A halloween tale

It's October and Halloween, my favorite religious holiday, is fast approaching. So, in honor of this dark and mysterious season, let me tell you a little story. Our tale doesn't take place in October but, rather, on a clear spring evening, a week after Easter.

Okay, here's the picture: You are sitting at your desk reading a book. You hear a noise at the window behind you. You stop reading and turn around. To your shock and horror, you see four feet of a six foot boa constrictor slowly slithering through the open window -- toward you! Then and there, you know you have been transported into the Twilight Zone and you have a heart attack and drop dead.

Or, let's change the picture slightly: You are sitting at your desk reading your book and suddenly feel something moving around your feet. You look down and there are all six feet of a six foot boa constrictor slowly wrapping itself around your ankles. The absolutely terrifying shock of it all gives you a stroke and you forever lose your ability to speak.

Dark pictures? Indeed.

The really weird thing is that this almost happened -- to me! It was in the spring of 1964 and I was a student in the Yale Divinity School. If it had happened, I think I might very well have had a heart attack or stroke. (You see, I really don’t like snakes!)

But it didn't happen -- and so I am here, almost forty years later, writing this tale for you.

Why did it "almost" happen? That's the part of the story I find most intriguing.

In those days, with some friends, I was giving séances in the basement of the Divinity School’s Brainerd House, where I also lived for two years. An undergraduate in the University, whom I did not know and had never met, had a six foot boa constrictor in his college rooms and during the Easter season, I later learned, would buy little pastel colored baby chicks and charge his dorm mates a dollar to watch the snake enjoy dinner.

Once the dorm counselor got wind of this situation, needless to say, he immediately insisted that the snake be removed from the dormitory. (No pets!) The undergraduate was in a quandary: what to do with his six foot boa constrictor.

Then another undergraduate, who had attended one of our basement performances, suggested there was this guy up at the Divinity School who did séances and maybe he would like to have the snake as a gift to scare people in the dark.

During this period, I was working part-time with the Lutheran Chaplain in the University. My job was to get together with all those students who had written "Lutheran" in the "religious preference" box on some official form, take them out to dinner and invite them to the services at the Lutheran Center. Sometimes I would invite groups of them up to the Divinity School for dinner.

As the undergraduates with the outlaw snake assembled, one of the group happened to be one of these Lutheran students. He knew exactly where I lived in Brainerd House and, as the group marched up the hill toward the Divinity School, someone got the very clever idea that it might be "fun" to "surprise" the "séance guy" with the snake -- by feeding it into my open window. (Undergraduate behavior doesn't seem to change much over the years.)

As I said, knew absolutely nothing about the any snake in the undergraduate dorms. That evening, I had finished dinner and was back in my room reading the second volume of Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology, with my back to the window.

I shudder when I think that this happy undergraduate plan almost worked. It didn't because of one rather curious thing -- and that, I repeat, is the reason for telling you this story.

First, you need to understand that I have been called a "fresh air fiend" for most of my life. I love open windows -- even though, in the 1970s, my millionaire landlady, Elsa Erikson, had warned me of the danger allowing the "Night Vapors" to enter my room.

I had lived in this room in Brainerd House for almost two years and every day of that time both of the windows in my room were always partially open. Even on the coldest days of winter, the windows would still be open just a crack.

But on this particular day a strange thing happened. I got up in the morning and looked at the window and then I closed it. As I was closing it, I distinctly remember that I was thinking to myself that this was a very odd thing for me to do since this window had been open every single day for almost two years.

Yet on this particular morning I closed it completely. And then I did something that, at the time, struck me as being even weirder: I locked the window. Again, as I did this, I knew that I was doing something very odd. I did not have a premonition of some terrible thing that might happen. I simply knew that I must close and lock this window. And I sensed, as I was doing it, that this was a really strange and somewhat baffling thing for me to do.

When the undergraduates arrived to give me my "surprise," they found to their dismay that the window was locked. As they were attempting to open it, I heard the noise and got up from my desk and walked over to the window. There were several figures outside. One of them was carrying with a very large cardboard box.

I think they were genuinely disappointed that their surprise didn't work. They were probably more disappointed when I explained that I really had no interest whatsoever in their six foot gift. Crestfallen, they marched back down the hill to the undergraduate colleges. I never learned what happened to the snake.

This is a true story and I personally learned one important lesson from my experience: Li>trust your intuition or "hunch" or "gut instinct" -- or whatever you feel comfortable calling "it." The alternative, really, is trusting your distrust -- and that seems slightly crazy. So, listen to that deep voice down there inside you—which isn’t a "voice" at all. And remember that our universe is far more mysterious than we imagine.

Years ago in Mexico City, I told this story to my friend James Randi. He listened attentively to my explanation that I had closed and locked the window for the first and only time on the very day that the boys with the boa constrictor decided to visit. James reassured me that it was only a coincidence.