John Carver’s Ghostly Interstices and Psychic Hair Salon;
Or, "The Care and Feeding of Unhappy Entities"
This one’s from this week’s story at JaxPsychoGeo.com. More substack-only work coming his week!
1. The Imprints and Recordings of Lives
“This is an unhappy house,” John Carver said as he stepped through the door that evening in early February 1978. His voice boomed. He stood 6’4”, broad-shouldered, burly and bearded. He could feel the house “tingling.” Clearly what the new homeowner had done had made the entity upset.
John Carver, the de-haunter, with his “piercing eyes” and fur-collared coat, walked into the house like a bear. People knew him best as an Avondale hairstylist and the host of the Stereo-90 radio show Yesterday. Sometimes he wore a metallic brocaded shirt and turban and read palms down in St. Augustine. Newspaper columns frequently asked his expertise regarding old records, antiques and other items of “nostalgia.” If you needed to fish into the past, whether that meant old musical instruments or ghosts, you called John Carver.
While renting a Riverside apartment, Florida Times-Union editor Lloyd Brown had started to renovate the bungalow he’d bought at 2833 Doric Avenue in old-money Ortega. He found wall studs and attic rafters charred from some long-ago fire. A worker had spent several hours, from nine p.m. to three a.m. one night, installing kitchen cabinets alone and said he’d heard a dog in the house, later someone at the front door, another time heavy footsteps in a nearby room. A neighbor told Brown that an old woman, an invalid, had died in a fire inside. Brown could find no record of the event.
So the editor called the city’s “best-known” “ghost chaser.” Carver said he didn’t like the word “ghost.” He preferred “entity.” He said, “Strong events like murders, suicides and deaths leave imprints.” Strong personalities could leave “recordings” of themselves in places to which they’d become attached. The dead, he said, sometimes don’t know they’re dead.
Carver asked Brown about “cold spots” in the house. “That one surprised me,” Brown wrote in a February 12, 1978 column. He’d avoided working there lately because of how much colder it was in the back of the house than outside. Carver said he’d like to visit, but he’d been ill. He’d be in touch. “Then one dark, cold and clammy evening, there was a knock at the door.”
When Carver came inside, he told Brown that several haunted houses resided in neighborhoods like Ortega and Riverside, enmeshed in a psychic web of “magnetic interstices” that snared entities after death. He said the changes Brown was making to the house upset the residual entity who still felt this house to be home.
After Carver sealed invisible boundaries with salt and blessed the bungalow, he advised Brown to light candles, to say the Lord’s Prayer and, if he should happen “to spot the lady,” to “look right at her and say, ‘God bless you.’” Brown and his wife moved in; he never wrote a followup.
2. The Allure of the Past
Newspapers mentioned Carver regularly throughout the 1970s, most often in his friend Tilly Teller’s column, “Tell Tilly.” Sometimes Tilly mentioned “Big John” weekly. Always she referred to his show Yesterday, which aired at six o’clock Sunday evenings on WJCT, Stereo-90. He played old music and episodes of old radio shows like The Shadow, with its famous intro – “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” In 1972, Tilly wrote that Carver had 10,000 records to play from and that anyone who had questions should call him at his Avondale salon at 3945 St. Johns Avenue.
In February of ’73, little more than a year before Nixon’s resignation, Tilly explained the allure of the past in a grim and unaffordable present. The war in Vietnam seemed it would never end. Inflation kept escalating, as it would for the decade. Americans worked harder to get further behind. People thus took “increasing pleasure in looking at and listening to the past.” Stereo-90 was extending Carver’s show to 90 minutes. He spoke of how the Florida Ostrich Farm once had an office in the Seminole Hotel, how old phone directories carried the warning, “Do Not Phone During a Thunderstorm.”
For Halloween radio specials, newspapers listed Carver as “your (g)host.” He frequently played records after “Tell Tilly” readers’ questions, from recordings of readings of Laurence Hope’s 1901 India’s Love Lyrics to Irish songs like “I Brought Me Harp to a Party,” “Paddy Murphy’s Wake” and “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.”
In February of ’75, The Jacksonville Journal reported that Carver was offering his customers a horoscope with a haircut – a “hairoscope” – saying, “Our big friend John Carver, who looks more like a football player with a Zeus beard than the hairstylist he is, is much interested in the psychic.” As he was sensitive “to each person’s magnetic field,” he’d taken to providing his customers with “a thumbnail horoscope” while he worked on their hair. He said you had to prove something’s worth to Scorpios and Virgos before they’d purchase it. The Journal opined, nearly halfway through Gerald Ford’s administration, “Sounds like good signs to be born under during these days of low values and high prices.”
3. The Space Between Conflicting Truths
Chris Carver is a natural storyteller. From his armchair in the big Riverside house called Gleniffer, sunlight filtering through old curtains in the bay window behind him, he leans far back as he descends in recollections. He tilts back his head, closes his eyes, rubs his forehead, gesticulates. With his elbows on the arms of his chair, his forearms stand straight, his palms open like he’s releasing what he has to say from his hands. He looks like he might be trying to see into your future to tell your fortune. It’s not an affect.
It’s a hot late April day. Beside Chris are his pedal organ and boxes of cylinders of old recordings on an end table. Also heavyset, if not as tall as his father, Chris too wears a beard. His eyes can pierce, though their brightness casts a lighter blue like the sky. He enters the subject of his father death-first. It’s easier that way, since he spent his early life, from age five, angry at his father and protective of his mother.
John Carver died at the end of a wonderful evening, Chris says, on Halloween 1984. A teetotaling heavy smoker and diabetic, John Carver was just 52. After the divorce, John had moved into a Riverside apartment with a male partner, and when that situation fell apart, moved to Tallahassee. That final Halloween, he shared the history of All Hallows’ Eve from a Tallahassee TV station and went full-diva, or as Chris puts it, “he presided over the subject like Queen Victoria.”
Afterward he went to have dinner at the home of a female friend, and Chris says, died on the toilet, as an uncle of his had done. As John had found hilarity in the location of his uncle’s death, Chris says his father would have been pleased with his own. “He used to say the toilet was his favorite place,” Chris says, “that it was the only place he could get away from my mother.”
John Carver hadn’t always been “Big John.” Sure, he was tall, but he’d earlier been sleek, svelte. When he was 26 years old, he modeled for Riverside-based photographer Edith Schiller-Fehl. In those 1958 photos, he wore black slacks, a striped shirt and sweaters either all-white or sole-black. He held his cigarette gingerly, his hair shellacked and side-parted, his dimple tufting his chin. Behind him classical music and jazz album covers hovered as he straddled a bar stool, stared through square-framed glasses. In one photo, he folds his arms parallel. In another, he grasps a shoulder blade.
Chris sifts through old black-and-white photos of his father. Here’s John Carver in his early 20s, an apartment on Cherry Street near Willowbranch, playing with a yoyo and a cat he and his children would remember all their lives, “Merry Xmas” on the floor. Here he is in other early photos, some by Schiller-Fehl, thin and coiffured, forward brow ridge and full eyes, anxious, collared and necktied, cigarette held upside down and genteelly. And here, a little later, face fuller, more anxious yet, more dapper, metallic squiggles and waves across the surface of the image, fittingly.
That anyone, even before his parents’ divorce, might be surprised that his father was gay strikes Chris as ludicrous. If Chris’s mother Terry didn’t already know before John left for Cuba with a boyfriend two weeks into their marriage, she knew then. Somehow their marriage survived.
John Carver’s been dead for more than 40 years now. Chris made peace with him sometime between his parents’ divorce and his father’s death. He knows, he says, that his parents loved each other, all their complications and righteous anger notwithstanding. Something reconciles itself between truths that can’t seem to coexist, like the cosmological difference between particles and waves.
Chris first sided with his mother against his father when he was five years old and saw his father hit her across the face. He’s come to believe that entangled beings sometimes switch roles across the distances of time, that in a previous life, Chris’s own ex-wife was his husband, that he was her wife. He hopes he might have made right, this time around, something wrong between them in a prior life. He hopes that what his father got wrong comes right through him, through his children, through those after them.
Ironically, none of the series of houses John Carver moved his family through seemed to have hauntings, or “disturbances” – not the South Edgewood Avenue house, the Oak Street, the Windermere Drive, or even the King Street house where others had reported strange happenings. Those reports, Chris says, resulted from faulty wiring and an attic fan that slammed doors shut.
John Carver’s place of business has mostly remained a hair salon, today called Willow and Ash. In 2022, new owners demolished the 1921 bungalow that newspaper editor Lloyd Brown had renovated in the late ’70s. They’ve replaced it with a much larger and less interesting house. Surely John Carver would have expected unhappy entities there to grow increasingly upset by the big, bland replacement.
4. “The Care and Feeding of Unhappy Entities”
The latter half of the 1970s made John Carver a star. Beginning in July 1975, he gave regular talks to the Florida Crown Psychical Research Society at that strange Brutalist / Mid-Century Modern bank designed by architect Edwin Reeder on University Boulevard. His subject there in March of ’76 was “How to De-Haunt a House.” The Jacksonville Journal’s headline was “How to Shoo a Spook.”
facade of architect Edwin Reeder’s Arlington Federal Savings and Loan Bank
To think of Carter as an “exorcist,” he said, would be “presumptuous,” though, said the Journal, “he knows people who are capable of this peculiar form of pest control.” If, on the other hand, you were more the “live-and-let-live sort, even for those no longer living, he can give some hints on what he terms, ‘The Care and Feeding of Unhappy Entities.’” Carver said, “It really isn’t fair to always want to get rid of them. They may have a lot more right to be in the house than you have.”
Summer ads, 1976, showed a profile photo and the caption, “Mr. John, well known hair stylist specializing in the natural and problem haircuts,” at Cameo Hair Stylists, while a full-page feature in The Jacksonville Journal’s religion section on May 15, 1976 carried the headline “Psychic: Death Only [a] Transition.” Carver said ghosts exist “on a different plane, a different time and place. But there is some sort of overlap.” He preferred the word “disturbance” to “haunting.”
the bedroom in one of John Carver’s first Riverside apartments, somewhere near Cherry Street and Willowbranch Park
Carver said he’d told one entity she was dead and she’d responded, “Hogwash! I don’t believe it.” He said certain personalities refused to believe in their own death. One entity clung to a house because new owners had replaced a window in a door with wood and she “could no longer see her rose garden.” He admitted to being puzzled that she couldn’t see through the wood. He preferred not to say someone had died. He used the term “passing over,” said it wasn’t a euphemism, that death wasn’t final. “The Catholics call it limbo, between here and there. It has no geographic location, it’s amorphous, sometimes it is narrow, sometimes very wide.”
He mentioned a house he’d de-haunted out west of town in Marietta. “The first thing to ascertain,” he said, “is whether it is the land, the house, something in the house, or a person that is the key.” Before the woman who lived in the house explained her situation, Carver told her she’d seen the “‘ghost’ in the hall, in the bedroom, that she slept on that side of the bed and the figure had stood there.” The entity had come from a man killed in a motorcycle accident in Ohio when a logging truck lost its cargo 10 years earlier. Carver told her there was a “blood tie,” that she was “a tiny light in his darkness.” Carver had “very little choice” but to help stuck souls pass on and hoped that in “helping the souls of others,” he was “helping [his] own soul to advance.”
Soon writers and paranormal investigators sought Carver’s insights to strange situations from Mayport to St. Augustine to New Orleans. An October 30, 1977 full-page feature about a New Orleans haunting headlined the question, “Does Headless Squaw Still Sweep?” Elsewhere he warned that “when you buy materials from a wrecking firm, you may inadvertently pick up a ghost.” Looking like “a statue of Zeus,” Carver spoke of a house near the Cedar Hills neighborhood, just 15 years old but with “strange manifestations.” He found that “roof beams had come from a demolished house where human bones were found in the attic.” He warned that a brand new house could be haunted from the land underneath.
The hairstylist also spoke of strange situations with hair. He’d mention the “famous seven Sutherland sisters,” whom P.T. Barnum billed in the 1880s as having “the longest hair in the world,” and Bella Carter, whose reddish brown “mane” grew 18 inches from a big mole between her shoulder blades. She wore gowns lowcut in back to showcase her hirsute glory. 1978 advertisements presented John as “specializing in natural curl-cutting, corrective perms and corrective coloring.”
Carver warned people that “hauntings” could range from vague sensations to the detection of faint perfumes to “seeing a ghost or even being touched by one.” Sometimes ghosts were only visible from the side. “Poltergeists,” meanwhile, mainly manifested themselves “by throwing objects.” Often, haunted houses didn’t “look” haunted. Sometimes a wife was sensitive enough to perceive a haunting, sometimes a husband, sometimes one family dog but not the other. Often the living seemed to ghosts more strange and threatening than ghosts appeared to the living, and since such entities had not accepted their own deaths, you could understand their hostility to others in their own homes as rational.
A month before his death, Mary Ann Lindley of The Tallahassee Democrat wrote of “sitting at a Whataburger with John Carver, an imposing white-haired Ernest Hemingway look-alike who de-haunts houses. Whataplace to meet a ghostbuster!” He’d never met a “really nasty ghost,” he said; “often they’re very sad.”
On the day of his death, Florida State University’s alternative weekly, The Florida Flambeau, published an account of a haunted fraternity house and said Carver and a psychic named Doug Reider had been investigating it for months. Carver told the Flambeau that traumatic events could register as imprints and recordings, stuck in place like “film loops running over and over.”
He told Lindley he would never use his talents for ill. “If you really crossed me,” he told the columnist, “I could turn you into an absolute pile of jelly, tell you your secret fears. But I wouldn’t. I believe that if you do something negative, you reap something negative.” Carver said God had given him his talent. When he resisted it, it “nudged” him into action. He would never call himself a medium or parapsychologist. “I’d rather just be called ‘sensitive,’” he said.
John Carver seemed to be a fascinating man. One of the most fascinating of his ideas in particular, is the idea that people can become intertwined with physical places in the interstice between life and non-life. Although this isn't anything particularly new, i think that the way his son expounded upon this idea saying that people could become entwined in life and come back throughout lives in order to "do right" by the other is pretty novel as well as being poignantly beautiful. I especially liked where you wrote that he expressed that, "he hopes that what his father got wrong comes right through him, through his children, through those after them." It's a cool way to think about the continuation of life through our subsequent generations.