I read with interest Ted's mention of the Ghetto being haunted. John Clay called this phenomenon "Ted Kline's Ghost". Not the ghost of Ted Kline but rather the ghost experienced by Ted Kline. When I first moved in to the Ghetto I lived in the bottom apartment farthest from the alley. If I'm not mistaken this is the one that Ted lived in before me, and the one where the ghost was seen. I myself never saw any ghost but I have a story about it none the less. In those days the Ghetto was frequently visited by a pig farmer by the name of Don Kleen. Don was neither a man of letters nor a man of means but he had been around and he was rich in experiences which, in a sense, gave him both. Now Don claimed to have a special sensitivity to spirits and the like and one night he decided to call up the spirit of the Ghetto. So he did. Don't ask me how. Maybe it was my frame of mind at the time, I don't know but within a half an hour or so I began to have the most unnerving sensation on the back of my neck. This started when we were out in the yard and persisted after I reentered the apartment. In fact it never did completely go away. From that time on I could never spend any time in the far corner of the bedroom without getting the willies big time. Later I moved out of that apartment (prompted partly be this experience) and moved to the other downstairs apartment. This was the one on the alley. In that apartment I always had the feeling that I was not alone. If I was in the living room I sensed that someone or something was in the bedroom. If I went into the bedroom to see the something would suddenly be in the living room. Imagination? Yes probably. The workings of an overmedicated cerebral cortex? Could be. But I will say this, after I moved out of the Ghetto I never had an experience like that again. Rastus Peabody (Powell St. John)

Don Kleen not only claimed the ability to detect spirits, he also claimed he could tell when cops were near. He demonstrated this to me on several occasions. Once he said, "Thre's some cops around here," and a couple of minutes later a cop car cruised through the alley. As Quinctilis says, Don was a cedar chopper, and I think Rastus is correct that he was a pig farmer, too. He was also a deer poacher, and from the account of Q, perhaps he was a goat rustler. Let us award him the honorific of Hill Country Renaissance Man. Wali Stopher

Ah yes, there is a memory trace or two left on this topic. Don was a genuine dirt farmer proletarian from maybe 50 miles east of Austin maybe who somehow got mixed up with our crowd since he was a sweet guy who liked freaky people who didn't hate him despite being uneducated or something like that. He did brag about how much he could drink one time I remember. If anything he was loyal and had strong moral principles. He was very honest and hard-working and proud and sensitive, and reasonably smart, but pretty utterly uneducated by the standards of UT dropouts. I went to visit "snakey acres" and other quaintly named territories at his very rural place one time -- and spent the night; he claimed there were even a few indigenious wolves left out there. Interestingly, poaching deer using a strong flashlight to make their eyes light up an shooting at the eyes was part of his cultural heritage; he claimed to know precisely how the sheriffs around central Texas operated. I went on a daring deer-poaching expedition with him one time -- on a trip calculated to avoid all sherriffs and their deputies. I lost my glasses in the wilderness along the road. We likewise failed to acquire any deer, but the episode was a useful addition to my daring adventures. To make a short story even longer, I was affiliated with a socialist group called YSA and there was a good-hearted woman from this 1970 or so socialist orbit that Don Kleen met and married. Soon thereafter she got polio, and walked kind of funny thereafter, as he described her one of the last times I talked to him. I hope they are still living happily out there somewhere. Roger Baker

Many thanks to Roger for updating our knowledge of Don Kleen and his poaching technique. Almost every day in Palo Alto I see a grey-bearded, cranky homeless guy who reminds me of Don so much I get a creepy "ghost feeling" whenever I look at him. I remember the time Don borrowed my red 49 Plymouth coupe to poach deer. He returned it unscathed (although Tommy Hall later blew out a piston on a dope run), but I never forgave him for leaving blood all over the trunk, where he must have concealed the carcasses. Well, maybe I'm just too fussy about my cars! Jon Ford

The account of the Ghetto ghost is very interesting, but I must take issue with Powell's description of Don Kleen. He was not a pig farmer but a cedar chopper (a very distinct Hill Country subculture all in its own), and, while perhaps not a man of much education ("letters") he was a damn fine poet. I last saw Don in the mid-70s; he had become a hard-shell Mormom and given up COFFEE and ciggies, which amazed me, as he used to live on those items - and not much more - in the Chuckwagon days. Don and I were poetry pals, and it was in his company that I - sweet little freshman girl - visited the Ghetto. His greatest contribution to the "scene" - and Clark S. will certainly remember this - may have been in acquiring the "goats" used in early SDS "Goat Roasts". They were not true cabras, but venados - out of season, fat & juicy! Mariann Wizard

Deer, right. I don't recall "goat roasts," but I did go poaching deer with Don on more than one occasion -- post-Ghetto, in the 2610 Salado days and afterwards. But look, ya'll have forgotten something. Term was "cedar WHACKER," not chopper. Somebody actually produced a grad paper grounding the Hill Country cedar whackers in specific East European ethnologies (claimed they were distinctive as to lack of a firm taboo on mother-son incest.) If Don's family might have been pig farmers, I don't remember. I last remember him from about the same mid-70s era... No, I may have still been with Diane. I last recall being at his home with an interesting wife named Celia, who had a colorful background herself. I think they had a child. Happy to see folks using the net to reach for the ghosts of the past. This is a concept alien to the late Boomers & Gen-X. Increasingly, for them, history seems to commence around 1992... Paul

Ted Klein (who, I believe, gave The Ghetto its name) had told me that he thought there was a ghost inhabiting the building. The following story doesn't explain Ted's ghost, but it might possibly provide an explanation for subsequent perceived presences in the now-legendery edifice. During Christmas break in '59 Ted and I drove my Renault down to Mexico City and Acapulco. In the public market in Acapulco we saw for sale big live iguanas, their hands and feet tied together and their mouths sewn shut, ready to be taken home to be killed, cooked, and eaten. So we bought six or eight of the largest and most brightly-colored ones (they were about fifty cents apiece), untied their limbs and unsewed their mouths, and brought them back to Austin with us. At the Texas border, the U.S. Customs official spotted the burlap bag in the Renault's tiny luggage compartment and asked what was inside, but when Ted told him it was live iguanas he quickly closed the lid, saying it was all right as long as we didn't have any cattle. Back in Austin the exotic reptiles were a big hit, and Ted and I got our photo in the Daily Texan holding one of the large lizards, and Ted got his picture in the Austin paper as well. Ted was living in the upstairs front (away from the alley) apartment of The Ghetto at the time, and he put the iguanas in his bathtub until we could figure out what to do with them. We donated one to the University of Texas, one to Texas A.&M, and eventually sold the others to curiosity-collectors at ten or fifteen dollars apiece. All but one of the others, that is. One of them, not surprisingly (it was over five feet long) got out of the bathtub and disappeared, never to be seen again. I have been wondering what happened to this poor animal ever since. It could easily have gotten through a crack into the space between the walls of the decrepit building, perhaps passing the winter close to the hot water heater, feeding on rodents (which lived there in abundance too). When The Ghetto was torn down, it could have easily moved into one of the many other decrepit wooden houses in the neighborhood. Furthermore, reptiles are thought not to die of old age, but to continue growing until they are killed. Maybe it's still in Austin, now possibly six or seven feet long, dreaming of the day when another miracle transports it back to its tropical birthland. So don't be too surprised, Austinites, if one day you open the closet door where your hot water heater is and there, glaring at you, is Ralph the Iguana, the Second Spirit of The Ghetto! Gilbert Shelton