Better Than Dead

Have you ever heard of high cuisine strangeness? (Haute strangeness?) I’ve always been reluctant to take this seriously as an incident of genuine woowoo because it’s so silly, but it is strange so here it is.

When my mother was still alive, I had to get up early every Saturday morning to take her to dialysis. It was a chore to get up early on Saturday, but at least I got to sleep in until 6:45 instead of getting up at 5:15 as I did on weekday mornings for work. And it meant I had 3 hours of precious me time when I didn’t have to worry about either work or caregiving. I loved my mother, didn’t begrudge the giving of care, but during the week the only time I got alone was driving to and from work (and, I’m sorry, but that doesn’t really count as me time).

On this particular Saturday, I had just left my mother off at dialysis and was feeling good anticipating the free time. The quickest way between our house in Westchester (a suburb of L.A. near LAX) and Inglewood where her clinic was located, was the 105 Freeway. On that section of its run the 105 is built high up in the air, towering above all but the skyscrapers, and gives you a panoramic view of the L.A. Basin as well as LAX since the freeway was built to be something of an expressway from various parts of L.A. to the airport. (On an irrelevant sidenote, in a separate incident, I remember taking my mother to dialysis one morning and watching the space shuttle in the distance wending its slow way through city streets to the science museum.)

It was a bright, clear Chamber of Commerce day, blue skies all around and views to forever. The sun was behind me as I traveled west at high speed in the direction of the airport, and I had a clear view to the horizon from a long way out. From the 105, you see the backend of LAX, the south side behind the terminals and runways where they park planes and maintenance/emergency vehicles and the like, and where the outbuildings reside. I don’t know what made me look that way but I became suddenly aware of some odd thing floating low over this part of the airport. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground. It didn’t look like a balloon or a drone or any kind of aircraft. It was oblong and odd shaped and brownish. “It looks like a donut,” I thought—one of those buttermilk Long Johns, lumpy and irregular. That was odd enough, but stranger still was that it was absolutely motionless. It didn’t seem to move a particle for many long minutes, then began to glide with painful slowness to the northwest, towards the terminals and the runways, gaining a little in altitude but not much. The sun glinted off it a bit then, but not much. (I have an irreverent desire to say it had something to do with the donut being glazed.) I kept flicking my eyes back and forth between the road and the sky. Fortunately, early on a Saturday morning the traffic was fairly light. As I approached the Sepulveda Blvd. off ramp (where I usually exited the freeway), I flicked my eyes towards the exit, then back to the thing—and it had completely disappeared.

I usually prefer logical explanations before jumping on the high strangeness bandwagon so I thought perhaps whatever it was had landed (although in four or five seconds, that would have been more like a crash). I could still see the ground underneath where it had been and there was nothing like it on the ground. Maybe it was an odd-looking balloon and the wind picked up and started to move it—but why did it hover motionless for at least five minutes if that was the case? It could have been a drone, but I’ve never seen a drone that looked like a donut, and this was restricted air space and drones were much less common back then. I suppose because I was traveling at a high rate of speed towards the object, I could have had the illusion that a very slow-moving object was standing still and as I got closer it appeared to move. Or some other form of real life trompe l’oeil. These are the things I told myself as I finished that drive home and what I’ve thought about in the time since it happened.

But it was strange. And it did share the one characteristic with other more clearly delineated incidents of high strangeness I’ve experienced: I’ve never forgotten it, and it periodically hawks itself back up again in my memory to be examined and wondered over before I put it away on the shelf.

Another thing I’ve noticed about the incidents of high strangeness in my life is that they often occur during times of stress, and this was certainly one of those times. Could the stress unlock some corner of my mind that’s usually closed? Or because I was anticipating some downtime, maybe the stress hormones momentarily eased up and I was able to perceive things outside my stress bubble?

Or maybe I was just craving donuts. So hard to say.

Long ago in a lifetime far, far away…Okay, when I was in my twenties, my friend and I liked to drive up Calabasas way and visit Tapia Park—part of the larger Malibu Creek State Park. They used to film M*A*S*H and other TV shows in Malibu Creek Park (still do film up there) and some parts of Planet of the Apes and other films. In fact, much of the land was owned by 20^th Century Fox for location filming until the state acquired it for park land. Before that it was a country club. Before that it was taken over by Spanish and Yankee squatters. Before that, it belonged to the Chumash tribe for centuries.

The smaller area of Tapia Park has hiking and biking and equestrian trails but the part we visited mostly just had lots of majestic oak trees and less majestic picnic tables. The big attraction for us was Malibu Creek itself, which ran along the western edge. (I think it was the western edge. Pardon me if I’ve gotten the direction wrong.) To me, this area always had a presence, a kind of watching-waiting, sometimes benevolent if you caught it in the right mood and there weren’t a lot of people around, sometimes—well, if not hostile, then reluctant to have company, if you know what I mean. I never felt anything sinister there but sometimes it just was not in the mood.

What we liked to do was pack a lunch, take our shoes off, and go wading down the creek. In the rainy season (usually October to April here in SoCal) it was prone to flood. In the latter months of the summer, it was greatly diminished. But there was a sweet spot in late spring and early summer when the creek flowed freely and was really delightful. Chapparal grew all around and every year there was a different growing arrangement along the creek. If you’ve been in the SoCal hills on a hot day, you’ll know chaparral has a distinctive scent: wild fennel, barley, sage, manzanita, and other plants give it the baking aroma of some exotic bread. It’s a unique scent I’ve never smelled anywhere else I’ve been in the world and it always says to me: home. The creek had rock pools and small waterfall cascades over the big rocks. The flow was never so much to threaten to knock you off your feet, but some of those pools were deceptively deep and it wasn’t unusual to take a step and wind up with a soaked crotch. But it didn’t matter. I loved it so much. It lifted my heart and spirit.

One year we went on a particularly long wade down the creek and spotted a stone pillar standing on a slight rise in the creek bed. It was about three feet in diameter and about four feet high and it was composed of shale—lovely streaks of salmon and gold and caramel and flecks of black and white. It felt like a natural altar to me. It stood all alone, maybe fifteen to twenty feet from the cliff behind it. Shale is very flinty and flakes off easily, so it’s entirely possible this had once been part of the cliff behind it—perhaps an arch or some such geological formation that got washed away by eons of floods. It had a presence, though, a sense of self-containment, even as the water washed by it, and a sense of wonder. There were a bunch of loose shale pieces on top of it. I picked up a piece that beckoned to me, put it in my pocket, and took it home.

No, this is not one of those stories like you hear from Hawaii or California ghost towns where if you take something your luck turns terrible and you have to ship the rock or whatever back to the park it came from to save yourself. I had that piece of shale for years with no ill effect, proudly displayed with other rocks I’d collected here and there. (It’s probably still around here somewhere but I’ve no idea where. That seems to be the theme of my life these days.) But sometime after I’d collected that rock I couldn’t remember if I’d thanked the altar for it. I thanked it in absentia but somehow felt the need for an in person visit—because I felt so drawn to it. It took me a while to get back there—the next year, in fact. My friend and I waded down the stream but never found the altar even though we knew we’d waded farther than the year before (using a bridge over the creek as a marker). Where had it disappeared to? Who hid it from our view?

I don’t really think it somehow mystically, magically disappeared. Perhaps the chapparal grew thicker around it that year and hid it from view. But…perhaps the park and the altar were just not in the mood for my nonsense. I only know that I’ve always wanted to find it again, but it’s been a very long time since I visited Tapia Park, and I’m no longer physically capable of hiking down that creek. Its disappearance, however, has kept it playing through my mind and heart ever since. Probably no enchantment involved. Probably nothing magical about it. Except, perhaps, the enchantment of a heart always willing to believe in the possibility of magic.

But it could be magic, right?

Greg and Dana Newkirk of the Haunted Objects Podcast and the Newkirk Museum of the Paranormal like to say that paranormal experiences are often initiatory experiences. They give you a peak at the Other, breakdown the dogma of consensus reality. If you run from these experiences in fear, the initiation fails. If you try to overcome your fear and accept what has happened it can completely change you and your worldview. They also point out that these initiations can lead to periods of great creativity and productivity. By that standard, I have had more than one initiatory experience, but the one I’m about to relate is perhaps the most profound.

I haven’t told this story in full here before because at the time it happened I foolishly told it to one of my materialist friends and he said, “What bullshit.” It was brutal and said in front of my other materialist friends and they all laughed. Maybe it was nervous laughter but whatever it was, I was humiliated and made damned sure I only spoke of these things with people who believed as I did. (I drifted away from that group soon after.) Now that I am a geezer, I want to own my truth. That’s part of why I’m telling these stories now. If people think they are bullshit, that’s their problem.

I have experienced high strangeness all my life, starting when I was about three or four. Except for one notable period in my early thirties. I had just successfully fought off thyroid cancer. So much weirdness led up to the diagnosis and treatment, so many wild swings of emotion that seemed beyond my control. Afterwards, after treatment and getting a proper dose of thyroid hormone, it was like someone flipped a switch and I had my equilibrium back. No weirdness for a long time after that.

It made me wonder if all of the strange things in my life had been induced by bad brain chemistry and/or pure illusion. Coupled with this, I had been working and hanging out with a bunch of diehard materialists and absorbed a lot of their worldview. It had me reassessing everything. I went from believer to agnostic to almost-declared materialist in a very short span of time. I said to myself one day, “I don’t think there’s anything beyond this reality except bad brain chemistry and illusion.” Well, the Universe decided to call my bet and raise me.

I had a cat I adored. Her name was Mocha, a brown and orange swirled tortoise shell. When we first met, I was living in a bungalow on the back end of a property in Venice, California. My landlords lived in the house on the front of the property and on either side of us were open fields where houses had been torn down. Idiots were constantly dumping cats in these fields which meant we often had to adopt them or otherwise find homes for them. One sunny afternoon I was sitting in my bungalow with the sliding glass doors open to catch a breeze and Mocha walked in bold as brass and said, “Hello. I live here now and you need to feed me.” So, of course, I did. (No, I didn’t really hear her say this but I got the message clearly.) I had two other cats and one of them, pure white angel Ollie, got so insulted that he moved in permanently with the landlords. (They were great fans of Ollie and were okay with this.)

I have adored all my cats over the years but my bond with Mocha was different. I can’t quite explain it except to say she was a soul cat for me. I knew it the minute she first walked in the door. Some years later I had moved to another part of L.A. on a busy street and about the time of my materialist reassessment of things Mocha was killed. From that point on, all my cats became indoor only cats but I was filled with guilt and shame that I’d been so careless with someone so precious.

Immediately after her death strange things started happening. The dog, who liked to play with Mocha around a swiveling chair in the living room, began to play this same game with something only she could see. She would also sit in front of the hall window, one of Mocha’s favorite perches, and whine in an excited but puzzled way. When I went over and put my hand in the spot the dog was staring at, the air would be noticeably colder than the rest of the room, even when the sun was shining through the window. These were events experienced by other people living in the house. But one night when I was alone in my bed and crying over Mocha I heard purring coming from the empty pillow next to me. It so startled me I jumped out of bed. I couldn’t hear the purring anymore until I leaned over close to the pillow and there it was again! I straightened up, no purring. I leaned over, purring. It was actually very comforting, so I calmed down and eventually got back in bed and listened to the purring beside me. Gradually, it faded away and then I was able to go to sleep.

But I am very talented at making myself feel guilty and sad and one night—again, lying in bed—I was indulging in this and really working myself up. Then something happened that words are inadequate to describe. A wave of pure, unadulterated, one-with-the-Universe bliss swept over me, starting at the top of my head and spreading through my entire body. I knew it was a taste of the numinous and I also knew it was sent to me by or through Mocha. These words on this page/screen cannot possibly do justice to that feeling. It was a privilege, a gift, and I was so profoundly grateful for it. For days my heart was lifted by it. But I got greedy because, wow, that feeling. One night maybe a few days later I wondered if I could cultivate it again and I started the ol’ chain of guilt-making but this time it was like I got a slap across the face—not physically, but mentally, psychically. Along with it came a clear message: “Knock it off. Get on with your life.” I kind of felt that message was from Mocha, too.

I was inundated for days afterward by a ton of small but meaningful incidents of high strangeness until I finally said to the Universe one day, “All right! I get it! I am not a materialist. I believe. You can send any weird thing to me and I will accept it but I only ask one thing. I don’t want to see anything because I think that would drive me crazy.” The deluge of weird stopped, but it has continued to be an occasional presence in my life ever since. For the most part, with one notable exception (a story for another day) I haven’t seen anything, but I have experienced intense synchronicities, odd things happening in the house, ghostly but unseen visitations from other deceased ones I’ve adored, etc., etc. Curiously, I never experienced anything with Mocha again except one dream, months later. She was sitting on the edge of the roof of the old bungalow where we first met, not really paying attention to me. I called out to her, “Mocha! I’ve missed you! Come here.” She looked at me and I got the clear message, “Can’t stay. I’ve got other things to do.” And she trotted over the peaked roof of the bungalow and disappeared over the other side.

The other thing that happened after I accepted my non-materialist pact with the Universe is that I entered into one of the most profoundly creative periods of my life. Art was pouring out of me for many years after. At the time, I didn’t think of these experiences as initiatory, but I do now. I have had other initiations in my life, but that was the most profound. And all due to the ghost of my soul cat.

I’m not sure if this is a ghost story, not sure what it is, but it’s eerie and has “haunted” me for over 10 years. I’ve blogged about the different parts of this before, here and here, but have included both experiences in this one blog because I’ve always felt they were linked.

Anyway, in the last few years of my mother’s life, a marked coldness started dominating her bedroom—much more than the rest of the house. I had to buy her an electric mattress cover so she didn’t freeze at night and not have to turn the heating up until I myself was suffocating and sleeping without covers even in the coldest weather. The chill in Mom’s room was so intense and pervasive it stretched for about five feet outside of her bedroom door into a small adjoining den. Walking through the den towards her door I would hit a well-demarcated wall of icy air. Just wham! Normal temperature, then icy temperature.

Being a weird but mostly rational human being, I searched for possible sources of the chill, tried taping over even the most minor air leaks, had the heating company check the vents, but none of us could find anything to explain it. And to test the existence of this wall of cold, I had my friends walk through the den (without telling them what to expect) to see if I was imagining it, but they felt it, too. Even the skeptical one.

The day my mother died I brought her home for hospice to that bedroom. She arrived at noon and was gone by about eight that night. She was very ready to go. Two remarkable things happened after she died. First, five to ten minutes after she passed, our cat (who had not gone into her room once the cold stuff started happening at least a couple of years previously) came to the foot of her hospital bed and started rolling around, showing her belly and acting coy as she did when my mother talked baby talk to her. The second thing, which I didn’t notice until the next day: the cold had completely disappeared. No wall of ice emanating from her door, the bedroom the same temperature as the rest of the house. And it has never returned since, over ten years on (her ten year death anniversary was January 22), even in the coldest parts of winter (which in L.A. is a relative thing, but you catch my drift).

What haunts me is wondering what caused this.

Mom had two incidents of possible near-death experience in her later years and I’ve often wondered if they were related. There was the time in her late eighties when she got a severe blood infection and almost died. She told me that one night she woke up in the hospital and three shadowy figures stood in the corner. They didn’t speak aloud, she said, but in her mind. They told her that if she wanted to leave this life she could go, but it was up to her. She told them she wasn’t ready, and they said she could stay but things would get much harder from that point on. She survived, and things did get much harder. Maybe a year after this incident, her shaky kidneys finally failed and she had to start dialysis. Less than a year after that, she had a stroke. We were lucky in that it didn’t affect her mind, nor was she paralyzed in any way, but it severely affected her vision (kind of like macular degeneration but not exactly) and her sense of balance. She had to go into rehab for three months and came out of it with her fighting spirit intact.

She confessed to me, though, that those three shadowy figures visited her in the rehab center and offered her the same deal. Again, she refused, and again they said things would get much harder. And they did.

I keep wondering if the shadowy figures showed up that last time? She was in a coma and not talking so I’ll never know. Were they present those years when it was so cold in that room? Sightings of the Grim Reaper, et al., are often accompanied by an intense feeling of cold. But the cat being so coy after she passed makes me think there was nothing evil or malicious hanging around. I still live in the same house and although weird things do happen here I’ve rarely had any activity I would call malicious. Again, I doubt I’ll get answers to any of this, just more questions and speculation.

I haven’t posted to this series in a while mainly because I’ve been going through a lot of stress, both in my personal life and nationally and I haven’t had the focus to do much writing. The national situation remains dire, but things look as if they may resolve personally so I ardently hope I can get back to my creative work. I wrote up this little bit of strangeness for another project and thought it a good fit for sharing here. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add to this series more going forward.

This incident took place at least 40 years ago now. (That blows my mind.) I was house and pet sitting for my parents while they were off on a road trip. I was slewping in one of the bedrooms near the front hall of the house when something woke me up. I noticed a strong glow coming from the hall so I went to investigate. This hall has a very small window right next to the front door that I almost never look out because of its smallness but I was drawn to it because the glow was coming into the house from it. When I looked out I saw a very bright big ball of light hovering over my neighbor’s house across the street, practically sitting on the roof. It was at least ten feet across, maybe more. It made absolutely no sound at all. I felt panicky because I knew it couldn’t be a helicopter. The police did do flyovers in that neighborhood with spotlights on but they never hovered right over the roof of any of the houses and of course they weren’t silent. Right in the middle of my growing panic, a voice came into my head and said, “Don’t worry about this. Just go back to bed and go back to sleep.” And I did just that!

The really weird thing is that when I woke in the morning I had no memory of this and I only know about it now because about a year later I came out of the same bedroom into that same hall, looked out that small window at my neighbor’s house—and the entire incident came back into my consciousness with this visceral punch. I felt all the things I’d felt that night and a deep puzzlement that I was able to go back to sleep and didn’t remember the next morning.

Now, of course, I realize this could have been some weird dream or hypnogogic something or other but I don’t think it was. It was just very weird, clearly something Other. I don’t know how to categorize it other than that.

I also don’t know if it’s relevant to mention that the particular neighbor whose house this happened over is bipolar and was going through a deeply chaotic time in his life at that point. Was it a manifestation of his turmoil? Was it something Other attracted to his chaos? None of the above? Who knows?

And what about that telepathic message? Those aren’t uncommon in UFO lore, nor is the “Go back to bed and remember nothing” nature of it. Carl Jung

(Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky) thought they were outward manifestations of our inner conflicts and fears. Jacques Vallee, groundbreaking ufologist (Passport to Magonia), thought they were closely related to fairylore. But he still has no explanation for what they are.

I personally think the nuts-and-bolts explanation—that they are real machines from outer space—is the least likely scenario, despite what Ancient Aliens would have us believe. No, whatever they are, in some form or another they have been with us a long, long time, perhaps for as long as our minds developed that mysterious trick of consciousness: in our dreams, in our skies, under the ground, in fields and forests, just the other side of this consensus reality we occupy. They are a part of us and a part of the earth. Whatever they are or aren’t they are not here to concur us Independence Day-style. If that was the case, their “technology” is so far superior to ours they would have done so long since. They are perfectly content, I believe, to concur our minds instead, or at least reside in that mysterious junction of consciousness and “reality.” Our minds, after all, are the best, most powerful, and most efficient paranormal machines of all.

This blog features a guest appearance from my friend Lynn (with her permission and cooperation) who had an experience that dovetailed with one of my own.

When Lynn was eighteen she moved into a small studio apartment above a garage in Ocean Park, a suburb of Santa Monica, California:

During this time, Lynn was having bouts of sleep paralysis syndrome where she would “wake up” but couldn’t move and would get panicky.

This condition is one in which, essentially, the mind “wakes up” before the body’s sleep-suppressed body movement does. In this state (called hypnopompic sleep) it’s still possible to be in a dream state and not realize it. Often times, fearful beings are perceived as being in the room with the sleeper, adding to the terror of the paralysis. These visions have intense clarity, as real as being fully awake. It’s also possible to experience these things while falling asleep (called hynagogic sleep).

Lynn’s bouts of sleep paralysis lasted from her late teens to her early twenties. Some people have this condition for years, others only occasionally or once in a lifetime. It often corresponds with stress but may also have a genetic component. Science is still figuring this out.

The paranormal community (and indeed many traditions around the world) say that although sleep paralysis explains some of these experiences, there may also be times when the visitations are real—an invasion from another dimension, et al., when we are at our most open and vulnerable in sleep.

One incident in particular was significant for Lynn:

I find the illness aspect of this quite fascinating. Many years back, my mother got an infection that went undiagnosed until it reached her bloodstream and made her very sick. She almost died and was in the hospital for over a week while they pumped massive doses of antibiotics into her. She told me later that one night in the hospital she woke to see three tall, shadowy figures standing in the corner of the room. They said to her, “You can let go now if you choose and come with us, or you can choose to stay. But if you stay, things will get much harder.” My mother, ever the fighter, told them she wasn’t ready to go yet and they disappeared. Her infection finally came under control enough that she could go home and continue the antibiotics there.

But they were right. Mom had been suffering from kidney disease before this but not at the point of dialysis. That infection pushed her over the edge into end stage kidney disease and she had to start dialysis soon after. Some years later when she was in a rehab center recovering from a stroke, they appeared to her again and gave her the same message. She still wasn’t ready to give up, they disappeared, and once again, things got tougher. I’ve wondered sometimes if they appeared during her final hospice stay, but by then she was beyond communicating with me. I do know that her time in hospice was very short. She checked out quickly.

Then there’s my own experience.

Several years ago, my roommates and I (one of whom was Lynn) lived in a “haunted” apartment. We all had odd experiences there—but that’s a story for another post. While there, I often woke up sensing a dark cloud hovering over my bed, something evil reaching tentacles out for me while I lay frozen, panicking. I knew that if I could just get myself to move, just reach out to turn on the light, the menace would disappear, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t even blink, only send up fervent prayers for movement and light. Then, all at once like a bubble bursting, I could move, lunged for the light, shot out of bed, panting with terror.

Sometimes instead of the evil cloud I caught a glimpse of a figure I’ve labeled (long after the fact, when I felt safer) the shadow wench. She was a shapely woman figure that looked as if she’d dressed in a black body stocking that went completely over face and head, every speck of flesh covered, no eyes or features visible. Like Lynn’s geometric figure, she was the blackest black I’ve ever seen—no light escaping her, all light absorbed into her. She sat in a chair beside my bed (except there was no chair beside my bed). Unlike the amorphous hovering cloud, I got no sinister sense from her. More like a deep puzzlement and curiosity, perhaps a slight sense of alien judgment, as if examining a specimen. As soon as I moved and turned on the light, she disappeared like all the other phantoms.

Eventually, we moved from that apartment and went our separate ways. My roommates experienced no more weird things, and I had only one more incidence of sleep paralysis in my new place. Many months later, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. The doctor said it had probably been responsible for the emotional rollercoaster I’d been on for the previous couple of years—sweeping swings of emotion that came out of nowhere and bore no relation to the events of my life. Oh, and had I been having odd dreams?

Had the shadow wench been a harbinger or just a symptom of a chemical imbalance?

Once the cancerous gland was removed and I was on a stable dose of thyroid hormone, all of that disappeared. I have been cancer-free for many years, and thankfully, sleep paralysis free. Like others, I have never felt sleep paralysis syndrome an adequate explanation for all incursions of weird stuff in night. Perhaps the majority of these experiences can be explained that way, especially in the proximity of beds or comfy chairs, but sometimes weird invasions occur when they can be corroborated by others. People aren’t always in bed. Sometimes they are in their cars, or reading a book, or sitting around a campfire when the strangeness comes creeping in and about them.

And why did my experiences, and those of my roommates, stop as soon as we left that apartment? Why didn’t they continue in the months before I received treatment for my thyroid cancer? I had very intense, weird dreams after that, but only that one incident at the new place of waking up with something creepy in the room. One last farewell appearance before the carny of odd went permanently on the road. At that time, I told it I’d had enough of it’s bullshit and was able to move—I clasped its odd, bulbous white head between my hands and squeezed until it popped like a soap bubble. It got the message and didn’t return.

I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation, perhaps some borderland between illness and otherness, but I do wonder, and always will. Certainly, I have not stopped having uncanny experiences or strange dreams, but my sleep remains mostly untroubled. Thank the gods, and the body chemistry, and the spirits, and the interdimensional beings.

All Weird Things Index

My early teens were a tumultuous time, with loads of interpersonal drama. But it was also a time of “spiritual” awakening—or maybe an occult one?—when many lifetime practices began. From about the age of twelve I began to read every paranormal book in the Santa Monica County Library. I nearly succeeded, but that wasn’t as impressive as it might sound. Paranormal books were looked down upon back then (still are in many circles). The entire collection at Santa Monica consisted of one bookcase: perhaps seven tall, five feet wide, crammed full of the classic titles of the time. There was Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle, Donald Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers Are Real, The Philadelphia Experiment, The Search for Bridey Murphy, The Interrupted Journey, books by Hans Holzer and Brad Steiger, and scads of others. Everything topic was covered, some of it profound and some sensationalist junk: ghosts, UFOs, bizarre theories, metaphysics, and reincarnation. As long as it was strange, I was into it. I also scanned the book sections of the local drug stores for “weird books” and SFF to squander my allowance on. I didn’t completely give up on critical thinking. Even back then some of this stuff seemed like junk. But I loved the mental adrenaline rush reading it gave me, the boundless what ifs.

This was also the time I began playing with the Ouija board—at first with my enthusiastic mom who bought it for us to play with and my friends. We’d have mostly hilarious, nonsense sessions. It was a lot of fun. Some “guy” kept coming through to flirt with my mom. He told her that her second husband would have the initials QZK and we spent many sessions trying to get the scoop on him. Answers on QZK never really showed up, of course. Mostly we got evasion and nonsense. Mom was still married at the time to my biological father, but they’d been estranged for years. She really wanted to believe in an afterlife of love. (She did eventually get it but not with QZK.)

I also tried working the Ouija by myself. At first the planchette was sluggish, then it moved more rapidly. I was not conscious of pushing it but I’m mostly convinced I unconsciously made it move and was mostly talking to my own right brain. I suffered no ill effects or demon possessions. The hysteria over Ouija boards conjuring demons really began in the 1970s after The Exorcist came out. Before that, it was considered a parlor game for people to fool around with. The The abominable Ed and Lorraine Warren also popularized the whole satanic panic/demon possession thing and still haunt the paranormal zeitgeist through The Conjuring movie franchise.

It didn’t take long for me to get bored with solo Ouija board sessions (no friends to play with) and I moved on to Tarot. I’ve done Tarot on and off ever since. I also tried my hand at automatic writing. Like the Ouija sessions, it began slowly and painfully, then became more fluid, then fast. The “spirits” would move the pen in big looping scrolls, taking up a whole notebook page with ten to fifteen words. The handwriting gradually got smaller, but never conformed to neat and staying within the lines. (Spirits don’t conform to the rules.) Again, I didn’t feel as if I was pushing the pen, but I believe it was an exercise in unconscious talking to conscious. Later it developed into something more profound—a way of having meaningful dialogue with my Self. When I was in therapy, trying to dive deep down and clear out the programmed junk in my psyche, my Jungian therapist encouraged me to continue with the automatic writing. I still practice it. It remains a beneficial way of talking to my Self, divining how I truly feel about things, working through the decision-making process, et al.

Except sometimes. Sometimes, even in the early days, the tone would shift into something that felt outside myself, much deeper than talking to the wayward winds inside my brain. Something channeled from Elsewhere? I dunno. I get this now and again with Tarot, too, that feeling when a reading really clicks into place and seems more than wish fulfillment or facile projection. A few years back I asked “Them” if I was talking to my ancestors. They answered along the lines of “took you long enough to figure that out.” “They” sometimes have a good sense of humor.

I continue to talk to myself and the ancestors. It’s a great comfort when I need it, a way of calming myself when I’m stressed, or working through what worries me. The messages that come through are overwhelmingly positive. If negative things come through (almost always self-critical crap, as distinctly different in tone as the profound messages are) I say a little clarification/protection prayer and ask them if the negative things are true. They usually respond with something like, “No. That’s interference from your Shadow or old negative programming.”

But it all began back there in my early teens. I really needed to believe in “cosmic friends” or better angels or a realm outside the tough times I was going through. I’m glad I found those better angels—even if they were merely the better angels of my own mind and soul finding their way to the surface. They have sustained me throughout my life.

When I was thirteen or so I invited my friend Margaret over and we spent the whole day together, had dinner with my parents, then sat around the “campfire” in the backyard. This was an old metal barbecue that my father set up on the large concrete slab at the back of our house where we could burn wood and enjoy the balmy summer night air. Margaret was a tall, gangly, unstylish girl (I was also not particularly stylish) who wore her light brown hair in a bowl cut all through junior high and high school. I don’t know if that was a decision of her parents or not (they were quite strict). She had very straight hair, which would have been totally the style in the 60s and 70s if she had just let it grow out. She got made fun of. My recollection is that her family was large and rather poor. We weren’t rich, either, but we were hospitable. I was never invited to Margaret’s house. The very idea of inviting me seemed to make her nervous. Something odd there. I never figured out what and didn’t inquire. She craved love and friendship, a refuge from the teasing and disdain of the cruel teenage years. She was often downcast and depressed but lit up whenever anyone paid her attention.

She was one of my strays. I always brought kids home who were outcasts (like me), who the cool kids shunned. Or I invited them to spend school lunches with me and my outcast friends. (Lunching rituals were extremely important in junior high and high school.) Recently, I was talking about this to another friend I’ve known since I was twelve and she said, “You were always sort of the den mother of our little group,” and I guess I was. A very old pattern going back to at least elementary school. Which is odd, since I’m an introvert who treasures my alone time.

So, Margaret and I sitting by the fire. I don’t remember if she stayed the night, but we were staring at the flames and talking well into the night. Eventually, we lapsed into a pleasant silence, each in our own reverie. And from one moment to the next, I was there in the backyard and also inside the flames. I had a vivid, absolutely realer-than-real vision of myself tied to a stake while flames rose around me. In the vision, I was screaming and looking out at the faces of the people watching me burn—a nighttime sky, their faces made pasty by the light of the flames, yelling, “Burn, witch!” Their expressions were pure hate mixed with glee at the spectacle of my punishment. Just their faces. No details of clothing except I think it was dark. I even smelled flesh burning and knew it was mine. (It smelled of burned hot dogs and, no, we didn’t roast dogs that night.) The name “Sylvia Thackby” popped into my head, and I had the complete conviction that was my name and who I was.

Then it was done. So vivid, so intense, so real. I turned to Margaret feeling the panic bubbling inside me.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

So I told her, all of it. I could see it bothered her a great deal, and why wouldn’t it? That was some crazy ass talk. (In retrospect I have to wonder if that’s why we stopped hanging around so much. She didn’t need a crazy person for a friend.) But I was full of manic enthusiasm. I wanted to research Sylvia Thackby. This was long before the internet, though, and I didn’t have the resources to travel to the kinds of libraries where I might get more information. I was just a kid. I had to let it go at the time. I have periodically fallen down the internet rabbit hole since and learned a few things.

First, accused witches in England and America were hung, not burned. The burning happened in Scotland and the Continent. So, if Sylvia existed she was probably in one of those places. My instincts even at the time of the vision told me it was the British Isles. The last legal execution of accused witches in Britain happened in the 17th century, and those accused were hung. (That doesn’t mean illegal burnings didn’t happen. They most assuredly did. In fact, a woman named Bridget Cleary was burned in Ireland in the late 19th century by her loving family who thought she was a changeling.)

Second, the name Thackby exists, but it’s not common. Most of the scraps of information I’ve found seem to settle in the Yorkshire area. Yorkshire was a hotbed of witch belief in the 17th century (probably earlier and later as well), but most legal executions there were hangings, I believe. I did find a list of servants from an estate in Warwickshire called Finham Park (from the Stoneleigh Parish Census of 1861). A young cowman named Christopher Kirby employed there  listed his birthplace in 1844 as Thackby in Oxfordshire. (An infamous unsolved murder of a supposed “wizard” occurred in Warwickshire in 1945, so it was not without its own witch hysteria.) A Google search of “Thackby Oxfordshire” brings up information on a town called Beckley, but no mention is made of Thackby in the Wikipedia article, so I don’t know what that’s all about. I do know that on July 26, 1640, Thomae Thackby baptized his daughter Maria in the Yorkshire parish of Kirk Ella, which until 1878 covered a seven mile area including part of what is now the Newington Parish of Hull and surrounds. The records of Kirk Ella stretch back to 1558. Witchcraft was made a capital offense in Britain in 1563. Also, I learned that a soldier named Levi Berry was K. I. A. in World War I in 1916. He enlisted in 1915 and his papers list his birthplace as “Thackley – Bradford – Yorkshire” where he was born on July 28, 1890. I even found one entry for a current resident of Hull with the last name of Thackby (first initial only), but I would never bother him or her with anything so foolish. This is my airy fairy obsession, after all, and nothing to do with that poor soul.

Third, the name Sylvia was not common in the British Isles until maybe the 18th century and that was mostly amongst the nobility and the rich. Sybil would have been a more likely name for a commoner and I got the distinct impression my girl was a commoner.

So I know a lot more than I did on that long ago campfire night but still not much. It has led to a lifetime fascination with witch accusations and persecutions. (The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion L. Starkey was the first nonfiction book I read cover to cover.) And I have always had a morbid fear of fire. Still, it could all be an elaborate hypnagogic vision that my neurodivergent brain turned into an obsession. I want to say that I don’t think so, that it has always from that night on carried the heavy internal weight of conviction, but who can say? That vision or dream or memory is as vivid today as it was that night.

I still need to check alternate spellings of Thackby (there are a number) and the genealogical sites but this is a casual obsession nowadays. I don’t really expect to find Sylvia Thackby no matter the spelling. If she existed, she was probably an outcast, some poor, odd or odd-looking woman who lived on the margins. Such people don’t leave historical records. Although the Scots and English kept good records of who they persecuted, many records were lost and it’s very possible Sylvia’s execution was vigilantism rather than de jure. But I’ll probably keep searching in my haphazard way. For one thing, it’s always fascinating to look.

And what about Margaret? We hung out a lot in junior high, but when we transferred to the larger student population of Venice High we kind of lost touch. We’d see each other now and then but had different friend groups. It happens. After graduating high school I only saw her one more time. About a year and a half later she called me out of the blue and asked if she could come over and introduce me to her…baby.

I was gobsmacked, to say the least, but I said sure. She arrived with a chubby baby in tow—about 9 or 10 months I’d say—but I can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl. (I’m going to call him a him since I don’t want to say “it.”) She’d finally let her hair grow and looked much more in the mode of the day, but still hardly stylish. She said she’d gotten pregnant by some guy who declined to marry her. Maybe it was still under negotiation, maybe a done deal. I wish I remembered. I felt sorry that she had the responsibility of raising a child on her own at such a young age. That feeling was counterbalanced by her excitement over the baby and the incandescent love on her face when she looked at him. Finally, here was someone she could love with all her heart who loved her back and needed her as much as she’d always wanted. She left, we promised to call, we never did, and I never saw her again. The usual casual carelessness of youth.

Margaret is lost to my personal historical record. I could probably find a trace of her if I wanted to join Facebook (I do not) or one of those alumni associations (again, no). I don’t imagine that incandescence lasted. It rarely does in life. But I can hope it did, can’t I? I can hope that the flames of life never reached her, the burning joy remained. I feel somewhat guilty that I don’t know. Then again, maybe it’s best I don’t. Some searches are best left abandoned.

I have written about weird things before but for the purpose of this project I am going to repost and rework those posts under the “all weird things” tag. This is the first of those posts:

We’ve all probably had a number of things in our lives that made us go “huh.” I know I have. I embraced the weird some time back, and even though I always try to find logical explanations before accepting anything para-weird, there is always going to be stuff that skirts the edge of rational and . . . other.

One such incident happened when I was about thirteen at our old house in Venice, the one I grew up in, which was in itself a strange place full of odd corners and unusual atmospherics. We lived on a huge lot with a big house on the front of the property occupied by our landlady. Our house was a little ramshackle place with four front doors because its basic structure consisted of four beach cabins strung together to make a house. (Beach cabins: those things from the early 20^th century set up on the sand where people would go to change out of their street clothes and into swimwear so they didn’t have to immodestly walk from their vehicles to the shore in “scanty” clothing.)

A prodigious backyard sat behind our little house in which my father grew a legendary vegetable garden every year. A large but very old and dilapidated shack sat at the very back of the southwest corner of the lot where my father kept tools and such. It hadn’t seen paint in centuries, it seemed, the wood chipped and splintered and that wonderful grey barnwood patina people pay big money to acquire these days. Between the back of the shack and the next property over (a dairy processing plant) was a passageway about five feet wide. My father put trellis up on the shed back there and grew banana squash, letting them crawl up the trellis rather than spread across the ground. I liked to sit back there in the summertime because it was always cool, even on the hottest days, and smelled loamy and of growing green things. It was one of many small, urbanized sacred combes I had on that property—but not a perfect spot.

We had the dairy processing plant to contend with, for one. Just across from the growing banana squash was a two-foot high concrete boundary marker topped by an enormous chain link fence—at least twenty feet high—that ran the entire length of the back end of our property. The fence was loose enough at the bottom that I could push it inward and sit on that concrete ledge to stare at and smell the growing things, wiggle my toes in the loamy earth, and think my solitary thoughts. Just the other side of the fence on the dairy property was a massive ice freezer and ice crusher machine. Again, it was at least 15-20 feet high, but seemed larger because the boundary marker was part of an elevation of the land between our property and the dairy. It towered, to say the least. Another fence sat behind the southern end of the thing, as well. A very narrow passageway ran the length of this monster, maybe three feet wide at most. A grown person would have had to walk sideways to go back there. There was a long freezer compartment (maybe 30 feet?) which held big blocks of ice, and on the front end a platform and some ice crushing machines. The dairymen hauled out these blocks of ice, crushed them (usually at about 3 a.m.), and loaded it into bags so they could pack their trucks (parked along the northern length of our property) and keep their dairy products cool while they made their early morning deliveries.

(The ice crusher was also part of a harassment campaign because the dairy wanted to force our neighbors and our landlady to sell the property cheap so they could gobble up the entire block—but that’s a separate story. Suffice it to say, it didn’t work because we were all extremely stubborn and adaptable poor people.)

Anyway, I was in the backyard proper one day, lying on the grass the other side of the garden, reading (though I don’t remember the book) but also feeling restless. That kind of restlessness that’s an itch just beneath the skin. A disease common in early adolescence, I believe. I put the book down wondering what I could do with that restlessness when I became aware of—how to put this?—another consciousness inside my brain. Yeah, I know. I’ve only experienced such a thing a few times in my life, mostly in connection with premonitions, but it’s a very distinct feeling. A restless itch of the mind, if you will. It was telling me to get up and go behind the shed to my sacred spot and if I did, something would happen. There would be a gift there for me. It scared me, frankly. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be kidnapped by aliens or other things, but the consciousness was reassuring and insistent. So I got up, walked through the garden, and behind the shed.

I stood there a minute thinking, “Okay, I’m here, now what?” I walked down to the end of the passage where our property ended and the low fence of our southern neighbor started. I turned around and looked back the way I’d come but . . . nothing. Then I glanced to my left. Lying on the ground, just the other side of the chain link fence, was a black, leather-bound notebook, maybe 6×4 inches. It looked brand new so I reached under the loose links at the bottom of the fence and pulled it through. It was a spiralbound notebook and full of crisp, new ruled paper—and completely blank. No writing inside, nothing to identify an owner. Like I said, an adult would have had to walk sideways along the passage beside the ice crusher, and this notebook was deposited at the very end of the freezer compartment about a foot from the other fence that ran behind the monster. It wasn’t something someone could have dropped from the platform. They would have had to purposefully sidle down that passage for it to be there. It’s entirely possible that someone could have slithered down there to take a secret whizz (although why go so far?) or maybe someone came back there to spy on our and our neighbor’s property (given the underhanded nature of the dairy owners) but . . .?

I dunno. All I know was that I was delighted with the notebook. Although I had known I wanted to be a writer since the second grade, I was flailing around about it at that stage of my life and getting a lot a flak from my mother about how impractical my expressed career goal was and what a foolish dream and etc. That notebook seemed like an important piece of encouragement to me at the time. I wrote a lot after that, despite discouragement. I’ve never really stopped, although I have had a couple of bouts of prolonged writers’ block wherein that restless itch beneath the skin became agonizing. Writing has always been the cure for that.

And remembering this incident also reminded me of something I encountered recently in my reread of Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality:

I have long thought of my art (any art, all art) as an act of worship—or if that’s too strong a word, an act of gratitude and devotion. To whom? The Universe for giving me this means of scratching that itch? Maybe. It doesn’t even matter if it’s good art or bad, whether or not you’re acknowledged publicly in galleries or publishing houses and the like, the act of doing of art shows the Universe that you have the passion and the practice of that devotion. The doing is the important part. That’s why I’m an emotional wreck when I’m not doing that work and why I’m always supremely grateful when it comes back to me.

That notebook long ago was something of a talisman. I may still have it buried somewhere around here, though I haven’t seen it in years. But like any talisman it was good for the time in which it came to me and lasted as long as I needed to look on it and be encouraged. It was indeed a gift, whether from the Universe, some mysterious being, or from some random dude taking a whizz out behind the ice crusher.

For as far back as I can remember whenever I’ve closed my eyes in preparation to sleep the faces of strangers appear in my mind’s eye—like on the cinema screen behind my eyelids. They stare down into my face, quite close. Sometimes they back off and I see details of their clothing—from many different eras, but mostly the 20th and 21st centuries. (As I write this the vivid memory of a blonde curly haired girl in a red fifties-style flare dress with large white polka dots comes to mind. Her hair was just above her shoulders, and she wore a white headband. She looked to be in her twenties.)

These people almost always have serious or concentrated expressions. I can’t recall an instance of them smiling, though sometimes they just have a curious neutrality. It’s as if they want something from me but I never know what. Maybe just to give them a spot of attention? They know, I’m convinced, that I see them with my eyes closed but not with my eyes open and want to get that attention while they can, though sometimes they seem genuinely surprised to be perceived. They never stay long, and I rarely feel anything menacing, just their passing flare of interest before they move on. These are people I’ve never seen before in my life or since. It isn’t a nightly occurrence, but a fairly frequent one.

I used to think this happened to everyone. Diana Gabaldon even talked about it in one of her Outlander novels. But when in my latter years I mentioned it to friends—“You know that thing where sometimes when you close your eyes you see the faces of strangers?”—they were incredulous. “No,” they said, “that’s never happened to me.”

So I realized that my eyelid friends were one of those things—like styles of thinking—that we assume are universal, a part of everyone’s experience, because we only live inside our own heads and can’t know how others perceive the world. I didn’t learn until fairly recently, for instance, that not everyone has a constant running monologue in their head.  I started seeing articles about it. I was dumbfounded. It made me think of my friend who has synesthesia. She didn’t realize when she was little that not everyone had specific colors attached to each letter in the alphabet or that sometimes words had a vague flavor to them. The chatterbox in my mind doesn’t drive me crazy because I’m used to this state of being but it is always narrating. (Okay, yeah, when I’m in a worry cycle it does drive me crazy, but I’ve developed coping mechanisms.) (And yes, my synesthesia friend also has a running monologue in her head.)

So I wasn’t worried about all those strangers clamoring for my attention. I didn’t know any better for most of my life and once I knew it wasn’t that way for everyone I was curious as to what it was but still not alarmed. I did wonder if it was some weird way of seeing spirits of the dead but didn’t really pursue that. Until I mentioned it to a witch acquaintance I had at the time (we’re no longer in communication) who practiced necromancy.

“Transient spirits,” she said. “They are attracted to you because they know you can see them, but you have to be careful. They can suck your energy, make you sick, and do other harm if you don’t protect yourself.”

For the first time in my life I became uneasy with them. She was a necromancer so she had to know more about this than I, right? Forget the fact I’d never perceived harm from these folks, I took this unsolicited advice to heart. From that point on whenever the strangers showed up I’d say, “You’re not welcome here. Go away.” Poof! They were gone. Their visits got less and less frequent then stopped altogether. But the funny thing was I missed them. I felt bereft of these “companions,” as if something essential had been taken from me. Worse, that I’d taken it from myself on the advice of someone who was just guessing.

I started saying to the Great Whatever, “I welcome all spirits who mean me no harm,” but the damage had been done. They didn’t return. And, of course, I don’t really know if they were spirits at all. They could have been an aspect of my active imagination and I’ve wondered since if that’s a component in why I sometimes struggle more with my creative work then I used to.

I want them back, those strange transient companions. It’s not the only time I have forcefully shut down an “ability” because I got uncomfortable, but that’s a story for another day. Today I’ll just say that the mind is a curious enclosure and we all live in an illusion of the world to one degree or another. We can only perceive the world as our minds allow us and can never truly participate in the thought processes of anyone else. Perception is a closed circle—or more precisely, perhaps, a labyrinth in which we wander endlessly.