The West Grand Haunting

October 5, 1988

My father woke me in the early hour just before sunrise on that October morning in 1988, that golden hour whose glow and glory comes only twice a day. I was still in my pajamas when we stepped out, leaving my mom and sister to sleep quietly in bed as Dad locked the door behind us.

The morning air was visibly misty, a thick sheet of fog rolling over the empty boulevard in front of our house there on Grand. There were no sounds; even the birds were silent, still sleeping on their perches or nests. You must understand the importance of this moment for me. 

Mom and Dad were in the "let’s try again’ phase after leaving my sister and me as distraught children for nearly two years. 

Our desktop computer was, in fact, a heavyset desktop computer with that memorable monochromatic headache-inducing screen that showed a basic font in spinach green. Back then, to get to whatever program we wanted to use, each entry had to begin with CD for Change Directory. These were the days when the wrong input resulted in a "bad command or file name response. If you were using a Macintosh, it would reply, syntax error."

There were no blogs or online portals to share on social media. Social media was handled in the classroom, passing notes back and forth behind the teacher’s back when they weren’t looking. Dating apps were a simple piece of paper your crush handed you (or that you handed to your crush) that read:

Do you like me Y ⬜ N ⬜?

There was no swiping right or left.

Our world still slept in darkness, and our only information contained whatever was shown on the evening news. Whatever evils existed in the world—there were many—seldom made it to any viral capacity in our self-contained world and isolated lives.

There was a sense of wonder that morning: the mist, the fog, and, for me, the strange smell of a new world. I rarely had a scarce relationship with my dad for two years. At this moment, we boarded his van, which smelled like orange groves mingling with the scent of Brut (Dad’s go-to aftershave). 

The gray minivan was more of a hybrid cargo van with an illegally installed non-DOT seat bolted into the cargo area. The only window in the back was a rear windshield that stretched the width of the back hatch.

I didn’t ask where we were going in what was a comfortably quiet ride along the grand circle. Later in life, I would learn that the road we drove along was once a drag racing track in 1914, but that day, I enjoyed the newness as we cruised along West Grand, turning right on Sixth Street, right again on Rimpau, and finally at the Magnolia cross street, grinning at the surprise of McDonald’s for a breakfast stop. 

I’ll never forget waiting in line in the drive-through (which I hated being spelled as drive-thru) or ordering two whole sausage biscuits to myself. Dad ordered three pancake breakfasts: one for him, one for my mom, and one for my little sister.

This is my earliest memory of Corona as a younger child. It is the fondest memory of my father and probably the last truly good memory I’ll have while my parents are still married.

After that, everything would be a slow burn toward a living horror story of the waking physical world, the nightmare-scape of a troubled child, and the brief terror of living in a house that hated our family.

...the way things were

I was born on a leap year, on Tuesday, April 29, 1980, in Harbor City, California, Los Angeles. Jimmy Carter was the president of the United States, and Deborah Anne Harry— Blondie —shook the airwaves as Call Me rose to number one on the charts. 

Within a month of my birth, Mount Saint Helens erupted in a cataclysmic event that destroyed Skamania County in Washington state and sent a column of ash so high that the ash surrounded the world while creating a hundred and fifty new lakes and ponds. On the evening of December 8th that year, John Lennon was murdered outside his New York City apartment.

Great Grandpa Oka passed away in 1985 after we moved to Lawndale. Grandma Oka followed him to the pearly gates in 1986. Emphysema.

Great Grandpa Oka, who I am told cherished me, exists now only in vague glimpses. An armchair in Grandpa Oka’s living room and quaint Japanese snacks ranging from rice crackers wrapped in dried nori to small pieces of dried fish patties are flavors I’ll never forget, not simply because I still eat them. All I know is he was there one day, and then suddenly, when I was five, he wasn’t there anymore. 

I was six when Grandma Oka passed away from emphysema. Dad was devastated, though I never saw it. 

Mom told me then that a funeral was no place for a little boy, but Grandma Oka had gone to heaven. That was what death was to me in the early 1980s. 

Dad raised me in Catholicism. Mom raised me in faith, a path I would later embrace with open arms. You were either here in the world or with God in heaven.

Back then, I could only count my days with time. I rushed forward with my heart set on Easter break, Summer Vacation, and Christmas break. Back then, that was what we called it. 

Back then, that was what it was. 

The days were magical. I came home from Anderson Elementary School, changed out of my nice clothes into my play clothes, and I could play outside until the streetlights came on. 

Back then, the hidden gears of life turned everywhere. Grandma and Grandpa Denney moved from their home in Redondo Beach to a handsome townhouse in Brea, California. I remember going there with my sister to spend the night shortly after they had settled in. The streetlights on the roads turned from cold white lights to soft yellow streetlights as Grandma said they would. Their Brea home was beautiful.

It was the last month of the summer of 1987 when Mom and Dad split up for their trial separation. Dad moved out, and my mom’s sister, my Aunt, took over the lease at the house on Freeman Avenue. Mom moved us in with Grandma and Grandpa Denney in Brea. My sister and I powered through our devastation, and when the school year came, we attended Ladera Palma Elementary School. 

I had friends in Lawndale, school friends, and neighborhood friends on Freeman Avenue. As tempted as I am to flex the names of every one of them, the details are as inconsequential to the dread building: inconsequential to the story. They were only punctuations of my childhood, ellipses, and exclamations that faded from the paragraphs in the story of my life.

I didn’t have those friends in Brea. I was alone. Not alone in my grandparents’ home, in the house that felt almost like home, save that it was not. My little sister and I attended school. Mom worked and saved money.

The passage of time moved ever forward, through visiting cousins, aunts, and uncles, and into birthdays. It was just at the beginning of the summer of 1988 that my mom, with cautious optimism, began seeing my dad again. He took us to his company store and let us choose whatever we wanted. We went to some fair outside where he was staying. Just after September of 1988, after lots of visiting, Mom announced that Dad was looking for a new home for all of us.

Which brings us back to October 1988—to where it all began.

Touchstones

While you are young, there is a place where you can still reach your lost childhood. A place between those childish things and putting those childish things away. It is a place where innocence is still navigating the concept of growing up, and for my sister and me, that place was the Root Cellar. 

There, beneath the house, stored in boxes we had not seen for two years, were our toys—the best on planet earth—and those toys carried energy to them.

That energy felt like Lawndale; they felt like birthdays and Christmas; they were attached to memories, to Great Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandma, and Uncle Oka. They were touchstones to some things I could never have again, where great grandfathers die of old age, and grandmothers die of emphysema. Moreso, these were the things that carried those memories, or energies of those memories, these many talismans of what a trip to the mental and emotional gallows in only two years would be to come. 

Fortunately, those two years had not yet passed but would come.

For this reason, a tragedy on a scale of immeasurable childhood proportions, that our house—the house that hated my family—woke up.

The root cellar was a deep place beneath the house, and fitting to its description, a sharp(ish) incline down a dirt path into the heart (and stomach) of the house on West Grand, where the house—and it was a house—sat on a foundation of stones and cinder blocks at its perimeter, and wooden stilts beneath its sturdy (if not unreasonably creaky) floorboards, and carpeted rooms.

I often remember the door to the root cellar being a little different than the door to a medieval dungeon, heavy and wooden, latticed in wrought iron and with as many rivets holding it together. To an eight-year-old, it may as well have been. The reality was not too far off from this, though. It was a door constructed of multiple four-by-eight wooden slabs, about three and a half feet wide and just slightly shorter than the average door.

That sharp descent of a dug-out path into the belly of the house required that adults duck a little entering the root cellar, and as in so many cliché tales of terror, what light was eventually installed there hung from a single wire in its bowels, from the rafters above, casting shadows in every direction, every which way.

One day, for no reason and without explanation, Mom talked with us after we got home from school.

Unless there is an adult, no one is allowed in the root cellar anymore.

It was not an open negotiation. It was a declarative and final rule.

Stormy

Between the setting and hasty exposition, I’ve been so busy fumbling through memory that I forgot perhaps one of the most important people in this story, which is saying a lot because he wasn’t a person at all; I forgot Stormy.

It is 1986, late in the afternoon in Lawndale, after school. He introduces himself to our family under a thick blanket of black clouded skies. Those angry clouds that cover infinitely in all directions choke out the sun.

In this perpetual dusk of inclement weather, Mom ushers my sister and me out of the house into the yard. 

Dad is home, smiling as the sky rumbles in a thunderous complaint about the dryness of autumn in Lawndale and a promise that rain is coming. It is a memorable moment here in Lawndale, Dad standing with the gate open under what I anticipate being a beautiful storm approaching.

The sky is dark, and I am filled with excitement and anticipation. Yeah! Dad is home from work. My sister and I were always happy when Dad got home, but this isn’t why I’m filled with excitement. There is something else. Dad leaves his place at the fence and opens the back passenger door of his car, and there, seemingly out of nowhere, this blur of shiny black fur, floppy ears, and wagging tail rushes past him into the yard, making repeated laps around its perimeter as Dad shuts the gate behind him. The doggy speeds around the yard, his tongue flapping along the slide of his cheek like a windsock. 

No one’s talking. Dad’s smiling—grinning, really—and the doggy charges us headlong. Mom is well… Mom. The doggy continues his charge toward us, and just as he arrives, Mom thinks he’s going to bite, to attack. She lashes out inelegantly with a closed fist and grazes the dog’s snout. He yelps, and immediately, instantly, she’s sorry she did.

He forgives Mom without a second thought, jumping and licking. 

In his body wagging excitement, he knocks my sister over. She’s crying, and our new doggy, well, he’s very concerned. Dad makes a sharp noise at him, a stern hey that catches the doggy’s attention, but he was already sorry before that. My sister is crying because it startled her. Doggy is pushing his head against her, licking her, and pawing his apologies.

Mom is relieved. Oh, he’s sorry. She consoles my sister, who is then a four-year-old with grubby, grabby little kid hands, petting the black Labrador affectionately. 

He didn’t mean to do it and made sure she knew. It was an accident. He’s a good boy. He swears it. He’ll be good for the family.

Memory is faulty in people, and there are holes in this memory that I can’t patch. Missing parts between the lightspeed rush of a full-body-tail-wagging black Labrador and the only minutes that pass until we are gathered around him, huddled so that he is the center of attention, his head turning between all of us like a cartoon that can’t make up its mind on who it wants to look at. He’s a smiling, floppy black Labrador. Dad asks me what I would like to name him.

I don’t know, and I say as much.

When the remnants of my family reminisce on this part of the story, there isn’t a matter of contention. Sure, some details we remember differently, but well into the future, those of us still here will all agree that Mom is the first to suggest a name, and it is the dumbest name anyone could ever have suggested for a dog. 

Extra points to Mom for knowing the toys and cartoons I love, though, as good mothers should. 

How about we name him… Megatron?

Oh, Mom. Transformers? Really?

I am now in the presence of my family and its newest member, the most incredulous six-year-old that ever lived.

No, that’s dumb.

Looking back on this, I must laugh now that I have my kids. Children at that age are so blunt and direct, without remorse. If I were a single man without children, this memory would still be funny, but it is more amusing because I am a father with three of my own. As a woolly-headed kid, I would never have guessed what