CaliforniaBull

By Ian Bull

Donald Ian Bull grew up in San Francisco. He lived in an old Victorian haunted by ghosts, he explored the secret temples of Chinatown, and made friends with astronomers, circus performers and artists. He is now raising a family on a quaint Los Angeles street with break-ins and stabbings, and a neighbor who shoots porn videos in the house two doors down. He also works in the TV industry, surrounded by schemers and screamers.

But California is his home. From hot summer nights at the Hollywood Bowl, to meeting a mountain lion on a hike, to warm Halloween evenings in fantastic costumes, he loves it all. He especially enjoys being a husband, and a father to a daughter who is growing up with her own California history, which he compares to his own.

These essays about life, love, childhood and parenthood could only happen in the Golden State.

Under the pen name Ian Bull, he has written four novels. Liars in Love, set in San Francisco in 1980, Facing Reality (A Love Story), set in Los Angeles in 2000, and the thriller series The Quintana Adventures, about Army Ranger photographer Steven Quintana and movie actress Julia Travers. The Picture Kills and Six Passengers, Five Parachutes are the first two books in the series, and The Danger Game will be out soon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian Bull
• Release date: May 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948873147

Ian Bull

Donald Bull is a thriller writer who has a side gig working in the TV industry. He grew up in San Francisco and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Book preview

Sunny California

A San Francisco Ghost Story

For a brief time, I lived in a house in San Francisco that had two ghosts who appeared late at night. I was haunted by one of these specters who frequented the attic, which had pitched walls and ran almost the entire length of the house, and was also my bedroom.

There's a famous photograph of a row of Victorian homes in San Francisco, The Painted Ladies, right on Alamo Square Park. The house I lived in is the old Victorian mansion on the corner of Steiner and Fulton Streets, but since the house hadn't been gentrified yet, it never made into any of those famous photos. The owner lived on the main middle floor, while she rented out the top two floors to Monica Stevens, who then rented out the four other bedrooms to a cadre friends -- Steven Adams, Michael Ahearn, and others. The girl tenants would get the rooms on the main floor, while guys who rented got one of the two rooms one flight up, in the attic.

We were young and on the move, cycling through jobs, school, traveling, and romances, a carousel of young adults in their 20s, coming and going, who were all part of an extended tribe.

The apartment itself was fun and funky. It had high ceilings with electric wall heaters, thick coats of paint on ancient molding, and long staircases that led up to small rooms with squeaky doors and loose doorknobs.

I was looking for a place to live, and the attic room came available for rent. It was the largest room in the house, but it was not high in demand, because of the rumor that it was haunted. Both men who had lived in the room before me had seen ghosts.

Steven Adams lived in the room the longest and was most plagued by the hauntings. He recounted how there was a malevolent male spirit in the room who would throw books at him while he slept, and who would hold him down and try to suffocate him. I heard that Steven and Monica and others had once held a séance in the house, to appease the spirit, but I don’t think that it worked.

There would sometimes be raucous parties in the house that went late into the night, with couples crouching in corners having heart-to-heart conversations, or people arguing politics in the kitchen over beer and cigarettes. It was after these parties that the other ghost would appear.

Michael Ahearn, who also lived in the upper attic room for a while, said the floating image of an older man with gray hair and a beard would appear either on the staircase or at the entrance to his room, and block his way. The specter would stand there pointing and silently shout, as if scolding him for his behavior.

Therefore, I was excited when the attic room was free on my next rotation through the house. Both Steven and Michael casually warned me about the ghosts. I shouldn't put books on the built-in bookshelf right under the window -- the ghost would knock them down on you. And leave the window open. The noises of the traffic would keep me awake, and the room would get cold, but I'd have peace.

The room had pitched side walls because of the roof, so there was no choice but to put your bed in the middle of the room and against the west wall of the house -- under the window. And right under the small window was the one shelf built into the wall.

I put books there, of course, and I waited. Nothing happened. Several weeks passed, and my room was warm and uneventful, and I forgot about all the stories.

Then, one night, all six books landed on my head while I was sleeping. I assumed there had been an earthquake. Growing up in California, you know not to hang a painting or a mirror over your bed, and the same goes for books on a bookshelf, so I blamed myself ... until I found out there had been no quake.

I put the books on the shelf again, and they were swept onto my head the very next night. I felt the twinge of fear and excitement. This could be my first visitation. I started hearing creaks and started to feel I wasn't alone in the room at night. I stacked the books on the floor after that, and played my clock radio after sunset.

Then the night came.

I was sleeping and then had a dream that someone was sitting on my chest until I realized I wasn't dreaming. I was awake. I tried to sit up, but I couldn't because the person then pushed me down even harder. I opened my eyes and saw nothing except the empty room, but I felt that someone was there. He was male, young, in his 20s, around the same age as me, and he was enjoying crushing the air out of me. He laughed at my fear, but I couldn’t hear him except in my mind. Eventually, I shook him off, and he disappeared. I turned on all the lights and paced for a while, and then finally got back to sleep.

From then on, I slept with the window open, and I didn't encounter the same problem again. I mentioned it to the other people in the house, and they confirmed that I had met the same ghost who bothered Steven so often, but the ghost only visited me that one time.

I’ve always loved ghost stories, so I did some research on the phenomenon, and it turns out that the haunting I experienced is the most common haunting there is. In fact, it’s so common there may even be a scientific explanation for it.

Sleep paralysis is a phenomenon in which people, either when falling asleep or wakening, temporarily experience an inability to move. You are in between waking and sleep, usually disrupted REM sleep, which is sleep cycle when you dream. While sleeping, your body is smart enough to have muscle atonia, or muscle weakness, which is what prevents you from acting out your dreams. It's a good thing we have it. Otherwise, we would all be sleep-walking every night. Sleep-walking, in fact, is when muscle atonia hasn't kicked in, and people start wandering around while in REM sleep.

The opposite is when muscle atonia lingers too long at the end of a dream, and that becomes sleep paralysis. You are waking up in the middle of a dream before you have fully recovered your ability to move.

Your dreaming brain is very good at creating imagery to explain outside stimulus, which is why when you are dreaming, and someone shakes you, you often incorporate that shaking into your dream. You feel a tug on your arm, you look over, and your brain creates an image from Star Trek, let's say, of Spock grabbing your arm. Only after you emerge from REM sleep into wakefulness do you realize it was your wife shaking you and not Leonard Nimoy.

So, what does your brain do when it’s still dreaming with protective muscle atonia, but then is suddenly awake? It creates a dream image to explain why it’s temporarily paralyzed, and we create an image in our brains of someone or something holding us down.

It’s so common that it’s called the Old Hag Syndrome, and people would say that the old hag visited you when you experienced this feeling. There are paintings and sculptures through the centuries of demons and monsters and hags sitting on people’s chests and paralyzing them in their sleep.

There are a lot of explanations to why you get sleep paralysis in the first place. Most of them involve difficulty sleeping or exhaustion, which is when your brain chemicals go wacky. Since Steven, Michael and I were all active, sleep-deprived, alcohol-drinking men in our 20’s, this answers some questions about our mutual sleep paralysis, but not all.

Why did Steven and I experience paralysis only in that room? Why did Steven experience it more often than me? Why did our brains create the same image, of an angry young man who was gleeful as he punished us? How does that explain the books falling on our heads? How does it explain the angry older man who would shout at Michael on party nights, when he tried to bring girls upstairs?

There have also been studies that show that many hauntings have been linked to a build-up of carbon dioxide in homes. When there is too much CO2, it's poisonous, and it can create hallucinations. In older homes, it’s more common. Because heat rises, I speculate that that rising carbon dioxide rose with the warm air and collected in higher concentrations in the attic, the last room in the house. When you opened the window, the cold clean air would enter, and the noises would stop.

This explains, perhaps, why just one room was haunted in the house. At the same time, there are still enough questions about my experience in the house to make me unsure about what really was going on.

John Dobson Blew My Mind

John Dobson died in Burbank last week, and when I read his obituary in the Los Angeles Times, I remembered him as the first person to stun me with the size of the universe. My brief encounter with him changed the way I see the world, influenced what I studied at university, and it still affects me to this day.

Dobson founded the Sidewalk Astronomers in San Francisco, an amateur group of astronomers who built homemade reflective telescopes out of whatever they could find, including gigantic cardboard shipping tubes, metal rings, and discarded timber.

I saw the planet Saturn for the first time through a Dobsonian telescope that was painted with whorls of bright colors. They had lifted one onto the roof of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and John Dobson himself was hosting the viewing party. I was twelve years old.

I was interested in the cosmos, so my parents signed us up for a mid-winter, mid-week astronomy class. Every Wednesday we’d get in the car and drive into Golden Gate Park and attend a lecture at the California Academy of Sciences.

I still remember how to find the visible planets in the night sky, and I know some of the secrets hidden in the constellations, like the middle star in the three-star dagger that hangs from Orion the Hunter’s belt is the Orion Nebula.

On one moonless Wednesday night, the professor invited us to climb to the roof of the Academy building, where the Sidewalk Astronomers had set up their 12-foot-long reflective telescope and pointed it at Saturn. I loved that we were allowed up there on the tar and gravel, and I could see over a mile in every direction. There were several amateur astronomers up there, along with Mr. Dobson himself. He was a tall and lanky guy with glasses and long brown hair, sort of a tall hippie version of Bill Gates.

It was finally my turn to put my eye up to the lens. When I looked inside I saw the planet Saturn, floating perfectly in black space. It looked like a Kodachrome slide from science class, it looked so perfect. As I looked in the lens, it seemed to be about as big as my thumb. The planet and its rings were mostly black and white but there was yellow and brown mixed in, and it was in sharp focus, and I could see the separate rings. I was convinced it was a trick, and that the man had just stuck a slide behind the eyepiece somehow.

This is an approximate recreation of my conversation with Dobson, from several decades ago:

Is that really Saturn?

Yes, it’s really Saturn.

It looks like a picture. It’s so clear.

It's a clear night, and earth's orbit is close to Saturn’s right now.

How close is that?

About 900 million miles.

How far is 900 million miles?

I’ll show you.

Dobson then gestured for my parents and me to follow him close to the edge of the building, which was about 600 feet long.

Imagine that the sun is a ball about a foot in diameter, which is a little bit bigger than a basketball, and we put it on the edge of the building. The earth is about 100 feet away from that basketball, so that’s about 30 steps for me.

My dad, my mom, and I then followed John Dobson as he walked his 30 steps, and we were about 100 feet away from the edge, and about a fifth of the length of the entire building. John Dobson held up his fingers and made a pinching motion in front of us.

This distance back to the ball on the edge of the building is the radius of earth's orbit, about 93 million miles, and our Earth is smaller than a pea between my fingers.

We were so stunned that we could only giggle. He then pointed off into the distance, past the building, and towards the dark trees of Golden Gate Park.

Saturn is about ten times further away. It’d be in those trees over there, and it’s the size of a small plum.

At this point, I was beyond words. I stared into the trees in the distance, imagining an orbiting