3 odd journalism tales - unedited for your pleasure

Ghost sex in the suburbs

Nobody could make up a story this strange: a woman believed that her apartment was full of ghosts, and the ghosts had been raping her repeatedly.

The paper ran a police blotter every week, and one simple two-paragraph item had the headline "Two women report ghost has been having sex with them."

By the end of the week, the headline had reached Jay Leno's monologue. You see a lot of odd reports in the police log, and the ghost sex item was just one more.

The woman who made these claims later dropped by the office. She said her apartment was haunted by the supernatural - and she had proof.

At first, I saw an opportunity for another weird headline. I didn't make the ghost sex connection until she invited me inside the apartment and the interview unfolded. Also, she said the "ghost sex" headline was about her.

This older senior-age black woman had documentation of the ghost encounters - graphic journal entries, Polaroid photos of a blank TV screen, etc. Her apartment was stuffed with religious knick-knacks and imagery.

She pointed to marks on the wall and ceiling that were created by the ghosts. She showed me the bathroom, where the ghosts allegedly rape her every night. She demonstrated by grabbing a towel rack and rocking back and forth. "See that? They're on me." She also re-enacted phone conversations full of profanity and even took me to her neighbor's apartment, where a non-English-speaking woman from Eastern Europe nodded along to the ghost sex lady's declarations.

I made a video of the visit and spliced interviews with shots of her apartment. My former company refused to let us post it. The webmaster said the video poked fun at this woman and would surely go viral. I admit to editing together the strangest moments, but there were a lot more strange moments than "normal" ones. Even the most flattering video about her ghost problem would have been sensational.

The video was posted temporarily on YouTube. In those few hours the video was online, a lone viewer left a serious comment ... saying she had experienced a similar encounter with ghosts.

Marijuanalyn Monroe

A medical marijuana dispensary owner was on the brink of punching me in the face because the story didn't make him look like a medical marijuana savior.

The dispensaries already operated in a legal gray area. The city had banned these businesses, citing federal law, and refused to issue a permit to the dispensary owner. In the story, the owner was candid about his goals of making cash in the green rush and had no plans to shut down.

Anyway, after the story ran, the owner called. He was furious over a cop's quote about complaints from neighbors near the dispensary over activity like selling and smoking weed.

I agreed to meet up again with the owner, who within seconds was shouting in my face. A posse of big black men watched from a few feet away. One guy filmed the encounter as the dispensary owner recited a prepared statement full of legal disclaimers.

The owner ended up leaving town shortly afterward and opened a few medical pot places in Seattle. Fast forward two years, and he was sentenced to prison for drug trafficking.

Mad mad mayor

It was the November election night in a former city I covered. Candidates had gathered in restaurants and businesses to wait for the results.

That year was a roller-coaster ride for the usually inert bedroom community. Not only were the crime stats on the rise, but the city had experienced its worst shooting in history after a gunman went on a rampage at an apartment complex earlier in the year.

The mayor race was at the center of local political drama, highlighted by reports of the mayor's anger problems. Everything was personal with the mayor, a longtime politician who usually came across as an "aw shucks" Jimmy Stewart good old boy. He was best known for serving in the state Legislature. He was also known, at least among adversaries, as thin-skinned and pompous.

Long story short, the mayor was running for re-election and hated the newspaper. The hatred ran back to the previous mayoral election, in which the paper endorsed his opponent. Since then, the columnists poked the mayor relentlessly for glossing over problems, and the reporters held him accountable.

Behind the scenes, the mayor retaliated by trying to switch publication of the city's legal ads to a different newspaper in the region. If approved, our break-even paper would have lost thousand of dollars a year - enough for an employee, and we were already a skeleton crew.

The mayor also refused to advertise in his city's paper during the election, while his opponent bought full-page ads and hammered home an alternative message. Around town, the mayor's snide remark was often quoted as "nobody reads the paper."

As usual, I covered the election night parties to capture the reactions of winners and losers. Many of these gatherings are at local pubs and coffee shops, with everyone hovering around a laptop when the results are announced.

On that election night, I was at the opponent's party when the results were posted on a big screen - and showed him crushing the mayor by double digits. I attended two other election parties to get quotes from council winners, and saved the mayor's party for last - because the story needed his comment.

I knew I was walking into the lion's den. Never in my life had I felt so many angry and icy stares concentrated on me all at once. One councilwoman chewed me out about the paper's coverage and blamed the paper for the mayor's loss.

As I reached the back of the room, the mayor grabbed my shoulders, shook me and shouted "You won!" right in my face. I snapped back that he needed to comment on whether he was conceding the race.

After another non-committal answer, he lectured me on integrity in journalism while his wife bared her teeth and screamed the worst things she could say about my journalism career. The soon-to-be-former first couple stormed out of the bar, leaving his minions to gnaw on me for a bit. Of course, none of this action made it into that night's report, but word spread about the confrontation.

I soon left that paper for another. People have said the former mayor blames the newspaper for ending his political career - the same newspaper that nobody reads.

Bad Religion beat Al Gore to the punch

Downloaded without permission, of course.

Bad Religion is a punk rock band that has been warning us about the environment long before Al Gore started gabbing around the globe.

In fairness, Mr. Gore cemented an important message in everyone's brain, whether they liked it or not.

However, Bad Religion reached me first and made a stronger impression. Years earlier, on a smaller platform, the band pleaded the people to save the planet from themselves while rocking their faces off.

A favorite is "Watch it Die" from 1993's Recipe for Hate, especially the last verse, which sums up the Earth's fate as man conquers nature:

I was born on planet Earth

At a drastic time full of plastic mirth

And every day, I've seen increasing signs

And you would too, if you opened your eyes

You had your chance, you did not try

And now it's time to watch it die.

I recently learned that Eddie Vedder sang the second verse of "Watch it Die." The two singers' voices sound similar even with careful listening, although you can catch a few flutters of Eddie's signature resonance.

I dusted off a couple of discs and was blown away by the profundity of the lyrics, which I knew by heart as a teenager. As I have discovered, or perhaps rediscovered, Bad Religion is a punk rock band that had an impact on my worldview.

Bad Religion, Against the Grain (1990)

But at the time, did I really know what Greg Graffin was singing about? Nowhere near the depth that I do as an adult who works for a living and watches the world turn. Graffin eventually went on to earn a Ph.D. and teaches at Cornell University.

Graffin's songs for Bad Religion are equal parts punk and poetic professor. Never would I have encountered the some of the topics he presents, such as the philosophical "Misery and Famine" from Against the Grain (1990):

Misery and famine, it's a force we cannot see

Misery and famine, don't allow complacency

Misery and famine, great ellipse we bend to thee

Misery and famine, it compels us naturally.

Songs like "Entropy" sounded like a science essay delivered by a pissed off lounge singer for a garage band with the gas pedal floored - and yet the package and all the precise moving parts are catchy if you can keep up: "Something in our synapses assures us we're OK, but in our disequilibrium, we simply cannot stay, it's entropy ... "

Bad Religion also motivated me to look up the word entropy in the dictionary, which defines entropy as "a degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system," although the main part of the definition had something to do with thermodynamics.

Like many corn-fed kids from small towns in the middle of America's Heartland, I discovered Bad Religion when their major label fed me the band's 1996 album Stranger Than Fiction. "Infected" and "Handshake" stand among the band's best.

I saw them in 1996 at the Riviera in Chicago. I was 17 and had never been to a club show like that. I bought a shirt that listed a bunch of songs together in a paragraph with no spaces, and one of the songs was "Fuck Armageddon, This is Hell." You had to look for the four-letter word, and yes, I wore it to school once.

At the show, my virgin ears were blasted with glorious power chords and Graffin's sociopolitical messages. A concertgoer near me knew every word to "Handshake" and shouted along. Here's a clip from 1996 (the subtitles are kind of cool):

"This is the way of the modern world, and something's gotta give"