A Sausage Sighting of the Mysterious Boy at the Old House

Garrett, July 1972

Just up the hill from my Grandpa Prater's farmhouse in northern Indiana was the Old House: over 100 years old, now fallen to ruin.  We could go up and play in the dusty yard, or hunt for frogs in the little pond, but we could not go inside.  Uncle Paul said that it was full of "witch's blood" that would turn us into "ghosts," but most likely it was just unstable.

We usually stayed away from the Old House, unless there were adults up there, playing horseshoes or skinning and cleaning the animals they hunted.  We didn't like the weird shadows in the upstairs windows, like dark figure moving about, or the porch swing that sometimes moved by itself.

But one day in the summer of 1972,  when I was eleven years old, the farmhouse was full of people: Mom and Dad, my aunts and uncles, and some people I didn't know, an old guy Grandpa Prater's age, some husbands and wives, and a couple of surly teenagers.  They were in the living room, the kitchen, in Grandma Prater's memorial room, even on the front porch.

They were all laughing loudly and talking about things that happened thirty years ago.  Boring!  And no kids to play with!  My brother and baby sister were out with Grandma Davis, and Cousin Buster was visiting his other grandparents.

It was noisy and oppressively hot; I had to get out of there!  I told Mom I was going to play outside.

But what to do?  Nothing is more boring than a farm with no animals on it.

I decided to go up to the Old House and throw rocks into the pond, to see if I could scare some fish.

Even though it was a bright, sunny day, the Old House seemed more sinister than usual.  I shivered with nervous excitement.

The porch swing was swinging by itself.  I heard the rusty scrape.

Trying to avoid looking in the windows at whatever might be inside, I rounded to the back yard, and and almost ran into a boy.

I yelled and jumped back.

He didn't approach.  He just stood there, staring.

He was a few years older than me, but not yet a teenager [models in the nude photos are over 18].   Tall and slim, with a round face, sharp features, and black curly hair.  Wearing a thin brown jacket, which seemed weird on a hot day.

Someone to play with!  And cute!  I thought, smiling at him.  "Do you live around here?"

"I think I used to live here," he said, still staring.

"Me, too.  We moved away when I was little."

"Do you want to go inside?  I can show you my old room. I carved my initials on the wall."

"No way...Grandpa told me to never go in there.  There's witch's blood."

He frowned.  "Ok, well -- let's swing."

We climbed on the porch swing and started swinging back and forth, until we were banging against the wall.  It felt like the whole house was about to fall down.  I jumped off.

"Let's throw some rocks in the pond," I said.

"No.  It's hot.  Let's go swimming!"

"In there?  It's all full of moss and gunk."

"No, it isn't.  When I was a kid, I swam in there all the time.  It's fun."

"Well...I don't have a swim suit."

"You weenie!  Come on, I'll race you." He started taking his clothes off.  I stopped instinctively to watch,   I saw a nice smooth hard chest.  He  turned his back to take off his shorts, but then turned back, giving me a nice view of his "shame."

A beautiful cut Bratwurst!  I hadn't seen very many at that time, but I could tell it was special, the stuff of dreams.

The boy ran and jumped into the pond with a big splash.

"Is it deep?" I said doubtfully.

But the boy wasn't paying attention.  He stood and started walking off, into the pond, like he belonged there...

At that moment, I heard my Mom yelling for me.  "I got to go," I said, and ran down the hill.

"Where have you been?" Mom asked.  "We've been ready to go for fifteen minutes while you traipsed around at the Old House."

I decided not to tell them about the boy, and get him in trouble, too.

For years I wondered about the mysterious boy.  Who was he?  Why was he at the Old House?  Was he a ghost?

I sort of wanted him to be a ghost, but I knew there was a realistic explanation.

Eventually I asked Mom, who told me that the people visiting that day were Grandpa's Cousin Crit and his family.  They moved to Indiana with Mom's family in 1942, and lived in the Old House until 1965.

"Was there a boy a little older than me?"  I asked.

"I think all his kids were my age, but let's check."  She went to get a family Bible to check.  "Cousin Crit, born in 1910.  Married Sarah, had six kids: Delmar, Ethel,  Wilkie, Alice, and Carl."

Carl, the youngest, was born in November 1943.  He would have been 28 years old.  Maybe a grandson, who lived with them?

 Mom didn't remember any, but she spent a couple of years in Long Beach, right after she got married, so she didn't know for sure.

North Manchester, Indiana, July 2006

Over 30 year later, when I was living in Dayton, Ohio, I thought about the boy at the Old House again, and tried to look up Cousin Crit's kin online.  There were dozens of people with his last name in North Manchester, including the mayor, but with a little digging I managed to find Carl.  A phone call got me an invitation to visit my third cousin.

Carl was 62 years old, a buffed muscle bear with a hefty gray beard, retired from the military and back in his home town to take care of his invalid sister (his other siblings had died).  He told me about his career: joining the army right after high school in 1961, being stationed in Korea, Vietnam, Germany, Afghanistan, always on the move, never able to find a home.    

"I remember that visit!" he said.  "It was first time I was back to the Old House since I moved away  But I don't know who the kid was."

"He said he used to live in the house."

"I don't know what he was telling you, but I was the last kid to live there.  Maybe one of my nephews stayed for a week or two.  But none of them were 12 or 13 in 1972."

I shruggd.  "I must be remembering it wrong."

"You know who it sounds like?"  Carl said.  "Me.  I was born in the Old House.  I carved my name on the wall of my room upstairs, and banged on the wall with the porch swing, and I used to go skinny-dipping in the pond all the time.  But I didn't do any of those things that day, and besides, I was 28 years old, not 13."

"Unless a younger version of you went skinny dipping with me while you was sitting in the farmhouse," I said with a laugh.  "A preteen doppelganger trying to recapture the lost freedom of his childhood."

"Huh?"

"It must have been a kid from down the road."

Carl didn't share my interest in the paranormal, and I didn't want to explain.  Or to ask him to drop his pants, so I could compare his penis to that of the mysterious boy I saw at the Old House 30 years ago.

See also: The Naked Man in the Peat Bog; Lane's Weirdest Paranormal Experience.; The Boy Hooks Up with a Fairy

The Boy Hooks Up with the Christmas Ghost

Rome City, Indiana, December 1974

The boy sat on the bed, reading about fairies.

It was very cold in his aunt's attic room, so he was under the covers.  A space heater glowed orange beside the bed.  Downstairs, a Christmas party was going on, with his parents and aunts and uncles and friends from town.  Most he didn't know.

But they were all paired up into husbands and wives, male-female couples extending in all directions to infinity.

Even Santa Claus had a wife.

The attic door was open, to let some heat up.  Downstairs he heard talking and laughter, and a song, "Winter Wonderland."

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he is Parson Brown.
He'll say "Are you married?"  We'll say, "No, man,
But you can do the job when you're in town."

Wife, kids, house, job, his destiny.  His doom.

Suddenly he heard footsteps coming up the stairs.  A dark shape that quickly resolved itself into the form of a young man, probably college age, tall and slim with thick reddish hair and very pale skin.  He was wearing a red sweater and jeans.  Oddly, he was barefoot.  The boy didn't recognize him from the party downstairs.

"Can I come in?"

"You already are in."

"Fair enough."  The stranger sat down on the edge of the bed.  "I saw you come up here, and wondered if you were ok."

Bogus!  Why would a complete stranger come upstairs to check up on him?  Why not his mother, or Aunt Nora?

"I'm fine, just tired.  And this is my room. Mine and my brother's while we're visiting, so I can be here.  Are you friends with Cousin Joe?"

He ignored the question.  "What you reading?"

The boy had hidden the book -- his parents disapproved of non-religious books in general, and especially science fiction and fantasy.  "Um...science homework."

The stranger reached up and pulled the book from under the covers.  "Fairies?" he asked in surprise.

"Not that kind of fairy," the boy said, cutting off the criticism,  He wasn't reading fairy tales -- he had always hated Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel, and their ilk, stupid boy meets girl stories with some flittery things added, shouting that the meaning of life is to be found in feminine smiles.  He was reading about fairies, the dark, sinister figures of European myth, like Puck in Midsummer Night's Dream. 

"Midsummer Night's Dream!" the stranger exclaimed.  "I love Shakespeare.  I used to be a grade-A riot on stage!"  He flounced about the room, reciting:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding, but a dream.

"You look pretty solid to me," the boy said.

"Who cares?  It got you to smile.  Cold up here -- got room for one more, Jackson?"  Without waiting for an answer he climbed under the covers next to the boy and put his arm around him.  His hard bicep bulged against the boy's shoulder.

"I'm not a little kid," the boy protested, while he instinctively cuddled against the stranger's hard chest.

"I never said you were.  You've got all of your grownup parts in place.  You shave?"

"Once a week!"  He actually hadn't started shaving yet.

"I can tell."  The stranger brushed his open palm against the boy's face.  "You've got some hair under your arms..." he caressed the boy's shoulder.  "A manly chest,  a regular Jack Dempsey..."  he caressed the boy's chest.

The boy began to get aroused, and quickly placed the book over his crotch.

The stranger chuckled.  "You have other adult parts, too, I see.  Have you spooned yet?"

"Huh?"

"You know, kissed."

"Sure, lots of times!" Adults often asked about kissing girls.  Other boys asked about screwing them. You were always supposed to answer "lots of times."

"Banana oil!  Not the stories you tell your friends.  Have you kissed anyone yet?"

The boy looked down at the book barely covering his arousal. "No."

"Would you like to?  Be honest, now."

"No.  I don't like girls."  It was a heavy admission to make to a complete stranger.

"What fools these mortals be, to tell you it has to be a girl!  Any fairy can tell you that boys kiss boys, too."

Boys kiss boys?  Was that possible?  

As if in response, the stranger pulled the boy close and pressed his lips against one cheek, then the other cheek, then his mouth, and they were kissing.  It was bright like fire.

Suddenly he raised his head.   "That was intense.  I gotta go, but we'll see each other again before you go back to Rock Island, ok?"


"Sure."

Then the stranger left.

Through the closet door!

Later the boy was looking through an old photo album, and he saw a picture of a teenage boy who looked like the stranger. He even had the same red sweater.

"That's Bryant, one of my high school friends, at a Christmas party a thousand years ago" Aunt Nora told him.  "You never saw such a cut-up!  After graduation he went to Indiana U., and then I lost track of him.  He's probably got a wife by now, and grown-up kids."

"Or not," the boy said, smiling.

See also: The Gay Ghost Who liked oral

The Naked Man in the Haunted House

When I was growing up in Rock Island, the western edge of my world was Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the eastern edge was Lasalle-Peru, about 90 miles away.  I knew Interstate 80 east to Chicago, of course, but we didn't stop at any of those farther towns.  We visited Lasalle-Peru quite often, for jump quizzes at the Nazarene Church and music contests at Lasalle High School, for orchestra concerts and drama club events at Illinois Valley Community College; and several times a year, usually on Saturdays in the summer, went to Starved Rock State Park.

It's named after a sandstone butte where the Illiniwek (after who Illinois is named) were besieged by the Ottawa and Potawatomie tribes until they starved to death.  The story is probably apocryphal, but there is archaeological evidence of human habitation since the Pleistocene Era.  There was a little museum, a trolley, and a lot of hiking trails down the canyon and to see the waterfalls.

On the way home, we drove into Lasalle for ice cream or hamburgers.  About a block from the Dairy Queen (now a gas station) was a  "haunted house," four stories, dark and spooky, with rotundas and staring windows and a light on in the tower.

My friends told rumors about the place:

At night you could see the image of an old man who hanged himself.

There were secret rooms where cultists performed human sacrifices.

And a tunnel that led directly to the cemetery next door.

One day in April 1973, when I was twelve years old, we came to LaSalle for an orchestra concert and stopped at the Dairy Queen afterwards.  It was about ten pm.  We wandered over to the haunted house, dark except for a porch light and a bright yellow light in a third floor window.

My friend dared me to walk up to the front door and knock.

"The porch light is on -- they're expecting you," he said.

Grinning to hide my fear, I approached the house.  But I only got a few feet.  Suddenly a figure appeared at that third floor window.  A young man, shirtless or maybe naked, with thick wavy hair, a broad face with a sharp chin, and a muscular torso.   He was glaring down at me.

A ghost!

We all ran back to the Dairy Queen.

I passed the house a few more times, but never at night, and I never saw another face in the window.

I didn't think anything of it for years.  Then, while researching my series on small-town beefcake for Boomer's Beefcake and Bonding, I thought it would be fun to do Lasalle-Peru.

And I discovered that the haunted house had a name.



It's the Hegler-Caron Mansion, built in 1876 by Edward C. Hegler, a chemist and engineer whose M&H Zinc Company was the biggest producer of zinc in the U.S.  He also founded Open Court Publishing for free and open discussion of Eastern Religions, especially Buddhism.

Daughter Marie (1861-1936), the first female graduate of the School of Mines in Frieburg, took over the family zinc business.  She married Paul Carus (1852-1919), the editor at Open Court Publishing and an author on religious matters, with 75 books (The Gospel of Buddha, published in 1894, introduced most Westerners to Buddhism). 

During the twentieth century, the family business expanded into the Carus Chemical Company, a major producer of potassium permanganate (a water purifier), and Open Court Publishing into philosophy and ethics (it does the pop culture and philosophy series: The Simpsons and Philosophy, Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy, The Walking Dead and Philosophy),  and into children's publishing (Marie's daughter-in-law Marianne runs a conglomerate of children's magazines named after insects: Cricket, Cicada, Muse, Ladybug, Babybug, Spider.)

Alwin (1901-2004), Marie's youngest son, lived in the house through his life.  He attended the University of Chicago, studied chemistry, and worked for the family company.  He also bought and developed farms across the state, and as far away as North Dakota.  His main leisure interests were astronomy (he traveled to view solar eclipses all over the world) and coin collecting.

At first the house was crowded with aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters, but by the 1930s it had emptied out, and Alwin was all alone -- although he entertained many distinguished guests, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg,  and Peter Mathiessen.  He worked out in the two-story home gymnasium, watched movies in the home theater, and wandered the rooms, remembering old times, thinking of the Buddhist precept of the impermeance of life.


In  1995 he moved into an apartment on the third floor and opened the Hegeler Carus Mansion as a museum  He died in 2004, just before his 103rd birthday.

Of course, I've been trying to figure out if Alwin was gay.

Evidence against: Open Court Publishing is not necessarily gay-friendly.  A 1984 article in their journal The Monist is about "Why Homosexuality is Abnormal."  Of course, he didn't write the article, but still....

And in the 1950s and 1960s, he supported the right-wing John Birch Society.

Evidence for:  no marriages, no women other than family members mentioned in his personal papers.

And who was the naked man at the window on that warm May evening in 1973?  Not Alwin -- he was over 70.  Maybe one of his nephews or grand-nephews -- but what would they be doing half-naked in Uncle Alwin's bedroom?

Maybe a boyfriend, or a pickup?