02/21/01

I haven’t been sleeping very well---spent last night awake, tossing and turning all night long. I was so fucking delirious I thought for a moment I saw a ghost outside the trailer. It was a figure of a man lurking behind a tree. I made it out in the faint moonlight. The figure was sort of there one moment and then it just disappeared. Then there was that glowing thing in the trees that came and went in an instant . Maybe it was a barn owl. Maybe it was natural phenomena, who the fuck knows. Caused by gases coming off Purgatory swamp---will-o-the-wisp. The dog wasn‘t happy with me at the window half the night. He was fucking yapping every time the creepy feeling came back and I opened the curtain once more to look outside. Make sure everything was OK but find no reassurance at all.

I saw a ghost-light once years ago. Jack-o-lantern they call them. It was when I was all beaten down with chemo treatments, so who knows if that had something to do with it. I know my mind wasn’t right then. Maybe it was all a hallucination. You see a ball of light come out of a swamp like that and float around, you’re left wondering whether you’ve lost your mind. But they say these things are seen coming out of swamps all around the world--- that it’s a natural phenomena caused by some kind of ignition of flammable gases from rotting material. The burning gas appears like a floating orb of light. There’s been accounts of these orbs following people around, but they say that phenomena might have scientific explanations also. Could be static electricity caused by tension between plates within the Earth.

In Ireland, the will-o-the-wisp is attributed to Jack the Drunk, who made a deal to sell his soul to the Devil in order to pay his pub tab. But then old Jack was caught trying to trick the Devil and was left to wander the Earth for all eternity carrying an ember from the fires of Hell with him inside a hollowed-out turnip. That’s where the Jack-o-lantern came from. It’s been said my Irish ancestor, Barney Noonan saw the will-o-the-wisp come off Purgatory Swamp too when he lived here in the 1800’s. My father always believed this place was haunted by Barney Noonan, that he wanders the night looking for his lost Hamiltonian trotting horse---the one he claimed was stolen from him by the Confederates during the Civil War.

Some cultures believe will-o-the-wisp appear over the locations where there’s buried treasure. If that’s the case, maybe there’s more of that treasure down there yet from old Claudius Smith.

I don’t understand that Percy. He wants to debunk my father’s dowsing abilities, but when I told him about the hallucination of the Indian I had back when I was sick, he said it must have been a vision quest---an effort by an Indian spirit to communicate with me and guide me. He’s got all kinds of strange New Age notions in his mind. I should be the one debunking that asshole. Instead he’s got it switched around for once. I’m the biggest skeptic in the world when it comes to all this paranormal stuff, that’s why it’s so weird for me that I would react so defensively to Percy’s theory that Dowser Boy was all a scam. In some ways I can follow along with what Percy’s suggesting perfectly. That is, until it gets down to the matter of it going against what my father believed about himself. Then it hurts for some reason. He was such a bitter, rotten man. I guess when I thought of him as once being a child with special abilities, it somehow took away some of the harshness I felt about him.

I better find a lock to put on the tool shed out back.