House of Exorcism Boy

January 26, 2009 — It was an excellent day for an exorcism. And by excellent I mean rainy and foggy and spooky. And by exorcism I mean visiting the supposed locations of the home of the boy whose exorcism inspired William Peter Blatty to write the novel The Exorcist that inspired William Friedkin to film the movie The Exorcist, which then scared all of us, scarred most of us, and stuck the occupation of exorcist firmly on the bad-ass scale along with such other better-than-yous as astronauts, martial arts movie stars, and these days, I guess, survival television show hosts.

In the late 1940s, a teenage boy in the Maryland suburbs of DC was deemed to have leased body space to an evil spirit after a series of events known in Church Latin as “weird shite” occurred at his home. Eventually, he and his demonic tenant were taken to stay with relatives in St. Louis, MO, where an official exorcism was performed on him.

I know it sounds like the quintessential urban myth, but the facts of the story are actually far from such, with the whole thing being eerily well-documented in newspapers of the day and even the “withheld to protect the innocent” information gradually leaking out over the years. I won’t go into all that, but in case you want to, Google any combination of the following terms: “Father Raymond Bishop,” “Roland Doe,” “Exorcism,” and “Buckaroo Bonzai.” All right, that last one’s irrelevant, but fun.

For 11 years I lived half an hour from the location of the notorious house of Exorcism Boy, but it wasn’t until I moved eight states away that I finally returned to my home state to visit the location. Good thing, too. If I’d of gone back when I lived in the area, I might have ended up at the wrong address.

You see, general lore has always placed the home of the possessed teenager that inspired The Exorcist at 3210 Bunker Hill Road in Mount Rainier, MD. And that's pretty much where I thought it was until a couple of months ago. Then, in planning to visit the spot, I came across an eight-year-old article that changed my life. Well, more like my plans for the day.

The article is called The Haunted Boy of Cottage City and was written by a Mark Opsasnick and published in a periodical called Strange Magazine. Honestly, you’re probably better served skipping over this article and reading Opsasnick’s instead. The only real advantage of staying here, though, is that this article ends in 800 words, whereas Haunted Boy is five parts long.

In the article, the author outlines in detail the research, interviews, and reasoning that led him to firmly believe that the Bunker Hill Road address is not the previous home of Exorcism Boy. Although I didn't double-check any of his research, his idea sounds pretty credible. More importantly, since the house he posits as the correct location is only three minutes away as the Google Maps fly from the Bunker Hill Road location, I could visit both and let God sort it out. Plus that’s a lot easier than double checking 18,000 words worth of research.

I don’t know much about Mount Rainier, other than that it’s inside the Beltway, it’s not a mount, and it has a great name…except on the drizzly day that we visited, when it was just a pun. The spot I wanted to see is located at the corner of 33rd Street and Bunker Hill Road, and I’m suddenly avoiding the use of the word house for the valid reason that there isn’t one there. Hasn’t been one there, in fact, for a few decades. According to Opsasnick, the original house that stood there had gone derelict for a while until it was burned to the ground in 1962 as part of a firefighter exercise. Since that time, it had been a vacant lot, and that was what I was prepared for.

Once again, though, I found I was way behind on my knowledge base. I’m starting to believe that my own personal versions of Al and Ziggy suck. At some point in the past few years, the spot has been turned into a nice gazebo and picnic area. Had I known, I would have brought a lunch to eat there just for style points. Instead, I just stood in the middle of it and thought, “This is going to be a short paragraph if I ever write about it.”

And just like that we were off to the second location. The address that Opsasnick offers for the real location of the previous home of Exorcism Boy is in the very nearby, very small town of Cottage City. In this case, the original house still stands, and though it’s probably a pretty jerky think for me to publish, the address is 3807 40th Avenue. Being called a jerk gives me a sense of identity.

The house is set on a straight, tree-lined road with small, similarly shaped houses along both sides of the road. If most of the streets of Cottage City look this way, the town is well named. At one end of the street, almost directly across from the Exorcism Boy house, is the town hall.

Nothing about 3807 makes it stand out from its fellow cottages. It has no ominous pall of clouds, no mysterious shadows without sources, its features don’t matrix into an evil face. It’s just a small house. I will say that it did seem well-kept, which I assume means lived-in, but you never know. There was an abandoned plastic-wrapped newspaper lying in the driveway, but newspapers are notorious for inflating their subscriber numbers that way.

As you can see from the picture, a truck was parked in the driveway when we visited. However, that truck and another one across the street both bore construction company names. So either somebody lives there and is having the house remodeled, or somebody doesn’t live there and is having the house remodeled to sell. Or, I guess, someone lives there and owns a construction company. Whatever the case, I’m sure they’re probably annoyed by the kind of attention people like me give it.

I realize that anytime I just walk past a house for pictures, it’s going to be a pretty boring article, but add that to the fact that it involves a subject I’ve already written about two other times for this site (see below), then you’ve got not just anti-climax, but anti-start and anti-middle, as well. However, in a bid to salvage the first of those three glaring flaws in this piece, I’ll end on a final, hilarious-to-me note.

In his article, Opsasnick puts forth evidence in the form of interviews with a childhood friend of Exorcism Boy that the teenager wasn’t anywhere near possessed, but was just a Michael Oliver-style problem child in a pre-pill society. That such might even be close to the truth cracks me right in half. One kid acts up, and we get butterfly-effected into a cinematic milestone the repercussions of which are still rippling outward six decades later.

Thank you, Mr. Ronald Hunkeler, wherever you are or are buried.

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Read about my visit to the Exorcist Stairs in Washington, DC, where the climactic scene of the movie was filmed, or my visit to the bust and ashes of Jason Miller in Scranton, PA, who starred in it as Father Damien Karras. Also my visit to the sites in St. Louis, where all the spooky stuff actually happened.

Spooner Well

January 20, 2009 — This is the story of a fetus that was hanged for murder. And as much as that might be my favorite opening sentence of any OTIS entry so far, the rest of this article sleds rapidly downhill until it finally crashes into a simple, unimpressive, tombstone-like monument.

In 1778 in the town of Brookfield, MA, back when the U.S. was in its terrible twos and more than a few people’s loyalties were still on the rebound after breaking up with England, a woman named Bathsheba Spooner hired a trio of soldiers to kill her husband, Joshua Spooner.

Various motivations for the crime have been thrown around like handfuls of confetti, none of which are particularly imaginative and all of which make me think that the job of criminal profiler is an over-rated one. Ideas include Joshua being abusive, Bathsheba cheating with one of the aforementioned soldiers, political disagreement between the two, Bathsheba wanting more access to Joshua’s sizeable estate, etc. Plus I’ve always just assumed that every wife has multiple, less easily articulated reasons to kill her husband.

Anyway, one night the three men hired by Bathsheba, two of whom were British soldiers and the third a continental soldier who was probably involved with Bathsheba, beat Joshua to death and then dumped him down his own well.

Despite how elegantly contrived that plan seems to appear on paper, beat-and-dump is a surprisingly sloppy operation, and all the conspirators were soon caught. The trial took place in nearby Worchester, and was, of course, a great time for all not involved, with the whole state apparently enrapt by the spectacle and the media touting it as “the most extraordinary crime ever perpetrated in New England.” We’ve topped it many times since then, of course, so yay us.

Speaking of great times for all not involved, the conspirators were all hanged with the usual barbaric but fun fanfare, including Bathsheba, despite the fact that she claimed to be pregnant. After a pre-mortem examination by midwives, she was deemed to be not with child; however, a post-mortem reveled that she was, in fact, five months pregnant, so autopsiest 1, midwives 0.

And that’s the end of the story. No secret suspects, no late-breaking evidence, no twist ending…except for the bodies twisting on the end of a rope. Just three newly orphaned Spooner children, and the hangover and possible morning-after regret of a populace who’d exulted too much in justice.

But some murders need markers, and that’s where it gets odd (and visitable) to me. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided to mark the location of the actual murder scene, that round hole of a well where Joshua’s square peg of a corpse was shoved.

The Spooner Well marker is located on East Main St., outside the center of the town of Brookfield. It’s a few feet off the side of the road and back-dropped by an overgrown field. Across the street from it are a couple of houses whose front windows seem to give the impression of ignoring the memento mori that is their neighbor.

The marker is a simple, white, rectangular slab bearing the text: “Spooner Well—Joshua Spooner murdered and thrown down this well March 1, 1778, by three Revolutionary soldiers at the urging of his wife Bathsheba. All four were executed at Worcester, July 2, 1778.” I searched around the marker a bit, but couldn’t find a well or hole or anything like that, and I’d forgotten my dowsing rods. I assume it’s either been covered up in the hundreds of years since its unholy use or I suck at finding wells.

I’m not sure if the marker was planted for historic reasons or for the same purpose that roadside crosses are, but I really hope the former because the latter kind of annoy me. Graveyards are the officially sanctioned place for honoring the dead, so why would somebody also commemorate the spot of an untimely, and probably violent, demise?

This might sound callous, but, like the Spooner Well neighbors, I happen to have a graveside cross right across the street from my house. It gets seasonally decorated by family members of the deceased, and it leers at me with its promise of my eventual and inevitable death (and, if that one fortuneteller was right, dismemberment), probably on that same stretch of road. I hate pulling into my neighborhood.

Joshua Spooner’s actual grave can also be found in Brookfield, this time in the 300-year-old Brookfield Cemetery on West Main Street, not too far from Spooner Well. It's in the northwestern part of the graveyard, right up against the stone wall that parallels the road. Nobody really knows the location of the graves of Bathsheba and her accomplices, and by nobody, of course, I mean me.

And that sound you hear is a sled crashing into a stone slab at the bottom of a hill. Non-caloric, silicon-based kitchen-lubricant, indeed.

Akai the Dolphin

January 10, 2009 — With winter here, my thoughts inevitably turn back to a time in my life when I lived on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The balmy weather, the sandy beaches, the brightly colored architecture. Man, did I hate that place. Living the same day over and over again is many people’s definition of purgatory and many more’s definition of hell. I need seasons, I need fireplaces, I need a varied geography, and I need people around me to wear actual footwear instead of sandals or flip-flops. It is not your decision to make whether you have nice enough feet to show off.

However, as bad a place as Florida can be for all kinds of reasons, there’s no denying that there’s way cool stuff to do there. Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, Kennedy Space Center, and SeaWorld are the places that come to my mind without having to resort to an Internet search to bolster my point. It’s amazing what you can build when you don’t have to worry about shutting down for the winter.

Adjacent to SeaWorld in Orlando is Discovery Cove, a resort-like attraction the main focus of which is animal-visitor interaction, mostly of the marine variety. The set up of Discovery Cove is different than the other major Florida attractions. You have to reserve in advance, they cap admittance to keep down crowds, there are no attractions that you have to stand in line for, breakfast and lunch are included in the admission price along with unlimited drinks and snacks, you have all-day use of all the swimming and reef pools, and a ticket to SeaWorld or Busch Gardens Tampa Bay is included in the cost.

Oh, and for an additional fee, you can schedule semi-personal time with a dolphin. All told, you’re looking at about $200 bucks for admission, and just under $300 if you add on the dolphin experience. It’s pricey, certainly, but I wasn’t trying to buy tickets for a family of five. Plus, I blow that amount of money on less memorable things pretty regularly.

When we arrived, we got our pictures taken and laminated onto ID cards that are both a map of the attraction and proof that we had $300 of disposable income. We also schedule our time slot for our dolphin encounter. We picked an early slot since we knew we wouldn’t be able to enjoy anything else there with that type of anticipation hanging over our head.

When I went, a staff member was standing nearby with a sloth of some sort hanging around her neck like a piece of rapstar jewelry. We were all encouraged to pet it, but I think my interaction might have been closer to prodding. It’s a sloth, what the heck’s it going to do? This type of casual animal encounter is set up at various spots around the entire place. If my memory serves me, there was a large tortoise at one, and a large bird of some sort at another.

Next, we got outfitted. That’s right. There’s a dress code. You get the choice of a yellow and black swimming vest or an outright body suit, similarly colored. I went with the vest because I was pretty proud of the swim trunks I was wearing that day. We also got a complimentary mask and snorkel, the latter of which I still have and still have no idea what to do with. It sits awkwardly and out of place in a box of mostly paper memorabilia in one of my closets.

While we waited the hour or so for our dolphin event, we discovered the ray lagoon. This was a small, waist-deep pool aswarm with car-tire-sized stingrays...and you could jump right in. Well, wade right in, at least. Which I did, without thinking, because in the pocket of my swim trunks was my digital camera. That’s right, I killed my digital camera 10 minutes into one of the most picture-worthy experiences of my life.

Fortunately, other people in my group had cameras and the dolphin experience itself was filmed and photographed by Discovery Cove staff for sale to us later. And that’s why I don’t have a lot of pictures of the various parts of the place, and the pictures I do have all look like advertisements for Discovery Cove.

The lagoon is so full of the silly flat creatures that they can’t help but swim all around your calves, although they pretty much ignore you in that annoying way that fish and other far-flung species do. Still, you’ll be able to get a hand down for a quick grope. Anyway, other than the camera mishap doubling the cost of my Discovery Cove excursion, the ray lagoon was an amazing experience. Even so, it ended up finishing third overall of my Discovery Cove experiences.

Next came the dolphin encounter, so let me condense the larger post-dolphin part of my Discovery Cove day into three quick paragraphs before getting to that. The coral reef was spectacular, and had I an underwater camera at the time, this article would be about that and not the dolphins. It was a large, deep reef pool where you could get in and snorkel around through schools of shimmering fish while rays the size of my splayed body glided inches below my splayed body.

In fact, the coral reef was large and deep enough to forget you were in a pool. Granted, I haven’t snorkeled much in my life and have no basis of comparison, but if you’re an experienced diver and find it laughable that swimming in a giant tank surrounding by all kinds of fish could be so awe-inspiring, you’re just jaded. The girl who dusts the Hope Diamond every night should still be legitimately impressed by her best friend’s engagement ring.

I spent hours of soundless snorkeling among all the creatures with just sights and thoughts to keep me company, although very few of the latter. Maybe it was because of the attendance cap, maybe it was the timing, but neither the reef nor the park itself, for that matter, was crowded. It really seemed like it was just me, the fish, and that one staff member who kept yelling at me from the shore to stop bothering the animals so much.

You even get to swim beside deadly barracudas and sharks by a clever little system of tanks within the reef, where the creatures are separated from everything else by large, invisible-seeming windows set in the sides of the reef pool and in a shipwreck decoration in the middle of it all.

Besides the reef pool, there was also an aviary where you could feed birds of various species while they landed on your arms, shoulders, head, or any other body protrusions you’d laid bare, as well as a more conventional tropical-themed swimming pool and lazy river that passed through the aviary.

Finally, 11 paragraphs in and close to the end of this article, the dolphin that’s supposed to be the main topic. We arrived at the dolphin lagoon at the appropriate time, viewed a video, were given some instructions, and then were separated into our groups. There were eight in each group, so in mine it was my party of four and a family of four.

We were led into the water by a staff member while another stood by to help out. There were four other groups of eight well-spaced throughout the sizeable lagoon, in addition to the trainers and staff photographers. Each group got its own bottlenose dolphin. Ours was a giant half-ton male named Akai. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder in waist-deep water while Akai floated and rotated patiently in front of us. We were encouraged by the trainer to pet everything but his nether-regions, which we avoided making too many jokes about as two of our group were under the age of seven (eight is my cut-off for lewd jokes).

Akai, like all dolphins I’ve seen on television and in zoos, looked like he was made of fiberglass, but he felt velvety and smooth, which I know is how pudding is usually described. Akai didn’t feel like pudding. I’m not sure if there is a land-equivalent. Of course, now that I’ve written that, I Googled to see how others explained it, and most of them had great similes that I won’t steal because Internet plagiarism is too easy to trace, although I will from here on out use them when I tell this story in actual conversation.

We got to throw dead fish in his mouth, strangely shaped things though they are (dead fish and dolphin mouths), and we were taught a few hand signals to use to communicate with him. Even watched him parody a shark on command. We then each individually got the opportunity to wade further into the lagoon and pose with Akai while the photographers took pictures. Each of us was peer-pressured to give it a kiss it on the snout, and I was comfortable enough in both my manhood and specieshood to go for it.

Then, two at a time, we swam out to the middle of the lagoon to be carried back individually by the dolphin. I’m a horrible swimmer, but the vest was buoyant enough to hide the fact and helped me easily get to where I needed to be in the water. While I held onto his fin, Akai towed me back to where the other members of the group waited. I felt like what a girl must feel like when she’s led well on the dance floor. That’s right, animal encounters always emasculate me. Akai was terribly muscular, like a giant bicep flexing through the water. His tail kept bumping into me as he swam, and his strength and solidity reminded me how weak I feel anytime I try to do anything with force while underwater.

For the finale, all eight of us were told to make one of the hand gestures we were taught earlier, and Akai raced away from us to the center of the lagoon before leaping into the air simultaneously with the other dolphins from the other groups, who had also directed their dolphins to do so.

The experience lasted about half an hour and was the opposite of disappointing. Afterwards we bought pictures of our experience and found out that they’d taped it as well. We split the cost of the DVD four ways and then burned copies, so now I know what kind of mannerisms I have when I’m interacting with a dolphin.

So, Discovery Cove...the place where I kissed Akai. That’s a funny joke if you say it out loud. And you’re a guy. And you’re not into that. All right. That’s too many rules for it to be funny.