Free Floating Apparition and the Living Dead!

 At 6:30 am the next morning Mrs. D let out a blood curdling scream...

“Royyyyyyy! 

Startled from mom's screeching, dad woke up from a sound sleep, grabbed the broom next to his bed and began beating the ceiling.  "Up and at 'em...Time of the harvest moon!" he began yelling in his staccato staff sergeant cadence. Meanwhile, mom continued to scream in fright at the piercing red eyes from the black apparition of the living-dead zombie that stood at the end of her bed.  Woken up abruptly to mom's screaming, Mr. D forgot it was Saturday, which was his only day to sleep-in, and thought he urgently needed to wake up the tribe for the Viking "Street Cleaning" ritual (must see blog post 7/13/13). 

The hippie Wolf Pack on the floor above groaned and moaned and cursed and burped and farted and stomped on the floor in mutinous rebellion. "Mr. D its not Wednesday" Puke-Breath yelled back at dad, but unable to overcome feverish pitch the frightened Mrs. D.  When Dad's sleepy eyes finally focused he turned the wrath of his broom handle onto the scabby burnt ghost and chased the demonic phantasm from the room in his underwear.

The free floating apparition sprang from the foot of the bed with the speed of light and escaped up to the third floor to the long rear bedroom. The scabbified-black poltergeist startled the Wolf Pack along with the rattlesnakes and nasty looking iguana that resided in cages built into the side of the room.

 Mayhem broke out. "Fright or Flight." The hair on the rat's spine stood up, rattlesnakes defensively coiled, the iguana from hell (blog post 8/1/13) thew itself against the glass and Ulrich clenched his fist ready to take on the repulsive manifestation. Dooh-Dooh Pants pulled the covers over his head and Puke-Breath cussed out the disgusting creature. Chewbacca, on the other hand recognized it for what it was!

A MIRACLE!

It was not something to be feared or loathed, but something to be venerated and loved. Chewbacca gave the creature its new name. "Lazarus" he affectionately cried, in an emotional embrace. The room was silent - it was not a ghost! NO, the dead calico cat (that was in a small shoe-box coffin out back at Wall Drug) had risen from the dead!

Apparently the cat had cashed in all nine lives and had cheated death itself.



When Chewbacca was a small child; before The Beatles, before all the hair, he used to fall over all the time and bonk his head. Mr. and Mrs D felt they needed to protect him from brain damage and made him wear a green hockey helmet as an exoskeletal brain bucket.  My vote was that - it didn't fully work and he had some serious issues... either that or it was the hippie weed that had affected his perception of the world.



It wasn't like things weren't bad enough with the veloci-rooster, the chickens, "grampa" the chicken-eating-frog, the alligator, the escaping rattlesnakes, and the dozens of hippies that lived at our house - NOW, the smelly burn victim of the Fraternity Fire (see previous blogs) was considered one of our numbers.





And the rest of us had to contend with the place of honor in which Chewbacca placed the gross looking cat. History turned a new chapter in the Dahlin house as none of us dared to take back our chair from the reviled demon CAT or kick him off the countertop when it dropped scabs and licked the butter - lest we face the wrath of Chewbacca.

   

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."