My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

I want to believe

A ghost once stole my corn dog.

This was college, my second year. I lived at 505 15th St in Minneapolis; Dinkytown to be precise. Some said Dylan lived in that building. But I don’t think the ghost of Bob Dylan stole my corn dog. For one thing, I’m pretty sure he’s an onion ring guy. For another, he’s not dead.

That apartment was me, the student newspaper editor, Steve the newscaster, Jon the landscaper, and Kurt the artist.

Steve was sophisticated beyond his years, kept his door locked. Probably for the best. Kurt, an ex-jock from southern Minnesota turned aspiring fine artist, had a habit of brushing his teeth next to your doorknob, by the keyhole, so you could be assured of hearing him brush his teeth. At all hours.

Jon, a drummer and, much later, molecular virologist, was learning the insides of plants the hard way, mowing sod. He always came home exhausted and covered in dirt grime and other shit. Then he’d take a shower and sit on the couch in a towel, his long hair pretty much everywhere, and eventually fall asleep. On more than one occasion we would have to — someone would have to — we would have to replace the towel that had fallen off him before girls came over.

That’s my apartment in 1990 or so, in my (literally) sketchy memory. We were 2 floors up on 15th St in Dinkytown, home of the University of Minnesota. Right next to one of the biggest McDonalds anywhere; it would have to be, to serve a university of 100,000 students. And by the video store, Dinkytown Video, that featured a wall called “Nick’s Picks,” because I was always making lists of my favorite movies, presaging my Plex Channel, which was a hit at this year’s Thanksgiving.

A couple years later most of the same group would live at 25th and Grand in Minneapolis, a short hop from the CC Club and other hallmarks of Mpls hipsterdom. The group liked playing a version of Canasta. Kurt would run around the apartment strumming his guitar, singing “I won” every time he won. Which, some nights, was every time. And sometimes, the next day. “I won!” (strum) “I won!” (strum). And so on.

He also wrote a song called “Nick’s Tighty Whities.” I don’t mean to bury the lede, but I also don’t have an mp3 of this song at hand. You’ll have to use your imagination. Unless Kurt is reading this, in which case, well, we will see.

There were other folks in that revolving door, railroad apartment. There were three girls next door, one of them always wore a half-shirt so we called her “stomach girl.” There were copious ‘80s-era hippies in the other apartments, set three buildings next to each other, three stories, six long apartments to a building, and always a party going on. It was college in 1989, this was Dinkytown, at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

I was making corn dogs in the oven. It was cold in Minneapolis. It was always cold in Minneapolis. And sometimes, in college in Minneapolis, cooking is making corn dogs in the oven.

The kitchen was at that northwestern tail end of the long railroad-style apartment. And then the living room, my bedroom far in the back southwest corner. The front door at the opposite end of the hallway, stood offset to the northeast of Steve’s larger room facing 15th street and traffic and the wider world, or at least the Athletics building.

Up in the northwest corner is the oven, the backdoor next to it facing out into the alley, 2 floors up.

I walked out of the kitchen, my corn dogs pleasantly baking in the oven, into the empty living room, and could hear Kurt showering in the bathroom. Jon wasn’t home.

I walk back to the kitchen and the oven door is open. I run to the range. My corn dogs are gone. The oven is still on. The backdoor is closed and locked.

I fly outside but no one is on our deck, two stories up. I go back inside. I run back toward the bathroom. Kurt is getting out of the shower. Jon is nowhere to be seen.

I run to the front door. I check the hallway. No one is outside.

I check Steve’s door. Locked, as usual, protecting his Mac SE inside.

I go back to the kitchen. The oven door is closed. And sitting on top of the stove, placed at angle aiming up at me, is one sole corn dog.

I believed for years that my late friend Doug Jones, who lived up the street on Como, ran down the blocks to our house, stole the corn dog, hid outside, then ran back and replaced the single corn dog, keeping the other two for himself. I even told the story in my Best Man toast at his wedding. He took the mic in his Hugo Boss suit to deny it.

Nobody ever fessed up. Nobody has ever fessed up, about the other two corn dogs.

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I believe in ghosts.

I believe that we are more than carbon and water and atoms and chemical reactions. That all this energy we exert and absorb has to go somewhere, and is probably not confined to these mobilized skin bags.

Have you ever walked into a room or a house and felt, something is wrong here. Something is *fucked up* in this place.

I’m not saying that’s a ghost, but I am saying that a space can be charged, like a battery, an absorption, a frame to hold bad juju.

And I am saying that I’ve witnessed ghosts. Or at least, I want to believe I’ve seen ghosts.

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By CafeDuNord - Digital Photography, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25221606

My friend Eric Shea had a ghostly encounter in the bathroom at Café DuNord, in San Francisco. Rose and I lived next door to the venue. I DJ’d there, drank there, had my 40^th birthday there. We had the annual Knights of Leisure Ball – the indie rock Shriners we put together in the late 90s – upstairs at the Swedish American Hall.

The Cafe DuNord and the Swedish American Hall are in a building that’s about 117 years old. The Swedish American Society moved into the Hall after the 1906 earthquake demolished their existing building.

According to the Internet, The Piano Man lurks in the Swedish Hall. Sometimes he can be heard playing. The Lady in Red haunts the main club.

My friend Michele Carlson was a bartender there when I was always there. She still bartends in San Francisco. She remembered, “I was working a really busy night and it was slammed and I had to pee. I had to pee for like an hour, so my focus was that only…at one point I looked across the room into the ladies bathroom, and I noticed the door was open, and one of the stalls was open, one of them was shut, so I ran for it!

I was doing my business and I could hear this woman in the stall next to me singing a very, very lovely melody, that didn’t have anything to do with the music inside. It was like punk rock or something she was just sweetly singing. I was gonna say something like, you sound very happy today, or some such but I did not. I stepped out, still hearing her, to go back to the bar and I turned around. I looked and there was nobody there. Nobody was in that stall. The chills ran up my spine. I was completely freaked out. Ran right back to the bar, (I) was just like, oh my God! I just had my first paranormal experience at Café Du Nord.”

Pete Schnell, who managed stuff and was always running the door when events happened there, remembered taking a Ouija board up to the Swedish Hall.

“First question, we asked their name. Introduced ourselves… and the friggin’ triangle thing starts immediately gliding across the board!

I wanted to dart out, crying… but no one else was budging, so I didn’t want to be all by myself running through the building. I was too scared to move.

It spelled out an odd name, which could have been Swedish, or I guess could have been demonic.. I forget the name, but something like Egov or the like.

We were all tripping the F out, and muttering what to ask next. We asked if it was male or female. It answered male.

Third question, which was much too soon in my opinion - we asked if the rumors were true that someone had hung themselves there.

It paused, then answered no.

I think I had the idea to ask if it actually wasn’t a suicide, but was, in fact, actually a murder… and it replied: goodbye.

We asked if it wanted to stop communicating, and it replied: yes.

We shuffled back down to the main Swedish Hall level, buzzing with what we just had experienced.”

Amazing stories. But not mine.

But yeah, back to Eric. He’s the only person I know who would have a ghostly encounter where the spectral presence kicked him in the ass. Squarely, while pissing at 4 am in the narrow raised bathroom on the speakeasy basement floor after bar close.

A kick in the butt from a ghost.

---

We were moving from San Francisco to Austin and we were driving, and we were following Batter Blaster Sean like our lives depended on it. For some reason, Sean insisted that we follow him, all 3000 miles to Texas. But outside of Scottsdale, I was frantic and anxious, trying to leave fast to be in his impossible-to-follow wake — Sean drives like a grade-A asshole, *especially* if you’re trying to follow him, pounding on the gas pedal, then pounding on the brake, neither of which with any sort of nuance.

In this state, I noticed that I had not gassed up the car.

With seconds and fumes to spare, we found a gas station. We had a very sick dog — our first Miniature Schnauzer Estro, who had an imbalance in her vestibular organ, so she could barely stand up — and an angry wife, Rose, who didn’t want to be so hot on the trail of Sean, and an impossible to please boss on our hands. Something had to give.

And so we found ourselves at the Hotel Congress in Tucson. I stopped and we vowed to take a break for ourselves, have dinner, and stay the night in a real hotel.

I’d heard of this place. All my band friends loved to play here. And it was haunted, the front desk told us.

Was our room haunted? No, we were down the hall from the ghosts.

That didn’t stop the ghostly knocks and bumps in the middle of the night.

At 4am, long after anyone should have been sound asleep, I heard the sound. A low keening cry. Muffled thumps from outside the door.

Rose was sound asleep. The dog was in her crate. Thankfully asleep.

And then a louder thump, into the door. Was the ghost trying to get in to our room?

If you’ve seen Robert Wise’s The Haunting, you know the fright that simple thumps and whispers can conjure. The sounds were getting louder. I had to see.

I crept to the door. The sounds didn’t abate. The ghost was literally right outside the door.

As I opened the door a crack, a blinding white light seized me. And a voice.

What? I opened the door fast.

And there I beheld…. a Discovery Channel film crew.

Doing a documentary episode on ghosts. Outside our room. At 4 am.

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There was the ghost who stood swaying in my bedroom, a dark figure in the middle of the room. Caught in fright, I didn’t move for an hour, until I realized it was my new suit hanging on a new wire clothing rack, caught in a draft from the heater by the window.

There was the ghost who woke my mom and I at the old house in LaPorte, MN, far north of the Twin Cities. We’d had our share of ghosts, like the one who played Grandpa’s piano after he passed away (it was the cat), or the ghost that dramatically ripped the window shade up in the middle of the night (an errant spring).

This one opened the front door. Came into the house. Moved around. slammed the front door again.

Mom got me out of bed and we decided to go downstairs. I put on my leather jacket, to look tough. Who looks tough in a leather jacket that for some reason has a belt?

I grabbed a weapon. A jar of loose change.

We headed downstairs. There was nothing there. There were no tracks in the snow, either, though. And Dad was nowhere in sight. Still don’t know what / who that was who opened the door and was walking around the old house’s kitchen, while we were upstairs in our beds.

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Listen, I want to be scared! I want a supernatural experience that challenges me, that tells me there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

John Barrymore as Svengali, who I swear says “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” but I couldn’t find it.

I’ve been scared by dreams. I read horror fiction and watch horror movies. I long to be be terrorized. I mean, in a nice way, like a friendly poltergeist, or by the specter of a dead friend. I would love to run into my departed pal Matt Harris in a dark movie theater and hear him tell me about the gypsy woman’s curse.

But no, I get stark raving reality.

I turn 55 in a couple weeks. I’m Sammy Hagar years old.

Sometimes I feel like a ghost.

Does the cold weather and brisk night get you down? Do the sounds scare you? It’s the wind. And the rain. The dog knows it’s nothing.

I’m a Lutheran turned skeptic. It doesn’t matter, it’s still loud cracks in the house foundation, thumps in the basement, sounds like whispers.

Everyone is susceptible to ghosts. I still keep watching for them.

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Happy New Year, and welcome to the first edition of Are You Experienced in 2025.

I’m Nick Tangborn, I write this thing, I’m Chief of Staff at Ekonomisk Management (Andrew Bird, Alan Sparhawk, My Brightest Diamond), and I run Marketing at The Small Bow, a sobriety and mental health media outfit from the minds behind Gawker and Third Bridge Creative. Formerly I’ve done time at BitTorrent, Rhapsody, CNET, and Batter Blaster.

I hope you enjoy this, and will consider a subscription if you’re not already committed, or, if you really feel it, upgrade to a paid level. Your dollars help me keep this thing out on the regular, 1500 words or so each week.

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