The Ghost on Hayes Street

Copied from a set of memoirs that I was writing for my next of kin.  But they'll never read it.

Someone on social media wanted to read this, so what the hell.  Here's my Ghost Story.

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A tale to tell the young ones around the campfire

I don’t believe in ghosts. But, there was this ONE time…

Now stories were made to be told
And here's the one that I know
I can't hide it anymore

There's evil on Queen Street

– Ronnie James Dio, “Evil on Queen Street”

Evil resides at 1682-B Hayes Street in Eugene, Oregon. Don’t ever live there.

It’s the middle unit of a triplex in what was once an apartment complex, but had been converted to condos by the time I moved there.

Shortly thereafter, the woman I loved dumped me – hard. Thus begins my tale.

A year or two later, my neighbor in 1682-C moved in with the love of his life, and offered to rent his home to me for less than what I was paying at “B.” So I moved.

Time went on, and my son, the son of the woman who’d dumped me, and I had gone backpacking to the Rosary Lakes on Willamette Pass. I don’t remember how the topic came up – maybe it always comes up when fathers and sons are around a campfire, but we started talking of Spooky Stuff and I was half-joking about a ‘curse’ on that place because his mother had dumped me right after I moved in there.

He wondered aloud what would happen to the young couple who had just moved in, and I kinda gulped and said, “Well, actually, the man just moved out.” The woman half of that couple was the infamous Kim Kutyba, of whom there are many entertaining (and ribald) stories.

Then he cleared his throat, beginning with, “Well, I don’t really believe in any of this stuff… but --” and proceeded to tell of strange noises he’d heard, sleeping on my couch during my exercise of what they call “visitation rights.” He said it sounded like someone was bouncing a pencil on its eraser somewhere in the room.

I made a little gulp when he told me that. He’d always insisted on sleeping with a light on, and I was always tempted to tease him about being afraid of the dark. Something dark in my own head had always stopped me from doing that.

So… I had moved in, and my marriage ended. Kim and Kerry Green moved in, and their marriage ended. Matt heard strange noises. Kim heard strange noises after her husband moved out: she complained to the building superintendent that she could hear me walking up/down the stairs, next door to her. The super tried to brush it off with, “Well, these walls are thin.”

“But that happens when Ken isn’t home,” she replied.

Years later, I actually saw that ghost. But that tale needs to be told separately. This one MUST end thus:

So Matt and I are around the campfire, talking about ghosts, and the sun has gone down. It’s getting a little spooky, so we changed the subject to backpacking. This was his “first” backpacking trip, sort of.
At least, the first one that he was old enough to remember.

I told him of a backpacking trip, years before, that my recently-departed father had taken with me and two of this boy's older brothers, to Mildred Lake in the Jefferson Wilderness north of where we were. Grandpa had had quite a bit of trouble on that trip, needing frequent stops to rest, but nothing bad happened and the four of us had a pretty good time. Matt was just a baby at the time and didn’t go.

So I told him of the trip and what a good time we’d had, ending my story with, “and that was the last backpacking trip that Grampa ever took.” Immediately the campfire flared up with a WHOOSH! noise, flames shot up 3-4 feet in the air – and the fire went dead out.

I looked over at Matt, and he was looking at me. I noticed that the moon, either full or nearly so, had come up and was casting a spooky light through the trees.

“I think I’ll go to bed now,” he said.

“Me too,” I replied. Both of us pulled our sleeping bags way up over our heads, and closed our tents as tight as a tent can be closed.

We still don’t believe in ghosts – but, there was this ONE time...

Pearl Harbor: Did FDR Know?

I have a blatant dislike of conspiracy theories.  I get downright abusive on social media of people who espouse them.

And yet, conspiracies do exist.  Most conspiracy theories are bunk, but human nature being what it is, it's almost certain that out of all the noise, there are probably one or two that are real.  The only question is:  which one or two?

There are two that I find credible.  The first is the "International Communist Conspiracy." There really was an international organization of various countries' Communist Parties, known internally as ComIntern (Communist International, sometimes further abbreviated to "ComInt"), that met regularly in conferences to plan how best to bring the world under Communist rule.  There were seven of these conferences before Comrade Stalin shut them down in the 1940s, referred to by insiders by the shorthand of "Second International," "Third International," and so forth.

So, yes.  It might not be an actual conspiracy, since they operated in the open until the 1940's, but there are people today who will accuse you of wearing a tinfoil hat if you speak of it.

The other conspiracy theory that I find credible is vastly more interesting:  the rumors that Franklin D. Roosevelt knew in advance of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on this day in 1941, and allowed it to happen.

First, a bit of background.  By 1941, Britain and Germany had been at war against each other for over two years.  We know from Winston Churchill's memoir The Gathering Storm that Roosevelt communicated to Churchill his desire to help the British, but the American people were were not having any of it, and were dead set against getting involved.

That all changed when the Japanese attacked American soil.  Americans changed their minds en masse and Roosevelt got his wish:  we entered The War the next day.

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Thompson Falls, Montana is a little logging, mining and ranching burg with a weekly newspaper known as The Sanders County Ledger.  For thirty years its owner, publisher, and editor-in-chief was a self-described "big fish in a small pond, " an old news-hound that, if I remember correctly, had once worked for the major dailies (or maybe the Wires), gave it all up, and bought a small-town paper in Montana to live out his years quietly.  His name was K. A. "Doc" Eggensperger.  I knew him.  Everyone in town knew him.  And every newspaper editor in Montana, including the big-city Dailies, knew him.

One day a story appeared that intrigued and shocked me:  he'd been to some convention of Press people and wound up in a bar with some other old News Hounds, one of whom had been in the White House Press Corps when Roosevelt was in office.  This old reporter claimed that Roosevelt had told them confidentially, "Boys, we're going to war against the Japanese."  That there would be an attack on Pearl Harbor, which would rile up the American people and give FDR the political backing that he needed to take the US into World War Two, which had already been raging for a couple of years.

I tried to put the story out of my mind.  "Well, national press corps reporters are all a bunch of drunks, and this guy was in a bar drinking," I told myself.  Still, I couldn't get it out of my mind.

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My dad was a World War II Navy veteran.  He turned eighteen about a year before Pearl Harbor.  In the National Guard at the time, he saw what was going on in Europe and correctly deduced that he was eventually going to end up in the Army somewhere slogging through the mud.  That prospect didn't suit him very well, so he went down to the Navy recruiter's office to talk about serving his country where he'd be sleeping in a warm bunk every night and have nice hot meals from a ship's galley.

The recruiter needed a signature from Dad's National Guard commanding officer.  "What do you want to join the Navy for, boy?"  the man roared.

"Well, I think we're going to get involved in that war over in Europe," Dad replied.

"Oh, no, we'll NEVER get called in to that," the CO snorted.  But he signed the paper.

According to Dad, his Guard unit was called up into the Army two weeks after he'd sworn in to the Navy.  He claimed that most of them ended up in the Bataan death march.

Dad was apparently a pretty good trombone player in high school (I never heard him play) and signed up to be in the Navy band.  "He can play anything I put in front of him," his instructor exasperatedly explained to his superior, "but he has no tone."  So Dad flunked out of Navy music school and went on to be just an ordinary swab.  The trombone player sitting next to him ended up on the Battleship Missouri.  The man is still there.

So one day I asked my dad if he'd heard that story about Pearl Harbor.  He said that he hadn't, and then said something that I've never forgotten:  "It always seemed strange to me that the only ship at  that base that was worth anything just happened to be out on maneuvers that day.  Everything that was destroyed in the Harbor was basically junk."

Hmmm...

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Decades later -- indeed, only a few years ago, I was in Colorado conversing with an Old Prospector who owned a gold mine that was open to the public for tours.  Unlike most gold mines, which the old joke goes are a hole in the ground with liars standing around it, this mine really did have a vein:  I saw it with my own eyes.  But I think he made most of his money giving tours.  And like every owner of a gold mine, that old geezer loved to talk.  In fact, that's all he did:  his employees did all the work.

I love to talk too, so he and I had a great time.  I don't remember how it came up, but he'd been a Navy man in signals intelligence during the Korean war.  I asked him if he had an opinion on the "FDR knew" story, and he related a story that his superior had told him back in his Navy days.

The superior had been a very young Navy man who was somewhere in the Pacific intercepting and decoding (we had cracked their encryption) Japanese radio signals.  He began to see a lot of traffic relating to an attack on a Navy base.

He alerted his commander, and the alert went nowhere.  Alarmed, he began escalating up the chain, and got ignored at every step of the way.  Finally, in a total breach of protocol he sent a desperate letter to someone at the top in Washington, DC.  I think it was Secretary of the Navy or somebody.

A day or two later, his commanding officer called him into his office and delivered a sealed telegram.  "I don't know what you've done, boy, but this came all the way from the top."  With quaking hands, he opened the message and read:  "You will not question the decisions of the United States Navy."

"All The Reasons Why" - deconstructing a feminist C&W song

My first real exposure to Country & Western music (as opposed to just plain Country, which includes C&W along with other genres such as bluegrass and its predecessor, old-time music) was as a teenager when a rock station that I listened to changed their format to C&W.

I was in Dad's tool shed doing my science experiments when the DJ said, "Well Aaaaah haaaaw!" and played Tammy Wynette singing D-I-V-O-R-C-E.  As a brash kid who'd never had any experience in relationships, let alone ones that had gone bad, I thought that was hokeiest, most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard..

Fast forward a couple of decades, when I was married with two kids and the marriage was falling apart.  I was waiting in line at the counter of an auto parts house when the C&W radio station they were using for store music played the Gatlin Brothers' Broken Lady:

She vowed every morning that what God put together
No one else in the world could pull apart -
But the walls came tumbling to the ground
And her world came crashing down around her heart

Now she's a broken lady
Waiting to be mended...

And it hit me, right there, standing in front of that parts counter.  They were singing about what I was going through.

Then I thought back to the Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman song that Tammy Wynette had made famous decades earlier.  All of a sudden, it wasn't hokey any more.  She was singing about Real Feelings that Real People go through.

And I started listening to C&W.

I remember a construction site I was working at, during those years, where one of the carpenters was playing C&W on his personal stereo (what we used to call a "Boom Box") all day long.  Finally, one of the electricians had had enough and just blew up.  "I remember when I was going through that phase.  Couldn't stand rock n' roll any more, and just had to have my country."

"So what phase are you going through now?" I asked him.

"I ain't goin' through no fuckin' phase."

Well, I'm out of my "Country phase" now myself, having moved on to Metal.  I still listen to the old classics of C&W though, and still love the genre as it existed in the Eighties.  I don't care much for the new stuff.

So I've said all that to say this:  Highway 101.  A song named All the Reasons Why.

Paulette Carlson is Highway 101.  She started the band, hired the musicians, and wrote some of the songs.  It's her band.  And she communicates a female perspective on life, relationships, and bar etiquette that is, in my opinion, instructive.

I like almost all of their songs.  This post is about the one exception:  an emotionally blind screed written by Carlson and another female songwriter about a woman dumping her man for no discernible reason at all:  All The Reasons Why.  Some excerpts:


All the reasons why won’t make you understand
I’m trying to explain but I’m not sure I can...


You ask what you've done wrong, and if there's someone new
What has changed my heart and what else can you do
Oh darling can’t you see, it’s not so cut and dry
And who knows where love goes and all the reasons why...


If I could explain it I would, take away the hurt if I could

What a cold, cold song.  And so representative of how women look at what they call "love."  I'm trying to explain... it's not so cut and dry... who knows where love goes... If I could explain it I would...

But she can't explain it.  Because it's not rational:  it's all about her feelings:  he doesn't make her wet anymore.  She doesn't feel the tingles any more.  And her feelings - mostly wetness and tingles - are the only thing she cares about.

The numbers vary with the telling, but supposedly somewhere between two-thirds and three-fourths of the divorces in the United States are initiated by the woman¹.  I find this credible.  Yes, there are cruel men out there who mistreat their wives and girlfriends and deserve to be alone.  I might have even met one or two of them.

But I have met many -- many -- who were unceremoniously dumped by their wife, girlfriend, life partner, whatever you want to call it, with no explanation whatsoever.  I vividly remember one poor neighbor who had come home from work to find all of the stuff gone from his apartment -- hers and a great deal of his -- and coping with the loss with a bottle.  I walked home that night with a heavy heart, thinking of his pain.  And thinking that he was probably dealing with the initial shock in the best way possible.

I've known tons of men with the same story.  And it's always:  no reason given.  I'm trying to explain but I'm not sure I can.  Who knows where love goes?

Because when "love" is based on nothing but feelings, on tingles and wetness, it doesn't go anywhere.  It just goes POOF! and evaporates.  Men view love differently, very differently.

Most of us men take wedding vows seriously.  When we vow "to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part," most of us mean it.  When she gets older, puts on weight, and unsightly wrinkles & bulges appear, we stay with her, continue to support her, honor and cherish her.

When women say those words, most of them mean, "Until I find a higher branch I can swing up to."

I once dated a woman whose first husband had been a doctor.  I got the opportunity to meet him and even party with him -- she was on good terms with all of her exes except one -- and he was a cool guy.  I asked her, "Why did you leave him?"

"Because I thought I could do better," came the surprisingly frank reply.

I'll bet she told him the same things the songwriters said:  Who knows where love goes?  I'm not sure I can explain...  Left unsaid:  because there aren't any reasons why.  I just want to swing to a higher branch.

I thought I could do better.  We have a word for that:  hypergamy.  Also called branch-swinging.  Look it up.  I won't say that all women are like that, but... well, it's in the mammalian part of our DNA and they can't help it; you might as well try to get your dog not to bark.  You can't overcome fifty or sixty million years of evolution with a mere ten thousand years of culture.

But you can get partway there.  And we used to be partway there.  Ten thousand years of culture had brought us stable (for the most part) marriages and family structures.  Many of the lower classes were unable to keep their commitments, but most people did.  Wealth was created, and passed down to heirs, who married others from stable families and leveraged the inherited wealth to create more.

In the past eighty years or so, there has been a systematic effort to dismantle all that to pave the way for a world under Collectivist rule.  Incentives that hindered branch-swinging have been swept away, and other, perverse, incentives have been created:  there is a reason why half of all marriages fail, and ⅔ to ¾ of those that do, are initiated by the woman.

Who knows where love goes?

I have saved the worst for last:  a line in the song's chorus.

I don’t think I can go through them again
I was hoping we’d end up friends

One of the most disgusting things about the female perspective on relationships is the idea that you can, for no good reason or any reason at all, dump a man who loves you, take away from him everything you built together, spit on the way he cherished you, rip his heart out and stomp all over it in front of his friends and family, deny him day-to-day contact with his children and even in many cases turn them against him, take away the bulk of the fruit of his labor at the point of a gun using the "child support" authorities --

and expect him to remain FRIENDS?

Women have no idea what love even means to a man.  But I've already written about that.

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¹I've not found an authoritative source for that; if anyone finds one please let me know.