31 Ghosts

31 spooky tales for October

31 Ghosts – Day 23: One Dead in SoMa, Part 1

Mitch bounded out of the WeWork space on Second in a rush. He popped open the charging case for his AirPod ear buds with one hand, while calling his assistant with his other hand.

“Jackie… yeah, I know, I’m on my way to the Creamery to meet the Angel investor,” he spoke into the air weaving through the other pedestrians. “I realize I’m late, that’s why I’m calling you on the run. Look, I need you to book me a flight to Vegas… no, not another party trip. My brother Thad died last week… Yeah, thanks… no, totally unexpected – some weird bathtub electrocution thing, he was into weird shit… he was an asshole anyway, but I have to make an appearance, you know?” He dodged a bedraggled man with a long beard carrying an enormous plastic bag with half-crushed aluminum cans and nearly crashed into three white guys with conference badges around their necks.

“Did you get rid of Elaine?” he changed the subject. “…No, I don’t care if she’s got two kids. You need to get rid of her before she files that sexual harassment charge. I don’t want a single mar on our record going into this next round of funding.” He rounded the corner onto Folsom, shoving his way through the knot of people waiting for the light to cross. “Did I do it? Jackie, you know me better than to ask that. Of course I did it. But that’s not the point. The point is if we don’t sweep this under the table it will mean a lot of money for the IPO.”

One of his AirPod earbuds came loose and as he fidgeted with it Mitch didn’t see the homeless woman’s puppy laying in front of her until he tripped over it, knocking it into her can of change. The puppy yelped, the change exploded out of the can, the woman shrieked, and Mitch staggered sideways flailing his arms to catch his balance before he fell. With so many things happening at once it’s reasonable that Mitch completely missed the hipster on the electric unicycle barreling towards him. Unable to stop, the hipster slammed into Mitch and tumbled off, barely missing the yelping puppy slamming into the building along the sidewalk. The force of the collision caromed the already-falling Mitch off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic. Mitch had time to look up before everything became bright white. The bright white, it should be noted, was the color of the Google bus that charged through the yellow light and didn’t even attempt to break until Mitch became a hood ornament. For Mitch, everything then went black.

The first thing Mitch noticed was music. It wasn’t angelic like he’d hoped for, nor was it some sort of Wagner-esque fugue to accompany him to where he expected to go. No, this was some ukulele solo over a hip hop trap beat broken by the intermittent howls of a woman clearly getting oral surgery without anesthetic. Oh shit, he thought, this was hipster music – it had to be that goddamn hipster’s Bluetooth speaker on his fucking unicycle, because of course he had a Bluetooth speaker on his electric unicycle. He opened his eyes and saw he was lying in the street in front of the stopped Google bus with the electric unicycle next to him in the gutter, “music” still blaring. He pushed himself to his feet and saw a crowd gathered near the back of the bus. He stepped onto the sidewalk and started into the crowd that were talking amongst themselves.

“Who is it?” someone said.

“I think that’s Mitch Dessner,” came a reply.

“Oh my God, that asshole?” someone else chimed in.

Mitch turned towards the voice, but couldn’t make it out before someone else joined in, “Right? A bus is too good for that guy” and “Poor bus!” and “Is the puppy okay?” and “Hey, a quarter!” “Oh yeah, I found an AirPod earbud!”

Mitch pushed his way through the crowd which didn’t move aside for him as much as he moved through them. Reaching the edge of the sidewalk, he saw two off-duty paramedics partially under the bus attending to… him. Well, what clearly used to be him. There’s denial, and then there’s seeing your body after it had been run over by a double decker bus. Without going into detail, let’s just say it doesn’t really leave much room for inconclusiveness. Mitch Dessner was dead. So, Mitch thought, where does that leave me?

As the thought coalesced in his not-head he didn’t notice that everything around him had become an opaque gray. Or maybe he did notice and just thought the fog came in awfully quickly for a fall day in SoMa.

“Hello, I’m Saint Andrew Avenillo,” The tall wiry man in a long, white, billowy robe and an aquiline nose spoke with a light Italian accent. “Signore Mitch, you may call me Andrew.”

Mitch turned to look at the man and he didn’t say anything, just gave him his best pursed-lipped TED Talk stare.

Andrew blinked several times before saying, “I am the angel of sudden death. I’m here to help you pass on… No,” he stopped. “That is not right. Not in this case. I’m here to guide you on your journey.

Mitch’s mask of self-importance fell. “Umm, excuse me? Journey?”

“Yes, Signore, your Journey. As you might suspect, most people who die are instantly judged and sent one way,” he gestured up towards the sky, “or the other,” he pointed to the ground. “And there’s cases like yours…”

“Because I’m such a successful, powerful power broker whose every utterance causes markets to quiver with anticipation?” Mitch asked.

Andrew stared at Mitch with a baffled look on his face, shaking his head. “No. Precisely because you are so irritatingly full of yourself. You still have much to learn before you are escorted off this earthly plane.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“Scusami?”

“So, what comes first? The ghost of Christmas past or Christmas future?” He snapped his fingers, “No, I’m supposed to say something like, ‘the world would be better without me,’ right? No, no, no,” he hopped up and down, “This is like some goddamn ‘Our Town’ with San Francisco standing in for Grover’s Corners?”

“Are you quite finished, Signore?”

“Finished?” Mitch spread his arms wide, “I’m in the afterlife, Andrew, I can go on forever, right? Time has no relevance, right?”

“Not quite,” Andrew said pulling back the hem of his sleeve to check his Apple Watch.

“Whoa,” Mitch stopped cold. “You’ve got an Apple Watch? I don’t believe this…”

Andrew gave him a patronizing smile and sighed. “No, Signore, not exactly. What you see is me through the lens of what you would expect. In your existence, an Apple Watch is perfectly reasonable. If I were speaking to a Swiss banker perhaps I would have a fine Rolex, or if you were one of the programmers you dismissed so often perhaps I would have a calculator watch. It is all relative, Signore.”

“Okay,” Mitch said, rubbing his eyes trying to ease the headache forming… then realizing he no longer even had a head to ache and that it still ached so he rubbed harder. “Then what does your not-Apple Watch tell you?”

Just then the opaque gray evaporated and they were back on the corner of Folsom and Second, but night had fallen. The bus and people and paramedics, and hipster, and electric unicycle were gone, as was the homeless woman and her puppy. Mitch looked up and down the empty street which was, in fact, slightly hazy with cold fog. He judged it sometime early in the morning – maybe two or three AM. He turned questioningly to Andrew standing behind him. Without saying a word Andrew nodded towards the direction of oncoming traffic. Mitch followed his gaze and saw a black Tesla Model X glide up to them silently. The black car had blacked-out rims, completely opaque tinted windows, but the roof bristled with numerous bulbous cameras at varying angles as well as a spinning LIDAR unit. As the car pulled to a stop, the rear driver-side falcon door raised open. Mitch looked in to verify what he already expected – self-driving. Of course, he thought.

“Signore,” Andrew gestured for Mitch to get into the waiting car.

To be continued…

31 Ghosts – Day 22: The Winery

Last night I bartendered for a venue I’ve worked at a number of times. The winery is off of 101, north of Cloverdale up where the freeway devolves into a curvy highway of rolling hills. Coming into town the road narrows and late at night you’d reasonably expect a story about a phantom hitchhiker — this isn’t that story.

I’m not going to say the name of the winery or the town that it’s just outside of, but suffice it to say it’s a fairly notable destination with not just vineyard and a tasting room but sprawling grounds, restored barns, orchards, and even a demonstration kitchen overlooking a pond on the property. You can understand why it’s sought-after for a destination winery wedding even if it’s outside of the traditional Napa/Sonoma region. The grounds are situated just east of the still-tiny Russian River, not too far from its source and were originally part of the land the Pomo Indians inhabited until the Governor of Alta California, Manuel Micheltorena, granted the huge swath to Fernando Feliz in 1844. The Pomo name for the lush valley meant “sweat lodge” because the area held special significance in their spiritual life. For that reason alone, it’s thought that some of the Pomo never left the Sanel Valley. While the Pomo generally lived too far north of the northern-most Spanish Mission in Sonoma to fall under their capture, err, I mean forced conversion and coerced labor, once Feliz took control of the valley he put an end to the Pomo’s use of their ancestral spirit land.

Once you pull off the main road, the driveway winds through vineyards until you reach the main parking lot. From there, it’s a short walk to the tasting room and main barns on the property. Beyond that, though, are a series of lush gardens and orchards. Paths run through the endangered apple and pear orchards as well as the lavender garden, and skirt the vegetable garden, out to a walnut orchard. Within the gardens is a small bar that wedding planners often use for a post-ceremony cocktail hour before guests saunter through another apple orchard to a Tuscan-style garden with pergola and open lawn that’s perfect for dancing. The orchards and gardens are dense, expertly maintained, and absolutely Edenic… while the sun is up.

After the last call and the DJ plays “Don’t Stop Believing,” or “Sweet Caroline” guests almost always file out to a waiting party bus to take them to either an after party or their hotel accommodations – usually bypassing the dark and now-foreboding gardens. Then it’s cleanup and breakdown and the florist vans, rental furniture trucks, and the catering trucks eventually depart. The last of us to leave would wander through the dark, unlit paths of the garden in pairs, if we’re lucky, or more often in my case, alone.

While convenient around the house, nothing demonstrates the utter inadequacy of iPhone flashlights by utter consuming darkness.

My first time working the venue I was tasked with breaking down the cocktail bar in the heart of the dark orchards while the guests danced in the Tuscan garden only a hundred yards away. They might as well have been on the moon. I positioned my iPhone flashlight to be as useful as possible for packing up the glassware and mixers, the light swallowed up beyond my little area. I heard someone coming up the main path, their gait slow but certain moving on the gravel. Despite the warm night, the cicadas in the immediate vicinity fell silent, their buzz replaced by the distant drone of the DJ, sounding even more remote by the immediate lack of noise – except for the footfalls of the visitor coming up the path. I looked up from the little bar and couldn’t see anything beyond the wan light of my phone. I picked it up and shone it as far as it could illuminate the pathway, succeeding mostly in casting eerie shadows of the low overhanging branches and leaves. Empty. I went so far as to take a few tentative steps out of the bar area to throw the flashlight beam further down the pathway – the lane the footfalls had come from just moments before remained bereft of any visible guest. I retreated to my bar and kept working, but now I could feel someone watching me. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, but the fear of chastisement over an unfinished job overrode my fear of an unseen visitor, so I put it out of my head and doubled my efforts to get out of there. A few minutes later I heard footsteps from the direction of the music and moments later one of my coworkers appeared out of the orchard. “Need some help?” “You have no idea.”

Talking to one of the servers, she recounted a time leaving the garden when she distinctly heard footsteps behind her. She stopped, the footsteps stopped. She shone her phone’s light behind her to reveal no one. But the footsteps continued to follow her just out of sight. She started running, and the footsteps receded… and then gained on her. Tired from working, but terrified she picked up the pace and flat sprinted the distance to the welcome lights of the barns. Another coworker said she ended taking a wrong turn and getting lost for twenty minutes in the garden pathways. Despite leaving quite some time after her, I arrived at the parking lot just as she finally managed to get to her car, visibly shaken.

Just last night the guests all occupied themselves on the dancefloor and I had a moment of peace at my bar. But again, that feeling of someone watching me came over me. I turned around… and someone was there – one of the property managers. I laughingly told her I felt someone behind me, and I mentioned that I’ve often felt that in the gardens after dark. She didn’t laugh at that. She recalled a number of different instances of errant guests in the dark catching glimpses of unexplained shadows, or hearing footsteps from empty pathways like I heard. She went on to explain some reports of white figures being spotted in the gardens occasionally. She explained that she locks up the kitchen by the pond after everyone else has left and then always takes a golf cart back to the barns – “I’ve heard and seen too much walking through that orchard at night. I’d much rather go around in the golf cart and leave whatever is in there alone.”

I welcome the next time I work the venue because, from a practical standpoint, it remains one of the best thought-out locations in terms of flow. Also, I’ve upgraded to bringing a bright LED gooseneck light for cleanup and a high-lumen flashlight for the long lonely walk out. But I know that even if I don’t see anyone,  I never walk the dark garden paths completely alone.

31 Ghosts – Day 21: Spare a Moment?

Keeping it short on Saturdays!

“Pardon me, sir? Are you from around here? I’m a bit lost…” the young woman asked Dave.

Dave looked at his watch anxiously, then at the light about to change. If he hurried he could still make it on time…

“Sir? Please?”

He spared a glance and saw a woman who looked vaguely familiar. In her winter coat and pants he couldn’t quite place the blonde hair or the smooth skin, but the eyes were the same blue flecked with gold he remembered from his mother. In hindsight, that’s probably why he responded.

“Yes, where are you looking for?” Behind him he heard the screech of tires and a car careened directly behind him and slammed into a parked car just mere feet away with an explosion of shattered glass and crumpled metal.

He looked at the skid marks and instantly knew if he hadn’t turned around to talk to the woman he would have been directly in the cars path. He turned to the woman and she was completely gone.