WELCOME TO Mojo Mountain
MMM1; Nickles & Dimes
During my travels I have taken many different jobs which sometimes are more multi-faceted than one might expect. For example, I make herbal remedies and have been known to help folks when they come to me and ask. A lot of times it starts when I strike up a conversation with a client that I clean for. They might have a sore throat or something and I suggest a natural remedy, it just comes up. In some towns, if I'm there long enough, word of mouth does its thing and then the strangest thing happens. People start asking whether I can help them with a problem they're having that isn't necessarily cleaning or health related. They might think that their house needs to be cleansed of one thing or another or perhaps ask if I can help them with something else, something out of the ordinary. Of course I can't help them every time, there is much I don't understand about things. There are also some things that over the course of time, travel and experience I have learned from watching and doing. This is the first story, a re-telling of that first time, the one that started it all and the first time Mojo Mountain "Cleaners" took on a whole new meaning.
There was a woman I was cleaning for long ago who was moving into her new house in the mountain town nearest to where I'd set up camp. I had met her at a coffee house and we had got to talking. Her house was up the mountain a ways and needed to be cleaned. I offered to help, she offered to pay so we spent a couple of weeks getting the house ready to be lived in. One of the bigger projects was to tear out the 70's style shag carpeting in the living room. It was risky as we had no idea what we'd find underneath it but were surprised at what we did find. Underneath that carpet was a beautiful wood floor. It was a dark wood, I don't know enough about trees to tell you what kind it was but I can attest to the fact that it was beautiful. Tearing up the carpet and finding that floor were the last bits before the house was totally done. It was great, I was paid with meals and money so it had been perfect for me. Now that the job was over I bid her farewell and went back to my camp to take stock and figure out what to do next, look for more work or move on.
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It wasn't even a month later when I ran in to her at the coffee shop, I had decided to stay a bit longer as I had a house-sitting arrangement. It didn't take me long to notice that she didn't look well. After I got my coffee I turned around and noticed her gesturing for me to come over and sit with her. When I asked her how she was doing she said that she was "fine" but wasn't very convincing. After a moment or two of silence she told me that she was concerned about her house. When I asked she told me that she thought maybe an animal or something lived under the floorboards, especially in the living room. She told me that at night she heard strange noises coming from the floor, like scraping. She speculated that it was a raccoon or some other animal. I told her I'd be up there the next day to have a look but she asked me to walk home with her right then and maybe stay the night since it seemed whatever it was, it was nocturnal.
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I didn't have a problem going up to her place, we even got a couple bottles of wine and decided we'd build a fire in the back yard and make a night of it looking at the moon and such. It was actually a really good time. It was fun to get to know Rose outside the employer-employee relationship. All but forgotten was the real reason I was there as she got me a blanket so I could crash in the living room. She brought me the blanket but rather than just hand it to me she took a seat next to me on the couch. "Look," she said, "I'm not going to mislead you, there is something funky going on in this living room." Then she told me what had really been happening in her living room and how it might be something more than a family of raccoons living under the floorboards.
At first she had heard scraping against the floorboards, she had described it in town as sounding like raccoons or something but now she came clean about it sounding more like something being dragged across the floorboards. She told me that she would hear it and come out from the bedroom to see what was going on but when she'd get to the living room the sound would stop. First off raccoons scratch at the floor if they're under there, they don't drag things across it, scraping them as they go along. Also, raccoons don't stop just because they hear you coming. At any rate, when coins seemed to be coming up through the cracks in the floorboards she knew for sure it wasn't a forest critter. It wasn't until that moment that I noticed the jars. The living room had a couch with an end table at each end, and both of them had a small jar on it that had coins in it.
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The relief Rose seemed to feel from just having told me was apparent, it was as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. I told her not to give it a thought, she needn't worry with me there, "stuff like that doesn't happen when I'm around," I told her. Truth is, it's rather the opposite should I want it to be. At any rate, once she had gone off to bed I sat up on the couch and took everything in. In the time that had passed since we initially cleaned the house she had decorated it. I noticed a lot of Native American art. Dream catchers, horses with feathers and beads woven into their manes and even a hoop drum with a wolf painted on it. There were rocks and crystals lying about, seemingly randomly but as I looked I noticed that there were certain things in certain areas of the house. One the southern end of the house was a table with some stones and a lantern, one of those metal ones you use a tea candle with. On the eastern side was a dream catcher adorned with feathers and on the western side were seashells and a few nice abalone pieces. On the northern end of the house she had potted plants and a Native American themed picture hanging on the wall featuring a Native woman and a white buffalo. I had a feeling whatever was going on in her house she could handle it.
As I was sitting taking it all in I heard it myself, scraping. In the pale moonlight beaming in through the window I made out something moving across the floor. The moon was full and its light was coming in through the window and hitting the floor. I could hear the sound of something coming closer and closer to me, soon it would pass through the patch of moonlight on the floor and once in the light I'd be able to see what it was. I just sat there, waiting for it to come into view. Finally I saw it in the moonlight, a coin moving on its own across the floor and making its way directly to me at what seemed an agonizingly slow pace. Part of me wanted to curl my legs up under me and go with the delusion that getting under a blanket would make a bit of difference in a situation like this, but I knew better. The part of me that made the final decision had me sitting there, feet firmly planted on the ground, hands resting lightly on knees muttering, "Fear is a choice, fear is a choice, fear is a choice...I will not choose it" over and over. The coin made it across the patch of floor bathed in moonlight and then re-entered the shadows, I could tell it was inches from my feet.
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I closed my eyes muttering something about fear being a choice and tried to keep my breathing in check, I thought if I focused on my breath I wouldn't focus on what this stray coin would do to me once it reached me. Of course that got me thinking about all sorts of other things like what the heck a coin could do in the first place. Then the sound stopped, the coin had come to a halt. I opened my eyes and found myself looking directly into the eyes of an old man. His finger was on the coin and he was bent over, he had been pushing it across the floor. He winked at me and I jumped and pulled my feet up onto the couch under me reaching for the blanket. Seemingly at that same moment Rose jumped, she had walked into the room and was bent over picking up the coin. "Didn't mean to surprise you." She said. She thought that her coming in was what had startled me. Apparently, she hadn't seen the coin move nor seen the old man who had pushed it. She blew it off and put the coin into the jar on the table, she said that there could be worse crazy things happening in her house.
I couldn't go back to sleep right away and Rose had plopped down into the chair opposite the couch where I was sitting. I asked her if she knew anything about the house or who had lived in it last but she had no idea and was pretty indifferent about it. She said that she had been finding change on the floor a lot and hearing the scraping sounds, she seemed kind of used to it, like it didn't bother her that much anymore or maybe she was more at ease knowing I might validate her experience. I told her about what I had seen and thankfully she didn't seem freaked out about it, you never know how people will react when you tell them or affirm for them that there is an entity in their home. They go from fear of the unknown to having the root of their fears validated, how that effects people is different and the next step is up to the individual. For Rose, it meant going back to bed, for me it meant being able to put my feet back on the ground. After Rose left I must have sat there for a half hour seeing if the old man would come back. I recalled him again but this time not out of context, he wasn't really menacing at all. In fact, he looked like a perfectly nice man, all he did was wink at me and not even in some "perverted old man" way. He seemed like the type of fella that would make a wonderful grandpa.
Despite not seeing him or having a "feeling" he was lingering about I started talking to him. I told him my name and what I was doing there and I told him that Rose was a nice lady just trying to start over again as we mortals are wont to do. I told him that if he had ill intentions he should find somewhere else to go and gently reminded him that there are plenty of folks out there who actually deserved being haunted and Rose wasn't one of them. Of course after my little diatribe I fell asleep and had the strangest dream, it was all about the old man. In the dream he was younger though, sort of a prankster. He was building the house, he was sanding the floor, the very floor that coin had come sliding across. It was like I was seeing bits and pieces of his life in that house and they were all out of sequence. I saw his wife, I saw them out back, I saw the kids. I saw the man sitting at a table but I couldn't tell what he was doing. I saw them growing old together, visits from the kids less and less frequent. I saw his wife very ill, I saw her in remission, I saw her sick again, I saw him sitting with her, feeling hopeless and alone, his kids not even calling.
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I saw his wife in agony, she wanted to die at home but kept hanging in there, everyone acting like her continued misery was a miracle. I saw her begging, I saw her try and drown herself in the bathtub, I saw him carrying her out to the living room. They talked and then held one another. He suffocated her with a pillow and she went with a smile on her face. He kissed her on her forehead. Then he was at the table again, this time I could see what he was doing, he had a rather expansive coin collection, they were all in fancy leather bound books and based on the diligence with which he took care of them, it was clear they meant a lot to him and were worth something. I saw him hide them under the house so the kids, circling like vultures, wouldn't get them. I saw the police come and take him away and I then the kids selling the house. The rest went by as though it were a fast forward through time. The house going through changes, the shag carpeting going in, the last tenants digging in the back yard to no avail and finally, Rose moving in.
I woke up with a better understanding of what was going on. It was as though there had been a dialogue between myself and the old man despite the fact that there hadn't been. I knew he had never wanted anyone to dig into the past of the house, he never wanted it drudged up that he was a murderer, he simply didn't want to be remembered that way. He had left it alone when the last tenants were there and the ones who were digging up the yard had been digging up the past as well and the old man didn't like it but he also knew they were looking in all the wrong places. Whether he haunted them or not, whether he was part of the reason they ultimately left or not is anyone's guess, I like to think he had a little fun with them.
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After I shook all the sleep off I reached over and grabbed one of the coin jars. The first coin I grabbed was a sterling buffalo nickel, the buffalo imagery wasn't lost on me. Then I found a VDB 1909 Lincoln wheat penny, I kept looking and finding more and more coins worth far more than their denomination. There was a 1913 Liberty Head nickel, a Saint Gaudens double eagle and an 1874 Liberty Seated dime which trust me, are all worth a lot more than one might think. At the time I knew they were worth something but had no idea how much since I knew very little about coin collecting. This all happened long before the internet so we couldn't just look online. Rose was determined to look under the house and asked if I'd help her so we went up to her place and took turns getting under the house and looking around. I was looking for the leather bound books I had seen in my dream, Rose found the first of them. Every time we found one of the coin books we'd say, "Thanks old man!" and they just kept turning up. By the time we were satisfied we had them all three days had passed. I left the research up to Rose, I had a house to tend to.
I was swinging into the coffee shop a month or so later finished with my house-sitting gig and ready to hit the open road when I ran into Rose again. She looked great and came right over to me while I stood in line. We got some coffee and took a seat and Rose took a deep breath and told me she had taken in some of the coins. She said she was really glad to see me and had something to give me. As she dug around in her considerably over-sized hobo bag she told me that some of the coins she had recovered from underneath her house were worth a lot of money. She never told me how much but did tell me that she'd never have another mortgage payment and handed me an envelope. Inside was a cashier's check for ten thousand dollars. I was stunned. I don't have that false sense of humility where I pretend like I don't want something someone has made the choice to offer me, that whole, "Oh no! I just couldn't! I can't take that!" I know that if I am offering something to someone it is my choice to do so and I didn't come to my decision all willy-nilly, I wouldn't be offering it if I didn't intend for you to have it. Telling me you don't want what I am offering is an insult suggesting that it isn't good enough. Instead, when someone offers me something I just say thanks and accept it with gratitude out of respect for their decision to offer it in the first place, so that's what I did. It was lovely.
As I said goodbye to Rose I reminded her to thank the old man, maybe light a candle for him and just talk to him out loud as though he is there and to bear in mind that respect means a lot to him. Leave the history of the house alone and just live. Gratitude is never a bad idea, I don't want to live in a world where it is at any rate. I realize this story is pretty tame and even has a happy ending, but that is just the way it went down. At the time I had no idea what was to come, this was only the beginning of dealing with these types of strange and unusual events. I suppose these occurrences get less and less strange and unusual the more I see as time marches on. After that first time though I somehow ended up being a "go-to" person for this sort of thing. It was always a mystery to me how people knew to ask. In some cases it was because I stopped off in a place during my travels frequently enough that people remembered me or maybe they had seen me read someone in that way that I do. Whatever it was, it was a snowball rolling down a mountain and it all started with a single coin.