The Disappearance of Shorty Wilson

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People disappear all the time.  Ask any policeman.  Better yet, ask a journalist.  Disappearances are bread and butter to journalists.
Young girls run away from home.  Young children stray from their parents and are never seen again.  Housewives reach the end of their tether and take the grocery money and a taxi to the station.  International financiers change their names and vanish into the smoke of imported cigars.
Many of the lost will be found, eventually, dead or alive.  Disappearances, after all, have explanations.
Usually.
Diana Gabaldon ~ “ Outlander Prologue” (copyright 1991 Diana Gabaldon)

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October 30th, 2024 will mark the 68th anniversary of the disappearance of Robert “Shorty” Wilson, a lifelong Kimball, Nebraska resident whose vanishing remains as much of a mystery today as it did in 1956.

A Brief History of the Wheat Growers Hotel

From 1913 to 1917, the price of wheat soared from $.78 a bushel to $2.12, which in today’s money would be $50.95 a bushel, an astronomical price (the current price of wheat is $9.66 per bushel as of this writing).  The United States government encouraged farmers to ‘Win The War With Wheat’, and Frank H. Cunningham set out to do exactly that, while also “making a nice profit on the side” as he would write in his memoirs.  By the end of WWI in November 1918, Cunningham had made over $100,000 growing wheat on his Kimball county farm, the equivalent of over $2,000,000 today, and had spent nearly every dime of it making his dream come true, the Wheat Growers Hotel, which he called “the Jewel of Western Nebraska.”   

The Wheat Growers consisted of eighty-six rooms, each with electricity, plumbing, and steam heat, which used a unique system designed by Cunningham that concentrated on heating the exterior rooms of the building so that even the iciest grip of a Nebraska winter could not penetrate the unheated interior rooms.  Light and air to these inside rooms were also provided by four ventilator shafts, another unique architectural feature. The tile floor of the foyer was inlaid with a shock of wheat, and a massive mural of wheat being harvested was painted in the lobby.  The furnishings, ordered in March of 1918 from the Denver Dry Goods Company, cost Cunningham an estimated $15,000 ($305,258 in 2022).  

By March of 1919, the hotel was hosting events including banquets given by the local Patriotic League and the Kimball Freemasons lodge, which both included entertainment provided by an orchestra. Two of the honored guests at the Masonic banquet were Gilbert Oldaker and Ray Lathrop, who had both served on the front lines of the war in Europe as truck drivers. Future president Dwight D. Eisenhower and his family were even once guests at the hotel, and the Wheat Growers Hotel was soon the place to see and be seen in Wyobraska.

Within just a few short years, however, Cunningham’s financial empire was in ruins. In 1920, the expiration of the Wheat Price Guarantee Act sent the price of wheat plummeting to a low of 50 cents a bushel. Farmers across the United States went bankrupt overnight, including Frank Cunningham. The Denver Dry Goods Company soon repossessed all of the furniture inside the hotel, the State Savings and Loan Company of Beatrice, Nebraska foreclosed on the building itself, and Frank Cunningham was arrested in 1923 for purchasing coal to heat the hotel under false pretenses. By 1924, Cunningham’s dreams of grandeur were nothing more than the dust floating through the empty rooms of a boarded-up and abandoned hotel.

Eventually, the hotel reopened under new ownership but never regained its former glory. After passing through the hands of several owners over the decades, the Wheat Growers closed her doors for good in 1988, and the building’s condition quickly began to deteriorate. 

Ghost Stories

Rumors that the building was haunted soon led to break-ins and vandalism, which are still occurring to this day. One popular ghost story claims that, during Prohibition, a tunnel was dug under the hotel, allowing bootleggers to smuggle alcohol into the building. The story goes that the tunnel collapsed on a hotel employee, who was trapped in the rubble and killed. Her spirit supposedly haunts the Wheat Growers and has been seen from windows on the upper floors, looking out at the street below. 

While the hotel may actually have its very own White Lady, as countless numbers of Kimball residents and visitors have claimed to have sighted her over the years, the rumors of tunnels underneath the building have been completely debunked, and so who she was in life will forever remain a mystery. 

The true unsolved mystery of the Wheat Growers is the disappearance of 31-year-old Robert “Shorty” Wilson. By the 1950s the hotel rooms were being rented as long-term apartments, and Wilson was a resident, the hotel being both affordable and a five-minute walk from his job at Dalton Buick, which was located at 305 East 3rd St. 

It remains unclear who actually saw Wilson last or where. Conflicting news accounts state that at 3 pm, Mrs. Ramona James, of James Taxi Service, dropped Wilson off at Ray’s Sinclair Service Station at 315 East 3rd St., right next door to Dalton Buick, after taking him to the bank to deposit some checks. They made arrangements for her to return and pick him up from the service station in 30 minutes for a cup of coffee. He told her they would have to hurry because he had an appointment with two men from Fort Morgan, Colorado concerning a used car. When Mrs. James returned in her cab, Robert Wilson was nowhere to be found. His brother, Dick, remembers it to be Plains Body Shop at 110 South Webster Street, which is still in business today. 

Panic began to mount among his family members as the hours passed by with no sightings of Wilson. James Dalton reported that none of his dealership’s cars were missing and that checks collected on Dalton Buick’s account were found inside of a car that Wilson had been using. He was not believed to be carrying much, if any, money on his person at the time of his disappearance, and his checking account at the bank in Kimball remained untouched. Wilson also needed specially tailored clothing made to fit his 4’8”, 200 body. None was taken from his room at the Wheat Growers Hotel.

On November 11th, volunteers, headed by the Kimball Volunteer Fire Department and joined by 100 civilians, scoured a 20-mile radius of Kimball, looking in culverts, barrow pits, and abandoned buildings. Kimball natives Gail Russell, Earl Strasheim, and Jerry Strasheim were joined by 7 Civil Air Patrol pilots from Sidney. On Tuesday, November 12th, Gilbert Nelson and Don Brown flew over Kimball and Banner counties but all of their efforts proved to be futile, and not a trace of the man was found.

Robert’s twin brother, Dick, always believed that the authorities botched their investigation. He and his brothers spent hundreds of hours on the case, hoping to find even the smallest trace of their beloved sibling. The long-deceased Sheriff George Brandt was in charge of the investigation, and the case was hampered by sloppy police work, including how the car that Wilson was driving, which was found with what appeared to be blood spots on the seats and a 30-inch-long rope in the trunk, was processed. The vehicle was not even looked at by the authorities for at least three weeks, and James Dalton’s wife had been driving it in the meantime. The FBI refused to become involved in the case since no clear evidence of a murder or kidnapping had been found. It’s most likely that whatever happened to Robert occurred during daylight hours before the temperature dropped to a low of 26F since his coat was found on the seat of his car.

Bringing the search to a complete standstill was a horrific blizzard that slammed the Kimball area without warning on November 2nd, 1956, three days after Wilson went missing. In what was called the worst blizzard to hit Wyobraska since the hellish storm of 1949, the temperature plummeted to 27F, and 40 mph winds created drifts nearly as high as the marquee on the front of the Kimball Clothing Co. store on Chestnut Street. Among the many dramatic rescues from the whiteout were two women who were stranded in a car on Highway 29 for more than 38 hours before being rescued by an airplane, and another stranded motorist who was rescued by a highway department snow plow after his car went off the road between Dix and Kimball, only to have the snow plow itself slide off into the ditch, stranding both men until they were subsequently rescued by an REA (Rural Electrification Administration) truck and taken to safety in Kimball. Livestock losses were staggering, and emergency food drops had to be made to drilling crews stranded on oil rigs as far away as Redington. In Bushnell, 20 men armed with shovels and one man in a bulldozer battled drifts for seven hours to clear 9 miles of rural roads and rescue a child who was suffering from a skull fracture on a farm southeast of town. 

On November 15, 1956, after Wilson had been missing without a trace for more than two weeks, the Western Nebraska Observer reported that Robert’s twin brother, Dick, was offering a $500 reward ($5200 in today’s money) for information leading to the recovery of either Robert or his body. Dick Wilson said, “There just isn’t any concrete motive that we can put our finger on. I do not believe that Bob left of his own account. Money was certainly not involved. Besides, there is the fact that he is the type that no one could use enough money to pay him to cause this much concern on the part of his family.”

Dick Wilson canceled the reward on Dec 27th after receiving no information about his brother’s whereabouts other than a reported sighting on the streets of Denver, Colorado, which the Denver police investigated and disproved.

In August of 1957, 9 months after Robert’s disappearance, Wilson’s family again offered a reward for information about his whereabouts, increasing the amount to $1000. Once again, his anguished family received nothing. Dick Wilson died in 2012 at the age of 87, having never resolved the mystery of his twin brother’s disappearance.

Everyone connected with the case, even in passing, believes that Robert “Shorty” Wilson is dead, and has been since October 30th, 1956. His bank account remained untouched, and all of his clothing, specially tailored to fit his 4’8”, 200 lb frame, was still in his room at the Wheat Growers Hotel. The only speculation left is why anyone would want to kill him, and what they did with his body after the fact. The pint-sized car salesman was likely strangled and dumped into the trunk of a car, possibly his own, and then disposed of. An archaeological team, after an extensive investigation, came to the conclusion that Wilson’s body probably lies at the bottom of one of the dozens of abandoned oil wells that dot the landscape of Kimball County, Nebraska. If this is the case, it’s unlikely that Robert Wilson’s body will ever be located, and there will never be justice for his murder.

Dick Wilson related to the Western Nebraska Observer in 1976 about the last time that he saw his twin brother. Their brother, Bill, was in Denver to purchase a truck and wanted Dick’s opinion before parting with his money. Dick asked Robert to come along to drive Dick’s car back if they purchased the truck, but Robert was too busy. That was October 30th, 1956, the day that he stepped out of a cab and became one of Wyobraska’s greatest unsolved mysteries. If their beloved “Bobby” had canceled his appointments and traveled to Denver with his brothers instead, today he would be 98 years old.

Today, the only earthly remnant of Robert Wilson is a headstone in the Kimball cemetery, which simply reads, “Robert G. Wilson, born May 28th, 1925, disappeared October 30th, 1956.” Inside the once majestic Wheat Growers Hotel, however, Robert Wilson is still roaming the halls.

On a recent tour of the Wheat Growers, accompanied by several members of the Kimball police department and the hotel’s owner, Ed Avila, our normally fearless photojournalist witnessed a sight that cured any urge to ever make a return visit to the Jewel of Western Nebraska. As the group stood in front of the door of the hotel room that Robert Wilson had once called home, a black shadow, roughly four and a half feet tall, crossed the hallway directly in front of them. The sight was apparently chilling enough to send our group of intrepid explorers, consisting of police officers and former members of the US military, beating a hasty retreat in the opposite direction of whatever entity had just crossed their path. Apparently, murderers and terrorists are less frightening than the restless spirit of a Lilliputian car salesman. If the mysterious disappearance of Robert Wilson is ever going to be solved, it looks like we’re going to have to bring in some slightly less chicken-hearted ghost hunters next time.

Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

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Daily writing prompt
What have you been working on?
View all responses

What have I been working on, WordPress?

Absolutely nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. The whole “working for a thieving con artist and no longer having an income” incident, combined with several other events that I may or may not eventually get around to writing about, have knocked me on my ass all spring and summer. I’m still sucking air, though, which I’m sure will disappoint a few of you who were hoping that I’d finally ridden my gravel bike into the path of a speeding TerraGator.

I’ve been trying to get my give a fuck back, but I am being hammered by executive dysfunction. I should be writing about spending $1000 in less than three days on a cat who died anyway, recreating the violations of the Geneva Conventions that Fred’s people call recipes, scouring newspaper archives for bizarre century-old newspaper clippings to transcribe, or even just digging holes in the lawn like an overgrown gopher. Instead, I sit here drinking so much coffee that I could probably thread a running sewing machine and staring at a blank screen until I end up doom-scrolling Facebook and Reddit and not accomplishing a damned thing aside from wearing a hole in an expensive office chair and eating my weight in goldfish crackers every day.

Today, I logged into WordPress for the first time in months. Fred is off terrorizing everyone in a car foolish enough to get in the path of his Peterbilt, I’ve got a Spotify playlist going which is appropriately titled, “Cat Calming Music”, and, if the neighbor’s kids would just get within coffee cup flinging distance, I could put a stop to “death metal pig squeal practice time” and maybe get something done today. Like logging into my other site and finally typing up the epic story of the sheepherder who rode his cow through a forest fire back in the 20’s. This right here is more than I’ve managed in only The Flying Spaghetti Monster knows how long, though. I’d hate to overdo it and actually write something that pays the bills.

Someone please pass the coffee pot. Also, if you’re going to Target, they’re having a sale on the giant boxes of goldfish crackers this week. Grab me two and I’ll pay you back.

Where Do These People Find Me?

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I worked for a literal con artist and had no idea. 

Here’s the backstory: For several years, I’ve had a website where I combine my love of genealogy and old newspapers, along with my volunteer work for Find A Grave and my autistic inability to leave anything alone, into posts about the bizarre accidents, tragic deaths, and general mayhem that took place around here in the early 20th century.

A follower of mine on Facebook messaged and asked if I was interested in writing for an online magazine about the area. I should have said no and continued my peaceful, cat-herding life. But, because I am an idiot, I decided it would make a decent side hustle. And there was my first mistake.

Fast forward: My co-writer (who never wrote any articles)/boss (who insisted that he was my “partner” even though he was the one paying me)/whatever the hell you want to call him, who from now on will just be called “Walking Eagle” was a loud mouth know it all from the start. Being a former nekked dancing chick, I’ve dealt with more than my share of blowhards, and just took the ludicrous stories of his life as an Army Ranger, National Geographic photographer, documentary filmmaker, rescuer of burning busloads of orphans, yadda, yadda, with a grain of salt while I waited to get paid. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. Soon, after countless tales of woe involving misplaced checkbooks, hacked bank accounts, his dog being attacked by a mountain lion in the center of town, his fiance’s mother surviving three strokes, etcetera, etcetera, he owed me over $1000. I went on hiatus until somebody somewhere started handing over some money. No more trips that cost me more in gas than I got paid while dodging free-roaming herds of bison, no more tempting tetanus in gutted-out hotels, no more ghosts of murdered little people, nada. Miraculously, it turned out that the dog didn’t eat his checkbook after all, and he managed to pay me the grand that he owed me. 

The idiot had me fill out a W-2 instead of a 1099 form when I began writing for him. This should have been my first clue that he had no idea what he was doing. Then he called me in October (around the same time he supposedly lost his vehicle in a lawsuit that no one has ever learned the truth about), claiming that he had lost the form and needed another one. Luckily, when I gave him the W-2, I had written down my Employee ID Number instead of my SSN. After joking over the phone about having a zero credit score and keeping my defaulted student loan in the spare bedroom, and telling a story about my ex filing his taxes every year as married to me, he suddenly didn’t need me to put my info on a new tax form anymore. A few days later, Walking Eagle showed up, driving a new Jeep Wrangler.

Months of this nonsense and twenty published articles later, I received the princely sum of $1800. Meanwhile, Walking Eagle received $76,000 for my work (which I wouldn’t find out until just a few days ago after a conversation with the head of the county’s tourism commission).

So, January comes and goes, and I have no 1099 form for my taxes. I’m starting to get pissed off. I called the IRS, and a lovely lady there told me how many cups of coffee I’d already drunk that morning and to wait until February 15th. If there was no 1099 information available online by the end of that day, then Walking Eagle had committed tax fraud, and I’ll have to call back on the 16th.  

With time to kill, I started Googling this dude’s name. I was not prepared for what I found on just one website. Lawsuits, bankruptcies, illegal porn creation (it turns out you can’t pimp out your wife in Oklahoma), and lots and lots of outright theft, going back to the 1980s. Every claim this guy has ever made about his life is a lie. He’s probably never opened a National Geographic magazine, let alone worked for them, never been in the military, never worked as Anthony Bourdain’s cameraman, nada. It’s all bullshit.

Meanwhile, my asshole buddy here shows up on the news. He’s just been named the Executive Director of our little zoo, which is already in dire straits even without him around. I sent out a few emails and Facebook messages on Tuesday, reaching one of his former business partners, who he had scammed for tens of thousands of dollars. My new friend sent an email to the news station on Thursday night. By the following Monday, Walking Eagle was standing in the unemployment line. Of course, he had to tell anyone who would listen that he had quit and hadn’t been fired. Whatever, dude. 

This rag I’ve been busting my ass for all these months for pennies has a contract with our county to produce at least five written articles a week and two videos. That’s twenty articles a month. Walking Eagle barely posted that amount in a year, along with one video. One. So, after several phone calls and Facebook messages between myself and county officials, Walking Eagle was fired over the phone last week. He immediately started calling and texting me, demanding I answer the phone. He has no idea I’m the one who set all of this in motion and got him fired, so he has created an elaborate story that he desperately needs me to hear. One of the County Commissioners just made up these stories about him to make him look bad, and he needs to tell his side of things. I refused to answer the phone. I made a Facebook post saying I was at the airport, and he immediately started texting me. I had to tell him my sister was dying to get him to leave me alone. He immediately offered to come to my house and feed my cats. Thanks but no thanks. I’ll pack all twelve of them into my car and drive to California before you ever get a key to my house.

So far, he seems to have either bought the story or taken the hint. It’s been eerily peaceful around my house. I’m sure he’s already moved on to a new scam, but the IRS should come knocking soon. On February 16th, I filled out and mailed off all the forms to turn him in for not paying his taxes or giving his writers their 1099 forms. Hopefully, he’ll be in jail soon before anyone else gets hurt or loses their money. 

Second Hoeing

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This book makes my teeth squeak

If you’ve never read “Second Hoeing” by Hope Williams Sykes, you really aren’t missing much. Written in 1935, it’s 309 dark, dismal pages about German Russian immigrants in the sugar beet fields of Northern Colorado. If The Grapes of Wrath just isn’t depressing enough for you, give this one a try. I know there are a lot of people who consider this barely legible novel a classic, but if you live in a German Russian community like I do, it’s infuriating. We are not dirty, and we are certainly not thieves like Sykes tries to portray us as. One of the worst insults that you can call a Volga German is lazy. Thief isn’t any better.

I picked up a copy from Thriftbooks a few weeks ago, and made it to about page 3 before I remembered how much this book pisses me off. In fact, it enrages me so much that I’ve been seriously considering writing a better version, without the garbled attempts at the German Russian dialect and the outright lies. Also, it’s not going to be so bleak and depressing that it makes you want to drown yourself in the nearest irrigation ditch after you finally slog your way through it and throw it in the trash. There may be a pervy school principal getting punched in the face, a couple of duels, a few sugar factory workers being turned into beet pulp, and a whole lot of bootleggers, though. You know, things that actually happened in these communities.

Gopher Crotch, Nebraska. Population: This Guy

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Write about your dream home.

My dream home, WordPress? It’s a Quonset hut in the middle of a full section wheat field in Banner County, Nebraska. 690 people spread across 745 square miles of the Great Plains. My nearest neighbor is at least a mile away and doesn’t own a lawn mower or dogs that bark 24 hours a day, and doesn’t have 6 “home schooled” crotch goblins that I find playing in the middle of the road in front of my house at least once a week with no adults in sight. I have those fancy book shelves with the rolling ladder, a commercial kitchen for canning the produce from my garden, and a heated concrete floor. I can roller skate around the place if I feel like it (and if I knew how to roller skate).

I can write in peace, take pictures of birds, speed goats, and old farmhouses, and never see another living soul unless a Costco sized box of stroopwafels shows up from California via UPS. Hell, I can walk to the mailbox wearing nothing but my Doc Martens if the weather is decent, because it’s not like one of my nosy troll neighbors is watching me from behind their cheap plastic window blinds every time I open the front door.

That’s about it. A big ass airplane hangar looking building in the middle of nowhere. With a giant catio attached to the side for the Furbeestes.

An Ideal Day

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Describe your most ideal day from begining to end.

Well, WordPress…

First, I’d spell “beginning” correctly.

Aside from that, I’d get 10 hours of sleep without a herd of cats performing a Cossack Cavalry Dance on my head at 4 am because they can see the bottom of their food dish.

Next, I would wake up to a full pot of coffee that I remembered to program the night before, and no one would call, text, or attempt to talk to me in any way, shape, or form until I’d had at least two cups. I wouldn’t have to hear for the 437th time this month how much my co-worker/editor hates their girlfriend and her mother, or their brilliant plan to fudge the numbers on the magazine that we write for, so that the tourism board writing the checks never figures out that people only come to this place to find out if you can literally die from boredom, and no one is reading anything that we write. Seriously. This place should take inspiration from The Never Ending Story and rename itself the Prairie of Sadness.

Third, my kitchen would magically clean itself and my laundry would fold itself and float from Mount Washmore to its home in the dresser. I don’t mind vacuuming, but I’d rather put out a lit cigar on my butt than do dishes or fold a pile of clothes. This is why I only own four plates, half a dozen or so coffee cups (whose population decreases by about one a month thanks to one of the cats who has a bizarre coffee addiction), and enough clothes to fill one laundry basket.

At the end of the day, I’d have an article attempting to lure people to this wasteland completed and I’d get paid for writing it for the first time in about three months. Then the cats and I would share a ribeye steak and a bowl of ice cream while watching Peaky Blinders for the 17th time, and then call it a day, where I would read a book in bed without having to get up to clean up cat barf three times or break up the nightly ritual of the 18 lb cat dragging the 8 lb cat around the house like a rag doll (the little one starts the fight within seconds of the lights going out every single time, the big one eventually gets tired of being jumped on and gummed in the face by an idiot with three teeth in her head, and holds her off the floor by the back of her head until I make him let her go).

That pretty much sums it up. Sleep, coffee, cats, no people, food, and books.

The Never Ending To-Do List

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Something on your “to-do list” that never gets done.

Oh, WordPress. Where do I start? My entire life is a never ending “to-do list” that never really gets done. Dishes, laundry, paying bills, and keeping the Furbeestes both indoors and out alive is my adult version of The Never Ending Story. Maybe tomorrow I’ll tackle Mount Washmore, which has taken over my love seat. Last night I finally checked off the 15 minute fix on the vacuum cleaner that’s been sitting downstairs in the haunted basement for the last six months gathering dust, so there’s a win, I suppose.

I also need to find a touristy story for the writing job that actually pays the bills, even though no one really gives a flying pug about visiting Nebraska in February unless they’ve got a hypothermia fetish.

But first, coffee. Depending on how many text messages and missed calls from my editor are on my phone when I get up at 7 am, it may also include a shot of Pendleton whiskey.

Another Day, Another Episode of “Dude, Fuck This House”

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Some backstory: I live in a really old house that at least one person that I know for a fact has died in. In fact, that’s how I ended up with this place.

To make a long story (kind of) short, old man who’d lived here since 1967 died, wife followed about three months later, and their kids pretty much gave the place away since no one in the area would even look at it. Fred and I, apparently with “SUCKER” written on our foreheads, saw a ridiculously cheap 1800 square foot house on a nearly half acre corner lot, with a three car garage, a separate steel building, and a second driveway long enough to park a Peterbilt and grain trailer in. We knew the owners had died, but had no idea that it had been INSIDE THE DAMNED HOUSE until after we’d been here a couple of months, dealing with bizarre incidents such as our dogs charging and barking at the empty dining room table, and someone repeatedly knocking on the front door without opening the storm door first.

I eventually made friends with the neighbors across the street, an elderly couple who had lived in their house since the early 1990’s. After mentioning the weird goings on, Elderly Neighbor Lady said, “Didn’t anyone ever tell you? Dennis (the previous owner) dropped dead at the dining room table while eating breakfast. Also, years ago at the house across the street to the south, the owner fell down in a snowbank at the end of his driveway while walking home from the bar in a blizzard and no one found him until the next day. And there used to be another house where your yard is, but they condemned it and tore it down in 2008.”

Well, that certainly explains a few things.

And so begins enough unsettling, but rarely frightening incidents over the last nine years, ranging from coffee disappearing from the pot on a regular basis to smelling pipe smoke and perfume, to write a book. So much weird shit happens around here that we barely even notice it anymore. The last couple of months, however, things have started to escalate.

The door to my attic is in a bizarre spot, in the ceiling of a phone booth sized closet in a bedroom that the last owners turned into a weird giant bathroom for some odd reason (that’s another story involving my opinion that pink and lavender sand textured paint should be illegal that I’ll get to one of these days). Getting into the attic requires getting a ladder out of the garage, trying not to put it through the TV or the china cabinet while stepping around 37 cats who’ve decided that the ladder is a cat eating monster from outer space and the obvious solution is to trip the person carrying said monster so that they can kill it when it hits the floor, and then navigating around a pile of empty cat food bags (give me a break, folks, I need snow shoes to get to the dumpster right now), a laundry basket full of dirty clothes and throw blankets covered in cat barf and a Rubbermaid tote full of Salomon running shoes, Doc Marten work boots, and worn out cowboy boots to get the door open. It’s not exactly what one would call accessible.

Anyhoo, this closet is where the extra bags of cat food and litter live, since I buy both in bulk online (I really need to get the FedEx guy a gift basket or something. The last time he showed up with 200 pounds of cat litter he was looking a little stabby.) The last time I opened the closet door to grab a bag of chow for the Furbeestes, the attic access door was firmly shut, just like it has been for the last five years or so since anyone had to go up there. Last month, though, shit got weird. On the night of New Year’s Eve, I open the closet door and feel a cold draft. I look up above my head, and the attic door is open. I sure didn’t open that hatch to Hell, and I was pretty certain that the cats didn’t stand on each other’s shoulders like a miniature cheerleader pyramid to go exploring. With a hefty dose of the heebie jeebies caused by the sight of the black hole in my closet ceiling, I grabbed a bag of cat food, shut the door tight, and pushed the tub of shoes, my 20 year old Dyson vacuum cleaner, and the laundry basket up against it. Who or whatever was up there was going to have a long wait in the dark until Fred came home to deal with it in a week or two. When Fred finally got home, he refused to climb up there and see if there was a frozen ax murderer in our attic, and just levered the door shut from the floor with a broom handle. So the world’s weirdest housewarming gift may just be waiting up there for the next owners.

Skip ahead past a clock lifting off the basement wall and flying past my head like a Frisbee from Hell, being scratched on my calf through my jeans so deeply that it’s left a scar, a coffee cup rolling itself out of the dish rack as I was doing dishes and narrowly escaping death on the kitchen floor as I caught it in midair, and an exploding canning jar full of water that left pieces of glass clear out in the dining room, and we come to the latest incident: The Case of the Missing DVD Player Remote.

I bought the entire series of a sci-fi show called Killjoys on DVD last fall, and never got around to watching it. The internet went out during the latest icepocalypse this past weekend and we can’t get air TV channels because we live in Gopher Crotch, so we hooked up the DVD player that we haven’t used in about five years, and pop in Season One. The remote for this thing has always been sitting on one of the built in bookshelves that are on each side of the fireplace, next to the dozen or so DVDs that we own. Without it, I can play and stop whatever I’m watching, but can’t do anything else. I can’t skip episodes, turn on closed captioning, watch the blooper reel, nada.

Look on the bookshelf, and no remote. All righty, let’s look in the cabinets under the bookshelves. Nope, not there either. I ended up searching the entire living room, the bookshelves in the dining room, my entire desk, even the drawers in my dresser in the bedroom. No luck. So I headed for the basement, and searched every box in the spare bedroom where unloved junk goes to die. Still nothing, so we gave up for the night. The next night, I decided to go downstairs and look again. There’s nowhere else this thing can be.

We just wanted to watch Killjoys, but apparently ghosts don’t like sci-fi.

There’s another room on the north wall of my basement that used to be storage for canning. We gutted all of the old rotten shelving out of there several years ago, and keep the door shut to keep the cats out. There’s nothing in there but two old brass lamps and a box of insulated coveralls. When I walked through the basement and headed for the spare bedroom, the door to that room was shut tight. Being an old house with a humid basement, the door sticks and makes a pretty loud noise when it’s forced open. With no reason to go in there, the door hasn’t been opened in months. I spent about ten minutes in the bedroom looking through boxes, and gave up. As I walked back upstairs, I looked over, and that storage room door was wide open.

I walked over, turned the lights on to make sure there were no cats in there investigating and my damned remote wasn’t in there lying on the bare concrete floor, and decided that I’m just going to go Target and buy a new DVD player. The ghosts can keep the remote. They obviously need it more than I do. One of these days, when they’re done with it, I’m sure I’ll find it in the deep freeze out in the garage or in the glove box of my truck.

Every Hallmark Movie Ever

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Mother In Law watches Hallmark obsessively in an attempt to escape the reality of being married to an idiot while raising a pumpkin headed half wit (which is a story for another day), and I’ve started to notice a theme…

Every Hallmark Christmas movie ever:

Writer goes back to their hometown for Christmas… falls in love

Writer buys a castle in Scotland… falls in love

Writer buys an apartment in Paris… falls in love

Seriously? Who are these people that can afford a plane ticket overseas during the holidays, let alone buy a castle? All of the writers and authors that I know are living in their mother’s basements, driving cars with tags that expired in 2019, and printing their unread articles to light their wood stoves full of cottonwood swiped from the village’s tree recycling yard, because it’s December in Nebraska and they can’t afford to turn the furnace above 55.

I’ve got to start leaving the room when she’s got that channel on. It’s giving me a complex. Why can’t I have a castle? Or at least a haunted hotel in Kimball, Nebraska?

Does Anyone Know How To Blow Up An Oven and Make It Look Like An Accident?

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I had the brilliant idea at about 8 pm last night to clean my oven, because I wanted to photograph some recipes for Horse Creek Kitchen, and I live in abject terror of people seeing my house and thinking that I live like my mother. That woman wouldn’t know what oven cleaner was if you brained her with a can of Easy-Off. This phobia of turning into her has warped my life to the point that I can’t even let my friends into my perfectly normal house (if you don’t count the cats occupying every flat surface) but that’s a story for another day.

Anyhoo, this was a wasted effort. I inherited this oven from Fred’s grandmother, and it has not gotten any better looking with age. Personally, I think the dent that I put in it while chasing a wasp through the kitchen with a cast iron skillet was an improvement. Fred disagrees.

I even tried Dawn Heavy Duty Degreaser in an attempt to remove the 20 year old lava caked in the bottom of the oven. This stuff will lift motor oil out of concrete, and it hasn’t done anything thing except gas all of us with the fumes. I refuse to use the Self Clean mode, because I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to evacuate the Furbeestes before a 900F firebomb torches my house, and my homeowners insurance is high enough already. So don’t bother suggesting that to me. Ain’t gonna happen.

Seriously. If this stuff doesn’t get your oven clean, just give up and buy a new one. Also, do you like my 1970’s green snowflake kitchen counters? They go great with the World’s Butt Ugliest Kitchen Floor.

My next step is to drag it outside, set off some dynamite in it, scare the shit out of the neighbors. and go buy a new stove.

Its now 11 pm. I give up. This as as good as it’s going to get for a blog that no one reads anyway.

Sorry, folks, but you’re just going to have to see cabbage buns being baked in an old, crusty oven. I’m pretty sure Martha Stewart won’t notice when she pops in this weekend to ask for my Fruit Soup recipe.