Goldberg: In search of...

By Tod Goldberg

Growing up, I had a deep and abiding fascination with the great myths of our time: Bigfoot, UFOs, telekinesis, ghosts, reincarnation. I'd sit in the library memorizing books like Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, ordering the symptoms of reincarnation, cataloguing the evidence, combing through the pages looking for mentions of dreams I'd had, or déjˆ vu experiences, hoping to find that I, like Suka, daughter of Sri Sen Gupta of West Bengal, had once been a woman named Mana and had, like Mana, tragically died in 1948, leaving a husband and children and, according to the book, several colorful sarongs that I'd immediately recognize (as Suka did...at age 5!) if only I could encounter them. I had to memorize the information because every time I attempted to check the book out, the librarian would tell me it was above my reading level.

"Does your mother know you're reading this trash?" she'd ask

"It's fine with her."

"It's not fine with me," she'd say. "Why don't you read about something happy?"

(Eventually, I just stole the books I really wanted to read. In my possession right now, date stamped July 1979 by the Contra Costa County Library, is that very book on reincarnation. I also lifted an insidious copy of Of Mice and Men from the same mean library.)

For a long time, I was certain that my life had occurred before I was born, that aspects of my world were too familiar, like a TV show I'd already seen. So I'd leave the book with the librarian and would go back to the shelf filled with books on the occult and supernatural and metaphysical and I'd sit among the stacks imagining I was like Hans Holzer and that I could find all the ghosts of Great Britain, could unlock the true story of the Amityville Horror, could meet people who knew who I once was.

I didn't believe everything I read. I knew that Bigfoot was likely a big joke. You spend any amount of time watching monkeys in a zoo, or teenage boys and girls, and you'll know for certain that no one along the primate line could exist without a mate. It was well noted that the Wild Man of Russia frequently had sexual relations with human women, but Bigfoot was always alone, always moving too fast for a camera to collect head-on, always a load of bullshit. Things exist beyond science and nature; I knew that. I believed that, but this Bigfoot business even strained credibility in my 10-year-old eyes. I read all I could find on Bigfoot anyway, looking for clues.

The odd thing is, I wasn't the only one in my family enjoying the life of the occult. I remember vividly sharing books on out-of-body experiences and ESP with my sisters and brother. I suppose it helped that my older sister Karen and my older brother Lee were holding séances over the Ouija board every weekend with their friends (for a time, they all played Stratego and when that got old--you can only put that flag in so many places--contacting the dead seemed like a more fruitful endeavor, I guess) and thus our house became ground central for discussions of light orbs, alien spirits, dead spirits, spirit spirits, the "Seth" books of Jane Roberts and general debate on the merits of the current episode of "In Search Of...," the original version of the Leonard Nimoy-hosted documentary show focusing on all the things I obsessed over.

I also recall reading a book on out-of-body experiences called Journeys Out of the Body and then trying for days, weeks, months even, to astral project into another dimension, or Lippert's ice cream parlour, to no avail. It was most agonizing because Karen was regularly communicating with a spirit guide (a la Seth) named Nathan and had been having out-of-body experiences on a fairly regular basis. Granted, her astral projection was limited to hovering over her own body for a few brief moments, which seemed like a copout considering all the places people were going in the book, but it was better than sitting in my bedroom listening to the Grease soundtrack again.

The most amazing thing about my childhood fetish for the unexplained was that I was able to keep it from most of my childhood friends and, thankfully, enemies, save for my best friend Todd, which was cool because he was just as messed up as I was. When the two of us would play on the Ouija, I'd typically want to speak with a dead relative or a member of Journey, which seems normal, if not odd. Todd had loftier plans.

"Let's see if we can get Hitler on here," he said once.

"I don't know," I said.

"It will be cool," Todd said. "We can find out all kinds of stuff."

He had a point, but after 10 minutes of busy paranormal signals, we opted for an easier target. "Why don't we see if the Ouija can find out if Megan Hill thinks we're hot?" Todd said, and off we went in search of yet another mystical happening that was, sadly, unfounded.