Haunted Valentines

Thursday, February 07, 2008 10:55:02 PM

Are you looking for a Valentine’s Day escape? Or just a romantic getaway any time of the year?

Leave it to our Scott Fais to find a bed and breakfast where Cupid’s arrows aren’t a match for “Mabel” — a ghostly spirit who never checks out.

This is Florida on a Tankful, with “Greetings from St. Augustine.”

“This house was built for elegance, quality,” said George Dann, the owner of the Casa de la Paz bed and breakfast.

Under blue skies and beyond the archway, the prime spot in St. Augustine holds a prime secret behind its gates.

“We knew the story of this place,” said Melissa Taylor, a guest at the bed and breakfast.

“We have a lot of nonbelievers, and then something will happen and they start to question ‘Maybe that is real?’” Dann said.

What’s real at the Casa de la Paz are the afternoon wine tastings over a casual game of Scrabble. But it’s what you can’t see that may take a few clues to spell it out.

“Mabel is our ghost,” Dann said.

“We’ve had guests here report they’ve seen her on the stairway and she has asked guests when are they are leaving,” Dann said.

The home, built in 1915, offers seven guest rooms, one of which is always occupied.

“We’re in the Queen Isabella Room, where Mabel, our ghost, originates,” Dann said.

“Her husband went out to sea and never came back,” Taylor said.

“She died of a lonely heart here in the house. She died in this room,” Dann said.

Spending the night with a ghost was something newlywed Melissa Taylor jumped at.

“We’re always hoping for stuff like that to happen,” Taylor said.

“So am I,” Fais said. “I spent the night in the same room where Mabel died, hoping to connect with her.”

“After a quiet evening, the only thing out of the ordinary I found — how our battery charger started beeping uncontrollably in the middle of the middle of the night,” Fais said.

Melissa experienced something else.

“We were both there watching TV and he had one hand on me and the other hand on his pillow, and I felt three taps on my shoulder and I looked at him and said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘You just tapped me on the shoulder,’ and he said, ‘I didn’t tap you on the shoulder,’” Taylor remembered. “I think it was a ghost.”

“But that kind of thing goes on here all the time,” Dann said.

“We are so not disappointed,” Taylor told Fais.

Mabel the ghost doesn’t like kids. Dann said that his bed and breakfast is reserved for folks 15-years-old and older.

You can find Casa de la Paz and several other bed and breakfasts located on the waterfront in in St. Augustine.

I was on Stage6 last night and I was watching Discovery A Haunting, Season 4 – Episode 11, Legend Trippers.  That is an actual term that is used and the show described it as persons who are interested in the paranormal, that go on casual investigations, of allegedly haunted locations.  That describes a majority of ghost hunters who are starting out, but if you are in that group, please beware. Don’t take the paranormal so lightly and always go in at least a group of two!  I wouldn’t recommend going at all if you are a vulnerable soul because you may be followed or overtaken. Speaking from actual experience, the force and strength an entity holds is beyond incredible. The following video is of three Wisconsin teenagers who have very little to do on a Halloween night so one learns of a legendary nearby haunted cemetery. The site also lists a dare and they decide to see for themselves if the stories are true.  I googled the site, but couldn’t find it.  For a list of haunted spots for Toronto, or your city, hit the web and you will surely obtain ample listings for public places with rumored activity.       

Album Review | The Mars Volta enters the paranormal realm
Four out of five stars
Ellie Steever
Issue date: 2/4/08 Section: Arts

Nearly everyone over the age of 12 will testify that Ouija boards are fake and a waste of time. But progressive rock band The Mars Volta (TMV) obviously doesn’t feel that way.

Disbelieve what you will, but TMV’s fourth full-length effort, “The Bedlam in Goliath,” is a bowl full of secrets poured forth from the occult.

While touring with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2006, the band purchased a now-famous Ouija board nicknamed “the Soothsayer.” During the tour and the initial stages of recording for “Bedlam,” the board began to mystify the band with the demands, stories and names it supposedly gave them.

However, the Soothsayer began to curse TMV and its efforts to record with a chain of bizarre mishaps. Cedric Bixler-Zavala, vocals, had foot surgery that required him to relearn how to walk, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s, guitar, home studio burned.

Three drummers quit during the recording process (leading to the addition of Thomas Pridgen), and the original sound engineer also left after a nervous breakdown.

Eventually Rodriguez-Lopez buried the board and forbade band members to speak of it, but the pandemonium and peculiar eeriness it stirred up cannot be missed in “Bedlam.”

The band is known for its musical chaos, and “Bedlam” pushes this element to the breaking point, mainly through sheer speed. In previous TMV albums musical buildups often lead to ten-minute sections featuring feedback, guitar chirps and frog belches. In this latest album, there is no such downtime, and buildups only lead to more of that fast, hard, loud rock that makes listeners bang their heads so righteously.

“Cavelettas,” ringing in just short of ten minutes, toys with fans’ expectations for long reprieves found on earlier LPs. The musicians and production team show off their utter genius by playing with the volume on this track. Different instrument sections and sounds alternately rise and fall until the audience believes the familiar feedback solo is coming, before being whipped back into the main body of the song, ecstatic that there is nothing to fast forward through.

Distorted vocals and looped effects that TMV is so fond of show up in nearly every song, as well as wailing saxophone and string sections that remind the listener of the geographical spans that influence the music.

“Soothsayer” begins with Middle Eastern sounds and guitar melodies, eventually erupting into gypsy-infused tambourines, chimes and violins amidst the pulsing guitars and drums. To complete the foreign effect, the song ends with children’s voices singing a Catholic prayer, which is no doubt some ironic reference to the supernatural, pagan ideas that sculpted the album.

The paranormal themes found in the Soothsayer Ouija board are most lyrically apparent in “Goliath.” Bixler-Zavala’s yipping falsetto and deeper, accusatory vocals catch the listener’s attention with lines like, “I’m starting to feel a miscarriage coming on/ It’s numbing a stump/ Clearing in my throat/ And I just can’t lose grip of it.”

The single, “Wax Simulacra,” is the shortest track on the album and is all the stronger with power chords played over palpitating drums, alternatively giving way to an over-exaggerated downbeat or some fluttering sax overtone.

The recent performance of this song on “Late Night with David Letterman” did not give it justice. The vocals were given precedence over the rest of the instruments, whereas in its recorded works TMV always makes each sound just as powerful as the next.

Moreover, TMV consistently ensures that each album is as powerful and inspired as the next. Most fans can hardly say which album is their favorite, and now “Bedlam in Goliath” enters into this debate. When TMV first formed, there was no other band with the same sort of sound, and this remains true today.

But just because they have a unique sound doesn’t mean they shouldn’t keep exploring new styles. If there is anything bad to be said about “Bedlam” it is that a conceptual exploration of an idea through complex time signatures and depraved guitar mashing can form a masterpiece – but isn’t that what The Mars Volta has been doing all along?

By Meera Pal, STAFF WRITER

Article Created: 02/02/2008 02:34:38 AM PST

PLEASANTONIRMA SLAGE was in her early 20s when she realized the people she had been communicating with in her mind were actually dead.

“You can go through your whole life without realizing you’re hearing voices in your mind … and others are not,” said Slage, a self-described psychic counselor from Livermore.

Slage, who hosted a seance at the Pleasanton Hotel last week, has been sharing her “gift” with others for more than 30 years.

“I like the idea that people can get a message from the other world,” she said.

The event, billed as a seance, was not what most imagine when they hear the word. People were not sitting in a dimly lit room, holding hands and asking thespirits to communicate with them.

Rather, the group of about 100 people, gathered in the hotel’s Victorian Room, sipped wine and munched on cheese and crackers as Slage recounted her supernatural encounter with the spirits living in the hotel and answered personal questions from the audience.

With the aid of photos showing what Slage called “orbs,” or balls of light energy, she spoke of the high level of spirit activity at the hotel, which was built in 1864.

Paranormal activity has been linked to the hotel’s seedy past as a thriving brothel and has lured other spiritual investigators, including Gloria Young, a Northern California ghost hunter from the Ghost Trackers Paranormal Research Group who documented psychic phenomena.

“The room next to the bar — that’s where all the action was,” Slage said. “I felt a man standing next to me. He was grungy and his beard was full of stuff. I could smell him.”

Slage has been commissioned to use her ability to communicate with spirits to help the police, as well as visit historic homes and grave sites.

Whether one believes Slage can communicate with the dead is really not her concern, she said.

“I don’t push it; you can believe whatever you want to believe,” she said. “Just sit with me for a while and we’ll go over it.”

To any of the people among her core group of believers, however, Slage is beyond reproach.

“Irma is not God, but she’s got a gift to help people,” said Oakdale resident Jan Rien, who said she has had several personal sessions with Slage since her father, Robert Fuchs, died in June 2005.

Rien and her family, who live in Livermore, located Slage through friends.

“We wanted to go talk to her and see if our dad wanted to get a message to us,” Rien said.

Rien, her mother Mary Fuchs and her sisters have since developed a friendship with Slage, whom they praise for her compassion.

For the family, who said their father has passed on several messages from beyond, the true reward is knowing their father is still with them.

“I don’t look at death like I used to,” Rien said. “I feel like my dad is in a spiritual realm. He is still with us.”

The idea of life after death has helped put mediums, and concepts like the spiritual realm, more into the mainstream consciousness. For instance, there is John Edward, the psychic medium who hosted the television show, “Crossing Over with John Edward.”

This week, in East Contra Costa County, a group of paranormal investigators from Livescifi.tv visited Union Cemetery, where vandals had knocked over 64 headstones. One psychic from Pleasant Hill said she made contact with the spirits of a woman buried there and the former caretaker, both of whom were upset about the vandalism.

Since Livescifi.tv launched in May, the site has averaged 40,000 viewers per show.

And nationally 1.6 million viewers tuned in for the Friday night finale of Lifetime Television Network’s “America’s Psychic Challenge.” The show pitted 16 self-proclaimed clairvoyants against one another to find the top psychic.

“More people are realizing that something is missing in their lives. They’re searching for something spiritual,” said Anne Pearce, a co-owner of Intuitive Way, a Walnut Creek-based school teaching how to sense your own spiritual reality, and how to read auras, heal and meditate.

“The people who come to our center are people who would not normally seek out a psychic … It’s not the kind of thing that is public,” Pearce said.

“I think a lot more people are becoming more spiritual,” Rein added. “Not necessarily religious, but with some higher power.”

Staff writer Matthias Gafni contributed to this story. Meera Pal covers Pleasanton. Reach her at 925-847-2120 or mpal@bayareanewsgroup.com.

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