The Coincidence Collector

The recent Hostess Twinkie shortage problem due to the labor dispute has reminded me of two different movies in which Bill Murray appears, in which the Twinkie plays a minor role. The first of the two movies is “Ghostbusters”, and in that movie the character played by Harold Ramis, Dr. Egon Spengler, makes the comment, “That’s a big Twinkie”, when the iconic Hostess snack is used as an example to explain a possible paranormal event. Of course, Bill Murray also plays a big role in “Ghostbusters”, and he also has one of the funniest scenes in the movie “Zombieland”, co-starring Woody Harrelson as “Talahassee”, a zombie-killing man on a mission: to get his hands on as many Hostess Twinkies as he can, since there really IS a severe shortage of Twinkies in “Zombieland”!

   So there you have it, two movies in which Bill Murray can be found, and Twinkies are at least mentioned. Is this a Bill Murray thing, or just an ordinary coincidence? I’ve got a hunch he’s enjoyed at least a few of them in his life, and maybe, just MAYBE, he suggested the subject of Twinkies should come up somehow at some point in these movies. By the way, when the news about the possible Twinkie shortage broke last Friday, I watched “Zombieland” in honor of the iconic Hostess snack, and enjoyed it as tremendously as I have all the previous times I have seen it! It’s a fun movie, and the story about the possible Twinkie shortage was all it took to send me to my DVD library to snag my copy of “Zombieland” and pop it into the player! Maybe you should check it out too, before all the Twinkies are really gone!

The devastation from Hurricane Sandy which has left millions without power for several days already reminds me of the psychic dream I had after I’d been without power at my home in Houston after Hurricane Ike for two full weeks. I was dreaming early in the morning of September 27, ’08, exactly two weeks after losing power, and in this dream I was walking through my house and wishing that the power would come back on soon. At one point in this dream, I walked into a small unidentified closet with a flashlight so that I could find something in there.

    Suddenly, a bare light bulb lit up directly over my head indicating that the power was now back on! I was so overjoyed in my dream that my excitement at having my power back on woke me up immediately. Unfortunately, I then realized it had likely only been a dream, and that my power was still out, but I jumped out of bed anyway to go turn on a lamp to see if it would light up. As you might imagine, I was immediately disappointed to find what I already suspected; that my power was still out, and that I’d only had a wishful dream, nothing more.

    However, my dream had been so real, that I began to wonder if something like that might happen at some point that day. But then I realized that it was unlikely, since I didn’t know of any overhead bare light bulbs in any small closets in my house that could alert me to the power coming back on when it finally got around to it. Also, after the power had gone out two weeks earlier, I thought it would be wise to go ahead and just shut everything off, since power surges might happen during the course of repairs by the power technicians, and that’s not usually good for your appliances if the switches are in the ‘on’ position. While it’s not so hard on incandescent light bulbs, I turned all of those off too, just to be on the safe side. Therefore, unless I missed a light switch somehow, there would be no light bulbs lighting up over my head when the power did finally come back on.

    I then decided to go ahead and turn on at least one lamp in the living room, since it would be a pretty dumb thing to have no way whatsoever to know if the power came back on, right? I did that, but every time I walked through the living room that day the lamp only reminded me that the power was still off. Thankfully, I had plans to drive to another part of town that evening to go to a party where they’d had their power back on for at least a week, and could therefore be in a cheerful setting for a few hours that indicated to me that I would indeed get my electricity back on, and possibly soon.

    Then, at about 5:00 that afternoon, while I was getting ready for the party (it was a costume party for a special occasion), I took a flashlight with me into the kitchen pantry to get some canned veggies that I could heat up on the gas grill outside. I had only just walked into the “small closet”, when a BARE LIGHT BULB suddenly lit up directly over my head!! Apparently, I had neglected to turn off the switch for the light in the pantry when I went around the house turning everything off two weeks earlier! Also apparently, I had never noticed that the overhead light bulb in the pantry was just a bare bulb with no glass covering over it! You might imagine I was totally blown away by this scene which appeared to be pretty much exactly how it happened in my dream about 10 hours earlier! I’ve now had many such psychic dreams that appear to predict events that will happen later in the same day. Now if I can only figure out how to have such psychic hits that can be of more benefit!

In honor of Halloween this year (2012), I decided to blog about my very first experience with ghosts, which appeared to be not one but TWO ghosts in the same room at the same time! The year was ’64, when I was 8 and my brother who shared the same room was 7.
I woke up one night about 2:00 because I needed to use the bathroom (duh!), and I saw a column of fluorescent light in the doorway which filled almost the entire space of the doorway. It was pretty spooky, but that vision in the doorway was nothing compared to the vision I then noticed out of the corner of my left eye!

   I slowly turned my head to get a good look at the glowing objects that appeared to be resting on the desk on the opposite wall a little to my left, and to my horror they turned out to be a matched pair of disembodied hands resting on the wrists, palms facing out, the fingers wriggling slowly, situated on the desk surface directly above the spot where a chair should have been housed, which we did not have at that time. Of course, I was mortified, and I pulled the covers over my head and poked my brother in the arm, who was sleeping next to me, to wake him up. When he finally stirred, I whispered fervently, “Terry, there’s a ghost in the doorway!”

     Without bothering to look first, he said “Go back to sleep. You’re dreaming”. I insisted that I wasn’t dreaming, so he finally looked and he said fervently, “Gene! There’s a ghost in the doorway! What’ll we do?” I purposely neglected to point out the glowing hands sticking up off the top of the desk, and he didn’t appear to see them. I feared that if he saw the hands, he would really freak out and yank the covers back over his head, leaving me to figure out what to do about the situation. The apparition in the doorway was about ten feet to the right of the desk, so I simply stared straight at it, and my brother followed suit. Then I came up with this idea that if we sat straight up in bed, demonstrating boldness on our part, perhaps the apparitions would simply leave, so I suggested this to Terry.

    At first he was reluctant, but I insisted this was our best course of action, so we quietly agreed that we would slowly slide up the headboard, both at the same time, until we were sitting straight up in bed. Slowly, VERY slowly, we did so, and to my relief, once in that position, the apparition in the doorway did indeed gradually slide to the left until it was no longer visible, as though it was just on the other side of the wall in the hallway. By the time I braved a quick glance back at the desk, the hands were also gone! Man, was I relieved (except for the part about still needing to use the bathroom)! We remained seated in that defensive posture for no more than a minute or so, and then plopped back under the covers, with the sheets pulled all the way over our heads.

    Amazingly, I actually fell back asleep within a few moments, but since I still needed to go to the bathroom, I woke up after having slept for no more than about fifteen minutes. Tentatively, I pulled the covers down so I could get a good look at the doorway, and the darn “ghosty thing” was back in the same place it had been before, completely blocking my much-needed trip to the restroom in the hallway! Alas, the hands were also back in their place on top of the desk, and those things were mighty spooky-looking, and they made my heart pound even more than seeing the thing in the doorway. Naturally, I woke my brother up again, but he refused to help me again, saying “It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work!” We were both crying by that time, completely distraught, and it looked to me as if I would simply have to yank the covers back up over my head and hope that I might fall asleep without making sure the ghosts would leave us alone, or getting some relief via a trip to the bathroom.

    Mind you, the possibility of wetting the bed weighed heavily on me, but I was not about to get out of bed and walk right through a rather large apparition (not that size actually mattered in this case!) in order to get to the bathroom, was I? I then did something I had never done: I prayed a real prayer, and not that silly one I did every night. You know the one: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep..etc..”. Instead, I entreated God to let me fall asleep without requiring that I wet the bed, to keep the ghosts from bothering me, and to never let me see ghosts again. “Amen”. Amazingly, I fell asleep in mere seconds and slept through the entire night! I was so happy to see daylight streaming into the room as my mom called from the doorway the next morning to wake us up for school. My brother and I both bounded out of bed to tell her about the ghosts, but she of course told us that we must have both just had the same dream.

     Of course, we knew that was not the case, but there was no point in trying to convince an adult who had not witnessed the supernatural event herself, so we dropped it. Besides, I really, REALLY needed to pee still, so I made a beeline for the bathroom and took care of business! Was that ever a relief! For the next three years, I made a habit of praying every night that I would not ever see ghosts again, and to this day I haven’t, unless I count the things I’ve seen only out of the corner of my eye and wondered if they could have been ghosts. Mind you, I was absolutely terrified to go to bed at night for several years after that, and it pretty much consumed my daytime thoughts as well.

     Then, in my early forties, a surprising twist developed. I happened to be telling this story at a Chrismastime gathering at a relatives house, and I didn’t realize my younger sister was listening as she played dominoes a few feet away. I had never told her this story, mainly because I was afraid it would cause her to have nightmares, and my parents would have certainly blamed me. She asked me, “Gene, are you talking about some ghost hands that came out of the top of your old desk at home?” Cautiously, I admitted that I was. She said, “I saw them too!”

     I was stunned! I had no idea! Naturally, I asked to know the details, and she told me that she herself had seen the glowing hands on top of the desk IN BROAD DAYLIGHT! Apparently, she had been playing hide-and-seek with our dad after he came home from work one day when she was about five-years-old, which would have been the following year after my own bizarre experience. She had been hiding behind the door to my room while I was playing in the park across the street, and she peeked from behind it to see if she could figure out if dad was getting close to finding her, and that’s when she had a really good look at glowing hands resting on their wrists on top of my desk! Sure enough, the placement of the desk in relationship to the door she was peeking out from was exactly as I remembered, so I believe her, especially since I had seen them myself!

     Naturally, I’ve considered over the years the possibility that the desk itself might have been haunted, especially when I found out as a young teenager that the desk had come from a purported haunted house, something I had not heard prior to seeing the apparitions. I’ve experienced much poltergeistic phenomena over the years, such as bangings on doors and walls, furniture and other objects that move around with no natural explanation, and at least one book that has fallen off a shelf at least ten feet from where I was standing. It was the book I had been looking for! But, at least I haven’t had such a frightful visit as the one I had when I was 8! I’ve got plenty more of my own ghost stories, so stay tuned for more of them in the near future! I’ll give more details about that book that fell off the shelf in another blog. It was really weird!