Haunting Season

The Sun don’t pity you,
The rain don’t envy you,
The wind don’t follow you,
And the snow sees right through you.
-Nebraska proverb

It’s October and Halloween is coming. There’s a chill in the air and the trees are starting to look more skeletal. Winter is just around the corner, when it’s dark most of the time, and almost everything out there in the darkness is dead. In the spirit of the season, I thought I’d talk about some haunted places, here in San Francisco and in Nebraska.

THE SILVER MAN - PART 1

Years ago, a tiny town called Cameron sat along a dusty road straddling a meandering creek. An old German settlement, it was never much of a town, but it had a few businesses, a few homes, a school, and a church with a cemetery. It also had a little park right on the bank of the creek, lined with mulberry bushes and shaded by cottonwoods, that was the site of old fashioned religious revivals, snake oil sales, family picnics, at least a couple Klan rallies, and maybe even a circus or two.

The town gradually died. The old park stopped hosting social gatherings and grew thick with weeds and rogue alfalfa. Cameron became a ghost town. There are actually a few buildings still standing there, but if you didn’t know what you were seeing, you probably wouldn’t recognize it as a former town. By contrast, the old Cameron church is still in pretty good condition, roughly a mile west and a mile south of the old town site. The last time I was there, the creek had begun eating into the cemetery, and some of the older tombstones were in danger of falling into the creekbed. But the little town west of Grand Island on the banks of Prairie Creek is scarcely more than a memory now.

The land around Cameron is my ancestral home. My great-grandfather farmed it, and some of my relatives still do. When I was growing up, two of the homes in the old town of Cameron were still inhabited by my kin. One of these old farmhouses was my great-grandfather’s farmhouse and the other belonged to my uncle and his family. Both houses sat right up against the overgrown woods that lined the banks of Prairie Creek.

Back then, “going to the farm” meant a trip out to one of these two old farmhouses. The days I spent out there are among my most cherished of memories, even though the woods along the creek were thick and frightening to me. We never went into the creek – the trees were full of ticks and the water full of leeches, and my cousin once told me that Bigfoot lived under the bridge. I also never went to the overgrown field where the park had been, which was just on the other side of the creek from my uncle’s old clapboard house. In fact, I only recall crossing the bridge on foot, into what had been the bulk of the town, a couple of times. Unlike many dark places, there was a darkness there that didn’t attract me.

At night, shrouded beneath the woods of Prairie Creek, the old ghost town of Cameron is dark and creatures lurk in its shadows. We’d often hear coyotes howling from somewhere in the mist and owls hooting from the tops of the trees. From the farmhouse we could hear rustling in the bushes as nocturnal animals moved about in the darkness, and sometimes we'd even see the dark bulk of a creature wandering through the dense brush.

But even though they sat at the gateway to what seemed like a dark and mysterious place, our farmhouses were havens of light and laughter and joy. I always felt safe there – until one night – in my uncle’s house – when I came face to face with the Silver Man.

It was an old two-story farmhouse. Built long before central air and heat, there were air passages covered by metal grates between the floors, to allow air to circulate and help cool the upstairs in the Summer and heat it in the Winter. I had just plopped down on the old couch in the living room. My two cousins were on the floor in front of me, propped up on elbows and holding their chins, faces glued to the gigantic wood-paneled television console that sat in the corner of the room, larger than a china cabinet. The grown-ups were all in the next room playing pinochle at the kitchen table. I laid back and looked up at the ceiling. Directly above my head was one of those metal grates covering an air-passage to the upstairs.

As I looked up into the dark space beyond the metal grate, the clear outline of a head and shoulders suddenly appeared there, staring back down at me. It had no facial features – none that I could see – but it was clearly the image of a man, and he shimmered, like the silvery reflection of moonlight bouncing off ripples of water. Face or no face, one thing was certain, the silver apparition was looking through the floor and staring right at me.

I screamed. And when I say I screamed, I mean I let loose a blood-curdling, bone-chilling caterwaul that rattled the windows and had the adults upturning their chairs and bottlenecking at the doorway in their attempts to get to the living room and see what the hell had gotten into me. The Silver Man quickly moved away from the grate opening, and the air passage above me was once again dark.

They tried to get me to calm down, but I was hysterical. I was simultaneously sobbing and screaming and crying – and subsequently hyperventilating, too. When I finally caught my breath, I told them through my tears exactly what I had seen.

Of course this led to pointless reassurances that nothing was really there, that I hadn’t seen anything, and after much coaxing (and ultimately dragging me up the steep staircase), the final reassurance of showing me the bedroom closet that housed the air passage leading to the first floor living room above the couch – the bedroom closet where the Silver Man had been crouching and looking down at me. See, there’s nobody here.

Of course there was nobody there. This only confirmed for me what I already knew: That there was some truly scary-ass, messed up Scheisse going down in the old dead town of Cameron.

Well, I was just a kid and that meant whatever I saw could be easily explained away by adults. And as it turned out, that was the only time I saw the Silver Man in my uncle’s old farmhouse. In fact, the whole incident would have been forgotten completely, except the Silver Man began following me. And eventually, I wasn’t the only one who saw him.

To be continued...