Ghost Hunting

I went to college in Williamsburg, Virginia. The place has some history. Colonial history. The white man, and even some Indians, have been dying there for centuries. And I’m talking about horrible, horrible deaths: dying while giving birth, a horse kicks to the head, small pox, malaria, and straight up genocide. It’s all so very quaint.

A famous murder that happened there occurred in the 60’s. At a prep school that is literally right next to colonial Williamsburg, a white janitor took 2 little black boys up to the school’s attic, held a faux trial (I think they were accused of being black) and then tortured them to death. It was Mississippi Burning meets Hostel meets the Nuremburg Trials.

And let’s not forget my alma mater, The College of William and Mary, the technically oldest college institution in America (fuck you, Harvard). The place once had the highest college suicide rate in the country, but now we’re number 2 (thanks, Cornell).

On top of all that, Williamsburg has a big retirement community, about a million graveyards, its own ghetto, which is literally, on the other side of the train tracks, and an abandoned mental hospital. The point is, Williamsburg is spooky. The place is enshrouded in a very charming cloak of death.

Every Halloween my friend Greta and I would get drunk and/or high and go ghost hunting. I miss that.

Luckily for me, there’s quite a haunted little place in NOVA that has some history. Before the area exploded with commerce, this region of the country was mostly farmlands that were used as battlefields in the Civil War. Which brings me to the Peterson Farmhouse.

The Peterson Farmhouse was erected in 1863, laying 10 miles northeast of Manassas. Old man Peterson was a Scots-Irish farmer who loved to regularly drink, beat his wife and molested his two daughters. Confederate troops would stop at the farmhouse, and for a small fee, use his wife and daughters at their discretion. One of his daughters, Emily, didn’t survive the war. She died under “mysterious circumstances”, but they say she was buried in the cellar. Years passed and the abuse continued until 1875. That’s when they say the ghost of Emily came back and murdered her whole family. The family’s bodies were found some time later, rotten and mangled. It wasn’t until 1933 when another farmer family bought the land and moved in. Now here’s the spooky part: the exact same thing happened. Drunk Scots-Irish farmer, abused family, dead daughter, more abuse, dead family. Then for a few years the house took on a few new roles. For a while it was a local morgue, a safe house for murderers, and a satanic church.

And guess what? The house is still there. Yup. It’s true. Only now a strip mall is on top of it. To be specific, a PetSMart (the one in Tall Oaks shopping center across from the Red Robin, next to that place where you can buy pool tables).

For my journey I brought along with me a tab of acid and a bottle of Thunderbird wine for company. At 11:30 PM I fell through the ceiling tiles of the PetSMart, dropped the acid tab and set off. Let’s find some fucking ghosts!

11:50 PM
Holy shit I am off! I knew I was descending into the spirit realm. Strange voices keep calling out to me. Towards the back where they keep the bags of cat litter I see a small girl. It’s Emily! She’s a glowing white image of a girl in a nightie. I hazard a greeting.

“’Sup?” She blankly stares at me. I look around for some sort of offering. Ghosts love offerings. I pick up a dog collar and put it on. It symbolizes identification and unwelcomed restraint.

“See? I’m down” I say. The little girl turned into a 15 foot, wolf-headed demon made out of blood and corpses. It lunged for me. I scream and run towards the door, leaving a trail of piss behind me.

12:45 AM
Everywhere I turned, there was a creature waiting to devour my soul. This world spinned and churned, engulfing me in all the pain and sorrow of existence.

“Turn back, now!”, the fish burble in their high pitched, aquatic voices. “Turn back!”

“I can’t! I fucking can’t!” I am trapped within the mouth of Hell, and I am forced to bear witness to all the horrors that await deeper inside the pit. Men were butchering men like hogs. Children were used as objects and then discarded as such. I saw a cat shit in a box.

2:00 AM
I was sealed within a burlap sack, surrounded by shadowy figures inside the corrosive, dark stomach of a giant beast. The figures loomed overhead, their will be my mercy. They were plotting what would be the first delightful torture in an infinite series of pain. I lose all control. Something within my mind snaps and I found myself climbing up the esophagus. Higher and higher, towards the hole in the ceiling I fell out of. I fell again. I fell and landed on my back. Everything went quiet. I no longer heard the demon chirps. I no longer heard what the iguanas were thinking. All I felt is a searing pain on the back of my head. I looked up. I saw God. I reached out and try to touch God’s big, wet nose. And then everything went black.

9:30 AM
The sun was shining through the sliding glass doors of the PetSMart. I woke up with the manager and two Fairfax County cops looming over me. An ambulance was outside. Waiting. A couple of animals were freely walking around, including 2 dogs, 9 cats and a tarantula. There was human shit everywhere.

“What the fuck happened?!” mustachioed cop # 1 asks me.

“Ghosts” I reply.