A Rainbow Ghost: The Clearwater Madonna

March 25, 2014 — I was digging through the detritus of my past the other day (I have to do that every once in a while to clear a path to the bathroom), when I came across two artifacts from a half-hour moment in time that I’d all but forgotten about and which pretty much represent a proto-OTIS jaunt of mine (and perhaps the very first): an old newspaper clipping and what looked like a post card.

It was early 1997, the beginning of my weird, weird, Florida years. I was in Clearwater, on the Gulf side of the peninsula, right next to Tampa. I was talking to a friend who casually informed me that a miracle was transpiring nearby.

We jumped in the car to go see it.

Now, that’s a simple statement, but it took me a long time to connect hearing about weird stuff and going to see it firsthand.

Living in Florida was like being in an oven made completely out of white ceramic. And that’s how I remember this little trek, hot and glaring. We pulled into a parking lot off US 19N to find it filled with people and white plastic deck chairs, all of which were pointed at the side of a finance building.

The building was about two stories tall, all mirror-finished glass, with palm trees here and there around its base. The wall that the chairs and bystanders faced was inset with a large niche that took up almost the entire side of the building.

And on the side of that niche glowed an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

Now, this wasn’t some gnarled tree bark or a burnt Tostito. It was a 60-foot-tall prismatic rainbow in the shape of a gently cowled and faceless figure. If you’re going to CGI a vision of the Virgin Mary into your Biblical epic, you might come up with something like this. Even if you’re not one to believe that the miracles of God have devolved over time from creation of a universe to parlor tricks with water and wine at weddings to a chemical reaction on a window, it was still an aesthetically interesting sight, made only less so by the fact that other rainbow stains of various sizes and shapes could be found on other sides of the building.

In had appeared just a couple of months previously, in December of 1996. Somebody randomly noticed it on their way into work…and then everybody noticed it. Hundreds of thousands of people visited it over the next few months and, over the years, people started citing visitor numbers in the millions. It got enough attention that in 1997 a then Ohio-based Catholic group called Shepherds of Christ Ministries bought the building and erected a permanent shrine there in that lot beneath the blind, multi-colored gaze of that pretty piece of glass.

On my visit to the site, there were a few dozen people milling around. Some showed awe, others curiosity, others obvious skepticism. I don’t remember my attitude, but I can safely assume based on general knowledge of myself at that time that is was somewhere just north of jerk and west of hypocrite. We wandered around until we were approached by a little old woman who handed us an audio cassette and the postcard that, 17 years later, I still have and will probably now use as a bookmark for my Kindle.

The postcard shows an image of the apparition, on the back of which is what purports to be a series of messages from the Clearwater Madonna, as “received by Rita Ring and reviewed for moral and theological errors by Fr. Edward J. Carter S. J.” A quick Google search reveals that Rita Ring is somewhat famous/infamous for being God’s Postmaster General for humanity.

I don’t think I ever read the card until now. Mostly, it’s platitudes about the evils of loving money (that’s why she appeared on a financial building), the inevitability of God’s plan, and the importance of getting the message of this 2D Technicolor Madonna (and the books of Rita Ring) out to the world. I’ve scanned it in case you want to go deeper with it.

On the way home, we popped the cassette into the tape deck of the car, which at this point in the history of audio technology was only used to hold one of those cassette-shaped adaptors that allowed you to play a portable CD player through the car speakers. The voice was soft, female, strangely modulated and, now that I’ve read the back of the card, basically reiterated what is there.

As to the newspaper clipping, I’m not sure what paper it’s from. Apparently when I did newspaper clippings, I cut out the picture and ignored the article itself. I was practicing for the Internet, I guess. On the back of the clipping is a partial advertisement for Sprint involving an illustration of a pterodactyl carrying a stone table that says “Circa 200,000 B.C. Carrier Pterodactyls. Message recipients often became snacks.” The small print at the bottom says that the advertised offer is good until 6/15/97.

The image shows the Clearwater Madonna with what the caption calls an “unidentified liquid” running down her face, thrown there by vandals. Apparently, my interest in the Madonna stopped after that clipping, so I looked up the old girl just now to see if she was still around.

Turns out she’s been beheaded.

The apparition surprisingly survived until 2004, when some 18-year-old kid shot out the top three glass panels that made up her head with a slingshot.

I couldn’t find any current pics, but looking on Google Streetview, it shows that the windows have been replaced sans rainbow, and that the rest of the body is still there, although it seems to have lost its hues (although that could have just been the time of day or tenor of sky when the Google car drove by). It has certainly lost its general Madonna-ness without the head. The shrine itself is still there and the building at 21649 US 19N is still owned by the same religious group, which calls it the “Our Lady of Clearwater Site.”

I didn’t document my time there. Don’t even think I owned a camera back then. Like I said, proto-OTIS. Looking back, though, I did something different that day. Different from my usual routine, away from my usual haunts, something I could talk about 17 years after the experience. Thanks, mother of Jesus. You almost showed me the way.

Screen-capped from Google Streetview

Screen-capped from Google Streetview

Landlubber Grub: The Pirates’ House

March 18, 2013 — She walked up to us with a muzzleloader in one hand, a black patch over one eye, and nautical puns on her lips.  “Okay,” I thought. “It’s going to be one of those kinds of places.”

I guess I should have known. It was, after all, a pirate-themed restaurant.

You don't tell a pirate where to look...he'll just give you the bird.

However, calling The Pirates’ House in Savannah, Georgia, “pirate-themed”—while completely accurate—does the place slight disservice. Because it is a legitimate pirate site.

Built in 1753 as an inn, the house was a meeting spot for seafaring folk of a wide range of loyalties. These salts would come up the Savannah River for food, drink, bed, and havoc. Stories are told of dastardly plans hatched within its rooms, men drugged and shanghaied into service, torture and imprisonment in its bowels. You know, tales that no dead man tells.

Of course, it’s the living you have to worry about when it comes to tales. The place has been a restaurant for like half a century and over the course of trying to pull in customers, the history of the place has gotten barnacled with fancy to the point that you can’t see the hull anymore. Plus there are the ghost stories. You can’t have pirate stories without pirate ghost stories (and vice versa). As a result, it’s deucedly difficult to figure out what’s true and what’s false about the building’s piratey past.

One bit of clever marketing connects the site to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. In it, the demoniac Captain Flint is supposed to have died in Savannah in 1754, a death which is basically the catalyst for the entire treasure hunt that is the book. No real details are given in the book as to the place in Savannah of the fictional Flint’s death, but what’s now the Pirates’ House was there at the right place, at the right time, and did have the clientele.  

It’s also a good example of those barnacles. From this vague, but still interesting connection, the stories have spiraled into Flint being a real pirate whom Stevenson met there and/or who died upstairs in the house and/or whose ghost haunts the place. The paper placemat is covered with those kinds of tales to read in between ketchup stains.

Located on 20 East Broad Street, just a block from the Savannah River. The Pirates’ House is covered in large wooden planks gray with age and weather. Inside, we were led through the warren of 15 or 20 dining rooms of various sizes that looked like they grew off each other randomly.

The place has great atmosphere, with fireplaces and exposed beams and, even with some of the cheesy pirate additions to the décor, you can really feel the age and easily imagine sailors tattooing themselves across the tables while breaking tankards of rum over each other’s heads.

After putting in an order for she-crab soup and a rum-and-coke (because, pirates), and chatting a bit with the piratess, I wandered about the place. Every once in a while a wall placard labelled a feature and implied this or that unprovable history of it. A deep, dirty, brick-lined hole in the corner of one room discovered during a renovation in 1962 was rumored to be the entrance to a secret tunnel or a place to hide treasure or a dungeon for holding hostages.

Elsewhere a set of blocked-off curving stone steps leading down to a basement was suggested to be the beginning of another secret tunnel. On one wall were framed pages from an old edition of Treasure Island. Fake skulls were set on a mantelpiece above one of the fireplaces. A wooden pirate statue stood guard at the servers’ counter. Upstairs was a gift shop.

One wall in a hallway looked as if it had been the exterior of another building at one time. In fact, when it was built, the Pirates’ House had shanghaied an already existing building known as the “Herb House,” which had been part of an experimental garden to see what could grow in the alien soil during the original settlement. The Herb House was erected in 1734 and is believed to be the oldest building in Georgia.

The Pirates’ House, he says, winding down the article without really knowing how to end it, is a weird mix of authentic and inauthentic. I don’t know if I wanted my experience to be more piratey or less piratey, but it’s a cool place. I only regret not walking out of there with one of the paper pirate hats they give to the kids. 

Souls That Left the Earth: Astronaut Graves

March 15, 2013 — It seems weird to stick the remains of those who have literally left this earth into that same earth, to take the bodies of men and women who have floated thousands of miles above its surface and bury them six feet below it, but what else are we going to do with dead astronauts? Start a lunar cemetery?

Whoa…sometimes great ideas happen just like that.

Until we get that lunatic graveyard, we’ll have to make do with what humble traditions we have to honor the amazing lives of these adventurous representatives of our species...our astronauts (or whatever your country calls yours).

I haven’t been to a lot of ’naut graves. Just three. Well, two and a fake one. And my editor tells me that’s enough for a post. Let’s start there with the fake grave.

We call fake graves cenotaphs, or more precisely, we call fake gravestones cenotaphs. It’s kind of like when you want an original piece of art but have to settle for a print. In this case, when the real deal is buried elsewhere or lost for whatever reason, and a family or a cemetery or a city still wants this person memorialized within their graveyard gates, they install a cenotaph.

And, in this case, that real deal is the real deal indeed…Alan Shepard.

That’s right. We’re talking about the first American to breathe space and one of the top two most famous astronauts to date. Shepard was born in the humble little New Hampshire town of Derry. He grew up there, went to school there, even had his first flying lesson at the nearby private airport.

Of course, he didn’t stay in the Granite state, opting instead to go abroad…like sub-orbital space abroad, missing out on being the first human being outside the atmosphere by less than a month to cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. A little more than a decade later he finally got to one-up Yuri when, at the age of 47 when the rest of us mortals are busy starting to worry about our 401K, he played golf on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission.

After that mission, Shepard finally decided to live the rest of his life among us mere earthbound, although in a much more prominent state of the Union than New Hampshire. He died in 1998 in California, as did his wife, and both of their ashes were scattered in the ocean.

But the Shepard family plot is still in Derry (technically East Derry) in Forest Hill Cemetery on East Derry Road. So a stone plaque was placed there that says “Here does not lie Alan Shepard, although had he been less of a man, he might have.”

Astronaut Grave No. 2 is also in New Hampshire. This astro-grave is 30 miles northwest of Derry in the capital city of Concord. She is also an extremely famous astronaut, for both inspirational and tragic reasons.

Christa McAuliffe wasn’t a pilot or a scientist. She didn’t have a high-ranking family member in NASA. She was a high school teacher. And yet, in 1986, she found herself strapped to the top of two 150-foot-tall rockets aimed at anywhere but here. She was the first ever civilian tapped for space. God damn, what a ride.

It all started in 1984. Ronald Reagan was running the country like a Hollywood movie. It’s one of the reasons the 80s were so great. In this movie, they wanted to send a civilian into space, a teacher specifically. There were a lot of reasons for this, all falling under the category of PR. For instance, they wanted to demonstrate the absolute safety of the space program, gain more public interest and funding for it, highlight education as a priority for the administration. And from all the teachers in the country and 11,000 applicants in total, this history and social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, was anointed.

Unfortunately, the mission she was chosen for was what history would eventually call the Challenger Disaster. On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger started shuttling its crew of seven astronauts into the Great Void…and then changed course for the Great Beyond. It disintegrated 73 seconds after lift-off due to a faulty piece of rubber. God damn, what a ride. Sometimes movies have unhappy endings.

McAuliffe never technically made it into space, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t an astronaut. She did the training. She wore the blue. She rode the rocket.

Her grave is easy to find at Blossom Hill Cemetery on North State Street in Concord. The stone that marks it is space-black and sits directly under a tree. A nearby planetarium is named in her honor. Her grave does not say, “She rode the rocket.”

The third astronaut grave that I’ve been to is way farther south…in Lake City, South Carolina. Unlike these other two graves that are also monuments to these astronauts, this one is more like a monument that’s also a grave.

It belongs to and memorializes Ronald E. McNair. It’s not located in a cemetery, but next to a library at 235 East Main St., a library named after him and which plays an interesting part in his story.

McNair grew up in segregated Lake City, South Carolina in the 1950s. When he was eight years old, he tried to borrow books from the local library, but was refused for not being page-colored. He raised a righteous fuss and, after his mom and the police were called, the library relented and let him borrow the books. He got the last laugh not only when the place was renamed after him decades later, but when his body was interred right beside it.

The rest of McNair’s story you can learn directly from the monument. It’s in two parts, all of which cover a large swathe of ground. One is the tomb itself, a human-sized block of stone surrounded by a moat-like fountain and gas-flame lanterns. The other, adjacent to the tomb but not so close that it’s easy to get a good picture of the two together, is a full-sized statue of McNair. It depicts him holding his helmet under his arm and backdrops him with a large polished stone slab that acts as his CV.

Using only that memorial as a source, I learned that he knew karate, played the sax, had a wife and two children, was religious, was from that town, and was a physicist. All of these facts are given equal weight and their own small icon on the slab. However, the one accomplishment that is physically emphasized over all of these, is the large space shuttle angled to look like it’s about to leave the monument.

The reason we can visit his grave is that he was also aboard the Challenger with Christa McAuliffe on that terrible winter day. It was to be his second time in space, the first having been aboard that same vessel two years previously.

Incidentally, these are some pretty important astronauts. The first American in space. The first civilian headed to space. The second black man in space. However, I do long for the day when we have no more firsts and seconds of this nature in space, when leaving the planet is as old hat as traveling from New Hampshire to South Carolina.

So in a way, it’s a good and appropriate thing to inter these celestial men and women on our home turf as reminders. We’re all dust…but dust capable of being so much more. Let’s get off this freaking planet.

From Under the Bed to Under Glass: The Vermont Toy Museum

March 12, 2014 — As I write this post, I am surrounded by toys. Other things too, in this collection of stuff I call my study, but lots of toys. Actually, it’s more like a nest than a study. I roost in this room. On a shelf at my seven, there’s a Rancor holding up poor, green Oola to its rubber jaws, my pal Krusher whose flexing belies a low self-esteem that no large reptilian monster should suffer, a chunky Granite from the Inhumanoids line, a translucent 10,000-Volt Ghost from The Scooby Doo Show, a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man (I tried to think of the most harmless thing). Directly behind me, there’s a Chick-fil-A cow dressed as a Christmas elf, a couple of those HEXBUGs, and a remote-controlled severed hand that walks on walls and ceilings. If I lean back and crane my neck to the right, I’ll see Unicron, the transformer who turns into a planet and then eats other planets. The Muppet’s Statler and Waldorf heckling me from a shelf. A couple of Happy Meal toys. Also a cow skull, but that’s a tangent. I even have an actual toy box in my study. One day I’ll tour you through this place, but the point here is, I love toys.

Much of my pre-adolescence was spent in the 1980s, when children really became an official target audience and savvy marketing strategies were launched with gusto at our defenseless intellects. And while corporations shrank our souls before our bodies and minds had even fully grown, they at least gave us great parting gifts…and ensured a future where none of us knew where the fine line was between child-like wonder and child-like idiocy.

Today, I treat toy aisles like museum walls. More accurately, I treat them like galleries. The same way I marvel at the crayon strokes of Munch’s The Scream or the vivid decay of Albright’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, I gaze with my chin in my hand at this obscure product license or that great action feature or this glorious level of detail represented on the pegs and shelves. And every once in a while I take one home. Each of those pieces of plastic and rubber represents a story…a story that, true, was developed precisely to convince impressionable children to game their parents into buying that piece of plastic and rubber, but a story nevertheless.

So finding an actual toy museum always seems, to me, like a validation or a commiseration or a culmination or something else that ends with “tion”…and, man, Vermont has a great one.

The Vermont Toy Museum is a hidden wonder. It’s in Quechee, VT, in a quaint-looking single-building shopping center called the Quechee Gorge Village. Outside, the building looks like a large, nicely kept antique or souvenir shop, the kind you’d take your mom to or stop by on impulse during a Fall road trip. And it is that.

You can buy Vermont T-shirts or sample cheeses or walk through rows and rows of New England antiques. But then you get to a set of stairs with signs all over it enthusiastically promising all kinds of toys…easily making one suspicious enough that it could be a trap, that the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was secreted up there with his nose and his net.

But if you ascend those stairs, you’re in for a grand time.

The single-room museum has no entrance fee, and it features some 100,000 toys from just about every decade that made toys. It’s not a big room, but it’s also not really a small room, relative to what it exhibits. Glass display cases line the walls and fill the middle spaces like one of those games where you need to get that BB into the cardboard hole. Oh, and, my apologies for the glare in the photos of those cases. The ceiling, besides have board games clipped to it, had numerous parallel florescent tubes running the entire length of the room, making it difficult to get good photos of some of the toys.

Everything there is arranged loosely and more or less neatly around themes. There’s a whole case of robots. Another full of lunchboxes. Another of science fiction toys. Shampoo bottles shaped like licensed characters. Star Wars, He-Man, video games systems, stuffed animals, Matchbox cars, and for those toys not copious enough for their own case, they were usually grouped together on the shelves.

The TMNT toys stuck together. So did the G.I. Joes and the Real Ghostbusters. Street Sharks. Silver Hawks. All those Japanese imports that were popular in the 90s and early 00s. There are even the Holy Grail classics, like the 19” 1977 Shogun Warriors Godzilla that shoots its fist or the 15” Bigfoot from The Six Million Dollar Man series from that same year.

It’s like the secret physical archives of ebay.

I can’t say that the collection leaned to one decade per se, but obviously, my selective observation saw lots of the 80s in there…Gremlins and Alf and Atari and Urkel and California Raisins and close to everything I’ve already listed.

I don’t know who owns this place. The website merely says these toys are the “result of one man's dream and 30 years of dedication to share the preservation of our toy heritage and the importance that toys play in our lives.” I assume he keeps his identity a secret for fear of becoming deluged with Facebook friend requests.

Because just like that one kid in the neighborhood who always seemed to get every cool toy, we’d be at his door in a second asking his mom if he could come out to play…and, more importantly, could he bring his toys.

Maybe that’s why he put them on display in the first place.

I kind of want that shirt for everyday wear.

Oh, and they had one of these outside.

Splinter in the Sky: The Shard

March 9, 2013 — So I was sitting there in my home, watching this episode of Doctor Who about people getting their souls sucked out of their bodies through WiFi by a baddies headquartered in an extremely tall, futuristic-looking, thin glass pyramid in London. I remember thinking, “Wait, how do the people of London not see this obviously alien piece of architecture completely dominating their skyline?” Eventually, I realized they were just not going to address this glaring plot hole (which I was admittedly used to from recent seasons of Doctor Who). Somewhere around the part where the Doctor is racing up the side of the skyscraper on an antigrav motorcycle, I started getting a suspicion. I Googled.

Turns out, what I took to be well-rendered CGI was an actual skyscraper in London that I had no clue about.

Nine months later I was standing on top of it.

They call it the Shard, and it was completed in March of 2012, a year before that episode aired. So technically, it was, or is, a brand new building. Still, I suddenly felt very parochial for not knowing about it.

It’s no surprise to me that the Shard is a London building. Well, it would have been my second guess after Abu Dhabi or Dubai or some place like that (Wikipedia says that Qatar is actually part-owner of the building). London is great at preserving old architecture while creative exciting new buildings for the city. Like the Gherkin or Lloyd’s or City Hall. Here in the States we often just build rectangles. Lots and lots of rectangles.

At over 1,000 feet high with 72 floors, the Shard is the tallest building in both London and the European Union. I mean, the thing just sits there poking the sky like it’s ready to lift off or receive extraterrestrial beams from the sky. This is how artists in the 1950s depicted cities of the future.

And it has a public observation deck. Yup, it’s currently London’s Signature Tall Thing.

The website recommends reserving a time slot online, but since that day in London was a weird one for me, I had to ear it by play. In fact, I didn’t make it there until after dark, like 8 pm…which I admit doesn’t seem too late, but it was the same day I crossed the ocean, so it was like my 30th hour in a row of being awake.

It was the end of December, and the observation deck had only been open since February of that same year. I’m not sure if that meant it was people-tested enough or not. They actually just hit their millionth visitor two weeks ago, so I was probably visitor number 840,000,000.

Despite not having a reservation, I got right in after a quick security check that entailed them having to make sure my DSLR was real. To test it, the security guy took the below picture. Keep in mind, this was me at the 30th hour and 3,000th mile of awakeness. Too much math in this post.

My tired face, my camera, but technically, I think I need his permission to post this picture.

They were doing a brisk business that night, but it took no time to get to the top. There was no real line, and the elevator was like antigrav motorcycle fast. By the way, those don't exist. I Googled.

They simultaneously dropped us off at and elevated us to floor 69, which is at about the 800-foot mark of the Shard’s full 1,000 feet. Walking around the room and seeing the 360-degree view of London at night, well, floored me…for three minutes. Then I realized I could take the stairs to the 72nd floor, where I was not only higher up, but had open sky above me.

The tip of the Shard is a series of overlapping triangular panels of various heights without a roof. It’s this crown that makes the tip of the Shard look slightly unfinished from a distance. The experience wasn’t vertiginous at all, as I still felt like I was in a room, albeit a glass one, and the slight chill was bracing.

Because it was nighttime, London was just a twinkling firmament, but everything was recognizable. I could see Tower Bridge and the Tower of London just across it, which is where I’d spent my morning. I could see the London Eye and the Palace of Westminster. A python loop of the Thames. Basically, I saw all of London in a night.

At 25 pounds per person, it was way overpriced for the 20 minutes I was there, but these things usually are. I assume they have a pretty hefty rent themselves, although low overhead…figuratively speaking. It would’ve been way more worth the money if they’d projected a massive version of Richard E. Grant’s face glowering down at us high up on one of the glass walls.

I'm ending with a Doctor Who joke, I guess.

Poe-Land: If You Purchased This Book Without a Cover…

March 8, 2014—As many of you know, for the past year I’ve been travelling up and down the East Coast and across the ocean for my new book, Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe. Well, as of last week, the manuscript is off to the publisher, so I’m suddenly a lighter man. Metaphorically. I always put on 20 pounds when writing a book because Cheez-Its are my muse. Poe-Land doesn’t come out until Fall, so it’s too early really to talk about the book itself…but we can talk about the cover. It might get tweaked before the final design, but check it out:

Once again, like my past two books, the cover is all Brian Weaver. We joked that we’ve done three macabre books together so far, and none of them have sported a black cover. Maybe the next one.

Obviously, this is the best cover of the three. Really jazzed about it. Brian was tasked with the impossible, to create a Poe cover that stood out in a cluttered field and gave me the same feeling I get when I see images of Poe without giving me that same feeling I always get when I see images of Poe. Also, to make sure people don’t mistake it for an anthology of his stories. In my opinion, Brian walked on water with this one, and I’m way grateful.

The cover was inspired by the poster art for the 1983 Ray Bradbury film Something Wicked this Way Comes, and the idea is to show Poe-Land as a carnival, an amusement park, a slightly sinister Poe-themed place of wonder to run around in and have a good time…because that’s what I’ve felt like I’ve been doing for the past year (once I suppress all the actual work from my memory). I’ve seen so much cool Poe stuff and met so many cool Poe people because of this book project.

If you want to do me a solid, please head over to the OTIS Facebook Page and share the cover image with any of your friends who are Poe fans. That would be awesome, and I’d owe you. But, honestly, right now this is mostly for you guys who have put up with the lack of content on this site for so long. I wanted to show you what I’ve been working on. It’s kind of like a doctor’s note. I promise to get back to posting now.

Certainly, at some point closer to the book’s debut, I’m going to really need your help. I want every Poe fan out there to know about this book. I really believe it’s a unique Poe book in a world where we probably don’t need another Poe book (whether it’s a good one, I have less evidence for…you’re going to have to tell me).

And with that, I’ll shut up about it until we get closer to its Fall 2014 release.