I used to not believe in ghosts. When I was a boy in San Jose, Calif., we had a sandbox in the backyard. An old tree stump with a face on it poked up from the corner of the lot.
We joked that the stump hid the spirit of an old Indian. The face looked male—sort of a dilapidated shadow of a big-eyed tiki. I imagined I was carving, but I don't think I accentuated its natural face at all. I remember when I was 3 or 4 I would take a rock and trace the contours of the eyes, an imaginary mouth and frown. I didn’t think it was really a spirit. But I was drawn to the curves of its face-like form and wanted it to be even more pronounced.
I never really believed the stump harbored an Indian spirit. Even when the house creaked late at night and the family joked, “It’s the old spirit,” I would just laugh. I guess I was braver then.
I was a teenager when I saw a woman sort of disappear from the middle of a road near Howard’s Mini Market. I brushed it off as nothing. Later, in my 20s, I saw a man sitting in a chair in the middle of a trailer park driveway with his mouth hanging open. It was across from an old roller hockey rink. I remember doing a double-take and thinking, That was weird. Was that man really there?. My girlfriend at the time had also seen the headlights shine across his coal-eyed gaping silent scream. It had given me goosebumps, but I still thought it was just my fiery imagination.
A few years later I heard from a kid who lived in the trailer park. He said there was a man murdered or died in the hockey rink, which was a bowling alley previously. He said the man was older, that he was killed/died in a chair.
So, did I see a ghost? Some say the hockey rink was haunted.
Again in my 30s I saw and heard a few ghostly occurences that again made be second guess my disbelief in the supernatural. I'll save those stories for another time, but I was certainly convinced at that time of the supernatural. Then of course my research for Lords. It wasn't just a myth about creepy old men. There were ghosts stories too.
I even recently spoke with the vice principal of a local school who said one of his campus buildings is surely haunted. He said too many people have experiences with the unexplainable there.
I think the Lords of Bakersfield are like my childhood disbelief in ghosts. The disbelief I had in a set of weird conspiracy articles about the local Lords, which at the time just made me laugh, also made me think, This would make cool book. A sketchy timeline was already there. Characters were loosely drawn.
Once I did the research I still wasn't so sure the Lords were real. A meeting with Robert Price didn’t lead anywhere except to him sort of trying to bash my character in jest. Whatever. I think it’s funny and put his verbage on the new Lords of Bakersfield MySpace (myspace.com/lordsofbakersfield).
I guess as with any kind of digging, if there's something there, you run the chance of eventually hitting the vein. Ex-cops have warned me not to go too deep in finding out Lords of Bakersfield stories. I get weird emails all the time, death threats—Bakotopia magazines were wrapped around bricks that said, “You’re next.” It’s nothing new. People just want to keep the myth alive.
Now I’m not saying I hit some kind of Lords of Bakersfield pay dirt. But the story seems more real these days, like ghosts do compared to when I was young. They’re no longer just thoughts about a dumb tree stump in a sand pit coming to life late at night. And even though you can’t touch them, you get a weird sense of the unexplainable now and then. That even though these stories are from the 1970s and early 1980s, they resonate. There was the small town ex-mayor who called me not long ago. And of course the newspaper articles themselves, as well as the strong historicism in Lords Part One, that suggest more than a snake-oil myth fueled by the Bakersfield Californian’s conspiratorial articles.
I’ll be launching a trailer from a Lords documentary in a day or two. It’s sure to freak you out a little. But then that’s the point of ghost stories, right?
If you want to be a part of the Lords documentary and share your thoughts, you might want to attend the meet-and-greet being set up by the Mas Book Club who currently have Lords Part One as their book of the month.
I’ll be bringing a film crew.
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N.L. BELARDES is a journalist, blogger and videographer. He writes several media blogs, including Noveltown's Paperback Writer and ABC23's Nick 2.0. His work has appeared on the homepage of CNN.com and other news sites all over America. You can purchase Lords: Part One, which describes the infamous Lords of Bakersfield. They still creep the city long after they and a 1977 Central California dust storm ravaged the area. N.L. welcomes humorous notes and news tips to his MySpace. And check out his new homepage at www.nlbelardes.com and recent www.twitter.com/nlbelardes addiction.
