Emma Gaskill's Haunting

Emma Gaskill’s Haunting

By Ken Ely

I returned to Blaine in September of 1982. After seven years of marriage, I was on my own with no place to live and no place to practice, so I returned to a place where I had found adventure and meaning and fulfillment: Blaine, Washington.
Uncle Ken and Aunt Sophia Macmillan still lived on Clark Street, so I popped in on them. Always willing to lend a hand at the drop of a hat, Uncle Ken and I went out to explore the rental possibilities while Aunt Sophia made lunch. He and I looked at two or three places, none of which had any possibility of living in and only one of which had any potential for a chiropractic practice.
When we returned to the house, Aunt Sophia announced, “Well, while you boys were out looking, I found you a place to rent!”
The fact that she could do this and turn out a roast beef and potatoes with gravy and green beans lunch at the same time amazed me.
After lunch, I was sent across the street to meet Hazel Gaskill, who walked with me over to H Street, one block to the north, to a little house she had for rent. It was small, had three tiny bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bathroom added onto what had been a section of the open back porch. I decided I could both live in it and work out of it and I agreed to rent it on the spot.
Hazel related to me that it had once been the home of her late husband, Benny, and his mother, Emma. Emma had died and Benny had then bought the house on Clark Street and offered the house on H Street as one of his many rentals. When Benny became ill, eventually terminally, with penile cancer, he divided the Clark Street house into two separate living quarters that shared the kitchen and hired Hazel Randall, a nurse, to take care of him. When it became clear to Benny that his end was near, having no heirs and wishing to bless Hazel for the solicitous care she had given him over more than two years, Benny asked Hazel to marry him.
Hazel refused. Years previous, when she had been married to Mr. Randall, he had extracted from her the promise that, upon his death, she would never remarry. Her relationship with Mr. Randall had not been a particularly good one but a promise was a promise and Hazel was going to abide by it, nonetheless. However, Aunt Sophia, who had become well acquainted with Hazel during her two-year ministration to Benny, convinced Hazel that, as Mr. Randall had had no real love claims upon Hazel’s posthumous loyalty and, moreover, since Hazel had really come to love Benny, and that Benny wanted Hazel to have all his property and money which would go to the state if he died heirless and intestate, Hazel should marry him. So, Hazel broke her promise to Mr. Randall and married Benny, who died not long afterward, leaving her numerous rental properties – fishermen’s cots, most of them, but productive of profit, for Benny was shrewd for keeping his columns in the black – and a sum of money in an amount that no one ever convinced her to divulge.
The house on H Street, 365 it was, needed major repair by the time I agreed to rent it. Not only had the people who had rented it prior to me abused it but it had sagged on its posts to the point that the floors had waves, valleys, and cambers; the wallpaper was stretched to tearing; the plumbing leaked, and several windows had cracked. Hazel hired a crew to lift the house and put a foundation under it; she paid for insulation, which Uncle Ken and I put in, and she bought piles of paneling with which we paneled every room in the house but the kitchen.
By October, things were sufficiently mended that I could open my practice.
Over the next five years (I guess it was), I also got to know Hazel pretty well. She told me quite a few interesting stories about herself – a Hoffman, from San Juan Island – her family, and Benny, who was a character worth writing about but in another account. One of the things she told me was that Emma, Ben’s mother, had died in the 365 H Street house, in the east bedroom.
I guess it was near the end of my first five years there that Hazel offered me the house for $60K and I agreed to buy it. She carried the contract. Three years or so after our sales agreement was signed, Hazel’s health declined to the point that she had to move into assisted living but I saw her every now and again: I either went to visit her or an aid would drive her round to the office and I would come out to talk with her in the car. She was not in assisted living for more than a year, I think, before she worsened and died.
Some years passed. I continued to practice and to live in the house. The strange events came on so gradually, I did not notice that they were so strange; just unaccountable.
The first thing that I noticed from time to time was a strange smell. It was a sauerkraut smell, what I imagined fermenting skunk cabbage would smell like. The local hog farmers used to roam the woods, harvesting skunk cabbage to put into barrels to ferment, in the manner of silage, to feed their hogs. The smell did not occur often but when it did, there was no missing it. I could not account for it, though, as there was neither propane nor natural gas supplied to the place.
The smell continued at odd intervals and I gave up trying to figure out what was causing it. But eventually, I began to have trouble with my radio/CD player: it turned on by itself or, if I was playing it, it turned itself off. This I attributed to something internally wrong with the player and, when it quit altogether, I bought a new one – which behaved the same way, although it was not the same brand. The police station was across the street at that time, in the old post office building and the fire department was in the city hall. Both departments had ‘clickers’ by means of which they opened and closed the big garage doors to the fire truck bays and I gradually concluded that the clickers were on the same frequency as my CD player.
Gradually, too, I began to notice that, if I were sitting still at my desk or in my easy chair, one side of me would feel cold. This made sense in the winter for the house was old and the possibility of gaps in its structure was a reasonable expectation, although I could never find any; but to feel the cold in summer, well, that was strange.
Sometimes, I noticed that two of the odd phenomena occurred coincidentally, sometimes all three, but I could not account for it.
One day, however, I was talking to a friend, Capt. Ken Markusen, who was not only a friend but a patient and the father of my receptionist/secretary, about it and he said, “Ohh! I bet you have a ghost! Anyone ever die in this house that you know of?”
I told him, yes, Emma Gaskill had died in the house, according to Hazel.
“Well, there you are!” says he.
I asked him, since he seemed to be an authority, how I could get rid of her.
“I dunno. Just try telling her that there’s nothing for her here and that she should go to Jesus, go to God. Use her name, though, so she knows you mean her.”
I had nothing to lose by this line of endeavor so the next time I smelled the smell, or the CD player went on or off, or I felt the chill, I addressed Emma, by name, in the captain’s prescribed fashion. This approach seemed to sort Emma in the short run but she would always come back at a later date and bother me again, which eventually provoked me into saying things like, “Dam’ it Emma! Leave that stereo alone! And you stink, Emma! You stink! Go to God, Emma! Go to Jesus! Go find Benny! Benny’s with God! Get out of here!”
I had no idea whether Benny was with God or the devil and I cared little for where Emma actually went so long I was rid of her.

After maybe a year of my howling thus, Emma left. I told Capt. Markusen she was gone after sufficient time had passed for me to really believe she was. And for more than a year, I thought no more about her.
Then one day, in the spring it was, I was writing at my desk one afternoon when I smelled the smell.
“Oh, no!” I said, pushing my chair back. “Emma! Look, Emma, I don’t know why you’ve come back but kindly go away. There’s nothing and nobody here for you anymore, Emma. Go to Jesus. Good girl, Emma. Go to Jesus.”
I don’t know whether Emma was hugging me goodbye or whether she just stood in close but I sudden felt chilled on the right side of my face and body.
“Goodbye, Emma,” I said, getting up and walking to the waiting room.
As I moved, the chill went down. The smell vanished. And of Emma I was aware no more.
About three years ago, I sold the little house on H Street to a man who opened a parcel and mailbox service in it. His business was so successful that he needed to triple his floor space and, as it would interrupt his business to tear the house down, he simply built around and over it. Yes, the old Gaskill house was literally entombed in the new addition. Whether Emma was entombed with it, I cannot say for she did not follow me into my new office – mercifully.
As a footnote, I will add that, when I first moved into Ben Gaskill’s house, the old Methodist Church stood upon the corner of 4th and H Streets. It was no longer used as a church but as some sort of youth meeting place. Later, the Maurers bought it, upgraded the interior, and rented it out to retail shops. Sometime in the '80's, the church burned down – while I was away visiting my brother in California – and was such a huge conflagration, sending burning timbers all over the block when it collapsed, that it is a miracle that Ben’s house did not go up in flames with it. The Maurers built a new structure reminiscent of the old church. When I sold the house to the mailbox man, I moved into one of the suites in the new old church. I wish I had made that move years before I did, for I really like my present studio office and I never liked Benny’s house much, at all.

Copyright © January 2017 Kenneth E Ely

Nakedness and Health

Nakedness and Health

Author Unknown

The clothes we wear are not part of us – we're stark naked under them. Many taboos about our naked bodies are well established but if the world were totally safe and always comfortably warm, I expect most people would spend a lot of time naked. It’s the natural state of human life. And if we could set aside considerations such as modesty or keeping warm, most of us might admit that being without clothes is quite comfortable. Well, physically, anyway; it is not always emotionally comfortable. That’s because, in our society, covering the human body has to do with morality. We suffer from a culturally imbedded notion that clothes make us ‘moral’. In equating nakedness with immorality, we deduce that nudity must be sexual. The logic is plausible even if it does not reflect the true nature of things.

Interestingly enough, though, studies of cultures living in varying degrees of undress show no clear correlation between our definitions of immorality and the absence of clothes.  If we can take venereal disease as a valid indicator of a society's level of sexual immorality, it is noteworthy that there is no culture in history that has ever had the incidence of venereal disease that America, despite clothes, experiences. It is difficult to conclude, then, that clothing can be much of a positive force for increased societal morality.

Most of us, as we approach adolescence, are taught that nakedness is bad, a sin, if you will, although its badness is usually made conditional, such as it's permissible to be naked for the doctor, or expected in locker rooms. For preadolescents, nakedness may be permitted within the context of family or even for recreational activities like play at the seashore; but as the transition to adulthood is made, nakedness in front of others usually becomes less and less acceptable. This is a cultural attribute. For Americans, it is an aspect of our Judeo-Christian ethos. It is in the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden, when sin enters in, that being naked becomes an issue. Shame after disobeying God compels the man and woman to make clothes – aprons, actually, to hide their genitalia.

Now, why in the world should shame for disobedience segue into sexual shame? I really have no idea. I have been told that Satan targeted the sexual natures of the man and woman in his shame/sin scheme because it was through procreation that the man and woman were the most god-like and that the ability to create was the characteristic of God and man that Satan envied the most.

For us today, clothes cover our shame for the sexual responses every normal person can have. But clothes really have no significant value in that. To the contrary, we all can acknowledge that sexual responses are often stimulated by clothing. Moreover, nowhere in the Bible is nudity directly prohibited. What the Bible deals with is the individual’s response to nakedness. So, I think we should take nudity as bad or evil in itself out of the moral equation. It could, in fact, be a force for morality.

As it is, for us in America, being naked is associated with two basic spheres: hygienic functions and sexual activity. But if we could be naked for other reasons, such as sunbathing, sports, exercising, even just relaxing, wouldn’t the singular association of nakedness with sexuality be altered?

Sociological studies of ethnic groups in which nudity is common demonstrate that there is no inchoate cause-and-effect relationship between being naked and being sexual. From a standpoint of scientific psychology, the sexual connotation of nudity is a learned sexual fetish, not an innate human characteristic. For social nudists, nudity is divorced from sexuality. In fact, studies suggest that social nudists actually have higher moral values than the general population, that nudist families are more stable than the average, and that children raised in nudist lifestyles are seen to develop far fewer sexual hang-ups and aberrations than those studied in clothed control groups. Parsing sexually deviant behavior, it is seen to have significant components of exhibitionism and voyeurism and, happily, these elements are largely lost among totally nude groups of people.

  

Being naked can provide many physical, mental, and psychological benefits not fully obtainable otherwise, even if successfully improving morality is not one of them. Naked, we enjoy greater freedom of movement. Naked, we can have a heightened appreciation of the beauty of the human body, even with faults and defects. Regular and controlled nude sunbathing enhances resistance to disease, providing a natural vitamin D and calcium balance. Being naked can positively impact depression and reduce stress, decreasing blood pressure and resting heart rate. It can contribute to lower blood cholesterol levels and reduce excessive blood sugar. Sunlight and air circulation upon the skin can increase muscular strength and endurance and help many skin diseases such as psoriasis. Studies have suggested that the risk of internal cancer and heart and blood vessel disease is lessened, probably by the reduction in stress. Because of more natural testicular function produced by a cooler scrotum, exposure reduces male infertility, impotence, nodular prostatic enlargement (with its resultant urinary tract obstruction), as well as reducing the risk of testicular and, perhaps, prostatic cancer. And being naked affords relief from the mechanical constriction of clothing which may cause poor lymphatic and blood circulation, inadequate breathing, compromised digestion, hernias, fibrocystic disease of the breasts and, possibly, breast cancer, varicose veins, and the formation of blood clots. Certainly, the list begins to sound like all the benefits of a patent snake-oil medicine but, even if a fraction of the claims are credible and backed by legitimate research, nudity would be validated, would it not?

Being naked should downplay concerns for our individual body appearances, but I think it can also encourage appropriate attention to diet, exercise, and other healthy lifestyle considerations for physical improvement. I suggest that a step toward better total health might be to accept public non-sexual nudity in a matter-of- fact way. Certainly no one could be harmed by it. When we realize that the coverings we have placed on our bodies have nothing to do with desirable moral attributes, the way is open to the idea that other psychological envelopes, attitudes, and opinions may also be undesirable, deterring us from otherwise attainable health and well-being. Psychological shells, like clothing, can protect but they can also isolate. Therefore, in embracing healthy nakedness, let us truly be naked, inwardly and outwardly.

A Run Through the Corn

A Run Through the Corn

By Ken Ely

I’ve liked being without clothes ever since I was little. I think it’s a bit strange, then, that there were only two occasions I can remember when my brother and I played naked in the back yard, as many kids do. We lived on Air Force bases and most of the yards were not screened off, although looking back on it, I don’t see why that should have made much difference. And we didn’t spend much time naked inside the house, either, as our shared bedroom was always air conditioned for my brother’s asthma:  it was hard enough to play in there without a sweater, let alone without clothes. When I was older, after I got my own room, I could do silly things like practice my trombone naked but I had to be careful about who was in the house and what they were doing. Or, at least, I thought I did; most of the time no one would come into my room while I was practicing, anyway – but I could never be sure.

My high school senior year was ’65-’66. This was the tail-end of a rather long period in the western world when males commonly swam naked – just about anywhere, it seems – and females could not; but there were no uniform standards for the practice and it varied country-to-country and region-to-region. By the mid-60’s, the only places in America where men remained unshackled by bathing suits were some YMCA pools and scattered high school swimming classes. The last gasp for both of these male sanctuaries came in the early 70s.

I was never very good at school sports, the kind played with a ball, because I could never keep track of where the ball was or where it was supposed to go. But I was a good swimmer and I looked forward to at least a portion of my senior year’s physical education classes because swimming was to be part of the curriculum. The school had swim teams, of course, but I would never join one of them, even when invited. I should have.

In those says, PE classes were not co-ed. Today, I think most of them are still segregated by sex but you can find some that aren’t. Our high school had two pools rather than have the boys and girls share a common one. The boys’ pool was just off our locker room and had a big window in the upper half of the door, which was always locked. Only the boys’ swim teams and the senior boys’ PE classes were allowed to use it, so I never saw anyone in it, not being on a swim team. Finally, though, on a day when we were lined up in the gym waiting for our work-out instructions, our teacher announced that we were going to swim and told us to go back to the locker room, get out of our gym clothes, and form up on the long sides of the pool.

I don’t think any of us had given much thought to the fact that we might be asked to swim in nothing but our skins and it came as something of a surprise to all of us but we were used to showering together and dressing in the locker room, so we did as we were asked, chuckling at the novelty and calling raunchy taunts across the water while we waited along pool’s sides.

When the teacher came in, he mounted one of the diving boxes at the deep end and asked us to cease with the hallooing so he could tell us how the class would go.

Swimming would last for eight weeks (we had gym class twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays). The next three periods, beginning with this one, would be devoted to sorting out our individual proficiencies in the water. We had two weeks to acquire bathing suits. He did not say that bathing suits were mandatory but since “if you want to wear one” was not included I assumed that at the end of two weeks, we would be expected to wear them. I also thought it funny that we were allotted two weeks to get them. I had two bathing suits and it would not take me two weeks find them. I brought one to the next class but didn’t wear it, just left it in my locker.

In fact, no one wore a suit for that next class. Maybe no one wanted to wimp-out and appear girlishly modest.

The following week, two or three suits were in the line-up but most of the boys still chose to swim naked. I say “chose” because I doubted that most or all of them did not have bathing suits and I rather thought that even the poorest fellow in the class could have acquired one overnight if he had wanted to. No, I think that most of us could have admitted to enjoying skinny dipping and would have acknowledged feeling camaraderie not experienced outside the pool. It was a definite social leveler.

I still wonder why the teacher gave us two weeks to acquire swimming suits. I did not know at the time that swimming sans vêtements was a norm for boys that was being phased out. Was it a school board mandate that our teacher did not agree with so he drug his feet? Or was he making a sociological point, showing us that many of our differences were artificial and that bonds of commonality might be forged where we had not expected?

The last class of that week, Friday, was the end of the two-week period allowed for getting suits. Or was it? I reasoned that the third week should actually have begun our ‘suited’ period. Most of the other boys turned out for Friday’s class in suits; five of us did not. Nothing was said by anybody when we lined up along the pool that day. But no one took off their suits to join the five of us, either.

It wasn’t until I quit college in my 3^rd year that I was among people that found being naked almost as natural as being in clothes. I went to live with an eccentric family of two young boys, two adult boys, two adult girls, and their parents. They were not nudists but neither were any of them bashful. This was good because we only had one bathroom.

The house had been built before bathrooms or toilets were indoor features and it looked to me as if the large upstairs bathroom had been installed post hoc in one of the several bedrooms. And it was a ‘bath’ room: it contained a tub, not a shower. And it might as well have had a revolving door, or no door at all, for whoever might be in the tub or on the pot, would have the company of everyone else coming and going. We all pooped, peed, bathed, and brushed teeth in the company of one or several other people, not necessarily of the same sex. Many family conferences ended up in that bathroom while essential bathroom business was conducted.

In the summer of ’68, we made a trip back to their family farm in the Midwest. The Suburban did not have air conditioning and it was hot; and we did not have money for motels so we camped. Well, more properly, we put our sleeping bags out at rest stops and moved off early in the morning before we could be run off by the wardens.  But on the third night, we stayed at a state park and it had a creek running through it. The further east we’d traveled the hotter it had become and we all were sticky and smelly so we decided we’d bathe in the creek at sunset, when we could still see what we were doing but be less likely to offend any of the other people staying in the park – of which there were not many as it was mid-week.

At dusk, all we grabbed soap and towels and headed for the creek bank where we stripped off and waded, soap bars in hand, into the creek. Fortunately, the bottom of the creek was lined with small stones, so it was relatively nice to walk in. And the water was cold but, if you held yourself down in it, you adjusted to the temperature and were able to wet down, lather up, and rinse off in relative comfort. The women washed their hair as they’d brought shampoo as well as soap, which the men borrowed to wash their hair, too. Damp-dry, we got back into our smelly clothes, went back to camp, and changed into clean ones.

That bath was totally refreshing, and not just because we were able to get cool and clean. I think it was because, for once, we were all bathing together. It was a family bath.

The next morning, one of the older brothers and I returned to the creek for a proper swim. Just down from where we’d bathed, the creek’s course narrowed, the channel deepened, and the current flowed more swiftly – but not dangerously so. Behind one big rock there was a pool that accommodated a shallow dive which would carry the swimmer out into the current toward some mild rapids. He and I got out of our kits and explored the pool and the current and then began making the swift loop from the rock to the rapids to back up the opposite bank to cross to the rock, over and over. One of the sisters came down to watch us and was at first a little alarmed by our plunging from the rock into the pool to be carried swiftly downstream toward the rapids but several repetitions convinced her we were quite safe. She stayed upon the bank to watch us, however, just to make certain neither of us got into trouble, until her father came down to call us up to leave.

The family farm was just as hot as the drive to it but the nights were comfortable, if not cool. I slept naked under a sheet – the first night in the farm house was the first time I had ever done so – and I have been sleeping that way ever since. The third night, as I got into bed, I resolved upon an early morning adventure: I would run naked through the corn.

Now, if a person were to run down the rows of corn, he would receive scratches from the edges of the leaves as his reward. But the harvester had been through the middle of the corn patch, for some reason, with trucks behind it, leaving a great corridor with tire prints in which the stubble had been crushed. Here was easy, scratch-free running. I had tentatively explored the corridor that day, had not been able to determine where it went, but had been inspired for my lark the next morning.

I awoke at dawn, dressed and carried my shoes to the kitchen, where I put them on and quietly and went out the back door.

The corridor in the corn was shaped like a T. From the farm yard behind the house, it ran north a short way and then went east and west. (I have always thought farmers began harvesting corn by going around the field from the outside working in, like lawn-mowing, or up and down from one side end to the other, until it is all gone. It seemed weird that a harvester would be driven into the corn in the middle of a field and then to the right and left, but what did I know?) I walked into the corridor until I got to the top of the T. There, I undressed, put my shoes back on, and speculated as to which way I should go. West was as good as east, so I went west.

The sun was faintly warm on my back and buttocks, the air faintly stirring. I could feel it move over the little hairs that covered my body. (I have read or heard the term ‘caress’ applied to air moving over those little hairs. That is exactly what it feels like: a gentle caress.) After walking a few yards, I began to feel as if I were coated with Teflon and smooth: there was no resistance to any movement I made. This generated a strange elation in me and I began to run – and running felt even better for it produced a wind over my whole body.

Much to my surprise, the corridor soon ended in a huge atrium where, apparently, they had turned the harvester and truck around! I stopped in the center of it to contemplate this wonder (for why would they do such an odd thing?) and to enjoy the tingly feeling of perspiration evaporating from my skin. Ah, well. Back the other way. This run was longer and, by the time I came to the end of it at the fence line and the road, I was properly sweating.

Across the road, I saw Mr Slavenhoek’s pig corral and decided to look in on the pigs. Looking back, I’m not sure what I was thinking because the corral was not very far off the road and a car could have come along at any moment; but one never did and I wandered along the rails looking at the pigs until I had cooled off.  After a bit, I crossed the road again to the corn field and walked happily back to my clothes, sorry that my lark had come to an end but vowing I would repeat the outing next morning.

I never went out in the corn again during the remainder of our stay there. Every night, I told myself that I would rise early and go but family events or projects or just plain fatigue always seemed to get in the way. We took a different route back to Washington, not staying near any creeks that afforded a communal bath. I lived through one more summer with that family and then moved on.

And what of today?

Well, the corn fields are a long way off, in distance and in time. But there is a lane in a secluded wood here, arched over by vine maples, ending in a shady atrium. I sometimes walk it now, soothed by patches of sun on my back and drifts of a breeze that caresses my body, and I feel again that I am covered in Teflon and am elated by the freedom.

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Copyright © Kenneth E Ely February 2017