Tulip City Dispatch

 Spooky season is upon us, so I thought I'd look at haunted or supernatural occurrences in and around Holland, Michigan.  Early on in my blog journey, I spoke with Mr. Nick McNamara, who was a custodian/building & grounds technician at Hope College, who shared the following stories with me:   *Dimnent Chapel: Fall 2017 I was cleaning the chapel very early in the morning (around 3:00 am when this happened) in preparation for Christmas Vespers. I heard one of our locked entrance doors shut, but heard nobody else in the building. I was expecting a student to come help but he wasn’t coming until 5, so this freaked me out. Around 5:30 I had a light flash in front of me, like a camera flash, but the student was down in the handicap entrance and no lights around me had burnt out or blown. Right after that I heard a thump in the balcony above me, but when the student went up there and came back he never mentioned seeing anything that might have fallen.   *Voorhees Hall, ...

 In early August, my wife and I took a long weekend to Nashville.  I wrote the little poem here about it , because I realized that I was in a creative rut.  I've been mulling over the whole thing for over 2 months now, and sorta realized that Holland, in essence, has no culture. We stayed in a hotel near Midtown Nashville, not far from Vanderbilt and not far from the main drag of Broadway.  The hotel we were in was built in the 70s, but renovated and doubled in size in the 2010s.  We walked to the Exit/In for a show and walked past an entire block of businesses that was burned out, graffitied over, and in general disrepair.  But, they almost all had old gig posters and stickers all over the windows.  The reason I was drawn to the Exit/In was because of the book Outlaw (ISBN 0062038192) and the stories of the venue that Kris Kristofferson, in particular, told . We walked from our hotel past Vanderbilt University and saw The Parthenon...got to readi...