The story of my fascination with this book begins, as so many of my stories seem to, with my Mother. I remember being about the age of eight or nine when Mom, ever fascinated, as I am, by the paranormal world, borrowed Spindrift, Spray from a Psychic Sea, by Jan Bryant Bartell, from the local library. I remember her talking about the book, and the discussion about it one night around the living room at a family get-together. I was about twelve years old when I first read the book myself. Since then, I've read it several times.
The real-life story of Spindrift, an autobiography of sorts, begins in New York city in the late 1950s. Jan Bryant Bartell, actress, poet and lecturer, and her restaurateur husband Fred are searching for an available apartment. Jan finds one on the top floor of a townhouse in Greenwich Village, and upon viewing it she feels compelled to live there, in spite of some initial misgivings. She moves in with Fred and her dog Penny shortly thereafter. From night one in the new apartment, strange things begin to happen. A monstrous, terrifying black shadow looms over Jan as she tries to fall asleep. As the days pass, mysterious soft noises and rustling sounds around the apartment frighten and puzzle her. Penny reacts strangely to something unseen, and smells with no apparent source, some sweet, some unpleasant, make themselves noticeable. A delivery man claims that someone or something follows him up the staircase, while a cleaning lady clearly sees a white figure drifting from one room to another, whereupon she leaves, never to return. While Jan dines one night with a friend, a deafening crash resounds through the apartment, but when the women rush to investigate, nothing is disturbed. Jan finds in the very back of a closet a box of priceless china, smashed to smithereens and left behind by a former tenant........
During their tenancy in this apartment, Jan suffers from eye trauma and passes through the frightening experience of being diagnosed - wrongly as it turns out - with a terminal disease. Penny dies. Jan struggles to make Fred understand what she's going through, but although he tries to be understanding he does not yet seem to experience the paranormal events with the same degree of intensity. Remember that it's the late 1950s and early '60s.......there are few avenues of help open to someone experiencing a haunting. Jan tries to educate herself and amasses a collection of paranormal and spiritual books. Spindrift is as much about her spiritual journey as it is about a haunting.
Things come to a head one night when Contessa, Tessa for short, the new Vizsla dog Jan and Fred have adopted from a local pound hours before her death in the gas chamber, reacts strongly and fearfully to an unseen something in the apartment......terrified, the Bartells retreat into the pouring rain with the dog and take refuge in a local cafe where they sit until dawn. After this event, the search for a new apartment begins in earnest. But before they find one, they enlist the help of noted ghost hunter Hans Holzer after Jan watches a TV program about him. But the celebrated ghost hunter is not very helpful, he holds a seance in the apartment which Jan, Fred and their friend Rocky find a bit suspect, and the hauntings continue. Much later, Han's book, Ghosts I have Known, is published, and includes material about Jan, Fred, and Rocky that none of them gave permission to be used.
Jan and Fred find a new apartment, and then another, and then another. Like lost souls they move with Tessa into one unsuitable living arrangement after another, until they find themselves once again in Greenwich Village, this time in the townhouse once occupied by Mark Twain, and with only a wall separating them from the original apartment where it all began........
Here, Jan and Fred adopt a second dog, a Saluki puppy that Fred finds languishing at the front door of the apartment building, emaciated and abandoned, the day after Christmas. Named Apres Noelle, this dog lasts a mere two and half months before dying of distemper in Jan's arms at the vet. And this seems to begin a cycle of death at the Mark Twain house.......arriving home from the vet, heartbroken from the loss of Apres Noelle, Jan and Fred meet a fellow tenant who also has sad news - her husband is dead. Then another occupant passes away while the Bartells are vacationing in Ireland. Yet another is mugged one night while walking his dogs....he dies of his injuries. The dogs die soon after, and his wife dies alone in her apartment shortly after that. Then yet another tenant is diagnosed with terminal cancer. And then Fred falls seriously ill with a burst appendix, but somehow, thankfully survives. The Bartells buy a house in the suburbs and flee the Mark Twain townhouse, where in four and a half years, nine of the ten tenants have died.
The final paragraph of Spindrift is a note from the Editor of the book. It explains how Jan Bryant Bartell finished the writing of Spindrift in March of 1973. After much delay because the typists working on the script kept falling ill, the manuscript was finally finished and delivered to the publisher in May. On June 18, Jan Bryant Bartell was found dead in her home, having died alone of an apparent heart attack.
Each time I read Spindrift, I seem to tune in to a different aspect of it. I seem to be drawn to this book, and to the real-life story of Jan, Fred, and their dogs. A ghost story it certainly is, and I soak in paranormal accounts like a sponge. But Spindrift is also about Jan's journey towards an awareness of what these days we like to call 'the web of life'. During my most recent re-reading of Spindrift, it is this journey with which I found myself the most sympathetic.
In spite of accounts I've read by people who claim to have known Jan that say she was neurotic and edgy, thus implying that she imagined most of what she recounted in Spindrift, I wish I could have met Jan, and I believe that what she was experiencing were genuine paranormal events. I feel a real sense of kinship with this woman, in more ways than one. As many of you know, I have worked in the animal welfare field for many years. Jan's love of dogs, and her outrage at the way some people treat them is parallel with my own. Reading her account of the loss of Penny, my own eyes well up with tears in sympathy. When the Bartells visit a city pound and find Tessa waiting for them, Jan describes the 'Pleading eyes, the mute heart-hunger, and the tremulous tail' of the occupants awaiting rescue. She writes 'Until the moment I relinquish my uneasy tenure on this earth, I shall never understand why, in the worldly scheme of things, hate was designed to roam at large, un-leashed, while love, in its least adulterated form was held captive in a cage.' Later, at the death of the abused Apres Noelle (the Saluki, my favorite of all dog breeds), Jan rages 'Why world, why? Why must your wretched sins of omission be paid for by the innocent?' Why indeed? And how many of us, in the face of animal abuse, have not cried out in our souls the very same lament? Jan refers to her rescued animals as 'rejects of a society that treasures it's rhinestones and throws it's diamonds away.'
Jan searches for meaning behind her experiences, but acknowledges a universe vast, and awe-inspiring. She toys with the idea of exorcism as a way of controlling the paranormal events that occur in her home, but wonders how they could know the spiritual affiliation of the entity? Here again, I find myself in accord with Jan! If the spirit doesn't believe in Jesus or even know who he was, how would exclaiming 'Be gone, in the name of Christ!' have any effect? The last chapter of Spindrift conveys Jan's dissatisfaction with western ideas on Spirit. I quote....'We refute the persistent evidence of our psychic sense, calling coincidence that which is telepathic communication; calling chance that which is synchronicity; calling dream that which is the soul's insight or the future's foresight; calling luck, good or bad, that which is destiny; and calling 'spooky' anything having to do with death that manages to pierce through this dense dimension to offer proof of survival beyond it.' And she has realized that as we become more detached from our psychic sense, from one another and from the Earth we live upon, we weaken the entire chain of links and damage ourselves. Remember that this book was written in the early 1970s, when the concept of ecology was still a fairly new one, at least by white, Western standards. Jan states 'If both physically and psychically we are what we eat - we're beat!' And the book is full of Jan's own telepathy, insightful dreams, and synchronicity. The synchronicity of finding Tessa, hours before she was to be put to death in a gas chamber at the city pound. The telepathy that brought Jan to explore her deceased Mother's old school days before it was slated to be destroyed. The two dreams she had that seemed to be foretelling her own death.
I look at my own life now, having put Spindrift back on the shelf for a few more years. At some of the occurences that I cannot explain, at my own frusterated psychic sense, hampered by a obsessive-compulsive need to seek out mundane explanations, at my seeming lack of ability to take a flying leap of faith. At the fact that when my loved ones pass on, it's as though they close a door behind them that I cannot penetrate, even for a second. I acknowledge that their survival beyond death is not only a possibility, it's a probability. Yet I cannot see, or hear, or sense even a part of them. Except in dreams, where my Mother (who passed away last August) and I wash dishes and have completely ordinary conversations, the details of which I can never remember upon awakening. Are these messages from her? Yes, part of me says, but another parts demands, how do I know for sure? Why can't I know for sure?
Jan and her story let me move, for a time, beyond my paralyzed ability to fully believe, and, frightened as I feel she often was, perhaps a little part of me envies her, because she knew. She knew for sure.
