Before October 1 lands, I like to go back and read my previous October 1 posts, because they’re a bit different than most of the 31 Ghosts entries. For one, they’re non-fiction. The first couple years documented real-life encounters I’ve had. More recently, I’ve used the October 1 post as sort of an Opening Ceremony – what have I been up to? What’s in store for the month?
The last few years I’ve detailed the ways that my year has been crazy and how October looked to be even crazier. I’ve looked at my calendar of the year so far, and I look at just my travel schedule for this month alone and I genuinely shake my head at those previous years and thinking I was “busy.” I’m not going to get in to it this year, but suffice it to say, the complete life change that started into motion last year finished its chaotic cycle this year – I’ve moved, gotten married, have a new, exciting job now, and have run more this year than all previous years combined. It’s been wild, and there’s still a lot left before we change the calendar.
But we did just change the calendar to October, and that means we have now officially entered the eighth year of 31 Ghosts!
Thinking about this post I started to look back at the last year and whether I’ve had any paranormal experiences worth sharing. Truth is, I haven’t. I remember having an experience relatively recently where I knew there was a presence in a specific room, but I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember the circumstances – must have been really terrifying, right?
But it got me thinking about my relationship to the paranormal and ghosts in general. There’s a popular paranormal podcast where the host argues that despite hosting the show and presenting numerous paranormal guests and their spooky situations, he himself isn’t sure about his beliefs on the subject of otherworldly-ness.
I’m not nearly that ambivalent, but the more I read and the more I encounter (or don’t encounter), the more complicated my feelings on the paranormal become. And that got me thinking about Harry Houdini.
Yes, Harry Houdini the escape artist and magician from the early twentieth century. Towards the end of his life, he set about debunking Spiritualists performing seances. He argued that his sleight of hand experiences made him uniquely qualified to expose the tricks many in the burgeoning séance industry used to con people into believing their loved ones were being contacted. By the 1920s the Spiritualist movement was extremely popular in the US. Founded in the nineteenth century with the fundamental principal that through mediumship we can cross the veil and contact those who have died, many well-known people participated in various aspects of Spiritualism. Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, hosted a séance in the White House to contact their son, Willie, who had recently died of typhoid fever.
The creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a vocal proponent of Spiritualism and came to a very public disagreement with Houdini after Doyle’s wife, Jean, performed a séance with Houdini where she claimed to contact Houdini’s late mother. She hadn’t, and Houdini exposed the fraud, calling Arthur Conan Doyle, “one of the greatest dupes” during a Congressional testimony on fraudulent seances – they were big enough to warrant Congressional hearings. Only a few months after the hearings concluded, Houdini died of a ruptured appendix at only 52.
What fascinates me about Houdini was that despite spending the last 35-odd years of his life systematically debunking séance practices, he still believed there was something to the afterlife, to the point where he and his wife, Bess, had an agreement that should he die before her, he would do everything he could to contact her from the other side. They had an agreed upon code his spirit could present to prove it was truly him. Following his death, every Halloween Bess gathered with friends and tried to make contact with her husband’s ghost. Unsurprisingly, he never showed. After Harry failed to appear on Halloween, 1936, Bess declared, “Houdini did not come through. … I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me, or to anyone.”
I’m not out to debunk anyone, and certainly not debunk ghosts or the paranormal. I’ve read too much to not believe there is something on the other side of that ephemeral veil. At the same time, I’ve become increasingly more cynical about many of the popular ghost stories that are repeated. Perhaps the best example of this is the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. I love the Winchester Mystery House and its mysterious back story and bizarre architecture and story about Sarah Winchester’s perpetual building to keep the spirits of the people killed by the rifle that bore her late husband’s name at bay.
I love the Winchester Mystery House knowing that it’s all a sham. Sarah Winchester wasn’t a histrionic woman terrified of ghosts. She was an enterprising woman of her time who did most of her own architectural work, expanding what began as a modest farmhouse to accommodate her extended family. She didn’t even live at the house for the last seventeen years of her life, choosing instead to spend most of her time at another house of hers in Atherton. The blue room in the center of the house where she ostensibly held seances in every night? That was the gardener’s room. Most of the dead ends that are presented as ways to befuddle malicious spirits are almost all the result of repairs from the 1906 earthquake that severely damaged the place.
So how did we get to The Winchester Mystery House?
After Sarah died, the sprawling place failed to find a buyer. Instead, an entrepreneur, John H. Brown, leased the land. He had run an amusement park near Lake Erie and one of its most popular attractions was billed as a “House of Mystery” – see where this is going? If his legend-building of the place wasn’t enough, the author, Shirley Jackson, grew up in San Jose and based the house in “The Haunting of Hill House” on The Winchester place. A few years later, Walt Disney drew on the gothic façade as the basis for the Haunted Mansion. And, like that, the legend built on itself.
But let me say again, I love the Winchester Mystery House. It’s a fantastic place, and I highly encourage you to visit – especially one of the nighttime flashlight tours. It’s truly spooky as hell – and I know it’s all a carefully crafted story that doesn’t have a lot of basis in actual fact.
In that regard, it shares a lot in common with many, many other popular ghosts.
And yet…
And yet, I love to read these “true” ghost stories and visit the places. These stories, I believe, tell us far more about ourselves and the milieu that created them than any actual historical basis. I think that’s why Houdini and Bess established a code to provide proof of the afterlife despite Houdini knowing how many fakeries he’d personally seen. And it’s why I always look for that unexplained bump in the night, or unexplainable light winking on or off… Is there something there? Ghostly wheat in the chaff? And I can’t discount the personal experiences I’ve had that really don’t have any other explanation – I will forever remember the cats triangulating what I still maintain was my dad’s ghost that I wrote about in that very first October 1, 2017 entry…
That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? For another month of reading about ghosts that tell us – sometimes literally – about the subjects they haunt as much as who they are and were. Because as much as we don’t want to encounter the paranormal… we kind of do. At least from the safety of a ghost story.
Welcome to the first day of the eighth annual 31 Ghosts. Stick around, let’s see what these ghosts tell us about ourselves.
