Stories

31 Ghosts 2019: October 2 — Remodeling

Photo by Logan Smith on Unsplash

I had hoped this would be a one-night story, but it got away from me. So I present to you the first part of “Remodeling”. Remember to say thanks to your house ghost!

The ancient doorbell gave a pathetic warble like the last gasp of a dying exotic bird.

A loud knock came from the door, as if whoever was on the other side was afraid the dying-bird doorbell wasn’t enough.

“Coming!” David directed at the door. He unlocked the deadbolt – leftover habit from living in San Francisco – and opened the door to a dark-haired wiry man in a suede brown leather jacket that showed an obnoxious amount of chest hair adorned with gold chains.

David raised an eyebrow at the man, then asked, “Vladimir?”

The man smiled broadly. “Yes, I am Vladimir!”

“Good to meet you, Vladimir. I’m David” he extended his hand and Vladimir shook it vigorously. “Daniel said you might come by! Come in, come in! I have the album in here,” He ushered the man in and closed the door behind him.

“Thank you, call me Vlad,” he said with more than a little trace of a Russian accent.

“Please have a seat! Can I get you something to drink?”

Vlad screwed up his face in thought for a moment and then said, “Many thanks, but no. I have to get back still. It is okay.”

David hurried to a small cardboard box on the counter pass through that separated the family room from the kitchen. As he carried the box back to Vlad, David noticed the man staring around the wood paneled walls wistfully.

“You know, my family… we spent a lot of good times here,” he smiled. “My baba… this was her pride and joy. That patio,” he turned and nodded past the closed front door, “That was the hub. All the families around here… Russian. From San Francisco. This was their getaway, and they all gathered here.”

“That’s so great,” David smiled outwardly. Though inwardly he felt a pang knowing he had just that day arranged for the demolition of the decrepit patio cover and concrete. “Do you remember it?”

“Da… Yes,” he said. “As little boy, my baba held court,” his accent thickening with the reminiscing. “She cooked such feasts in this tiny little kitchen. My Deda, he kept that fire going all afternoon grilling shashlik. So much food, you could feed an army! And this was their idea of vacation!” he let out a laugh that belied his slight frame. He nodded silently remembering.

David let an appropriate amount of silence pass then set the box on the edge of the leather couch and opened it to reveal a weathered book. “Let me give you this…” he said drawing the book out. When Daniel came across this in the crawl space, I just knew I had to get this back to you. Is this album your grandmoth– your baba’s?”

Vlad took the album gingerly and opened the dust-caked cover. Inside a faded sepia photograph of an ornately dressed baby sat on the knee of a woman wearing a gown. Vlad’s smile beamed and he let out a little gasp. “That,” he said pointing to the baby, “that is my baba back in Odessa! And her mother,” he pointed to the woman. He gingerly closed the album. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“Oh,” David said, helping Vlad set the book back in the box, “like I said, I just knew we had to get this back to your family. I know you had a lot of history here.”

“We did. We did,” Vlad said, picking up the box. “And I am sure you will have wonderful times here, too,” he turned towards the door. “I must go.”

“Certainly, Vlad,” David said, hurrying past him to open the door. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can get for you? You’ll be alright? You’re not going all the way back to the City, are you?”

“Da, it is okay. I am fine, thank you.” He started out the door and stopped remembering something. “Oh, David?”

“Yes?”

“On the way in, it looked like the garden in front of the bedroom is torn up?”

“Oh, that. Yes,” David smiled sheepishly. “We’re remodeling a bit. We’re going to bump the bedroom out and make a second bathroom, bring the laundry room inside…” he trailed off as he noticed the color drain out of Vlad’s face. “What? What’s wrong? Are you okay, Vlad?”

“That… that is… big change. The domovoi will not be pleased…”

“Domo-what?”

“Domovoi. Umm…. It is…. In Russia we have domovoi, everyone has domovoi. It is… house ghost. House spirit?”

“Oh, okay…” David nodded confused. “That’s nice….”

“Yes, domovoi… takes care of the house, make sure nothing bad happens, keeps pests out… is good.”

“Sure!” David tried a plastic smile.

“But if you upset the domovoi – make too much noise, or especially break up the house like this…” he waved towards the site of David’s future double vanity, “the domovoi will make a fuss.” Vlad’s head jerked towards the open door and his eyes got wide. “I… I have to go. Thank you again,” he said hurrying down the stairs towards his BMW X5 in front of the gate. “Goodbye!” he said as the SUV chirped an unlock

David stared after the quickly retreating man, not even able to manage a wave before the black BMW roared to life and kicked up gravel from the unpaved road as Vlad floored the accelerator and sped around the corner.

In the quiet autumn air he could hear the SUV roar away taking another corner hard. David pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pressed a few buttons before raising it to his ear. “Daniel?”

“Hey hon,” Daniel’s voice came. “I should be out of here in about ten. Everything okay? Need me to pick anything up at the Safeway?”

“No… no, we’re good. But… That guy, Vladimir?”

“The former owner’s son? Did he stop by?”

“Yeah,” David trailed off.

“Daniel? Everything okay?”

“It was weird,” David said, walking inside and deliberately locking the door, the deadbolt and setting the chain lock. “Have you heard of a domo…domo… domovoid?”

“Domo—no, no I haven’t. What is it?”

“I don’t know,” David said. I’m going to look it up. It didn’t sound good.”

“What about it?”

“Oh, Vladimir said it would get mad because of the renovation.”

“Heh,” Daniel scoffed, “Must be some old-world Russian bullshit.”

“Heh,” David half heartedly returned the laugh, “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right. It was just… I don’t know… a little unnerving.”

“Don’t worry about it, David. I’ll be home in a bit. I’ll grab a bottle of Sirah at the store.”

“Okay, be safe,” David said, reaching for his laptop.

“Will do. Love you!”

…

By the time Daniel got home, David felt pretty well acquainted with the folklore of a domovoi. He had read a Wikipedia entry, two wiki folklore pages, watched a YouTube video of a Russian woman try to explain the domovoi in broken English, and looked quizzically at the carvings and representations of the domovoi that looked to David’s eyes like a squat troll doll.

Secure in his newly gleaned knowledge, when Daniel asked about it over dinner, David just brushed it away. “It’s like you said, some old-world bullshit.”

To himself, though, he remained vigilant. He lay awake that night and started at an audible creak in the house that interrupted the mechanical rhythm of Daniel’s CPAP machine. But the creak really did sound like… well, a normal creak of an old house. And an old house that was raised above historic flood level. He listened again, but no sound came again and eventually the CPAP’s drone lulled him to sleep.

In the back of his mind, he felt his vigilance wane after the next day and night didn’t bring any unexplained phenomena. Then a week passed without incident and David felt pretty comfortable that, yes, maybe it truly was some “old-world bullshit”.

The crew showed up to demolish the patio just as David was finishing with the contractor about the new bathroom/laundry room. The enormous ivy vines that wrapped around the rotting patio structure offered the biggest resistance, but by mid-afternoon the last of the structure had been piled into the construction dumpster and sun poured down and warmed the concrete that had seen only dappled light for generations.

David slept well that night. At least until Daniel’s CPAP machine silenced abruptly. “Daniel?” he asked quietly. When no answer came, he awkwardly pulled the CPAP mask off Daniel. Daniel’s breath came in gasps.

“Can’t….breathe….” he croaked out. “Can’t… move… Get… it…off…me…”

In the dim moonlight coming through the window David could see the night shirt Daniel wore pressed flat against his chest, as if something actively pressed down on him. David flipped on the night stand lamp. As soon as the room flooded with light it was as if a spell broke, and Daniel let out a heaving breath and clutched at his chest as he struggled to sit up. “Daniel, are you okay?”

Daniel panted. He nodded and looked at David. “I couldn’t breathe,” he said finally. “It was like… It was like something was sitting on my chest. I, I…” he breathed heavily, “I couldn’t move…”

“How do you feel now? Can you breathe okay? Do we need to go to the hospital?”

“No… no, I think I’m good, David… Maybe some water?”

“Absolutely,” David said hurrying out of the room to the kitchen. He took a glass from the cabinet and filled it from the Britta in the fridge. “How are you doing –” he started to say as he approached the bright bedroom but the bedroom door violently swung closed, smashing into his hand with the glass as it slammed into the door jam with a blast that shook the house and drowned out the crash of the water glass onto the floor.

“David?! Are you okay?” Daniel called from the other side of the door. A moment later, Daniel yanked the door open to reveal a pale David standing wide eyed in the doorway, cradling his bruised hand.

“I think we pissed off the domovoi,” was all he could say.

To be continued…

31 Ghosts 2019: October 1 – Seeing the Unseen

Photo by Jack Antal on Unsplash

It’s October again and you know what that means… It’s time for 31 Ghosts! This is the third year I endeavor to bring you a ghost story every day of the month through All Hallows’ Eve. The yellowing leaves are starting to fall, the temperature (at least at night) is growing chilly as the days get shorter and the shadows grow longer.

Earlier this year I moved back into downtown Guerneville. My buddy’s lower unit had taken on four feet of water and his tenant left town almost as quickly as the floodwaters. Before the flood and before that tenant, my friend’s boys lived down here off and on. They talked about at least two ghosts down here — one that haunted towards the back of this lower level near the bathroom and the other… the other had some definite ideas about what to watch on the TV. They said they’d have activity when they started watching scary movies — lights flickering, bumps, cold spots. One of the boys’ friends claimed a ghost kept whispering in his ear that they shouldn’t be watching scary movies so vehemently that he had to seek psychiatric help afterwards. Missed like a month of school. Wasn’t the same afterwards…

I lived down here then for about six weeks between houses. With a huge dog and two cats in one room, it was easy to blame any unexplained noises on the cats or the dog… even if they were in the same room with me. The hallway light flickered on occasion, but that constituted the paranormal experiences I had in my first time here.

Fern and I came to help as soon as we could after the water receded. That first weekend was a mess of hauling out soaking debris and pulling down soggy drywall. Numerous times coming in and out I swear I saw a cat out of my corner of my eye. Nothing definite — I’d tell you it was a black cat, but I don’t know that I caught enough of its slinky figure moving among the tools, mops, and buckets to really be sure. But it wasn’t a single time. Power was shut off, there was still standing water, maybe it was just a trick of light, but I kept seeing that cat.

It brought be back to the middle of February, 2014. We were told my mom wouldn’t last the night, so racing to the airport turned into a forced quiet of unknown in an airplane hurtling through the night. We made it. Long after midnight we got to the hospital bed set up in the family room of my mom’s small home. She was sleeping. My sister Jenny asked if Jack, Jay, or I would stay with mom overnight and I volunteered immediately. Jenny had already made the hospice nurse, Augustina, get some rest and in short order I was alone with my mom. Wracked with an obscenely fast-moving cancer diagnosed less than three weeks earlier she lay unconscious. The only sounds in the room came from the rise and fall of the mechanical oxygen machine. The only light shone a weak orange glow from the bulb about the range in the adjoining kitchen.

“Jenny and Jill said I should sleep. The aid said I should sleep (she just came out and said it again),” I wrote in my journal. “Not now. Now I feel I need to be present. She’s drugged asleep, I know that. But she’d do it for me. I will sleep later. Now breaths are finite and even if it’s just watching her, so be it.

“Oh, and the ghosts,” I wrote. “Sitting here watching her there are shadows flittering at the edge of my peripheral vision. I feel people standing behind me – that uncanny feeling. I can’t discern who it is/ they are, but it’s unmistakable.” There was a cat there that morning. I saw it slip around the coffee table and move around the bed. At least one other person told me later they had seen a cat in the room another time. My mom didn’t have a cat.

I’d mentioned in the first 31 Ghosts entry my dad died on October 1. I remember very vividly as a teenager watching my dad in his last days seem to unwind like a watchspring, making statements that didn’t make any sense in context… or maybe they did. Once, I remember, he startled and demanded, “I need the key!”

“What key, dad?”

“I need the key, goddamnit, I need the key!”

“Dad, there’s no key.”

He was desperate now, “I need the key to open the door! I need the key!”

Maybe he was seeing the final door he wouldn’t get to for another few days.

My mom’s last morning she lay mostly unconscious, incoherent. “Around 3 in the morning Augustina was resting on the couch next to my mom. Suddenly mom woke up with a cry of ‘Nana! Nana, wait!’ She turned to Augustina and said, ‘I have to go now. Tell my family I love them.’ And then she lapsed into the state she was in before.” She died twelve hours later.

I still see them both – mom and dad – in dreams, mostly. A smell of my mom’s favorite hand lotion sometimes. I hear my dad laugh. Ghosts. Shadows…

It’s October again. The living have had the last eleven months, so I’m taking this one for the dead. 31 Ghosts has begun.

The Port Chicago Disaster: 75 years.

Seventy-five years ago today World War II raged across Europe and the Pacific and two liberty ships sat side-by-side at a pier at the Port Chicago munitions depot on the shore of Suisun Bay. The SS Quinault Victory sat with empty cargo holds having arrived at the docks that day after taking on fuel at the Shell refinery in Martinez. The other side of the pier, however, was a hive of activity as Navy personnel worked furiously to load the SS E.A. Bryan with explosives bound for the Pacific theater.

At 10:18pm an ominous sound rent the din of loading. “A metallic sound and rending timbers, such as made by a falling boom,” one survivor reported. An small explosion followed, and then, seconds later the SS E.A. Bryan vaporized as the munitions detonated causing a fireball hurled flaming scrap over 12,000 feet into the air. A seismograph at UC Berkeley 20 miles away registered the blast as a 3.2 magnitude earthquake, and the explosion was felt as far away as San Jose and Santa Rosa. Debris was reported to have fallen in towns ten or more miles away. The blast picked up the enormous SS Quinault Victory and tossed it into the bay where it landed 500 feet away upside down and facing the opposite direction.

All 320 men on the pier died instantly. Of those deaths, nearly two-thirds were African-Americans.

This is what happened 75 years ago today and, sadly, has been largely forgotten. What led up to the explosion and what followed changed the military, race-relations, and the nation.

The site of the explosion is now the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial. You can visit the quiet memorial on the shore, but it’s not easy. Or popular: overseen by the National Park Service, only 653 people visited the memorial in 2018 making it the fifth least-visited place in the National Park system. By contrast, the roadless Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in the desolate western edge of Alaska logged three times as many visitors in 2018 (though, a “nearby” park, the Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve way out on the Aleutian peninsula came in as the least visited place with only 100 visitors). I was lucky (and tenacious) enough to be one of those 653 visitors.

Boxcars full of ammo were queed in revetments prior to being towed onto the pier for ship loading.

The lack of visitation isn’t wholly owing to lack of remembrance. The monument is on the grounds of the still-active Concord Naval Weapons Station. Visiting begins with inquiring about when you can visit as swaths of the calendar are blocked out due to maneuvers on the base. I made my appointment two months ahead of time, in January, only to be called back in February and told that date would have to be rescheduled due to base schedule changes; I could come in May or later that week. I moved around my work schedule and took February 23rd off.  Oh, and you don’t park anywhere near the memorial or base. No, the tour begins in Martinez at the John Muir House (National Historical Site, almost 47,000 visitors last year) with a brief video describing the conditions leading up to the explosion, the explosion itself, and the tumultuous aftermath. Then you’re loaded into a van and shuttled to the site with a brief stop at the base’s visitor center to register your visit. If that’s not enough of a reminder that you’re visit is being monitored, when we got out of the van our ranger pointed down the shore past a razor-wire topped fence to a new pier with a container crane and instructed us to avoid taking any pictures that include that active pier because your camera (or phone) could be confiscated by base security at the end of the trip – he’d seen it happen.

But immediately after, the gravity monument itself takes over. Burnt stubs of timber still peak out of the water as if standing sentry, the only remains of the pier. There are interpretive plaques explaining what we’d already seen in the video. The names of the men who died are listed. There is a hunk of quarter-inch plate steel blasted from the Bryan and crumpled like tissue paper. There are replicas of some of the shells the men were loading at the time of the explosion. An American flag flaps in the shifting winds. Above all, it is quiet. The sounds of work at the Navel Weapons Station seem far away. You hear the waves. Birds. The wind through the few trees on the site. It is a solemn place.

In the aftermath of the explosion, while the destruction was still being sorted through, the Navy sought to get back to work – there was, after all, still a war going on. Several of the remaining divisions of sea sailors were relocated to Mare Island, and on August 8, just three weeks after the explosion, they were ordered to load the USS Sangay. They refused. Conditions – which were abysmal and extremely dangerous – hadn’t changed. The 328 men were still justifiably shaken and resolved not to put themselves back into a situation that killed their friends and comrades. After their (white) superiors upbraided them about their “duty” and the potential consequences of their actions, 70 agreed to go to work. The remaining 258 They were arrested on charges of mutiny. They were moved onto an make-shift prison barge off shore built to hold 75 men. Eventually 50 men, were charged with disobeying orders and making a mutiny “with a deliberate purpose and intent to override superior military authority”. Because the US was at war, they were facing a death penalty.

The trial of the “Port Chicago 50”, as they had become known, shared headline space in newspapers with the ongoing war overseas. The proceedings were held on Treasure Island. Future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall represented the NAACP on the defense. In the end, all 50 were found guilty and sentences ranged from eight to 15 years of hard labor. The sentences were later reduced, and the men spent about a year and a half in prison.

Over the years efforts have been made to exonerate the men. They were working under egregious conditions, woefully under-trained and pushed past exhaustion to meet unattainable deadlines with harsh penalties for failure. Several of them men refused to work not out of safety concerns but because they were physically injured. Subsequent investigations showed just how racially biased their accusers were. And yet 75 years after the explosion that killed their friends, their memories are still besmirched by the convictions (none are still alive, the last survivor died a few years ago).

On July 12th, Congressman Mark DeSaulnie attached an amendment to the yearly National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 2500) to exonerate the Port Chicago 50. The bill passed 220-197 and moves to the Senate.

Visiting the memorial may become easier as well. On July 2nd the Navy turned over 2,200 acres of the Concord Naval Weapons Station to the East Bay Regional Park District. I’ve been using the name “Concord Naval Weapons Station” but that’s not technically correct. The Concord Naval Weapons Station was technically closed. The active portions are split between the inland “Detachment of the Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach” (for now; this, too, is scheduled to be closed) and the tidal section is now known as “Military Ocean Terminal Concord” operated by the Army. It’s the inland area that is being turned over to eventually become housing, businesses, a college campus, as well as Concord Hills Regional Park , which will receive the lions share of the acreage. The National Park Service is also hoping to set up a dedicated interpretive center for the monument there, too, with permanent educational displays about the disaster and the Port Chicago 50.

For further reading I’d recommend starting with the surprisingly detailed Wikipedia entry. From there,
The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History by Robert L. Allen is considered the definitive text on the subject.  

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Steve Sheinkin focuses well on the aftermath, trial, and repercussions.

James Campbell’s The Color of War: How One Battle Broke Japan and Another Changed America sets the explosion against what he calls the decisive battle of the war in the pacific, the battle of Saipan – which also occurred in July 1944.

There are a number of pieces out this week discussing the 75th anniversary. This one from NBC Bay Area offers a nice interview with one of the sailors at Port Chicago that night.