Paranormal Events

compiled by José

The Peeing Ghost

I moved into a townhouse recently, which is an unusual thing. Apartments usually don't have thick enough walls for me to record music properly, but this place has concrete walls between every residence in the buildings.

So it seemed strange when, after a month or so, I began to realize that every time I went into the bathroom, I could hear somebody else peeing, on the other side of the concrete. It took a month for me to notice the sound, and after listening carefully for a week, I was a bit alarmed that there was someone who seemed to be waiting on the other side of the wall, perhaps watching a little video monitor of my bathroom or waiting for the 'sensor' to go off, and they would prance into their bathroom, listening with a cup to the wall until a silent moment, and, standing on a chair or maybe the toilet seat, pee carefully into the water. Usually they would wait until after I'd washed my hands, because there is always a good 10-20 seconds of silence while I'm drying my hands or face with a towel.

Eventually though I figured out that the 'peeing' always happens right after I turn off the sink, so it's probably just the main drain peeing down the vein of the building.

The Psychic Telephone

I was taking a shower one afternoon, preparing to go play music with the Muffaletta Galaxy Pirates, and right as I got out, the phone rang. It was Damon. He asked me if I had just called him, and I told him I hadn't. He said that he had received a call from my phone (according to his caller ID), and there was no voice when he picked it up, but he could hear me talking, and the album I was listening to, far in the background. The call he received lasted about fifteen seconds and then hung up. I don't know how this happened, because there was no-one else in the house at the time.

Brain Damage Technician

When I lived up in North Portland by I-5, I would sometimes pick up CB or ham radio signals on my Fender keyboard amp. The most consistent of these, by far, was an old guy who called himself Technician, who would regularly call his friend Brain Damage. I could never hear "Brai" (as Technician would call him), but Technician came through loud and clear, even when all the volume controls on my amp were turned down.

At first, it scared the hell out of me. Once I left my amp on all night, and at 6:30 a.m., he came on yelling at full volume, and somehow there was even some extremely scary reverb on him and I just about shit my pants, waking up to an unknown voice blaring out of my keyboard amp. Some of the things he said made strange sense to me and it was almost like he was responding to my thoughts... I started wondering, "Is it ME with the brain damage... and this is what happens when you really lose your shit? so I am the brain damage technician, and the damaged controls are talking to me now?"

So I started recording him whenever I got the chance. I kept a microphone by the amp at all times, hooked into a 4-track with available tape space at the ready. I got many great sessions, and ended up adding his multitracked conversations to our disc, 'The Think-Happener'. The main track on which he appears was created by recording him two different times, and was not physically edited (only mixed with the faders), which is strange since at some points he seems to actually be having a conversation with himself; he just happened to start talking at times when his previous recording stopped talking, and vice versa.

Sunday Brunch Breakdown causes a housequake

Lots of weird stuff has happened around the SBB, and it is not surprising, due to the bizarre energies we synthesized in performance. During a jam in April 1997, at Alex Dunn's house in Eugene, we were on some scary, heavy grooves for a while, exploding at random, and at one point we felt the house shake for a few seconds. There were several other people in the house, and everybody noticed it. We all stopped playing and listened to the windows rattle and watched the chandelier sway.

Infestation of bees onstage at Water In the Ditch

At WITD 2000, many musicians were at the event a week early to set up the gear, practice a few days, and take a night to go camping. When we got back from camping, only fifteen hours had passed, but a small swarm of bees promptly came to the stage and began to take up residence inside one of the stereo speakers behind my keyboard and DJ setup. Roger Johnson, owner of the property, had a can of Raid handy, and Damon used most of it but the bees didn't seem to care.

After an hour of this, a local beekeeper showed up and investigated the situation. He said there was no apparent reason for the swarm, since they didn't seem to be focused on anything about the speaker--- they weren't collecting nectar from it, or even landing inside it, just going in and buzzing around --- and there was no queen to be found. Eventually the musicians decided to just go up and start playing, and the bees dissipated by that night. No-one was stung during this ordeal.