CINDY LANGE-KUBICK / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Monday, October 30, 2006 6:00 pm
Forget that it’s Halloween. Forget it’s the day the undead awake (now is not the time to argue oxymorons) and the ghosts of the evil ones walk among us.
Clear your mind of dark thoughts and just look at the pictures. (I said, LOOK! There in the left-hand corner, in that grove of trees, Sherlock.)
What do you see?
Does it help to know the photos were taken on a stormy spring afternoon from the edge of Rudge — better known as Lake Street — Park?
Does it ease your mind to know the photographer is a regular guy named Jeff Larchick who lives in a bungalow at the park’s edge, a storm chaser not a ghost buster?
Oh, sure, it’s true, Jeff has heard the stories. Stories about an old farmer murdered on the dairy that used to spread across this parcel of land just south of the old Lincoln General Hospital. And a little girl who drowned in the lake that’s not a lake any more.
He knew firsthand about the way dogs sometimes start to growl at invisible spirits at the park’s edge. Just ask him about the rabbit-chasing beagle that stopped dead in its tracks and froze like the Husker secondary in Stillwater on Saturday, as it entered the block-wide city park.
(No, he hadn’t heard the one — the sad, true story — about an 80-year-old man named Eugene Warren who was murdered and robbed by a 14-year-old boy in 1981 as he took his nightly stroll along the border of the park.)
So you know the history, too. Look again. NOW what do you see?
A low-floating alien? Your great-aunt Tilda? The outline of a crime boss in the witness protection program, his voice electronically distorted to further conceal his identity? A really, really, really giant oak mite? Or something else?
THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRIT OF LAKE STREET PARK, perhaps?
Jeff’s been sending his strange pictures out to local photographers and paranormal experts.
So far, he says, no one can explain the eerie shape that emerges out of nowhere in the corner of his fancy digital camera images.
Photographers here at the Lincoln Journal Star can’t see any funny business. Nor can Dale Bacon, a local storyteller who specializes in spooky.
“I have no reason to believe there’s manipulation,” Bacon says. “It’s just one of those weird things that happened.”
He doesn’t think it’s a ghost. (Spoil sport.) Jeff doesn’t really think it’s a ghost.
“I’m sort of on the fence on that,” says the 42-year-old production line worker. “I can’t dismiss the history of the park, but I’ve tried to explain the photos every way I can.”
And he can’t. That’s why he started e-mailing them to people who might know more than he does.
He doesn’t want the photos to end up on some wacky Web site and have the next Area 51 conference held in the park outside his front door.
He does want to know what’s in his picture. He wants to know just what is lurking in the Lincoln sky on a quiet street, making dogs bark and cold drafts appear out of nowhere. (I’m not for certain about the cold drafts, but it sounds reasonable.)
This much he knows for sure: It’s not moisture. It’s not his thumb over the lens. It’s not Waldo.
It’s something. Something else. Jeff wants to know what you see.
Do you see the halo? That faint glow around the dark oval?
Forget that it’s Halloween.
That looks like the Virgin Mary to me.
And look at the clouds, there, just to the right of Mary, can’t you see it? Cock your head, a little more, a little more, no, to the left. See that black arc? That great-winged Satan ready to swoop?
Prove me wrong. If you dare.
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.