The Dark Secret of the Ouija Board.

1969: The Ouija Board and Dark Portal of Harding Ave.

Last time I left off with - not only my pride bruised from the epic "love-fail" in the Saint Mark's schoolyard in front of all the girls, but also with a couple choice bruises on various body parts at the hands of a bully big brother and his gang of angry little men.  Now I am in my room talking to my dog and worried about what is going to happen after dark.  You see, not only do I try to avoid the flippant hippies downstairs who think I'm a throw toy and the schemes of the unfeeling Wolf Pack upstairs on the third floor, but spend nights frightened to death of something even more dark and sinister that began years ago.









My family was responsible for opening a portal to the dark underbelly of the demonic realm by dabbling in the dark arts by staging séances in our living room. I was young and remember the time the table lifted off of the floor and how one of my older brothers pee'd his pants - two cried because they were scared to death (teenagers crying - could have been the best day ever EXCEPT...

...Except the fact that at that very moment it was the precise instance that we unleashed something insidious that dwelt in the dark places of our house and we had lots of dark places.  Being young, I had a special sensitivity to the boogie man and monsters under the bed, Zombies, demons and things that go bump in the night.

Me? I saw it - they didn't! They were dull and clueless to what they had  unleashed into the house and into the neighborhood and probably worst yet - didn't care.

And here I sat in my room with my trusty dog - in the room nobody wanted. The reason I had a room to myself in a house with something like 532 people (that would be my brothers) crammed together in the limited number of bedrooms ... was because this room had a dark secret.

The hole that I slept in was discovered by the Ouija Board.  

                              THIS IS ALL TRUE!

Here is a picture of me (later in about '72  with a broken leg - and a hippy older brother clickhere Hotel Crazy and the Harding History of Broken Bones) and the loft bed in the background.   I liked the loft bed because it gave me an advantage over the Wolf Pack that had protection on three sides and offered high ground.

It made it easier for me to defend myself against night raids and suffocation but was the portal of the ghost that lived in the basement.

Since this it is just a couple days to Halloween I think I will tell you the story of that day with the Ouija Board that changed everything.            


 If you don't believe me ask my brothers!


What my house looked like...

What I thought it felt like....  

Next time the conclusion to the Ouija curse. 

 

Conclusion: To a Dahlin Christmas (the nightmare on Harding Avenue).

(continued) 1:40 am Christmas Morning...during the unwrapping frenzy at the Dahlin house.


While crumpled wrapping paper was whizzing overhead, Pinky was sitting in his large overstuffed chair busily cracking the nuts in his Christmas stocking and putting the shells in one of the ten ashtrays that decorated the eclectic living room comprised of "Early-American-Thrift." 

The pile of colorful paper continued to accumulate to about waist deep and at precisely 1:43am the "Zombie Hand" of the" Ghost of Christmas-yet-to-come" sunk its sharp claws into Pinky's left ankle (I'm pretty certain it wasn't Casper the "Friendly Ghost."

Pinky shot up like the botched-launch of a missile fired from a submarine. Up he shot. Head dizzy from sedentary low blood pressure, the colossal human being spun on one leg as if he could come crashing down in any direction.

Leaning one way, the Wolf Pack made a mad scramble in the opposite direction to extricate themselves from the impact area of the seismic catastrophe. Then Pinky swayed the other direction which caused the troops to move again from one side of the room to the other. Like something out of a Three Stooges movie, this comical clambering took place three or four times before he finally blacked out and landed backwards into his chair with a giant crack that could be heard around the world. Cracked walnut and hazelnut shells scattered into the air like the fallout from a bomb and spread a layer on the wrapping paper and sifted through to the floor.

"We didn't want that chair anyway" Gustav said mockingly.

Even though everyone was thankful that Pinky had finally landed, I was still freaked out about "The Hand" and Matilda was still clinging to dad's head with her tiny hands cupped over his squished eyes which made him navigate through the whole episode blind.Her leg caught the tinsel covered tree and knocked it over...into the center of living room adding to the clutter and chaos.

Mom made us sound off one by one until we had discovered that the youngest Dahlin was not accounted for. missing. Kjersten was gone! Panic ensued, fearing that the baby girl of the family had been killed in the latest calamity.

Mom prayed to Saint Anthony!
Dad barked out orders!
The boys shuffled their feet through the massive wrapping pile in hopes of stumbling across something solid that might be a body. Occasionally, words not authorized by the Catholic church were spewed by angry lips every time one of the older boys stepped on the sharp fragment of a hazelnut or walnut shell.


I pretended to look behind the couch from where I was perched, as though, what I was doing was important. I wasn't about to let the Zombie Hand of death grab my leg. When Pinky landed, I could see the scratch marks on his leg and knew that there was something hidden under the paper and I didn't want to find out what it was.

"The Hand" could help itself to one of the older boys for all I care, but not me. No sir, not me! I nearly died two months ago at McIlliot's pool and it was no fun. My leg still ached where they took the stitches out so I was not any any mood to let a monster kill me on Christmas day.

Mom solved the mystery of "The Christmas Boogie man" and "The lost little sister" when she found Kjersten under a pile of wrapping paper in tears. Turns out that Kjersten had gotten buried under the accumulating pile of rubble and was crawling underneath trying to find her way out. Groping about in the dark, she discovered Pinky's ankle and clung on as though her life depended up on it.  Thankfully, when Pinky spun around, it flung Kjersten five feet away under the safety of the coffee table, which had been excavated by mom.

In "The wrapping paper debacle of '65" we had inadvertently scooped up the dog and threw it out with the trash. Since then, we have lost and broken many presents and lots of toys. Everyone was afraid that it wouldn't bode well for my parents if the local paper ran the story about child endangerment for throwing a kid away in the alley in a heap of multicolored wrapping paper.

This year though we lost only four presents, mainly because of the manhunt... we didn't, however, loose any children or throw away any pets. So all in all - other than the crushed chair and a downed Christmas tree it was a good Christmas at the Dahlin house   We laughed and we sang and we were loud.

And one of the Blasers next door heard the raucous at our house, crumpled a wad of wrapping-paper, looked around carefully to make sure a parent wasn't watching and tossed the crumpled paper into the middle of the floor. The words weren't verbalized, but that particular Blazer was getting tired of normal and wished they could be a little more like the Dahlins.

We just came from church and the Priest read  Luke 2:8-11 "And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord."

The way I look at things as a 12-year-old Religious-Philosopher was that if God could send His Son to earth to save people from their sins...then certainly he came to the right house. Surely there wasn't much good to be found in the Wolf Pack, so I figured that God should probably be down at the Lennon house looking for someone who did deserve to be saved - Lord knows we didn't.

But then, maybe that's what love is all about. True love wasn't just loving those who loved you...but loving those who don't care about you, loving those who hung you on a cross and loving people despite the fact that they hate you. God's love is perfect in that it loves those that don't deserve it.  I guess that's what unconditional love is all about.

And that is the message of Christmas - The One true God of the universe, Maker of all things - never giving up on us - relentlessly perusing us with His Love - even when we don't do a darned thing to earn one bit of it.

And maybe - just maybe, there is a little bit of Dahlin in all of us...and maybe not everyone is as normal or a perfect as we think!                                                  Merry Christmas

The Nightmare of Christmas Present

1:43 am (middle of the night) after Midnight Mass

You know that moment in a horror flick when the hand comes up out of the ground, or out of the water, or out of grave... (it doesn't really matter what it comes out of) - but in any case, it scares the snot out of you...well, this is exactly what happened at our house on this particular Christmas in the dark hours of the early morning.


Out of nowhere, a hand - "The Hand" shot up through the 4-foot strata of wrapping paper and grabbed one of Pinky's thick ankles. Ejected out of his chair like a misfired rocket, Pinky screamed bloody murder if he had just been attacked by the legendary one armed hatchet murderer. In a dizzy head-rush, Pinky began to spin in circles as though he were about to fall over and the Wolf Pack panicked, scrambling to get out of the way - for fear of being squished to death...as if by an 8 ton tree.






As I mentioned before, our house was haunted, so I wasn't worried too much about being Pinky falling over on top of me. I was more concerned about "The Zombie Hand" of the Boogie-man - so I freaked out and jumped up on the back of couch while Matilda climbed up and perched herself on top dad's head.

Screaming...Panic...Fear and Mayhem broke out... This was our house on Christmas.




I'm pretty sure this is not they way it is most normal families.  My friend, Julie, at Saint Mark's told me about their Christmas. She said they had a fake, white Christmas tree and had the cool colored lights...the kind you see in the window displays at department stores. If she said this to make me jealous - it worked. The best part about the picture was not the green ornaments on the Styrofoam flocked Christmas tree or that she was still taller than her little brother, but the mini-skirt!  

That was was pretty cool - I guess!


32 minutes earlier: 1:11am.



My mother remembered back to the days when we were young and in control and longed for those days again - but they had been lost forever.








But the fact that my Brothers had grown up to be full fledged hippies - never stopped her from trying to make our Christmas like they used to be.

Good luck with that one Mrs. D.  So on the way home from Mass...by the time we were passing by John Gillemot's house Mom was already screaming for us to pay attention. She was about to give the annual "Pre-Christmas-Speech" on how we were to open our presents.

 It didn't help that we had to pass the Famous Lennon sister's house...it only served to make things worse. I swear you could angels signing "Gloria in Excelsis Deo" as we rounded the corner and passed by their statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Mom looked towards the Lennon with begging eyes as if hoping her kids could be more like Bill and Sis's kids: sweet, obedient, kind, thoughtful, intelligent, musical, reverent...(I think the list was pretty big - because her pause was long).

As if she were herding a bunch of feral-cats... she screamed all the way to the front door of the house and charged inside in front of the motley crew. Throwing herself against the two great big sliding door that lead into the living room (where the presents had been delivered by Frank Nargie while we were at Church).

Mom gave us her list of demands...as though we were prisoners of war and was threatening to withhold our weekly rations should we not comply.  I wanted it mom's way but nobody listened. The older boys tried to open the doors and prior her fingers off as she shouted her famous last words. "Over my dead body!" 

That didn't work... then the list of names and the "Clause"  GustavBjornKnutLeifUlrich...hell...whatever your name is...UNDER PAIN OF MORTAL SIN!" she screamed hoping to get our attention.

SILENCE for one split second as the Wolf Pack contemplated purgatory then rushed head long into the room and assaulted the presents as if they were a dead caribou that lay under the Charlie Brown Tree.

Whoosh…wizzzzz…Bam
Presents were chucked and flew across the room like misguided missiles striking members of the brood in the forehead!

Picking up a present and reading the label...someone would say "Here...this one's for Dooh-Dooh Pants" and  fling it - not really caring whether or not it got broken or where it ended up - other than hoping someone got hurt in the process. 

"This one's for... Puke-Breath" another brother would say, just before the indiscriminate tossing of projectile that nearly cracked a window. 

 Whoosh…KaBam!

Presents flew... Mom fumed...Dad mumbled...and Kjerstan and I "stopped, dropped and took cover" as if the Air Raids Sirens were blaring in alarm.

There was no soft golf clap of appreciation after each patient unwrapping that neither honored the gift-giver or acknowledge the person receiving the gift.      My mom's biggest nightmare had come true. 

1:26 am 
Shredded rapping paper was carelessly flung into the center of the room like the living room was the Sepulveda Dump.

1:42 am 
The loud chaos... the present opening frenzy continued at a fevered pitch and the strata of torn-up wrapping paper began to pile up higher and higher. 4 feet high - a record and that was when the Zombie attack happened. 

1:43 am  The Hand emerged from under the strata of crumpled paper and clawed Picky's ankle, which set off an unfortunate chain of events...

I will share the rest of the story on Christmas Day... until then be blessed and be a blessing! On this Christmas Eve know that you are loved dearly - the message of Christmas! 

The Boogie-Woogie, Boogy Man!

What I didn't say last time (when I told the truth about the Lennons), is that they were also very creative along with being talented.

Some of that creative juice began to spill over into their elaborate front and backyard productions.

As some of them began to wonder off the premises and down to our house, I think it lead several of them to be corrupted by the Dahlins as they also began to grow long hair. Some of the older Lennon boys began to come over and help my brothers in the cultivation of the "Mexican tomato plants." 

 Again it was quite bizarre to me...for a couple reasons!  The first, is those plants never grew tomatoes and second is the fact that this gang of hippies were so fastidious and diligent about those ugly - stinky o' plants... when they weren't really known to be fastidious about anything else!  It's 1968, I'm in seventh grade, and I just didn't get it.

I don't know what their infatuation was in those stupid plants. I'm no expert, but it did seem to have something to do with the long hair.  Hummmm?

Now the Lennons began hardcore decorating for Halloween and putting on a show for all of Venice and Santa Monica and Culver City... Everybody would come and crowd our block and watch the latest installment of the Lennon haunted mansion. ONLY...!

The only thing is, although the the Lennons put on a great show, our house really was haunted.

                      I'm not lying!

When I was really small, my mom and the Wolf Pack would hold scary séances. With all the lights in our big creaky old house turned off  - mom and the boys would gather in the candle lit room, touching thumbs and baby fingers connecting all the way around the large oak table. I don't know why we were allowed to do this as Catholics...but we did! I don't know if there was a formula or chant involved, I was too young to remember that, but whatever it was they did... it worked! That old heavy table lifted off the ground and hovered as if floating.

Watching the table float like that gave me the heebeegeebies as the hair on my neck stood up and I got fraidy-cat goosebumps all over my body. Freaked out by all this darkness and candles and everything else, I crawled underneath to see if it was some kind of hoax. But it wasn't!  That 'O table was moving all by itself... and I didn't like it one bit!  And I tell you right now -even some of the older boys were scared. When I was under the table.. I smelled urine! Somebody peed their pants... and that somebody was a teenager!  

I think what this voodoo-ritual-thingy did, was invite bad stuff into our house that stayed there for a long, long time. If you stick around long enough with me...I  am eventually going to share some of that evil-craziness that really did happen.

So RIGHT NOW...I going to admit to the WORLD that I was afraid of the dark. I figure that if you knew the context then you wouldn't judge me so harshly. We had angry ghost as well as the boogie man living with us...NO WONDER WE WERE SO MESSED UP!

I just knew...they lived in the attic, in the dark dingy basement, in the recesses of my bedroom closet and in most of the dark places where light refused to shine. When the boys were doing their herbal experimentations with those tomato plants and smelling like a bunch of skunks, I think those ghost...the boogy man...whatever you want to call them...whispered in their ears and gave them some of their brilliantly sinister ideas...

“Hey…order of the Wolf Pack, why don’t you electrify the sides of the pool and shock your little brother.” 

They would happily emerge from the cavity in the ivy saying things like, "Dude bro... that's a groovy idea bro..."
 "Righteous dude! Cool man, let's do it."
 "Dude!"
 "Groovy"
 "Psychedelic Man"
 "Now, this is a funky situation"

 
It sure seemed to me that whenever those older boys got around those plants and they ended up in that dark, hippy, ghost-infested-grotto (that was covered in thick ivy hidden behind our mosquito pond...AKA the pool) they would come out looking for me... with some diabolical plan in mind.  

ANYWAY... I never-ever-ever-ever wanted to be home alone!  When the three of us little ones were left all alone we heard footsteps and things that went bump in the dark.

 I'd have to admit, however, that it was a good thing not to have the Wolf Pack in the house. At least I didn't have to worry about getting shoved in a hamper, squeezed in the temples of my forehead and knocked out, tied to a tree or anything like that - THINGS THAT WENT BUMP IN THE DAY!  YAY!   But Madeline (one year older), Kjersten (couple years younger) and me...we would find the clearest room of house (the room with the least amount of junk and clutter) - turn every light on that was possible, huddle together and arm ourselves with butter knives!

 THIS IS TRUE!  I'm not making this up. Pshawwww!    I have no idea how a butter knives would help us against the likes of the ghouls who lived under the bed or in the closet - monsters that I knew were just waiting to grab me by the ankles and drag me away, but it was worth a try!

 Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore-
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door-
Only this, and nothing more." 

                                                                                    'The Raven', by Edgar Allen Poe

If you grab your butter knife, next time I'll  tell you the EPIC story of how "John the Baptist" imploded into the scariest Halloween of all...      "The Spawn of Charles Manson."  

   



   

Milk Wars...kinda like WWIII, but not!

Friday Morning: Last night was uneventful...other than the dream I had about falling off the roof of the house and where Tony had morphed into Frankenstein 's monster, chased me around the front yard and caught me near the palm tree when my legs moved no faster than slow motion. I woke up flailing the air defensively with my boxing gloves and laid awake for the next couple hours thinking about the boogie man who (I knew) lived in the dark secret passage in my room.

Fridays were very long days... which included some thumps on the head (vomit of course) redemption, love and a scary trip to the "Albino Camp."
 

Thank goodness we didn't have to push cars this morning, but speaking of Dr. Frankenstein...I think its time to share about another Dahlin morning ritual...    i.e.          MILK WARS!

With a billion kids in our house, it would have been a lot cheaper if we ran on gasoline instead of milk. Gas was about 32 cents a gallon, while milk, at about a buck a gallon, was like three times that. This was back in the day when milkmen worn uniforms and drove special trucks and delivered milk to your front door.

Our milkman came just about every other day, but the 60 bottles of milk never seemed to make it until the next time he had to maneuver through the junk on the porch to take away the empty bottles and to leave the next fresh batch of liquid white gold (I hope you realize that 60 bottles was an exaggeration).  Part of the reason is that our milk spoiled especially with that amount of consumption was that: 1) The older boys never used cups, they just drank straight from bottles - Yep... lips and slobber and germs and canker sores and all - YUCK!  2) They opened new bottles indiscriminately and chugged it down leaving half empty bottles completely untouched. 3) Was that no one wanted to drink after Knut (pseudonym to protect the guilty), who used to wear a retainer and still had bad breath. 4) A lot of stuff got hidden and forgotten about with all the stuff crammed in our fridge 5) I think the spoiled food in the refrigerator help to accelerated the milk on to its way of becoming sour cottage cheese. That meant with all bottle jostling and juggling and rim licking a lot of milk ended up being spoiled and the boys decided to used me as their taste-test dummy. They forced me to try a sip from each bottle knowing that if I didn't gag or throw up then they knew the milk passed the test.


Well, my dad was an early riser and got up before the crack of dawn in order to experiment in his evil laboratory. 

This is TRUE. He had purchased a 50 pound sack of powdered milk that was taller than me, which sat behind the kitchen door and turned into concrete crawling with bull-weevils.

The older boys had refused to drink anything that was synthesized from powered milk... it was WAR!

Dad would have to chisel the solid block of ancient power with a jack hammer and mix it in his laboratory... always experimenting in ways he thought he could fool the milk snobs.

He opened the lids of good milk and drizzled power on the top to fool the Wolf Pack... he partially mixed some and continuously worked on different variations and percentages and poured milk back and forth from bottle to bottle with his newest concoction hoping to fool the fickle crew. They categorically refused to drink anything less than 100% whole milk. They made fun of the Blasers who had to drink non-fat milk - there was none of this 2% stuff back then - it was either whole fat or 0%.  Tony thought non-fat it was like trying to run a race car on 87 octane.. Of course they had to have 100 octane in their High performance Viking Machines.

My poor dad felt using that powder he had invested in was the only way he could stay out of the poor house and worked hard every morning to fool the fools.

While the Lennons and Blasers and normal families got to eat box cereal...we had to eat oatmeal, Cream-of-Wheat or Malt-O-Meal, which only compounded things even more.






"Good for you Mrs. Lennon. Good for you."


That was an ad campaign for Kelloggs... Special K



We, however, had to deal with my dad's cunning Milk Wars experimentation in addition to picking meal worms out of our oatmeal cereal. Gross!

"Not good for you Wolf Pack! Not good for you!"

Kurt came down stairs with the gloom news that another rattlesnake had escaped from the third floor cages in the boys room and made me go up to the roof to put up the yellow and green warning flag for the neighborhood - that read, "Don't tread on me."

I picked the boiled carcasses of meal-worm larvae out of my cereal, endured the Mad Scientist's milk concoction, managed to throw-up only one time and left for school. With the Italian family screaming in loud conversation and Mrs. Steadman peering through the blinds fearfully at the flag, I saluted the statue of the Blessing Virgin Mary (that was enshrined in the Lennon's great big picture window), then rounded the corner as I whistled my way to Saint Marks anticipating my Friday encounter with Irene.

Good Morning Harding Avenue. 

I guess a "Good Morning" is relative. For some it means waking up to 6 different choices of favorite boxed cereal, while for for others-  it means waking up. For Markie D it meant surviving the MILK WARS, meal worms, and a couple clunks on the head... in a life which was more like a reality show starring the Wolf Pack! 

Sincere blessings and a good day to all 6000 of those who have checked into this blog from 20 different countries... We are all members of the same human race and should endeavor to show kindness to all... especially the weak, the downtrodden, (little brothers) and to those incapable of defending themselves.  Love is not a  word that is out of fashion.

Until later Russia, Canada, Romania, Germany, Japan, South Korea, UK, France, Italy, Netherlands, and the rest of God's glorious diversity that makes humanity so special.      Jag alskar du.