Book Review: The Witch Cloud by Timothy Renner

Photo by Barbara Fisher 2021.

The Witch Cloud is a lovely little book that tells the story of Tim Renner and Chad Redding’s investigation into the haunted bridges in Gettysburg.

Fully illustrated by the author with a lyrical and hauntingly beautiful forward by Alison Renner, the book evokes the deep mystery and wonder that embraces anyone who chooses to engage with The Other on a regular, continuing basis.

Examining the folklore closely as he is wont to do, Renner finds no real historical support for the locally promulgated stories of these haunted bridges, and yet, when he and Redding investigate on location, they find plenty of mysterious goings-on in the land surrounding the two bridges.

So many questions arise during the investigation. Are these ghosts? What are ghosts? What are these lights? What is bigfoot? Why are bridges so often haunted? Does water have anything to do with it? And why are the owls always hooting?

I have read the entire book; I am waiting for the download. I’ve heard three tracks worth of it (thank you Tim, for a quick preview—or rather—pre-hear) and what I heard is just as beautifully done as the book. I look forward to hearing the live investigation recordings; the transcripts included in the book are revealing—and, yet, at the same time concealing.

Renner reminds us that there are no answers to the questions The Other raises. No one -knows- for certain what any of this is, and he cautions us against certitude in ourselves and other humans. Anyone who swears they know exactly what any given paranormal thing is or isn’t, is not to be trusted.

The book, which is part of a multi-media project that will stand in for the 300th Strange Familiars Podcast episode, is beautiful. Renner has stretched the definition of what a podcast can be in the best way possible here. It is very much worth your time and effort to read and savor.

Caught Up By The Spirits

“Oya: Queen of the Winds” Painting by Barbara Fisher Acrylic on Canvas

Recently, I was talking with Greg Bishop about my experience with being "caught up" by the Orisha, Yemaya, along with two friends of mine in the 1990's, and it made me think about our experiences.

It was intense., and led to spirit possession. We would have had no good idea as to what to do, had the four of us not found Luisa Teish's book, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals.

Decades later, I read in Jacques Vallee's "Forbidden Science Volume 2" (or 3, I can't remember which), that Luisa Teish is a friend of his, and he had urged her to publish that book, saying it was an "important work." (And just today, June 11, I found out that a new updated version will be released on June 29th, and I am thrilled. Dr. Vallee was absolutely correct that this is an important work.)

That was a very strange, unexpected connection: to find that two authors who have had profound influences on my life were friends.

At any rate, the four of us, two African-American women and two white women, sang together, created altars, did divination, performed rituals and gave worship to Yemaya. We even put on a large public ritual, a “love feast” in honor of Yemaya at the local Unitarian Fellowship, which had around 40 participants.

For that rite, we built a beautiful sprawling altar draped in blue and white cloths, with white candles, a large iridescent blue bowl of water at the center with a statue of Yemaya in the center, with quartz crystals and white flowers floating around her. Piled on platters around her were fruits and little cakes iced with rosewater frosting all in bite sized pieces for us to feed to each other as we danced and chanted to the beat of drums. No one fed themselves; we fed each other, with love and devotion, just as Yemaya feeds her beloved children.

It was a beautiful time, and it lasted for over two years.

The climax to that period in my life was a ritual at the Starwood Festival where Mambo Miriam of the Rampart Street Voodoo Spiritual Temple and her people joined forces with Babatunde Olatunji and his drummers and the usual, very accomplished drummers who came to Starwood every year. The Fire Keepers of Starwood, and most of the attendees,, which that year was well over 1,000 people participated and together, we performed a ritual in honor of Ogun, which culminated in lighting a several stories tall bonfire that had been build carefully over the entire week of the festival.

Ogun is the Orisha of iron, blacksmithery, hunting, forestry, war and his colors are red and black, and one of his symbols is a knife or more typically, a sword. Because of his association with metal arts, he is often associated with fire, but in its creative, not destructive aspect.

By that time, my devotion had widened to include Ogun and Oya, the female warrior spirit of the winds, and of change, fierce protectress of women.

My first experience of Oya was being possessed while chanting with a group of drummers, that culminated in riding a thunderstorm into the area, with winds fierce enough to blow open the doors of the fellowship hall where we had gathered.

The participants in the ritual gathered in a large group at the top of the hill at the entrance to the campsite. Most of the people had never participated in an African ritual, and so there was much speculation as to what would happen. When Babatunde and his drummers and dancers showed up, they taught us a chant to Ogun.

After we had gotten the words, melody and the rhythm of the chant, Babatunde led us all on a procession through the site toward the ritual ground. We sang as we wound our serpentine way through the camp with torchbearers,.

Babatunde ‘s voice projected easily over us all. He and his dancers and drummers wore red and black, and they kept us singing and marching in time, the stamp of our feet on the well-worn paths seeming to shake the earth.

Babatunde was a master of building energy.

Just before we got to the bonfire site, we could hear Mambo Miriam's and the Starwood drummer's start up in syncopation with Babatunde's percussionists, and her voice soared like a wild bird over the thunder of drums.

We waited and watched Miriam give smoke and rum to Papa Legba, the keeper of the doorway between the worlds. This is done at the beginning of every ritual, because Legba must open the gateway between the world of mortals and the world of the spirits.

We kept singing, swaying in place. All of the questions about what would happen had been chanted and drummed and marched away, and everyone, whether initiates or neophytes, were moving and singing as one. And we were all calling Ogun.

And then the gate was opened, the torch-bearers barring the entrance to the circle parted, and we were led inside, still swaying, still singing, still moving with the heartbeat of the drums. The torchbearers circled the gigantic pile of wood, and danced, while we still chanted around the perimeter, swaying, clapping, stamping our feet.

Now Miriam and Babatunde were singing together, and the drummers added their cries to the nearly overwhelming waves of sound that spiraled up and around and over us.

When Miriam and Babatunde called the spirits, they CAME.

They were there.

We could all feel it. It was visceral. Electric.

And when the torches went into the bonfire, it went up with a wild whoosh we could feel as well as hear and see, and Babatunde’s and Miriam’s dancers began the dance, drawing us all in with them.

And we started to dance and still chanting, we were all at one with each other and the fire. It was nearly indescribable in its raw power.

The African spirits are not shy. They are not mental constructs or ideas or wishy-washy feel-good crystalline gods and goddess that people talk about in a very intellectual way and worship in the hands-off ways that many American Pagans are used to.

They are powerful.

They are real. They are strong. And they will gather you up in their embrace if they want to. And they do not seem to care who you are or what color your skin is—if your spirit is compatible with theirs, they will reach out for you.

There were possessions that night. I saw it happen, often with people who were not initiates. People fell entranced and were taken to Mambo Miriam to be tended to.

I was, if not ridden by a spirit, was held and embraced by one. I could still think through it, my body could still move, I could feel everything--but it was at a remove. I could feel there was another consciousness present, close, her energy ancient, wild and fierce, our arms moving together, our feet spinning our body, tracing the ancient spiral of great whirlwinds, cleansing storms. We threw our heads back, she and I, and laughed to the night sky.

My consciousness of time passing was...compromised.

We all shone with sweat as we danced ecstatically, moving as close to the fire as the Fire Keepers would allow. They were very good at keeping everyone safe, as we danced right outside of ourselves, our consciousnesses merging with each other, with the Earth, with the Fire, with the Spirits, with the Wind that whipped around us,, with the Drums, with the water that was offered to us by those standing on the perimeter.

I have no idea how long I danced, but I remember the drumming went on all night. And at dawn, when I woke up and wandered out of my tent to find the latrine, the embers were still warm and smoke still rose, swirling up to the lightening sky.

There were still drummers, Fire Keepers and singers there, and a few dancers came, to greet the clear light of morning.

What was impressive to me that morning was that I realized that I had danced and chanted for well over an hour, and my asthma, which is induced by things like smoke, and exercise--did not play up at all. I was able to move and sing and breathe smoke without a problem.

I suspect that was a gift of the spirit, who I believe to have been Oya, who danced along inside me.

Looking back on my time with the African spirits, I found them to be the most vital,, living, viscerally aware non-human intelligences with whom I have worked. Unlike the European deities I worked with off and on in other Neo-Pagan and Wiccan contexts, the Orishas were present, self-aware, deeply real beings—not airy mythical constructs or memories of gods from another time.

I think this comes from the Orisha having an unbroken lineage through time where they have been worshipped, communed with and conversed with continually by humanity. The Orisha have become part of syncretic religions where African traditions are wedded with Christianity and combined with European and Native American traditions, which has kept them vital and alive, evolving with the times.

The only other spirits I have felt so strongly have been the Good Folk (Fairies) and the Native Spirits of North America. Traditions surrounding these spirits have continued alongside Christianity, without being obliterated the way that European Pagan pantheons were as the Continent was converted.

Any doubts I ever had of the reality of spirits, of non-human intelligences, of the Other, of the denizens of other realities, were completely obliterated by my experiences over those years.

The spirits are real. And they do, indeed gather humans up in their embrace and change our consciousnesses and lives forever.

Podcasts: The Oral Folklore Tradition Resurrected

Photograph by Barbara Fisher

“Books insist on being either fact or fiction. But daimons, like the stories about them, are not so easily classified. They straddle the border between fact and fiction, as they do so many borders.”

— Patrick Harpur Daimonic Reality

When I started doing the 6 Degrees of John Keel Podcast last year, I had to do a lot of research into podcasting and put much thought into the hows and whys of it.

It wasn’t even my idea to do a podcast, honestly, and I hardly ever listened to podcasts myself. Truthfully, I wasn’t even sure what a podcast entailed.

My friend, Jacqueline Bradley had suggested it because I had told quite a few stories of my own paranormal experiences in various spaces in social media, but in no sensible, easily accessible form. It was all scattershot—comments on this or that media post by another person, or in a thread that was a book review of an atmospheric novel that leaned into fairy lore or in a social media post about my art. I never really endeavored to tell my own experiences in a way that made them make a lot of sense, or in a personal context.

To me, they just weren’t that special. They were just the weird things that have happened all my life.

Well, I brushed that first casual suggestion off fairly easily but she repeated it about six months later when I made a post in a FB group dedicated to strange subjects asking if other people had been experiencing an uptick in odd occurrences or paranormal events in the past few months.

She pointed out that if I listened to podcasts, I’d have access to other people’s experiences, and even better, if I did a podcast, I could tell my own stories and embolden people to tell theirs.

So, I began to think about it seriously. And I started listening to podcasts. And as I listened, I gradually was drawn into paranormal podcast culture and realized that Jacqueline was right—podcasting fits right in with one of my strongest personal qualities—it’s about telling stories.

See, I grew up in Appalachia, and there, we still tell stories. On weekends growing up, we sat around and “visited” with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, family friends and what did we do while we were there?

We hung around on porches or at kitchen tables, or under shade trees and told family stories that came in various flavors and genres, but all of them were told as true.

We had adventure stories from my Dad of how he missed the Cuban Missile Crisis, even though his ship was sent on her maiden voyage early because of it. We had funny stories from the farm about how my Mom and her brothers got a whipping for riding the milk cows like horses. We had sad stories about how my Gram’s father was killed in a railway accident. We had love stories, and silly stories and off-color, naughty stories, but my favorite ones were the weird stories.

Disappearing farm dogs who left bloody paw prints behind. While out in the wilderness in the middle of the night, an aunt heard the hauntingly beautiful sound of a choir filtering down from the starry sky, but her boyfriend who was right next to her, heard nothing. Grandma’s blind friend who touched her face and felt her hair and said it was black, even though he couldn’t see, because he could feel colors in his fingers.

I grew up among skilled raconteurs, so I know my way around the telling of a story, especially a true one. It’s in my blood and bones, just as sure as the clay and coal of my native land shaped my soul.

Once I twigged that podcasting is at heart about telling stories, I started researching the technical aspects of it and listening to podcasts critically, finding ones that I particularly resonated with.

Which is when I found Timothy Renner’s “Strange Familiars.”

Listening to Tim tell his experiences of exploring the weird landscape of Pennsylvania, and his careful drawing out of listeners stories of The Other, I got hooked by the whole gestalt that is paranormal podcasting. And that’s when I gathered my team, talked them into taking this big step with me and started building our own podcast.

And from the beginning, Morganna, Kendra, Zak, Chris and I all realized we were doing something pretty special, and that kept us going. even through some technical difficulties and personal trials and tribulations. The learning curve was steep, but we managed it because we had a mission: we wanted people to understand that the paranormal wasn’t para-anything. It was pretty normal. Might even be commonplace if only people felt safe enough to tell their stories.

I knew it was probably a little bit deeper than that; I felt sure that there was more to it, but I was too busy figuring out what microphones and recording systems to use to really put those amorphous feelings into concrete form.

But last week, I started re-reading Patrick Harpur’s excellent book about The Other, Daimonic Reality and I ran across a passage that crystallized exactly what it was about podcasting that so special that it grabbed me and refused to let go.

In Chapter 5: “A Little History About Daimons,” Harpur writes:

“The decline of oral culture, too was seen as contributing to the decline in daimonic belief. The prosaic printed word was more forceful, more focused than the stories which fed on the expression and gestures of the teller....Oral culture was further undermined from the eighteenth century onwards by the uprooting of the poor from the land, and their move to a life in the cities where, with no time for leisure, their own “folk” culture starved....”

— Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality

Oral culture refers to the tradition of storytelling, and the passage of information by way of oral transmission. This tradition has been with us since prehistoric times; long before humans developed written language, we’ve been talking to each other and sharing information via stories, songs, poetry and memorized litanies of useful knowledge.

In the context of oral culture, or oral tradition, I don’t only refer to storytelling as merely an entertainment for the tribe. Of course, it did serve that function.. Without novels, radio, movies or television, humans needed something to pass long hours of darkness in the caves when it was too dangerous to go out and face toothy predators laying in wait for a tasty human morsel to blunder by.

But oral tradition and folklore serve many other purposes among humans besides entertainment. It contains useful information. Tribal and regional histories, religious beliefs and cosmologies are preserved in folklore and oral tradition. The knowledge of what plants are fit for consumption and what are not was carried down orally. How to make tools and art, heal illnesses and broken bones, how to birth babies, how to hunt, how to grow and prepare food, how to tend domestic animals—all of this knowledge came to us through oral tradition.

Most importantly for the context of this essay, however, is the knowledge of The Other, or as Patrick Harpur would call it, Daimonic Reality, that was passed down through the tradition of storytelling.

If you believe in the paranormal, I assume you have some understanding that humans have been in contact with seemingly non-corporeal or semi-corporeal intelligences since we began walking upright and communicating via spoken language.

This body of knowledge called “folkore,” has not only served as entertainment, but has also imparted useful knowledge which has helped humanity survive our encounters with apparitions, spirits, daimons, or The Other who exist in our world beside us, albeit, usually unseen, unheard and unrecognized.

As noted by Harpur above, the oral traditions regarding these beings, were somewhat disrupted by the development, of written language. However, the big interruption came with the movement of the lower classes from rural communities into cities which began in the eighteenth century and then picked up speed during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. It continued unabated with the development of mass media in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I am not against literacy,—far from it. I love reading and have existed most of my life with my long nose stuck deeply in a book.

Anyone who listens to our podcast and reads the show notes knows that the hosts and guests are all inveterate readers who will suggest entire lists of books for the gleaning of further information on any given topic.

And thanks to anthropologists and folklorists (who rose to prominence as academics in the nineteenth century), folklore has been preserved in books which are read by everyone, not just academics.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, better known as “The Brothers Grimm,” collected, transcribed and translated European folktales that have formed the basis of the fairytales that we all know from childhood. Their stories have stepped from the page and into visual media through film and television, most famously made by Disney, but they’ve also been adapted by studios around the world. Charles Perrault was a French writer who took folktales for his inspiration, and while Hans Christian Anderson was writing original stories, he used motifs gleaned from folklore so well, people nowadays often assume they were originally folktales.

Most of our ideas of what witches, fairies, ghosts, ogres, werewolves, angels, djinn, spirits, elementals and demons are come from the diligent work of folklorists who went around listening to traditional storytellers and transcribing their words.

But, as noted above by Harpur, there’s a problem with writing down and then reading the tales of the daimons.

We lose something in the translation from oral to written communication—we lose the storytellers’ voices, their gestures, their expressive language. We lose the hushed tones used to describe the awful encounter their grandmother had, with a dire apparition in the darkest wood on a dreary late October evening. We lose the quaver in the voice that comes from recounting a vision of a lady clothed in light seen one May Eve at dawn in the teller’s sixteenth year.

And that is a great loss indeed.

Mere sterile words in black and white on a page, no matter how poetic and descriptive, cannot adequately convey the awe and dread that such encounters inspire in those who experience them first or even second hand.

Here I must note that there is a difference between the tales that we call fairy tales or folktales and stories in what we call fairy lore or folklore.

The tales the Brothers Grimm gathered and wrote down were clearly primarily meant to entertain people of all ages. They were meant to while away the long hours of cooking, gardening, carding and spinning wool, weaving, and other such handwork that people often did collectively. While they contained fantastical elements and non-human intelligences galore, and they impart morals, reinforce social norms and share wisdom when it comes to dealing with supernatural beings, they were not meant to be taken as “truth,” or as the testimony of a person who had an extraordinary experience with “The Other.”

Those sorts of stories, stories that contain the names of the people to whom they happened, that were describing experiences either within living memory of the teller or close to it—those are what I consider to be the basis of fairy lore and folklore. Those testimonies which were collected by writers such as the Reverend Robert Kirk in seventeenth century Scotland or by anthropologists such as Walter Evans Wentz in Ireland, Wales and Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contain information which was useful for people who experienced non-human intelligences in their daily lives.

Those sorts of stories are the ones we are hearing now in the twenty-first century on podcasts.

And in hearing them on podcasts, we may lose the visual aspects of storytelling—the leaping shadows of the fire’s light and the expansive, eloquent gestures and facial expressions of the story teller—but their voices are perfectly preserved.

The rhythm of the story comes to life on a podcast.

We will catch the cadence of excitement as the story moves forward, and the pause as the teller slows down to emphasize a point. Every caught breath, every hushed whisper, every drawn out syllable that drips with the awe of a relived moment of beauty or horror leaps from the speaker and comes to life in the listeners’ psyches.

We hear the nervous laughter that comes in a rush as a particularly absurd detail is exposed, as well as the caveats that tumble forth unbidden: “You may think I’m crazy, but….”

Even the choked throat of held back tears, or the involuntary sob when the tears come anyway are revealed as experiences tell their stories to a patient, empathetic host.

All of these vocal cues convey so much more of the flavor of an experience than words on paper can ever hope to.

Timothy Renner once said that he felt that collecting the stories people tell on Strange Familiars is important, and I think he is right. Not only are he and many other podcasters collecting the stories of established modern folkloric figures like Bigfoot or Sasquatch, but connections to older fairy and folklore traditions are also caught in these tales and brought forward into our modern, social media-driven lives.

Emergent folkloric creatures such as UFOnauts, Flannel Man and Phantom Clowns are also recorded, and in capturing these stories, and reeling them in, podcasters can trace patterns that may lay hidden otherwise. This way, we can witness folklore develop in real time..

What does all this mean?

I think it means that oral culture, like The Other, or like Daimonic Reality, cannot fully be banished from our material world.. Books, radio, movies and television dealt it a blow for a while, but it’s returning and I think that is not only a good thing, but an extraordinary thing. It tells me that oral culture is stronger than we ever gave it credit for and its resurgence speaks to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of changing technology.

It also tells me that technology cannot sever our connection to the shadowy world of The Other.

It’s still with us, and the voices of experiencers are here, reminding us of that connection.

And The Other is listening.

Not All Nutsy-Boltsy-ETH

Dr. Jacques Vallee

So, I listened to Dr. Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris on Fade To Black with Jimmy Church talking about their new book, Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, (which I just discovered is available right now, this second on Kindle) last night, so you don’t have to.

I wanted to see what they had to say in response to all of the hew and cry that is currently going on in the UFO community.

One of the reasons people are having a cow over Vallee and Harris’ new book is because it is about a crashed UFO retrieval, which Vallee has historically said he was uninterested in studying. (The fact that he has been gathering up physical traces and materials from UFOs and having them analyzed for decades rather belies that stated disinterest, but more on that later.)

People perceive this book as a departure from Vallee’s typical tactic of examining patterns within the larger UFO phenomena. People are acting as if he never has investigated singular cases before—which is absolutely not true. In order to look at the entirety of a large scale phenomena like UFO’s, one must first look at individual cases, and this is something Dr. Vallee has done from the beginning.

People are also upset because this case gives Dr. Vallee the appearance of having “gone over” to the “Nuts and Bolts” Extraterrestrial Hypothesis” side of theorizing. This is particularly disturbing to some, when Dr. Vallee was, with the publication of Passport to Magonia among the first UFO theorists to highlight the similarities between folklore and modern UFO experiences. He then went on to suggest various other theories to explain what UFOs could represent besides extraterrestrial visitors from space. He suggested that the UFOs were perhaps interdimensional in nature, for example.

UFO folks seem to have their collective underpants in a bunch over the idea that Dr. Vallee is doing something new and different, making an about face, when in fact, the case examined in this book fits into the pattern of other cases of his from the past.

How so, one might ask?

Well, let’s look at the 2018 film, “Witness of Another World.”

This film centers on a case he investigated in the 1970’s in Argentina. There, he and his wife and investigative partner Janine Vallee, met with Juan Perez, a 12-year old gaucho boy. After being sent out on horseback one morning by his father to bring in the horse herd, Juan encountered an anomalous, dense fog. He and his horse, Cometa, went into the fog, and there he found a landed “craft..”

Juan tied his horse to the ladder that led up into the ship and went inside. There, he was confronted by mysterious beings, had psychic communication with them and saw his deceased grandfather.

He rode away on his horse, and told his father what he had seen, and within days the horse died.

And how do Harris and Vallee describe the case that is central to this new book?

Two hispanic boys, Jose Padilla, age 9, and Remigio Baca, age 6, are sent out on horseback by Jose’s father, to find and bring in from the range a cow who is about to calve. They go out, and after taking shelter from a sudden rainstorm with lightning and thunder under a rock, they hear what sounds like an explosion and the ground trembles, much as it had a month before when the atomic bomb test at Trinity had occurred a few miles away from their homes.

They look out and see fire and smoke, they ride toward it as far as they can go, then tie up their horses and walk the rest of the way.

They end up finding an avocado shaped object on its side, with a jagged hole in it. Inside were three or four “hombrecitos”—little men—who are strange looking and they move oddly. They look back at the children and there is psychic contact with them. The boys ride home in a fright, and tell Jose’s father.

Later on another day, the boys return with Jose’s father and a policeman, and then, the US Army arrives and over a period of days, a few soldiers gather up the debris and put the object on a trailer and haul it away to parts unknown. The object is never put under full guard, so the children hide in the rocks and watch all of this go down and they sneak in and enter the object, see it is devoid of any visible controls or visible propulsion, take pieces of the wreckage and then, hide them away.

One of these pieces was later purchased by Harris to be analyzed by Vallee. (One thing people seem to be stuck on is Vallee’s interest in physical bits from alleged UFO’s—as noted above, he’s been collecting such materials for years and has talked about it in books like Confrontations: A Scientist’s Search for Alien Contact and most recently in the film, “The Phenomenon.”

Let’s look at this in terms of folklore—one of the ways you analyze two separate stories in folklore is you look for similarities in motifs, which are bits of a story that you can pick out and analyze.

Both stories involve children. In both stories the children are hispanic. In both stories, the children are sent out by their fathers, to go out into their rangelands on their ranch to retrieve livestock. In both stories the children are confronted by a a strange object on the ground, in both stories, there are beings in the object, in both stories, there seems to be no propulsion or controls for the object, in both stories the children have psychic communication with the beings in the object, and in both stories, the children return home without the livestock they had been sent after and they tell their fathers what they have seen.

If we look at it in folklore, what we have are two analogous stories, so similar, they could be considered variants of the same story.

Which tells me that we are looking at two classic Jacques Vallee cases.

There are of course, differences between the two stories.

Juan Perez was interviewed by Vallee shortly after his experience,, while he and Harris never got a chance to interview the Jose and Remi at the time of thier sighting for the very simple reason that Vallee was a child in 1945 in war torn France and Harris hadn’t even been born!

This is a shame, because while there were no frames of reference for UFOs in 1945 (remember, Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and Roswell occurred in 1947), Padilla and Baca didn’t tell their stories until they were well into their 70’s.

My concern with this gap between the event and Harris’ interview of them men is there was plenty of time for UFO lore to invade their memories. (No, I am not saying they willfully lied or added to their stories—I’m saying that the popular UFO lore depicted in books, movies and television shows had plenty of time to seep into their consciousnesses over decades and to taint their memories—-all with the men unconscious of this happening.)

The promise of the book of course, that it will change how we look at UFO history forever—and it may well do that, -if- there is corroborative evidence. This piece of the puzzle is also classic Vallee—he’s always been interested in finding pre 1947 possible UFO experiences from history—his books Passport to Magonia and Wonders in the Sky are full of such stories.

And, finally, near the end of the interview, when Church asks Dr. Vallee, “Was it one of ours?” meaning was the object some sort of human-built prototype aircraft, he answers, “No.”

But then, he goes on to add, and I am paraphrasing, “No, it is not human-made, but it was physical. However, that does not mean it was from outer space. It doesn’t mean it was extraterrestrial—there are many other explanations of where it could have come from.”

So, there we are.

Dr. Vallee hasn’t stepped that far out of his typical pattern of looking for patterns within the UFO phenomena with this case. He hasn’t gone all “Nutsy-Boltsy ETH” either.

The case central to this book, which also takes up the angle of UFO’s historic connection with atomic weapons and their tendency to be seen lurking around military nuclear facilities, fits perfectly within the sorts of culturally-grounded, historically relevant cases with physical traces that Dr. Vallee has pursued his entire life.

In another blog post, I will take up how Paola Harris became Dr. Vallee’s co-author of this book.

After I go read the book, as it is burning a hole in my Kindle right now, begging to be opened.

Secrets Within Secrets

The “original” book cover of Dr. Vallee’s newest book, as shown in Amazon.

Last Saturday, May 1, I was minding my own business, re-reading Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality, when my phone binged to tell me that I had a message on FB. I opened it up and there was a UFO friend of mine, Steve Coop, and he had most intriguing news for me:

Dr. Jacques Vallee’s newest book, entitled The Best Kept Secret, had been inexplicably delayed and had, in fact disappeared from Amazon’s website, as well as other online bookstore’s sites. Since it was due out in three days, this of course, caused consternation and puzzlement.

However, even though it had disappeared, those of us who had pre-ordered the book on Amazon—the orders were still open, but if you clicked the link on the order, there was no page for the book.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Of course, the UFO subs on Reddit were ablaze with speculation, paranoia and wild theorizing. (Which is why I never post to any of them.)

I told Steve that it likely had diddly squat to do with the government quashing the book because Dr. Vallee was revealing some great and dangerous secret to the unwashed masses. Nor did I think it had anything to do with the impending “disclosure” that the government was gearing up to do, because I don’t believe that’s going to be significant to any great extent.

Instead, I opined that it likely had to do with the papers he’s been writing on analysis of the anomalous metallic fragments found in conjunction with UFO “crash sites” that he’s been working on for decades. Last I’d heard, he’d submitted papers to peer reviewed journals, and it was possible that more information had come to light in this review process and he pulled the book from publication to add or remove information from it so that it wouldn’t go out of date as soon as it hit the public’s hot and eager hands.

I thought that was the end of it.

But, oh, no. That wasn’t the case.

It’s never that simple, y’all.

Nearly a week later, once again, I was minding my own business, this time, writing emails and working on a blog post (Not this one. The one I was PLANNING on posting today, but am instead posting this one….), when I decided to look at Facebook.

There I found Joshua Cutchin’s post which said simply, “WTF, Jacques?”

Now, I knew which Jacques he meant. Clearly it was not Jacques Pepin to whom he was directing his query.

So, I had to read the entire thread and that’s where I first saw this “revised” cover for Dr. Vallee’s newest book.

The “revised” book cover. Which isn’t revised at all. Read on to see where I’m going with this.

Speculation as to what was going on was coming fast and furious.

UFO Twitter was all over it and Reddit was roiling with all sorts of crazy.

And I engaged on Josh’s thread because while I do not tweet nor do I bother with communicating on Reddit, I will converse with rational folks on Facebook. And I participated similarly on Greg Bishop’s Radio Misterioso Facebook page on the topic.

And there was a lot to read and think about, and my brain went galumphing off along with everyone else’s asking questions and conjuring up possible answers.

First of all, a CO-AUTHOR? What? Where had she come from? Did she just appear in the last week? Who is she? What does she do? WHAAAAAT?

Italian investigative journalist Paola Leopizzi Harris turns out to be a pretty standard proponent of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis of UFOs, and she’s….not generally as well respected as Dr. Vallee is in the field. People whose opinions I respect are pretty unimpressed by her and her ideas. So, I was wincing inwardly as I read on. Then looked up her work, and winced harder.

Later that evening, I found that Linda Moulton Howe had called the good doctor on the phone to get shit straight and was told that new information had come to light and he had pulled the book in order to add that new information.

And she helpfully posted a press release he had sent her.

The reading, speculation and thoughts continued yesterday as I cleaned the entire house because a friend was coming to dinner and I hadn’t been able to bestir myself to dust in..like….a long time.

Then Chris and Morganna arrived and we had a merry talk about his continuing work on building a searchable database of Albert Rosales’ Humanoid Sightings, and shared news of paranormal nature, including this news about Vallee’s book, and all the speculations and questions about the new title, subject and co-author.

Then we had dinner and talked and had a great time visiting and after dinner, I worked again on that other blog post (you’ll see it in a week, be patient).

But the buzz around the The Best Kept Secret kept coming up in my head, so I gave up editing the blog post and went off track, digging around the Internet for any clues I could find to perhaps explain this entire meshugas. (That’s Yiddish for a crazy mess.)

I found an interview with Dr. Vallee in the March 2006 edition of The Daily Grail’s “Sub Rosa” magazine, and in it, I found a quote that sat in my head and fomented thought.

When asked by the interviewer what “three top cases should we be devoting attention to” in order to best research the UFO question as a whole.

Dr. Vallee replied, “I am not comfortable with the idea of basing the reality of the phenomenon on a few so-called “best cases.” We have to start from a global assessment of patterns in a large number of cases where common misidentifications have been screened out. To that end, I have developed a family of four computer catalogues from several parts of the world, under a new standard format. This requires a major effort but fortunately the tools of database development have evolved rapidly in the last few years. Roswell, in my opinion, is a blind alley. It is a major tactical mistake to base the argument for UFOs entirely on a case that has so little scientific evidence and so much ambiguous and conflicting testimony surrounding it.” (Emphasis added by author.)

That quote stuck out to me, because while it is a quintessentially Dr. Vallee quote (he has always leaned more heavily on looking at the larger picture of the UFO problem in context with social, political and historical data, with an eye toward seeking patterns) it also seems to be directly at odds with revealed content of his newest book, which appears to be about a singular case involving a UFO crash that predates Roswell.

That interview was on my mind as I fell asleep, and as is often the case, my subconscious mind took up the problem where the conscious mind left off and I woke up with a new idea.

And here we get to the meat of this post.

I think that what we are witnessing is a bit of a ploy on Dr. Vallee’s part. I think this entire meshugas—the original cover of the book, its disappearance on Amazon, and then the press release a week later was deliberate misdirection as to the title of the book, the nature of its contents and the presence and identity of the co-author.

Why do I think this?

Simple.

Dr. Vallee is not a stupid man, nor is he inexperienced in the ways in which the UFO community acts and reacts to anything in the least bit new, different or controversial in the field. He knows how any perceived change in his own ideas is going to cause waves to crash through the community, and battle lines will be drawn and minds made up long before the book is even published, much less anyone has even had a chance to read it.

He also knows about how his co-author’s work is perceived by others in the field. And, in this field, generally, once one’s mind is made up about a researcher or author, ones mind stays that way,. We UFO folks can be a prejudicial lot, and no amount of good work done by said author later will change the UFO community’s perception of them, once a consensus has formed.

Don’t believe me? Well, we all know about Dr. J. Allen Hyneck’s swamp gas comment. A comment which he deeply regretted, and which doesn’t reflect his later excellent analysis and research at all—but we still remember it, long after his death. And while Dr. Hyneck is generally lauded now, for a long while, UFO fans groaned at every mention of his name.

And, of course, Dr. Vallee was there for that—he lived that experience with Dr. Hyneck.

So, his co-author, Ms. Harris, (whose work I have not read), may not be well respected by people I trust, but Dr. Vallee respects her enough to put his name on a book with hers. However, he knows how we are, so he decided to forestall the rumblings, grumblings and judgements that are going on RIGHT NOW, by concealing her existence until a month before the book comes out.

A month’s worth of speculation and furor are enough to deal with, but six or more months of it would be tiresome at least, and infuriating at most.

Consider this. If he had released this information back in December when I first found out about and pre-ordered the book, all of this speculation would have gone on for months, with questions of the authors’ characters and theories, whether or not Dr. Vallee had hopped onto the ETH bandwagon and thus lost his mind, questions as to his mental acuity due to his age—-all of this would have been going on while he and Harris worked to complete the manuscript on time for publication.

By releasing the book under a revised, more secretive title, with no mention of a co-author, he managed to generate buzz and excitement for the book while sidestepping all of the drama that we now are watching unfold. With a longer, more drawn out spate of drama, not only would he and his co-author and publishers have to deal with questions, requests for interviews as well as the possibility that there would be this well-known researcher or that UFO pundit declaring they weren’t going to bother to read the book “Because obviously, everything Vallee said up until now was bullshit and it was ETs all along.!”

He wants us to read the book and THEN judge, not the other way around. And for a field where lots of people like to say we’re all about science and are logical and rational and sensible—we are pretty emotional people. We get het up easily, and sometimes that’s a problem.

Finally, by occluding the title and co-author, and thus avoiding the hullabaloo until the last minute, Dr. Vallee ensured that he and Ms. Harris were able to glean as much information from their sources in the intelligence community as possible without fear of having said sources clam up because of the unfolding drama in social media.

Intelligence people like secrets to be secret. They get squirrelly and scurry off if their veil of secrecy is disturbed by a tempest in a teapot or in social media.

So there we are. The Best Kept Secret wasn’t just the subject of the book—the title and the co-author were also well-kept secrets.

And I don’t mind a bit. I think Dr. Vallee was sensible and well-reasoned in his decision to handle the release of the book this way. Because, we UFO folks are really, honestly not known for our sensible, well-reasoned responses to surprises and new information.

Oh, and one more thing—about those metamaterials that he’s been collecting, establishing a chain of custody and analyzing for decades. This is not new information—he’s been at this for a long time, and he’s already released information regarding anomalous properties of some of these fragments in the recent past.

In 2017, he gave an open lecture in Paris on the findings he and other scientists he’s worked with have made regarding metamaterials collected in the context of the UFO phenomenon. The paper, entitled, “What Do We Know About the Composition of UFOs?” regarding the metamaterials is available for download at academia.edu is well worth reading and thinking on.

Remember, just because he has in his possession physical bits of metal that seem to have been engineered, but apparently not by humans, doesn’t mean that Dr. Vallee has gone all “nutsy-boltsy ETH” on us. Non-human intelligence can originate in many places other than another planet. That is just one possibility.

I don’t believe that the metamaterials or the secrets revealed in Trinity: The Best Kept Secret are going to provide us with -the- answer to the UFO question. Or even -an- answer to the many questions that surround the subject of UFOs.

I think it’s just going to bring up a whole lot more questions.

And that’s ok. I like chasing after mysteries.

Wouldn’t it be boring if we had all of the questions answered, once and for all?

Building a Mystery: John Keel and the Modern Paranormal Phenomena

Detail of “Belief is the Enemy” mixed media collage by Barbara Fisher

About thirteen years ago when I was re-reading John Keel,’s books, Mac Tonnies ‘ blog “Posthuman Blues,” and Greg Bishop and Nick Redfern’s posts on the UFOMystic site—as well as The Fortean Times, and a smattering of other blogs and UFO webzines and suchlike things, I realized something.

I wasn’t the only one of my generation of writers, thinkers and researchers whose paranormal worldview was shaped by the writings of Keel. Lots of us were. And as I wandered about the message boards, comment sections and online communities, I found that there were a significant number of very flexible, interesting thinkers out and about whose ideas and theories clearly had been strongly influenced by the Keelian concept of the superspectrum, ultraterrestrials, and the interrelated nature of all paranormal phenomena.

There were lots of us.

Used to be, Keel was the maverick, the one that folks poo-pooed with copious eye-rolls when his works were mentioned in UFO circles.

I was thrilled to see a difference—that among those my age, a bit older and then the younger generations—there was a respect for Keel’s ideas that had been totally lacking the last time I had made a serious foray out into shadowy world of paranormal research. (I never stopped reading, thinking, writing and theorizing—I just did it quietly, privately and on my own. )

And it got me to thinking.

You know how John talked about his experiments with the phenomena that he wrote about in The Mothman Prophesies? How he said belief was the enemy, because he realized in 1966-67 that whenever he came up with an idea about the phenomenon, or a theory, as to what was going on, the phenomena would shape itself to conform to that theory—or—would go out of its way to deny that theory? And how he also noticed that he didn’t have to either write down that theory or tell another person about it, but just -think- of it? And it would go out of its way to conform to that very idea?

Now, there is something to be said here for confirmation bias being at play here—that because Keel was thinking something, he saw evidence to back it up, but this kept happening, over and over, enough times that it really got his attention.

If confirmation bias wasn’t in play here, this could mean one of two things.

Either the intelligence that is responsible for UFO’s is telepathic and can just reach into any human’s mind and read what’s in there, or Greg Bishop’s co-creation theory is correct, and the witnessed phenomena is a chimera created at the axis of the meeting of a human consciousness and an intelligent non-human consciousness, more or less in partnership.

(This partnership can be formed with a fully willing human, or, it could be that the human’s unconscious mind is in partnership with the non-human intelligence without the everyday conscious mind being aware of it.)

There’s a video on YouTube of Keel which I bought on DVD around the same time as I was doing all of this reading. (That DVD of Keel’s lectures has since disappeared into the same black hole that seems to eat physical evidence of Bigfoot and UFO photographs. I probably lent it out and never got it back, but still, I can’t help but snicker.)

He’s giving a lecture at a FortFest in the 1990’s where he describes watching from a hilltop on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River, as boatmen flashed their bright lights up into the sky at the strange lights that were skittering about. He describes how the lights would dash away from the beams of the boat’s lights. Then, Keel tells how he used his own powerful flashlight to signal the aerial lights, in Morse code, telling them to flash, or descend or ascend, and they would do as requested.

Which gave him pause.

They either knew Morse code, or were reading his mind.

In order to see which possibility was correct, he made up his own code on the spot, and signaled them—and the lights reacted appropriately.

To my thinking, it’s clear that, the intelligence represented by the lights was in telepathic contact with him.

Keel wrote in various of his books about furthering his experimentation with the phenomena’s malleability. He wrote in The Mothman Prophesies that he would come up with an idea, and once again, not tell anyone and would give bits of it out to some of his contactee associates who claimed to be in communication with the UFO occupants, and then would later find it coming back to him from different contactees who were not known to the first set of contactees.

Or, he would get a story about a Man in Black experience from one UFO witness—who had not told anyone other than Keel about their sighting—and Keel would write down the story in his notes and not share it with any other researcher. Later, he’d end up hearing a story very similar from a different witness from a different part of the country, often with the same odd details.

What exactly am I getting at here?

Serious readers of Keel can see that he shaped his own interactions with what many of us now call The Other.

And many of his readers’ ideas have been intensely shaped by Keel’s theories and ideas.

What if he shaped the larger Phenomenon by shaping -our- ideas about how the Other acts and reacts to humanity?

What if, by recognizing fairly early on the links between UFOs, ghosts, poltergeists, monsters, apparitions, psychic phenomena and other paranormal activity, Keel made it more likely that the weirdness would not only continue, but grow in prevalence because more humans expect it to be there?

It’s kind of meta, I know—the idea that Keel has, by virtue of shaping younger minds, shaped the malleable non-human intelligence with which we interact.

However it doesn’t seem that far fetched, if we think on it for a minute.

If we accept the Keelian notion that we interact with protean a non-human-intelligence/the Other/ultraterrestrials/cryptoterrestrials/daimon or whatever you want to call it/them, and have done so throughout history, to go one step further and think that Keel may yet be shaping said intelligence from beyond the grave through the power of his words alone really isn’t that ridiculous.

This is just a blog post, not an article or paper or book, so it’s very much a “what if” kind of train of ideas. I’ll be developing it further in the coming months, with quotes and citations and all that proper official documentation, but I wanted to release my thoughts out into the wild now, in time for Keel’s birthday.

I turned out to be a day late and a dollar short of the goal, as my Dad would say, but that’s ok. It’s here for others to think and wonder about.

Holding Space

Photograph by Barbara Fisher

This is just a small blog post to let our readers and listeners know that one of our hosts, Kendra Maurer, is the the middle of a family crisis and will be taking a break from blogging and podcasting while she takes care of herself and her family.

I wanted everyone to know that she will be back when she can—and that this is still a three woman operation, and we’ll be holding space in her recording chair for when she can return.

If you can, hold space for her in your hearts. If you have a spiritual practice, I’d like it if you could send her and her family your love and prayers and thoughts at this time. She could use the extra positivity right now.

Thank you.

My First UFO

“Do You See It?” My very first art journal page. It illustrates the incident that happened 37 years before. Art by Barbara Fisher 2014. The object didn’t have any markings on it—the eye as illustrated symbolizes the haunting feeling I have that the thing was looking at me while I looked at it.

It was 1977.

I was 12 years old.

I had just finished re-reading John Keel’s The Mothman Prophesies, along with having just had a first read of Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse and Our Haunted Planet—all found at the Kanawha County Public Library and checked out together.

And I had just had my mind blown by reading Dr. Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia—also found in the dimly lit, dusty stacks where I stalked my prey: books filled with forbidden knowledge, folklore, ghosts and the great Unknown.

Previously, I had only been exposed to nuts and bolts, extraterrestrial hypothesis works by authors like Frank Scully, Jim and Coral Lorenzen, Donald Kehoe and Frank Edwards.

This new, high strangeness-laden strain of thought surrounding the anomalous subject of UFO’s had hauled off and smote my brain from behind, sneaking up and changing my worldview within a week. (That’s how long it took me to devour that set of books in a frenzied, up-all-night reading by flashlight binge.)

In hindsight, I would say that I was primed to see a UFO.

I was ready.

Now, it’s not like I had never seen strange things before.

I grew up surrounded by oddness, with strange flashing lights, and entities oozing through walls and prescient dreams. Family members had strange experiences, from my father’s sighting of an anomalous light in the Navy, to his sister having ghost experiences. I had been taught to dowse for water and metal by my Grandpa and on summer nights all through childhood, he and I and Grandma sat up star watching, and tracking strange lights bobbing and zipping along the night sky in ways that no man-made craft could fly.

But I had never seen what one would call a “structured craft.” Nothing with defined edges, that looked anything like a cigar, a saucer, or and egg. It was always lights in the sky—and they happened so regularly on the farm at night that they were fairly unremarkable.

But there I was, 12 years old on a post-dinner walk through an old residential section of Charleston, West Virginia with my mother. It was around 6pm on an early June evening. The sky was still blue because the sun didn’t set until around 8:30 or 9pm.

I had my Kodak Instamatic dangling from its wrist strap, mostly forgotten, because I had failed to find any cats on porches to photograph. (I had recently read a book on how to photograph dogs and cats by renowned photographer Walter Chandoha, and was tired of photographing our three cats and dog and had taken to carting my camera everywhere in search of neighborhood pets to pose for me.)

I’d been staring into a particularly large yard that often had cats lounging in it, when I ran into Mom who had stopped suddenly and pointed up into a large, old maple tree. “Look up there!” she said, excitedly. “Look at that bird!”

My eyes followed where she was pointing, up at a high branch, and squinted. I saw nothing. No sparrow, no robin. Not even a pigeon.

I blinked. “I don’t see a bird.”

”It’s right there!” she insisted, pointing actively, pumping her arm forward and up. “It’s red, it’s red but it’s not a cardinal. What is it?”

I thought maybe she glimpsed a woodpecker, and that would be exciting, so I tipped my head, squinted my eyes, adjusted my glasses and stared all along the branch she was clearly pointing at and saw….nothing. Not even a whisper of red.

I kept scanning along her line of sight until I got to the tip of the branch, beyond where her finger pointed, and then, in the patch of blue sky not occluded by bright green leaves and dark branches, something caught my eye.

It wasn’t red.

It was a dull aluminum or brushed silver color.

It looked like an upside down bowl.

And it was moving—drifting lazily like it was descending an invisible set of stairs in the sky.

And time stopped.

I couldn’t speak.

I couldn’t move.

My mind. Stopped. Moving.

Vaguely, as if from far away, I could hear my mother. Her voice sounded hollow and dampened, like she was done in a well, far underground.

She was still going on about that damned phantom red bird, exclaiming how she’d never seen such a thing, while I stood there, staring, unblinking, at this…..thing.

This metallic object, slowly moving diagonally across and down the sky.

I forgot I had a camera. I couldn’t feel my hand. I couldn’t feel the blister on my heel from my recently outgrown sneakers.

I could barely breathe.

My breaths came shallow as I stood there, gaping, watching until that thing—that metallic flying cereal bowl—disappeared behind the rooftops of the Victorian houses of this historic neighborhood.

Finally, I could move.

I blinked.

I could breathe, and I looked at my mother, who was now agitated, berating me for not seeing the bird.

“I don’t know how you didn’t see it, it was right there, in plain sight—a bright red bird, right there on that branch, plain as day!”

It struck me that if anyone who lived on this street would happen to see us, they’d probably think us quite unhinged. A kid staring, silent goggle-eyed at the sky and a frustrated woman going on and on about an invisible red bird.

I didn’t say anything for a second, then blinked again and said quietly, “Maybe it was a cardinal?”

She snorted. “I know what a cardinal looks like. It wasn’t shaped right and it was bigger.”

”Where did it fly to?” I asked having trouble forming words, as my mind kept going over that silvery thing I saw, trying desperately to explain it away to myself.

It was my mother’s turn to be puzzled. “I don’t know,” she said. “It must have flown, but I don’t remember seeing it go. It must have just—well, maybe I blinked. But it’s gone.”

She finally noticed that I was acting strangely and frowned down at me. “What’s wrong with you.? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I shook my head. “Mom. Is the Goodyear Blimp in town?”

The Goodyear Blimp had visited our city a year before. It was the only thing close to the right color that moved slowly enough to even fit remotely the description of what I had seen. Although it was much larger than the thing I saw, and its engine made noise and was a dull shade of grey as opposed to the brushed metal color of the…thing.

I still didn’t wouldn’t call it a UFO, even in my mind.

She frowned. “Didn’t see anything on the news or in the papers about it. Why? Did you see a blimp?”

I shook my head and said, “I saw something. It moved slow. But it didn’t make noise. And it wasn’t shaped right. And it didn’t have ‘Goodyear’ written on the side.”

I felt nauseous, and my knees were weak. I realized years later that I was probably in a state of shock.

I took a deep breath and said, “Mom. I think I saw a flying saucer. A UFO.”

She scoffed and shook her head. “You didn’t see the bird, but you saw a flying saucer?”

She nodded toward my camera. “Well then, why didn’t you take a picture?”

I looked numbly down at my camera, still dangling from my wrist. I shook my head once and said, “I don’t know. I couldn’t move. I forgot I had it with me—I couldn’t even feel it hanging from my wrist.”

She snorted and rolled her eyes. “After all those books you’ve read, you’d think you’d be ready to see one of those contraptions. Big dummy.”

I didn’t say anything; I just looked down at my too-tight sneakers. She was right, I remembered thinking. I wasn’t ready.

“Well, come on. Let’s go home. You look awful,” she finally said with an exaggerated huff as she started back down the sidewalk.

Most of the way home, we talked about what we had seen and not seen.

She asked questions and I answered, and then I asked her what the bird looked like. As we walked, her description of the bird became less and less specific. She couldn’t recall the shape of its beak, the size, whether it had white or brown or black markings on it, how it was sitting on the branch—in fact, the best I could get out of her was that it was a red bird.

This was strange, because one of the things we did as a family was watch birds, and field guides to birds were well-worn, oft-consulted books in our home. There was no good reason for her inability to describe what she saw.

About five blocks from our house, we fell silent and just trudged along, not speaking. I was still fairly numb, except for my stomach, which churned with anxiety.

By the time we got home, she had forgotten about the bird.

But I still remembered the UFO in the sky.

Brushed silver on a brilliant blue cloudless sky, with shadings of gold along the edges where warm sunlight caressed its curves.

It was seared into my memory, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.

I kept thinking—was it a kite? I’t didn’t move like a kite and wasn’t shaped like one I’d ever seen, and I’d built quite a few. I loved kites.

A balloon? No. It wasn’t a blimp. It wasn’t a plane, a hang-glider—anything I could identify.

It was a mystery that haunted my mind.

Especially the way it drifted, majestically, as if it was going down a flight of stairs—a slow, graceful, silent descent. It moved impossibly—and exactly as John Keel had described as being a maneuver typical of UFO’s.

In my head, that thing—that UFO—kept drifting. That vision kept replaying in my mind. And the words of John Keel that I had so recently read rang out in my thoughts. I had liked the quote so much, I had copied it down in decorative lettering and hung it over my typewriter.

“They are not from outer space. There is no need for them to be. They have always been here.” (John Keel, The Mothman Prophesies.)

If they had always been here, would they always be here? What were they doing here? Were they watching me? Could that thing see me while I was seeing it?

When I looked at it, was it looking back at me?

And why couldn’t Mom see it?

After what seemed an eternity of walking in silence with these thoughts running faster and faster laps around my brain, we made it home and walked in the back door.

Dad was reading the newspaper.

I put my camera away in the dining room buffet cabinet and walked up to him and stared down at him, while Mom poured herself a drink of water from the bottle in the fridge.

”Did you have a good walk?” he asked, turning down the corner of his newspaper and peering up at me over it.

I didn’t answer right away, just stared at him.

He frowned. “Are you ok?” he asked, when I didn’t chatter at him about the squirrels we’d seen or the cats of how the nice the roses smelled down on Virginia Street.

In an emotionless voice, I stated simply. “I saw a UFO, Dad.”

Mom came into the living room and said, “No you didn’t! If you saw one, why didn’t you tell me about it?”

I looked at her and wearily said, “I did tell you. You stopped and pointed up a tree at a bird you saw and I didn’t see it, but then I saw something moving in the sky, and it was silvery and it looked like an upside down bowl and it drifted like it was going down a set of stairs, but you kept going on about the bird, and I never saw the bird, and I couldn’t talk or move, I just watched it until it was gone.”

The words poured out and she stared at me and shook her head. Setting down her drink, she lit a cigarette with shaking hands and said, “I don’t remember any of that,” in a sharp voice that would accept no argument.

She took a long drag from the cigarette, and then blowing the smoke out in a huff, laughed. “And why didn’t you take a picture of it? You had your camera.”

I sighed and shook my head, “I don’t know,” I answered,. Defeated,, I turned and headed up the steps up to my room.

My border collie, Rufus, followed on my heels as Dad returned to hiding behind his newspaper fortress, blocking out my mother and I both.

“She shouldn’t be reading all those books you let her read,” she complained.

Dad just answered, “She can read what she wants, She gets good grades. You should be happy she reads so much.”

And then Mom turned up the TV, and I was in my room with the door shut.

I thought about it a lot. That image stayed with me. It still stays with me. The strangeness of that little episode—that must have only lasted a minute, maybe two, probably more like 45 seconds—has stuck with me, and the questions left unanswered have haunted me my whole life.

Why did Mom see a bird that I couldn’t see? And why couldn’t she describe it beyond it was red and not a cardinal? And why couldn’t she see the silver thing in the sky? And then, why did she slowly forget the entire incident? To this day, she doesn’t remember it, though Dad remembers me telling him when we came home about what I had seen.

No, there was no blimp in the area at that time. The next day while Dad was at work and Mom was planting flowers, I snuck in the house and called the airport and asked. No blimp and no weather balloons.

Then, the more disturbing questions started chasing me.

What was that thing anyway? Was it real? What does real mean? Was it solid? Was it a hallucination? Was I crazy? Why hadn’t I been able to take a picture of it? Why didn’t I think about my camera? What kind of person has a camera in her hand and then forgets when confronted with a vision of an impossibility like that?

What if I wasn’t crazy? What if it was real and it was piloted by some sort of intelligent being? What were they like? What did they want? Did they see me? Were they looking back at me? Did they do something to my mother’s mind to make her not see them? Why? Were they watching me then? Were they watching me now?

I didn’t read the UFO books again for a week or two after that.

I just couldn’t. I was having trouble sleeping, and I felt like I was being watched.

Besides, what good did they do? I had my camera with me and still didn’t have enough sense to try and photograph it.

Of course, if I had taken a picture, and it showed a UFO, would I then have had a visit from the dreaded Men in Black?

I was suddenly glad I hadn’t had sense enough to photograph it.

Though, in truth, the books had prepared me. The reason I -knew- as I watched the thing drift idly down the invisible staircase in the sky that what I was seeing was a UFO, was because Keel had described that very motion so eloquently that I instantly recognized it and -knew- my world had changed forever.

I had taken the UFO books back to the library and checked out instead, The Antagonists by Ernest K. Gann, a novel about the siege of Masada. A little light, uplifting reading that is perfect for a kid home for summer. And when I finished that, I dug into How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn, which Dad had suggested I’d probably like.

I had traded in UFOs for Romans attempting to subjugate Jewish rebels and the tragic way of life in a 19th century Welsh coal mining village.

Until Dad came home from the bookstore on his day off and tossed me a paperback.

It landed on my lap where I was sprawled in the living room,, sniffling over the tragic death of yet another coal miner in that Welsh village.

It was a paperback of The Mothman Prophesies.

”I reckoned you should have a copy of your own, before you wear out the library’s book.”

I smiled and wiped my eyes and thanked him. I set aside the dying coal miner, and opened up Keel’s book, and started reading it for a third time.

Dad nodded.

It was his way of saying he believed me and understood why I hadn’t tried to take that picture.

John Keel -had- prepared me for my first UFO, even if he never knew it.

Guest Post: An Incident at the Ridges

Photograph by Barbara Fisher

Barbara here—this blog post is one written by a guest. It’s a print version of the story sent to us for our second Haunted Asylum episode, that I read on air. It was so well written and interesting, I thought I would feature it here on the blog and will do so with any written stories we get from listeners and readers—with their permission of course. (As always, we will keep you anonymous if you want.)

Before we get to the story, a few words about the author, Bryian.

He was the first friend Zak and I met in Athens, only about five or six days after moving here.

We met Bry in the local bead store, “Beads & Things,” which is an Athens institution—much more than a craft store—it’s where you go when you need a special gift or a long talk with the amazingly wonderful, well travelled and fascinating proprietors, Joey and Phil.

Beads & Things was, in fact, the reason we visited Athens the first time.

I made beaded jewelry at the time and a friend and coworker in Huntington, West Virginia, heard on the radio an ad for a bead shop in Athens, Ohio, and seeing it was only an hour and a half or so drive, we all headed out to find it.

The ad wasn’t for Beads & Things, however, it was for a different bead store—a competitor (which is not longer here), but a lady on Court Street saw us come out of that bead store and told us how to find Beads & Things, so we went there and our eyes were opened and we continued to fall in love with Athens.

In love enough that I transferred my college credits from Marshall University and finished my degree at Ohio University.

But I digress—we ended up getting. a house up the block and around the corner from Beads & Things, so after we unpacked, we walked down to do some shopping (it’s dangerous to the wallet to live within walking distance of that store), and there we were confronted with a tall, soft-spoken man showing Joey a pair of earrings he had wrought himself out of the finest silver chain mail—that he called “insane mail”— and I knew we had found our people.

I went right up to him and said, “You’re in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) aren’t you?”

Of course he was. And they had meetings every Tuesday on campus in Morton Hall, and you should come out, and before we knew it, we were told three SCA folk lived up the street from us,. In a few breaths after that, Bry had asked us to come that weekend to join a Dungeons and Dragons game he was running, and the rest is history.

That’s how Zak and I met and became part of what we call, “The Athens Family.”

So, the author of this true story is my oldest friend in Athens, and I trust his word implicitly.

”An Incident at the Ridges”
by Bryian Winner

I used to work for a computer service company who had their office in a “newer” part of the Ridges. Building 20 has been demolished now but I will tell you of an odd occurrence I had there and the later information that made it even creepier.

It may sound a bit trite, but in fact, it was a dark and stormy night. I got an emergency call from a client around 2:45 am that one of their critical systems had lost a power supply. While I will not name the client, let me just say they were no one I could ignore till the next day for everyone’s sake. I jumped in my car and drove the 10 minutes to The Ridges to get a replacement power supply before heading to the clients.

Our office was on the second floor of the building, on one end of a very long hallway that once housed individual patient rooms.. I unlocked the front door and rode the elevator to the second floor. I headed directly to our office and entered it, but I had a very uneasy feeling. You know that “something is not quite right” feeling in the pit of your stomach.

The storm had mostly subsided by this point as I turned the lights on and headed to the workbench. I grabbed the power supply and started back to the door when I heard a sound. Now, mind you this is in the wee hours, the staff and everyone one else, including the custodians, had gone home. I knew for a fact I was all alone.

That is when I heard it. A squeaking noise coming from the hallway outside from the far end (which at this point had no client offices in it at all.)

The sound was like a squeak from a gurney wheel.

There had been no gurneys in this area for more than 10 years so I know that is was not just someone messing around. The squeak got louder and louder as it came closer to me. 

To give you an idea of the layout this floor was like a giant u shape with the elevator at the bottom of the u and stairs at either tip. My office was near the elevators.

I looked down the hallway and it was empty. No mist, no shadows, just the sound coming closer to me. I thought it might be some sort of mechanical sound but after working in that building for a few years I had never heard it before.

The noise got louder and then began to fade a little as if it was moving away from me.

Then suddenly, the elevator doors opened. They then closed and it went to the first floor. Now, this may not seem strange but, the elevator was on a “will call” state so since I left it last the doors would only open when the button was pushed and it would not move until a floor was selected.

I exited the building by the stairs with great expediency.

Soon thereafter I kept a supply of replacement parts in my car.

Now what I had learned later on:

This building was part of the center hospital and originally used as the receiving area. Dr. Walter Freeman, pioneer in trans-orbital technique, demonstrated how lobotomies are performed on over 200 Athens State Hospital patients in that very building. Also, Kirkbride Plan asylums like the main building at the Ridges, occupy a unique niche in our culture. As more than 70 were built across the nation (with 25 surviving as of 2019) they are a uniquely accessible and idyllic representation of the allures of urban exploration. Kirkbride Plan asylums have appeared in films and television, been the subjects of notable photographers, and inspired fictional locations such as Arkham Asylum in Batman, and Parsons State Insane Asylum in Fallout 4.

Is Belief the Enemy?

“Otherworld: ” Acrylic painting depicting the little lights in the trees by Barbara Fisher. 2018

John Keel is famous for having said “Belief is the enemy.”

He explains in his most famous book, The Mothman Prophesies, “Paranormal phenomena are so widespread, so diversified, and so sporadic yet so persistent that separating and studying any single element is not only a waste of time but will automatically lead to the development of belief. Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to support that belief and thereby escalate it.”

I think Keel is right,. Although, it really is hard to go through life—especially a life where you are in the midst of a nearly constant barrage of strange experiences—without beliefs.

Humans like to believe in something. It helps keep us balanced, though many others besides Keel himself would point out that some people take their beliefs too far and end up as fanatics, which really isn’t a good thing. And currently in the US, we are awash with people who, like the White Queen in Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass, are not only practiced in “believing six impossible things before breakfast,” but who most certainly believe many more improbabilities all day long, to the detriment of the social contract in our country.

I’ve decided that it is easier to believe than it is to not believe.

I mostly stand firmly in the middle road between belief and disbelief—rather like an obstruction, as George Carlin would have said.

I usually occupy the wishy-washy wibbly-woobly middle ground of being agnostic on all of the impossibilities which see fit to confront me on a daily basis. This middle ground might infuriate some friends and colleagues, but for the longest time, it seemed the most logical standpoint for me to have.

I can’t claim the mantle of a skeptic, because I have so often seen and been confronted by inexplicable things that I just cannot say that they didn’t happen. I was there, so I know they did.

But I can’t truly say “I’m a believer,” because I don’t want to become a victim to confirmation bias when I stare the impossibilities in the face and ask, “Who or what are you, and what are you doing here?”

However, for the past year, I have been trying something new.

I have been attempting to -not- believe in things., while also not being an annoying skeptic who tries to debunk everything including the evidence of my senses.

This is a precarious path to walk.

Let me give an example: the little lights I see dancing around in the woods around Athens fairly often.

I first started seeing them in the early 1990’s, and it wasn’t just me who saw them. It was in fact, a couple of friends who were first plagued with brightly colored, small balls of light dancing in the woods behind their house, right here in town. They experienced it, and then the phenomena also happened to another couple who lived slightly out of town. Friends, including myself., hanging out at the first couple’s home, saw the lights,. Even the young man’s father who most certainly didn’t believe in impossible whatsits flitting about in pretty colors in the woods at night saw them.

When he asked his son what those lights were outside the window, merrily dancing around like a rainbow of fireflies in every wrong color of the rainbow, my friend answered, “Um, nothing.”

So we started calling them the “Umnothings.”

My husband Zak refined that to the “Umnoughts,,” which is a more elegant way of stating that these little lights were a whole lot of impossible wrapped up in a shiny, blinking, prettily-colored package.

Then Zak and I moved into a house slightly out of town and the Umnoughts really liked the piece of land the house was on, and so were constantly appearing outside the house in the woods and fields, as well as coming up to windows and finally, invading the house itself.

And that’s when I began to firmly believe they were somehow related to the fairy realm.

Which is not a bad thought, really, because fairy lore warns us of the Will-o-the Wisps who will lead you far off the path into the forest or a marsh to either fall off a cliff or into a swamp never to be seen again. And I had already come to that conclusion much earlier, but by the time I lived in the “Falling-Down-the-Hill House,” as we called the rickety little hovel that was sliding off of its foundation, it was cemented into my brain that I was dealing with fairies.

But once I began to truly believe that and treat them like fairies, giving offerings and following “the rules” that fairy lore teaches us, the phenomena really began ramping up and manifesting more often and more clearly in the shape of the fairies.

Just like John Keel reported in The Mothman Prophesies, every time he formulated a theory about some aspect of the UFO or Mothman phenomena, and -didn’t- make that idea public- the phenomena would manifest proof that his theory was correct in a prompt and pointed manner.

Decades later, I read about little lights appearing in the Ural Mountains, (around the same years we saw them in Athens) in a book by Dr. Jacques Vallee called The Cosmic Samizdat, which was about his trip to the USSR to learn about the UFOs sighted and studied there. The witnesses of the phenomena of the tiny lights in the Ural Mountains took them to be part of the UFO phenomena, which was also manifesting itself heavily in that time and place.

Later still, in Ardy Sixkiller Clarke’s book, Sky People: Untold Stories of Alien Encounters in Mesoamerica, she experienced the exact same phenomena of little brightly colored balls or orbs of light dancing around in the jungles of Central America, only this time she and her guide took them to be ancestral spirits.

Three different interpretations of the same exact simple phenomena.: little balls of light dancing around in a wild place at night.

So, who’s right? Whose belief system is the correct one? Are they fairies, tiny UFO’s or the spirits of dead humans?

Facing that question, when the lights came dancing back into my life starting in the winter of 2019, I decided to try and just describe what I see whenever I experience something impossible, and not put it into a belief system.

That is really hard to do.

Because as Morganna wisely said, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, dammit, Mom, it’s a damned duck.”

Naturally, I had to be a twit and say, “But what if it’s a shape-shifting duck?”

After more than a year of this, I admit I haven’t done very well at not putting those lights into a belief system, just as I am failing to keep a belief system from invading my thoughts when strange stones or pieces of iron appear in my house.

Human brains like explanations for something, even when that explanation isn’t super-rational. Our minds just like to have a context into which to put all of our experiences, but I find this to be especially true when it comes to the weird stuff.

Because when we deal with impossible things like little lights bobbing around in the trees in our back yards, we need -something- even if it’s folklore- to explain it. Even if we don’t rationalize it away, we need something to wrap the impossibility up in because it helps us cope with its impossible, implausible and damned peculiar nature.

Belief is comforting.

So, I’m back to walking well worn middle path betwixt and between belief and disbelief. Belief, while comforting, has its perils—I don’t want to become too rigid in my thinking and miss a valuable insight or bit of evidence because it doesn’t fit into my preferred paradigm. And disbelief is just plain too uncomfortable for me to maintain when nearly every morning before breakfast something weird manifests in my vicinity.

I don’t think Keel meant you couldn’t believe things, especially if you use belief as a shorthand, or a convenient label for something mysterious. When you lose your wallet in your house and after looking for three days, find it in the first conspicuous place you looked three days previously and say, “Oh, the pixies stole it,” it doesn’t mean you believe literal pixies stole your credit card and were out on the town—it means something weird happened and you chose pixies as a shorthand for it.

What he meant was, don’t believe something and hold onto it to the exclusion of all other information. Don’t believe blindly. And for the love of Gaia, don’t believe everything you’re told, especially by non-human intelligences who are out on tear in their UFO. You can’t trust those guys.

So, no belief isn’t really the enemy, at least, not casual belief. And neither is disbelief.

But neither are they perfect allies when one is confronted with impossibilities.

So, I stand in between. Between the shadow and the light.

This all said, which paradigm (fairies, UFOs or ancestors) do I think the little lights are best fit into?

All three. They are all related, and the core phenomena, the little lights, has to do with all of them.

And, none of them. It both is and is not those things.

It is those things because those paradigms are the clothes with which we enrobe the little lights when we engage with them, and it may be the only way the individual who sees them can engage with them productively.

It isn’t those things, because it is by its nature not human and protean and it changes shape and meaning the way we change our clothes.

And I’m pretty sure John Keel would agree with me on that score.

I used to have a video of one of his talks at either a Fortfest or Mothman Festival where he described standing in a field in Mason County, WV, where he was surrounded by a group of these very small bobbing lights. He was interacting with them, using his flashlight to flash at them, and thinking directions of where they should fly next at them, and he said they responded to both of those communications. He said they acted both telepathic and intelligent. I saw that video decades after I first started seeing the lights in Athens, and his close-up encounter with them was so similar to my own from years before that I nearly fell off of the couch.

Whatever they are—the little lights—the Umnoughts— are intelligent. They are sentient.

I don’t believe that.

I know it.

Disappearing And Appearing Objects

From left to right: 8-sided piece of aged/weathered cast iron, a stone that naturally looks like a vulva, and a chip of rose quartz with a smoky quartz or tourmaline inclusion. All three appeared in my house in the past 6 months on the floor in high traffic areas, with no precipitating sound or occurrence to explain their presence. Photo by Barbara Fisher.

Ever have something disappear that you had just seen moments ago?

And you search around your house looking for it, looking in all sorts of outlandish places where you would never put it, all while harassing members of your household for moving it while they swear up and down they never saw it, much less touched it?

Only to give up, and then, hours or days or even months later, walk past a spot you checked multiple times, a spot that is very obvious and in a very visible place in the house—a high traffic area and there it is, for all to see?

That happens to me ALL. THE. DAMNED. TIME.

And has happened to me for years.

I have lots countless pieces of jewelry, and seldom does jewelry get found later. Within the last 6 months I have lost a favorite bracelet. The last time I saw it, I had taken it off in my sewing room while working on face masks for family and friends. I have not worn it since then and it has simply disappeared. A few weeks ago, I lost a favorite earring which was large and hard to miss, very colorful. It has not reappeared.

There are many more dramatic instances I could recount here,

I’m used to this.

What I am going to talk about are three objects pictured above that have appeared in my house in the last eight months.

Objects I do not recognize appearing in my house is a new oddity to me. The tricksterish entity, spirit(s), poltergeist or my own psychic abilities (or my own forgetfulness) that have for decades played games with my stuff (and other household members’ things) has a new pastime.

It, they or whatever, leaves little strange gifts on the floor for me to find.

And they don’t leave them in out of the way places. No. They’re left in the middle of well-travelled areas where they could easily be trod upon.

The first one I found was about six months ago. It was in my bedroom, next to a trunk at the foot of my bed, between the dog bed and trunk.

It is an eight-sided piece of cast iron, about the size and shape of an 8-sided die used in roleplaying games. In fact, when I spied it there on the floor, that’s what I thought it was. But after I picked it up and saw how weathered it was—rusted and corroded, it was apparent that wasn’t at all what it was. There are no signs of numbers on any of the 8 triangular sides, nor is there a place where it is obvious that it was once attached to a larger piece.

Thinking perhaps my fourteen year old son, Koi had found it in one of their walks with their older sister, Morganna, I asked if he had brought it home. He said no, but that it was something that seemed familiar, like he’d seen in it a dream.

Well, that was comforting. So, I asked Zak, who also had not seen it. I called Morganna and showed it to her over a video call. Nope. She’d not seen Koi find it, nor had she given it to me.

Thinking it may have come from a piece of decorative iron fencing in our town, I took it to the several places I know that have wrought iron fences, and found no eight-sided bits that matched this piece.

It now lives in a bowl on my altar. An unsolved mystery.

About two months ago, a stone was found in our hallway. It’s the middle object illustrated above.

It’s a natural stone, and it doesn’t look carved. It’s fairly sizable, as you can see. Perfectly smooth, save for the cleft, which doesn’t look carved; if it was it was carefully smoothed after being worked. It looks like it was formed that way.

Once again, I went the rounds of my household. Koi looked at it and suggested one of the dogs brought it in from their run beside the house; there is gravel there. (I always check with Koi because he is always bringing things like rocks, shells, feathers and bones into the house—rather like their sister and myself.)

But none of the gravel looks a thing like this stone, and it’s too large to have been carried in by paw pads, and none of our dogs have shown a propensity to pick up and carry rocks in their mouths either before this incident or since. Koi noted it looked like a vulva and dubbed it “The Coochie Rock,” which seems to have stuck, so that’s its name. Zak hadn’t seen it and Morganna hasn’t been in our house for any appreciable amount of time because of the pandemic.

So, it sits on the household altar between a carved malachite fox, and a Mother Goddess figure.

Finally, about four weeks ago, that chip of rose quartz appeared on the floor right next to the chair that I sit in by the hearth. It is small enough that a dog could have dragged it in the house in its paw pads. But it was sitting in a place where I would have stepped on it easily and in bare feet it would have been noticeable.

In fact, I found it exactly by stepping on it, since it was between the chair and my route to the kitchen. And between when I found it and when I had sat down there were hours where the dogs hadn’t been outside. Plus there was snow on the ground when I found it, which would have meant there would have been water around it. The floor around it was perfectly dry.

Looking at it, it appeared to be of mostly rose quartz, with either a small inclusion of black tourmaline or a narrow piece of very dark smoky quartz crystal in it.

I did the rounds again, but no one else had seen the little chip of rose quartz. Koi, the collector of quartz crystals and stones adamantly said it wasn’t his. I believe him because when I offered it to him, he refused to take it, citing he didn’t trust its mysterious provenance, and saying since I found it, it was obviously meant for me.

It’s now living in the goblin house on top of the bookshelf that holds my fairy lore and mythology books in the living room.

What does all of this mean? Why are stones and such appearing in my house?

What will happen next?

I’m not sure.

I have started leaving offerings of cream, butter and bread on the stump in my back yard and on my doorstep regularly, in the hopes of appeasing any creature within or without who may be making these gifts. We’ll see what happens.

Of course, I wonder if anyone else has ever had strange small objects they can’t explain show up in their houses?

Kids Say the Darndest (and Creepiest) Things

Photograph: Barbara Fisher

How many of you heard scary stories and superstitions as soon as you went to school that confused your parents?

For me, it started innocuously. “Step on a crack, break your mommas’ back.” I learned that phrase in kindergarten, and like many kids, sort of believed it!.

So did most of us, and we spent a good long time avoiding cracks in the sidewalk. A version of it also held that a BEAR would come out of the crack and follow you home.

There is a separate mythos and culture among school aged kids, passed down from kid to kid, that evolves as you grow up. They are told by peers, and older kids, whispered at sleepovers and recess.

I’m not sure where they came from, or when they started. But we all learned them, and I’m sure that there are region specific ones, and more universal ones. The one’s I’m writing about today are the ones I heard personally.

I suspect that they arise because school is a separate culture formed of children, and all cultures need and create myths. Kids are also somewhat bloodthirsty, judging by some of the skipping rhymes and other bits of mythology that I picked up over the years, told to me by other kids, and later, teenagers. I’m breaking them up into jump rope rhymes, scary stories, superstitions, and games. 

So let’s look at some of them.

In elementary school, all us girls jumped rope while the boys played basketball and ran around. We jumped rope with the big jump ropes held by two people. Some of the rhymes are probably familiar to you, but a favorite for us was “Cinderella”. “Cinderella dressed in yella went upstairs to kiss a fella, by mistake, she kissed a snake how many doctors did it take? One, two, three”, and then you jumped as many times as you could as the rope went faster and faster-however many times you could jump determined how many doctors it took to save her from death.

We also had Five Little Monkeys-you would start out with 5 people on the rope, and as the song went one one by one you jumped out. “Five little monkeys jumping on the bed, one fell off and hit his head, momma called the doctor and the doctor said, NO MORE MONKEYS JUMPING ON THE BED!” 

So, we have poisoning and head injuries already here, in elementary school.

Oh, and who could forget Lizzie Borden? “Lizzie Bordon took an ax, and gave her father 40 whacks, when she saw what she had done, she gave her mother 41!” If you couldn’t jump to 40 or 41 the cops caught you.

There were less macabre rhymes too-”Teddy bear, teddy bear turn around, teddy bear ,teddy bear touch the ground, teddy bear, teddy bear tie your shoes, teddy bear, teddy bear read the news, teddy bear, teddy bear hit your head, teddy bear, teddy bear go to bed.” where you mimicked the motions of the teddy bear while jumping. (Note, the teddy bear still hits his head at one point—kids are still a little bit bloodthirsty.)

The funny thing is, with the exception of Five Little Monkeys which was in a children's book, none of these were taught to us by adults as far as I can remember. A kid just knew them and taught them to the rest of us. The teachers much preferred us to jump to Teddy Bear, or “Lemonade” or something NICE, but we LOVED “Cinderella”, “5 Little Monkeys” and “Lizzie Borden” and would start those up as soon as the teacher was out of earshot. I think we loved them because they were slightly forbidden, and also kids are just...bloodthirsty. They also touch on lessons-don’t do risky things, you will get hurt, if you jump on the bed, you’ll hit your head, don’t kiss boys, you’ll get bit by a snake. Don’t chop up your parents, the cops will get you. (Lizzie Borden let us express frustration with parents.)

So onto scary stories-”urban legends” that were shared by kids. The two I remember vividly were “The Babysitter Killer” and “The Murderer Under The Bed”. The story of the Babysitter Killer is pretty simple-and was actually picked up as a horror trope in the movie “Scream” so I assume it was a widespread story.

A teen girl is babysitting some kids, and the phone keeps ringing, with a creepy guy on the other line, saying he is coming to kill her. She assumes it’s just a prank at first, but as he keeps calling her she gets scared, and calls the police, who trace the call, only to find it’s coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE, upstairs with the kids who are in bed!

In some versions, the kids are fine, and the cops catch the killer, in others, the kids have been murdered and the killer is caught, in another the kids are murdered, the killer escapes, and she is haunted for the rest of her life, waiting for him to come back and kill her too. The saddest version is that the cops don’t believe her about the phone calls, search the house, and find the kids dead-she is blamed for it and spends the rest of her life in a mental institution. 

“The Murderer Under The Bed” is about an escaped killer who preyed on teen girls. The girl in the story hears about his escape on the radio or TV, gets scared and worried. Her parents tell her not to worry, but she is really nervous and shuts her windows that were open. When she goes to bed and is falling asleep her hand falls off the edge of the bed. Throughout the night, she feels something lick her hand, and she assumes it’s her dog and scolds the dog while half asleep. When she wakes up she finds her sister who was asleep in the same room dead and covered in blood, screams and wakes her parents and the police come. They find the escaped killer hiding under her bed, and when they take him away he smiles at her and says “I was going to kill you too, but your hand tasted so good I kept tasting it and you woke up before I could get you!”

This one has a few versions too-in some of them he kills her parents, or doesn’t kill anyone, and she sees a knife peeking out under her bed, and rouses the house. In that one he says “I couldn’t get out, you locked the windows!” in addition to the hand licking. In another version of this story, her dog is the one murdered on the floor and he doesn’t say anything when he is taken away, instead simply smiling and licking his lips. 

Both of these stories contain a common view in America-that women will be targets of bad men. That you will not be believed by the authorities-in one, the police blame the girl, in another, the parents refuse to acknowledge their daughters rational fears. In the second story there is even a direct line drawn between the girls actions of locking the windows to her sister being murdered and her being victimized.

There is a thread of victim blaming, there is a thread of fear of men and being victimized. How did us kids even KNOW about that sort of thing? Well, we saw it. We were steeped in it. It is possible these stories were both cautionary tales, indoctrination, and simply making use of tropes that existed in our world. We had all been told by teachers after boys had pushed, hit, or kicked us, made fun of us, or stole our stuff that “boys would be boys” and that “they liked us” and that was why boys did those things.

In our imaginations these small assaults translated into bloody murders, with authority figures ignoring our concerns. 

Superstitions were things that would bring you luck, or doom you in some way, or would protect you from harm, supernatural things, or just silly stuff.

The aforementioned “Step on a crack, break your mommas’ back.” is a very common one.

Others were to hold your breath walking past a graveyard to keep ghosts from possessing you. Never walk on a grave to keep from angering the spirits inside. Hold your breath in a tunnel until you pass through it for good luck (this I heard from a cartoon AFTER I had been told it by another kid.) A bird in the house meant death. Say “Rabbit Rabbit, or I hate White rabbits” to keep campfire smoke from blowing towards you. (Although there was another saying, that “Smoke follows beauty.)

If there was a school pool? Someone drowned in it. The folding bleachers? If you were under them they would close on you and cut you into pieces-IT HAPPENED BEFORE ONE TIME! And of course, the inevitable, pervasive belief that monsters lived under the bed and in your closet.

If you were caught smoking a cigarette, the principle would burn you with it. Cover mirrors that face your bed or something would get you! If you whistled at night in a certain stairwell at school, you would hear a whistle back. These little bits of superstition seem to be for fun, for shivers, and to give some kind of control in a world where adults ruled. 

Games that I learned in elementary school ran the gamut from “cooties” where girls had them, and boys shunned us-not letting us touch them, so we chased them, (they could be inoculated with a “cootie shot” to be immune to girls’ cooties) to “cootie catchers” which lasted well into high school. (What are cooties? Some sort of bug or germ, though generally, they are thought of as head lice—and it would make sense that girls would have them, having longer, cleaner hair than boys—lice like long, thick, clean hair.)

Cootie catchers are those folded paper toys, made up of numbered or lettered flaps with writing on the insides. To play, one person operates the catcher, and asks you to pick a number. They then open and close the catcher, then lift the numbered flap you picked to reveal the writing inside. They are used as a kind of divination, or just as a silly game. You can use them to answer questions, or just to mess around. As we aged, the writing went from silly insults and bad words, to names of boys who would like us, the age at which we would have sex, what sexual position we would do first, etc.

These were explorations of sexuality, games to make fun of people, answers to questions in a format that was “silly” and thus safe, or to simply cross social norms. After all, girls aren’t supposed to say “fuck” or “blowjob”, so it was a semi-secret way to do that, out of the prying eyes of teachers. Girls played this game MUCH more than boys, and would even approach boys with specially made catchers filled out with girls names, offering to have them play so we could find out who they liked or who liked them. These were sort of make believe, but also sort of not. You learned fast not to play this game with a rival-because they could use the catcher to create an opening for teasing. 

We also learned-and played-the game/legend of Bloody Mary, and Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. 

As for Bloody Mary?

Well, buckle in, because this ones a doozy-and I played this in first grade! There are so many stories about Bloody Mary-that she was a pretty girl who got pregnant by her father and he killed her before she could tell, she was a witch who was murdered by townsfolk and jumped in the mirror to escape at the last second, she was a normal girl who was killed by a jealous boyfriend, she was a girl who got pregnant, wanted to keep the baby, and was killed for it since it was out of wedlock.

The most important part is she was murdered, bloodily, with a knife, in a bathroom with a mirror. She haunts mirrors to this day, and you can summon her like this: Shut the bathroom door, light a candle, turn off the lights. Run the tap juuuuust a little bit. Then chant “Bloody Mary” 3 to 5 times (I heard both) and on the last chant, blow out the candle, shut your eyes, and when you open them SHE WILL BE THERE IN THE MIRROR. Alternatively, you turn your back to the mirror and when you turn around she will be there. 

So, I did play this game once or twice, with my hand on the doorknob, ready to bolt and leave the other girls at the mercy of her bloody hands, because I was a jerk. The reality is that NO ONE that I ever did this with had the courage to stay in the dark and see if she was there.

If you DID see her, you would die-either pulled into the mirror with her, or she would come out and knife you. So you generally ran like hell as soon as you finished summoning her. This didn’t stop us all swapping stories of what happened if you were brave enough to stay in the bathroom with your eyes shut, or didn’t turn around. 

The sink would run with blood, or there would be bloody hand prints on the mirror. There would be a bloody knife on the sink, or you would hear her whisper your name. She would scratch your face trying to make you open your eyes so she could kill you, or she would pull your hair or grab your shoulder to try and make you turn around.

Now-one time we did brave it out with eyes shut and backs turned. But nothing happened except a bunch of scared crapless little girls got messed with by the older girl who talked us into doing it-with tapping sounds, and hair pulling, etc, until the light flicked on. Lord have mercy parents must have been tired of all the screaming little girls tearing ass out of bathrooms throughout the school district after we learned about this! 

Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board was a game where you put one person on a chair, or flat on their back, and had everyone else form a circle around them and place the first two fingers of each hand under them. Then, while chanting “light as a feather, stiff as a board” over and over you lifted them up and BOOM, magically they would rise into the air.

I do remember this working in 6th grade with a friend in a school chair. We got them up to eye level before we all got freaked out and stopped doing it. Now-bear in mind, about 12 kids were doing this, and it is possible that we only lifted the chair since we did it with our eyes shut. But I have a distinct memory of this working, and I want to try it as an adult some day.

These two games in particular seem to be kid versions of magical rituals that we greatly enjoyed. We liked to feel like we had power, and also that there were creepy things in the world, and that these were things that were just for US, and not grown ups. I honestly wonder if they would ever work now that I am an adult-though….I dunno if I really want to try Bloody Mary now that I know some basic magical theory. 

So-what did you hear as kids? What were the stories, superstitions, schoolyard chants, and games from your childhood? 

The Wandering Canoe

Photograph by Kendra Maurer.

I have a strong sense of Nope. Not that I don’t believe in, or run wildly towards the strange, or visit haunted asylums...but there’s a level of Nope when it comes to learning more.

Seems counterintuitive but it’s true. When I think of a weird experience I’ve had and consider looking in to what may have been the cause, I run into Nope. It’s largely because I know that if I acknowledge that experience in that way, I will be inviting more of it to my life, which was certainly the case with Mothman. That dude can never come back and I will be happy—in fact I had buried that whole experience for about 20 years til the Sci Fi channel brought it all back for me.

The Nope was also very much the case with the Wandering Canoe, and that was FAR less terrifying than Mothman.

First, the story.

When I was in high school, a couple of the teachers would sponsor an annual trip to the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota. It was a 10-14 day canoe and portage trip in the deep wilderness where we packed everything in and out. I was so excited when I was finally old enough to go with 6 or so other kids from my school.

We left from Ely, MN and entered the deep woods on a narrow trail, our backpacks on or backs, and canoes on our shoulders. During our journey, we drifted down rivers, paddled across lakes, and carried our canoes in between. We experienced bears, and saw the very rare (at the time) Bald Eagles just across the water in Canada. We drank water straight from the lakes, and I meditated—experienced nothingness and everythingness—for the first time. The trip was experience I will treasure forever.

Crossing one of the lakes, I heard the girl in the canoe beside me, struggling like she was fighting for every stroke. She and her partner were fighting something, while my partner and I were fine. I tried to grab the stem ov]f her canoe but it waws just out of reach.

Finally she took her paddle out of the water, looked at me and shook her head with disbelief.

Her canoe immediately started drifting back and away from ours, like it was being dragged slowly. Everyone stopped paddling, and just watched. Whatever it was, was pulling their canoe to a different shore than we were heading for. No one was worried or frightened...just confused.

They drifted for about a hundred feet before it stopped and they could resume with normal effort. That night we all told ghost stories, ate fresh Northern Pike for dinner and the trip went on pretty well uneventfully, even though I spent every night staring at the sky hoping to see a UFO. Because I was that kid.

I’ve often thought about that drift, and the look on Dawn’s face and the way whatever it was just let go. I filed it under “weird stuff I will never understand” because, as I think on it more, research is eye contact. And as I keep saying, once you make eye contact, it’s your responsibility.

So. Fast forward to me reading Where The Footprints End by Timothy Renner and Josh Cutchin...and there it is. The Ojibwa have the Memegwesi! Generally benign little dudes who occasionally drift a canoe if not shown proper respect and I really can’t think of a less respectful group than a pile of GenX teenagers let loose in the wild for days on end.

And honestly, that night...I can’t be sure that was a bear at the open latrine. There was no threat, and I wasn’t scared. There was just...a furry presence.

So now I suppose I’ve made eye contact, but I’m far away in the remnants of the Black Swamp in central Ohio. I have some trickster happenings in my house still (metal objects relocate themselves to inconvenient places). Maybe it doesn’t just take eye contact for things of this nature. They somehow know we can perceive them, so they find those of us who can, and don’t let go so easily.

Happy New Year From Us to You

Art by Zak Kramer and Hero Forge. From left to right: Morganna, Kendra and Barbara.

Happy New Year!

I personally am thrilled to see the backside of this dumpster fire of a year get kicked.

I mean, it wasn’t all bad.

Kendra, Morganna and I, with the help of Zak and Chris, and some amazing guests, started the 6DJK podcast, website and blog.

That’s pretty epic. Especially for someone who can’t stand the sound of her recorded voice! (That would be me.)

But you know, with the pandemic and all, that part of 2020 was bad. And losing loved ones, that was awful. And not leaving the house except to walk around outside far from everyone, and homeschooling and all that. Yeah, that part wasn’t so great.

But I’m pretty happy with what we’ve done so far with 6 Degrees of John Keel. It wasn’t unplanned, but it wasn’t overly planned either. Remember, I hate the sound of my recorded voice. (I’m getting more used to it. Eventually, I reckon I’ll get over it.)

No, it was a project that came about because my friend Jacqueline said I should do a podcast to tell all my stories of weird experiences.

And it ballooned from there.

I wasn’t much a podcast listener until Jacqueline put the bug in my ear. Then, I listened, and realized I rather like them. I could listen while I did stuff around the house. Cooking dinner isn’t nearly so boring when someone’s talking to you while you’re doing it.

So, I listened to podcasts and talked Kendra and Morganna into being co-hosts, and then Zak said he’d help with recording and editing and putting together the website. Then I talked Chris into doing some computer analysis, and then I added a blog to the mix, because I used to be a food blogger and I can write blog posts like there’s no tomorrow.

And here we are.

So, now that we’re here, where are we going to go?

Well the first big news I have for the New Year is that we’re going to move to a weekly episode format.

YES! No more every other week episodes! I’m excited about this because we have some great stuff that we’ve recorded and is ready to edit, and we’d love to bring it all to you.

And so we will.

Every Wednesday, starting January 6, we will be putting up a new episode.

We chose Wednesdays as an homage to John Keel’s “Wednesday Phenomena.” That’s where he found after a friend did a computer analysis on several years of UFO sightings that people were more likely to experience something strange on Wednesdays. (I wonder if it’s because the day’s name came from Wotan—otherwise known as Odin—who was a god of magic and mysteries. Along with being the All Father and the king of the Norse Aesir.)

Now, mind you, various other researchers have both proven and disproven the Wednesday Phenomena with their own data analyses on larger sets of data, but it’s neat idea so we stole it for the day we will have new episodes available., barring technical difficulties.

We also will be introducing our fourth team member, Chris, who is doing an exciting data analysis project with us. He’s been involved since the beginning, but mostly in the background. But, he’s gonna come out into the spotlight and join in on some episodes with us.

There’s other fun stuff coming up. More talks around the virtual kitchen table with experiencers,. Discussions with authors, artists and creative thinkers. More stories, more blog posts, more photographs and art. Maybe some live recordings around campfires. Some first hand investigation.

And I think probably a book project.

Yes, I believe I’m finally ready to haul off and actually write a book. That’s all I’m going to say about it for now, but this time, I’m serious, and have topics for two different books.

So, Happy New Year to all y’all!

I hope you’ll have a happy, healthy and productive new year to come with lots of creativity and love and light.

And maybe some Bigfoot. Or the Good Folk. Or a ghost or two. Or some UFO’s.

Because, y’all, the world really is stranger than we think.

Never Alone

Photograph by Koi Kramer

The winter holiday season has not always been a happy time in my household.

In fact, in my adulthood, it’s mostly been not happy, and with very good reason.

When I left my daughter’s father, 30 years ago, it was just after the winter holidays, and it went horribly wrong.

I had naively assumed that if I treated him with good faith and honor, he would treat me the same, and it just didn’t work out that way. I also assumed that my parents, who had never liked the man and who knew he was abusive, would be supportive of my having left.

They were not.

And so, long story short, even though I took Morganna with me when I left, I was foolish to bring her back to visit her father for a weekend, when he asked me to. When I returned for her, I was not only refused admittance to my parent’s home, and not allowed to take my daughter with me, I was served with papers suing for custody on the grounds that I had abandoned her.

And my father physically assaulted me.

Then, it all went downhill from there.

My daughter’s first Christmas was the only winter holiday I spent with her until she was 10 years old. The next Christmas I spent significantly with her was when she was 14 years old. And then, after that, she came to live with me when she was fifteen years old and we’ve spent every holiday together until this one. We still live in the same town, so we do see each other, during the pandemic, just from a distance.

All of those other Christmases, Yules and Solstices were spent cut off from my child, and most of my family, for it wasn’t only my parents who turned from me,

I was supported in my quest for safety and freedom by an aunt, an uncle and a grandmother, all of whom have since passed on.

So, you can imagine, that most of my immediate household have a very ambivalent view of this time year and are not completely comfortable in its celebration. (Even my son who wasn’t even born during this period, is somewhat unenchanted by the holiday season. There are other reasons for his trepidation, and yes, these reasons compound our difficulties with this time of year.)

But, even in those dark holidays past, in those times I was mired deep in a black well of grief and depression, there were flashes of light that were so bright that my breath would catch and I would find my soul singing with silent joy.

The first one happened when I was out wandering the wildwood.

On the greyest of Solstice days—grey as only an Ohio winter day can be, I was wandering through snow-kissed woods up above the little house outside Athens where we lived.

Once again, while I had been promised to see Morganna, because of the snow, the promise was denied,, and I had found out by telephone on the Solstice. My husband, Zak had gone on a walk with me and our Siberian Husky, Liriel, in the snow, While he gamboled about with her, I slipped into the woods ahead of them, my head spinning and heart pounding.

They were in the field just outside the wood line, and couldn’t see me. And I couldn’t see them, and could barely hear them, for a stillness had settled over the snowy woods, and I found myself barely breathing.

I was in a tiny clearing, crouched beside a stump that I had used as an altar and where I had gone to pray many times before. My heart was bleak, and empty, my throat throbbed with unshed tears. I missed my little girl so terribly. She was four years old.

I was lost—untethered, adrift. I had no family, I was outcast and unwanted and my arms wanted to hold my girl so much that it caused physical pain. I wanted to scream, but I knew it would only rip my throat raw, so I didn’t do it.

Instead, I laid my head on the stump and whispered, “I’m so alone.”

I laid there, for endless moments, my cheek against the rough, damp wood, tears silently soaking the stump, my hands gripping the mossy bark.

Without warning, there was a break in the clouds and a brilliant shaft of sunlight pierced the tangle of bare branches above me, and the silence was broken by the clear song of a cardinal.

I looked up and beheld the answer to my pain.

There, in the shaft of light, was an arching cane of black thorns hung with crimson berries, both encased in a rime of ice, like clear glass. Snow blazed pure white and flashed rainbow sparkles in the sunlight. Perched on that branch was a male cardinal, not three feet from my face. And he looked at me and burst into glorious song again, and my heart cracked open and the tears of loneliness and sorrow became waves of joy.

There, before me the darkness and light were balanced and the red was the blood that connects all living beings together. A tableau presented to me, a message in pure symbolism that illustrated the threads that bind all life together. For a moment, I was the cardinal and he was me, and I was the branch of thorns, and the berries and the snow, and the sunlight and the shadow.

Warmth filled me and in my head and heart I heard two words: “Never alone.”

And Pagan though I am, the song that bubbled up in my heart and came from my mouth was the first lines of William Byrd’s setting for the old Latin hymn, “O Magnum Mysterium.” 

Of course, it was Ohio, so the clouds skittered over the sun again, before I came to the middle of the hymn, much less the end. And the bird, of course, flew away.

But the feeling of connection and completeness , of being an integral part of the Mystery of existence in that moment stayed with me. If I close my eyes and remember that tableau of white, black and red, I feel it viscerally again, after over 25 years.

When I came stepping out of the woods to meet my husband and joyfully cavorting dog, I was smiling.

”What happened?” Zak asked, as Liriel, her blue eyes shining, leapt upon me.

”I said I was alone,” I whispered. “But the Universe answered—in a perfect moment.”

I hugged him and said, “My heart is full.”

And, it still is.

For those who are lonely this year, isolated and far from your loved ones, know this—I know how you feel. I’ve been there and go to that dark place in my heart for a little while every year around this time.

But, even when you sit in solitude, far from other people, you are not alone.

Never alone.

The Universe is there, with you.
We are there with you.
And you are loved.

Up the Airy Mountain

Illustration by Garth Williams 1951. While these brightly colored little fellows on the surface seem rather twee, as a child, I always found their eyes to look shifty and sly. They may not have been openly malicious, but neither were they friendly and open, either.

“Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping alltogether,
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather.”

— William Allingham "The Fairies." 1883

For those who listen to our podcast, even after only six episodes, I could be known as the “fairy lady.”

It makes sense: many of my experiences have taken the form of interactions with what look and act like the Good Folk.

When I talk with other experiencers in the wider community, I often come into contact with those who have interacted with UFO entities, or with what was taken to be UFO entities, and I wondered for years why that hadn’t happened to me. There were plenty of instances of “bedroom invader” motifs in my experiences—whether they were dreams, hypnogogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, or visionary in origin. Plenty of entities traipsed around my psyche and bedroom in the deep of night on mysterious errands that seemed mostly to end in me developing night terrors and insomnia.

In only two instances did the creatures ever resemble some sort of “extraterrestrial-styled” entity such as a Gray.

(And that’s fine with me, I have a distinct and abiding mistrust of what are popularly called “The Grays.”)

But I did wonder why what I now call “The Other” came to me cloaked in the shape of the Fairy Faith, when I grew up in Appalachia in the 1960’s and 70’s. I had been reading books about UFOs since I was about 8 or 9., so, it made little sense to me why my own dealings with non-humans had been colored by beliefs that were seemingly 100 years out of date and from an ocean away from the hills of my home.

I got a clue, when I was 12 years old and read a library copy of Dr. Jacques Vallee’s book, Passport to Magonia. It was there, in the book that changed UFOlogy forever, that I found a poem that I had memorized organically by hearing it read to me over and over since I was preverbal—William Allingham’s “The Fairies.”

I remember being breathless when I found that poem quoted in Dr. Vallee’s book.

Breathless because that was -my- poem—one I could recite virtually from the time I could speak and it was a poem that I now realize has shaped my entire worldview in ways that I find difficult to explain.

I am certain that this poem, and Garth Williams,’ illustrations that went with it, in The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies (Edited by Jane Werner) shaped my aesthetic understanding of art, literature, and folklore. (Recently, I figured out that my own drawing style has been strongly influenced by Garth Williams’ work in this book—the way I draw faces and eyes and paint hair is very strongly reminiscent of his art.)

It also colored and my interactions with non-human intelligences almost from the moment I was born.

Vallee’s thesis is also what caused me to stop, and blink—for he postulated in 1969 that the fairy folklore traditions of Europe described the same exact phenomenon as the emerging UFO folklore of the 20th century.

It was at that moment the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis began to slip from my fingers.

John Keel did it in the rest of the way when I read The Mothman Prophesies, and then Operation Trojan Horse the next year.

So, you must be thinking, “Wow, how daft do you have to be, woman? Of course, this is why you don’t see aliens! The Good Folk got to you first!”

Well, yes, and no.

What I didn’t think about until very recently was how strongly this one poem, in this one book, shaped my entire worldview, and it explicates the enormous power language has to shape human understanding and belief. It also speaks to the strength with which art can shape human thought on an individual as well as a societal and cultural level.

By the time I was nine or ten, I was a voracious reader of science fiction—much more so than fantasy. By the time I was twelve, I was INTO Star Trek. I lived, breathed and believed Star Trek. I was ready to head into space. I wanted to go. I wanted the aliens to land.

And yet…..in the back of my brain, the “wee folk, good folk, trooping altogether,” lurked and shaped my thoughts. Unbeknownst to me, and unbidden, “The Fairies” molded my psyche with images placed there from the time my eyes could focus on a page and recognize faces and shapes as representing…..something.

And then Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s Faeries book came out yet another year later.

I saw that book at my Aunt and Uncle’s house. She’d brought it home from the library and I spend our vacation with them reading it obsessively, staring hungrily at the pictures.

And it was all over.

I started reading fairy lore from folklorists like Katherine Briggs and Walter Evans-Wentz, and even as I worshipped at the altar of Spock (Ever look at his ears? I’m just sayin',—even Dr. McCoy teases him and calls him a hobgoblin) and continued to read UFO books, the die was cast. Yea, though I read every book by Vallee, Keel, Hyneck and Sanderson, and devoured every science fiction book in the library—it made no difference.

It was too late.

The Fairies had hijacked my brain, sure as the little men had stolen Bridget away “for seven years long.”

Yeah—that’s the thing about this poem.

Most of the stories and poems in “The Elves’ Book,” as we called it,” were of the light, sweet variety, though there was always a tiny edge of darkness and warning to them.

Allingham’s poem, however—there’s naught of sweetness to it, and very little light.

I reckon this is largely because he was writing at a time when “The Fairy Faith” was still very much a living tradition among the rural folk of his native Ireland. The narrator speaks of avoiding the mountains and glens for “fear of little men.,” and tells how they kidnapped a little girl named Bridget who they kept for seven years. When she came back, no one remembered her so, she died of a broken heart. They found her “sleeping,” and so they took her again, and placed her body in a lake where the keep it preserved until she should wake up.

That’s dark stuff for a little kid.

For all that Garth William’s illustrations are full-color, soft watercolor paintings, with lots of cuteness going around, his work for this poem has an edge to it. I always found the eyes of these colorfully dressed little fellows to be sly and somewhat forbidding. They smile, but not in a warm and inviting way. More in a beguiling, tricksy way. And of course, the dead little girl is right there, resting at the bottom of a lake on the right-hand page.

And yet, I knew it, word by word, and recited it at the drop of the hat. And found resonances in it in my reading years later.

The colors of the Flatwoods Monster, for example—red, green and white-- jumped out at my at first reading of the case. “Green jacket, red cap and white owl’s feather” rang out in my mind and I ticked a little box under,, “Vallee was right.” And decades later, when I read Mike Clelland’s The Messenger Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee, I was right there hearing, “and white owl’s feather,” in my memory.

So, there it is. This is likely why my “Other” stubbornly takes the shape of what we commonly call “Fairies,” and not “Aliens.”

I’m not complaining. I’d much rather have truck with the beings of light and shadow who look for all the world like goblins, elves, White Ladies and other beings of Fairy than those who feel the need to conduct amateur hour medical examinations . Poking and prodding humans stolen from their beds in the dead of night for some supposed “hybridization” program does not endear them to me.

(Yes, I am well aware of fairies kidnapping humans and using them for breeding purposes. I will say that in the accounts that have come down to us of such activities, it sounds like a lot more fun than the ham-handed rape-like experiences the Grays dole out.)

It’s kind of amazing, really, the power that rhythmic language can have to shape a pre-verbal mind. When combined with powerful visuals, the programming is exceedingly powerful, and can shape us in ways that are difficult to understand or parse out.

But digging deeply, seeking those sounds and images that have shaped our entire worldview is well worth the time and trouble.

Illustration 1951 Garth Williams. There, on the right side you can see the little dead girl, Bridget, laying in the lake, being watched over until she awakens again. That’s not creepy or anything right there. This is the original first edition copy my dad read to his little sister, and that was read to all of Gram’s grandchildren, including me. We called it “The Elves’ Book.”

Am I am the Laziest Shaman?

Caveat: I never underwent formal shamanic training from anyone that wasn’t a god. So I could just be crazy. And I do not claim to be a practicing, formal shaman in any way. I just consider myself more like a shaman than a witch, visionary, or mystic, because that is the cultural framework that I have for this. I dearly hope I will not offend any practicing shamans, and apologize in advance if I have. 

Photograph by Morganna

I grew up seeing stuff, hearing things, and feeling things that are generally unseen, unheard, and unfelt by others.

I was also raised in a Native culture that is part of my heritage and genetics.

Because of this, while I dabbled in witchcraft, much of my spiritual system is based on animism. I do belong to a god, which was not by choice.

When a god appears to you and says “Hey you are MINE, and I am going to be here for you, and talk to you and guide you” you just sort of accept this and move along with your life. It isn’t like you can say “Nah man, I’m good, you don’t need to do that.” That is a quick ticket to having an annoyed god causing chaos in your life. And I mean, the way I was taught, I was SUPPOSED to have a spirit guide and a totem animal. This was normal, if a bit...intense sometimes. 

Most of the things that have happened to me I viewed as more or less....normal?

It was always talked about at powwows that you would be connected to the Earth, that the spirits were everywhere, that everything was alive and we were all connected to each other, and that you could see them if you looked. So when things happened, it was just...well, duh, of COURSE that is happening. It happens to EVERYONE or so I thought.

I was also part of a family that was just….odd. My great grandfather dowsed for the other farmers, my great grandmother talked to the land, my other great grandmother had prophetic dreams, my dad could occasionally read thoughts and when he was angry things would fly off shelves. My mother saw things all the time, we ALL saw the ghosts in the haunted house my dad grew up in, my grandfather believed in UFOs, my other grandfather saw them in the Navy, my great aunt saw the same things my mother did,.

We are a strange clan.

My grandfather who lives on a farm out in the hills STILL has strange things happen, which makes sense- he’s an elder. Of COURSE he has things happen.

I don’t think I am any stranger than anyone else in the family. My flavor of strange just took an interesting form, probably because of the god.

Even my two best friends saw things.

I also think WV, maybe because it’s less settled than other places, and the mountains are so old, is a very active place, cradling old beliefs and superstitions, and home to large numbers of people who have either seen something, or don’t consider it too odd that someone else has. 

Photograph by Morganna.

I first ended up in what I assume is the Spirit World at the age of 12,.

While hiding in a wardrobe from a shitty situation, I fell into a deep hole, popped out of it, and found myself on a wide plain with a forest in the distance, an unseen light source, and my god staring at me saying “ What took you so long. See that thread coming out of you? Don’t lose it, that’s what you follow to get back. Let’s talk.”

And we did. We walked about on the plain and He explained that if I wanted to come back here, all I had to do was become silent in myself, separate myself from my body and find the door/hole/entrance. If I didn’t find the door I could just….wander around out of my body. When I wanted to go back all I had to do was turn around, grab the thread, and follow it out and it would lead back to my body and the normal world. He also said “I wouldn’t wander too far from yourself for a while, and you shouldn’t go alone. Call for me and I’ll meet you-there are other, meaner, dangerous things in here.”

He also warned me about losing track of the thread-if I lost it I would lose myself. Then he said it was time to go back to myself, turned me around, and pushed. I fell back into rushing darkness, and slammed back into myself. 

I remember waking up, feeling light headed, dazed, and dizzy.

When I crawled out of the wardrobe the air was a haze of shining sparkles, and there were currents in it. I went outside, and the trees were like flames of green and gold energy, and the earth was humming. Animals seemed to have a shine that pulsed with their life force. It was something that I had seen before when I was younger and had put myself into what I thought of as suspended animation, but never this vibrant or immediate.

I wandered around for a bit, blinking and staring at this familiar/unfamiliar world, and then headed back in and laid down in my room with my eyes shut and went quiet until my eyes calmed down.

Later in my life I learned about what is termed the Sight and the Third Eye and it all clicked. That was what I was doing when I went into that state-I was managing to open up that channel and unlocking that ability to See more actively. Which, before I got good at it, was bloody distracting sometimes. It would randomly open up when I was a kid.

(I also firmly believe that children naturally See more clearly, possibly as a defense mechanism, maybe because they haven’t had imagination beaten out of them yet.) 

Not long after that, all of a sudden, in class of all places, I was fooling around with my friends on a free day. It was one of the days where my Sight was stuck open and everything was a haze of sparkles and energy-the trees outside were glimmering with green and gold light, the kids in class had silver sparks in them, and the wind was a shining flow of lights.

Suddenly, there was a darting shape made of light leaping around and around the classroom-I started jumping and twirling in my seat, following the things movements. It finally stopped right in front of me as a whirl of color and light, then it solidified. I don’t know WHY it chose the shape it did, or the Name it did, but quite abruptly there was a tiny silver, green, and blue raptor/dragon standing on my desk with a cocked head looking at me with gleaming orange eyes. 

I blinked, and it was still there.

I then got a strong feeling that it was a she, and she was there for me. She seemed intrigued that I could see her, and I remember saying out loud “Hello, yes I see you, what are you doing here?” (It was so odd, thankfully the class was full of very loud 6th graders, so no one really noticed me talking to an invisible thing-but I am not sure if they WOULD have noticed anything odd anyway—she and I were sort of in a muffled bubble.)

She said in my mind, “I’m here to be with you, and be your friend, since you can see me.” I asked if she had a name, and she said no, and I said, “But you HAVE to have a name, everything has a name!” She said she hadn’t gotten one yet, and I said, ok, let’s think up a name. 

Then the bubble popped and I turned to one of my friends, , who could also see things (she saw ghosts) and said, “There’s a little spirit thing here, and I need to think of a name for her.”

My friend could ALSO sort of see her-but not the shape of her, just a greenish-silver light whirl in the corner of her eye. My friend asked me what it looked like (We were all sort of used to this sort of thing-me and her and another friend were all experiencers, and well, we were kids so we accepted things more easily).

I said, well, she looks like a very tiny wingless dragon crossed with a velociraptor. So we started trying out names-Drake, Wyvern, Starwind, etc. Each name elicited a shake of its head. Finally I said “Velocity? Since you’re fast, and also look like a dinosaur.”

That, apparently, was the correct Name. And Velocity stayed. She was always whirling about, sitting on my shoulder, or flitting around, playing with other little light things, and chasing fallen leaves. My other experiencer friends could also see her more or less, and she stayed for YEARS. She acted as a Spirit guide or a daimon, and I think she WAS my daimon. I just sort of...accepted that I had her, and didn’t fuss about it too much. 

Not long after I got Velocity, and after I wandered into the Spirit World, I started experimenting with it at night after the house went to bed.

I would put on music-Native music, Celtic music, even rock music and classical music on my headphones,  and I would enter a trance state, and leave myself and fly around. I would either drop deep into myself to see my own light inside-expanding and contracting it, making it glow brightly and then sink it into a deep ball, filling myself with my breath and glow to my fingertips and the tips of my hair, and then back into my center. It was soothing, in a time when I needed soothing.

If I wanted to leave, I would call on my god, and me and Him and Velocity would go flying outside. I could go out the window and into the woods, or over the city, and over time, I could go further. We would race through the air, the ground a blur under us, until I could visit my loved ones in other states and see how they were doing. Sometimes we would go to the plain, and the woods there, and see everything shining. I could hear and feel the heartbeat of the earth, and see how everything was connected by this flow of life. Velocity was also bigger-looking at those times-instead of being the size of a crow, she was about my size. 

When I look back at that time, I realize that I was accidentally doing shamanic things-I wasn’t eating much, I was meditating, I was communing with spirits and the earth, and I had a spirit guide, I was entering altered states of consciousness, and I was learning how to control my medicine. I also have a broken physical body, and a history of trauma that I think played into this.  I still do some of them to this day-but not all the time like I did as a child. Then I was playing and learning, now I know and I don’t play with these things. 

Photograph by Barbara Fisher.

I had also learned skills that I have to this day.

I can Name things. I can feel things-I can walk into a place and feel the energies there, and douse. I can find things that need finding, just small pieces of medicine that want to go somewhere-little spirits in stones, or bones, or feathers, or plants that may or may not belong with me, but know I will run across the person they DO belong with and I can pass them on. I can still open up my Sight all the way and see things. I can still astrally project, still pop into the Spirit World if I need to, still call upon my god and have him show up.

I can ward the fuck out of a place. This is a skill I was taught very early on in my life-once word gets around that you can see them, things start showing up A LOT and not all of them are friendly. I still get prophetic dreams (though usually, they are annoyingly not useful-it’s not like I can warn people something is going to happen in Nevada or whatever).

I still sit down and talk to spirits, and I still see things unbidden. I have an affinity for storms, I can feel the land and know I belong to it and with it. I have an affinity for animals-wild and domesticated and we sort of understand each other. I am on the Psychic Friends Network. (Meaning, I can feel my loved ones and know instinctively when one is ailing or is thinking about me, or just wants to talk, so I call them up.)

I look after my people who are my new tribe. I give thanks and respect to my god, to the spirits, and the land. I still dance to the drum (but by myself-I miss powwows). I still get signs and portents and greetings. 

But I don’t do things as lightly as I once did.

Now that I am an adult, I realize what I was doing as a child, and I am slightly horrified and very very glad that I was being watched out for by Velocity and my god. I was taking risks without knowing it—I was essentially dancing on the edge of a volcano, believing it was just a swimming hole.

I learned caution by the age of 15, and learned fear earlier. Now I’m a lazy shaman- I don’t poke at things, I don’t do ritual, I don’t travel or push or call. I simply live quietly, and pray, and nod respect at the things I see, and speak softly to my God (who yes, is still very much around-there is no getting rid of a God once he is interested in you and your life), lest things hear me and decide it’s time to pay a call. 

When I do things, I do them by serious request only-and not for my own seeking.

I have learned the most important thing about medicine and magic-that most of the time, you don’t use it.

You just walk a good path, try to live a good life, and listen, and watch, and give respect.

You care for your people-friends, family, everyone you love, your animals, your plants. Even the wild creatures around that show up you should feed and speak with respectfully -they are, after all, just another tribe-they are our neighbors more than anything. 

What I have learned over the years is that most things in life can be solved with the mundane application of empathy, advice, community strength and aid, and clear headed planning than with calls to the Otherworld. 

And if that makes me lazy, then so be it.

I think it just makes me sensible.

Telling Athens Stories on Strange Familiars

Mixed media painting by Barbara Fisher Typography by Timothy Renner

Timothy Renner, author, artist, musician and podcaster, kindly invited me to appear on his excellent podcast and tell some of my experiences with the mysterious lights I see in the woods here in Athens Ohio a while back. They are very like some of what he has experienced in his corner of Pennsylvania, and it was fun to share experiences with him.

Though, in truth, the poor man barely got a word in edgewise, I talked so much!

But be that as it may, I had fun talking with him—even if telling some of the stories is still a little nerve-wracking to me. Listeners get hear me talk about the lights, and what seemed to be fairies, and mysterious glowing beings that I and multiple others saw (and sometimes still see) around Athens. As a bonus, Tim asked if I knew anything about the history of Athens, and I gave him a quick and loquacious overview of some of the strangeness that Athens has to offer.

And as always, Tim’s music sets off the stories beautifully.

I was happy that Tim even decided to use a piece of my own art that I painted to convey the idea of those strange little lights for the episode.

In related news, the next episode of the 6 Degrees of John Keel Podcast will feature Timothy Renner talking with us about The Other—a name he and a growing number of other authors, researchers and podcast use to describe the non-human intelligence that interacts with us in myriad, ever shifting forms. Look for that coming up in the next couple of weeks! (I promise that I let him talk a lot more this time!)

Giving Thanks to Mountain Mama

“Mountain Mama Dreams” Mixed media painting by Barbara Fisher

I was born and raised in West Virginia—the only state completely bound within the confines of the region known as Appalachia.

And for this, I am thankful.

Because, I am a hillbilly.

And I am a mystic.

Being a hillbilly is nothing to be ashamed of. Nor is being a mystic.

Outsiders may look down upon Appalachians for our culture, and skeptics might shake their heads at mystics who have visions and experience things outside the bounds of most people’s understanding, but none of us should be ashamed of who and what we are.

I bring this up because the film version of J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy came out this week. That book, and now, I fear the film, will be viewed by the media not as a single person’s experience but as a universal Appalachian truism. The film is full of scenes of poverty, addiction and violence and people seem to be thinking this is all that Appalachia ever has been and ever will be.

But that isn’t the Appalachia I know. Or at least, that isn’t all of the Appalachia I know.

It’s much more complicated than that.

Appalachia is an enchanted place to my eyes. The magic, for good and for ill, is sunk deep in the red clay earth and seeps out into the muddy groundwater,. It has colored every interaction I’ve had with consensus reality from early childhood on.

And that muddy iron-tinged water runs through my veins as sure as hemoglobin does.

Appalachia is indeed a hardscrabble place. The hills and mountains are rugged, heavily forested, and scarred by the ravages of extractive industries. Salt, coal, iron and gas have been dragged from the bowels of the unwilling earth by the exploited labor of our sons and daughters. Their hands and bodies have bled into the hungry ground, while the riches from those resources clothed monied outlanders in wealth, power and prestige,

Little of that prosperity stayed in Appalachia to benefit her children. Her people are strong-backed and stiff-necked by nature and have been for hundreds of years, and they can be as harsh as the environment in which they live.

Yes. There is horror in these hills, as depicted in both the book and film, Hillbilly Elegy.

There is poverty.

Gods above and below, there is poverty. I grew up using outhouses off and on, and knew folk who didn’t have running water in their houses just outside the limits of the capitol city, Charleston. I saw hunger in the tenements and hollers, and experienced it briefly myself in childhood.

There is addiction.

Appalachians are known to be hard drinkers and I have to say, the number of alcoholics on both sides of my family is…staggering. I’ve never tasted moonshine, but my Gram knew moonshiners when she worked in a speakeasy during Prohibition, and she told me their stories.

There is violence.

So much violence, on a personal, familial and societal level. And yes, that does affect the culture of Appalachia. It can’t help but do that. I experienced violence, and witnessed it from an early age. Trauma shaped my spirit and mind, my heart and my soul.

For both good and ill, I am a true daughter of Appalachia.

But by all the Gods above and below, by the spirits within and without, by blood and bone, iron and stone, Appalachia is a place full of magicks and myths as old as the sky and as young as a newborn babe.

There is Mystery here, dancing up the airy mountains, and lurking in the deepest, darkest hollers.

The Other lives in every boulder, river and tree, and calls to us in the voices of wren and owl, crow and whippoorwill, cardinal and nightjar.

The Other’s music slips into our consciousness, dripping into our awareness in the cold notes of the banjo, the bright bells of hammered dulcimer and the wild banshee wail of a fiddle, It calls our feet to the dance that is always beginning and ending in a circle of life that spirals inwards to our hearts and outwards to eternity.

For all of these things, I am grateful. So very grateful, because of these magicks I was born, and to them, I will return when my body is finished.

Appalachia is home to the second oldest mountain range on this planet—the Blue Ridge Mountains.—and I think this may be why it is so filled with wild wonder and dark, chthonic power. Creation and destruction live here, in the dark bowels of Mother Earth—or as I called her as a child, “Mountain Mama.”

She was my first Goddess.

I got her name from that John Denver song—you know the one—the one he wrote about Virginia, but West Virginia scanned better, so, he changed it.

I caught a glimpse of Her sleeping, a tree-covered giantess laying on her side, her hips as wide as the world, shoulders strong enough to carry generations on them, her breasts full enough to feed us all. She lay across the Kanawha River from the high ridge where my grandparents’ farm perched—up in Red House, in Putnam County. That was where I first saw her as a child and I said hello to her every weekend on the drive to their farm, and I said goodbye to her on the way home.

My mother thought me strange, but when I pointed Mountain Mama out to my father one rare morning when he came with us, he nodded and said, “You’re right. That does look like a giant woman sleeping there.”

She was the first embodiment of a female deity I met in person. As I rambled and tumbled through the woods on the farm, running wild with three dogs as my companions, I heard Her whispers in the wind through the leaves and Her laughter in the chortling creek. In the nights, so dark and silent up on the ridge, I heard Her mourn with the voice of owls, and and sing the songs of stars, in the clear cold sky.

And when I lay down in the warm newly cut hayfield, I felt Her love wrapping me like a cloak, the scent of drying grass and clover rising around me in the heat of an early June sun.

I am so grateful to have grown up in this enchanted land, and to live still in Mountain Mama’s embrace.

Yes, there is sorrow and darkness, for the land here is soaked with blood and tears.

Appalachia served as our nation’s battlefields through three tumultuous wars—one fought between two colonial powers and the Native peoples, another that birthed our nation and one that nearly tore it asunder. And then there was the forced removal of the Native tribes who dwelt in these mountains, And the battles the tribes fought to try and hold onto their homes. The battles of coal miners seeking to be treated decently by coal operators.

So much bloodshed, horror, sorrow and death.

No wonder there are nightmares here. No wonder we think of bleak shadows when we think of Appalachia.

But there is light in that darkness. Beauty, and love and music and poetry and magic, woven together with the blood, death and tears.

Appalachia is betwixt and between. It’s a liminal space. It stands between the past and present, between the known and the unknown, between the darkness and light.

And I am a child of that liminal place, and walk barefoot the winding paths that separate the truth and the lie, matter and spirit, history and myth.

My feet are forever stained red with mud and blood—Appalachian henna—and I am grateful, and humbled by this ensorcelled place I call home.

And by blood and bone, iron and stone, I hope it never lets me go.

The Other Side of Psychics

Photograph by JC.

She said, “I suppose I am the color blue.”

I said, “No, you’re the color yellow.”

She said “It’s because of the yellow eyeshadow in that picture, isn't it?”

And I said, “No. You’re the color of the daffodils who defy the sweeping gray skies that try to cling to winter. You’re the yellow of sunshine ripping through, bringing us to spring again.”

That’s the last thing I said to her. It was posted on her timeline. And if you ask me, she was the most perfect person to exist. She was bright, beautiful, made of paint splashes and the brightest smiles. 

So, of course, for me, her story would end this way.

Her tense changed. Is. To was.

Not too long after that exchange, Katelyn went missing. My nephew’s fiancee. Vanished from her home one night with no sign of struggle. She left voluntarily, at least at first. But there were so many “not her” things about it, that there was no question she didn’t just want to give a new life a try. She was gone. And eventually a neighbor said they remembered hearing a short scream.

The police, then the news and it all took off from there. We gathered every day for--I don’t remember how long anymore because I worked so hard for so long to make it all a blur, though I still remember shopping for different shoes, and shirts because it was so hot outside that August that I didn't like the feel of cotton anymore. 

Texas Equusearch got involved, and brought some amazing, dedicated volunteers who showed us how to search for a shallow grave-- you take a stick and you stab disturbed dirt or suspicious piles of rocks, and you smell the tip. The best tools were extendable paint roller rods, because they can be collapsed and stowed in a bag.

I found out during that search that I was pregnant with my youngest.

That’s how I spent my first trimester. Stabbing piles of dirt, smelling for a corpse that was someone I loved.

Nancy Grace caught wind, and did what Nancy Grace does, leaving pain in her wake. “Good Morning America” showed up for a morning interview. And everyone had an opinion. 

Facebook pages were dedicated to stalking the people closest to her. Some literally digging in the family backyard fire pit for “evidence” and judging character by handshakes.

The onslaught of analysis rolled in. Who makes eye contact, and when, and who does the talking and who doesn’t, and why doesn’t she say something when he does, why are they sitting together and why is that one on the news but not the other one? 

It never ended.

Our lives became public domain and it was horrible. Deeply, unspeakably horrible.

And then the psychics.

Every one claimed credentials.

From working with police, to finding other people’s stuff. We were contacted by phone, facebook, email…We never asked. They just arrived with predictions and visions. And I knew they were trying to do the right thing, likely guided by compassion, kindness, or duty.

Here’s the thing.

I believe in psychic ability, I’ve experienced it myself; I felt the sting of her leaving this existence late one night.

Reliability is the problem. But with every “She’s in a barn in Fort Mitchell” and “She’s under a water tower with a giant W on it” came a drive to check. I had to look. Because I do believe. And despite how painful it became, each call was a teardrop of hope.

Hope. It’s a wicked bitch.

So my pregnant self would dutifully look if I could, not because I believed, but because I didn’t know how I’d feel if one of them was right.

“What if she is on this small slip of land by the river...not even remotely easily accessed by any road?” I annoyed the hell out of the rest of my family, and I get it. Because at least one sibling usually made the trek with me regardless of how they felt about it all. Their pregnant sister was looking for a dead body left behind by a murderer. And they didn’t believe. But they were there for me anyway.

Two years later a scrapper found her remains by the side of a road in Indiana, her head in a Kroger bag.

Cops and search crews were called in. They used little flags to trace where her bones had washed from the years of weather so they could be sure to get as much of her as they could. 

She was 5 miles outside of our search radius and exactly nowhere near any psychic sighting. 

When psychics contact people who are in these places of pain, chaos and darkness, they’re adding pressure to a stressed system. They’re telling a pregnant woman to go stab a pile of dirt and hope it comes out smelling like the dead girl she loved.

If you’re a psychic and want to be effective help, join the searches.

Get involved. Physically go to the places you’ve seen and look for yourself, and if you can’t, find someone else who can.

Searching for a loved one is a merciless thing. The grass doesn’t care, the sun, the stars the dirt hold no concern.

This is not a cautionary tale.

It’s a plea for mercy.