I don’t know what’s going to happen. Perhaps when you die you come back as a part of your wardrobe and move about the places you loved most in life. A pair of pants seem friendlier than a floating shirt or pair of shoes. 

Everything usually turns out alright. I’m still alive, I never starve. The path forward is full of wonderful and annoying things. I’m even grateful for even the boring parts. But every step comes with fear of the unknown. 

My favorite story that my mother used to read to me was “The Pale Green Pants” from “What Was I Scared Of?” by Dr. Seuss. In it, the main character is followed at night by a pair of pants walking around all by themselves. Eventually the protagonist befriends the stray pair of pants and they keep each other company but I remember wanting to live in the middle of that story; in the fear and the wonder of it; the mystery. Why was he being followed? How can the pants walk by themselves? What do the pants want? Where do they come from?

My sister and I watched “Unsolved Mysteries” and would frighten ourselves into hysterics over the whereabouts of some unknown killer in another part of the country. It wasn’t the killing that scared us, but the fact that nobody knew where or sometimes who this person was. Stories of lost time, unexplained death, someone simply showing up where they aren’t supposed to be.

The scariest thing that ever happened to me is a little similar to the Dr. Seuss story. I was 15-years-old and I liked to walk alone at night listening to music on my Walkman. Washington Park in Springfield, IL closes at 9 p.m. but patrol cars were lazy. You could just walk around there whenever. It was mostly deserted. There is a pond, a playground and some woods that separate them. The woods aren’t particularly deep, but they’re deep enough that from the trails you cannot see out from either side. 

I don’t know why I decided to go into the woods that night. Maybe it was a dare. Or I was trying to take a shortcut. But I cut through the trails and made my way in. I had my music on so I don’t know how I knew, but I could just feel something was near me. I pressed pause, took off the headphones and listened. It was pitch dark. There was some wind. It was summer and the leaves on the trees were moving quietly. 

I listened close and l listened as far away as I could, for a car or some other person. It was completely still. I couldn’t move. No trains in the distance. Everyone else asleep in their beds. The whole town silent. 

Then out of nowhere – directly next to my ear – I heard the distinct immediate sound of a person making only this noise: “Hmm…”

I’d never felt such a bolt of fear rush through me and ran as fast as I could , tripping over branches and rolling down the hilly parts of the trail. I didn’t know if they were chasing after me or not until I heard laughter coming from deep in the woods. The laughter of one man who seemed to be out there by himself.  I ran as far and as fast as I could but the bellowing “Hmm…” was still playing in my ears.

What was he doing out there? Was he alone? Was it a prank? Coincidence? I never found out. And as much as I wanted to know, finding out would be a kind of loss.

When I was 12-years-old I became obsessed with a murder that happened in my town. The obsession was less to do with the murder than the setting. The building where it happened was left to rot. It grew into a haunted, scary looking place. 

On March 18, 1981 someone entered the Lauterbach Cottage Hardware store in Springfield, IL, took an ax off the shelf, killed one man and permanently disabled two others. He ordered all three people in the store to their knees and stuck them each in the head with the ax. The stranger took some money from the register, left, and was never identified. 

If this had happened at an Ace Hardware my young mind would have quickly forgotten it. Because it was the answer to a mysterious old gray cottage overgrown with vines and shrouded by trees, it became legendary. 

I learned the story by asking my father about it while driving by. He told me his incomplete, half-remembered version of the killing, not realizing how much the shock of it would fascinate me.

I went to Lincoln Library to examine the microfilm of old newspapers. I used to do this all the time just to see what movies were playing in the past. Now I had a legitimate thing to research. I told other kids at school the story, my father’s half-remembered version mixed with my own fantastic retelling and whatever little facts I’d picked up from the library. My version always ended something like “…and he was never caught. He knows what he did and he’s still out there walking around. You may have even seen him today!” Admittedly this was lightly plagiarized from Robert Stack’s “For every mystery, there is someone, somewhere, who knows the truth. Perhaps that someone is watching. Perhaps… it’s you.”

One day at school I couldn’t contain my curiosity and thought it might be a good time to dial 911 to ask the police directly what new developments there might be in the Lauterbach case. Did they have any new leads that might shed some light on who the assailant could have been? 

They told me never to abuse 911 and I got in a lot of trouble for using my school’s office phone. 

Around this same time I used to listen to old time radio shows on cassette. My grandparents would send them to me. I particularly liked the program called “Arch Obler’s Lights Out Everybody”.

I wore out a tape of the episodes “Come To The Bank” and “Special to Hollywood”. In “Come To The Bank” a bank manager becomes obsessed with the idea that he can walk through walls and to the astonishment of his secretary he does, only he gets stuck inside. The rest of the episode is her trying to convince everyone to break down the wall and let him out. 

“Special To Hollywood” concerns a group of entertainment professionals taking an express flight. The engine dies mid air. But the plane just hangs there for hours, literally held in suspense, without dropping or moving, forcing all passengers to consider their fate and their lives up to that point. Some of them lose their minds and can’t handle the break from reality while others become belligerent and angry. It’s how a lot of people react to mysteries, as an inconvenience or an attack on their intelligence. I don’t feel that way but as much as I love to stay in the middle of the story you can’t live there because a good mystery wants you to solve it, or to try. The best ones take you somewhere far away and leave you there. 

I don’t believe in magic or ghosts or anything beyond the realm of the physical world. Death isn’t a transition or part of some mysterious lore. You are a body. The body works, and then it does not. The mystery of death is not where you go but what goes on without you. I never felt more clear about this than when my mother died. I didn’t feel her anywhere. She was suddenly and irrevocably gone.

I used to like the idea of ghosts. I wrote a song about one, mostly for mischievous reasons. I like the notion of lingering around to invisibly torment and annoy the living. It seems a lot more fun than any notion of heaven that’s ever been explained to me. And yet when anyone suggests that my mother or any other dead loved one is “watching me” I feel horrified by the idea. In that context it sounds like an eternal prison, as does “living on in someone’s memory”, which I know is meant metaphorically but taken literally sounds like a Twilight Zone experience. 

The pale green pants ultimately just wanted to be known. In 2018 the city of Springfield tore down the Laurerbach Cottage hardware store. Only the man in the woods knows what happened there. Maybe wore pale green pants and held an ax.

—

Or perhaps when you die you come back as a part of your wardrobe and move about the places you loved most in life. A pair of pants seem friendlier than a floating shirt or pair of shoes. If you’re walking the trails in Washington Park some night you may see a pair of 44×30 Dockers® Men’s Classic Fit Signature Lux Cotton Stretch Pleated pants, say hello. 

It’s a nice idea but I think this is all there is. This and the unknown. Mom is gone. I now live on the other side of her life; that she could only have ever wondered about.

Feature drawing by Daniel Knox

This piece is in Recommend If You Like The Spooky Issue Fall 2026. You can find physical copies in bars, cafes and stores in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The newspaper is available for purchase here. 

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