White Noise

Ghost to Ghost, Heaven's Gate, and the American Id

Television static.

In 1997, shortly after I moved to Denver from NYC, a bright comet with a gloriously long, curving tail—Comet Hale-Bopp—graced the skies. It was an exciting time in my life, I remember thinking of the comet as an omen. I recall one night in particular, the night of a lunar eclipse, when I was walking home with my girlfriend at the time, Comet Hale-Bopp dominating one half of the sky, the eclipsed moon holding court over the other half. I felt like a lucky man to witness it.

A (very) amateur astronomer took photos of the comet one night around this time, mis-identified an optical flaw in his telescope as a “Saturn-like object” following in the wake of the comet, and called into a radio show called Coast to Coast to tell them about it. A few days later a trio of psychics on the show identified the optical artifact as “a metallic object full of aliens.”

A few weeks later, 39 members of a religious cult in California called Heaven’s Gate committed mass suicide, in three separate, carefully planned shifts. They believed the object following behind Hale-Bopp was a spaceship coming to take them to heaven. This was back in the early days of the internet, and the Heaven’s Gate cult were early adaptors, looking for clues about the end of the world in cyberspace, and leaving a trail of HTML breadcrumbs. Like Heaven’s Gate, the Coast to Coast show was an early adaptor to the internet as well, and published pictures of the alleged spaceship, and spread the theory. After the suicides, the press began hyper-ventilating about the dangers of internet misinformation in a way that seems almost quaint today, decades later, in a time of Tucker Carlson and vote-altering Chinese thermostats.

The rest of the world at the time focused on the internet. I focused on the radio show. Coast to Coast. I still remember the tiny little black clock radio I used to listen to it on (now I use my iPad). Most of the talk on the show at the time was about the cultists, and they were taking a lot of (in my opinion undeserved) blame for the suicides. As time passed, the show veered back to its more traditional subject matter: UFOs, cryptids like Bigfoot and Nessie, astrology and numerology, exorcists, shadow people, the hollow Earth, psychics, urban legends, ghost stories. I became a big fan. They changed hosts, their politics drifted a little right, but the show has not changed substantially over the years.

I rarely bother listening to the shows devoted to UFOs (which is a LOT of them) or astrology or numerology. In fact, show devoted to any specific subject are not my favorite thing. I listen to Coast to Coast for when they declare “open lines.” No subject. They just open up the phone lines and listen to what a certain subset of Americans has to say, without much judgement or incredulity or even much common sense. They accept it all. It’s not unlike listening to America’s Id.

Ghost stories. Tragic twists of fate. Omens and dreams and premonitions. Myths and prophecies. Small details culled from larger lives (all lives are large), presented with little context. Death looms over many of these stories. The Universe is seen as an unknowably mysterious place, subject to hidden rules, unpredictable miracles, capricious demons.

I don’t believe most of the stories I hear on the show, but belief misses the point. I think that most of the people who call in believe the stories they are telling. The woman who saw her dead husband materialize before her eyes. The man who claims to have traveled here from the future with dire warnings for us all. The boy who has disturbing conversations with his shadow (a story told by his freaked out mother, and one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard on the show).

And that’s why I listen. I listen to the stories people tell about their lives. Attempts to make sense of their lives by telling stories, not unlike visiting the therapist, or writing fiction. I try to listen without judgement or prejudice, to look beyond the specific beliefs—often nonsensical—and see the very real lives that gave birth to those beliefs.

Sunday night was Ghost to Ghost, the annual Halloween show devoted to people calling in with their own ghost stories. Most of the stories are interesting, but not noteworthy. But occasionally, maybe one story out of ten, the tale grabs you. It has the ring of truth about it, the terror of the believable. Those stories stick with me, just as they stuck to the people that told them.

Fear is fear. I’m not too sure our fears about life are all that different. We fear death, loss, abandonment, meaninglessness. But the stories we use to code those fears, to express the to others, and perhaps better understand them ourselves, are all our own. They are as unique as fingerprints, as personal as memories. Rarely do those fears distill into something as concrete and tremendously disturbing as the mass suicide of 39 people. More often they take their shape in a anecdote told to a friend, a confession handed to a therapist, a voice on a tinny radio speaker, late at night, telling stories, a recognizable signal in a sea of white noise.

Peace.

If you like the writing, buy a story! October’s story is The Gray Angel, from Jamie Ferguson’s excellent anthology, Hauntings, linked below.

• October’s story: The Gray Angel

• September’s story: Exit Ramp

• August’s story: Monster

• July’s story: Goodneighbor.com

• June’s story: Feral

• May’s story: Nine Lives

• April’s story: Prince Albert in a Can

• March’s story: Fuck, Marry, Kill

• February’s story: Veronica Scissors

• My first novel, Life Under Water

• My erotic flash fiction series, Serious Moonlight (as J G Cain)