SEEN A GHOST?
Pachyderm is said by a good number of people to be haunted. It’s also likely
that such thoughts are all cooked up by city people who don’t get out to the
country enough or have spent a few nights watching The Shining or The Exorcist.
Whatever the case, the ghost stories keep on coming.“I definitely had some weird things happen to me there,” says The Honeydogs’ drummer Noah Levy. “I was walking through the woods once a couple of years ago, and all of a sudden I just started screaming, and I fucking flew out of there and ran back up to the house...I’m not prone to those kinds of thing either. Something really shook me up out there. I didn’t see a thing, but I felt something.”
“You’ve got to have a sense of humor about it [overall]. I’ll still go back there. I think it’s the best studio around. I love Pachyderm and I can’t say enough good things about it. I’ve been there a ton and the house engineers are great- Brent [Sigmeth] is the best and they’ve been as supportive as anybody when it comes to local bands.”
(Editor’s note: Noah (a great guy and great drummer) is really easy to scare. He is often preyed on in this regard by band mates and engineers.)
It’s been reported that Gary Louris (The Jayhawks) has a photo from Pachyderm with a white ghostly figure swirling in the background (although that may have been bandmate Mark Olson walking around wearing a white sheet). Rex Daisy ‘s Jerry Anderson has a gravely serious phobia about staying in one of the bedrooms. So, which room do you think his bandmates make sure he winds up with?
(Another Editor’s note : It was Mark in a sheet.)
The most fascinating stories were recounted in a story Wendy Lewis wrote for The Squealer in late 1996. There is one about a woman in the family who had sold the house showing up with a bunch of sage leaves and other assorted herbs to rid the house and land of evil spirits. Pachyderm founder (and all-around swell guy) Jim Nickel and company thought it was quite humorous, so they gave her the go-ahead.
“She was one of the daughters and she said she wanted to bestow upon this place a smudging gift,” says Lewis, “ and [Nickel and friends] were like, ‘uuuh, whatever.’ She did some strange new age ceremonious deal. She also camped out on the property. At one point someone caught her by the campfire. She’d smeared menstrual blood all over the trees. So she was having some pagan ritual in the woods. It flipped [the guys] out because she was so intense.”
(Yet another editor’s note : I don’t remember anything about menstrual fluid, that’s really gross.)
Of the stories Lewis collected, she says: “I am not by any means a person who runs around chatting about these things at dinner parties. These things are powerful...things that you couldn’t tell to anybody and have them believe you.”
Believe it or not, this is one is just tailor-made for a Halloween campfire:
.....A woman was walking across the backyard to her car late at night. Very
suddenly, she was lassoed around the neck by something that felt like a cold,
clammy vine which whipped around her neck on and off again. She stopped and
looked around, thinking she had been snagged by something hanging from a tree
branch. Suddenly, she heard leaves crunching in the underbrush right beside her.
She looked down, expecting to find some small forest creature, and instead saw
the grass compressing with the imprint of an invisible shoe. She literally
watched the footprints walking away and then, understandably frightened, ran to
her car, desperate to get away from that place...(Still yet another Editor’s note : We are trying to locate the original SQUEALER magazine article from which the above is excerpted (making this piece an excerpt from an excerpt). It was from 1996. Anybody have it? Free day of studio time (not including engineer) for anyone who can get us a copy.)
“Wendy covered them all in The Squealer article,” says Nickel. “[I like her piece but] I would’ve added that the girl who saw the blue man floating in the swimming pool is borderline psychotic herself, I’m sure she’s seeing shit everywhere. For a lot of the other ‘sightings,’ I’d imagine there may have been some ‘things’ being ingested at the time which ‘may’ have altered people’s perceptions. That and the planted suggestion of there being Ghosts here, often combined with people messing with each other - trying to scare each other – can lead to some pretty funny stuff.”
(Even still yet another Editor’s note : for reference, “The Blue Man’ has been seen in the pool room from time to time over the years – he has black curly hair and is often standing or floating near the pool’s edge)
Nickel and (engineer) Brent “Pink Bismuth” Sigmeth believe that the collection of ghost reports is a myth originally initiated by people who were either under the influence of sleep deprivation, narcotics, intoxicants or a combination of all three.
“The bouncing ball was straight out of The Shining,” says Nickel of one old story. “But the beach ball down in the pool has supposedly gone places on its own volition, although I’ve certainly not seen it.”
(Again even still yet another Editor’s note : The Beach Ball one is pretty
ridiculous – the pool room is drafty, windows get left open, and the chimney
flue is left open, and there’s all sorts of weird teeny-tiny wind currents that
are capable, of course, of moving a beach ball resting on the water’s surface)I’m sitting with Sigmeth and Nickel on the patio just outside of the studio, when Nickel (lying comfortably in a hammock) says, Actually, I think it’s all pretty dumb. What do you think, Brent?”
“Well, you know I think it’s dumb. I’ve lived in the house for eight months before and I never had a freaky ghost experience.
(Return of again even still yet another Editor’s note : The only one that gave me (the editor) a second thought was the (very sober) engineer who kept getting tapped on the shoulder while he was watching TV. He was alone in the house.)
(Son of the Return of again even still yet another Editor’s note: The “Mafia
Dude” referred to by Alkaline Trio was a guy who rented the house for a year or
so before the Pachyderm People bought the house and built the studio. Most
stories have the original owner’s (“The Beer Hops Master” referred to by The Connells, who was actually a “Beer Malt Master”) wife as The Ghost (or one of
them) who haunts the place. She is often seen as the lady walking a dog (a
poodle, which is depicted, along with the “Girl and the Vines” on the cover of
The Honeydogs’ “Seen A Ghost” CD) who suddenly disappears after being sighted.
Many people claim to have seen her, often through the Studio or house windows,
cruising through the yard with the dog on leash. It’s a little freaky that the
real lady did have a poodle.)