Chaplin, the pliant symbol of the Drama Workshop.
2 I’ve had my share of Happy Halloweens over the years.
3 Always fun, always something eerie goes down. This will be the first time since I arrived
at YB so many years ago that I won’t be having ghost sessions in the Theatre. Well, I can’t really say in the Theatre, because I don’t recall if I took my classes over there on Halloween in the early days. But I went in there yesterday, and the old Theatre looks pretty ragged these days. Fortunately, this group of students is still keeping it going. I’m sure I’ll be in there tomorrow, just for old times sake, and to offer them the support they deserve. But it really looks like it’s been torn to pieces. It kills me. It’s been ransacked, and looks a bit like a ghost town.
4 Anyway, I do know that when I was a student teacher, which was when dirt was invented, I turned the lights down in my classroom and we told scary stories. That was way back in the day, up in Chico, California, one of my favorite places on the planet.
5 At YB, I began that same way, if memory serves, and eventually I had students telling real stories to one another, and some of the stories scared me to death. There were stories of Grandparents sitting in corners of rooms, of the smell of roses drifting from one room to another, of students feeling pinned down in bed, or of Ouija boards banging under mattresses, and of those scary things being thrown away, burned, etc. only to return on someone’s porch.
6 I mentioned yesterday that I used to pour myself a brandy at midnight and play the recordings of the students’ stories at the very witching hour, complete with a candle burning and all. I used to do this after all the trick-or-treating and stuff. I loved it.
7 Later on, students began telling me there was a ghost in the Theatre. I always laughed and made fun of them, but they told me she wanted to communicate with me, and that she did so through making the seats click.
8 She.
9 The told me her name was Heidi, and that they reached her through a Ouija board.
10 I always treated that rumor as a joke, but each year, weird things would happen, and it got curiouser and curiouser.
Honest Abe played a huge role in the Heidi Chronicles.
11 Eventually, a series of strange coincidences and unexplained things began occurring with more and more regularity in the Theatre. It certainly got my notice, as well as the notice of many students through the years. There were seats clicking, smells, coincidences, odd things revolving around the numbers one and nine, and those things continued all the way up to and including last year.
12 It expanded beyond Heidi, and I started to report many of the things to various people, and many students saw some of the most amazing coincidences in the world, especially last year.
13 Since I moved to the Chill on the Hill, very much of it has stopped, although the jungle noise the other night seemed interestingly timed, and just today I told students that coincidences are among the most amazing aspects of the story, and of life, for that matter.
14 I said, “Did you ever think of someone you haven’t seen in around six years, and then get a phone call from them soon afterwards?” That was all I used as an example of what Jung and Dr. Wayne Dyer refer to as synchronicity. Most of the students come alive with that question.
15 Tonight I was watching some cop show or other, and I was daydreaming when I heard a character on the show say, “Did you ever think of someone, and then they show up soon afterwards?” or words to that effect. Nothing really weird, but interesting, at best. I had spoken almost those identical words earlier today. Nothing really amazingly coincidental, but duly noted.
16 The deeper, stranger occurrences that happened in the YB Theatre have been rounded up in a piece I wrote several years ago entitled The Heidi Chronicles, after the play by Wendy Wasserstein. The Heidi Cronz can still be accessed by going to www.ybdrama.com and navigating to the link. Once there, it gets weird pretty quickly. Since I first wrote it, some of the web pages have overlapped, and I haven’t gone in there to fix it, but it’s still there. And it goes all the way up to a couple of years ago. I tried to update it last Halloween, but it just wouldn’t let me. It was pretty weird.
“…it got curiouser and curiouser…”
17 Last year I had a ton of coincidences, so many that it was almost every other day, more than I ever experienced. I was going through a very tough time adapting to all the changes that were happening all around me, and seats clicked, but absolutely amazing coincidences kept happening with incredible frequency. Many students and alumni saw the stuff happen with their own eyes. No real ghosts, to be sure, but the coincidences were so out of control that it was either the most amazing year for the odds of things happening, or there was something quite amazing going on.
18 Anyway, today, I’m going to continue the tradition of telling the stories, but I don’t feel close enough to my Leadership students really to go there quite yet. But my English class, which I absolutely LOVE, is primed and ready. I have bonded with the Freshmen class, ironically. They have bonded to me as well, because in many ways, we are all new to that place, and already I have spent more time with them than with any other group on campus. I have twenty of them. That’s it, so I’m going to tell them the stories today. I may take them to the school’s Theatre, but I have utterly no connection with the Theatre, so I might just bring all twenty into my office, which is the only real place I have there that feels like it’s my own classroom, or space, if you will.
19 It’ll be interesting, that’s for sure. I shall tell them the Heidi Chronicles. I’ll finish, and will finish my day, and go home to enjoy this wonderful evening of strangeness and mystery.
20 I’ll try to update the Heidi Chronz at the end of the evening. Last year it didn’t let me, but I’ll try again this year. It’s time for an update.
21 Meanwhile, read it again. It’s always an interesting ride, and there are things I couldn’t tell anyone, and some of those things are the strangest of them all. But every single thing is as precise and as correct as my own memory serves.
22 So as you go through the day, enjoy the fun. There is always something in the air on Halloween. You just have to feel it; sometimes it’s in the trees, sometimes it’s in the breeze.
23 But it’s always there.
24 Happy Halloween.
25 Peace.
