#8 Talkin' Them Marble Orchard Blues
(Originally appeared in A Ghostly Cry: True Encounters with the Paranormal, Fall River Press, 2009.)
Several years back, I wrote an essay in my Mothers And Fathers Italian Association column that posed the question: how does one write stories and novels about the supernatural without actually believing in it?
Good question, I thought, and my final conclusion in the essay was, for me, the jury was still out. I simply was not certain whether or not I believed in the paranormal/supernatural. I wanted to believe in such things (and the attendant UFOs and lake monsters . . . ) but I wanted my own personal proof, and as yet in my life, had witnessed none.
Now oddly enough, about three months after I published that column, in the early Autumn of 1989, I received a call from a woman I knew in Baltimore. He name was Ann, a friend and free lance journalist writing for the Baltimore Sun newspaper and many regional magazines. She had once written an article about me and one of my upcoming novels for the Sun, and knew of my interest in horror, the supernatural, and the bizarre. Ann had called to invite me along on an experimental ghost-hunt (of a sort). She was working on a newspaper piece about a group of paranormal investigators in the Maryland/Pennsylvania area called The Enigma Society, and she’d arranged to go on a field trip with members of the Society to a graveyard in the outskirts of the rural town of Glyndon, Maryland. Did I want to go along?
Sure, I said. Why not?
Ann filled me in on the particulars: local legend claimed the graveyard in question was filled with restive spirits and that on any given night, visitors to the spot may hear the conflux of their voices calling out, perhaps speaking to us or each other. The Enigma Society was going to investigate by hauling in a panoply of sensitive recording instruments and other equipment to detect the slightest electromagnetic field (EMF) disturbances.
On hearing this, I decided I’d bring my portable battery-powered Sony tape recorder and a brand new, unopened cassette of Maxell Ultra tape.[1] Just in case everybody else was in on some kind of rigged-up stunt, I would have my own gear serving as a kind of personal back-up verification.
And so I met Ann at one of the local pubs in Fells Point—the bohemian district of Baltimore—and we drove in her car out of the city, to State Road 140, heading Northwest into a cool, early-Autumn night. The star-filled sky was almost completely clear, the air crisp, without even the slightest breeze. We passed through a town called Westminster, then took Route 32 through some gently rolling pastureland, beyond a very small town called Glyndon, and into a field next to a tiny, country church, the name of which I cannot recall. Beyond the churchyard, up a slight hill and surrounded by old maples, oaks, and a few evergreens, lay the target graveyard, already invaded by ten or so Enigma Society people, mostly in their twenties and thirties, all in jeans, sweaters and light jackets.
Several people had set up a folding metal table, and stacked it with some industrial-looking electronic gear. If you’ve seen any number of cheesy SF movies, you know what the equipment looked like. The Society folks had also ran a power line from the table out of the graveyard to the open rear door of a Dodge van where a small gasoline-powered generator chuddered along. When they closed the door to the van, the sound of the generator was minimal.
Okay, so Ann made some quick introductions, and everyone went back to their stations, either seated in front of the electronics gear, or at strategically selected points around the graveyard. While Ann spent some time interviewing members of the Society and taking notes, I did some reconnoitering, and picked out a headstone that was thick enough to accommodate my Sony recorder on its flat, upper edge. I placed it there and waited for the signal from the Society that the experiment was officially in progress.
While standing there, I tried to absorb the atmosphere of the place, to pick up on any vibrations that may or may not be present. The cassette contained 90 minutes worth of tape—more than enough time to catch any “ethereal conversations”—and I sent it spinning as I depressed the red button marked record.
Then I sat down on the grassy earth, leaned against one of the weathered, granite gravemarkers, and waited to hear something. The atmosphere in the graveyard changed dramatically as the Society tech-heads signaled they were also recording. Everyone settled as they do on a movie set when the sound-man yells “speed!”
An almost palpable silence held everyone. No one even moved, much less spoke for the next several hours. Each of us, just sitting there in the dark, several feet above a scattering of rotted caskets and bones; several generations away from a similar fate. It was a time when your mind can get real weird on you; and believe me, when you’re sitting there with the express purpose of trying to hear the dead speak, the time comes when you’re not sure what you’ve heard and what you’ve not heard.
Like me, for example.
After about an hour of hearing nothing, and having been totally silent and immobile (other than to flip over my cassette), I thought I may have heard something. No wailing, no wooo-wooo kind of thing—just a very soft murmuring. It truly sounded like human speech, but thoroughly unintelligible. As though you were standing in the foyer of a house and people were talking softly in an adjoining room. I thought I may have detected the rhythm of speech, rather than speech itself. Looking around the graveyard for any sign of recognition from my friend, Ann, or any of The Enigma Society folks proved fruitless. Nobody seemed to be hearing anything—at least that was the message of their body language and facial expressions.
And that’s about the way it went for the remainder of the experiment. On and off I thought I may have heard something, but, well, you know . . . .
Once in Ann’s car, on the drive home, I compared notes with her and she was in agreement with me. Totally inconclusive. When we admitted it to each other, neither one of us could honesty say we’d heard a damned thing. I held my Sony tape recorder with both hands and said something like: “okay, so let's see if I got anything on here . . .”
Time out.
To spare you from any bogus suspense, let me say right up front (a) the batteries didn’t fail, (b) the tape didn’t break, or (c) the tape recorder inexplicably stopped. Everything worked just fine, okay?
So: I pushed the play button and we started listening, but almost immediately scotched that ploy. The combined sounds of Ann’s car engine and wind-noise around her less-than-hermetically sealed windows effectively masked anything we might hear on the tape.
Punching off the Sony, we agreed we had two options—either pull off to the shoulder of the country road and listen right away, or drive back to Ann’s Fells Point apartment and listen there. Oh right, just in case any of you are surmising or wondering if Ann and I were “an item,” I should disabuse you of any such notions—we were friends, nothing more. So whether or not we pulled off the road in the dark, or went back to her place was of no matter to me. I was out there with her for purely scientific purposes.
She suggested waiting till we reached her home and I was fine with that, and so let's cut to that chase and see what happened, okay?
Back at Ann’s apartment, it was very quiet when I pushed the play button. She had turned off all the lights and fired up a few candles to promote an atmosphere of focused and silent attention from both of us.
It worked. We both sat there for about a half hour just staring at the little Sony tape recorder like people used to do with their enormous Philco radios while listening to a Thirties drama featuring somebody like Lamont Cranston.
What we listened to—for that first thirty minutes, was a kind of a low-register whisper that was equal parts soft breezes activating the mike and indigenous tape-hiss from single-head recording technology of the era. In other words—zippo, nothing. The muscles in my back and neck had been starting to cramp up, and my throat was dry. I was ready to call the whole evening a complete bust and chalk up another one for the Skeptics in the audience.
And of course that’s when Ann grabbed my arm and whispered “What’s that?”
I’d heard it too—very soft voices carrying on a conversation. I could even make out a few of the words, although sporadically enough as to make no sense in the context of a sentence or even a phrase. But it was definitely human speech. I’d swear to that.
And you know how people say they felt the hair on the back of their neck raise up? Well I felt it too, at that moment, and the hair on my arms and practically everywhere else (too much information?). My eyes started to water and I had a hell of a time trying to swallow. All the atavistic responses to the sound of those voices on that damned tape.
Ann and I sat there, silent and kind of chilled, listening to the whole thing. Definitely a collection of different people talking, and no way it was ambient conversation from The Enigma Society folks, because I was there with them and everybody (every live body, anyway . . .) was completely quiet.
There was no hoaxing going on; I would swear to it.
We replayed the tape several times that night, and later, Ann took it to several different sound technicians from one of the local TV stations who checked it for veracity, and both guys said the sounds were really there and not phonied up in any way. It was real.
Voices.
So what did we capture on that tape?
I have no idea, but I of course want to believe it was voices of the dead. In a way, if you've been the agnostic empiricist I’ve been for so many years, that would be somewhat comforting.
If you know what I mean . . . .
[1] Analog daze, right? (Can you say “digital”? Probably not.)