Even the public library had stories of a fastidious apparition who, after closing hours, threw books on the floor that had been incorrectly reshelved.
After a nap at the hotel, I woke feeling a little dizzy again, but it soon passed. I ate dinner at the same diner I had the night before, then walked two blocks to the shop where I’d signed up for the ghost tour.
A long, gray passenger van was idling in front of the office and a small congregation on the sidewalk. I walked inside the office. A tall, pleasant-looking woman with long, dishwater blond hair stood next to the counter holding a clipboard.
“I’m here for the ghost tour,” I said.
“Then you’ve come to the right place,” she said, wagging a pen in front of me. “You must be Mr. Christoffersen.”
“That’s me,” I said.
She marked the list on her clipboard. “I’m Doreen. You’re alone, right?”
I felt it acutely. “Right.”
“Just go ahead and find a seat in the van out front.”
I walked back outside. The small group I’d passed on the way in was now seated inside the van. The van’s door was wide open.
There were five of us in the group: a young, fresh-faced couple who, from their glassy-eyed expressions, I guessed to be honeymooners, occupied half the front bench, and two women in their mid fifties sat in the middle row.
The driver was a thin, thirtyish man with a face shadowed with stubble. Even though it was already getting dark he wore Ray-Ban aviators, and he looked a little like Richard Petty, the former NASCAR champion. His head was bowed as he was evidently playing a game on his cell phone.
“Good evening,” I said as I climbed into the vehicle. Only the ladies greeted me back. The driver was fixated on his phone and the couple was still fixated on each other, oblivious to all other life on the planet. I squeezed through to the backseat of the van.
A few minutes later, Doreen poked her head in through the front passenger window. “We’re waiting for one more.”
The driver grunted and scratched his face, but still didn’t look up. About two minutes later Doreen returned. She was standing next to an elderly gentleman who wore a flat cap and gray sweater and carried a black, metal-tipped cane.
“There you are, Mr. Lewis,” Doreen said. “I’ll take your cane. Watch your step.”
Mr. Lewis was probably in his mid to late eighties, gray and bent with age. He struggled to climb up into the front row, sitting next to the honeymooners. Doreen helped him fasten his seat belt, then slid the side door shut and climbed into the front passenger seat. When she was settled, she turned around and smiled at us.
“Welcome, everyone, to haunted Hannibal. I have been guiding this tour for nearly twelve years now, and let me tell you, in those years I’ve seen some amazing things. Rest assured, your experiences on this tour are your own. We don’t judge the validity of your encounters, we just accept and let things happen. Most of all, you’re going to have a good time.
“Our first stop tonight is rife with paranormal activity: the Old Baptist Cemetery.” She turned to the driver. “Let’s go.”
The driver put down his phone, then looked over his shoulder and pulled out into the quiet, vacant street.
The cemetery was about five minutes from our pickup point and the last of the day’s light was gone when the van stopped. Doreen and the driver helped Mr. Lewis out of the van, then the rest of us followed.
I was the last one out and the small group had already formed a half circle in front of Doreen. Most of the cemetery was draped beneath a canopy of aged oak trees, which left us standing in a darker shade of night.
Doreen handed each of us copper rods that swiveled in wooden handles, like divining rods, the kind water witches use to find water.
“This little device will help you find spectral energy,” she said. “As you walk through the cemetery, hold the rods in front of you like this.” She demonstrated, holding the rods in front of her with both hands like she was holding a pair of guns. “If they start crossing, you might have found someone who wants to communicate with you. Sometimes the lines will just open up. I’ve even seen them spin. Go ahead and ask the spirits questions. The ghosts up here are used to us, so they know what to do. But do be careful, it’s dark, so watch where you’re stepping. We don’t want anyone tripping over anything. Now off you go. Have fun!”
At Doreen’s dismissal, everyone wandered off with their spirit wands, headed toward different sections of the cemetery. I stood there feeling stupid, holding the pointers in front of me.
Mr. Lewis was still next to me. He was moving slowly, his cane in one hand, both of the rods in the other. I thought that at his age, traipsing around cemeteries at night might be a bit too ambitious.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Certainly,” he said curtly, his voice low and gravelly.
“Have you done this before?”
“Countless times.”
“Oh,” I said, a little surprised. “Have you ever encountered anything?”
“Not what I’m looking for.” He turned and looked at me, his eyes as dark as the cemetery. “I’m looking for my wife.”
His response jarred me. I had never considered looking for McKale in this way. Nor did I want to. Everything about it seemed wrong.
“You’ve been looking for her for a while?”
“Yes,” he said. Then he hobbled away, mumbling something as he crossed the grounds.
I walked off alone toward the cemetery’s northeast corner, holding the rods in front of me. About ten minutes later, Doreen joined me. “How’s it going?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Good,” she said brightly.
Nothing had happened, except the rods had moved a little, something that was almost impossible to prevent, even if you were trying.
“Tell me,” I said. “What do you know about Mr. Lewis?”
“Mr. Lewis is a retired insurance salesman from Tulsa, Oklahoma. His wife died a while back and since then he’s spent most of his time traveling the country to séances and ghost tours, looking for proof that she still exists.”
“Has he had any luck?” I asked.
“Apparently not. A lot of people have claimed to find her, but none have passed his test.”
“What’s his test?”
“He had a pet name he called her. If they can’t tell him what it is, he knows it’s not her.”
“When you say a while, how long are we talking about? A few years?”
Her eyebrows rose. “Try forty.”
“Forty years,” I said. “He’s been traveling the country for forty years looking for his wife?”
She nodded. “He’s spent his life and fortune trying to find her. At least that’s what he told me when he signed up for the tour.”
“Doesn’t he have any family?”
“He has four adult children. Sounds like he’s estranged from them. I guess he was pretty broken up about losing her.” Doreen read the look of disapproval on my face, then said, “I know, I wouldn’t do it. But you can’t judge someone until you’ve walked in their moccasins, can you? So have you found anyone tonight?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Well let’s get busy,” she said.
For the next half hour Doreen followed me around the cemetery looking for traces of paranormal activity. My lines crossed several times—actually, several dozen times—and, at Doreen’s encouragement, I found myself in a one-sided conversation with a grave marker named Mary Stewart. My divining rods had rotated backward and Doreen was certain that Mary’s spirit was hugging me.
I’ll admit to one peculiar phenomenon. I kept feeling the sensation of walking through spiderwebs, even when I was out in the open.
An hour later as we reboarded the van, the two women were chatting excitedly, one claiming she’d found a spirit who knew her recently deceased grandmother. The honeymooners were still just staring at each other, clearly desperate to get back to t
he hotel.
Mr. Lewis was the last to return, only doing so at Doreen’s insistence. As he struggled into the van he looked sad or angry, I couldn’t really tell which, as his face was sufficiently hard that it was difficult to read any emotion except unhappiness. Watching him had a powerful effect on me.
The van took a circuitous route back to Doreen’s office, passing by a series of buildings that were supposedly haunted, including the Old Catholic Church, which was up for sale. Doreen told us that one of her clients claimed to have placed a recorder in the church and, within minutes, recorded the sound of an invisible choir.
A few blocks past the Old Church, Doreen pointed out a Victorian home. “Up ahead here, to your left, is LaBinnah Bistro. I recommend that you eat there if you get the chance. Can anyone figure out where the restaurant got its name?”
We all looked out at the building, even the honeymooners.
“It’s French,” one of the women said.
“Or Cajun,” said the other.
“No, that’s not it,” Doreen said.
“It was the chef’s wife’s name,” the male honeymooner said, the first word he’d spoken to anyone but his wife.
“No,” Doreen said.
“I know,” I said.
Doreen looked at me. “You think you do?”
“LaBinnah is Hannibal spelled backwards.”
Doreen clapped. “You’re the first person in twelve years who’s gotten that right,” she said. “Twelve years.”
When we’d returned to the office and disembarked from the van, Doreen asked me what I’d thought of the tour. “It was life changing,” I said.
She beamed at my report. “I’m so pleased. Thank you for coming. And come back soon.”
“Good night,” I said, then turned and walked back to my hotel.
I meant what I said to Doreen, just not for the reasons she had likely assumed. The experience had had a profound impact on me. Not the paranormal aspect of the tour—which I had found mildly amusing—but rather my experience with Mr. Lewis. In this man I had seen something far more frightening than any graveyard specter or poltergeist. I had seen the bitterness of unaccepted loss. I had seen the possibility of my own future and my own ruin.
CHAPTER
Twenty-five
What’s wrong with me? Something’s broken.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
A man’s experiences of life are a book. There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
—Mark Twain
I hated to leave Hannibal. On the way out of town, I stopped at Mark Twain’s Cave, the same cave Twain explored as a boy and referenced in five of his books—most famously in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where Tom and Becky get mixed up with Injun Joe.
I left my pack behind the counter at the cave’s gift shop, then entered the cave with a tall, boyish-looking guide and a small group from a Church of God Bible class visiting from Memphis, Tennessee.
Mark Twain’s cave was a remarkable thing—a labyrinth of shelved limestone that tangled and twisted in the belly of the hill for more than six miles.
“One could get more lost in here than on the New Jersey Turnpike,” our guide announced. How he had come up with that exact comparison I wasn’t sure. I decided that he’d probably been lost in New Jersey at some time.
For the next hour we wound our way through a few dozen of the cave’s more than 260 passages. Inside, the cave was chilly, as it maintained a year-round temperature of 52 degrees, and many in our group complained that they hadn’t brought their sweaters.
Among the many things we saw was the signature of Jesse James, who hid out in the cave after the robbery of a train in a nearby town.
Our guide led us to Grand Avenue, the largest room in the cave, where Tom and Becky were lost in darkness after a bat doused Becky’s candle. This story was, of course, a natural segue into the climax of the tour (of all cave tours, for that matter) when our guide turned out the lights with the exhortation, “Put your hand up to your face and see if you can see it.”
We couldn’t, of course. “Dark as sin,” McKale would have said. Actually she never would have come in the cave; she was crazily claustrophobic. Amusingly, someone said “ouch” after hitting himself in the nose.
Our guide turned the lights back on then said, “Let me share with you an interesting fact. The human eye needs light to survive. If you got lost in this cave, you would be permanently blind in six to eight weeks.”
“Imagine that,” the woman next to me said. “That would be horrible.”
“If you got lost in this cave, you’d be dead long before you went blind,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that.” Peculiarly, the woman smiled, as if this were a comforting thought.
Our guide continued. “At one time this cave was owned by a Hannibal doctor named Joseph Nash McDowell, who bought the cave to do ‘scientific’ experiments with mummification. When his daughter died, he brought her in and embalmed her. He did his experiments in that crevice about fifty yards back.”
“Wait,” I said. “He did experiments with his daughter’s corpse?”
“Yes, sir,” the guide said.
I shook my head. Just when you think people couldn’t get any more bizarre, a Joseph Nash McDowell turns up.
At the completion of the tour I retrieved my pack, then started back to historic Hannibal. That wasn’t my original plan. I had stopped at the cave on my way to highway 79, a scenic route that followed the Mississippi River south along the Missouri–Illinois border. But as I verified my route with a clerk at the cave’s gift shop, I learned that the river had recently washed out the road and the highway was closed. I reasoned that I could always walk around construction crews, but the clerk wasn’t sure that was possible. Considering that a closed route might mean backtracking for days, I decided not to take the chance.
My only other option was to take U.S. Route 61 southeast to St. Louis. It would be a considerably busier route but I really had no other choice.
Over the next three days, I passed through New London, Frankford, Bowling Green, Eolia, and Troy. I woke in Troy feeling dizzy and nauseous again, but forced it aside, vowing to rest properly once I reached St. Louis.
I had had a headache all day, and about six miles from the 70 junction into St. Louis, my vertigo returned with a vengeance. Oddly, my first thought was that there was an earthquake, as the spinning was much worse than before. I staggered then fell, landing partially on my pack, which cushioned my fall. I rolled to my stomach and began violently vomiting, struggling to hold myself upright as my head throbbed with pain. What was happening to me?
“McKale,” I groaned. It’s the last thing I remember before passing out.
CHAPTER
Twenty-six
Déjà vu.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
I woke in the hospital. I couldn’t believe that I was in a hospital again—it was the third time since I’d left Seattle. I hadn’t been in a hospital that many times in my entire life. The room was dim and I could hear the beeping and whirring of machines. I looked over at my arm. It was bruised and there was an IV taped to it.
“It’s about time you woke,” a voice said. I looked over to see a young, African-American nurse standing to the side of the room reading a machine.
“Where am I?”
“You are at the St. Louis University Hospital.”
“How did I get here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I wasn’t here when you arrived. Do you remember anything?”
“I was just walking, when I suddenly got dizzy and everything started to spin. I must have blacked out.” I looked at her. “What’s wrong with me?”
“I’ll leave that to the doctor to talk to you about,” she said. “In the meantime, there’s someone here to see you.”
I couldn’t imagine who it could be.
“I don’t know anyone around here.”
“Well, she knows you. She’s been in the waiting room for three hours. I’ll send her in.” She walked out of the room.
I stared at the door, wondering who could possibly be here to see me. Falene suddenly appeared in the doorway.
“Hi,” she said sweetly.
“Falene. What are you doing here?”
She walked to the side of my bed. “The police called me. I was the last number you dialed on your cell phone.”
“ . . . You came all this way?”
“Of course I did. You needed me.” I noticed that her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. A tear rolled down her cheek.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“What is it, Falene?”
The tears fell faster. She furtively wiped her eyes then looked away from me.
“Falene . . . ”
She reached over and took my hand. Her hand felt soft and warm. “Your father will be here soon,” she said. “Can he tell you?”
“Is it bad?”
She just stared at me, tears rolling down her cheeks.
I looked down for a moment, then I said, “When McKale was hurt, you called me. When Kyle stole my business, you called me. You’ve always told me the truth, no matter how hard. I’d rather hear it from you.”
She wiped her eyes. “Oh, Alan,” she said.
“Please. What’s wrong with me?”
She looked into my eyes, her eyes welling up in tears. “They found a brain tumor.”
EPILOGUE
To learn grace is to discover God.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
Who am I? Or perhaps a better question is, what am I? A refugee? A fugitive? A saunterer? Henry David Thoreau, in his essay on walking, wrote that the word sauntering was derived from “people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “ ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer—a Holy-Lander.” Maybe this is the truest definition of who I am—a Pilgrim. My walk is my pilgrimage. And, like all worthwhile pilgrimages, mine too is a journey from wretchedness to grace. Grace. I have learned much on my walk, but most recently, I have learned of grace.