It was just after dinner on a weeknight in 1981 when my best friend Tom called me on the phone to ask if I’d be his wingman on an exorcism.
Tom had been my freshman college roommate. He’d left college after a single year to marry his high-school sweetheart. A part-time seminary student, he worked full time and moonlighted as manager for the apartment quad he lived in. Tom collected rent, hassled deadbeats and changed the occasional faucet washer or light bulb. He also repainted apartments when they were vacated and found new renters to fill them. It was one of those newly vacated apartments he wanted to exorcise.
The woman who had lived there for decades was schizophrenic—or maybe not. She heard voices, howled in the night, and muttered dark threats to passersby through the gaps in her venetian blinds.
Tom was studying theology, and the situation gave him pause. What if this woman wasn’t just mentally ill? What if she was—you know—possessed? How could he, in good conscience, rent the apartment to someone new until he was sure it contained no evil entities that might make the new renters projectile vomit and speak Latin?
And, to be fair, I was right there with him. I’d graduated with a degree in psychology from an evangelical college, and I was working at a psychiatric hospital, were I was seeing some creepy-ass stuff. I wasn’t ready to parse the distinction between psyche and soul right then. An exorcism seemed like a prudent idea.
But Tom and I had to be discrete. He preferred that his other renters didn’t know what we were up to. We’d slip into the apartment late—like one or two in the morning—while everyone was asleep. This presented one small problem. The electricity to that apartment was already shut off, so it would be dark. Tom didn’t want to take the risk of having to deal with the police if someone saw flashlights moving around in an apartment in the wee hours and reached for the phone. We’d do our exorcism in the dark.
Our plan: I’d go over to Tom’s place around midnight. We’d hammer out some kind of game plan, pray a little, steel our nerves, and then—you know—cross the quad to the empty apartment and do battle with supernatural forces of pure evil.
My heart was thudding like a brick in a cement mixer as we stole across the courtyard and Tom fumbled with his ring of apartment keys. I was terrified. I honestly had no idea what might happen and whether or not we were ready for it. What if my faith wasn’t strong, and I got—well—possessed or something?
That night Tom went room-to-room calling out spirits, and I stuck to him like varnish on a Ouija board. We spent a good 20 minutes at it and got nothing in the way of otherworldly response. All that lingered in that vacated apartment was the funk of decades of unventilated Marlboro smoking.
#
I’ve been thinking about that night a lot lately, and here’s why: I’m now in my late-fifties and my memory of that night feels wince-worthy. How could I ever have been so callow and clueless? But my current knee-jerk reaction to the memory roils up all kinds of murky questions. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be worried about supernatural forces if Tom asked me to tag along on another exorcism today, but is that a sign of growth or atrophy? What happened over the decades that makes me see the world, and the sorts of things it might contain, as so circumscribed?
#
As someone long ago trained in the social sciences, an experiment seemed in order. I wanted to replicate the conditions of that night in the devil-apartment, to see if my knee-jerk responses to the world had really changed. In a similar situation, might I still act in a way that revealed some basic default belief in the supernatural? Maybe all my years of not being invited to exorcisms had made me forget what it was like to be in that heart-in-mouth moment. Maybe in that moment—or one very like it—some vestige of my old sense of possibility would emerge. Maybe I’d be terrified again.
#
I Googled Orange+County+paranormal, and got more hits than I could reasonably have expected. There are meet-up groups and bloggers and podcasts and, well, people I’ll generously describe as eccentric.
But I wanted to be scientific. I had to find a group that was seeking the truth, not out to make a buck selling scrying mirrors and smudge sticks. I filtered out any walking tours that charged money, and any group of ghost hunters that mentioned “healing crystals” or “necromancy.”
I settled on a group in north San Diego County that did paranormal investigations. They had the best website and they had tee shirts with their logo on them, which looked legit in my book. They also had a trained historian on their team, which seemed pretty impressive.
I drove down to Normal Heights and met their leader in a pretend-Irish pub. I bought her a cider and asked if maybe her group would be okay with me (and my daughter and a few of her friends) tagging along on one of their investigations. I told her I was a writer, and brought along a few of my magazine pieces to show her what a seasoned pro I am.
Sure, she told me. They’d be happy to accommodate us. In fact, we were just in time to crash a late-night exploration of a haunted adobe in Vista, CA, just a few miles from my daughter’s apartment in Carlsbad. Perfect. Sealed with a handshake.
#
The Rancho Buena Vista Adobe is now a museum of sorts. There are tours and a gift shop—and you can get married on the grounds, if that idea appeals to you. All that is during daylight hours, though. We’d be visiting in the middle of the night.
When we arrived at the adobe, it was already dark, a night with a small crescent of moon that backlit the yucca plants and palms and the burbling fountain. We met the team of paranormal investigators inside the visitor center, a modern, purely functional building. We watched a video about the adobe’s history, and then the investigators showed us their equipment—which all looked like stuff on the clearance shelves at Radio Shack. In other words, no planchettes or séance trumpets. Once we were all acquainted, and the witching hour was nigh, we crossed the lawn to the adobe proper.
Built in the mid-nineteenth century, the adobe felt like every other adobe I’ve been in. It was cold and silent, and the yard-deep walls, the ceilings and floors felt slightly askew in ways that were barely perceptible yet somehow unsettling.
After a tour of the whole house, we stopped in the big main room, a space the size of a tennis court. There we spaced ourselves evenly around the floor, switched off the lights, and our leader began an EVP session. Very little moonlight made it through the curtained windows. I could only make out the broad outlines of the room and its many old-timey accouterments, and in the near complete darkness I found myself listening with my whole body, since my eyes were useless.
This was the moment I was here for. This was the moment I’d gone to some lengths to engineer. I was in a haunted house, and the lights were off.
I lay supine on the cool, foot-worn tiles and thought about how good it felt to be stretched out on my back after such a long week. I was relaxed and unruffled. I could have easily drifted off to sleep. I experienced none of the pulse-quickening expectancy I’d been seeking. I felt zero suspense. I was in a 150-year-old hacienda and those around me were earnestly summoning spirits, but I may as well have been lying on a sofa. By a fire. Listening to Nat King Cole.
#
I suppose this experiment told me what I wanted to know. In the last few decades the way I look at things has changed, without design, debate or intent. The world I now inhabit seems bankrupt of magic and mojo. I can no longer fathom how I once allowed that something astonishing and unexpected—and, yes, supernatural—could happen in the middle of the night in an empty apartment in Whittier, CA.
But the truth is, I feel a heavy sense of loss. I’ve gotten so used to miracles not happening that I no longer live as if they might. It’s not an intellectual choice; it’s a matter of default expectation. Have I grown wiser, or just more cynical?
#
Which all brings me to what might have been the most thrilling 15 minutes of my life.
My family was returning from a week in Mendocino, a windswept coastal village three hours north of San Francisco. It was maybe 1990 or ’91, and my three kids were all between the ages of Pull-Ups and pogs. I drove our old Jeep Cherokee along that laser-straight section of the 5 freeway between the Pacheco Pass and Bakersfield. It’s a stretch of two-lane road so dull and non-descript and straight that you might glance down at the dashboard to discover you’ve topped 100 mph. Add to it that it was in the wee hours; the kids had long since nodded off in the back seat, and my wife was snoring shotgun. Everyone was asleep, and I was having one of those Dad Moments where everything felt right, and I could convince myself that, with age and wisdom, I’d become some breed of responsible adult.
Then my son spoke from the backseat. “Dad,” he said. “I just saw a UFO.”
I turned down the talk radio I’d been ignoring for the last half hour and, still feeling dadly, patiently explained that he’d just imagined it. Maybe he’d been asleep. Maybe he’d seen Venus. Maybe it was just a radio tower aircraft warning light.
I was in mid-assurance, when my wife chimed in. “Woah,” she said. “I just saw it, too.”
I took my foot off the gas. For a minute or two I coasted, looking back and forth between the road ahead and the impenetrable darkness into which my wife now pointed.
Then I saw it, too.
A trio of brilliant lights, arranged in a triangle, rose up from the black ground, turning slowly, and disappeared above the roof of the Jeep. My mouth went dry. My skin prickled.
I pulled off at the next exit and (egged on by all three kids who were now awake and adrenalized) I careened down narrow farm roads, trying to get us back to where we had seen the lights. I blindly turned east down a one-lane road just beyond a windbreak tree line.
As soon as I straightened the Cherokee out, I stomped the brakes. Up ahead, a pair of lights careened down the road in our direction. It had to be a semi-truck; the blinding headlamps looked to be about 10 feet off the ground. It struck me as insane that any trucker would be fool enough to take this cramped road, especially at the speed he was coming. I veered over into the weeds, as close to the barbed wire fencing as I could, hoping to create enough space for the speeding truck to barrel past.
For a few beats, we all sat in speechless, dry-mouthed dread as the truck bore down on us inexorably, not even tapping its brakes.
Then—maybe 30 yards from our front grille—the two lights swooped straight up in the air and out of sight.
We sat in awestruck silence a second or two. Then I ripped off my seatbelt and swung open the door, to better see the alien craft.
High above us the lights turned and descended. And then the sound of the propeller emerged above the drone of crickets. The crop duster swooped down over the edge of the field next to us and soared away, skimming the ground.
I got back in the Jeep. Pulled the door shut and buckled my seatbelt. None of us spoke. It’s hard to express what a bummer it was to be once again, just a typical suburban dad, in the cliché SUV, returning from vacation to T-ball practice and department meetings and trips to Jiffy Lube.
But for those few minutes—from when the alien lights lifted off the ground to when an old bi-plane flew back down—I lived in a world where the astonishing might just happen. It was a world full of possibility and wonder.
I miss that place.
