by Holly Nadler
One Friday evening in July, as I entered the Campground with my ghost-walk group, I told them about the spirit of the fuming minister, pointing out the location up ahead on our left. As we flocked by the dark house—at about 8:15, so the sun had set and shadows were rife—a jagged bar of light sparked below the porch ceiling. It looked as if a fluorescent tube had slipped free of its metal pins and exploded in midair.
As a group, we jumped, cried “Eeek!” and asked each other, “What was that?!” I surely didn’t know. I shook my head and we kept on walking.
The very next Friday night, I told another tour group what the other group had witnessed the week before. As we paraded up alongside the mad preacher’s cottage, again, pitch black inside, a sonic boom like thunder erupted under our feet.
More jumps, more eeeks, more questions. Again I shook my head and we kept on walking.
Perhaps the crazed preacher, in those two successive Fridays, finally got his fury at us sinners out of his system, because no similar events occurred during my later tours. By the following summer, people were back living in the cottage, their lamps aglow each night.
As Julian of Norwich famously said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
7 In the Realm of the Psychonatural
Anyone who does research into the paranormal—and sticks her neck out even further by writing about it—receives calls from people wanting an exorcism of their home. And often the people stand in dire need of exorcism themselves. It’s not that they are possessed by demons, although I’ve met a few individuals who seem to go beyond any diagnosis of abnormal psychology, straight to the category of minion of the Devil. Still, when people think dark spirits lurk within their walls, creating depression, madness, accidents, and just plain doggone bad luck, chances are the occupants of the house, both living and dead, are contributing equally to the pool of misery.
When matters are past the point where a priest’s holy water or a witch’s wand will do any good whatsoever, I’ve had to recommend the Nadler Method, but we’ll get to that later on.
The saddest case I’ve come across was presented to me in the fall of 2007 (and please note that I’ve changed the names and identities of the persons in the story because we live on a small island, and I hesitate to cause any undue chagrin).
A strikingly handsome man of about forty appeared in my bookstore one morning in late August. He introduced himself not by his own name but as the son of the late actor Graham Thomas, a movie star long connected with the island. My visitor’s own name, as he told me secondarily, was Adam Thomas. His mother was equally famous: Claire Juneau, an expatriate playwright who lives in Madrid, but is often photographed at society functions in Manhattan.
Children of the celebrated seem to generally accept—and even to exploit—their reflected glory, but they seldom, if ever, seem truly happy. Adam was fine and dandy that day, however. He had the long, lanky physique and artlessly fab posture of the fashion model he’d been in his younget days. He wore designer jeans, a snug-fitting green Jellyfish shirt ftom the trendy new shop next door to mine, and his coifed brown hair, clean-cut and chiseled features, and sparkling turquoise eyes gave him a look of glamour and health.
“My house is in Katama,” he told me, referring to the wide, open plain near the white sands of South Beach. “It’s only seven years old, but it must have been built over a slew of old Indian bones. There’s something inside it that’s keeping me, my kids, my guests, my help, on pins and needles. Can you come look at it and suggest a remedy?”
We played desultory telephone tag over the course of two and a half months before finally settling on a mutually agreeable time for me to visit the house on a Monday in late November. I woke up that morning at five o’clock with a rip-roaring headache that I knew from experience would last until nightfall. I called Adam, and he said he too was “feeling sorry for” himself, having bumped his head on his parakeet’s cage: “My eye has been bleeding and bleeding and bleeding!”
We changed our appointment to the same time, next day.
Feeling much better on Tuesday, I decided to rack my bike on the bus to Edgartown and then pedal the several miles down Katama Road to Adam’s house. In a movie version of this story, my path would have been plagued by all sorts of obstacles and portents. Nothing fearsome actually occurred during my journey that day, but still, there was an indefinable sense of the fates shooing me back.
First, when I tried to wheel my bike from behind my building, it stubbornly resisted. I bent down to find a yellow bungie cord snagged in the spokes, and it took a good deal of prodding and prying to get it loose. Then, as I pointed the bike between the buildings, I found the narrow alleyway clogged by a fallen tree limb—odd, since there’d been no wind-storm the night before. I dragged the limb away and leaned it up against the trash cans. Once I was finally astride my bike and pedaling toward the bus stop, a sudden gust of wind blew in from the sea and nearly knocked me down, almost seeming to warn me to turn back.
Later, as I rolled along Katama Road, I realized Adam had been non compos mentis the day he’d dictated directions to me over the phone. I ended up about three-quarters of the way down the beach road and nowhere near a house, haunted or otherwise. The nearest structure was a grain silo in the middle of a field. I phoned Adam, gave him my coordinates, and asked whether I was anywhere near his home.
There was a long pause. Then he turned from the phone to speak to someone in the room with him, saying, “Could you please explain to this lady how you got here today?”
Next I heard the breathy voice of a young woman who, it turned out, had been hired as his personal assistant that very morning. (Apparently Adam went through a great number of helpers. His employees regularly quit because Adam was (a) too demanding—his dog-walker would be told to make him breakfast, his assistant ordered to drive him to New York—and (b) notorious for not paying people. That day’s unsuspecting young assistant gave me superb directions to her new employer’s house, and I arrived inside of ten minutes.
The house was typical of the area—a hulking, shingled, reverse contemporary, which meant the living area was situated on the second floor, the better to take in the distant grey-blue line of ocean (about the best you can do for a water view on this part of the island). A sign on the red-enameled front door read, If you can’t be nice, go away.
I reflected on this, as most visitors must have done, and decided I presented no problem.
A small, frail-looking man of about sixty answered the door. He had watery blue eyes, thinning and improbably yellow hair, and was dressed in grey flannel slacks, brown loafers, and a button-down white shirt that someone—presumably he himself—had expertly ironed. He looked so much like a butler straight out of Bertie Wooster’s circle that I expected him to speak with an English accent, but his voice was pure Dorchester, Massachusetts.
“Adam’s in the study,” he said, inclining his head to the left beyond one of the sets of double doors off the foyer. That message delivered, he shuffled off in the opposite direction to take up a vacuum cleaner in the center of what appeared to be a warm-up living room of overstuffed sofas and chairs, opening onto a larger living room with still larger sofas and chairs. The furnishings were upscale country and surprisingly feminine, with floral fabrics, needlepoint pillows, and stenciled wood-grained floors. I dimly recalled that Adam and his wife, a semisuccessful TV actress, had been divorced. Had she been responsible for the decor? Or perhaps Adam had purchased the house with all the furnishings intact?
The study had an atmosphere of intense activity. It turned out that Adam had not one assistant but two, both blonde, thin, and pretty, wearing tight jeans and white cotton blouses. They were so generically alike, they might as well have been twins.
Adam was sitting in front of a computer. He was wearing polar-fleece slippers and a full set of pajamas decorated with yellow with blue Scottie dogs. A small bandage bracketed his right eye, the result of his collis
ion with the parakeet cage that had caused such distress the previous morning. Without any greeting, he asked point-blank, “Do you have good taste?”
Since there’s no objective answer to that question, I said with a laugh, “Of course!”
“Sit here,” he pointed to a chair beside him. “Come look at this wallpaper Web site. The deal is, we’ve got Mommy coming for Christmas, and she’s bringing Sidney Lumet. Already the bitch is throwing out hints that my guest room is too shabby for him! Why can’t she book him a room at the Charlotte Inn where she’s staying? Well, she’s tight as a tick, we know that—so I’ve decided to wallpaper the guest room with something really expensive so I can throw that in her face if I need to.”
He tilted his head in my direction as he spoke, but kept his fabulous turquoise eyes shut tight. All people close their eyes for a moment now and then, but I’d never before seen anyone speak as if he were summoning his conversation from the depths of a trance.
All of a sudden I was knee-deep in wallpaper print-outs. “Look at these!” he commanded as his inkjet printer spewed out page after page of variations on one design: a pale pink background with pink, grey, and mauve beaded cameos of Victorian belles. (Clearly, Adam was responsible for the home’s decor.) “I just can’t make heads or tails of these!” he cried in exasperation. “I’ve talked for hours with this sweetheart of a woman, Cynthia, but these are all so much alike, I can’t choose one! I just can’t!”
I could easily believe that he had spent hours on the phone with Cynthia, though I wondered why a wallpaper company would risk frustrating their nuttier, more compulsive clientele, as typified by Adam Thomas, by providing so many nearly identical choices. I said soothingly, “They’re all so similar, and all really pretty; I don’t see how you can go wrong with any of them. Just pick one!”
He didn’t hear me. Eyes wide open and locked on his computer screen now, he kept the pages churning from the printer, some of them nothing but spec sheets with shipping prices, dimensions, and other hieroglyphics.
Soon I held thirty or more sheets of paper in my lap. Adam said to one of the blonde assistants, his eyes again closed to facilitate speech, “Could you put these in order?”
With a happy smile, the girl took the pages from me, sorted them, and stapled them into separate bundles. She was clearly entranced at the thought of working for the son of two rich and famous people. I wondered—a bit evilly—how long she would continue to perform all sorts of meaningless tasks without a paycheck.
Meanwhile, as more wallpaper samples spilled out of the printer, I thought of the sign I’d taped to the door of my bookshop: Opening at 1:30 today. Certainly this was a slow time of the year for island retailers, but I had set aside this hour to consult with this man about parapsychology, not to rack my brain about minor variations in reproduction Victorian wallpaper designs.
“Adam,” I said with a sigh, “Can I have a few minutes with you to talk about your ghosts?”
“Oh that,” he said with a dismissive wave, eyes glued to the screen. “George can tell you all about it.”
“He’s—?”
“George!” hollered Adam.
Across two sets of doors opening onto the foyer, the sound of vacuuming ceased. A few moments later, the diminutive, golden-haired “butler” appeared. Adam said, “Tell her about the spirits, will you, George? And show her the room.”
As I followed George into the foyer, the front door opened and a black-haired woman in a stylish brown suede jacket poked her head inside. I recognized her as a long-time island caterer, and we greeted one another cheerfully.
George canted his head toward the study and told her in a conspiratorial whisper, “He’s got a check for you.”
The woman smiled wanly. “It’s only been three years.”
As George and I mounted two sets of stairs, he filled me in on the home’s dark side. He and Adam often heard footsteps coming from the third-floor master bedroom when they knew for a certainty no one else was in the house. They often found objects missing, only to have them turn up a week later in one of the many obvious places where they’d already looked countless times.
On one occasion, the disappearance had turned mean. A pearl necklace that belonged to Adam’s daughter vanished from the drawer beside her bed while she was on a visit home from Bard College. Adam accused another young woman who was working for him at the time. The police were summoned, and the girl was both questioned and fingerprinted, after which the disgraced hireling was banished from the house.
The pearl necklace showed up the next day under Adam’s pillow.
George said Adam’s main concern was that the ghosts were spreading gloom and doom throughout the house. While Adam had never been Mr. Mental Health, he had never before felt so chronically depressed, irritable, and accident prone.
“He and I are constantly tripping. We can’t get rid of the feeling we’re being pushed. Some of Adam’s guests have sensed that theit lives were in danger when they stood at the top of the stairs. And the worst part of it all is that Adam has been attracting bad people! They think he’s got tons of money, and they bilk him for it!”
I stopped and looked at George, who seemed genuinely fond of his employer. I found it telling that whatever malicious entity gathered strength inside these walls, it hadn’t been able to infect this good man, other than to cause him obvious sorrow and concern. Possibly his mission to protect Adam served as a true amulet.
“Bad people, huh?” I echoed.
He nodded somberly. I wanted to observe that personalities like Adam’s—helpless, entitled, self-centered, oblivious, willing to buy expensive wallpaper while neglecting to pay a caterer for a job performed three years ago—are bound to irritate other people to the point that they might appear “bad” (i.e., grasping, carping, and angry). There was a good chance that Adam himself was at the root of these problems.
Or was the house making him that way?
At the third-floor landing we entered through a wide lintel to a room that ran the length and width of the house. Dor-mered windows faced in every direction, with a central bank of floor-length windows framing the sea. Most Katama architecture goes through comical contortions to catch a peek of the water; this third-floor bedroom positively captured the view.
Ornate antiques were placed around the otherwise modern room, dominated by an elderly mahogany bed burnished black with time. Its scalloped headboard was imprinted with a fading chain of primroses.
Lovely as the room was, I felt an immediate, overwhelming aversion to being there. I felt myself struggling to breathe as I moved through this space suffused with melancholy as thick as Jell-O. Even the spectacular sea view left me unmoved, in fact the lack of pleasure in the view turned my mood even more dismal.
“There’s something here,” I told George. “Something serious.”
Almost arguing with me, he said, “But how could there be ghosts here? Or poltergeists? Or whatever? This house is only seven years old! The man who built it was a periodontist, for ctying out loud, with a wife and two little kids! From Ohio! Have you ever heard of anyone or anything unwholesome coming out of Ohio?”
Normally I would have laughed out loud at such a comment, but I was feeling increasingly bleak. “Maybe it was brought in with the furniture. Maybe it’s the bed.”
When we clomped back down the two flights of stairs and reentered the study, I saw something that, in hindsight, sttuck me as humorous. The caterer was seated in what I’d come to think of as “the hostage chair” in front of the printer, and now she held a pile of freshly printed wallpaper pages. Assistant Number One stood at the ready with a stapler.
Adam looked up at me, eyes open. “What do you think?”
How could I tell him that he and his home were a perfect example of negative energy feeding off a vulnerable human, until the two blended together into a white-hot compost, a human and nonhuman folie à deux?
George said, “She thinks it could be the bed.”
Ad
am closed his eyes and shuddered. “It’s not the bed.”
Assistant Number Two called to Adam from the adjoining pantry with a cordless phone in her hand. “Another wallpaper guy is calling with a quote.”
Eyes still closed, Adam said, “Not now… It’s not the bed.”
I shrugged. “Well …”
Eyes still bulging through thin, pale lids, Adam asked a question in my general direction, “What do you think I should do? Should I move? Can we get an exorcist in here? Will it cost a bundle? Can you do it? Are you going to charge me for it?”
Suddenly I had a good idea of what Adam Thomas should undertake. It wouldn’t be easy for him. It might not even be possible, given his deteriorated mental condition. But the healing I had in mind was, I was convinced, his only hope.
One thing I refused to do was to discuss this or any other matter in this zoo of bewildered people led by a man who was deaf to any kind of reason or observation.
I said, “Come see me in my bookstore when you’re not so busy. We’ll have coffee or hot chocolate, and I’ll share my ideas with you. No charge.”
At my back as I marched to the front door, I heard him say, “It’s not the bed.”
As of this writing, in early 2008, Adam Thomas has not appeared in my bookstore. But here’s the Nadler Remedy, which should more justifiably be called the Aristophanes or the Commedia del Arte or the Norman Cousens or Mel Brooks remedy. You’ve got it—this afflicted man in Katama would need to learn to laugh, a lot, to effect a change in himself and his household.
We know that someone like that is too far gone, too punctured by his own neuroses (or even psychoses), for anything to relieve him truly—not psychotherapy nor psychotropic drugs nor a change of lifestyle, short of holing up in a monastery. But laughter—the kind that originates in the belly and blasts out the chest before erupting vocally—that works as well as anything. It’s God’s great gift to us. And I could tell that eons had passed since Adam Thomas had found anything even remotely funny.