Ghost Cats in Central Florida - A True Story

As some of you have heard, I've done a few speaking engagements over the past couple of years, mostly discussing the horror genre, writing and my book, The Wash. A question I've been asked on more than one occasion is whether I believe in the supernatural.  You'd think that as a horror fan I'd have a healthy belief in all things paranormal.  After all, I've spent an unusual amount of time reading, watching and writing about the subject.  The fact is though, that when people asked me about it, my answer was always, "I want to."

That was the truth. I wanted desperately to believe that there was something supernatural, otherworldly, downright frightening and unbelievable out there but the fact was I'd never experienced anything like that firsthand.  I'd visited haunted houses, haunted forests and places where stories of monsters abound but I'd never seen one for myself.  Because of that, I had reached the conclusion that there really wasn't any truth to the stories I'd heard. 

Don't get me wrong. I didn't think the people who did believe in that were crazy.  I believed that they honestly thought they'd seen otherworldly phenomena, but I was sure there had to be an explanation for it. I just thought they weren't thinking clearly.

That is, until about a week ago.  Now, I'm a believer.

My father and stepmother live on a lake in Central Florida.  It's one of my favorite places to visit and I don't get there often enough.  It's a great place to reset for me and last week I was there visiting.  For years, they had a solid black cat named Ninja.  He was an indoor cat and was an unlikely addition to the house at first.  My father had always been a dog person but my stepmother agreed to foster him when he was young and my father and he became quick friends.  He lived with them for over 20 years and died less than a year ago.  

I have a major allergy to cats.  Anytime I'd visit, I'd be doped up on Allegra and sometimes even had to supplement it with Benedryl just to get through the week, but Ninja was awesome.  Occasionally, he'd come up and want me to pet him and I gladly would, even though my fingers would begin to itch almost immediately.  He was a cool cat who continued to be playful even when he got older.  So when he died, it left a hole in their household.

I wasn't here to experience just how much of one. I just knew he was a much loved pet.

Last Tuesday, my father and I sat out on the back porch and talked until it was pretty late.  Finally, he decided to call it a night and I headed in and took a shower before laying down myself.  As I lay on the bed in the guest room, I felt something jump up on the bed at my feet and then walk along the side of the bed next to the wall.  I could feel every footstep.  

I bolted upright!  I thought for sure that one of the two outside cats had gotten in.  I hit the light and looked around.  There was nothing there.  Nothing.  Yet, without a doubt, I felt a cat jump up on the foot of the bed and walk along the edge next to the wall, toward my head.  It freaked me out a little but then I started explaining it away.  Maybe I was dozing.  Maybe it was a dream.  All the usual excuses.

The next evening, we were all talking after dinner and I mentioned it to my stepmother. Her eyes lit up and she said, "That happened to me also!"

A month after Ninja died, she felt him jump up on the exact same bed, in the exact same place and take the same route along the edge before climbing onto her chest.  It was something he'd done countless times before when he was alive. I never knew he did that though.  Because of my allergy, when I stayed with them I kept the door closed, so I never experienced Ninja jumping on the bed to come visit.  

I've played it over in my head repeatedly since last week, but I have no doubt about what I felt and having it corroborated by my stepmother has cemented my belief that I actually experienced my first ghost, and a cat ghost to boot!

Pretty crazy, huh?  

Anyway, I thought I'd pass it along because it's truly changed the way I look at some of the stories I've read and heard.  

There aren't any ghost cats in The Wash or in my upcoming book, but there are ghosts in my short story A Debt to the Dead.  Check it out if you haven't already. More is on the way.

Quality Family Time - October 2018 Edition - Week 2

So last week, I subjected the girls to Battle Royale and while one was not impressed (Karen), the other (Lil) just hated it.  I really only had three films that I really insisted that Lil watch with me and that was one of them.  I figured this week, I'd ask her to watch one that I actually thought she'd like.  That's why we sat down on Saturday night and fired up Dario Argento's 1977 classic, Suspiria!

For those who don't know, Suspiria is about a young American woman who is invited to attend a very exclusive dance academy in Europe.  Once there though, she begins to realize something is not quite right about the place and as her fellow dancers begin to wind up missing and/or dead, she digs in further to see just what is going on.

My daughter is a dancer.  Actually, that's not correct.  My daughter is a dance fiend and she and her mother will pick apart every tiny movement in any dance that's done on film.  When it comes to ballet, she's a dance snob.  So last year when we watched Black Swan, I was pretty amazed that overall, she didn't have much of a problem with the dancing in the film.  I mean, there were times when she commented on something but it never pulled her out of the narrative.  In fact, she actually really liked the film.

With Suspiria though, this was not the case.  Things started out promising with Karen declaring after the first fifteen minutes that she didn't know how it could get any weirder.  Then, things devolved from there.  I thought they'd like the color, pacing, crazy plot, etc. but I underestimated something that reared its head almost immediately.  My wife has a thing about hair.

I know this is confusing, so let's go back in time about twelve years and let me tell you the story.  At the time, I was a staff writer for a site called DVDinmypants.  It was a pretty fantastic place with great people and a very open editing staff who was up for almost anything.  At one point, I pitched the idea of rewatching some of the old exploitation films of the 1970's and 80's with my wife.  We'd pick them apart and she could bag on my horrible taste in films as a teenager. Somewhere around film number three, I started noticing that Karen's first impression of any character in any film was based entirely on their hairstyle.  It just pulled her right out of the story, no matter what.

So, in Suspiria, when the dancers first show up in especially low-cut leotards and everyone has 70's hair, Karen was the first one to say something about it.  Then she noticed none of them had their hair in buns.  That became a pain point for Lil and I got to witness the transition as a mother passes her weird obsession to her daughter. 
  

As for the dancing, neither was really enamored with it, but Lil was the most harsh.  For those of you without teenagers, it's hard for me to communicate just how insanely sarcastic one can be.  Below are a few comments I overheard.  Please read the following in a tone that sounds like an audible eye-roll.

"This seems to be complete chaos. Nobody's in sync. Everyone just do whatever you want." 

"Oh wow.  Another dead ballerina."

"Does anyone in this film know how to correctly hold their arms when doing a pirouette?"   

And then... there was Karen.

Her:  I thought you said this was about ballet.

Me:  No, I said it was set in a ballet school.  It's a horror film.

Her:  It's pretty horrible ballet.

And when it was all over, I asked what they thought of it overall. 

Karen:  I thought it sucked.

Me:  What?

Karen:  It's so slow and the dancing is terrible.  

Lil:  I thought it was okay.  I didn't think it was horrible.  The dancing was horrible but the movie itself was okay.

Heathens!  I tell you I live with heathens!

If you've never seen Argento's Suspiria, you should.  As you can tell by the handful of stills here, it's beautifully shot and is a great story.  The soundtrack by Goblin is one of the few things that Karen and Lil liked about it.  They recognized how effective it was at ratcheting up tension throughout the entire run time.  

Check it out and then get ready for the remake which hits theaters later this month.  It's getting great reviews and I'm super excited about it.

Winners and Losers for Week 2!

Winners (Everyone Agrees)

The Giant Behemoth (a giant radioactive dinosaur invades London!)

The Black Scorpion  (a bunch of giant scorpions invade Mexico City!)



Winners (Cary Only)

Suspiria  (an American dancer invades a European dance school!)

Terrifier  (one of the creepiest killer clowns in ages invades your nighmares!)


Losers 

None this week!

October Music and The Ocean

Those of you who read the blog know that I’m a huge music hound.  I love most types from pop to jazz to blues, heavy metal, classical and even classic country.  As long as I can remember, music has been my one refuge when things seem bad and I’ve even noticed (and commented to some of you reading) that my listening tastes tend to change with the seasons themselves.

Fall is upon us and with it comes my favorite time of year, Halloween.  My birthday is in October.  My daughter’s birthday is also in October and we just make the whole month one long party.  It’s around this time of year that my listening tastes become slanted more toward rockabilly, punk and metal.  Bands like The Cramps, Nekromantix, The Horrorpops, The Birthday Massacre and soundtracks from Suspiria (Goblin’s best work), John Carpenter’s The Thing and pseudo-soundtracks by The Midnight Syndicate will go into heavy rotation over the next few weeks.

That said, this week I found myself listening to a song that’s definitely not in that vein and realizing that I’d almost unconsciously mimicked the lyrics in my own life.  As most of you read, I lost my Dad about a month ago.  I spent a couple of weeks in Texas helping my mother get things sorted and then when I came back here, I realized that I hadn’t really dealt with it myself.  I spent the next couple of weeks kind of going through the motions of work and home.  Then something clicked and I asked Karen and Lil if they wouldn’t mind going down to Laguna Beach after work one night. 

We hit up Husky Burger on PCH and then crossed the street and headed down to Shaw’s Cove.  We wandered along the rocks and watched the waves crash.  There were some cool blow-hole effects happening in one spot and the high tide was just starting to subside.  We waited there and watched set after set roll in until the sun finally started creeping down enough that the air got a little too cold for us.  Once we got back to the car and started driving home, I realized I felt better.  A lot better.

The ocean has that effect on me.  I’m not sure why. 

A week later, I found myself throwing a Counting Crows disc into my car stereo.  “A Long December” (a song that I’ve liked for a long time despite it being overplayed) came on and the last verse struck me.  For the one or two people out there who may not know it, the lyrics are about a guy who's reflecting on the past year, realized it's kind of sucked and is looking forward to the new year in hopes that it'll be better.  The last verse goes like this:

And it’s one more day up in the Canyon

And it’s one more night in Hollywood

It’s been so long since I’ve seen the ocean

I guess I should

I’m not the biggest Counting Crows fan, but I don’t think I’ll be able to hear that song again without automatically thinking about the last few weeks and how good it felt to just sit and listen to the waves for a while.

Starting next week, we'll start posting about the Halloween movies being viewed this year (including a couple that Karen and Lil may or may not particularly like).  On Thursday, I'll post up the last Horror Histories for the time being.  It was supposed to go live a month ago but life got in the way.

Happy October, everyone!

A Man of "Immovable Character" - Don Kilgo

These last few weeks have been a son of a bitch to get through.  I lost someone very important to me and I’m still trying to deal with it.  While being around family and grieving together has helped, the fact is that writing is the most effective outlet for me, so here goes...  

Don Kilgo came into my life when I was about three years old.  My mother had filed to divorce my father and sued for custody of me.  The thing was, Stuart, Florida was a very small town and everyone was in each other’s business to some degree.  My mother’s actions were instantly discussed through a lot of the town and since my grandfather worked in the Martin County Sheriff’s Department, she felt a lot of pressure to keep her image squeaky clean.  She knew she had to go in front of a judge who likely knew my grandfather and if there was anything to build a case against her keeping me, then it would be held up in evidence.  Her own mother didn’t approve of the divorce and basically just stopped talking to her completely while this all played out.

However, my mother is a strong woman.  Have no doubt about that.  Had Don Kilgo not entered our lives, she would have pulled through with custody of me just as she eventually did.  It might have been harder and would certainly have been messier, but she would have done it.  The important thing for both of us though, is that right when it counted, Don came calling.

Don was raised in Augusta, Georgia.  His parents were people of their time, which is to say that I didn’t really like either of them much and don’t have a lot to say about them.  Funny thing was, Don didn’t like them much either.  They were obsessed with status, money and class.  They wanted him to dress nice, attend the best schools, marry into an important family and socialize with those who could take him to the next level.   Don wanted to hang out at truck stops, drink beer with his friends on the weekend, chase girls and see just how fast his car could go on a two lane street on a Saturday night.  He’d been a great athlete in high school, playing football, running track and earning himself a basketball scholarship to a nearby college.

That scholarship lasted less than a year as he found he was just not ready for school yet.  He bounced around to a few more colleges until he finally enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.  This was at the height of Vietnam, but Don wasn’t deployed to the jungle.  Instead, he rode out the war stateside and when he achieved his honorable discharge, he finally got his degree.  He somehow ended up in Stuart and worked in and around the same industry that my own father did.  That’s how he first came in contact with my mother and I don’t know whether it was love at first sight or if they just recognized a kindred spirit when they first met, but I do know that when the shit hit the fan and my mother was looking over her shoulder constantly wondering if someone was going to come take me away from her, Don Kilgo showed up at the door.

At first, he just offered to help with things he knew she couldn’t do easily.  He’d change the oil in her car or mow her lawn.  My great aunt, Maude, lived with us at that time and was helping take care of me.  She took a liking to him instantly and would fix dinner for him on occasion.  My mother, Don and Maude soon all discovered they had a shared love of card games and he came over pretty regularly for marathon games of Canasta, Hearts and later Bridge.  

Reading this, I’ve glossed over something that he told me years later.  He didn't just come around because he saw a woman who needed help.  He told me that he thought my mother was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever set eyes on and unlike all the girls he'd chased before, during and after the Marine Corps, he'd decided on playing the long game with this one.  He had designs on spending the rest of his life with her and after some famous prodding from a four-year-old me (who asked him point blank why he didn’t just marry her already), he did. 

From the moment he married my mother, he became “Dad”.  He never once, in my memory, ever called me his stepson.  I was just his son.  When my brother and sister were born, none of us were treated any differently from the other two.  This was despite his parents not being nearly as inviting and welcoming of our new family.  They were not at all excited about having a divorcee with a young child as a daughter-in-law.  In short though, Don didn’t give a shit what they thought.  

He as much as told them that very thing.

Just as importantly, Don never once said anything negative about my real father in front of me.  He always supported him being in my life and felt it was important that I knew who and where I came from.  He always talked about my father with respect and that made it so that instead of having a "broken" family, I just had two regular families.  One I lived with most of the time and the other I saw less frequently but which was still an important part of my life.  

Don spent the next 45 years married to my mother, who he called his "best friend".  Through all of those years, they played hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of card games.  They rarely spent a night apart.  They raised three kids and gave us a living, breathing model of how a successful marriage is achieved.  It wasn’t about social status, money or putting on the proper “look”.  It was about respect, love, teamwork and most importantly laughter.  We laughed as a family more than any other family I know. Their example is why I waited until I met my own best friend before marrying her.

When Don died, all three of us kids were together within 48 hours, this despite the fact that we literally live all over the world.  We sat in a room in my mother’s house, jet-lagged and devastated, and laughed our way through some of our favorite memories of him.  We cried too.  I’m crying now just thinking about it, but that laughter was the important part.  Don would not have wanted us to sit around crying.  He’d have wanted us to give him as close to a “going away party” as we could manage. 

No one dressed up for his memorial service.  He’d have hated that.  In the late 1990’s, he offered my sister $10,000 free and clear if she promised to elope instead of ever holding a formal wedding.  He just didn’t want to wear the tuxedo again after my brother’s wedding and then mine.  That’s why, at his service, the dress code consisted of jeans and Georgia Bulldog gear.   After the service, I sat and talked with friends, cousins and family members.  No one had a single bad thing to say about him, but if you knew him, that was to be expected.  He ended his life surrounded by nothing but friends.  Not an enemy in sight.

The amazing thing about Don Kilgo, and the thing I want to make sure to get across here, is something that my brother, Patrick, captured perfectly in his eulogy.  Dad’s greatest trait was a “quiet and kind consistency”.  He truly felt that everyone should be given the same benefit of the doubt.  It wasn’t about what a person said or what they looked like.  Don based his impression of the people he encountered on the merits of their actions and throughout his life, that's how he conducted himself.  It didn't matter if you were black, white, gay, straight or whatever, you were just another human being in his eyes and that's how he treated people, consistently.

That’s why, growing up in the Deep South, I was taught at an early age not to suffer racism kindly, not to stand by quietly when a friend was singled out by others for his race or religion.  He taught me to stick up for those who were being held down.  He taught me to love my roots and the small town way of life, but never embrace the mistakes of the region’s past.  He taught me the importance of lifting others up around you, so they in turn could do the same.  

Ultimately, we differed politically but we always agreed on those points.  We just disagreed on the way to go about achieving them.  I’m a liberal.  He was a conservative, but we continued to come together and while he would gladly argue his side of things with me, he never shut me or my view out entirely.  Ours was one of those few family relationships where we could be complete opposites politically and love the hell out of talking to each other still.

In closing, I want to say one thing.  Some may think that I’ve written this because I missed the chance to tell him how I felt while he was alive.  That’s not true.  Twenty five years ago, I wrote him a letter and in it, I thanked him for all of the same things I’ve mentioned here.  Don wasn’t much of a collector, so imagine my surprise when I found he still had it.  It was in his file cabinet, in a folder with my name on it.  It’s the most important thing I could possibly have found over these last three weeks because I know for sure he understood how much his influence meant on my life.   

There are so many stories I could tell.  So many instances where his life touched mine or another’s in a way that was unforgettable.  In his eulogy, Patrick went back to a conversation with Dad’s best friend, John, during a round of golf.  John had pulled Pat aside and told him how much he admired Dad and particularly how he admired his “immovable character”.  That’s the thing that sums up Don Kilgo more than anything.  He was one of a kind, in the best way possible and I miss the hell out of him every day.  I know that I’ve spent my life trying to live according to the example he set and will continue to do so.

I also know I’ll never meet a man like him again.