THE GHOST FROM MY PAST IS ON TV
PARANORMAL SHOWS OFFER ESCAPE AND COMFORT
WH A T have I gained during the pandemic, aside from weight and a new appreciation for grocery delivery services?
The knowledge of what happened to someone I cared for dearly, yet lost track of, someone whose memory I’d lost until he returned to me as a ghost, via paranormal TV.
No doubt, cabin fever has driven me mad, but I swear this redemptive tale of trash TV is true. In the Before Times, I only had time to watch new prestige TV to review or write about the stream of political controversies playing out on our screens. Then came the safer-at-home order, which meant sheltering in a cramped home with my teenage son, work-athome husband, two lovable, clumsy pit bulls and one prickly, harder-tolove cat. By summer, we didn’t just need to retreat from the virus, we needed space from one another. More time was spent in separate rooms — watching TV, of course.
I’d burned through new shows like “Never Have I Ever,” “Upload” and Season 2 of “Ramy,” so I caught up on or rewatched series like “Sons of Anarchy” and “Breaking Bad” (it never gets old). In keeping with 2020, things devolved from there. I found myself watching true crime reenactments while doomscrolling Amazon Fresh for toilet paper. Then I found the Travel Channel and TLC, which offered a new way to pass the day: paranormal TV
show like “Ghost Hunters” felt oddly topical: Folks were traumatized by an invisible, deathly threat; a phantom that seeps under doors and through vents undetected. Paranormal investigators, mediums, intuitives, even an ex-cop looked in “haunted” houses, historic hotels and abandoned psychiatric wards for answers to unexplained phenomena.
And there’s a series for every terrifying situation. Families who swear their homes were taken over by spirits, poltergeists, shadow people or demons call “The Dead Files” team. Steve DiSchiavi, a retired NYPD homicide detective interviews the living and researches property records. Paranormal researcher and psychic Amy Allan sees and speaks with the dead. They investigate cases separately, then meet the victims and compare notes at the end of the episode. The aggrieved learn who or what is wreaking havoc and get advice on what to do — sprinkle salt, call a shaman, summon a priest, sell the house.
Audiences looking for proof have “Ghost Adventures.” Now in their 19th season, Zak Bagans, Nick Groff & Co. lock themselves into “active” locations overnight. These burly, tattooed guys grow increasingly jittery, jumping at creaking floorboards, recoiling from their own shadows. Their arsenal of ghost-busting equipment includes the Talker (a.k.a. an inductive sensor), which captures electromagnetic waves and converts them into words. An E-field Pod detects the electric field that surrounds a static charge. A simple voice recorder is a “spirit sensor.” During playback, they often hear otherworldly threats — “Get out now!” — where the rest of us hear static. The spirits never fully materialize, and unlike ScoobyDoo, the haunting is never a scheme cooked up by the innkeeper.
“Long Island Medium” Theresa Caputo purports to help the living overcome the loss of loved ones by channeling communication between this life and the afterlife. The grieving often report a sense of peace after her readings. The show “helped” reconnect them with loved ones. I have “Ghost Adventures” — the Haunted Hollywood edition — to thank for that. The episode reunited me with a long lost, late friend, Marshall Wyatt.
I’d lost touch with Marshall nearly 25 years ago, when he was in his 80s. I assumed I’d never hear of him again. He was a barkeep and live-in caretaker at the American Legion Hollywood Post 43, an architectural marvel from grander times, described by LA
Weekly as “a beautiful and ostentatious Egyptian Moroccan revival building a stone’s throw from the Hollywood Bowl.” He worked there for 31 years and was the only soul to live full-time on the premises until his death at age 89, which I learned from the show was on March 24, 2000. He now apparently haunts the place.
Marshall has haunted my memory since I met him in an earlier “uncertain time,” just after the ’92 riots. Or was it the ’94 Northridge quake? Regardless, Hollywood then was was seedier, cheaper and home to lots of downscale establishments where Marshall and his peers felt welcome. They were called dive bars.
The Powerhouse was on Highland, just north of Hollywood Boulevard. I bartended there, but not at night when hipsters who’d rediscovered forgotten watering holes like the Firefly or Boardner’s would roll in. I started my shift at 9 a.m. Marshall was my “manager,” but in reality, he was a friend of the bar’s owner, there to help “the new girl.” Stout and tough, he’d totter down Highland with the bar’s keys and cash bag (the owner didn’t trust me yet), open the back door and help set up.
Then he’d sit at the bar as the morning regulars streamed in, sitting on wobbly barstools and cracking pleather booths. The older crowd came first with their coffees from a nearby McDonald’s. Most didn’t drink anymore, but they’d meet there anyway to compare notes about what they’d heard on their police scanners the night before. Stabbings, homicides, muggings — ’90s L.A. was the gift that kept on giving. One had worked at the studios back in the day, building sets. He claimed to have drunk with Clark Gable. A former Brown Derby waiter was still bitter Mickey Rooney had stiffed him on a tip more than once.
By 11, the second-shift of regulars trickled in, shaking and smelling of whatever they were about to drink again. A gruff woman and her middleage son, who had lived together in the same apartment since 1978, usually sat near the far end of the bar. The manager from the Snow White Cafe on Hollywood Boulevard would join after he finished the breakfast shift. Students from a nearby guitar school would slip in for a quick drink between classes.
Marshall advised me when and what to serve them, and more important, when to cut them off. On my third day, a belligerent desperado wandered in and threatened to jump behind the bar unless I gave him free booze. Little old Marshall all of a sudden got big and ferocious. “Get the f— out!,” he bellowed..
We becameA fast friends. I went with him to group dinners at the American Legion hall, where we dined with other veterans and their families. He gave me tours of the premises — a testament to old Hollywood glamour — when no one was supposed to be there. Other times, we sat in the hall’s bar and had drinks. He supposedly haunts that bar now, making the lights flicker and tapping patrons on the shoulder.
I lost touch with Marshall when I left L.A. for New York and a career in writing. According to “Ghost Adventures,” he died after a night of drinking and playing poker. He’d been tying one on in the hall’s Memorial Clubhouse before suffering a stroke in the southeastern stairwell. He died doing what he loved. We should all be so lucky.
The pandemic has robbed us of many things: joy, intimacy, employment and, in the worst cases, life itself. But in the case of my unexpected friendship with Marshall, it brought answers and closure, courtesy of a ghost-hunting show. Strange times indeed.