Jim Watson is the author of Mysterious Island Catalina: The Strange Side of Catalina, available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores in Avalon and Two Harbors.
What follows is a ghost story that transcends time and space, a story rooted in Avalon but transpiring in two different physical locations all at once, as if the distance between those two spaces was non-existent.
This is also a ghost story possibly tinged with that age-old belief known in Sanskrit as the samsara, or reincarnation. It’s a story I’ve heard many times from Avalon’s own Chuck Liddell, a story that had a great influence on his life.
Unfortunately, this is also a story born of tragedy, a tragedy that occurred back in the 1970s when Chuck’s younger brother William “Bill” Liddell took his own life after struggling with depression, chronic neck pain and the associated addiction to pain pills. On two separate occasions, the pain and depression had driven him to attempt suicide. The third time was the “charm.”
It was on the evening of January 21, 1974, when Chuck got the call from his father that Chuck’s brother Bill had committed suicide.
Chuck was in Indiana at the time teaching at Indiana University and his father, Orval, was making the call from his hospital bed on Catalina where he had been sedated in order to control his grief. When the two had finished their grim conversation, Orval’s doctor took the phone and urged Chuck to come back to Catalina as soon as possible.
It was late at night in Indiana at the time and Chuck, overwhelmed with this information, went to bed “crying and in shock,” suddenly faced not only with his brother’s death, but with all of the logistics of the trip back to Catalina, from finding the money that would be required to finding someone to take over his classes the next day.
That was when he heard the chain on the apartment’s front door begin rattling “as if somebody was trying to get in,” he said.
The next thing he heard was the sound of rustling papers in his front room.
“I had been correcting student papers that night and I had their papers scattered all over the floor of the front room and I heard the sound of those pages rustling,” he said. “Now I knew somebody was in the house.”
Terrified, he sat up in bed with the sheet under his chin and watched in fascination as a white mist, “kind of like a fog” entered his bedroom.
From out of this mist came a large white sphere, or orb, the “size of a volleyball.” That was when he heard his brother Bill’s voice.
The disembodied voice had two things to say to Chuck. The first was, “Chuck, if I knew then what I know now I never would have taken my life.”
The second thing was nothing short of a demand.
“I give you a commission,” said the voice. “You have to let people know how much they are loved.”
With that, the voice, the mist and the orb vanished.
The next few hours were a blur for Chuck as he grabbed the first flight to Los Angeles and then by speed boat out to Avalon where a hearse, no less, was waiting to take him to the hospital to see his distraught father. After arriving, he was escorted to his father’s room.
“Dad was still sedated,” said Chuck. “But I noticed on the side table next to his bed was a white piece of paper.” This piece of paper, he said, had doodlings of a circle with a spiraling line coming out of the bottom of it. Within the circle itself was a crudely drawn face.
Chuck stayed by his father’s side until his father emerged from his drug-induced slumber. Awake now, Orval was once again overcome with grief. “When he calmed down,” said Chuck, “I asked him, ‘Dad, what was that you drew on that paper?”’
Orval proceeded to tell him that when he was lying in his bed after first being admitted to the hospital the doctor briefly left the room to get a sedative. “Into the room,” he said, “came a white cloud.” Emerging from that cloud, according to his father, was a “white ball” which “spiraled up” at the foot of the bed.
“In the ball, I saw your brother’s face,” he said. “Your brother said, ‘I don’t feel pain anymore.’”
In their conversation, the two determined that their visits from Bill had occurred at almost exactly the same time, but 2,600 miles apart.
After the funeral, Chuck returned to Indiana. But because of his father’s need for round-the-clock care, he made the decision that he would have to leave his teaching post at the university and return to Catalina Island permanently.
Halfway across the country in Indiana, Chuck continued to receive “visits” from his brother Bill.
One day, something miraculous happened. The “white orb” popped up again.
But this time it was not only in the presence of Chuck, but also that of his neighbor, a physics student at the university.
“What is it?” Chuck asked.
“Chuck, I believe in possibilities,” came the reply from his neighbor. “There are things we don’t understand. I think there’s a possibility your brother is still here. Better make sure your brother leaves.”
As the days dwindled before Chuck’s return to Catalina, he tried to make it clear to his brother’s spirit that he was leaving Indiana for good and that he’d better make the journey with him to California, as there would be no more reason for him to stay in Indiana.
“Every day I told him I’m leaving. I’m going home. I’m not coming back,” he would tell Bill. When the day of departure finally arrived, Chuck literally walked to his 1970 Mustang, opened the passenger-side door and instructed Bill’s spirit to get in. “Okay,” he said. “This is it. We’re leaving!”
Once on the road, the first stop was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at the house of a former student of his, Steve, and his wife Jean. Upon arriving, Chuck told them the whole story and how he hoped Bill had come with him. This last bit was the cause of no small amount of concern for the host couple, particularly the wife.
“They looked at me like I was crazy,” said Chuck.
“I want to know if Bill is here,” said Jean. “Let’s get out the Ouija board.”
Chuck wasn’t keen on the idea of using the notorious device and protested, but to know avail. “You owe it to us,” said Jean.
With the infamous Hasbro Ouija board spread out on the table in front of them, the trio sat down to try to work some magic.
“I lightly put the fingers of both my hands on the planchette,” said Chuck, referring to the heart-shaped game piece that supposedly elicits messages from the beyond. “I asked ‘Bill, are you here?’”
The answer came quickly and dramatically. The planchette flew over to the “Yes” part of the board, stunning everyone.
After collecting their wits, Chuck asked “Bill, are you going home with me?”
“No,” came the reply, surprising everyone and causing concern among Chuck’s hosts.
“But why?” asked Steve. “Ask him another question, quickly!”
“Bill, are you here because of something that happened?” asked Chuck
“No,” said the board.
“Are you here because of something that’s going to happen?” continued Chuck.
“Yes.”
Chuck asked one more question: “Why are you going to stay here?” But with that—the first non-yes-or-no question—the board fell silent and remained silent for good.
After staying for another day or two, Chuck continued his trip back home to Catalina Island. Interestingly, he could distinctly feel the absence of Bill from that point on.
It was three weeks later when Chuck got a call from Steve. Expecting to hear distressing news of Bill’s shenanigans disrupting the couple’s lives, Chuck was pleased to hear that Steve was happy about something. It was the news that he and his wife had learned that very day that Jean was pregnant. The child, said Steve, was conceived on the night of the Ouija board session.
Several months after Chuck’s visit to Steve and Jean’s house, he found himself travelling back to that neck of the woods and decided to pay another visit to the couple.
Their new baby, Jeff, was all of three weeks old at this point and Chuck was thinking the same thing that you are no doubt thinking now: was Jeff the reincarnation of Chuck’s brother Bill?
Was this how the mechanics of the Cosmos functioned, that the nearby spirits of the dead are “infused” into the bodies of the newly conceived? Was it some numinous requirement on the part of Bill that, having taken his own life, he was now obliged to assume the life of another, this time to bring it to its natural conclusion as an act of atonement?
There had mysteriously been no sign of Bill in the months since that fateful night in Fort Wayne and Chuck just had to know.
He just had to get a message to Bill, if it was indeed him.
“I put the baby on my lap,” said Chuck, “and looked directly into his eyes.” Under his breath, so that neither Steve nor Jean could hear him, Chuck uttered the words “Hi, Bill.” The baby looked directly into his eyes and smiled.
As the decades have passed, Chuck periodically makes contact with Jeff, now in his fifties, mostly by occasional Facebook exchanges. He has never divulged his theory of Bill’s reincarnation to him. Perhaps disappointingly, Chuck confesses that Jeff doesn’t share any characteristics of his brother Bill. At the same time, he has had no further visits or contact with the spirit of his brother.
But Chuck will always have a smile and a direct eye-to-eye gaze, highly uncharacteristic for a tiny three-week-old baby, to leave him wondering, and waiting …