The Last Word On Nothing

The title of this post is not metaphorical nor is it a misleading hook. I’ve got a sound on tape. It could be a ghost. What is a ghost? Science says no such thing exists. But in these thinning days of autumn, even diehards might glance up startled. What was that?

If you want to skip this post and go straight to a spooky audio recording I picked up while covering a ghost hunting story, here it is:

However, I recommend you read this early Halloween entry first.

It starts with flashlights panning across Gothic effigies, lighting up figures in the walls above us. I wondered why the lights in the theater weren’t turned on, and now I knew. The shadows were stranger this way. You’d see things out of the corner of your eye, a face, a human body in a headdress with golden wings behind it, its face dark, eyes gleaming.

We were in the Million Dollar Theater in downtown Los Angeles, its turn of the century artwork, including the winged figure with gleaming eyes, was eerie and otherworldly.

The theater had been having trouble keeping its employees. This was a while back, more than a decade ago. The theater was shut down at the time. Employees were just here to check on things, doing maintenance, and they kept having odd, troubling encounters. One, I was told, had run out of the building onto the noonday street gasping for breath.

A ghost hunting crew had been called in.

The head ghost hunter made a point of calling his crew “scientists.” After all, they had funky instruments and gauges for temperature, air pressure, and electromagnetic radiation. When I asked the head guy what qualified him to be a scientist, he replied that he’d been Hugh Hefner’s bodyguard.

That made sense, right?

The crew drifted through the halls of the theater like a Scooby Doo team, stopping abruptly, pointing their detectors unaccountably at dark places in the corner or under the plush red-velvet seats, before moving on.
They weren’t here to stop anything from happening, just to observe it.

The Million Dollar Theater opened in 1918. It was LA’s first grand movie palace. The first movie to play here was accompanied by a thirty-piece orchestra. If you believe in ghosts, this would be the spot. So many voices have come through here, they must still be ringing in the walls.

Did I believe? Sure, why not? Shining my flashlight up to balconies and boxes, I half expected to see anything at all. To believe we’ve catalogued everything, understood each kind of energy and interaction, would be foolish.

This crew, however, wasn’t helping me believe.

Here’s how it works: ‘scientists’ bring their equipment and follow behind proclaimed psychics, who at the drop of a hat will start pointing and saying, there, there, don’t you see her, she’s in the seats right there, her name…her name… begins with an…M.

Detectors and rods all pointed the same way, trying to gather signs of Lady M.

I saw nothing.

I did encounter some strange things that day, but nothing definitive:

A door yanked out my hand and slammed closed. When I tried it a second time, it did the same thing. Upon inspection, it had no spring-like mechanism in its hinges, and it didn’t close that way a third time.

A flashlight started going on and off rhythmically on stage, even as we passed it between us.

And there was a room down in the catacombs, what used to be a speakeasy underneath the theater. It was narrow like a closet and long as if it meant to go somewhere, but it only ended in a wall. We gathered in the back of it, one of the psychics, crying, Murder! They brought him here and killed him!

I don’t care if you believe or not, my spine felt as if it were shuttling champagne bubbles into my neck.

For some reason, the owner hadn’t wanted us to come back this far, but the crew ignored him. He seemed impatient and stood at the door to this long, narrow room. I remember looking up from our huddled study of an empty place on the floor where apparently a man had been murdered. When I saw the owner leaning against the door, the only door in or out, I thought, one slam and this story would change fast.

He didn’t slam the door. I didn’t see a dead man on the floor. I left as ambivalent as when I came in. Sure, maybe I believe in ghosts, or maybe it was a gust of air slamming a door, or a flashlight battery fritzing, creating its own Morse Code.

It wasn’t until weeks later that I heard what had been caught on tape. I’d been using an old school mini-cassette recorder. I was in Arizona at the time, sitting down in the library stacks of a university, which smelled of old paper, and you rarely saw anyone. I’d taken a cubicle at the end of rows of towering bookshelves, headphones on, fingers clattering on my laptop as I transcribed interviews from a variety of stories I’d been covering.

The Million Dollar Theater cued up. I came to the part with a psychic who’d gone fetal at the foot of the stage, rocking back and forth. I’d been sitting on stage with my legs dangling over, holding the recorder near her. The head ghost hunter was talking about how these disembodied spirits interact with us, and how the psychic can feel the bodies of the dead. When the woman began to complain that things were crawling on her, the man said, “Things are crawling on you? Like…bugs, you mean?”

In the midst of his last two sentences came a sound, not something I recognized, definitely hadn’t been there at the time.

I paused the tape and rewound. The sound was there again, like the belly of a drum being struck, or a slow and raspy voice. I couldn’t tell. I had no idea what it was.

I played it again and again, until I threw off the headphones and backed out of the cubicle. Thousands of books hemmed in around me and I thought, this is how it happens, a journalist alone in the basement of a library…he hears the recording…and then…

Here’s where you should hit play. Go all the way through the recording at your own risk. The first few runs are straight from the tape. After that, you’ll hear what a sound engineer did to break the sound down to its pixelated audio at different speeds. The engineer said it had been with us in the room, like a magnetic distortion imprinted into the tape, something present:

This is all pseudoscience at best. It is guesswork, faith, belief. Evidence of ghosts is naturally opaque, and generally not scientific. I wrote up the story with as much science as I could muster, reporting on the parts of the brain that fashion emotion and memory, the places of hallucinations. I cobbled together odd studies from the corners of psychology and sociology departments. My postulation was that ghosts, be they shadows, echoes, lingering trails of presence, could be the same as germs once were, nothing we could see at the time, plagues moving by mystery.

Science says no. There’s really nothing to ghosts but personal experience, subjective interpretation. Viable evidence simply has not surfaced. Even my tape could be anything, not a ghost or paranormal passing, but a place where my finger oils got on a fine magnetic ribbon and distorted a sound…just as a woman was rocking back and forth believing she was covered with bugs.

Real or not, does it matter? Does a single bubble tickle up your spine?