1996
January 24:
Dean turns seventeen today. We went shooting. Then I sent him out on his first hunt. I’ve let him take the lead before, but I’ve always been there to back him up. This time he’s on his own. Partly it’s a test, and partly I wanted some time with Sammy. Should be no problem for Dean. Ghosts of two nuns haunting St. Stephen’s Indian Mission in Riverton, Wyoming. Simple salt-and-burn mission. Nuns in love with each other, then discovered. Killed themselves. We scoped the situation out, figured that something must be left behind that’s now a focus for the haunting. Bible, rosary beads, some small article that’s hidden somewhere in their room. I figured Dean would take care of it no problem, but I still stayed close by with Sammy.
The boys are old enough now that we can start spending a little more time in one place. Thinking California, maybe. When I need to fly solo, they’re big enough to stay home by themselves for a while without me worrying. When we go on a hunt together, they can bring their homework. That’s what I wanted to talk to Sammy about. It’s going to be hard enough getting his bullheaded self through adolescence without also having to fight every other day about how he wants to be Jimmy Normal. We can make this work if we do it together —but he’s going to have to know that everyone pulls their weight. Mary comes first.
Dean took care of the nuns just like I thought he would, but I don’t think I’m going to be sending him on any more solos soon. That one was a little tense.
March 11:
Called Fossilman by the locals, but possibly Cannibal Owl? Oka-moo-bitch, Shoshone legend of being that would take bad children, and sometimes unwary hunters. Associated folklore of children learning magic or hunting while in Owl’s captivity, sometimes learning to turn his tricks against him. Shoshone, Paute, Shuswap.
To Shoshone, petroglyph sites known as Poha Kahni, House of Power. Spirit world closer to the surface there. After ritual bath in a hot spring, the shaman went to Poha Kahni and entered a trance to journey in the spirit world and capture power, or return with knowledge or kidnapped souls.
May 2:
Sammy is thirteen today. He’s finishing sixth grade, a year late and with all the grudges to show for it. When Dean hit this age, I started to worry about girls, booze, drugs… all the regular stuff. With Sammy, I don’t worry about that. What worries me is that he’s got so much bottled up inside him that when it comes out, he won’t be able to control it. I think that’s part of why he has the dreams. He’s different, my Sammy. I think he’s a little haunted by being in the room with Mary when she was killed. He feels like he should remember something, or be able to offer a clue. God, it must be terrible to know you witnessed something but that you’ll never be able to remember it or tell anyone about it. I think he also wonders about Ms. Lyle. Dean and I never told him the whole story.
June 17:
Slave Hauntings, Lynghing Sites:
CLINTON COURT, HELL’S KITCHEN, NY: Sailor known as Old Moor hanged there when it was a potter’s field. Has haunted ever since. Blamed for at least two deaths since the field was built on, one in the 1820s when he scared a woman into falling down the stairs, another later, little girl, no details except might have also involved a fall.
MCKORY HILL, EQUALITY, IL: Quarters built for slaves leased into Illinois to work in a salt mine. Owner, J.H. Crenshaw, also kidnapped free blacks and sold them South. 1846, one of his slaves cut Crenshaw’s leg off with an ax. Quarters riddled with spirits of slaves who died there. Hard to find all of their remains. Salt mine also likely haunted, but it’s been closed for decades.
BECKER FARM, SELKIRK, NY: Now part of GE Plastics complex, farmhouse still standing. Becker caught his wife in the sack with a slave, killed them both, then hanged himself. GE quit using house after several mysterious events.
HENRY HUDSON PARK, GLENMONT, NY: Old slave quarters near the river off 9w. Four kids and a cop disappeared sometime in the early 1980s. No press coverage, nobody there will talk about it.
FLORENCE, AL: Runaway slaves hung from a bridge through the middle of town.
GENEVA, AL: Intersection of Pea. River and Choctahatchee River. Tree once used for hangings, nothing will grow near it.
GADSDEN, AL: Crestwood Cemetery haunted by ghosts of murdered slaves from when it was a plantation. Ghostly packs of dogs have also been reported.
JACKSONVILLE, AL: Chief Ladiga Indian Trail. At the edge of an uncompleted subdivision, slave quarters in the woods. The area haunted by visions of hanging bodies and ghosts of slaves and lynch mobs.
MOBILE, AL: Oak tree growing behind the public library said to be over the unmarked grave of a wrongfully killed man who swore that the tree grow to prove his innocence.
STEELE, AL: Settlement of freedmen burned by night riders after the Civil War. Their spirits still haunt the location.
CROSBY, TX: Neighborhood built over slave cemetery haunted by poltergeist activity.
AUGUSTA, GA: Pillar on Broad Street, where the old slave market used to be. Cursed by one of the sold slaves —anyone who has tried to damage or remove the pillar has died?
NEWMAN, GA: Northgate HS haunted by ghost of a slave lynched after he killed his master?
POLOMOKE FOREST, MD: Area said to be haunted by ghosts of children drowned because they were offspring of plantation owner raping his slaves.
MT. MISERY ROAD, NC: Stretch from Brunswick to Fayetteville haunted by spirits of slaves who died on the way from Cape Fear docks to market.
LAYLE, SL: Apartment complex on the site of a plantation haunted by ghosts of infants discarded in plantation outhouses.
That’s it. I can’t write these down anymore.
May 17:
This would have been our eighteenth anniversary. Bismuth. A brittle metal, silvery white with tinges of pink and other colors.
August 21:
From Agrippa: “And so we must understand that which Psellus the Platonist saith, viz. That Dogs, Crows, and Cocks conduce much to watchfulness: also the Nightingale, and Bat, and horn Owle, and in these the heart, head, and eyes especially. Therefore it is said, if any shall carry the heart of a Crow, or a Bat about him, he shall not sleep till he cast it away from him. The same doth the head of a Bat dryed, and bound to the right arme of him that is awake, for if it be put upon him when he is asleep, it is said, that he shall not be awaked till it be taken off from him. After the same manner doth a Frog, and an Owle make one talkative and of these specially the tongue, and heart; So the tongue also of a Water-frog laid under the head, makes a man speak in his sleep, and the heart of a scrich-Owle laid upon the left breast of a woman that is asleep is said to make her utter all her secrets. The same also the heart of the horn Owle is said to do, also the sewet of a Hare laid upon the breast of one that is asleep.”
November 2:
Mary has been dead for thirteen years. Longer than I knew her. What does it say about me that I’ve devoted more of my life to her death than I ever did to her life? If I could only see her again, just once, so I could ask her if she thinks I’m doing the right thing… but remember what happened at Jim’s that first time. Would it be her? How would I know? Also remember Ms. Lyle.
Life is about remembering the dead and making sure you protect the living.
Met an alchemist who believes that the souls of the dead can be pinned into homunculi. Offered to do this for me and Mary. I turned him down, but it wasn’t easy. Spirits that can’t go on turn bad, and I couldn’t stand to see that happen to her. I’ve seen it happen to too many other people who were loved.
November 14:
Got this one from one Emil Besetzny, who published a book in 1873 about homunculi created by John Ferdinand, Count of Kuffstein (if there wasn’t a place called Kuffstein, someone would have to make it up), in about 1775. Besetzny’s sources were apparentluy Masonic manuscripts and the journal of the count’s butler, who went by the name of Kammerer. The count’s collaborating alchemist was a Rosicrucian monk by the name of Abbé Geloni.
The bottles were closed with ox-bladders, and with a great magic seal (Solomon’s seal?). The spirits swam about in those bottles, and were about one span long. …They were therefore buried under two cartloads of horse manure, and the pile daily sprinkled with a certain liquor, prepared with great trouble by the two adepts, and made our of some “very disgusting materials.” …After the bottles were removed, the “spirits” had grown to be each one about one and a half span long, so that the bottles were almost too small to contain them, and the male homunculi had come into possession of heavy beards, and the nails of their fingers and toes had grown a great deal… In the bottle of the red and in that of the blue spirit, however, there was nothing to be seen but “clear water”; but whenever the Abbé knocked three times at the seal upon the mouth of the bottles, speaking at the same time some Hebrew words, the water in the bottle began to turn blue (respectively, red), and the blue and the red spirits would show their faces, first very small, but growing in proportions until they attained the size of an ordinary human face. The face of the blue spirit was beautiful, like an angel, but the face of the red one bore a horrible expression.
Once every week the water had to be removed, and the bottles filled again with pure rainwater. This change had to be accomplished very rapidly, because during the few moments that the spirits were exposed to the air they closed their eyes, and seemed to become weak and unconscious, as if they were about to die. But the blue spirit was never fed, nor was the water changed; while the red one received once a week a thimbleful of fresh blood of some animal (chicken), and this blood disappeared in the water as soon as it was poured into it…
… the spirits gave prophecies about future events that usually proved to be correct. They knew the most secret things, but each of them was only acquainted with such things as belonged to his station; for instance, the king could talk politics, the monk about religion, the miner about minerals & etc.; but the red and blue spirits seemed to know about everything.
By some accident the glass containing the monk fell one day upon the floor and was broken. The poor monk died after a few painful respirations, in spite of all the efforts of the count to save his life, and his body was buried in the garden. An attempt to generate another one, made by the count without the assistance of the Abbé, who had left, resulted in a failure, as it produced only a small thing like a leech, which had very little vitality and soon died.
And about golems: Most golems can’t speak. Idea is that if granted speech, they would have soul, and that an imperfect creation (created by man rather than God) would have an imperfect soul and be dangerous.
Sanhedrin 65b:
Rava stated: If they wish, Tzadikkim could create a world. Rava created a man and he sent it to Rabi Zeira. Rabi Zeira spoke with it and it did not respond. Rabi Zeira then stated, “You are created by my coleague, return to your dust.” Rav Chanina and Rav Oshiah would sit every Friday and study the Sefer Yetzirah and create a calf that has reached a third of its potential development and subsequently eat it.
Eleazar of Worms mentions golems in commentary on Sefer Yetzirah:
Whoever studies Sefer Yetzirah has to purify himself, don white robes. It is forbidden to study alone, but only in two’s and three’s, as it is written, …and the beings they made in Haran (Gen. 12:5), and as it is written, two are better than one (Eccl. 4:9), and as it is written, it is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him (Gen. 2:18). For this reason Scripture begins with a “bet” —“Bereshit bara,” He created.
To control the golem, the creator writes one of the names of God on its forehead, or on a tablet under its tongue. This can then be erased or removed. Or the creator could write the word Emet (ajx “truth”) on its forehead. By erasing the first letter in Emet to form Met (jx “dead”) the creator would destroy the golem.
According to Kabbalah, a golem can never disobey its creator.