Clairaudience, and the Night We Went Looking for Buddy's Ghost | From The Vault

Two weeks ago I walked back into The Rave for the first time in about twenty years.

The Format played the Rave Bar on July 25. An unplugged show, one of only four dates on the Boycott Heaven summer run, Limbeck opening, sold out. Standing in that building again, in a room where I'd not been since my early twenties, I kept thinking about a podcast episode from 2021. Which is a strange thing to think about at a sold-out show. But that's The Rave for you.

Because if you've ever loaded in through those doors, someone has told you the place is haunted. And in November of 2021, WASTOIDS made an episode about exactly that.

Clairaudience ran from July 2021 to April 2022. A late-night, radio-style broadcast hosted by Ersa Lowly, the mistress of midnight, channeled by Mandi Kimes and written and produced by Jason P. Woodbury.

The format was simple and the execution was not. Each episode: a set of bewitching, sleepy-time selections. Library music, exotica, early synthesizer records, threaded together with real voicemails left on the WASTOIDS hotline at 1-877-WASTOIDS. Ghost stories. UFO sightings. Things people saw once and never explained and never quite stopped thinking about.

The whole thing was staged as if it were coming to you live from a haunted studio at 850 W. Lincoln, somewhere past midnight, on a signal you found by accident. Ersa's voice arriving like it had traveled a long way to reach you. Anyone who ever sat up late with Coast to Coast AM knows the frequency. It was a put-on and it wasn't. That's the trick of the show.

The episode I keep coming back to is Buddy's Ghost, which originally aired November 23, 2021.

Ersa opens by admitting the studio itself has a reputation. The building at Hello Lincoln went up in 1927 for the Arizona Sash, Door & Glass Company, and old buildings collect stories the way they collect dust. Odd noises, movement in the corner of the eye, the usual inventory. From there she turns to a bigger and sadder legend: the tragic legend of Buddy Holly's ghost.

Here's the part that got me standing in Milwaukee. 

The Rave/Eagles Club was also built in 1927. On January 24, 1959, it hosted opening night of the Winter Dance Party featuring Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper. Eleven days later the plane went down outside Clear Lake, Iowa. The story every crew and every band will tell you is that Buddy never entirely left. A man watching soundcheck from the shadows. Footsteps with nobody attached. Historians will point out, correctly, that this wasn't his last show, and that the building's more persistent hauntings get pinned on a teenager who drowned in the basement pool that same year. The pool is still down there, drained, covered in the signatures of everyone who's played upstairs. 

I've signed that pool. I've also been spooked in that building. Make of it what you will. What makes the episode work isn't whether any of it happened. It's that Woodbury takes the legend seriously without asking you to believe it, and Kimes delivers it with a warmth that never tips into camp. The Buddy Holly stuff is the hook. The rest is about the way a place holds onto you after you've left it, which is why a twenty-year gap between shows feels like nothing at all until you're standing in the room.