things i can see, can touch, and spend the rest of the night shaking the feeling that i'd had some sort of near-miss situtation.

i don't know if there's any truth to the stories about stull, and i don't know if it's possible to determine anything more than what we know already. i do believe however, although i can't really define it, that by believing that a place is "bad", or that some charm is "lucky", that we begin to endow those places and things with that power. if i determine that my kitchen is an evil place, and tell people so and they begin to believe it as well, then slowly but surely, i think the kitchen will begin to live up to its' reputation. no more or less do i think that decades of people being scared of "something" in stull provided it with the power to frighten me that night.

i don't have some comeback ending, that i went to my car in the morning, and the back window was busted with claw marks all over the upholstery and paint. i was genuinely frightened that night of something that i was pretty certain might have been my imagination. in a non-zero possibility situation, there's always a chance i could have been wrong.