In the summer of 1989, on a remarkably stormy day in early August, I attended my first an only seance. Spasms of thunder and lightning wracked the sky all afternoon with periods of torrential rain. An ideal atmosphere for paranormal activity but not great for walking from the nearest subway if you've forgotten your umbrella.
To make matters worse, it was absolutely freezing in the seance room. Apparently, the spirits of the dead demand their air conditioning be set on high, as if the grave isn't proverbially cold enough already. In fact, it was so cold in the seance room that I worried I might catch my death and join them on the Other Side before the first candle had been lit.
The medium was named Madame Susan but introduced herself as plain Susan. I insisted on adding 'Madame' to feel as though I was getting my money's worth. The full arcane and esoteric effect, as it were. "Susan" didn't sound sufficiently eldritch or appropriately European enough as a name for a person disgorging ectoplasm and interrogating discarnate entities.
Besides myself and Madame Susan, there were five other sitters, exclusively female, ranging in age from middle-age to elderly. They all regarded the lone male twentysomething suspiciously, convinced I was there purely to turn the lights on mid-session and dramatically expose paranormal fraud by dragging a sheet-wearing actor out from beneath the table.
And much as I would enjoy participating in such a spectacle, the truth was I hoped to hear from my recently deceased uncle Chip. When he was alive there was always talk that I would inherit his souvenir silver platter commemorating the 1855 unveiling of the Smutney Monument, a simple stone obelisk originally designed to honor the town's first mayor but which quickly became a notorious phallic pick-up and drop-off point for ladies of the night and their patrons.
Suffice it say, the platter was not found amongst uncle Chip's effects when the family was sorting through his possessions. Where could this coveted object be? Nobody knew and nobody cared. Be content with his Omega watch, I was told, it's very valuable and that stupid Smutney Monument platter really isn't as funny as you think it is. Which is why I was forced to resort to disturbing Uncle Chip's eternal sleep via the medium of a spirit medium. Go to the source, I decided, even if the source has been reduced to ashes and poured into the second-cheapest urn available.
Actually, I was surprised and somewhat annoyed that Uncle Chip's restless spirit had not tried to contact me already. Surely he would be doomed to haunt his own house until the Smutney Monument platter was united with its rightful recipient. His phantom could easily arise from a cold mist in the basement storage area, pointing portentously towards where the platter was concealed. Then Uncle Chip could return to playing in the fields of the Lord or however else he planned to spend eternity. It wasn't hard.
Alas, it looked as though I was going to have to do all the leg work myself, including forking over sixty bucks for an hour with Madame Susan and her beldame acolytes. We sat in a circle and held hands while the lights were extinguished and Madame Susan summoned her spirit guide, whom she claimed was an ancient Cherokee called Singing Crow. To my ear, when his ponderous voice materialized in Madame Susan's throat, Singing Crow's vocal intonation seemed more reminiscent of a Belching Owl or a Hiccuping Parrot than a warrior wraith from the happy hunting grounds.
'There is a spirit named Alec who wishes to speak,' Singing Crow announced as solemnly as his ethereal croaking would allow. 'Does anyone here know an Alec?'
'Alec was my brother,' the woman to my left answered, then proceeded to furnish the circle with a lengthy biography of Alec and an even lengthier description of Alec's final days. If Alec wanted to speak he was going to have a hard time getting a word in edgeways with his chatterbox sister. I wondered what Alec's message from the spirit realm was: 'Stop talking,' probably.
When Alec finally did get a chance to speak, I was reminded of Jacob Marley as performed by an adenoidal teenager in a high school production of A Christmas Carol. Alec confessed he'd been too keen on life's material rewards, neglecting his immortal soul and other intangibles. He didn't want his sister to make the same mistake. She replied by offering to itemize what threatened to be an exhaustive inventory of her New Age credentials until Singing Crow wisely cut her short.
Uncle Chip was the last spirit to speak. Very typical of him to keep people waiting. That's how I knew it really was really Uncle Chip, despite the voice issuing forth from Madame Susan sounding more like my Great Aunt Daphne choking on a mouthful of Hot Tamales. Also typical of him, he was feeling very sorry for himself. Apparently, his immortal soul was trapped in Limbo, or perhaps Purgatory, or just drifting around lost in the ether. He wasn't quite sure where he was, which was yet another standard Uncle Chip idiosyncrasy.
This anxious inability to define his own current location trumped any interest Uncle Chip might have in helping me find the Smutney Monument platter. Every time I broached the subject he selfishly ignored me, responding instead with more tedious observations about his equivocal existence in the limitless void.
'Susan grows weary and the curtain between this world and the next begins to close,' said Singing Crow with evident relief. 'There are profound secrets of the afterlife that can never be divulged,' he continued rather sanctimoniously. 'Including the whereabouts of certain silver platters of no importance, and so we must accept that much must remain occulted in the shifting shadows of the astral plane, especially if it is something as banal as a foolish souvenir that only frivolous young men care about.' Then his presence faded with a puff of ectoplasm and Madame Susan slowly stirred from her trance into wakefulness.
The seance was over and I wasn't satisfied. Sure, I had seen incontrovertible proof of the existence of life after death but if Sunday School lessons are anything to go by I'd more or less taken that as a given anyway. So what was the point of all this sitting in a circle and holding hands clairvoyant business? What was the point of contacting a ghostly revenant if it couldn't even answer a simple question about missing silver platters? And why do ghostly revenants make the effort of crossing over from great beyond if they're only going to complain about their present circumstances? They could at least impart a smidgen of ancient wisdom and timeless truth to the still living, even if it's completely inscrutable or in the form of a Sphinx's riddle.
But no. It's moaning and groaning in the dark for an hour with a woman called Susan and her snooty Cherokee compere. Furthermore, I could easily have purchased my very own Smutney Monument souvenir silver platter using the money I'd wasted attending the seance to locate Uncle Chip's. And I'd still have a few bucks left over to buy a bottle of polish to give it a good clean.
Which is why I decided from that point forward I to let the dead bury the dead, as the saying goes. No longer would I seek to peer beyond the veil of death to divine the secrets of the angels, for I had finally learnt the meaning of The Ineffable: it's simply demiurge and man having a discussion but never listening to what the other is saying. So what's the point?
