Dear beautiful reader, humble reader, awe-inspiring and adventurous reader,
I hope you are well.
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All you have to do is press this button.
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Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
The please-fasten-your-seatbelt sign dings on, and I’m almost halfway done reading The Amityville Horror. George Lutz—family man, homeowner, dog lover—this guy is locking up his boathouse for the I-don’t-know-what’th time, and Harry won’t stop barking at shadows. Lutz shakes. It’s three in the morning, and his boots suck up wet mud as he walks back to the main house. Everyone’s asleep. His daughter’s asleep. So who’s that person watching him from her bedroom window? The figure evaporates, and Harry won’t stop barking at shadows.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your seats. We’ve begun our initial descent.”
There’s an apartment building—just off I-5, in Seattle’s University District. Nothing too special. It looks like every other complex in the area. Six floors. Basement parking. A “Now Leasing to Students” sign. Seriously, one of those I’m-a-broke-college-kid-but-my-parents-aren’t places. Private balconies. A courtyard. The only things that make it stand out, what really separates it from everywhere else, are the horror stories. Ask any of the residents. Ask me.
Something in that place fed on our dreams.
Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say, the dreams were feeding on me.
By the summer of 2015, I’d been addicted to heroin and speed for a couple years. And this combination of uppers and downers, along with their constant abuse, had put me into a sort of twilight. An inflection point between consciousness and sleep. Consequently, my dreams, and especially my nightmares, they all leaked into reality.
Ghosts filtered in through the cracks in my windows. Voices whispered from behind my walls. Insects buzzed and multiplied between the fibers in my carpet. I started living in my closet as though it were a holy sanctuary that demons couldn’t cross.
But fear still possessed me. Sometimes literally. I once woke up on the floor only to find black-buzzing-tendrils-of-ectoplasm slithering into my mouth.
I was paralyzed. I didn’t go buy an EMF sensor. I didn’t call a priest (or Sam and Dean for that matter.) All I could do was handle these supernatural problems the same way I had been handling every other problem in my life.
By taking a lot of narcotics.
Shockingly, this didn’t seem to help much. The ghosts multiplied. The disembodied voices got louder—having wormed their way into the folds of my brain. And the bugs had migrated from the carpet to set up a new home just under my skin. My body wasn’t mine anymore. It belonged to something else.
And whatever that thing was, it convinced me of something horrible. It convinced me that somewhere inside my apartment complex, inside one of the dozens upon dozens of units, was someone I knew. Kidnapped. Shackled and chained to the floor.
Seriously.
Now, I had been a decent physics student, not too bad when it came to using logic. But this constant, daily fear had ridden me down. It was so all consuming that it short circuited any attempts I’d make at common sense.
So I gave up trying.
So at three in the morning, I started wandering the empty halls of my apartment complex looking for kidnappers.
So I found someone’s front door unlocked.
I creaked it open. Light spilled into the hallway, but there was no one on the other side. Not in the foyer at least. There must be a hidden room somewhere, I thought. So I took a step in. And another. And…
I saw myself. Just for a second. My skinny jeans torn and baggy. My shirt, a stained dress. I was a skeleton with skin. Not much else in the way of substance. A ghost.
With that moment of clarity, I shut the door and left.
“Whether you’re here visiting or returning home, our crew would like to thank you for flying with us.”
The please-fasten-your-seatbelt sign dings off, and I dog-tag the page I’m at in The Amityville Horror. George Lutz is back inside his home, boots squeaking against the wooden floor as he walks up the main staircase. He puts his hand on the doorknob to his daughter’s room, opening it up, taking a step in, and I have to put the book away. People are clicking open the overhead compartments, dragging out their luggage. We’re about to deplane.
“Welcome to Seattle. Enjoy your stay.”
One of the many hang ups I had about getting sober (other than the no drugs part) was a fear that I’d lose myself.
Not that I had much left to lose, but that’s not how I saw it at the time. I had tied my identity to Seattle. Growing up in Utah, there was nothing I wanted to do more than leave, become my own person. So when I moved to the Pacific Northwest it represented the start of a new me. It was that wide open place where I could shoot for the stars.
Unfortunately, I missed.
I aimed for the sky and, after several years of turbulent flight, I came crashing down at a small rehab in San Diego.
But that didn’t change my attitude. Seattle had filled that hole in my identity the way heroin had filled that void in my soul. How else could I be whole?
Turns out AA does a pretty good job of that, at least for me. AA. Family. Friends. Gratitude. Replacing narcotics with different varieties of sugar and baked goods. The whole laundry list. I wasn’t just whole, I was something more. Something I hadn’t been before. So when my wife and I went on a trip to Seattle earlier this year, my feelings had changed.
Who wants to live in a haunted house?
It’s strange returning to a place like that—a place where you lost yourself, a place where part of you died. It’s like a possession that doesn’t quite take. The cold chills, the goosebumps, the looking over my shoulder, they were all still there. But now, the ghosts were intangible, unable to take hold.
I finished The Amityville Horror on the flight back from that trip. George, his dog, his family, they make it out. But just when you’re led to believe all is fine and dandy. A cliffhanger. It seems whatever malevolence found them in Amityville had followed them to their new home.
Fortunately, in Seattle, in that unassuming six-story apartment building, the dead have stayed dead.
And now the closest I come to looking like a skeleton is on Halloween.
Golly, you sure do know how to write for a Satanic ex-junkie! That was a good read. When I was hooked on heroin I dropped down to 82 pounds. Ive been a few years sober now and I still have problems with appetite.
Matt, I'm so behind on everything, but just know I love this.