Tour Stories - Part 2

On Adulterous Woman's first tour, we only played a few shows. Booking your own unknown band is no easy task, and you have to just take what you can get and hope there's a crowd. Well one way we hoped to reach more people is to play on a college radio station. We contacted KDVS at the University of California at Davis campus and they set a date for us to play live on the air.

When we arrived everyone was very nice, but we ended up being hurried on for reasons i can't recall. There was no time for any soundcheck and the monitoring was really bad, almost non-existent. So not being able to hear our vocals well enough meant that we effectively sucked vocally. Often we were off-key and singing too loud which distorted the signal at times. The proof of this was that they recorded the whole thing for us; that's a tape that i've only listened to all the way through once, while cringing.

The day before that show, though, while staying in San Jose, my wife and I had a strange experience. We got a motel room for all of us, and then leaving Heather and Natalie there, Kelly and I decided to go in search of some dinner, ie fast food. We started off one way on the not-so-busy divided road and after 5 minutes or so realized that wasn't the way to go. There were no restaurants of any kind to be seen. So we found a turn lane, made a "U-ey" and started off in the other direction.

As soon as i turned and started speeding up, i immediately noticed a man walking from the curb in to the street from a boarded up ex-motel. I slowed down a bit, not knowing whether he was going to stop. Then he did stop, right at the white line, and when our rental car was about 10 feet from him he turned and faced us. To my shock, there was blood streaming down the right side of his face. I gasped, and so did Kelly, as we passed him within a couple of seconds (i was probably going about 25 mph by then) and then i immediately looked in the rear view mirror. I saw nothing. Of course it was getting darker (our headlights were on) so there may just not have been enough light to see him. So i found the next place to make another U-turn and we went back to see if he needed help. There was no sign of the guy, and no blood on the road even though there really should have been. I mean the blood was literally streaming.

It's the only time i've ever had an experience that i can't explain except to say that it had to be an apparition. A prank? Not with the volume of liquid coming off of that guy's face. There would have to have been some trace of it left. It was only about 45 seconds between seeing it and going back. And in our headlights the second time around the road was completely dry. Kelly and I drove back to the motel mostly in silence. We both saw it although Kelly has always been more skeptical about it. But as for me, i think we saw a ghost.