It’s the 4th of July, 2016. A day we all celebrate with family, the three colors (red, white & blue), cookouts and a TV Marathon (usually The Twilight Zone), and yet… do any of us really know what Independence Day is about? Do I even know for certain? I mean, I am not going to go into a history lesson that someone gave me ages ago because their paycheck depended on it. What I have learned about history has never been stagnant. I have had my thoughts on history upturned plenty of times.
When you are a kid, you don’t quite understand where all the holidays come from and what they all mean. When you are a student, they tell you, but they tell you a regional take on history. It depends on what side your Ancestors were on. If you’re American you get one story, but if you are from Europe or Japan, you are given a different story.
And then you grow up and you call ‘Bullshit’ on everything.
It’s the same with every event in life, really. A house stands. A house burns. A house is abandoned. Then it is rebuilt, and new people move in, and things start to move around and then a story, a narration is born.
But there is a history to that house. A history of the land, the people of the land, the house and the people of the house, and depending on where or from whom you get the story, it’s all different. History is why we have historians, and not the other way around.
We have people who want to preserve a story, or pull out the knots and straighten out a story. But there are no historians for haunted houses. There are historians who are well read on the subject of a particular place and they may take up a job telling people about that history, but there is no warehouse for historical data to reference on every haunted site in the world.
If there were, it would be easy to research and to find a common ancestral thread in all this paranormal mess. There are books, yes. And there are people who take pride in knowing every little detail about a case and a place, but there is no library of the Weird/Strange/Paranormal. No Warehouse 13, if you will. There should be. There should have been one a long time ago.
It should be carefully curated and it should seek submissions from all the professionals of the field. It should house queer artifacts and details that even the public isn’t privy to. It should require a membership and should allow researchers to congregate within its walls and make… history.
So the next time someone wants to drop money down on a Ranch with a history of paranormal happenings, or on a program to find E.T.’s, why not instead convince them to buy a building and call it THE MUSEUM OF THE ARCANE, or whatever. Doesn’t matter to me. I just want to be invited.
