Everything You Know Is Wrong

Ah – All Hallow’s Eve. This day rated as my favorite holiday. (Bastille Day was second – serving our Heads of State to the masses). Granted there were times during the punk era when it seemed like we celebrated it daily!







It does bring out creative talents. Gini gave it her School-Of-Fashion-Design-all to enable Chip to ‘come up to bat’:



In fact, each year we felt it was a challenge to gather the Von D’Luccis and let ‘er rip. When we lived at Branch Street in Lowell we were famous throughout the city for our Halloweeen festivities. Literally hundreds would show up in this 8 apartment, century old Victorian house. Each apartment was devoted to some theme such as food, dancing or ‘other’. We even had visitors from Remulac…er…France:



Metamorphosis was not uncommon. Take one bank executive and one software consultant and poof! It’s Magenta and Medusa casually discussing what to do with the guests.



Though my all-time couples appearance for Gini and myself was as Patty Hearst and Gary Gilmour (look him up in your Funk n’ Wagnalls), sad to say there is no photographic evidence to reminisce. However we can ogle the Pink Panther and her alluring tail:



Some of us, however, aspire to artistic heights year after year:













But topping all of these soirees is the all time Zuma/Rodriguez/Von D’Lucci Halloween experience – the Shaw Hospital and its aftermath. To this day it remains the wonderful enabler to the adage, “Everything You Know Is Wrong!”. It occupied the lives of those of us attempting to go to Lowell Technological Institute (now UMass Lowell) and redesign the fraternity experience during the cerebrally challenging 60’s and early 70’s.

Each year, as a teacher, I would reserve a class day for the telling. At one point, while teaching at the University of Lowell (yet another manifestation of LTI), my lecture hall, usually about a third to a half full, would teem to capacity with eager listeners to what became known as the ‘Ouija Board Story’. Fame spread to WBZ radio whose nighttime host, Larry Glick, decided to broadcast the story nationally (11/4/1991), thus including myself in Warhol’s prediction of fifteen minute fame (actually a half hour).

It all began with a the college radio station wanting to have a live broadcast in a haunted house in Lowell. These facts can be objectively viewed at:

http://www.wuml.org/history2.php
(in the last quarter of the page)

The station at the time was WLTI (now WUML) and they had convinced a real witch, from New Jersey no less, to be in on the shenanigans. It was Friday, October 29, 1971. The fraternity heard the first rumblings, however, the next day. Several of our brothers worked for the station and one was involved with managing it. Other reports had emerged about students freaking out at a house near our fraternity house on East Merrimack Street. In fact the house was the Old Shaw Hospital only five houses away. It was a favorite ‘haunt’ of ours because of its imposing architecture and the ‘ark’ in back which was actually a creation of Dr. Shaw.

The radio website agrees that someone who believed she was a witch cooperated with them to do the broadcast as a ‘fun’ endeavor. The hospital was prepared with gimmicks and sound effects. Participants were collected at the school, blindfolded and then brought to the hospital. A séance was initiated. Before the evening was over many of the volunteers would initiate information about where they were and incidences in the history of the hospital. The tape of the show was eventually procured and the events were even shaking up the announcer as his voice quavered and cracked. At one point a charcoal drawing of a girl on the wall was thought to turn blue and have a tear appear on a cheek. The witch finally declared that this was all too much to handle and everyone ran from the house (a la Monty Python – “Run away! Run away!!”). None of the planned gimmicks or sounds had been activated.

Our weekend at the fraternity, so far, had been part of a series of events planned to enjoy with our dates. Saturday’s scheduled activity was a hayride. Gini and I had just started dating and were looking forward to the fun.

My roommate, Terry, was affianced to someone back in New York and decided to forego the hayride. He convinced a few other brothers to indulge in a trip to Toys R Us to purchase a necessary item for one of his ‘hobbies’.

We had been roommates for three years (Mike F had joined us for one) and I had traveled home with him on vacations so I could ‘practice’ on his parents before I took on mine. During those visits it became quite clear that he was a key member of a cabal that partied with Ouija boards (you know, the original internet). Well, maybe not a cabal, just very close high school friends. Many times they severally attested to the strange and bizarre whenever their group ‘seanced’ and the board did its thing.

So as we returned to the house after our golly-gee-willikers hayride, we were met by a darkened house. On a Saturday night?! Cautiously we realized that there was a small cluster on the second floor. The scene was discovered to be candle-lit and the board was very ‘active’.

At this point I will attempt to transcribe from the narrative I did on Larry Glick’s radio broadcast:

“..But when we came back from that hayride, they had the stylus on that Ouija board moving very, very quickly and managed to be describing relevant events to the Shaw Hospital. They managed to describe events that we had not heard through rumors; that we had not heard through the radio station. In fact, the radio station was careful to eliminate certain information from being broad cast over the air. I am sure you are familiar with tape delay… We had managed to pick up this information independently through a Quija Board. And later, after we got this information, we took it down in written form after it was dictated from the board and compared it to the tape from the radio station, which was unedited. And everything we got wasn’t a hundred percent of what was on the tape, but everything we got was a hundred percent accurate. and that pretty much uh brought it to our attention that maybe we were playing with something here and we managed to further investigate the hospital…And I don’t know what Jim (friend of Larry Glick and my student at the time) has told you, but some of the more dramatic events were that the people who owned the hospital, boarded up the hospital after the séance…Not wanting any more college kids to run around ‘spookin’ the neighborhood… And we managed to find out a way to get into the hospital mainly through the Ouija Board after he (Dr. Shaw) had gone through a lot of trouble boarding up windows and doors…we were brought specifically to a spot in the hospital so as to gain access, two of us did, and we were asked to do all sorts of bizarre rituals such as singing of songs, finding of graves and all the information that the… “ (pause transcript)

There’s a lot to fill in here that the radio broadcast did not cover in detail. This posting has gone on for quite a bit. What do you think? Do you want some more of the story?