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I was walking with a ghost

It’s no secret around these parts that I have a thing for roadside attractions. Yet for some reason, up until recently, I had neglected to check the Roadside America website for the strange and unusual in my own backyard. This is how I ended up at the Seattle Museum of the Mysteries on Saturday night. Also, how have I not been to see the troll under the Fremont bridge yet? Or to the Spite House?

It’s really a museum in the the very loosest sense. They have a few bookshelf displays–a couple on the history of the location, one on ‘Mel’s Hole’ and one on DB Cooper. The rest appears to be the results of a lifetime of collecting books on the paranormal and occult, with one lonesome plasma ball hanging out on a table.

We had arrived about 20 minutes early for that night’s lock-in, where we would be “participating in our ongoing paranormal investigation of our resident ghost, Peter Alexander Dunnovitch” by playing poker with him. But before that, we had to sit through the remainder of the ‘Ghost Hunter’s Meeting’ which registered at about an eleven out of ten, hilarity-wise. One group fervently espoused the need for psychics on the ghost-hunting team to ‘assist in pseudoscience by peering over the cliff of the known, where scientists dare not see’, while the other group indicated that no, they were scientists, and would do things scientifically. The first group countered that the second can’t rightfuly call themselves scientists if they’re not endorsed by, or members of, an official scientifc organization, to which the second group angrily retorted “Oh, so YOU can do science, but we can’t?” I was struggling between two major urges at that point: the urge to laugh maniacally, and the urge to blurt out “NONE OF YOU ARE DOING SCIENCE. I KNOW THIS BECAUSE I AM A SCIENTIST.” Another woman was also facing an internal struggle, and her struggle became quite clear to us all when she started snoring on the couch. Clearly, scientific debate doesn’t hold everyone in thrall.

After the ghost hunters cleared out, there were just three of us left–a ‘gun-toting republican ghost-hunter’, my date, and me, plus the museum employee. The museum employee (one of the psychic scientists) sat us down in front of the TV to show us a little bit about the history of the location as a prohibition bar, and afterward, she took us on a tour. As a psychic scientist, she had a lot of theories regarding just about everything. She had a theory that liquor was smuggled into the bar via the women’s club next door. She had a theory that a lot of the areas that were walled off, yet should’ve been accessible via the blueprints, were all secret passageways. She also theorized that these secret passageways have been backfilled at some point during the last 100 years. She showed us the inside of a closet, and theorized about the gap in the wall. She took us into the women’s bathroom, and theorized about a secret passageway. She talked about the exposed brick in the men’s bathroom and theorized further. So I wasn’t at all surprised when she took us through a cluttered service closet into a back alley and said “I have a theory that this is the most romantic spot in all of Seattle.” I know that when I am standing in a freezing cold, filthy alleyway blocked off by a chainlink fence topped off with razorwire, I think ‘true love’.

Next on the tour was the Harvard Exit Theater, which is supposed to be the most haunted place in Seattle, with employees reporting doors opening and closing by themselves and patrons reporting feeling someone fondling their hair, bathroom doors locking themselves, and ‘balls of leaves’ floating down the stairs. The psychic-using scientist also took a moment to theorize on why there were so many women’s organizations in one block, and what purpose they served in the community. After we went back to the museum, it was time for some ghost poker. Although I am by no means a spectacular poker player, I can hold my own, and was looking forward to playing for a while, ghost or no ghost. Had I known we were only going to play two hands, I would have bet more aggressively.

After our two hands (during which the ghost made no appearance, scientifically or otherwise), the tour guide had each of us draw a card, and said she would return in a moment. When she came back, she had us flip over our cards, and the person with the high card got to be the leader of a ghost hunt. Showing my natural inclination toward dominating others, I had drawn an ace and subsequently got busy ordering the other two around, as is my wont. The tour guide handed me a thermal video camera, I had the other two conduct a game of rock-paper-scissors to see who would use the EMF detector, and the other person became the Keymaster. This video–I can’t even begin to describe it. It was comedy gold. Our mission was to go into the women’s bathroom in the dark, do a baseline EMF scan around the room (noting that there are electical wires and whatnot around), then implore the ghosts of the women’s club to assist us in finding the secret passageway, and do another EMF scan. Afterward, we were to look in the mirror if we dared. It was clear on the video that we were all pretty uncomfortable, unbelieving, and out of our element, and the sarcasm flew fast and thick. The gun-toting-Republican-Keymaster asked the ghosts to do something to make him shit himself. We stood in front of the mirrors and chanted “bloody mary” and “candyman”, respectively. I wish to Cthulhu we’d gotten in some ‘light as a feather, stiff as a board’ and all of the other sleepover activities from my youth, but alas, we were short on whipped cream, sharpies, and a freezer in which to stuff people’s underwear. I further wish I’d been able to coerce the psychic-using-scientist to give me a copy of our footage. Since I wasn’t, here’s a picture of me and their Sasquatch.

Who wants to go back on ‘Weird Science’ night?

Whoreloween

On Saturday, I met up with Carrie for some much-needed girl time–we ended up going out for breakfast at Peso’s, where we were promptly each served a plate of blue corn pancakes approximately the size of Mount Everest. Tiny sherpas leading goats burdened with butter bravely scaled the sides, intent on spreading their message of milkfat deliciousness across the land. Skeletal, unhappy harpies screeched their mantra of the benefits of a low-fat diet from the peaks, heaving pine nut boulders over the sides. Men train their whole lives to ingest something this mighty, so what chance did we stand, sleepy and slightly buzzed as we were? I tell you true, a mighty battle was waged, but ultimately Pancake Mountain prevailed.

No sooner had we admitted defeat than a sloshed gentleman named Nate perched on a barstool next to us and told us that he wouldn’t show us his breasts immediately because he wasn’t easy, but perhaps over time we’d get lucky. As you can see, luck is merely a matter of perspective.

He then proceeded to ask us how thoroughly we tended to shave ourselves before a big date, informed us that he shaves everything in the boxer-brief zone, and intimated that he thinks the girl sitting on the other side of him was a total bitch. Every other sentence was “I just hate her” because she’s one of those girls with a stick jammed so far up her ass that she actually has to wedge her pancakes AROUND the stick in her esophagus. Nate, for all of his drunken, slurring ramblings, was quite entertaining, though he never did end up showing us his breasts.

After breakfast, we hopped into massage-y chairs and got Halloween pedicures while the little asian ladies presumably made fun of us–mine made shaving gestures at my leg and giggled maniacally, and I was mortified–did I miss a spot? Am I legally required to move farther north, strip naked, and live as a Yeti? When she turned away, I quickly checked my leg; smooth and hairless, like a mexican rat dog. So I’m not quite sure what she was laughing about–all I know is that I’m safe from being Mrs. Eegah for a while yet. AND I’ve got dark purple toenails with tiny glitter spiders on them; I can put up with a little mortification for cute feet. Only a little, though.

After our pedicures, Carrie and I went to the costume shop in our super-fancy foam flip-flops to break her cycle of picking out a costume on the day of the event she’s attending–when you do that, you’re stuck with a selection of the crap that no one ELSE wanted.

I still think it’s funny that the same costumes we sold in the porn store are sold by mainstream stores as Halloween costumes–there’s a reason that skirt only hangs an inch below your vagina! However, it stopped being as funny when, while I was waiting for Carrie to try on and model one of her selections, a group of young teenage girls all showed up in line holding fuck-shop costumes. One of them mentioned “Oh my god, this is nothing like what I wore last year, in seventh grade.” She had a firefighter costume that was essentially a low-cut top, high-cut leg swim suit with a hat. I wanted to shake her and say “Honey, no. HONEY, NO.” At fourteen, you’re far too young to be selling yourself as a sex object. This next sentence may make me sound older than I am, but seriously, when did kids stop being kids? She disappeared into a booth to try it on, and the girl working at the shop and I exchanged meaningful looks–she’d previously informed me that (at eighteen) she couldn’t believe all of the young girls that were coming up to her with very short, low-cut costumes, and marveled that their parents would allow them to leave the house looking that way.

Now, I’ve always believed in the transformative power of the costume; when I was Firefighter Costume’s age, there was nothing I wanted to be for Halloween more than Elvira–she was too cool for school, and I was not a very popular kid–glasses, braces, short, unruly hair, mom still had dominant control over my wardrobe, and it didn’t help that I was a total teacher’s pet–it was not an easy road I traveled. But if I could just borrow some Elvira mojo for the Halloween Dance, people would finally see how cool *I* could be. My mom laid down the law–Elvira’s dress was unacceptable, but I could wear a regular witch costume in its place if I was dead set on being her.

And I was. With the black dress, long black wig, Elvira makeup, and a bra stuffed out so far it actually poked into another dimension, I believed myself transformed. Disguised. I shut myself in the bathroom at home and pretended that my young teen crush, Tyler McAllister, wouldn’t recognize me and would ask me to dance, and then we would fall in love forever and ever. I pressed up against the bathroom wall, and looked at myself in the mirror, and I could picture it all so clearly. Of course, what actually happened is that everyone still recognized me, I didn’t get asked to dance by anyone, much less my teenage heartthrob, and I got a rash on my chest from all of the scratchy paper towels stuffed inside my top. What was the point of this story again? …I like stories.

Oh yes, the point is, even in my delusion, I never transformed myself into a WHORE as an underage girl. Also, that it’s funny that I can’t remember a lot of the details of the most wonderful things that happen to me unless I write them down or save mementos of the day, but even though no one caught me pretending to dance with Tyler in the bathroom, I can remember it clear as day; my mind hangs onto things that I do that I know for a fact I’ll be embarrassed about later. MY OWN BRAIN IS AGAINST ME.