The Ghost and Pancho Villa
Surely there's a rational explanation for the mysterious dusty handprints that keep appearing on the author's car windows. Isn't there?
By Donald Croft Brickner
It is early Wednesday afternoon as I write this — and I can't believe what I've just done: I've walked out to my car with a plastic bottle of canola oil, a can of WD-40 (with its own built-in spray nozzle), and a partial roll of cheap paper towels.
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Police photo of a partial dusty handprint. |
I then did what I had to do to my beloved 2000 Plymouth Neon. Were it alive, it might have said to me, "Don, why are you walking toward me with those items in your hands and arms — and that determined look in your eyes?"
Of course, my car isn't alive — even I know that. Still, I don't know everything.
And I'm getting ahead of myself here. To properly tell you this really peculiar tale, I need to backtrack to two mornings ago — after I'd eaten lunch with friends at the seniors' center in Columbus.
MONDAY
I walk up to the Columbus Post Office entrance this day, and a small lizard runs in front of me only three steps before I open the door. Then he or she is gone.
My final unemployment check has arrived from the state of Florida — yay, sort of (it's for only $45) — and so I walk back to my car. There I conveniently find my luncheon companions, Ralph and Wallace, heading in on foot into the post office themselves this midday. They both walked to the post office, while I drove — with my air conditioner on. In these parts, that makes me a gringo wimp, twice over.
We all had eaten another spectacular pre-noon meal only 15 minutes earlier — tacos with guacamole and sour cream and real-deal Mexican salsa with mega-peppers and cilantro, along with a baked potato — and so now we are preparing to activate our respective planned afternoons: them, driving to and from Deming; me, writing a personal essay entitled, "Rising From the Mesquites."
By the end of this day, however, that title (and its content — all about my adapting to my new environs, toils and neighbors here in southern New Mexico) would be discarded.
Deming is the small city 35 miles due north of Columbus, and the only one in our immediate area. The 70-mile round-trip costs me $10 for gas now, thanks to the nation's ever-spiking gasoline costs. I figure the drive will cost Wallace a few bucks more than that in his aged truck.
Wallace agrees to deposit the unemployment check for me into my Deming checking account, which isn't his bank, or Ralph's. There is only one small branch bank in Columbus, and it's not my brand.
"If it saves you the $10 to make the round-trip drive into Deming, that's money worth saving these days," Wallace says. Few Columbus residents are particularly well off financially — and that includes the three of us.
I'm starting out on a new life from scratch here in Columbus. I know it, and so does everyone else who's heard of my "escape" from Tallahassee in late March.
Which is another story for another time.
I'm not nearly as lost or lonely as I expected to be here, though, even though I remain unsettled.
My landlords are Jim and Susan, who met while both were living in Hawaii prior to moving to Columbus 12 years ago. Jim writes weekly articles for Deming's newspaper, builds Web sites and a self-designed truck, among an array of other remarkable and successful tasks, while Susan is a desert garden expert and a yoga instructor in their home (which Jim built, in part using straw) that stands next to mine (also built by Jim, using straw). I help them out, parenthetically, mostly by digging up weeds on our shared property, which all belongs to them.
When I have questions about this or that, I usually approach either Jim or Susan. And goodness knows, there's lots of stuff in this strange land to warrant seeking answers about — particularly when one is a native South Floridian.
Here's but one example — and so you know, not only weren't Jim or Susan able to figure this out, but neither were the Columbus Police.
About four months ago, two weeks after my arrival here, I'd apparently had my new car title and registration, plus my passport, stolen out of my car's glove compartment. That was the opinion of the Columbus police officer, anyway, who took down my loss information and filled out a report on it. He even warned me afterwards that my New Mexico license plate might be next to go. The thieves, he reasoned, would want the plate to go with the stolen registration, and silver Neons are relatively commonplace around here.
My initial reaction to the missing papers then was that I'd simply misplaced them, even though I'd conducted an all-night search before going in to report their loss. But the cop pretty well convinced me that if I'd left them in my car someplace (which later proved to be so), theft was the most likely cause for their disappearance.
Yet, I thought, how brazen of someone to open my driver's side door (the only one I ever leave unlocked around here — since it can't be unlocked from the outside) and guess that I'd have left key personal papers inside. This would have been while stretching across to my glove compartment, smack in "downtown" Columbus (which is made up of 2 1/2 blocks) in broad daylight, the only time I ever go downtown. On all other occasions my car is always locked, and always parked in an obscure or protected setting.
Still, shortly after moving in to my first temporary setting here out in the desert north of Columbus, I'd begun to notice single, full-palm handprints made of dust (!) planted on the windows of my car, usually on one of the two windows in back. Based on what the policeman later told me, then, I figured my car was being "marked" by the same desperadoes who'd overtly stolen my title, registration and passport.
This "marking" occurred countless occasions both shortly before I discovered the papers lost, and for two weeks or so afterwards. Several folks insisted the local kids were just peeking inside my car (as kids do), but I said, no, these were open-palms dust prints, not cupped ones as would appear if blocking the sun while one peeks in. Moreover, one of the strange qualities of life in the desert is that cars aren't usually all that dusty (why, I have no idea) — and on one peculiar occasion a clear dust palm print showed up within an hour of my having had the car washed! Ergo, the palm prints were not only likely applied somehow when no one was looking — not that easy to pull off around here, truly — but the hands planting them on my car had to have dust on them prior to applying their prints. And who wouldn't notice someone reaching down in the dirt outside, and then walking over and plopping dust (and their open palm) on a rear window of my car?
Further, these open palms, always with all five fingers spread apart,were often so clear, I was (passingly) tempted to ask to have them fingerprinted. But after my second visit to the police — who actually took a photo of one such palm print — I opted to pass on showing the authorities any more of them. They really weren't intrigued.
About two weeks after reporting my papers lost in my first chat with the police, I found my registration, title and passport — right where I'd left them, "so I wouldn't lose them," in my seldom-used front seat compartment separating the driver and passenger seats.
The palm prints, however, continued to appear.
No one had an answer, until this couple from Colorado, a couple of metaphysical book writers, pulled up at neighboring Pancho Villa State Park in their RV. The location would prove apt, given the observation she'd make to me (while admitting she read auras, as well). The two showed up at a seniors' lunch about three months back, and sat across from Ralph, Wallace and me. The wife, Glenda, then made this casual passing remark, as if it were an act of assistance intended for those who, unlike her, can't "see" all that goes on around us day in and day out as she can.
I'm among the local blind. I admit it. I'm still waiting to see my first UFO.
"There are a lot of ghosts running around this town," she proffered. "You wouldn't believe it. They're all over the place. And they're still lost and upset about getting killed by Pancho Villa and his raiders in 1916. They don't realize they're dead yet."
As most of you know, tiny Columbus' primary claim to fame is a relatively well-known — and certainly well-documented — historical event: Well before dawn on March 9, 1916, Mexican General Francisco "Pancho" Villa led 500 to 600 "Villistas" revolutionaries across the US border into then-sleepy (literally) and peaceful Columbus, passing a slumbering US Army camp on the way to the town three miles to the north of the Mexican border. Concerned more with pillaging than killing, they set buildings ablaze — but 18 Americans, mostly civilians, were killed nonetheless. Some 70 to 75 Villistas were also killed after US soldiers were awakened by the ruckus, and then fired, among other weapons, a machine gun at the Villistas while they returned to Mexico. No definitive reason was ever given for General Villa's motives in ordering the raid.
In any case, in the face of no better explanation, I told Jim that I suspected the clear, dusty open palm prints were "the work of ghosts." Jim marginally reacted, at best.
He and Susan aren't surprised by life's anomalies in the desert any longer.
TUESDAY
It's late morning, and I stop by the Columbus Public Library prior to having lunch again with Wallace and Ralph. I get into a spirited chat with a library volunteer over this and that, and when I step outside to my car — to drive a half-block over to the seniors center, with my air conditioner on — I notice something that stops me in my tracks: another fresh palm print, very clear, dusty and thick, planted on my closed drivers' side window.
This is a first. All previous palm prints had appeared on my rear passenger windows. The "ghost" seems to be escalating its brazen activity.
It had been at least two weeks since I'd noticed any prints on my car. And the timing of witnessing this new one strikes me as being too pat, and certainly way too coincidental. I suspect my buddies.
But Wallace and Ralph swear up and down they know nothing about the new print, nor do they have any idea who might have planted it there. In fact, they seem eager to see what one of these things looks like when, after lunch, I take them outside to my Neon to show them the print, first hand, so to speak.
Ralph pretty well dismisses the handprint as having been put there by someone for some unknown reason(s). Wallace is slightly less convinced; he admits he's never heard of anyone else in Columbus with such window prints, and he's lived in the village for five years. Further, he, too, is struck by the thickness and clarity.
Neither of them buys into my ghost theory. They know I'm half-kidding about it.
Before I head north of town to do laundry, however, I go out of my way to have two more Columbus acquaintances I run into check out the print. Outside of the post office, Walt walks over and is pretty sure the print is mine (it isn't — I don't open or close the door by placing my hands on the driver's-side window, ever), and that it's probably static electricity, or something.
Charlie, meanwhile, whom I pull out of the library, is mostly just amused. He has no answer for my diverting little mystery, either.
I then plant a full palm print of my own on the car, near the other one, to see if something shows up. Nothing results that day, nor on the next.
WEDNESDAY (TODAY)
I'm having lunch again this late morning with Wallace and Ralph, and when I bring up the subject of the palm prints once more, they both listen — albeit a lot less enthusiastically than the day before. Ralph, in fact, seems a little annoyed with me at this stage because I'm continuing to remain so worked up over this.
Traces of yesterday's "ghost" print remain on my window even after I wiped it off, I notice — a curiosity that might prove noteworthy, I suspect. Meanwhile, there is no sign of the print I'd left there.
I tell Ralph I'm not worked up. I'm having fun — that, and I'm writing about it.
"Someone is putting their handprint on your window, that's all," he says, shrugging.
"Why, Ralph?" I ask him. "What's this person's motivation?"
"To get you upset," he counters.
"But I'm not upset," I say. "I'm simply looking for a compelling explanation — and I haven't heard one yet."
Wallace intercedes, and suggests I perform an experiment when I return to my apartment: Put cooking oil on my palm, and try placing that on a window, and see what results. Ralph concurs, only he recommends I use WD-40. It's good for your skin, as well, he adds.
So here I am, in the throes of scientific experimentation. In a moment or two, I'm going to go back out to the Neon and view my two sets of open palm prints — two made with canola oil (one thick and drippy, and the other after I wiped my hand off with a paper towel), and two made with WD-40. I'd sprayed WD-40 on my other hand, one to make a print just as thick and drippy, the other after wiping the silicone-based metal parts cleaner/loosener off with a towel, too.
But before I check out those results, I want to throw in something to consider that I found after running a search at the library today. It's a report by a Janet Kennish in September 2002 about purported "ghostly" handprints appearing in a window at a British pub called The Royal Stag:
"The Royal Stag has provided the locals with good fun and pulled in the tourists to see the ghost hand on one of the bar windows overlooking the churchyard. At various times it has been claimed an outline of a palm print and fingers of a tiny hand appears on the window, despite attempts to clean it off, and claims that the glass has been replaced several times." (Emphasis mine.)
Now, for today's experiment results on my poor, innocent and trusty Neon.
Well, isn't that a disappointment. And what a mess, too! Forget about a hand covered in either vegetable oil or WD-40 being responsible for this mystery. After three hours of sitting out in the open desert, no dust stuck to either of the car's rear windows, as the result of sticky, unclear and highly runny palm prints drenched in either gooey application, thick or slight. I'm actually surprised by that.
(So you know, too: Don't put oil or WD-40 on your windows, regardless. Only window cleaner will take off either of the applications — after scrubbing. Yuck.)
So I try one last (and dead-final) experiment: I stick my open hand in the dirt, and plant my full palm on my passenger-side window — and that, at least, is promising. It exhibits much of the clarity of the dust print found early Tuesday, only it's just not nearly as thick (nor the least bit as photographable, either).
Thus, I've come to a conclusion: Those clear prints were made by dusty open hands, placed palms-down, fingers spread, on my Neon's windows.
That's a lock.
What's not so clear is whether the bearer of those dusty handprints was, you know. . .
Alive.
With more than 17 years in newspaper journalism, Donald Croft Brickner is an oft-published philosophy and essay writer on the Internet, and only just recently moved to Columbus from Tallahassee, Fla. Brickner has his own archive at the online The Radical Academy, www.radicalacademy.com, featuring (at this writing) 11 "ontologically empowered" social critiques, with more sure to follow.