1 post tagged “bailey leiter”
I don't know what made us want to find something like that so badly, but it's all I wanted to do. I had just graduated high school, in a few months I'd be moving away from everyone. We all took trips to the Super Wal*Mart together, and we wandered through the aisles of Target in search of the perfect twin extra long sheets. We did all the things that incoming freshman should do, we just also consistently went looking for ghosts. That summer was about a trip to Dunellon, nights spent in the old slave graveyard and endless drives around the abandoned mental institution. We hit up every website to find out where the ghosts were, checked all of "Haunted Florida," we were even willing to leave Pinellas County.
Looking back, I want to say that this was just what we did because there was nothing else to do. Now, Clearwater is not in the middle of nowhere. In fact- it is a hot bed for tourism, there are gorgeous beaches, and then little miniature golf courses scattered around among shops where you can get your named spelled out in sea shells. On the weekends you can do things like ride a jet ski, or go parasailing or do other things someone would do when they vacationed to the west coast of Florida. But you see, when you live there, you don't really do these things. You may go to the beach, but unlike the tourists, we don't swim in January. There are so many months left in the year with nothing to do, where you drive around and think "there is absolutely nothing to do".
So, wanted to find ghosts, or demons, or anything really. Sometimes we'd steal our father's flashlights, the very strong ones that they saved for the hurricanes (because when this story takes place, Florida is still plagued by storms) and we'd pack bags and look up directions and go and try and find ghosts. It wasnt only that summer - that summer when I swore I'd never go back, it was before then and after then, too. Even now when I visit we make a three hour drive to go to Spook Hill, we ride around in the Circus Town, we stare at the window. But I want to tell you about how desperate I felt when I did it then, how good I felt. It felt like sex for the first time, when you have sex when you're too young. You are in on a big secret that no one else knows about. You feel special and you feel disgusting. We fucked when we were too young and then we looked for ghosts all summer when we turned 18.
And all of the ghosts were supposed to be kept in grave yards. But I left for Ohio, after nights of abandonment and a going away party, I went to my grandmothers house and in many ways, I purged myself of the things that I had done wrong. I had this kind of insanity about me in high school that I don't think I can accurately describe because I just can't feel it anymore. I had some kind of anger, and then I went to Ohio. I spent two months in the summer there before returning to Florida to gather my belongings. I wanted to stay in Ohio because I had lived there until I was 8, and I had no choice about moving to Florida and I felt that it wasnt fair I wanted to give myself something back. And I didn't know that my grandmother would die or that I would fuck up or that I would leave and return to read some broken down eulogy .
But that summer I felt like everything was mine. The ghosts were mine and the house was mine and my freedom would be mine and I'd learn to stop writing, even in letters to men I'd never end up meeting, because I wanted some things to be personal. I go through these phases, like then where I don't want to share anything.
And then sometimes I am just Barbara Walters talking to Oprah Winfrey, I don't want it to be mine, I want to get rid of it. You see, now it's yours. You'll have to go there to Dunellon and see that church and ride in a car while the lights go out. You, you can go drink red wine in my grandmother's backyard and you can kiss the boy across the street. You can drive to the east coast of Florida on drugs with your best friends and decide to legally change your name to Aurora Borealis before the olympics or the floods or the concept of four or five years- now you can do that. There are one million things that I can never say anything about, so just let me tell you these things.
None of the ghosts would look us in the eye, you know, you know what? I don't even know if any of those places were actually haunted. I don't even know if you believe in ghosts at all.
