A Ghost Story Review (spoiler alert)

“Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.” Virginia Woolf,  A Haunted House

A few minutes into David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, couple C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara) are woken in the early hours by a loud crash coming from the living-room of their one-storey, middle-of-nowhere house. They go to investigate and find….. nothing. So begins a circular, peculiar story that moves back and forth through time.

C dies on what could be the next morning, or the next month, we don’t know, because time is weirdly elastic in this film. C, dressed in a child’s notion of a Halloween ghost, rises from his mortuary gurney and returns to the house he shares with M. He observes M grieve, meet a new man and eventually move out. He meets another bed-sheeted ghost, who’s haunting the house opposite while they wait for someone, but can’t remember who.

Long after M has left the house, C continues to haunt it and it’s could be previous or could be following tenants. Even after the house is demolished and replaced with a luxury office block, and is surrounded by a neon city-scape, he stays there.

 On the surface, the premise of this film is silly and a bit pretentious. Who wants to spend a couple of hours watching Casey Affleck wandering around draped in a bed-sheet?

To me this was a film about two things. 1) Our place in the world and the meaningless of our existence in the grand scheme of things and 2) The nature of what we perceive as endings.

While C can wander back and forth through time, he is perpetually stuck in the place he can’t explain his attachment to, even when he’s alive and M is asking him if they can move to the city. When M asks C why his pull to the house is so strong, he says, ‘I don’t know. History?’  We see some fragments of his home’s sometimes awful history as C time travels to the years before the house was built.

We can project our own feelings onto C – our fears that we’re going to die and be forgotten, that we’ll die without ever doing all the things we had planned to do, that we’re running out of time, that the time we have left seems to be moving forward at an alarmingly accelerated pace. M’s fear manifests itself in her habit of leaving little notes hidden in all the places she lives, explaining that if she ever goes back, she’ll find a piece of herself there waiting. The note she leaves in the house she shares with C is what keeps him stuck there, and is key to his eventual moving on.

 There’s strong chemistry between Affleck and Mara and they convince as an on-screen couple. There’s one scene where we watch them from above, as they lie in bed and kiss, which feels kind of  voyeuristic. This scene ties in well when we later learn that C has also been watching all the time, could have been there with us at that moment too. We are also allowed to observe the couple’s relationship as it starts to crumble under the weight of their different expectations.

Rooney Mara (M) and Casey Affleck (C)

There are moments where good old haunted house tropes are used – flickering lights, books flying off shelves, cupboard doors being flung open, doors being slammed shut. I think this was probably because C was doing what he thought a ghost should be doing when they’re haunting houses; these moments seemed to come when he was upset or distressed (like when he sees M kissing her new boyfriend.) But because time is so oddly fluid in this film, he can’t even make the poltergeist style activity happen when he wants it to – the books fly the shelves too late to scare off M’s new boyfriend.

I found the idea of M perpetually haunting a place he can’t escape from overwhelmingly sad, but it’s a theme that’s at the core of this film; our refusal to let go of things, people, places, meaningless stuff, and memories. It’s also about what happens after we die, to those that we leave behind. Everything else just goes on, without you, until they end, too.

I am not an aspect ratio / camera technique buff, so I am not going to use any technical terms here. The film is shot in a way that makes it look like an old home movie, or Polaroid photo – the kind of effect that we’d use filters on phones to achieve. Because the story is told from C’s point of view, we can only really see what he can see, or how he’d see it. It’s beautifully shot, though, with long distance tracking shots and loooong one-take static shots (there’s a pie-eating scene that feels a bit like one of those extended Family Guy jokes -  I’m pretty sure it’s going to divide audiences into ‘I get this’ and ‘what the fuck am I watching?’)

The music is just brilliant, and really fits the mood of the whole film – it’s atmospheric, creepy, sad and at times uplifting.  

A Ghost Story isn’t going to be everyone’s thing at all. If you’re expecting a straight up chilly ghost story, you’ll be disappointed. If you like your films a little bit weird and a little bit unsettling, but ultimately thought-provoking, it will be for you.

Kind of wish I hadn’t watched it on my birthday, though.

Score: 3.5/5 (I’ve moved off a /10 rating!)

Dishonourable mention: Casey Affleck’s legal troubles. Don’t think about that too much, or it will spoil this film for you. 

It 2017 review and comparison (contains spoilers)

THERE's TWO THINGS that I’m going to have to mention reviewing this film. The first is the 1986 Stephen King mega-novel and the second is the 1990 mini-series adaptation, both of the same name.

I read the book 15+ years ago, so there won’t be many comparisons to that here. After seeing the 2017 remake, I dug out my copy of the mini-series and it’s on as I write this. For the rest of the review, I’ll refer to the new film as It 2017 and the mini-series as It 1990.

There follows a brief plot synopsis:

All three versions are set in Derry, Maine. Stephen King fans will be very familiar with Derry (and the fictional town of Castle Rock) as these are two places that appear over and over again in his work.

A group of young teenage misfits, calling themselves ‘The Loser Club’ have to band together to defeat a fear-eating supernatural entity whose favourite visual representation in the real world is that of Pennywise the dancing clown, who has a mouthful of supernumerary razor sharp teeth. Here's the thing, though...the entity can manifest itself as anything at all, anything that you’re frightened of.

The Loser Club

The Losers Club: Eddie, Bill, Mike, Stan, Ben, Beverly and Richie

Bill : is struggling to get over his guilt over the death of his little brother Georgie. He let Georgie go out and play by himself when he was supposed to be looking after him. His obsession with finding out what happened to Georgie alienates him from his father, who cannot hide his anger and disappointment towards Bill. In the 1990 version, we meet his mother. She does not appear in the 2017 version.

Ben :  is new to town. He’s fat (though not really by 2017’s standards) he’s fascinated by local history and it’s him that’s worked out something really bad happens in the town every 27 years. We don’t know too much about his home life.

Richie: is the comedian of the group, and provides light relief. He also does a marvellous line in filthy jokes. Again, we don’t know too much about his home life and have to assume that his parents are often absent and/or neglectful.

Eddie: is an asthmatic germophobe with a controlling mother. He’s often very anxious and easily wound up. His mother is morbidly obese and spends the day watching television game shows.

Stan: is the voice of reason. We don’t actually see too much of Stan’s backstory, other than his bar mitzvah is coming up and he hasn’t studied for it. Oh, and he’s haunted by a painting of a faceless flute player.

Mike: is an orphan in this version (not in the 1990 one) He’s black, so that automatically outcasts him and makes him the focus of negative attention from Henry Bowers and his sidekicks. He works for the family meatpacking business, a job he struggles with because he can’t bear to slaughter the animals.

Beverly:  is the only girl in the group. She is  the victim off false rumours about her promiscuity. Her dad is sexually abusive, and this is made far more explicit here than it is in 1990 version.

The 1990 version begins with Mike realising that ‘It’ has returned to Derry after a young girl goes missing. Mike phones Bill, and we have a fade-out flashback flash-back to what happened to Georgie in the summer of 1960.

Each version handles Georgie’s death very differently, though what actually happens is identical. The paper boat Georgie and Bill make together is swept into a storm drain. Waiting in the drain is Pennywise. It 1990 gets this scene out of the way quickly – it’s there purely to introduce Pennywise to the audience. It’s also oddly accompanied with weirdly jolly plinky-plonky music. It 2017 spends much longer setting up, firstly in establishing the sweet, close relationship between the two brothers and secondly in holding tension for what’s to come next. We know what’s going to happen to Georgie, and when it does, it’s brutal. His interaction with Pennywise is much longer, and it feels much, much more uncomfortable; Pennywise has water running in and out of his mouth. And he just…lets it run. He doesn’t wipe his mouth or lick his lips. I found that more unsettling than his bright, bright blue eyes. This is an alpha predator on the hunt and his focus on getting Georgie is absolute.

'Hiya Georgie!'

Pennywise is played by Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård, and he’s pretty fucking scary. He has a child-like quality to him, but because he’s obviously very tall, his physicality, the sheer size of him over that of the kids alone, makes him frightening. The way he moves is freaky; his slightly off-kilter eyes are freaky; his sly little smile is freaky; even his grubby, Victorian vaudeville era costume is damned creepy.

Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise

It 2017 dispenses with the adult sections of the narrative altogether, staying with the children first in  the autumn of 1988 when Georgie dies, and then in the summer 1989,  instead of time hopping back and forth like the novel and It 1990 does. This is actually a pretty good way to handle the bloated source material because it nicely lines up part two, and means that this part of the story can fully focus on the kids and their lives in 1989.

The child actors in It 2017 are all superb, and totally believable. There is not one dud performance (and it does feel mean to slate a kid’s acting) Richie, Eddie and Ben provide the comic relief from what would otherwise be a relentless misery fest. And they talk like kids really do; they swear, they take the piss, they tell sexually explicit jokes. Their friendship feels very real. The only girl in the group Beverly, seems older, taller, bigger and more mature than the boys and that’s because in real life, she would be. We first meet 2017 Beverly hiding (unsuccessfully) in the loos from the school bullies. Beverly is actually one of the most complex, and well-drawn characters in this film. She has an utterly miserable home life, but her ‘public’ face is one of sass and bravado.

Each child is facing their own personal fear (and this is what Pennywise manifests as) Beating demons is a reoccurring theme in King’s work. IT 2017 knows this, and puts this theme at the heart of the film. This actually ties in nicely with the coming of age feel that the film also has, and the idea that our childhood fears may always haunt us. I read, watched and listened to other reviews, and it didn’t surprise me to hear comparisons of It 2017 to films like The Goonies and that isn't a bad thing at all. There is an element of adventure to this film too, and it doesn't feel out of place. 

Like with a lot of King’s novels, there are plenty of Easter eggs to be found. Eddie wears a t-shirt that has a picture of a car with eyes and teeth on it (Christine), Beverly’s bathroom scene recalls both Carrie and The Shining. The actor playing vile bully Henry Bowers has more than a passing resemblance to the late River Phoenix, who starred in another Stephen King adaptation, Stand By Me. One of the boys calls Beverly ‘Molly Ringwald’ which is funny because she looks just like 80’s Molly Ringwald (though that joke went over ¾ of the audience’s heads in my showing.) When TVs are playing in the background in scenes, you can hear the audio talk about playing in sewers with clowns. A cinema is showing A Nightmare on Elm Street 5.

 The ‘deadlights’ from the novel don’t appear until the end of the film, but I was so pleased they did. In the car on the way home, I said to my friend, ‘they did the deadlights!! THE DEADLIGHTS!!!’

Eddie's Christine inspired t-shirt

With the exception of Tim Curry's performance as Pennywise, IT 2017 is superior to IT 1990 in pretty much every way. It’s unnecessary to compare Curry and Skarsgård, because they are both so different and frightening in their own ways. That said I do prefer Skarsgård’s interpretation.

 Not one scene is wasted and each one contributes to keeping the plot moving along nicely. You can’t root for characters you don’t care about, but we feel like we’re part of the Loser Club, so we root for them every step of the way. There are moments in this film that are heart-breaking – Bill’s confrontation with his dad in the garage feels so painfully real, it kind of hurts to watch. That said, the film is also actually very, very funny with a good few laugh out loud moments.

For those of us that came of age in the early 1990s, this film will feel especially nostalgic – we can remember the late 80’s elements of the film – the faulty Casio calculator watch that goes off at weird times, the huge unflattering NHS style glasses, shell suits, analogue TV, beat em’ up arcade games – and we can also remember the first time we watched It 1990.

My only issue with the film was the amount of CGI used. It’s all pretty seamless, so it’s not an issue with quality, but more that some of the scenes were scary enough without all the extra bows and there were some genuine ‘hide behind you hands’ frights.  I went for dinner after the film, and walking alone up two flights of stairs to the restaurant toilets spooked me. And that to me is when a scary film has done its job well. When I’m thinking about it the next day, and well into the next week. 

Scores on the doors:

9/10. 

Dishonourable mention:

That scene from the book is cut from both screen adaptations and thank fuck it is. It’s way too twisted, even for me. Don’t know what scene I mean? Read the book, friends. Read the book. 

Re:Watching - Pump Up The Volume

‘Load up on guns and bring your friends, it’s fun to lose and to pretend…’  - Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana.

‘Eat your cereal with a fork and do your homework in the dark’ – Happy Harry Hard-On

Some things are best left on the nostalgia shelf, next to Boots lavender & mint shampoo, petrol blue Kickers, pink lemonade Snapple and wearing skirts over trousers. This is a new series of posts where I’ll look back sometimes not so fondly on the books, films and music of my youth. We’re starting with the 1990 Christian Slater film, Pump Up the Volume.

Ah, Christian Slater! With his Jack Nicholson eyebrows and his knowing chuckle, his bad boy hair and the way he smoked cigarettes, what teenage girl from a small town in England wouldn’t hope to bump into him outside McDonalds? He would take you for rides in his vintage car, he’d have booze and cigarettes. Best of all, he could even dispose of school bullies by making them drink drain un-blocker, or shooting them in the head.

In Pump Up the Volume, he plays nerdy, awkward Mark Hunter (you know he’s awkward and nerdy because he wears glasses and short sleeved, button-down checked shirts) the new kid in school (Hubert Humphrey High, Phoenix, Arizona) who can’t talk to girls but can talk filth over pirate radio waves. Mark’s voice-disguised DJ alter-ego is Happy Harry Hard-On, a priapic, chronic masturbator with an authority problem. He hates his parents, his teachers, the guidance counsellors, any kind of authoritah. 

Nerdgasm

Mark/Harry soon sets about exposing his high school’s unfair expulsion policies, which involve booting pupils out for things like getting pregnant, wearing band badges on your denim jacket or playing sexually explicit rap in the break rooms. 

One night Harry gets a letter from a depressed listener, fellow HHH pupil Malcolm, asking if he should kill himself. Because Harry is a teenage boy and knows jack shit about what you’d say to someone that asks you that, he doesn’t handle things well at first and his later attempts to talk Malcolm out of suicide fail.  Mark/Harry blames himself and Mark decides he’s not going to be Harry anymore because being the representative voice of the yoot is too much for him, especially if his audience are going to kill themselves.

'What if you're a normal reaction to a fucked-up situation?' 

Also listening to his late night shows is Nora Dinero, (Samantha Mathis) the ‘Eat Me Beat Me Lady’ who sends Harry her dirty (and terrible) poetry. Nora is the 1990s take on the manic dream pixie girl. For those not familiar with the manic pixie dream girl trope, she is a female character that serves no other purpose other than to help the male protagonist open up and embrace love / life/ laughter. The manic pixie dream girl will run through puddles barefoot, decide to get a train to Paris after a few beers in a London pub, she’ll be cray-zee and arty and quirky, she’ll be gawky but pretty (not seen a fat manic pixie dream girl yet) It may seem that she has agency, and a personality, but she doesn’t. We only see her viewed through the eyes of the male character.

Mark and Nora meet for the first time

Once Nora discovers Harry’s true identity, she hassles him to ‘get his message out there’. The youth are unhappy! Parents listen! You have forgotten what it was like to be young and angry with the world! That kid what shot himself in the head! Posh popular Paige putting all her stuff in the microwave!

Let me tell you, putting your pearls and medals in the microwave isn’t rebellious or a two fingers up to da man, it’s fucking stupid and dangerous.  Paige escapes only with a broken nose instead of say, third degree burns that require hours of extensive, painful surgery despite the fact she sits IN FRONT OF THE FUCKING LOADED MICROWAVE AND WATCHES IT BLOW UP AND SET FIRE TO HER KITCHEN.

Anyway that’s the basic plot, the authoritahs try and get Harry off the air because he’s a bad influence on the kids but it all turns out OK in the end, fuck you parents of dead kid, it’s all your fault anyway for being mean to him when he said he didn’t want to watch TV with you.

The End. The ending is rushed and unsatisfying. Ambiguous endings to films don’t bother me – one of my favourite film endings is Shutter Island because it’s so open to having whatever resolution the viewer wants it to have. I don’t expect things to be tied up neatly before the final credits roll, but in PUtV it just feels like they didn’t know how to end the story, so they just….end it.

While writing this, I looked up some reviews of the film and comments on Youtube clips. It’s a much loved movie, and a lot of people think its Christian Slater’s best. It’s true that I really like Mark / Harry as a character, but then he’s designed for teenage girls to fall in love with. In fact I fell slightly in love with him all over again, especially during the scene where he’s burning letters from his listeners. There’s something about the way that scene is played and lit that makes you want to scoop Mark up and run, run away with him forever. Then Samantha Mathis ruins it by taking her top off and pointing her perky boobs in his face. Damn you, Mathis!

There are some aspects of PUtV that are still relevant and will always be relevant. Most of us know how it feels to think we don’t fit in anywhere. Most of us feel total, bleak despair at some time in our lives.

Another credit is that Nora and Mark are a good match – he’s not the geek getting the beauty queen (initially he’s crushing on Julia Roberts lookalike, Paige) and Nora’s not the awkward nerd who gets the most popular boy in school because she’s had a makeover and taken off her specs. As an onscreen (and later on real life) couple, they really work. There’s chemistry, even if most of it comes from Mathis’ lustful glances and plump lip licking.

That said, I don’t think this film would ever work outside of an early 1990s setting, and that’s not down to changes with technology or the teenage mind-set. If Harry was at high school now he’d just be podcasting, Instagramming or Snapchatting instead.

 Watching the film again, despite its message of rebelling against authority, or the unfairness of a system that singles out poor and troubled kids, it all seems pretty tame. These kids aren’t going to a school where guns and knives are a constant presence and they don’t live on sprawling, grim, hopeless housing estates. Sure, there’s a different kind of hopelessness, one that’s probably hard to understand when you come from small town England. A lot is made of the little hillside boxes PuTV’s character live in and I don’t think it’s an accident the film is set in state with a desert climate. Bleak council estates might be absent, but thousands of identical houses are present, perhaps to show us the teenage character’s fight to remain individual and distinct in a place where everything looks the same. (you see shots of Mark walking past these houses being built on his way to school.)

The film’s story belongs to the loners and outcasts, but it also belongs to the kids tired of being forced into a mould of popularity and academic achievement.

In April, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot and killed twelve fellow pupils and one teacher at Columbine High School. In their video diaries (known as ‘The Basement Tapes’) they outlined their plans for destruction. Their reason for the massacre was that they were bullied, lonely outcasts.  They were going to kill the jocks that made their lives hell. As it happened, they killed indiscriminately and not one ‘jock’ was among the victims. They killed outcasts and loners. They killed kids they professed to be like. Their youngest victim was only 14 years old.

Pump Up The Volume and the Columbine massacre bookend the 1990s for me, apart from date-related obviousness.  In 1991, I had started secondary school myself and some of my own fears of going to ‘high’ school were realised. But I didn’t take a gun into school and kill the kids I hated, the kids that picked on me.

 The early 90’s were the age of Take That rubbing jelly on their bare buttocks, salt and vinegar Disco crisps, Panda Pop cola, Body Shop perfume oils, platform shoes, Smash Hits, Just Seventeen, walking home from school with your friends, when everyone wanted a JD Sports drawstring bag and a pair of Adidas Gazelles.  By 1998, Britpop was dying (grunge was already dead) to quote Blur:

We all say ‘don’t want to be alone’

We wear the same clothes, cause we feel the same

We kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight

End of a century Oh it’s nothing special

When I think of PuTV, I think of 13 year old me, crushing on Christian Slater and taping the Top 40 off Capital FM, dressing like Winona Ryder in Heathers, and smearing my mouth with Body Shop watermelon lip gloss. 1999 might have been in the same decade but it was a whole lifetime away.

So sure, watch Pump Up the Volume, whether you haven’t seen it in twenty-seven years, (TWENTY-SEVEN!) or you haven’t seen it at all. It’s not aged well, but it hasn’t aged badly either.   I don’t think things can have changed that much for teenagers, but I feel that Mark, Nora and all us 90s school kids were lucky we didn’t come of age in the internet era.  (though I’d like to have seen Paige live-streaming  blowing up the microwave, ‘U OK hun?’)

Maybe I’ll dig it out in another few years and laugh again at the bit where Nora is gagging for a snog from Mark so much, she stands in front of him with her mouth hanging open. That’s what I’d have done if he was standing in front of me.

KISS ME you hot nerdy piece of ass

Scores on the doors:

For nostalgia purposes: 9/10

For an accurate representation of high school life: 4.5/10

 The soundtrack actually rocks, so it gets another point for that – 5.5/10

Another for repeatedly using Leonard Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows’ 6.5 /10

Oh the dialogue is excellent and pretty funny, another point… 7.5/10

Christian Slater shirtless for what feels like 40% of the film gets another…… 8.5/10

Total: 17.5 /20

Where Is Asha Degree?

A note on this post: this case contains a fair about of conflicting information from different sources. I have tried to use what seems to be the most accurate information. Links and further reading are at the bottom of the post. 

There was a heavy rainstorm in the early hours of the morning of 14 February, 2000, in Shelby, North Carolina. There was also a power-cut that night, apparently unrelated to the storm.

By the time Harold Degree had finished work late that night, the power was back on. Harold lived with his wife of twelve years, Iquilla, and their two children, nine year-old Asha and ten year-old O’Bryant.   

When Harold got home, Asha was still up, fully dressed and lying on the sofa.  

Asha went to bed in the room she shared with O’Bryant not long after her father got home. Harold checked in on the children twice before he went to bed at about 2.30am. 

Iquilla got up at around 5.45am the next morning. It was her and Harold’s wedding anniversary, but the kids had school and needed a bath as they had missed theirs the night before because of the power cut.  Their alarm was set for 6.30pm, but Iquilla went to wake them up before the alarm went off.

 Iquilla found Asha’s bed empty. Iquilla searched the house and the cars on the driveway.  She then phoned Asha’s grandmother, who lived across the street, but her sister-in-law, who picked up, said Asha wasn’t there. 

O’Bryant said that sometime in the night, he had heard his sister’s bed squeak, but thought it was just her moving around in her sleep.

Police arrived with scent dogs at the Degree house an hour later, at 6.40am. The dogs were not able to track Asha at all. Further information of scent dog ability can be found in previous posts about Elisa Lam (Every Contact Leaves A Trace) which will dispute the theory that the dogs weren’t able to track her because of inclement weather. 

Asha had left her home before dawn, taking a bag that contained changes of her favourite clothes, (a pair of blue jeans with a red stripe, black trainers, a red vest with black trim, black overalls with Tweety Pie on them, a long sleeved white t-shirt with purple lettering and a long sleeved black and white shirt.) her Tweety-Pie purse, her clean basketball kit, photos of her family and some sweets.

Asha kept her house key in her backpack, and she had locked the front door behind her.

She was last seen at around 3.30 – 4.15am, walking south along North Carolina Highway 18, just over a mile from her home, by several passing motorists. It was raining heavily, but Asha, who was dressed all in white, wasn’t wearing a coat. A truck driver went past her three times, but on the third time he circled round and drove past her, she ran off the road and into the woods. He said that he had turned around because he thought it was "strange such a small child would be out by herself at that hour,”

On 17 February, some sweet wrappers were found in a shed belonging to Turner’s Upholstery, located along the stretch of highway where Asha had last been seen running into the woods. With the wrappers were a pencil, a green marker pen and a Mickey Mouse shaped hair clip. The items were identified as belonging to Asha. It’s not known if these had been there since the morning of 14, or were planted there later.

The initial search for Asha covered a 2 -3 mile radius of where she had last been seen, taking 9,000 man hours of following the 300 something leads that ranged from possible sightings to tips about what places to search. After a week, the search was called off. There were no clues as to what had happened to Asha, or where she had gone.

In August 2001, construction workers on a site at Highway 18 in Burke County, 26 miles north of Shelby - the opposite direction from when Asha had last been seen - dug up her bag, which had her name and telephone number written inside it.

The bag had been wrapped in plastic rubbish sacks. The FBI took the bag for testing, but the results have never been made public. In October that year, similar rubbish sacks were found and taken for testing.

In May 2016, the FBI announced that they had a possible new lead in the case and revealed that Asha may have been seen getting into either a dark green, early 70s Lincoln Mark IV or a Ford Thunderbird with rusted wheel arches the night she disappeared from Highway 18. This was actually a tip that been given back in 2000, and was revealed when new investigators took over the case. To date, it is the only other piece in the puzzle of what might have happened to Asha.

Background

Asha (pronounced Ay-sha) Jaquilla Degree was born on 5 August, 1990.

The Degrees were what some people might consider over protective of their children. There was no computer in the house, and Asha and O’Bryant’s lives centred around church, school, and family. As both Harold and Iquilla worked, the children let themselves in after school and were expected to have their homework finished by the time their mum and dad got home.

Asha was the starred point guard on her school’s basketball team. For those not familiar with basketball, this is a specialised position. The point guard players are expected to run the team's offense by controlling the ball and making sure that it gets to the right players at the right time. Above all, the point guard must totally understand and accept their coach's game plan. While the guard must understand and accept the coach's game plan, he must also be able to adapt to what the defence is allowing, and he also must control the pace of the game. (from Wikipedia)

The team played its first game of the season on 12 February, but it didn’t go well for Asha. She fouled out (Basketball foul) and they lost the game. Her parents recalled her being very upset about this, and crying with her teammates.  She seemed to recover quickly though, and watched her brother’s game.

Asha’s class were reading  ‘The Whipping Boy’ by Sid Fleischman. The story is about two boys, a prince and his servant, that run away.

Asha is African-American, and at the time of her disappearance was 9 years old,  4’6 in height, and weighed 60lbs (about 4 stone) she has brown eyes and black hair. She was last seen wearing a long sleeved white t-shirt, white jeans and white trainers. She was afraid of storms and dogs.

Timeline

Friday 11 February

School is closed for lessons because of the three day President’s Day holiday weekend.  Harold and Iquilla have to work, so the children spend the day at an aunt’s house and at basketball practice at the school. 

Saturday 12 February

Asha and her brother play in the first basketball matches of the seasons. Asha is upset when her team loses and she fouls out, but she seems to recover and watches her brother’s game.

Sunday 13 February

The children spend the day with family, going to church. Harold works a split shift, his second shift starts in the afternoon.

8pm – 9pm some reports say this is the time Asha and O’Bryant went to bed, missing their bath because of the power cut.

11.30pm: Harold comes back from work. Some reports say Asha was still up when he got home, possibly because she was cold after the power went out. It’s unclear as to whether Asha DID go to bed at 8pm and then got up again to wait for her dad to get home, or if she didn’t go to bed at all until Harold got home.

Monday 14 February

12.30: Harold leaves the house again to buy Valentine’s Day chocolates.

2.30pm: Harold checks on his children before going to bed. Both of them are sleeping.

3.30 – 4.15am: Asha is seen by several drivers walking south along Highway 18, approximately a mile from her home. The weather is very bad; it’s cold and raining heavily but Asha is not wearing a coat, hat, scarf or gloves. One concerned driver turns to go past her three times, but it seems Asha gets spooked before he can approach her and she runs into the wooded area that lines the highway.

17 February

Sweet wrappers, a pencil, a marker and a Mickey Mouse hairclip identified as belonging to Asha are found in a shed along the highway at about the same location where Asha was seen running into the woods by the driver.

August 2001

Asha’s backpack is found by construction workers on a site 26 miles north of where she had last been seen. The bag is wrapped in rubbish sacks and has her name and telephone number written inside it.

October 2001

Rubbish bags similar to the ones that were used to wrap Asha’s bag are found and sent for analysis.

2004

Acting on a tip off from a man in prison, investigators conduct an excavation search at the corner of Shelby and Rube Spangler Roads near Lawndale, South Carolina. They found bones, which turned out to belong to an animal. They also find a pair of men’s khaki trousers.

2016

New investigators looking into Asha’s case find a tip given back in 2000, a sighting of Asha getting into a 1970’s Lincoln Mark IV or a Ford Thunderbird. There were two other people in the car.

Lincoln Mark IV

Ford Thunderbird

Questions and Notes

Why was Asha dressed all in white? So she could be seen easily in the dark?

None of the drivers called the police after they saw Asha. The driver that turned round 3 times only called them after he saw news reports that she was missing.

She was seen by the drivers walking SOUTH, her bag was found NORTH, 26 miles in the opposite direction.

When and why was her bag buried in that particular location?

Theories:

Grooming for various purposes and problems with this theory

Some people have tried to discredit this theory, saying that Asha’s family didn’t have a computer, so she could not have been vulnerable to grooming. This doesn’t mean that she wasn’t groomed. Was it someone she knew through school? Through basketball? Did someone convince her to run away, or say they were going to take her somewhere special, like Disney Land/World? Was this place somewhere warm, which was the reason why she didn’t take a coat with her? Did they use her parent’s anniversary as a ruse? Or ‘romantic’ Valentine’s Day?

Why did she leave house at 3am but was seen over an hour later? Was someone supposed to pick her up? Had she walked to meet someone, realised something was wrong and run away from them, which was when the drivers saw her? If this was the case, perhaps she was scared anyone driving past might be the person she was running away from.  This would explain why she ran into the woods. But what happened to her after that?

Were the items planted in the shed? How come her bag was found so neatly wrapped, as if preserved? Did someone want it to be found? Was it buried on the site knowing someone would soon find it? Why have test results not been made public? Because there are clues as to what happened to Asha that the police can’t make public in case it jepodises the investigation?

Runaway and problems with this theory

Had Asha been inspired by The Whipping Boy and decided to run away to have adventures?  If so, why would she choose a night of terrible weather to go when she was afraid of storms? Why would she leave without a coat?  Children aged ten and under are not considered ‘runaways’ by law enforcement, and children  only truly run away when things are very bad at home, where abuse, violence and neglect are present.  It didn’t seem like any of these things were happening in the Degree home. Asha’s parents may have been protective and strict, but she seemed happy and enjoyed sports and hanging out with her family.

Sleepwalking 

There’s no real evidence for this theory. Asha did not have a history of sleepwalking, and it seems like her bag was pre-packed (before she went to sleep that night) so she was prepared to leave the house.

Hit and Run

If Asha had been struck by a car walking along the highway, there would be evidence of this; marks on the road, someone who had taken a dented car to be repaired. There were other drivers along that road on the morning of 14^th who would have witnessed a hit and run.

Asha is alive but can’t get home

It’s possible Asha was taken and has been held captive somewhere, like Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Lee Dugard and Natascha Kampusch. There’s no evidence to suggest this happened, other than a girl matching her description was seen getting into the 1970s green car.

Hypothermia 

After Asha ran into the woods, did she try and hide, but succumb to hypothermia? If this is the case, wouldn’t the scent dogs have been able to track her? Wouldn’t she have been found? 

2017

Harold and Iquilla hold a walk every year along the North Carolina Highway 18, travelling Asha’s last known route. A billboard stands at the spot where she was last seen running into the woods.  Her parents still live in the same house, and have the same telephone number in case their daughter ever comes home.

Asha's walk

Anyone with information on Asha’s case can contact the Cleveland County Sheriff’s office on 704 4844822.

Further reading and information:

The Charley Project

Dark Matters (Cayleigh Elise Youtube video)

Brainscratch Searchlight (LordanARTS youtube video)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Asha_Degree

Shelby Star

https://findingashadegree.wordpress.com/  (this is a very indepth website, but Asha's parents have said that not all the information on it is accurate)

Reddit Unresolved  One of many Reddit threads discussing what may have happened to Asha.