I drove up to the Flying J truck stop yesterday to meet with my friend from Omaha. On the drive home, I took the backroads, down the Platte River road through the Gretna Fish Hatchery, down to Louisville, and on down to Church Road. As I drove past the Hatchery, I glanced out toward the river and was amazed to see not one Bald Eagle, but SEVEN perched on stumps along the middle sandbar.

I took it as an omen, a sign of better days to come. I once had to drive back and forth to Elkhorn during my days as a Nebraska Storyteller for the Arts Council. And each winter day I drove there to perform for three separate schools, I spotted seven red-tailed hawks hovering next to I-80. I counted them every day to make sure I had the count right. And seven appeared to be the magic number each time. It inspired me to write a story, and Lionstone was born. 

I don’t know what those seven hawks symbolized or if they pertained to an omen or not, but during that next year I did publish 4,000 copies of Scratchin’ on the Eight Ball and The Kid, the Cop and the Con. And I did manage to sell the majority of those books that year by speaking in all the Middle and High schools in Lincoln. It was a great year for book sales, and I was able to pay back the Havelock Business Association for their investment in the printing of these books, $7,000 in six weeks seemed like a small miracle to me.

So, that next year, after having much success with the book sales, my friend and fellow-author, Gary Gablehouse, President of the Board at Camp Kitaki and CEO of Fairfield Research, approached me about pitching my anti-drug program, Kastleland, to the video industry. My three Gifted students and I wrote the script, took a 1,000 kid survey, had a psychologist anayalize our script, and then sent the script to an agent in Arizona. The day it arrived, lighting struck the guy’s fax machine and we had to send the script a second time. Gary joked and said, “Whoa, you’re always saying God is on your side, what was the purpose of him striking Bill’s fax machine?” 

I told Gary, “Oh, that is an omen, and the company that picks up our game will have a lighting bolt on their letterhead or as an emblem for their company.”

Amazing as that seemed, we submitted the game script to Electronic Arts, the biggest in the industry. It passed the muster of 4 major gatekeepers there, and their proposal came back with them offering us $85,000 for the rights, 5% on the backend of four different formats, Nintendo, Playstation, IBM and Apple. My three students started talking about investing their money in a college fund, and I, too, talked about writing full-time after we sold the game. The Journal Star picked up the story and we had a full-page story about the sale of the game, Kastleland to EA. It was a big deal, and I thought about those seven hawks I had spotted the year before.

But then, the game script went before the 5th Gatekeeper at EA, and he shot it down. Yes, after all the talk, our balloon went bust. During those next two years, we continued to submit the game to 12 other companies, even to Sound Source, who had a lightning bolt on their letterhead! But alas, the game was eventually rejected by all the companies and the game script went into a drawer in my den, and has stayed there ever since.

So SEVEN BALD EAGLES? Perhaps a good omen, perhaps just seven eagles on their long journey through the Nebraska flyway. Nevertheless, it was an impressive sight and perhaps that it is all it was meant to be, that I happened to driving along those backroads and I happened to glance out toward the frozen river. Maybe nothing more than a nice sight to carry with me on my way down the road.

A week later, after the strange man peered in our house at my mom, Tommy Wolfe and I went down to Bob’s Tavern one Saturday afternoon to get money to go the Joyo Theater. When we walked in, neither Tom or I noticed the small, stocky man seated at the table with Tom’s dad. He was dressed in overalls, wore a railroader’s cap, and was facing in the other direction.

Tom and I were both so busy trying to coax money out George Wolfe, that we didn’t notice the man until George pulled out his billfold and said, “Hey, boys, have you ever met Bubba?”

The small man turned to face us. Tommy and I ignored the money George offered us and ran out of there quicker than Jack the Bear! Bubba was the Red Faced Man! And Tom’s dad knew the guy!

Forever after that day, we watched out for Bubba whenever we snuck out at night or whenever we went wandering around Havelock. I can’t say we ever had some violent confrontation with Bubba, but the Red Faced Man, was definitely for real.  

A year later, my mom and my Aunt Darlene got to talking about the night the Red Faced Man had peeked in our back door, and they began telling me a similar story from their childhood.  

As girls, they’d lived in Beatrice, NE, and one night when coming home from a movie, they were followed by a strange man. Much like the Red Faced Man, he followed them, almost catching up to them in the dark.

They made it home and ran in shut off all the lights, telling my Grandma about the man following them home. The three of them were walking around in the dark house, peering out of windows. My aunt had recently been in an auto accident which left her jaws wired shut. As it happened, when she peeked out the bedroom winddow, the man was looking back at her! She screamed and popped all the wires off of her jaws!

Moments later, the front door started to open and my Grandma ran and got the poker from the woodstove and started to swing it at the figure who came through the door. It happened to be my Grandpa, who caught the iron poker just before my Grandma brained him with it. She quickly explained about the strange man outside, and my Grandpa went and got his shotgun and searched the perimeter of their property, but alas, the man had gone.

Now the kicker to this entire story is, my mom and Aunt Darlene shared this story while driving us around in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery long after dark. I kept saying, “Let’s get out of here before we get locked in.” But my mom and aunt were having too much fun scaring the 10-year-old kid propped on the backseat, staring wide-eyed out the car window, looking for the flashlight ghost rumored to be out there.

And after thoroughly freaking me out, they finally decided it was time to leave, but when we got to the front gates, they were closed and locked! I screamed bloody murder, scaring the hell out of my mom and my aunt. I then shouted, “I told you so!”

It was spooky watching my mom walk up the caretaker’s house, while my aunt sat protecting me in the car. All the way home, they talked about how much fun that was to tell ghost stories and get locked in a cemetery. However, I wasn’t laughing . . . until later.

When my Aunt drove into her garage, my cousin stuck a dust mop in through her window, directly in her face, and Aunt Darlene stomped on the gas pedal, and crashed the nose of the car through the back of the garage!

Only then, did I laugh. And to this day, that story still spreads a grin on my face.

So now that we established that no one believed us about the Red Faced Man prowling the streets of Havelock, one night Tommy Wolfe and I armed ourselves with baseball bats and set out on a mission to prove he existed.

We walked up Benton Street, determined to catch the Red Faced Man peeking in some unlucky lady’s window. But halfway up the dark street, all the bravado went out of our sails with a sudden whoosh! as another neighbor kid leaped out behind a car and scared the Be-Jesus out of us. I stood my ground, baseball bat raised to destroy. Tommy Wolfe, however, flung his bat in the air, dove to the ground, and screamed, “Mommy!” at the top of his lungs. So our mission for the night came to a screeching halt.

A few nights later, my dad and I were coming home from the Hinky Dinky grocery store on Adams, when the Red Faced Man walked past our drive-way. I stood and watched him blend in with the trees across the vacant lot next to our house. That image would forever remain in my head (and appear in several of my books later), for the Red Faced Man stood there in the blackness between the cottonwoods, silently smoking  a cigarette, its cherry-red glow illuminating the creepy features of his face.

I directed my dad’s attention to the man between the trees, and while he took interest in him for a moment, when I said, “That’s the Red Faced Man,” my dad chuckled and walked back into the house. I quickly followed him.

A few minutes later, I was sprawled on my bed, reading comic books, while my dad was in the nearby bathroom shaving. I got the distinct feeling that someone was watching me from outside my bedroom window, and when I turned to look in that direction, there came a loud Boom! on my window.

I yelped and rolled off of my bed, hit the floor, and crab-crawled my way out into the hallway. My dad, standing at the bathroom sink, shaving cream plastered on his face, looked down at me and asked, “What are you doing?”

I gasped, “The Red Faced Man just banged on my window!” My dad simply snorted and continued shaving, once again believing the spook of the night was nothing more than my wild imagination.

The kicker came a few weeks later, when one night I was seated at the kitchen table. My mom was talking to my Aunt Darlene on the phone, standing at the sink washing dishes. I was eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, and I remember my mom turning at the sink and staring off toward the open back door. She muttered something to my aunt and then suddenly screamed!

I melted out of my chair, knocking my spoon full of Lucky Charms out of my bowl, and slipping to the floor. My dad came running from the living room and my mom began screaming, “There was a man standing there on the porch staring in at me!”

My dad went outside, my mom following him, the phone with my Aunt Darlene on the other line forgotten on the floor where she had dropped it. I crawled over, picked up the phone, and Darlene asked me, “What in the hell is going on over there?”

I whispered, “It was the Red Faced Man!”

 to be continued . . .