An Eerie Fairwell To Edgerton

From the very beginning, I could see signs that the whole Edgerton venture was going to be just another headbanging disappointment. Little could I have guessed then that the final straw would be an altercation with a ghost which would close the door to Edgerton all together. Joni, the massage therapist I was sharing the place with, owned the building that I had my practice in. From the moment I set foot in the house, I knew something wasn't exactly right. But I figured it was just an old house, and it had that "old house" feel to it. Besides, most of the town seemed like that. After all, sharing a place with another healing practitioner who would refer clients to me was ideal.

The population of the town is right around 1,000. It was a town full of farmers, kids, and locals who just opened new businesses. Sounded like an opportune place to be. Then I learned that the people there were of Dutch descent. I knew from growing up around the Pennsylvania Dutch that such people shy away from anything that is "new" and are very skeptical of anything that might make them have to think progressively. Soon I came to realize that these people were no different. My ads that I placed in the local newspaper, and even an interview in the same paper, generated only three new patients -- people that were already clients of Joni. For a town that size, I wasn't getting the reception that I thought I would.

Even as far as Joni herself goes, she is a great person and fun to be around, by Edgerton standards. But her own reservations about getting the care she needs, chiropractically speaking, and the fact that she couldn't even pronounce Reiki correctly, brought me to the realization that I was probably in the wrong place after all. I didn't really see much of a "spiritual" component to her practice. It was more about her interest in selling Arbonne products. Even the massage therapist who was sharing the place with her was a very uncultivated redneck. All in all, Joni was nice enough to allow me to sleep overnight at the house so I don't have to pay to stay in a hotel. Besides, the closest hotel was 21 miles away in Luverne. (There were two bed-and-breakfasts in Edgerton, but that's not my thing.)

Even though Joni offered her place to me, I didn't take her up on it right away. I had listed my hours as being Wednesdays and Thursdays from 3 PM to 10 PM. Out of the three weeks I spent taking care of patients there, the first week I had driven down and back all in one day because I had only one patient scheduled on Wednesday. But that was way too much driving, and I realized how quickly I got tired out. A 3-1/2 hour drive one way where all you see is farm fields the whole way was just too much to handle. But the next week were different. During the second week I had a new patient scheduled for Wednesday and the client from the week before scheduled for Thursday. So I stayed at the house located at 321 East Mill Street overnight.

It was a quaint, small house with a kitchen, full bath, and laundry room on the first floor and three bedrooms on the second floor. This is where Joni had lived until she got married several years ago. She retained ownership of the house, and now uses it just for the massage studio and to house family guests when they come to town. Now if the "old" vibe to the downstairs of the house wasn't scary enough, the feeling I got when I went upstairs to the bedrooms was downright frightening. Still, I set up my Aerobed air mattress and settled in. After all, it sure beat paying to stay in a hotel. But later that night, I wouldn't be so happy about my decision to stay there.

Being the nightowl that I am, I decided to go for a joyride late at night. The town of Edgerton was so still that you could hear a pin drop a mile away. So I decided to drive down to Sioux Falls, South Dakota just to see how long it took to get there. After all, I had my laptop with me and I was hungry, and I was looking for a place to take it easy for a while. Just over an hour later I arrived at a Denny's Restaurant, the only one in Sioux Falls. They had internet connection there, and both my need for food and for being online were fulfilled. When I arrived back at the house in Edgerton it was almost 3 AM.

I laid down on my air mattress, felt the eeriness of the air around me, and hoped to fall asleep soon. Instead, for the next three hours I would be constantly woken up by an unseen force. This force was no stranger to me. I knew EXACTLY what it was -- an evil entity that was there to attack me. I knew because I had this exact same thing happen to me only once before in my life, the night after I performed an exorcism in the apartment I lived in in Smyrna, Georgia ten years ago. Invoking the same healing energy I used to dispel that unwelcome spirit, I shrouded the house and myself with protective light in hopes that the disembodied attacker would go away. The attacks did lessen, and at dawn they stopped all together. I was then able to sleep soundly the rest of the morning and into the afternoon.

I didn't think much of what happened during the night. Haunted houses are aplenty, and I've even gotten rid of a few unpleasant entities in my day. But I do so only if the owner of the property asks me to do that. I don't just go around "playing with energy" like a voyeur. But how was I to tell Joni that there is something evil in her place, the house she once called home? I didn't. Right after I took care of my patient for the day, I packed up and went home to Richfield.

Now came this past Wednesday. I received the bill for the ads, saw that the interview appeared nicely in the newspaper, and I was confident that word was getting around that there was a new chiropractor in town. I only had one patient scheduled on Wednesday. My plan was to stay overnight again and spend the day on Thursday going around the city and to neighboring areas introducing myself and posting signs. Joni asked me how it was staying overnight the week before. I said that they energy wasn't very good, but it was probably due to the fact that I was sleeping in an unfamiliar place. I thought to myself I would give it another try though because, again, it still beat paying to stay in a hotel, and I thought maybe this time things won't be so disruptive.

I had gotten only 4-1/2 hours of sleep the night before. So after I took care of my patient I was in no condition to go for a joyride again. I stopped by Tally Ho, the local coffee shop, to get myself something to eat, and I return to Joni's house to spend the rest of the night reading and typing on the computer. I finally felt tired enough to go to bed at 1:30 AM. But instead of getting a good night's sleep, the SAME EXACT thing happened as the week before, and it was now WORSE! This ghost was more aggressive as it not only "stole" my sleep from me but was also poking me with something that was sharp or burning. I didn't even bother to call upon the protective energies. I figured if I could just put up with it until daybreak I'd be fine. But the more I laid there, the more I told this intruder to go away, the more adamant it became. It really wanted me out of there!

I can sense the negative energy around me. It feels like a still, heavy, dark cloud. Whereas some mediums and psychics can actually see spirits, auras, and energies, I feel them and intuit them. By having my sleep "stolen", I mean that I would be sound asleep one minute and then would find myself lying wide awake the next without apparent reason, and this would be repetitive every time I started to fall back to sleep again. But the poking and prodding was something new. Now I knew I was dealing with something I never dealt with before. Still and all, it wasn't in my place to play the rescuer of the house here. Just before daybreak, I finally gave in and said, "You win. I'm outta here." And at 5:30 in the morning, I packed up my belongings, my patient records, and my chiropractic table, and I left for good, never to return.

This event wouldn't end without something positive coming from it, though. As I drove down Murray County Route 1 on my way back home, the scenery all around me was one on the best I had ever seen in my life. Daylight was just starting to creep above the horizon in the East, and the dark silhouettes of the hundreds of windmills flapping in the night sky filled my vision. The planet Mercury sat on the horizon to announce the beginning of a new day. I turned around to see the night sky behind me. Clouds just started to obscure a bright full moon. Despite all that happened, this one vision of the morning sky in Edgerton is what I will walk away with and will cherish the rest of my days. It was as if the Universe were saying that from here on, things will be better.

The Last Call

I was going to write about my trip to Vancouver tonight. But instead, I am writing about something far more sentimental to me.

My interest in healthcare as a career started "by accident," I guess you could say. Here's the story. The year was 1979. I was just a bumbling, nerdy high school kid who had a friend named Michael that I used to hang out with. My activities consisted of taking piano lessons and playing Scrabble. Other than that, I was pretty average. Then Michael started telling me about his dad being a fireman, and about the local Fire & Rescue Explorers Post that trained kids our age how to be firemen and rescue personnel. I figured that sounded like a great way to add some excitement to my life. After all, I was looking for some action, a way to really dive into something that would get my adrenalin rushing. I was looking for a way to "fit in" and be a part of society, and being a fireman would be a great big huge way to do it. So I joined the explorers post that Michael belonged to. Over the course of the next two years, I really enjoyed taking training classes in first aid, CPR, firefighting techniques, and even going to some real-life emergency calls to observe. I really felt that I was onto something great.

Then came my senior year in high school. I turned 18 years old. Now I was old enough to actually join the fire company and become a volunteer fireman. So I did. Reading, Pennsylvania has the oldest existing part-paid-part-volunteer fire department in the U.S. Even though you become a member of one station within the city, you can go to any station and hop on the fire truck if an emergency call came in. Naturally, I joined the station that served my neighborhood, the Oakbrook Fire Company. That was in March of 1981. I now had a place to call my "second home," and many of us enjoyed hanging out there during the evenings. Even though the "Oakies" was my primary base, I didn't hesitate to go anywhere in the city to help fight a fire if it was big enough. Six months after joining the Oakbrook Fire Company, I transferred to another company simply because I wanted a place where I could sleep at night and be right in the middle of the action even during the night. That station was the Keystone Fire Company, and it was located in downtown Reading. Many fellow Oakies warned me not to transfer my membership. But I didn't listen, especially because they never gave me a good reason. Within a matter of days, I found out why.

One night I was at a fire call with the "Keystones," it was a house fire, and I maintained my position outside the burning building, unraveling the hoses when they'd get crossed and maintaining crowd control. During the cleanup process after the fire, the head chief at the time, Swifty Schaffer, called me over to talk to him. I wondered why he would want to talk to me personally. He said that he knew about my heart condition, and he told me not to go to any more fire calls until a doctor gave approval for me to do so. That took the wind right out of my sails. Until then, I was flying on Cloud Nine. Then I began to wonder who squealed. Who could have blabbed that I had a heart condition, a failing aortic valve, to be exact. Interesting. What was even more interesting was that just two months later, my cardiologist discovered that my heart condition had worsened to the point where something needed to be done. On November 4, 1981, I had life-saving open heart surgery at the Deborah Heart & Lung Center in Browns Mills, New Jersey. If that wasn't life-changing enough, all I could think about in the days that followed was when I would be able to get back on the fire truck and be a fireman again.

I ended up spending three weeks in the hospital due to post-operative complications. Despite the internal bleeding and infections, my main question to my cardiologist was about returning to the fire department. He said that I would never return again because I will be taking an anticoagulant medication the rest of my life which would make me more prone to internal bleeding if I was ever injured bad enough. Needless to say, I was not at all happy. Three months later, during a followup visit, I asked a doctor who was examining me if he could write a letter giving me permission to be an active firefighter again, even though I was aware of the risks. He did, and I could feel myself rising up to Cloud Nine again. As soon as I got back home, I brought the letter to Chief Schaffer. But Chief Schaffer wasn't so agreeable.

A friend of mine named Matt, who was a fireman with the city's rescue unit, said to me, "Maybe you'll be allowed to work on the ambulance instead." So I started approaching things from that direction. Why not? At least I can still be of help in some way. I can still help out in emergency situations. I would be saving lives. I would be very happy if I could do that! When I approached Chief Schaffer again, he said that I would have to talk to the city's examining physician. So the next day I did. Lo and behold I was jumping for complete joy when Dr. Hassel approved and I was granted a city license to work on the city's ambulance squad. WOW! I took that license right down to the Keystones, which is where one of the city's ambulances was housed. A few minutes later I was riding on my very first ambulance call ever.

Upon returning to the station, I received a phone call from the deputy chief, William Rehr. He told me that that was not acceptable because in order to be able to ride with the ambulance, I had to be able to perform ALL the functions of a firefighter. That's when I knew I've been railroaded. That's when I knew that the REAL situation was that nobody wanted me around -- period. That was in March of 1982. I walked out of a Reading Fire Department station for the last time as an actual member.

I think to this day that if the guys at the Oakbrook Fire Department would have explained their reasons for not wanting me to transfer to another station I certainly wouldn't have done it. I was told that they were protecting my status as a firefighter because they are an independent annex of the city. Well, it was a little too late for explanations now! Now I could only sulk and be very bitter. I still continued to hang out with my friends at the "Oakies," even though I couldn't go to the emergency calls with them. I was glad to be able to help out in the cleanup work after they got back to the firehouse.

Then one day I met my friend Matt again. He said to me that if the doctors did indeed allow me to work on the ambulance, then there was a sure chance that I could work for the neighboring volunteer ambulance service -- the Governor Mifflin Area Ambulance Service. That was in July of 1982. The president of the ambulance service was a guy named Larry. Larry and my mom worked for the same company, so they knew each other well. My mom explained the situation to Larry, and Larry showed me around the ambulance station. After becoming a member there in August of 1982, I went on to spend the next ten years as an ambulance attendant. I had FINALLY found a place where I felt welcome and where I could really make a difference!

But that's not the end of the story. On weekends I continued to hang out with my firefighter friends at the Oakies and the neighboring volunteer fire department in Kenhorst, PA. That's where I learned about Fire Police. Fire Police are called Reserve Police Officers in most municipalities in the U.S. In states where fire departments are mostly volunteer, they are called Fire Police instead. When I realized that my heart condition did not prevent me from becoming a Fire Police officer, I just had to sign up. That was in September of 1986. Over the next six years, I went on to serve as a Fire Police officer in five different municipalities. One of them was in Cumru Township as a member of the Cedar Top Fire Department.

Now I had TWO fantastic ways to be of service to the community -- as an Emergency Medical Technician on an ambulance, and as a volunteer Fire Police officer. Fire Police, just like Reserve Police officers, function as police officers during times of emergencies or special events. Duties include setting up road detours during emergencies, crowd control, commencing evacuations, and more. It was quite an honor to be given such a responsibility! At the time, my squad Fire Police captain with the Cedar Top Fire Department was Ron Gehman. Cedar Top was a small community, and the Fire Police squad consisted of only four men. A few months after joining Cedar Top, Ron passed away. The fire chief, Richard Trostle, appointed me to be the new squad captain since the other men didn't want the responsibility. I gladly accepted. That was in February of 1992.

One day, on August 30, 1992 to be exact, the Cedar Top Fire Department was called to stand by at a routine training that the Cumru Township Police Department was conducting. They were training that day with highly explosive materials. The firefighters' job was to go through the surrounding woodlands around the training site to hose down any fires that would start after the incendiary devices were deployed. Later in the day, some of the firefighters were getting tired, as it was a very hot day. The police had just set off a very large bomb that shook the whole area. Burning embers were flying everywhere, and we knew that there would be a lot of ground we had to cover. That's when Chief Trostle called me over to talk to him. I wondered what on earth he would have different for me to do. He handed me an Indian Tank, which is a vest full of water that is used for fighting brush fires, and told me to get geared up and go fighting fires. In that instant, I was once again a fireman. This moment in history was captured in this picture that you see. But what the camera could never capture was how high and how far my heart jumped for joy. And that was the last call.