Voices
We decided to make a ghost recording in the woods. It was my idea, though we all agreed to it.
You’ve probably heard about stuff like this, maybe listened to alleged spectral voices on the Internet. Professionals — if that’s the proper term — go to places where they hope to capture messages from beyond, setting up ultra-sensitive audio equipment to do so.
But we weren’t parapsychologists using cutting-edge technology. We were three teenage boys in a podunk town in Upstate New York in the summer of 1979, and our equipment was a Realistic CTR-43 portable cassette recorder.
If you’re willing, come walk with me along the corridors of memory, and I’ll tell you of that attempt, and what became of it.
There were three of us in this enterprise: me, my older brother Marvin, and our neighbor Ronald. I was 13, Marv a year and a half older, and Ron 15. It was the start of summer vacation, those three blessed months of freedom: a catalyst for fun, for mischief, and for the weird notion soon to be planted in my adolescent mind.
Browsing in the town library in the first week of June, I came across a volume titled The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. It needs a snappier title, I thought, gazing upon the monochrome photo of Edison in profile gracing the dust jacket.
Opening it, I skimmed the table of contents: “War and Peace,” “Education and Work,” “Man and Machine.” Then the last chapter title caught my eye, and I felt something course through me, like a tiny jolt of electricity.
VIII THE REALMS BEYOND
Life after death
I borrowed the book, got on my bicycle, and went home. Sitting on my bed, I began to read.
Thomas Edison wanted to invent technology to contact the dead. He had a theory about microscopic “life-units” which survive physical death and comprise what we call the soul. It was vague, with no details about how the device would work. Still, this wasn’t the kind of stuff about Edison you learned in school.
The next day, Marv and I went “excavating” with Ron. That was when the idea for the ghost recording hit me.
Our street and Ron’s intersected on the eastern edge of town. Each street had a dead end beyond which were woodland trails leading to the Batten Kill, flowing west until its waters joined the Hudson. With a bit of digging in the woods just beyond the end of Ron’s street, you could find empty bottles from the turn of the century: sarsaparilla, whiskey, patent medicine, what have you. We traded them like baseball cards.
So there we were, having chosen our respective excavation spots, searching with buckets and shovels for bottles to add to our collections. We’d later wash them off with the hose in Ron’s backyard and divvy them up.
My first find was a thin, blueish bottle that had once held “Therapeutic Mineral Water of Saratoga Springs.” At least eighty years old, I thought, brushing the soil from it. Whoever had bought and drunk this water was likely no longer alive. Who was it? I pictured a young man in a sack suit and bowler, sporting a handlebar mustache, and a young lady in a long skirt, shirtwaist and elaborate colorful hat, sipping the mineral water of Saratoga from slender bottles. She is young and beautiful and a Temperance Unionist, and he is courting her, and even though he enjoys a cold lager after work, for the sake of her hand in marriage he will disavow the demon alcohol.
Who bought this? What if I could talk to them and find out, like Edison wanted to?
Later, washing dirt off the bottles with Ron’s garden hose, I said, “Guys, I’ve got an idea.”
…
There was rain that night, so we put off our self-appointed mission until the next evening, agreeing to rendezvous by Ron’s house at a quarter to midnight and head for the entrance to the woods.
After making sure our mother was asleep — our father was in Florida, as I recall; he wasn’t home much — Marv and I quietly left the house and took our usual route to Ron’s house, squeezing through the corner gap in the fence at the back of the yard to enter Ron’s property.
Dew from the grass stirred about our feet as we walked. The fireflies of early June, happy to be out among the still-damp foliage, floated like a myriad of fairies’ lanterns. I imagined, briefly, one of the fairies warning us to go back, not to meddle in things no mortal man or boy should know. I ignored this fancied admonition and trudged on behind my elder brother. Ron was waiting for us by his house, silhouetted against the streetlights. No one spoke as we exited his front yard and proceeded down the street.
We got to the dead end where asphalt became dirt and gravel, which in turn became the trail into the woods. The entrance struck me as a black cavernous maw waiting to devour us, but I drew a little comfort from the light of the fireflies within.
Don’t! cried the floating, lantern-wielding fairy of my imagination. The forest is waiting to consume you! To eat your soul! I suddenly had to pee. I stopped walking.
“You all right, Bruno?” Ron asked.
“Yeah. Just gonna take a whiz.”
“Sure.”
I stepped just inside the canopy of trees and off to the right. Somehow, the prosaic act of emptying my bladder calmed me.
“OK,” I said, zipping up.
“Did you bring it?” asked Ron.
“Right here,” I said, reaching back to slap my backpack.
“OK. Let’s go.”
We entered the woods, flashlights on. Our destination was Indian Rock.
I’d never heard a definite legend of how Indian Rock got its name, other than the obvious allusion to indigenous people. There were rumors that the site was haunted. It was more or less what the name suggested: a large rock jutting from the earth, a few yards from the river bank. In the daytime we would occasionally fish there.
When we got to the rock, I opened my backpack and removed the tape recorder. There was a cassette inside, 45 minutes per side, rewound on side A.
Under the light of Ron and Marv’s flashlights, I placed the recorder on the surface of Indian Rock and pressed the play and record buttons simultaneously.
Placing my mouth near the built-in microphone, I asked:
“Is there anyone here who can speak to us?”
As agreed the day before, we walked some distance along the bank, downriver, leaving the device to record whatever it could. Marv and I caught fireflies with a couple of empty pickle jars. Ron seemed to view making firefly lanterns as childish, and hadn’t brought a jar of his own.
After about an hour we went back to the rock. The cassette had played itself out. I put it in my backpack, and we went home. We agreed to meet at Ron’s house the next day to play the tape.
…
Ron’s parents were out visiting in-laws somewhere, and his sister was with her boyfriend at Lake George, so we had the house to ourselves. We sat in Ron’s kitchen, sipping glasses of grape Kool-Aid. I removed the tape recorder from my backpack and placed it on the table.
“OK, Mr. Flanagan the younger,” said Ron. “As this was your idea, please do the honors.”
“And just in case the tape recorder is now cursed, I’d rather not touch it,” said Marv. “Just kidding,” he quickly added.
“Great,” I said. I rewound side A, turned the volume dial all the way up, then pushed the play button.
From the speaker came a background hiss. We sat listening, all eyes on the machine. I was tense, torn between fear and anticipation.
A sound came: a deep sigh. Then a whisper, deep and male:
“Hear my message.”
Again, the deep sigh. The voice spoke again:
“Ronnie Richter and the Flanagan brothers are dumbass dorks.”
Muffled guffaws, whispered mockery.
“Dorks.”
“Geeks.”
“Freaks.”
“Morons.”
Ron pushed the stop button and said, “Shit!”
“Steve Barrie,” I said.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Steven Barrie was the school’s star quarterback, an able athlete and mediocre scholar about to start his senior year. His admission to one of the better Northeastern colleges on a sports scholarship was considered more or less a done thing. That, and being the son of the Superintendent of Schools, made him more than a little arrogant. It was his voice and those of three friends, his entourage of fellow jocks, that had mocked us. (And not for the first time. We weren’t exactly the cool kids at school.)
“How the hell did they find out we were doing this?” asked Marv. “We never mentioned it to anyone.” He paused, looking from me to Ron and back again. “Did we?”
“Hell, no,” I said.
“Me neither,” said Ron. “They must have been smoking weed somewhere upriver and spotted our flashlight beams. Indian Rock’s supposed to be haunted. They saw the tape recorder. Not hard to figure out.”
“Right,” I said. “Well…”
“Shit!” shouted Ron, grabbing his head with both hands. “We’re never gonna live this down!”
“Ron,” I said. “Relax. It’s not —”
“Relax! Christ, man, how am I supposed to relax? This is gonna be all over town by the end of today. We’re gonna officially be the freaks of the school when we go back in September. Shit! This is worse than that stupid survey you did in the fifth grade.” I’d made a questionnaire to learn what percentage of students in my class believed UFOs were real. I thought of it as a kind of social experiment, but it didn’t go over well.
There was no calming down Ron as he then began ranting — albeit in an indirect way — that being labeled such an oddity would likely prevent him from ever losing his virginity. Marv and I took the tape recorder and went home.
We drank lemonade in the kitchen. Our mother was in the living room, watching an afternoon rerun of The Love Boat. Marv, seemingly undistracted by Captain Steuben’s advice to a lovelorn passenger, sat reading a collection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. (I briefly imagined greenish tentacles emerging from the sea to creep toward the good captain.) The tape recorder lay on the table between us. I stared at it, arms crossed, in silent turmoil.
I realized Ron was right. We would all be labeled certified freaks who hunted ghosts in the wee hours. The mockery would be instant, merciless, and unrelenting. Marv seemed coolly detached about the whole thing. He wore his outsider status as a badge of honor.
I was far less equanimous than my brother. Silently, I began formulating ways to exact revenge upon Steve Barrie and his Neanderthal underlings: keying their cars, putting sugar in their gas tanks, having hardcore porn sent to their homes, in their names but addressed in care of their mothers. Then a new thought struck me.
“We haven’t listened to the rest of the tape,” I said.
“Yeah,” answered Marv. “Maybe a voice will say, ‘You fool, Warren is dead!’”
“Huh? Who’s Warren?”
“It’s a line from Lovecraft.” He pointed to the book he was holding. “‘The Statement of Randolph Carter.’”
“Oh.”
“You ought to read it.”
“Yeah.”
“All right,” he said, getting up. “But I think The Love Boat’s going to interfere with our listening. Let’s play it in my room.”
Marv’s room had a bookcase lined with volumes he’d told me about, but I’d never read. Not yet. Books by or about occultists such as Aleister Crowley and Eliphas Levi, fiction by Lovecraft, Poe, and Algernon Blackwood. I was the more conventional Flanagan brother, though Marv’s interests had begun to rub off on me.
“Look, this whole thing,” he said as we sat on a couple of beanbag chairs, “about using technology to listen to ghosts. It’s nothing new. You read about Edison’s idea, right?”
“Yeah.” I’d shown him the book from the library.
He got up, pulled a book from the top shelf, and handed it to me. “Well, check this out.”
The title was Electronic Voice Phenomena: Seeking the Voices of the Dead. It was kind of like a manual, with no author credited.
“People have been trying this stuff for decades,” said Marv, “using sophisticated technology. Ultra-sensitive audio equipment. Receivers that can pick up signals from any radio frequency.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow. And the evidence so far has been vague at best. It’s not as if a few kids with a Radio Shack cassette recorder are going to pick up messages from beyond the grave.” He had this lecturing way of speaking at times like this, like a 50-year-old professor trapped in a 14-year-old body. It was annoying.
“Then why didn’t you say anything about this before?”
“Even if I had, you would’ve done it anyway.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But you seemed just as hyped about it as me and Ron.”
He shrugged. “I had my hopes, I guess.”
“So, odds are…”
“There’s nothing else on the tape except background hiss. Unless Barrie and his boys came back to insult us some more. I can take it if you can.”
“OK.” I pressed the play button, and the tape’s hiss filled the room.
Marv passed me a thin volume titled Flatland. “This is a good one,” he said, settling into the beanbag chair to read his Lovecraft. I was in no mood to read. I held the book closed, staring at the recorder, keeping my ears attuned to the slightest sound from the tape.
There was nothing but background hiss.
That same evening, we learned that Steve Barrie and his three friends had been killed the night before near Lake George when Steve’s car crashed head-on into a light pole at high speed. They’d apparently been drinking. Word was that the paramedics had to literally pick up the pieces. It happened around 11:00 P.M., about an hour before we’d started recording at Indian Rock.
Our feelings were a strange mixture. We hated Barrie and his buddies, but they were classmates who had died a horrible death. We also felt relieved that our midnight mission at Indian Rock would remain a secret. And then there was the apparent evidence for life after death.
The next day, the three of us sat on Indian Rock in the afternoon sun, talking it over. We agreed to tell no one. Analog cassette recordings had no date & time display. It would simply be assumed the recording had been made by the living, physical jocks at some point before the car accident, and that we were lying. I could picture the bereaved parents accusing us of exploiting the deaths of their sons for the sake of public attention. No, thank you.
“Maybe that was the point,” said Ron. “To give us proof of a ghost audio, yet not really proof.”
“A final act of mockery,” said Marv.
“Those dickheads,” said I.
Ron was pretty handy with electronics. With Marv’s assistance, he took the recorder apart, took Polaroids of everything, and somehow managed to put it all back together so that it worked. There seemed nothing strange about its components, nor the cassette. We decided I should keep them, along with the photos, taped up in a box in my closet. I was appointed Keeper of the Paranormal Technology, if that’s what it was.
Maybe there was something about Indian Rock that attracted Barrie and his friends, and any tape recorder would have worked. Or maybe it was both Indian Rock and the recorder, a supernatural combination of location and equipment. But if that’s true, who or what made the recorder able to do what it did?
We agreed to try again, to figure out how this had happened: to experiment by using the same recorder at a different location, and a different, more sensitive recorder at Indian Rock. But we never did, and neither Marv nor Ron has mentioned it to me since.
I still have that sealed box, which to this day I have never opened. On the rare occasions I am reminded of it, I feel the urge to throw it into a blast furnace, or sink it to the bottom of the sea. And yet there is also the thought, unaccountable, that I may need to use it again someday.
I have no idea why. It scares me a little.
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Bigfoot evolved mimicry skills. All I’m sayin’.