Roberto Valdez

Roberto Valdez spent his early years in his hometown of McAllen, TX drawing, reading comic books, and playing video games. By his teen years he had learned the art of screen printing, computer-aided design, advertising design, photography and even developing his own film with the use of a darkroom. For the last twenty years he has resided in Chicago, Illinois; successfully creating and marketing various forms of art in all mediums ranging from painting, illustration, threedimensional sculpting, and computer-aided graphic design. His plan for the future is to continue marketing his own brand and resume work on his own comic book series.

THE NIGHT OF OPEN GRAVES

Fiction

His heart is beating heavily, his breathing strained as the necromancer holds up a grimoire called “The Book of the Dead.” On this very night at the peak of the full moon, he has gone through all the preparations to conjure up a spirit to appear before him in a full physical manifestation. With all his might the sorcerer has called upon the spirits of the abyss to assist him with the task of bringing back his brother who has been killed in a terrible accident. Having just buried him only a week ago, the sorcerer has the belief that the spirit can bring him back from the dead and tonight he has undertaken the task of summoning up this otherworldly being. With everything in place during the planetary hour of Mars, he has called upon forces he cannot comprehend. One of the precautions in his grimoire is that the sorcerer must not leave the protective circle unless the operator wishes to wreak havoc upon himself.

Within minutes of repeating the conjurations the room grows cold, temperatures dropping by many degrees as strange wailing sounds are heard. The area outside the circle is lit up by four candles on each of the hour quadrants, providing the only light in this dark dungeon, but one by one the candles are blown out by this mysterious force that is trying to arrive. Now, this unskilled sorcerer begins to sweat, as he has not memorized the long strings of verbiage in the conjurations that contain the names of power in a most bizarre language. He cannot read the invocations as the candles have all been diffused but one remains, and with shadows running rampant outside the circle the sorcerer magician begins to panic. He tries to focus on the task to complete his ceremony but with fear in his heart that it will be difficult to remain in control.

He begins to fumble through the process of asking

the spirit to appear before him just outside of the circle within the triangle. He repeats the request to have the spirit appear a few times until all of a sudden the windows to the dungeon crack and a dark shadow in the form of black smoke begins to swirl all throughout this dark dungeon. The spirit has arrived and begins its full physical manifestation.

“By whose authority do you dare summon me, mortal human?”

“I call upon you by the name of Tetragrammaton!”

At this point, the room fills up with smoke coming from the incense burner and the air becomes difficult to breathe, so the spirit asks: “What do you desire? “

The sorcerer magician coughs as the air is too heavy with smoke, “I have lost someone to the other side” Cough, cough. “And he is now dead,” Cough, cough. “Please bring him back!”

“Who is this you speak of?”

Cough, cough, “His name is….” Cough, “Ellis,” cough.

“Your wish is my command.”

The spirit leaves and the room returns to its normal state. The sorcerer magician, exhausted, leaves the dungeon and goes to bed.

Elsewhere, a rumbling is heard, a hand is seen digging upward towards the ground, and something crawls out of a grave. This creature is dragging itself towards the sorcerer’s home and comes into the house making it towards the magician’s bedroom. The creature flicks the light on and the exhausted magician awakes to find this creature dancing in the room and singing “A Mess of Blues,” which was originally performed by Elvis Presley. “I asked for Ellis to come back from the dead, not Elvis.” The magician then realizes that the dead creature is not Ellis but Elvis the King, and realizes how terribly his operation went and how he fumbled the whole operation coughing at the last crucial moment.

This man has just resurrected Elvis from the dead.

GHOSTS, ENDORPHINS, AND BLOOD

Nonfiction

Many years ago while trying to escape being indicted on international drug trafficking charges, waiting out the statute of limitations to run its course, a friend invited me over to work with him at a tattoo shop on Irving Park in Chicago. His description of it was all I needed to know. The tattoo shop used to be a funeral home back in the late 1800s and was currently haunted by spirit called Walter. Aside from that, the backyard had apparently been a graveyard.

At the time, “Odin Tatu” was owned by Richie and we instantly became friends. He had mentioned to me the ghosts that lived in the tattoo shop and he brought me over to the basement and showed me where cremations and embalming were done. He had also told me of the time that Walter the ghost had pushed him down the stairs, but during the first few weeks, I had seen no ghosts. Richie had been a practitioner of Santeria the Yoruban religion with African voodoo roots.

Richie used to love drinking and partying late at night and had invited me to his upstairs apartment to party many times, but I had a girlfriend at the time who was taking up a lot of my time, so it was rare that I would hang out with him. One night he had invited me over for drinks and I told him I wasn’t able to, so I decided to go home and I cannot recall what I was planning that night. The following day, I showed up to work and when I got there, the place was flooded with police. I asked what was going on and Nick, a friend of Richie’s, told me that he had passed away the night before. He died in his sleep. A few days later I attended his funeral. A lot of his friends showed up and talked to me about re-opening the shop under a different name and asked if I was interested in returning to work there and I agreed.

The shop was re-named “Old Town Tatu” and after a few weeks, Nick was talking all about this ghost stuff and said that he did not believe in ghosts. At that very moment, a mask that was hanging on the wall flew off a few feet in the air and hit the ground. I still remember the expression on everyone’s faces. Everyone looked bewildered and shocked. Another time, we had just closed the tattoo shop and the lights to the upstairs apartment where Richie used to live were going on and off. We thought that maybe someone had broken in; when we got into the abandoned apartment to see what was going on and as soon as we got in, the lights went back to normal. There was nobody there, all of the windows locked and closed; the back door was also locked. Nobody had broken in. It was a ghost.

Now, ghosts are peculiar beings. I say beings because they are embodiments of memories that are clinging on to something on the material plane, or so I read. If someone dies suddenly and has some unfinished business on this mortal plane, they may become attached to an object or a place. Most of the time they are in shock and do not know what has transpired so they are stuck in between worlds. I have had previous experiences with ghosts.

When I was a child I began to hang out with a kid from across the street. I’d come over on foggy days and remember hanging out with him by a dead tree. I cannot recall the number of times I’d seen the boy, but I do know that I would see him from time to time. One day, my mother had been looking for me, and when I finally came home, she asked me where I had been, and I told her that I was across the street by the old house hanging out with the boy. She took me to the house and knocked on the door, and a lady had come out to tell her that she did not have a kid, that her son had passed away ten years earlier. After that my mother forbade me to go to that house again.

One night as I was closing the tattoo shop, while I was locking the back doors and turning everything off, I heard a little girl crying, saying, “mommy” and she had repeated it a few times. But I heard it coming from the basement

where the embalming area and crematorium had been, and I went to check downstairs, thinking someone left their child behind. There was no one there. I then heard the crying from upstairs and also checked there and there was absolutely no one in the tattoo shop.

On another occasion, when we opened the tattoo shop, a co-worker from Tennessee, an ex-graffiti artist going by the moniker Debt, was pretty upset, saying that someone had tossed all of his tattoo machines’ supplies on the ground and his area was in disarray. He was furious. He then told me what had happened with his equipment being thrown around and I told him that I did not know who had done it. He was very adamant about finding out who it was. I had a solution, I told him we could check the security cameras. We rewound the video footage up to the point where we left and turned the lights off. As soon as the lights went out, we saw footage of a white ghostly figure that looks like white smoke floating around the tattoo shop and then it was flying around in the area by Debt’s desk. Everyone that was watching the footage was in awe as we all looked at each other and asked, “What the heck was that?”

Did I mention that our tattoo shop was a part of the “Haunted Chicago” and “Ghost Tours” attraction? Shortly after that a few psychics came to do a paranormal investigation. Joe Caballero was working on a documentary titled “America’s Most Haunted” and they arrived to film and interview the shop. Not too long after that, the tattoo shop was contacted by “Ghost Lab” to do an investigation at the tattoo shop. A total of three television shows by different networks were filmed there. I believe that title to the other episode was “Haunted America” but I’m not too sure about the exact show.

You can Google the “Ghost Lab” episode titled, “Under the Skin” which aired on televisions across the U.S. on cable TV. An entire crew came down with their lab to record, set up cameras, motion sensors, and temperature gauges. One night they had set up cameras and recorders everywhere and everyone was kicked out of the shop that night. Just

one person was there recording and they proceeded to ask questions as to who was in the shop. One of the recordings that came back said the name “Walter” and it confirmed everyone’s suspicions. After further investigation the crew mentioned that the research they came up with was Walter, one of the persons working at the funeral parlor a long time ago. I cannot recall how long before that he had lived but they had documented that in the show. “Ghost Lab” had also found another recording which seemed to say, “Turn me on” which the crew believed to be Richie’s voice, the original owner of the tattoo shop who had passed away years earlier.

One of the reasons that ghosts were drawn to the tattoo shop, according to the “Ghost Lab” crew, was that by having endorphins released as well as blood drawn, we were subjected to more activity by these spirits.