A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven

by Corey Taylor

  It was the night before Halloween, which was on a Saturday that year. My “guardians” were out because it was Friday, and why stay at home with the family when it was a Friday? My sister was staying overnight with a friend. I sat in the house, contemplating what I should do. I was, of course, out in the boonies with no adult supervision. Should I start a fire? Should I look for a gun? Should I get high? Should I drink a beer? These were all wonderfully obvious options for a twelve year-old boy. But in a foreshadowing of good judgment I would not possess again until my thirties, I finally settled on watching TV in peace for once. I pulled on the power button, and the twenty-inch tube beast fired up with a spark and a flash of white light streaking across the screen. It just happened to be on channel 6; the Count was giving some speech dripping with drivel and useless vaudeville throwaways, and I was just about to switch it to channel 3 and look for a video when he announced that night’s feature: Night of the Living Dead. I had never seen it—hell, the only horror movies I had ever watched were the children of Halloween, like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and a weird one called Happy Birthday to Me, which starred one of the girls from The Waltons, I think. This was something different. So I plopped on our secondhand couch, lit a stolen cigarette, and hunkered down for a nice, scary movie.

  Needless to say, it fucking terrified me.

  First of all, it was in black and white. Black-and-white films to me are much more scary; I do not know if it is the graininess that somehow gives it the feel of a documentary that actually happened or what, but I get supremely fucked up by black-and-white films. Second, the house where they eventually hole up looked exactly like the fucking house I was living in, so after an hour I was bouncing between watching the movie and looking out the windows for starving naked zombies feasting on victims or random bugs. By the time the film was over, I was so fucking scared I actually welcomed the presence of the drunken assholes as they arrived from a night at the bar—at least I was not in that damn house alone anymore. I headed up to my closet for bed. Needless to say, even with a house full of loud people, I was still unable to fall asleep very quickly. Every noise was a zombie invasion. Every voice seemed to be calling my name, hungry for brains and blood.

  After a while I came to make peace with the house, the irony being that shortly after I did, we moved again anyway. But I had learned a valuable lesson in that time: sometimes there is nothing to be afraid of. Sometimes it is your imagination and nothing else. I figured out the hard way that it is the threats you can see that can do the most damage—and usually do. Because of that house, I stopped worrying about the things that were not in plain sight. Maybe that is one of the central themes for this book: stop stressing on the shit that has not happened. I know there are people living in houses that seem to have uninvited roommates, and those interlopers tend to keep them on edge. My advice to them is take back your house—do not be intimidated by the, shall we say, extracurricular activity. Do not hire an exorcist unless you enjoy the process of cleaning up incense and sage while also drying off the walls when they are covered in holy water. If that is your kink, fucking have at it. In fact, make the priest wear leather and a helmet to enhance the sense of drama. Go for broke: play the musical score from Conan the Barbarian—that will get you fucking pumped, and it is also about as useful as bringing in a well-dressed holy man with a canteen full of H2O blessed in a glorified bird feeder where strangers dipped their grubby fingers.

  The best thing to do is what I said before: take back your house. Walk around and yell—it is even more effective if you do it buck-ass nude. Throw your own stuff; it will confuse them as much as anything else, and at least when you break something, you know who did it. The main message is do not be afraid of them. You may experience some physical contact and you might even encounter a situation in which they try to hurt you. But my opinion is that it takes so much energy for them to make a fuss and so little for any of us to brush it off like nothing happened. You are going to have times when you are uneasy—that is natural. The creep level on a poltergeist is pretty high up there, and it is just plain unnatural for things to move on their own. But that moment is brief and fleeting; once it passes, life goes on just the way it did before the chandelier started swinging and blinking or the drinking glasses began pushing themselves out of the cabinets. Clean it up, throw it away, and move on—it is as simple as that. If you want to feel something, get pissed because now you need new glasses. However, be constructive with that wave of emotion and chastise them like children. It is an energy akin to children who do not know their own strength. Every once in a while you are going to have to clean up after them.

  And as I said, there are better (or worse) things to be afraid of. Humans are notoriously atrocious to each other. I think you have a better threat of home invasion by real thugs than by ghostly ones, and that kind of violence leaves a mark that lasts longer than anything else on the planet. It is not like we live in the jungle and are surrounded by big cats. It is not like we live on the Great Barrier Reef and have to make it to land before the great whites swim up from underneath and chew the fuck out of us in a massive and spectacular breach. It is not like we sleep in a hammock at night and there is a chance a brown recluse spider could crawl on our face and make us necrotic with one fatal bite (well, no one reading this book anyway). The majority of the human rat race really just kind of rubs shoulders with . . . well, each other. There is the rare bolt of lightning and the occasional circus elephant rampage, but the only truly viable threat is the motherfucker next to you on the bus. Sorry—I know a lot of hippies and liberals want to ignore that idea and feel that if we all start drinking the same milkshakes, there will be world peace and renewable fuels and bullets that only chastise people. Life does not work that way—life only gives you the pieces. You have to put the puzzle together yourself.

  I am not saying the next person you sit beside on the trolley is a serial killer either. I am simply making a point to the people who suffer unneeded paranoia and stress because of the haunts in their homes. What I am saying is that there are other things that deserve that kind of attention, and if you waste those emotions on things that do not really need it, you will not see the real shit coming until it is right in your face and unavoidable. Nightmares have enough fuel in the subconscious without throwing more lambs to your lions. This is your life, those are your things, and that is your fucking home. Dissipate their power and mend. So they come back—who gives a wet runny shit? Do it again, and again, and again until it quiets down. Their sense of “daily chores” is about as innocuous as a mouse fart on Sunday. There is nothing they can do to you that is truly dangerous as long as you know they are there and you know it is coming. After that, it is as easy as being calm and taking names.

  I knew the risks when I started writing this book. I knew how people would regard a whole tome about this crazy person who sees and reacts to ghosts. But this is the great part about being me—I do not give a flying fuck what people think about me. You show me an expert who knows all the answers, and I will show you a man who closes his store down before he has made any money. You can believe whatever you want. You can even expound at length about how these “beings” do not and will never exist. It does not change the fact that I have had these experiences. If you are going to call me a liar, step to my face and do it. If not, shut the fuck up. I am not saying there is no merit in any of their arguments. As a man who puts no stock in God and his Sunshine Band, I do not blame them for a second. But I deserve the same in return: you were not there and you are not me. I may go on about religion, but I do not condemn the people who use the practice in their lives the way it was intended. I have wonderful friends who are Christians, like my friends in the band Skillet, and they are some of the best people I have ever met. I only really crack off when people commit hell in heaven’s name. The others are safe from my brutality. I do my best not to make sweeping statements so I do not get swept up in hype and hypocrisy. I also do not rail against the other en
d of the carpool, the ones who do not subscribe to anything that has not been proven or at least warrants a special on the Discovery Channel. All I say is that this is my story and this is what I have seen and been through. This book is for sharing, helping, and exploring—nothing more.

  When it comes to what these spirits are and why they are around in the first place, religious doctrine gives few answers that really give me satisfaction. Maybe that is my own bias getting in the way of embracing their side of the fence, but I doubt it. Catholics and the like have their rituals to deal with the phenomena, and yet it never seems to do any good. Plus, there is no practicality about it; a house swarming with invisible rascals does not even register if you throw some suds around and light some candles. They may enjoy the prayers and the attention, but who knows? Almost every testimony of ghostly confrontation that I have heard or read about that includes an exorcism has revealed that it never solved the problem, and the family is left helpless and eventually moves away. Man, FUCK THAT! When you apply a more realistic approach to the issues, it may not stop these things from happening, but at least it gives you a sense of propriety, that this house is yours and no one is going to drive you from it, ever. It takes time and application, but it builds that peace that only the strong can understand. You have to be strong in the face of fear; it is the only way to leave that indelible mark on what is yours in life.

  On the flip side, the scientific and generally pragmatic communities really just disregard any mention of anything as fantastic as ghosts and hauntings, despite countless bits of evidence and stories to the obvious. The extent of their imagination consists of zeros and ones, theories and studies, white coats and black holes. They continue to look to the unexplored heavens or depths, concerned with proving their own ideas while disproving others, though these may have merit or none at all. The only comparison I can make is how most people who can afford to donate to charity choose to do so as far from their front doors as possible, while more pressing issues closer to home are ignored or disregarded. That is the way I see it anyway—I may be right or I may be wrong. But truth be told, I at least know the difference between conjecture and a statement that, in retrospect, may make you look like a fool. I refuse to believe that the universe is the last frontier where fabulous mysteries reside. This world is lucky enough to have developed in the first place, through a collision of meteors, water, and wayward bacteria. Who is to say this planet, with all its beauty, has no capacity for the existence of the paranormal? Things like spooks and the like may be a part of the reason many of the “gods” and myths were created hundreds of years ago. There may well be explanations for everything I have said. Maybe I saw a human in Cold House. Maybe there was a person in the corn outside of Indianola. Maybe I was blown down the stairs on Foster. Maybe I was victim of mass hysteria at the Mansion. Maybe there was nothing in Farrar. Maybe my house on the Circle simply moves around and settles, like most houses its age eventually tend to do. Maybe all of this is nothing. Maybe . . .

  Then again . . . maybe not.

  What if I am onto something? God, could you imagine that? Could you imagine the looks on the faces of scientists, physicists, mathematicians, theorists, and geniuses around the world? They would pause, put down their chalk at the blackboard (because that is how I imagine all of them at any given time of the day), and quietly ask, “Are you telling me a brash, loud-mouthed heavy-metal singer with no actual training nor any discernible education put together a hypothesis about the existence of spirits and how it relates to energy . . . and it was right?” I can almost hear their heads exploding. I have been saying it since I threw a desk at my ninth-grade English teacher: be careful how you perceive the ones around you. Just because you are smart, that does not necessarily mean you are clever. The same people who crack the codes of the universe are still completely oblivious to how you keep brown stains out of white underwear. I figured that shit out in junior high school—simply refuse to wear underwear. But what do I know? I am just a brash, loud-mouthed heavy-metal singer and so on and so forth . . . .

  Now, I am the kind of rabid bastard who immediately jumps to the extreme on things. So the possibility of me being right about these phenomena from a scientific point of view has me chasing dragons. I see myself accepting a Nobel Prize in science, getting the sash and the cash while flipping off the audience with my tongue sticking out. They could do a special on me for Nova, a wonderfully underrated, underappreciated program on PBS that I have watched for years now. I would book myself on the talk show circuit and say unbelievably inappropriate things like, “I bet Britney Spears smells like hot garbage from the waist down . . .” simply because I fucking could. I would be the toast of towns around the world if my deductions were indeed plausible and provable. I would be the one-eyed man in the blind kingdom, kicking people in the ass when they were too slow in the buffet line and tripping the guys who made fun of me in high school. I would be emperor of all.

  The problem is that when I think about that shit I am reminded all too often that I am no amazing scientist. Hell, I have to be reminded to put the fucking seat down in the bathroom (one soggy butt and I am an asshole for life . . .). So I am not trying to outdo Galileo or outwit Newton and his ilk. But crazier things have been possible. I am reminded of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematician from India who did almost all of his research in the middle of nowhere—he once applied to a college and failed because the only course he passed was mathematics. It was only after he submitted various papers to academics in England that his genius was really discovered and fully realized. Ramanujan went on to revolutionize the medium, with breakthroughs in mathematical analysis, infinite series, continued fractions, and number theory—all of this from a man who simply taught himself and unlocked the hidden power of his mind. Think about this: Ramanujan tragically died at the very young age of thirty-two. With all that he was able to achieve in the time he had, imagine if he had lived a longer life. Think of the possibilities. This is not a story of sadness; this is a story of inspiration, with a very simple message: the only limitations in life are the ones you conjure up for yourself and, thusly, then allow to control your destiny. Without those shackles, you can be invincible.

  I fear again I may have failed my mission with this book. I wanted to examine instances in which the paranormal was a factor in my already loony life. I wanted to cast the twelve-sided die on the idea of God and deal with His supposed existence. I wanted to defend my position as an atheist and yet maybe make some sense of all these wonderfully amazing mysteries that seem to descend on my habitation with alarming frequency. I wanted to put forth different ideas that had nothing to do with superstition, myth, legend, religion, or mysticism to try to explain what these spirits, spooks, ghosts, and such could possibly be when we strip away the sitcom side of things. I do not know if I accomplished any of that. I am not even sure if I answered my own questions. Christ, did I invent new questions? At the end of the day, how far did I really go with all of this? Was I meant to know the truth, if there was any to know at all? In my quest for enthralled enlightenment, I may have left the safety of the street lamps and plunged a little too close to the alleys our parents warned us away from when we were young. But of course, no one learns anything sitting on the curb—you have to cross that street to really know what is on the other side.

  I have been reading recently about several fascinating studies that are going on involving writing information—really truly encoding programmed knowledge—onto energy itself. Think of that for a second. Can you understand the ramifications of that idea? It has me thrilled and intrigued. The idea that we could eventually emboss light and energy with information—to possibly be able to control that energy with intelligence—is astonishingly exciting. Could you imagine sending messages on a beam of light? Not that stuff we use today, like fiber optics and whatnot, but using beams of pure energy for communication. It is one step removed from using that same energy for transportation. The laws of physics basicall
y state that we, as not-so-durable humans, could not endure space travel physically. Okay, but what if the secret to long-distance space travel exists in the work I just described? And more in keeping with the theme of this damn book, what if this study, as a side-effect, proves my “intelligent energy” idea? If we as humans can write or encode energy with information—more to the point, somehow program the very electrons that make up the universe—how is it not plausible that a soul (energy), over a vast period of time and with enough power of will and thought, might imprint on that energy its personality (information), and as a result, after the physical form has died, its soul can go on with all that knowledge for an incredible amount of time because energy can neither be created nor destroyed? The human body is equal parts organism, supercomputer, and high-powered battery. I refuse to believe, with all these pieces and all these clues, it is that far-fetched to assume that this may not be possible. I am not trying to convince myself of anything; I have “seen the footage,” so to speak. I may be trying to convince you that what I am saying has gravitas, but at least I am not cribbing notes from a shitty horror movie.

  However, that leads me to the other revelation that I had as I was writing this book and putting this all in place. So assume for a moment that this idea of programming energy is a realistic endeavor. By all accounts and from what I have read, the progress has been slow but promising. So if we accept that as a viable component to this next equation, doing so makes this next set of ideas very interesting, even for a cynical bastard like myself. Let me explain: there have been other studies conducted that have looked at the world from the standpoint that planet Earth—from the seas to the air, from the country to the cities (yes, the cities), from the rock foundations to the humans who scamper across its face like “cells”—planet Earth might just be considered a superorganism. Yes, that is right: Earth, if you look at it as a whole, might be considered a single living being that just happens to have several species and communities clinging to it and shaping the way it “lives.” If you think about it, it is not so crazy. Cities, with all their traffic, progress, and citizens, are not that far off from how human cells work or how organs pump blood and various fluids through the body, keeping us alive. What if everyone on this planet was keeping Earth alive in the way that our assembled cells, bacteria, fluids, and energies keep us alive? Physicist Jürgen Schmidhuber says the same pattern works on an intergalactic scale as well, from galaxies to universes. It is indeed an awesome idea.