Wednesday 30 October 2024

Resistance: The Gary Rowe Story

CONTENT WARNING: This story contains discussions of domestic violence and child abuse.

Pain. Pain was what woke Gary from sleep that night, and he winced as he opened his eyes to find himself caught in blinding lights on the ceiling above him. The surface under his back was cold, hard and unforgiving. Save for the ceiling lights, most of the setting was shrouded by darkness. He was on an operating table. As a regular biker, his mind immediately went to thoughts of a horrific accident. Had he been out on the road? Was he in hospital? He began to panic.

The pain was getting worse, it was throbbing in his head. His eyes focused and adjusted to the dark, and his heart dropped as he looked upwards. There was someone - something - in the room with him, and it wasn't a doctor. It was tall and had grey skin. Gary tried to move, tried to escape, but found he was paralysed. Shouting at the creature now, he demanded to know why it was doing this. 

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He was met with only silence from the entity. He screamed at it again, and his next memory is of the horrible thing inserting a large needle into his left temple. Pain ricocheted across his skull, throwing him to the limits of consciousness. 

"What are you doing? You're going to fucking kill me! You're going to fucking kill me! Leave me alone!"

The creature gave Gary no compassion or acknowledgement as the needle was pushed further into his skull. The searing agony finally overwhelmed his threadbare senses, and he blacked out.

Gary soon found himself back in his bedroom, and the room was spinning in a disorientated haze. It was 1988, and he was roughly 19 years old. His head hurt terribly and he needed the bathroom. Staggering to his feet before looking in the bathroom mirror, it must've felt like the ground was swept out from underneath him. There was an angry red mark on his left temple. It wasn't a dream. What had happened to him?

The Night Side of Childhood

Gary Rowe (pseudonym) was born in Cumbria in 1969. Despite the beauty of the Lake District and rolling mountains around him, his family home was a tangled nest of vipers and thorns. Susan, his mother, had resented him since before he was born. She would tell him bedtime stories about the times she had tried to miscarry or abort him. She was convinced that he only made it into the world through terrible luck. He doesn't remember anything about his father, except seeing him sat in a van, screaming verbal abuse at Susan before leaving both of their lives forever.

This abandonment prompted Gary and his mother to move into his grandparents' house. Unfortunately, he was subjected to further abuse at the hands of his grandparents. It seemed as if his mother had simply carried an intergenerational trend forward into her own behaviour. He was kicked and beaten by his grandfather, and these awful moments constituted some of his earliest memories. 

In spite of it all, Gary fought to express the humanity that his elders had lost. He was a chatty and curious child, spending his free time with the animals at the local zoo and developing a strong distaste for greed and other social ills.

In hindsight, Gary remembers that his first UFO encounter came when he was about five or six. He had been in his bedroom in his grandparents' house when he saw something strange outside his window. There was a "large, white object" hovering in the sky nearby. Hollering for his grandmother to come take a look, she joined him by the window and could also see the anomaly. As they both watched, it started to move away from them before disappearing. 

"What was that?" he asked, breathlessly. 

"Probably the moon" she curtly replied.  

Gary knew this wasn't right, even at the time. Nevertheless, he forced himself to dismiss it, knowing that he was surrounded by people who would be unwilling to entertain his myriad questions. 

Soon, a strange lump appeared on the roof of Gary's mouth. It didn't move when he felt it with his tongue, and appeared to be below the tissue. It was months until his next dentist appointment, and the object somehow vanished in that time, disappearing as suddenly as it had appeared. When he told his dentist about it, he was intrigued and examined his mouth thoroughly, but was unable to find anything. 

Susan began dating a man named David, who would eventually reveal himself as a drunken gambling addict. Understandably, Gary and David didn't get on very well. 

A tense drive ensued when Susan decided that the family should all go on a holiday to the other side of the country. They were still trapped in the car together by late evening, and this was when Gary's next meeting with the anomalous currents running beneath the surface of his life would take place.

Perhaps on the brink of sleep, Gary didn't notice anything was amiss until his mother loudly cried out, "Oh my God! It's following us! What are we going to do?"

Something luminous was keeping pace with the car. It was floating along above the hedgerow on the left side of the road. David told both Susan and Gary to ignore it - "Don't look, just ignore it and go to sleep" - but Gary was unable to. He quietly watched it move along beside them for about an hour, before it turned and disappeared into the long night. 

Once the family had returned from this fated vacation, Gary can recall that he began experiencing intense dread around bedtime. Eventually, this unattributed apprehension morphed into memories of full-fledged visitations by "little creatures" who would enter his bedroom at night. He cannot remember them ever interacting with him directly, but he still felt extreme fear around them, running out of his room every time he saw one. Susan and David reacted to their son's night terrors with amusement.

Even regardless of the nighttime visitations, Gary never needed to sleep that much. He would usually sleep for a few hours per night, before just lying in his bed and daydreaming. 

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Perhaps as a way to escape both the boredom of these hours and the wanton cruelty he experienced in his day-to-day life, he discovered the ability to leave his body during these liminal times. He would catapult his awareness out of his physical limitations and float above the house, flying around the neighbourhood and experiencing the quiet of village nighttime. He even found that he could leave the planet altogether, and observe our blue world from the vastness of outer space.

It was at roughly this time that Susan married David, and David began to beat Gary just as all the rest of the adults in his life had. His mind was set on slot machines and alcohol, and he regarded the presence of a child in his life as an unwanted burden. The verbal abuse was constant and physical violence was frequent as well. 

Beyond the Bounds

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gary was a struggling student. He enjoyed the process of learning, but he didn't feel any sort of attachment to academia. Once he'd finished school, the suffocating life that had been built up around him started to fall away rapidly. 

His mother and stepfather kicked him out of the house the moment he was of legal age - but this would ultimately serve him well. He was able to successfully secure a place to live, and managed to find a fulfilling job and a lively group of friends. I can imagine that joy became a more frequent part of his life. 

Just a couple of years later, it was 1988. One night, Gary woke to find himself lying on a cold operating table with an inhuman spectre staring down at him. The being drove a needle into his head, causing him to lose consciousness shortly after he'd woken up in the otherworldly setting. Much to his horror, he discovered a red welt on his left temple the next morning, exactly where the needle had been inserted. Despite its incongruity with the rest of his life, it had indeed taken place.

Knowing that he would not be believed - barely believing it himself - he pushed this experience out of his head and submerged himself in his ever-expanding life in the human world. 

Soon afterwards, he found a woman named Grace and she found him. They were bound together in romance, and shortly thereafter got married. They decided in together in the little town of Distington, Cumbria. This place had only slightly over 2,000 inhabitants. It was the perfect place to raise a child. Nine months later, Grace gave birth to a baby boy. Gary would give his son the childhood he was deprived of, and was a loving and compassionate father. 

Many years passed, the new family sharing trials and joys and sorrows. Gary felt anchored and happy in his world. His son had grown into a bubbly little toddler, and everything seemed as if it had finally reached a place of calm. Gary was now 24 years old, and it was 1993. 

Most nights, he would be woken up by the need to urinate - unable to sleep through it due to an unspecified injury he'd received as a teenager. The bathroom was on the far side of the house, and so Gary would need to navigate down the stairs to the first floor and make it across the living room and through the kitchen each time. One night in particular stands out. 

It was close to dawn, and although Gary had woken up needing the bathroom, he briefly tried to wait it out. He proved unable to, and had to get out of bed and walk down to the living room. As he stepped into the room and shut the door behind him, his blood ran cold. There was a short humanoid stood in the middle of the room. Its flesh was dark grey, and it had its head bowed and its arms together in front of it, "like it was a scolded schoolboy". Gary recoiled in horrified confusion, before abruptly losing consciousness. When he next woke up, he found himself back in bed.

He remembered this fully the next morning, but once again decided to keep it a secret. Although the uninvited guests had left years in between their previous visits, they started to pick up the pace after this incident. The next bizarre happening took place a few weeks later.

Gary and Grace turned out the light after talking in bed for roughly 30 minutes, and laid down with their backs facing each other. Gary curled into a ball to sleep in his usual position, and waited ten minutes before realising that he couldn't sleep. Sticking his head out from the blanket, he was terrified to see a woman's face just "six or eight inches" from his face.

It took a moment for the reality of the situation to set in. Was it Grace? No, she was still asleep in bed. There had been a total stranger staring at him through his bed covers. She was wearing a grey-coloured suit which looked clean and new, and she had blonde hair. He lept to his feet, yelling, and the woman did the same. Without wasting a moment, she floated upwards and disappeared through the ceiling, which seemed to blur and swirl as she passed through it.

Grace was now awake, and pleaded with Gary to know what was going on. He gestured to the ceiling and told her that he thought he had seen a ghost. The swirling effect on the ceiling was no longer visible by the time Grace was looking upwards. The couple made tea to calm themselves down, and Grace agreed that the strange woman might've been a ghost.

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Two weeks later, the woman reappeared. Gary woke to find himself curled up at the foot of his bed sometime around midnight, and his heart lept in his chest when he opened his eyes to see the same woman kneeling at the side of the bed, staring intently at Grace. Heart still pounding, Gary approached the woman and put his hand on her shoulder. 

Choking out words, Gary asked, "Hello, what's your name?"

The woman jumped backwards and shoved Gary powerfully away from her. His screaming woke Grace up - but the woman had already vanished before she could see her. 

Could she have been a ghost? Her shoulder felt solid, and she had physically pushed him with great force. A while later, Gary and Grace were briefly exposed to information about alien abductions involving "Pamela Anderson lookalikes". Gary wondered whether the woman he had seen could've been from another world. 

Big Questions

"What do you want to do with your life?

This was the question that Gary found himself confronted with when he woke on the operating table, in the company of a tall grey humanoid. He was sat upright on the edge of the table, with his legs dangling off it. One or two years had passed since the encounters with the woman in grey. For a reason he couldn't explain, he felt "calm, relaxed, and at home" with the grey alien. It was as if he was with his doctor. When the entity asked him the question, he was nonetheless caught off guard.

His response to it was apparently so embarrassing and humiliating that he refused to tell Preston Dennett (with whom he spoke about his experiences) what it was. It was through this experience that he began to reconcile with the fact that he was an alien abductee. It also seemed that the aliens had no sense of humour, based on the being's emotionless response to his absurd answer.

He got the impression that his family was somehow involved with the abductions, and shortly afterwards this would be confirmed. 

The next time he woke somewhere he had not gone to sleep, he was with his wife. He felt groggy and disorientated, struggling to come back to full consciousness. He and Grace were both completely naked, huddled together "like two trapped animals in the corner of a cage." They were floating in a clear, breatheable liquid in some kind of giant tank.

They could both see grey humanoids above and to the right of them, observing from an elevated walkway. Three of these beings were tall, and two of them were shorter. One of the tall greys was the same one who had painfully inserted a needle into his skull many years previously. He understood that the tall entities were the masterminds, and that the smaller ones did grunt work.

Behind the greys stood two human-looking figures in dark suits and boots. They held what were either tablets or clipboards, and seemed to be taking notes on their observations.

Grace was terrified, screaming at Gary and pleading with him to tell him what was happening and what they should do. Despite not feeling certainty, and knowing that they were powerless in the situation, Gary tried his best to reassure her that the beings were not going to hurt them.

Gary's memories of that night abruptly end there, and he discovered that Grace did not recall that night's events when he gently questioned her about it the morning after. He decided against telling her.

In late 1994, Gary was looking out of his window in the late evening when he caught sight of the most striking UFO he had ever seen. It was slowly, silently moving over the house. It seemed to be solid, shaped like a cigar, and was big enough to have completely "blotted out the winter sky". Gary said it was "the biggest moveable object I have ever seen in my life".

This was the last alien-related experience he would have for many years. Gary got a satisfying job at a nearby warehouse and attempted to move on with his life. All the while, he continued to have intense out-of-body experiences in which he had the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, and even to other dimensions, which he lacked the language to really describe. He believed these experiences were related to his abductions.

Both Gary and Grace developed precognitive abilities. Grace's were more pronounced, regularly giving her foreknowledge of events in her daily life. Gary experienced many dramatic visions of tragic events of both personal and global scales. 

"I Think We're Property"

It was now 2016, and the intrusive beings had been absent from Gary's life for over twenty years. A few years earlier, the Rowe family had moved from Distington to a little village outside the city of Carlisle - a city with a strong military presence. It took a long time to unpack their whole lives into this new dwelling-place, and by the time they had started to feel properly settled, they were due to receive some unexpected visitors.

Gary was lying awake in bed at night when he suddenly felt the covers being tugged back away from him. He snapped out of his nocturnal reverie, uncertain whether he had imagined what had just happened. Just as he tried to relax again, the same thing happened. The third time it happened, whatever it was successfully pulled the covers fully off his body. 

"My heart was pounding like a steam train".

Panic struck him like a rock impacting glass as he felt his body begin to float off the bed and into the air. Unable to resist, he levitated out of his bedroom window and upwards into the night. 

Beyond that point, he was unable to remember anything else of that night. When he woke up the next morning, he checked himself for any visible marks but could find nothing. 

The same thing would happen to him repeatedly over the next few months. They could take him whenever they wanted, and there was nothing he could do about it.

After repeated violations, he noticed something crucial that would eventually help him defend himself from his otherworldly tormentors. There was a peculiar heaviness that would come over his body when they were about to make their presence known. He could now anticipate their interventions, provided he was awake at the time.

One evening, Gary drifted off to sleep how he usually did - and found himself jolted awake. He was lying on an unfamiliar surface and there was a figure straddling him. It was a young woman, and she was having sex with him. The moment she realised he was awake, she immediately got off him and sat down beside him. Gary presumably scrambled backwards with horror and bewilderment. 

"Shush! It's okay. Keep calm. You're okay", whispered the woman in a forceful, urgent tone.

She had dark hair and was lithely built, and appeared maybe only twenty years old. For reasons he couldn't explain, Gary found himself feeling reassured by the woman despite the bizarre situation. He was sat on the floor of a strange room, facing the wall. He could see an arched doorway nearby, that led down a narrow, curved corridor with dim lighting.

Where was he? He made a move to turn around to look at the rest of the setting, and the woman reacted dramatically. Her voice rose in panic, and she begged him to remain facing towards her. 

It was too late, and Gary's head spun with what he saw. The room was enormous, like a warehouse. There were human bodies, male and female, lying all over the floor. At least 50 of them, probably closer to 100. Most of them were completely still, while others twisted around with apparent pleasure. Some were coupled together and were having intercourse.

"The feeling I got was, I really, really wasn't supposed to see this."

Looking back towards the woman, he was momentarily confronted by two small greys walking past them at the end of the corridor. They seemed to be talking with one another, and didn't notice him. Nevertheless, he reacted with instinctual panic and the woman grabbed him, telling him to ignore them. She stood up and put out her hand - "Quickly, come with me!"

He followed her through a previously-unnoticed arched doorway and passed into a long, narrow room with a work surface with sinks up on the furthest wall. It was some kind of washroom. The woman leant against the surface, and Gary approached her before lifting her up onto it and kissing her. She reciprocated eagerly, and they both agreed that they were attracted to one another. Gary asked her if she would like to have sex again. It seems likely that she ultimately refused, though the precise events were lost in Gary's hazy memories.

The woman looked entirely human, but Gary somehow knew that she did not live on Earth. She seemed to enjoy spending time with him, giving the impression that human interaction was a scarce thing for her. Making the most of his intimate audience with her, Gary started asking her questions about his circumstances, which made her visibly nervous.

"Why are you doing this? Why are they doing this?

"I'm not allowed to tell you."

In what seemed like an instant, Gary was suddenly back in his bed. It was morning, and his otherworldly lover was nowhere to be seen. This experience led him to conclude that the interlopers had an agenda involving human reproduction, and that alien abduction may be a much more common experience than most realise. 

What if it happens to everyone? What if it's a human universal, like birth and death? What if only some of us are able to remember it?

Pandemonium and Resistance

Gary was laying in bed one evening in 2016 when a different kind of visitor appeared in his bedroom. He opened his eyes to see a tall humanoid shape stood by his television. It was entirely black in colour, but seemed to be three-dimensional. As if realising it was being observed, the entity darted away from him and abruptly passed through a closed curtain and window before disappearing. These shadow people would soon become a permanent fixture of Gary's life, most commonly appearing at night. 

The Rowe family household seemed to suddenly become a magnet for all sorts of otherworldly intruders. Grace was terrified to see an entity she described as a woman's ghost, and one morning the couple woke to find that all their stove burners had been switched on overnight. Phantom footsteps and weird noises prowled the corridors at every opportunity. 

Gary and Grace both witnessed a "ghost dog" walking through their house, which was certainly not the same animal as their two pet dogs. They would see this creature often enough that they started referring to it as another pet in the household. 

Gary also saw a round, spider-like creature “about the size of a grapefruit” scuttling on the floor. A giant lizard-like entity made its presence known to him as he was lying in bed, crawling up his wall and turning its crocodile-like head to hiss at him. He saw it several times over months, and would liken it to a demon. Despite having loved animals his entire life, he could not love this thing.

Later that year, he would have one of his only daytime encounters. He came downstairs in the morning to find a grey alien standing next to the base of the stairs in the living room. Thinking fast this time, he jumped towards it and grabbed it by the throat in a strong chokehold. It spun its spindly arms around in mad panic, and he could hear its voice screaming in his mind.

"Get off me! Get off me now!"

The thing had leathery, firm skin which was cold to the touch. Just as he seemed to have gained the upper hand over his kidnappers, something unseen rushed him from behind and he lost consciousness. Nonetheless, he felt good about having made his tormentors panic for once, instead of the other way around.

His first experience of 2017 was a repeat of his horrifying abduction from 1988 - complete with the agonising penetration of his temple with a large needle wielded by a tall grey. The nighttime kidnappings had also become constant at this point, with the blankets being pulled from him and his body being levitated up out of the window. 

Gary woke in the middle of the night on one occasion to see something moving in his bedroom to his left. It felt like there was something in his head, and it was attempting to force him back to sleep. He tried to sit up, knowing that this wasn't right - and was met by an gentle voice telling him to go back to sleep.

When he finally managed to sit himself up, a hand reached out of the darkness and pushed him back down. "It's okay. Just sleep. It's not you we need this time."

He felt a hot surge of anger at the sight of two greys getting Grace out of bed. Unable to help his wife, he mutely fell back to sleep.

Gary found himself standing up when he woke from sleep one night in September of 2018. He squinted as his eyes filled with a blinding light, and had to stop himself from covering his face. He was inside some kind of small craft. It was a circular machine, and was entirely transparent save for the floor. Two small greys sat at a control panel roughly eight feet away from him, apparently piloting the vehicle.

Standing there, motionless, Gary took in the view as it rushed past him. They were flying through a scrubland environment, resembling the quintessential North American desert. Although they were only several feet off the ground, the craft was continually picking up speed. It felt like he was seeing something that he wasn't meant to. He wasn't meant to be awake.

A few minutes passed before he decided to make his presence known. He wasn't sure what to say, still feeling groggy and disorientated from sleep. "Alright, lads!

The entities in the bubble-like vehicle seemed terrified, more scared than he had ever seen them. The one sat at the right leapt up and started running from one end of the craft to the other, seemingly trying to find a way out of the situation. Gary got the impression that it was young, or otherwise inexperienced. The other one was frozen at the controls in complete silence. 

"It's okay! I'm not going to hurt you!" Gary repeated, until the seated grey finally broke its silence and told him to remain standing where he was. He agreed, and the younger one seemed to calm down slightly. It went back to its seat and looked at him. The ship stopped moving and both entities approached him, initiating a telepathic conversation.

He felt that this was the first time a human had woken up while they were being returned to their home after an abduction. Just like he had asked the woman, Gary asked the pair why they did this to people. They seemed sad to tell him that they were not allowed to say. They did not say why this was the case. 

"Can you let me remember being taken?" Gary pleaded.

"No, we're not allowed" the greys responded regretfully.

"Who am I going to tell? Who'd believe me anyway?"

He received no answer, and soon woke up back in bed. At first, he didn't recall the incident - but his memory suddenly came rushing back to him later in the day. He felt as if the beings had allowed him to remember what had happened as a 'thank you' for remaining calm when he had woken up onboard the ship. 

Three days later, he remembered that the small craft had actually left a mountain or mound in the desert via an opening. This implied that he had been taken to an underground facility, and that the "shuttle craft" had been ferrying people back and forth from it. Perhaps he had not been being taken to an off-world mothership all this time, but rather somewhere closer to home?

A few months later, it was December of 2018 and Gary was lying in bed when he felt the familiar heavy feeling that announced the greys' impending arrival. This time, he was prepared for what was coming. The entity pulled the covers all the way off him when he lunged forward and punched it in the face.

It was as if a mask slipped. The grey's face changed immediately - its slit-like mouth suddenly widened to display jagged teeth in a gaping maw. The monstrous thing approached him and Gary pulled his fist back in preparation to punch it again, realising that he was fighting for his life. He blacked out.

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Nonetheless, this experience changed something in him. He had now seen the true face of the greys. They had tried to come across as frail and innocent, but were really vicious predators underneath. He was ready to fight back even harder when they next appeared.

Just a few months passed before the heaviness once again filled his bedroom. The visitors were here. Gary thought to himself that he would have to kick them this time instead of punching them, to gather more power and hopefully do more damage. As soon as this thought crossed his mind, he lost consciousness.

Conclusion

The greys would not appear to him again. They had learned that he was prepared to violently resist, and so adopted more indirect means of kidnapping him. His next experience took place in early 2019, when he was relieving himself late at night. A group of approximately twenty small orbs appeared in the bathroom, swirling around next to his head at high speed. Confused, he retreated from the bathroom. 

In Spring of 2019, Gary had just gotten into bed when a dazzling white light filled his bedroom from the curtained window. He stared at it, transfixed, until a grapefruit-sized orange ball floated through the curtains and into his room. It hovered silently as he watched it, perplexed at this new phenomenon. A dizzying flash caught him off guard, and he lapsed into unconsciousness again.

One cold December morning of that year, Gary woke up and went to look out of his bedroom window. Thick mist covered his garden and field. The gust of wind suddenly blew, pushing the mist around the outline of a large UFO that had previously been invisible. It was some 50ft above the ground, and was a clear oval shape. As the mist gradually cleared, the object did not depart - but was no longer visible. Was he being watched? 

Eventually, Gary realised that he could not do anything to stop the abductions altogether. He often woke with memories of being floated out of his bedroom window, but nothing much else. Eventually, he decided to break his silence and tell Grace about what had been happening. He had to get a little bit drunk to do it. "It would be easier confessing to being a serial killer, I think."

Grace was shocked but supportive, and Gary felt safe enough to also tell his closest friend. His friend also supported him. "Now that the weight has been lifted, I want people to know."

After many decades of abductions, Gary's perspective on his visitors remains negative at the present. He suspects that the human species is essentially livestock to the beings, but has resolved to make the greys' job harder for them by talking openly about his experiences.

"I've spent most of my life trying to block this all out. I think that's what they want you to do... but now, I've gotten through that mental block. The genie is out of the bottle."

Source

Dennett, P. (2020) ‘Chapter Fifteen: Gary Versus the Greys’, in Onboard UFO Encounters: True Accounts of Contact with Extraterrestrials, pp. 175–193.

Friday 17 May 2024

Two Phantom Dog Tales

From here in Britain, it can be easy to assume that supernatural 'black dogs' are a primarily British phenomenon. Most areas of the country you visit have their own local names for the unpleasant creatures, and we even have pubs named in their dubious honour. One was immortalised in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1902 Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles

However, our black dogs are only some among many. Encounters with the hellish hounds stretch across much of the planet. Today I'm going to tell two stories, one of which was told to me directly by a friend, and the other I found in Flying Saucer Review. The latter is so weird that I can't help but tell it.

The Beast of Bhavnagar

People can only know me for so long before I inevitably ask them if they've ever had any encounters with the paranormal. I met Valerie (pseudonym) a couple of years ago and we've grown very close since then. She asked me about UFOs, and I started explaining my research into the topic. It was at this point that she volunteered to tell the story of a strange experience she'd had as a child. 

Valerie grew up in the city of Bhavnagar in the Indian state of Gujarat. In the early 2000s (probably 2005), she remembers sitting on a jhula swingset in the back garden outside her family's house. On the other side of the garden was another swingset owned by the neighbours, backed up by a tall wall. She cannot recall whether anyone else was outside in the garden with her at the time, but she knows that there was at least someone else in the house - possibly one of her grandparents or her sister. 

All of a sudden, something came over the wall behind the neighbour's swingset. Valerie described it to me as misty in texture, comparable to a cloud. It was in the shape of a dog or other four-legged animal, "very black and void-like". The spectral animal seemed to jump over the wall into the garden at great speed. Shortly after hitting the ground, the entity vanished as quickly as it had appeared. 

Valerie was young enough at the time that she couldn't "describe what [she] saw or make sense of it". She told herself that she might've just been dizzy or had some kind of waking dream. She remembers being "disturbed" by it, but deciding not to tell anyone else about it for fear that she wouldn't be believed or would be mocked [1]

Phantom hounds are not nearly as prevalent in India as they are in western Eurasia, but there are some mentions of spirits in the form of black dogs in religious lore. The Mahākanha Jātaka of the Pali Canon tells of how the god Sakka saw that mankind had fallen into a state of wickedness, and so he came to Earth with another god in the form of a fearsome black dog with tusks and chains around its body. He came to the city of Varanasi and pronounced the world doomed, allowing the monstrous hound to chase its residents. 

Before returning to his heavenly abode, Sakka and his dog went to king Usīnara of Varanasi. The dog roared with rage, and the king ordered the monster fed. The dog ate all the food in the city and was still hungry, at which point Sakka told the people that the hound would devour all those who lived in unrighteousness.

"Not to hunt game the Black Hound came, but he shall be of use
To punish men, Usīnara, when I shall let him loose."

Terrified into following the teachings of the Buddha once more, the population was saved from their fate at the jaws of the hellhound. Sakka revealed himself to be the King of the Gods, before disappearing back up into his otherworldly home [2]

UFO Road-Rage at Vereeniging

It was late at night on December 13th of 1963 when the police phone-lines in the Vereeniging district of the Gauteng Province of South Africa lit up with reports of strange lights in the sky. A dazzling object was seen passing over Keyterskloof, roughly 20 miles northeast of Vereeniging city proper. 

One Mr. Gericke, working on a farm near Keyterskloof, saw a "fiery object travelling low over the horizon" that night. He said that it lit up the whole surrounding area as it seemed to disintegrate, before disappearing with "a tremendous bang". The official explanation is given as a meteor. Shortly afterwards, two men approached the Afrikaans newspaper Die Brandwaag to tell their story, which suggests a different explanation for the eerie lights. 

These men were Leslie Immelman and WT Muller. Early in the morning on the 14th, they had been driving along Potchefstroom Road towards Vereeniging and were about 50 miles away from the city. They were unaware of the UFO wave then hitting the surrounding area. Leslie was a sworn skeptic of "ghosts, fairies and any such nonsense", but that was about to change. 

As they raced along the dark road, they passed something large and out of place in the road. Leslie later said that he initially thought it was a buck, and he impelled Muller to turn the car around so that they could look at it. They soon found that it was an "exceptionally large dog". Turning again to drive away from the strange dog, both men were stunned when the area around them was suddenly lit up as bright as daylight. 

This shock quickly turned to panic as a glowing object appeared ahead of them, moving towards their car at enormous speed. Instantly sensing that the UFO was going to collide with their vehicle, both passengers fled the car in terror. As they stood beside their car, the light dove down over their car before ascending again at a breakneck pace. 

Swinging like a pendulum, the object then turned back on itself and made another pass over the car. This time it hovered in place for a moment, bathing the road in its unearthly light. It stood still in the air roughly 50ft above the vehicle, and Leslie could see it clearly enough to describe it in detail. 

It was round in shape, and approximately 50ft in diameter. It glowed an incandescent orange, with a blue light on one end, which seemed to emit a fiery tail of electrical-looking sparks. It was this light that was responsible for lighting up the surrounding environment. The object was accompanied by a gentle humming sound and no noticeable heat. 

Turning to his companion in amazement, Leslie asked Muller if he was seeing the same thing, to which he responded in the affirmative: "Yes, but I don't believe it!"

Like a bullet from a gun, the object then shot away from the witnesses once again - travelling extremely rapidly southeast towards Parys before changing course northwest towards Potchefstroom. It made another pendulum swing down towards the terrified pair's car, and actually repeated this daring manoeuvre "five or six times" - each time "swooping low over us only to disappear into the distance". 

Leslie and Muller had decided to keep their experience to themselves until they saw the coverage of the bizarre 'meteor' flap at Keyterskloof. Both men later swore statements before a Commissioner of Oaths to say that their testimony was "gospel truth", as Leslie later put it. 

About six days later, on Friday the 20th of that month, residents of Krugersdorp (some 47 miles away from Vereeniging) were awoken by two defeaning explosions and an unexplained bright light. One Mrs. A Stoop says she heard a bang coming from an easterly direction at about 3am that morning, before seeing a blue luminous object "swinging... to and fro" over the town. This phenomenon lasted for about a minute before subsiding [3]

Conclusion

The latter story might appear to have very little do to with black dog folklore, but I contend that it is relevant to this specific category of zooform phenomena. A black dog reported from Budleigh Hill in Somerset was said to have gone "up in the air like a flash of fire" when it reached a stream of running water that it presumably could not cross. Another case from Dartmoor in Devon describes a shaggy canine entity that disappeared with a dazzling flash of light and the sound of an explosion [4]

Black dogs and other phantom hounds are found all across Eurasia and the Americas, with examples being known from as far afield as China and Guatemala. It seems likely that they are connected with the frequent mythological appearances of dogs as psychopomps, accompanying the souls of the dead. This archetype is not only present in Eurasia with famous examples like the Greek Kérberos and the Norse Garmr, but is also found in the lore of American civilisations such as the Aztecs and the Mayan Téenek people [5].

Sources

1. Personal correspondence. 

2. Translated by Rouse, WHD. (1901) 'Jataka 469: Mahā-Kaṇha-jātaka' in The Jataka, Vol. 1V. https://sacred-texts.com/bud/j4/j4033.htm

3. ‘On the Road to Vereeniging’ (1964) Flying Saucer Review, 10 (3), pp. 27–28. Translated by P.J. Human.

4. Bord, J. and Bord, C. (1985) ‘Chapter Three: Mysterious Black Dogs’, in Alien Animals: A Worldwide Investigation. HarperCollins, pp. 80–108.

5. Cutchin, J. (2022) ‘Chapter Two: Psychopomps’, in Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death and the Paranormal - Volume One. Horse & Barrel Press, pp. 47–72.





Monday 25 December 2023

The Relic: A Warning for the Unwary

Introduction

Our ancestors kept traditions for a reason. Culture does not tend to endlessly self-replicate without any meaning for the people who live within it. This raises the important question of why religious ritual has survived the ravages of the evolutionary process for (at least) tens of thousands of years if it is merely the product of mistaken conceptions of the world. The modern world is actually becoming more religious, not less [1]. Why? 

Cognitive evolutionary theorists and medical anthropologists seem to have the beginnings of an answer. Ritual works, and appears to be a natural response to something. 

According to Winkelman [2], the psychological impact of ritual is capable of producing physical healing through the placebo effect. This same psychological component produces strong senses of in-group solidarity, contributing to the formation of communities. Individuals with genes that predisposed them to dissociation and extraordinary experiences could've thus been more likely to survive than those without, and rituals were gradually developed that encouraged such experiences [3]

Kalweit [4] speculates that religions have their roots in unusual experience, and in experiencers trying to replicate the conditions that gave rise to their encounters through ritual.

What sort of experiences would give rise to ritual/religious behaviour? Shushan [5] convincingly argues that the spontaneous near-death experience may have been among them. Cutchin [6] highlights that a large percentage of those who apparently return from death find that they have developed extrasensory capabilities that they did not previously possess. They may have increased IQ, the ability to sense the thoughts of others or even to perceive apparitions. According to Vallee [7], similar strange developments take place in the lives of those who come into close contact with unidentified flying objects. 

It seems that psychological and social benefits would not be the only results of regular, ritualised contact with the unknown. 

If some forms of ritual (like shamanic trance) exist in response to the advantages gained from supernatural experience, then what can we say about rituals that developed to repel evil? If paranormal phenomena are the roots of religion, then perhaps a similar experiential basis exists for various taboos and prohibitions. After two decades of misfortune, Jim Hunter would likely agree that such taboos might've existed to protect us from something... 

The Discovery

Jim Hunter contacted paranormal investigator and prolific author Brad Steiger in the mid-1980s to report his ongoing experiences with entities that the latter came to label 'Deiform Spirits'. By Steiger's definition, these are spirit entities that "have congealed in certain places" they deem sacred [8]. Meddling with these places or taking things from them can anger these beings, with unpredictable consequences. 

Hunter's involvement with the Deiform Spirits began when he was just seventeen years old. His father worked for a large South Pacific import company, and so the family moved around frequently - but in 1967, the Hunter family was living in New Zealand. It was March of that year, just shortly after Jim's seventeenth birthday. He had gone on holiday to the isolated coastal town of "Kawhai" [9], and was swimming off the shore when he came across a smooth metallic object lodged between two boulders.

Wrenching the strange object out of its hiding place, Hunter saw that it was shaped like a flat oval, encrusted with algae and seaweed, and seemingly inscribed with some kind of strange symbology. It weighed roughly one pound. Intrigued, he took the item home and showed it to his father. 

Mr. Hunter figured that it was probably of Maori origin, and so encouraged Jim to show it to the local Maori community. After about two weeks, they told him that they had no idea what the object was [10]

Shortly afterwards, an ambiguous figure arrived on the Hunters' doorstep. He introduced himself as a journalist with the New Zealand Herald, and claimed that he had heard about the object from a Maori contact of his. He asked to examine the object, and concluded that it was "made of some kind of bronze alloy". The alleged journalist asked to take the object back to Auckland to run tests on it [11]

The Hunters declined, having already inquired about having a metallurgical analysis of the object done at a university in Christchurch. As far as Jim knows, these tests were never performed, and the object instead languished in a drawer for the next year before the family relocated to New York in May of 1968. 

When Jim went to retrieve it while packing his suitcase, he discovered that it had gone missing. He suspected someone he knew had stolen it, but he had to accept the loss given his limited time left in the country.

Scare Tactics

Amidst the bustle of Auckland International Airport, Jim found himself on his own while his parents bade goodbye to some friends. Two strange men approached him - described as "Polynesian types" - and identified themselves as being affiliated with New Zealand Inland Revenue. 

They asked if he was taking anything illegal out of the country, and despite their professionalism, Jim soon found them very intimidating. They asked specifically about "any relics, art objects, or the like"

Despite his repeated denials of having any such objects, the pair were persistent. They eventually insisted that he come with them to a hotel room for a private baggage check. Frightened, Jim called his father over, who demanded to see their ID cards and asked why they couldn't simply check his son's baggage where they were standing. He got a nonsensical reply in return, and responded by calling for a patrolling constable. Finally taking the hint, the bizarre figures wordlessly "shuffled" away [12]

There were no further incidents until the Fall of 1968. By that time, Jim had enrolled in Columbia University for the freshman year of his undergraduate course. Shortly after the start of the term, a middle-aged man who claimed to be an Italian art dealer approached him. Predictably, this man had somehow heard that Jim had lived in New Zealand and wanted to know if he had brought any interesting artifacts home. 

Presumably starting to suspect that something was amiss, Jim told the 'art dealer' that he didn't have any relics. This didn't stop the man from approaching him two further times to ask the same question [13].

It was around this time that Jim discovered that three of his closest friends in New Zealand had been harassed by figures who seemed to be the same people he had encountered at Auckland airport. 

The letters his friends sent to him used words like "weird", "creepy" and "spooky" to describe the men. Apparently situations had escalated enough that the police had gotten involved, and one girl's life had been threatened. 

"You Have Acted Unjustly"

Jim transferred to Stanford University in 1970, and immediately after he had gotten a telephone installed in his new apartment, he received a bizarre and ominous call. An anonymous voice warned him never to return to New Zealand. 

A second call (from a high-pitched female voice) told him that he was being surveilled by a group that he had wronged by acting "unjustly" and "not returning things to their proper owners" [14]

Throughout his time at both Columbia and Stanford, he received over thirty mystery phone calls regarding New Zealand and the stolen artifact. 

In 1972, Jim was on holiday in San Francisco between graduate work and beginning a teaching career in the Sacramento suburbs. Just a few weeks before starting work as a teacher, he received another phone call to his hotel room. On the other end was a male voice, who said that he "had acted wisely by not returning to New Zealand".

Three days after he'd begun work at the school, a student he'd never seen before stopped off in his classrom. While this wasn't inherently unusual for obvious reasons, the child walked towards the blackboard and drew some strange symbols. Jim's heart dropped - these were the same markings that were on the object from Kawhai. The student asked Jim if he knew what they meant, to which he desperately insisted that he tell him where he'd seen them. 

Swiftly erasing the symbols and laughing, the student said that he had just been "fooling around" before making a rapid exit from the room. When Jim described the offending student to his colleagues, he was frightened to discover that nobody could identify him. He would never see the boy again [15]

After teaching at a high school level for four years, Jim was finally offered a teaching assistant position at a major university. He began his doctorate program in the Fall of 1976. Four days after starting at the university, someone rang his room and reprimanded him for theft. The voice from the other end of the line accused him of "acting unjustly" and demanded that he "should never take anything from where [he] found it"

By the time Jim contacted Brad Steiger, the harassment was infrequent but still ongoing. 

Conclusion

Anthropologist Mary Douglas [16] describes taboos as being for "hedging divinity off" - protecting the supernatural from contact with the profane world, and protecting the profane world from chaotic contact with the supernatural. Supernatural disorder seems to act as a contagious agent according to Douglas, with those who break taboos spreading their misfortune to those they come into contact with. Ritual could almost be thought of as a form of quarantine. 

This reminds me of the descriptions given of visitors to 'window areas' such as Skinwalker Ranch being followed home by unwelcome supernatural guests [17]. This same terrifying effect was observed among Jim Hunter's close friends, who were harassed by the phantom strangers despite presumably not having had much contact with the mystery object. The hitchhiker effect - as this phenomenon has been called - will be the topic of an upcoming article. Watch this space. 

Bibliography

1. Sherwood, H. (2018) ‘Religion: Why Faith is Becoming More and More Popular’, The Guardian, 27 August.

2. Cited in Shushan, G. (2018) ‘Chapter Five: Interpretations, Implications, and Conclusions’, in Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–247.

3. Ibid. 

4. Kalweit, H. (2000) Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men. Boston: Shambala.

5. Shushan, G. (2018) ‘Chapter Five: Interpretations, Implications, and Conclusions’, in Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–247.

6. Cutchin, J. (2022) Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death & the Paranormal Vol One. Horse & Barrel Press.

7. Vallee, J. (2008) Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. San Antonio: Anomalist Books.

8. Steiger, B. (2007) ‘Chapter Nine: Sacred Places of the Deiform Spirits’, in Shadow World: True Encounters with Beings From the Darkside. San Antonio Tex.: Anomalist, pp. 192–216.

9. As far as I can see, there is no coastal town in New Zealand by this name. The location was likely the town of Kawhia on the country's North Island, probably misspelt by Steiger. 

10. Steiger, B. (2007) ‘Chapter Nine: Sacred Places of the Deiform Spirits’, in Shadow World: True Encounters with Beings From the Darkside. San Antonio Tex.: Anomalist, pp. 192–216.

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid. 

16. Cited in Hansen, G.P. (2001) The Trickster and the Paranormal. Philadelphia: Xlibris Corporation.

17. Lacatski, J.T., Kelleher, C.A. and Knapp, G. (2021) Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insider’s Account of the Secret Government UFO Program

 






Tuesday 27 June 2023

The Flatwoods Seance

Looking up from the fog-shrouded fields of Braxton County, Tommy Hyer and Edward and Fred May saw a blinding light streak across the sky before apparently coming down on a nearby farm. It was September 12th of 1952, and the three terrified boys ran back to the May household to tell their incredible story. I imagine that most of this blog's readers will be familiar with what happened next. Accompanied by a local National Guardsman and two other children, the group ventured onto the farm - and were eventually met with one of the most bizarre beings ever recorded in the annals of UFO history: the now infamous Flatwoods Monster.

A Baffling Sequel

Twelve years later, it seemed that the Flatwoods Monster was not yet done with the human race. The strange story apparently transmitted to ufologist Gray Barker by its ill-prepared protagonists also seems to suggest that the entity involved with the 1952 events might not have been a material extraterrestrial, but rather some aberrant form from the spirit world.

Gray Barker's knowledge of the events was made public by Riley Hansard Crabb writing for the Borderline Sciences Research Foundation in 1967. Crabb had previously received a letter from the witnesses, but had not been in further contact with them until Barker investigated the case. Crabb's letter made it clear to him that the witnesses were college students who had picked up an interest in the flying saucer mystery, and had quickly concluded that the answer to said mystery lay in the metaphysical realm as opposed to outer space.

Norman Schreibstein and Ervin Vertleib lived somewhere in Pennsylvania, and they'd decided to establish a home-grown flying saucer observatory in Norman's home in early 1964. One of their first ventures into the ultraterrestrial world would yield far more dramatic results than many seekers could hope to receive after years of work. For reasons best known to themselves, they set their sights on establishing contact with the Flatwoods Monster. 

Contact!

Drawing used for the seance
To begin with, the boys elected to draw up a picture of the robot-like apparition on a large sheet of paper. They found a suitable model for this makeshift idol in the May family's witness sketches that had appeared in Gray Barker's Saucerian Bulletin. The drawing was stuck up on the wall of the observatory, the lights were turned out and the group all sat down the meditate. At this point, Schreibstein and Vertleib had been joined by individuals named Mark Kaplan and Patricia Morgan, as well as Norman's unnamed skeptical cousin. 

Upon sitting in the dark for roughly fifteen minutes, a light appeared above their heads in the room. The floating orb lazily circled the room. Another light briefly appeared and disappeared. Perhaps predictably, Schreibstein's cousin promptly fled the room. 

Showing boundless dedication, Vertleib reached out into the darkness. He felt a disembodied hand clasp his own and firmly shake it, as if in acknowledgement that contact had been successfully established. At this point, the group needed a way to properly communicate with the entity that was manifesting in their room - and they decided on a simple code for the floating light to follow - one circle for yes, two for no. 

Crabb doesn't say who was first to break the silence, but the first question they asked was whether the entity in question was the Flatwoods Monster. They received a single circle in response, signalling 'yes'. They next asked if the entity minded if they told others about their encounter, which was answered 'no'. The entity responded in the affirmative to a question on whether it was friendly, and then offered no firm answer when asked if it was limited to appearing at Norman's house. 

"If you are solid, give us some sign."

This final question was a mistake. This became clear to the group as the whole house started to violently shake, and deafening crashes were heard in the observatory room. In terror, someone flipped the room's light switch, causing the spiralling light to immediately vanish. Norman was appalled to see that his PA system and microphone had been smashed, and that the camera the group had been hoping to use to photograph the phenomenon had been thrown across the room and had had its lenses unscrewed. A model airplane had been broken as it hurtled to the floor, and it lay among chaotic heaps of books and other detritus.

Somehow undeterred by the threatening display, the boys swiftly turned the lights out again and sat around in their seance circle. The light appeared once more, floating just above Vertleib's head. He impulsively reached up and grabbed it - and was stunned to grasp a "sharp, metallic structure". This object remained in his hands for roughly ten seconds before it jerked itself away and continued its flight around the room. 

The activity in the room escalated one final time, as Mark and Norman felt humanlike fingers touch their foreheads and Patricia felt one touch her throat. The floating light started to lurch around, divebombing the seance participants and being met with screams of alarm. As if satisfied by the terror it had inflicted, the light dove into the Flatwoods Monster drawing and disappeared. Norman claimed that the drawing was hot to the touch shortly afterwards. Patricia soon developed a sore throat, and Mark and Norman had terrible headaches. 

Follow-Up

Three strange men showed up to Norman Schreibstein's house in September of that year. Perhaps they were curious about the letter he had sent to Crabb, or perhaps they were late to the punch in dealing with the seance. Although both Norman and Ervin were familiar with the concept of the Men in Black, Norman didn't recognise the figures at first. Instead, he assumed that the men had a genuine interest in flying saucers, and so happily allowed them access to the observatory. 

Bizarrely, the men seemed largely disinterested in the books and UFO memorabilia on display throughout the seance room, but rather focused their attention on the electrical equipment in the space. They carefully examined the PA system, and inquired about the specific make of his tape recorder. Crabb pointed out that Albert Bender experienced problems with his radio in the attic that played host to many of his encounters with the Men in Black. It was as they prowled around his observatory investigating various wires and dials that Norman started to feel a cold chill scuttle down his back - he suddenly knew that these 'men' were not human beings. 

Almost as if they'd sensed the shift in their host's awareness, the men turned to leave. Before they did so, however, they sternly told Norman to "get the hell out of flying saucer research if you know what's good for you" - as well as threatening him with "serious consequences" if he told anyone about their visit. It seems he later did this anyway and was entirely unharmed.

In the next few months, Schreibstein experienced four more visits from a phantasmal stranger. Crabb likened this character to a stereotypical CIA agent, and Norman described him as being "about 33" in age and being roughly 6ft in height. The man had dark skin and wore distinctive horn-rimmed glasses, as well as a strange ring on one of the fingers of his left hand. Perhaps predictably, the CIA man also warned Norman to leave flying saucer research. 

The boys were apparently not frightened by these tricks, and Gray Barker claimed that they actually had "other psychic experiences", which they were unfortunately not happy to be made public at the time of Crabb's writing. 

Source 

Who Flys the Saucers? by Riley Hansard Crabb, 1967

Thursday 2 December 2021

Whispering Clowns in the Woods: The Genesis of a Panic

Hysteria consumed the globe in 2016 - starting in Summer and concluding after Halloween. There were men patrolling neighbourhoods across the world dressed as clowns, and these sinister figures were menacing children, chasing pedestrians and even sometimes attacking people with various weapons. Several arrests were made, proving that the majority of these clowns were flesh-and-blood criminals exploiting a growing atmosphere of panic, but there are certainly some reports which seem to be slightly more mysterious. The first of these anomalous reports took the form of the first report of the entire panic. Today I am taking you to Fleetwood Manor in Greenville, South California - be warned, there are clowns in the woods.

This photo fits the description of the first two clowns

Outbreak! 

The young son of a woman named Donna Arnold would become patient zero in a coulrophobic hysteria that would soon reach pandemic proportions across the globe in the Summer of 2016. It was 8:30pm on the 21st of August - and the boy could see two men dressed in bright clothing in the nearby forest behind the local basketball court. As he looked closer, he soon realised that he was looking at two clowns - one of whom was wearing a red fright wig and the other had a black star painted on his face. The clowns apparently whispered something to him, but what exactly this was remained unclear throughout the reporting. Donna was originally skeptical of her son's claims, but felt it necessary to report the incident to the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office just in case. She told her son to calm down and assured NBC News that she wasn't eager to let rumours of clowns spread across the community. She said that her son had 'seen clowns in the woods whispering and making strange noises'.

A police deputy was dispatched to investigate the matter, and he uncovered several other sightings of kooky characters dressed as clowns. An anonymous individual said that she had seen a 'large-figured' clown with a blinking nose stood under a post light near a garbage dumpster area. The strange man waved at her and she nervously waved back, but the enigmatic entertainer did not approach her or harm her in any way. He seemingly just stood there. The neighbourhood had suddenly been taken over by clowns. Another woman claimed that her son had told her that he had heard clanging chains accompanied by a banging noise at the front door.

Things would only spiral out of control from there - and although Donna had disbelieved her son, she would soon be forced to reevaluate this conclusion when thirty children approached her the day after her son had allegedly seen the phantom figure and asked her if she had seen the clowns in the woods. Although the reporting somewhat differs among my myriad of sources, it would seem to be the case that her son then took her to where he had seen the clowns - and she would become the second confirmed adult witness of the phenomenon. She saw two clowns in the forest 'flashing green laser lights' before they ran off into the woods. It had taken one day for the clown hysteria to reach epidemic proportions among the child population of the area.

The Greenville County Sheriff's Office released a report based on the findings of their investigations in the week of the first sighting, and most of the details from the former two paragraphs are sourced from there. The Greenville police also said that children had told them that the clowns had showed them 'large amounts of money' in order to persuade them to follow them into the forest according to the police report obtained by ABC News. The children also believed that the clowns lived in 'a house located near a pond at the end of a man-made trail in the woods'. This might've sounded like a fantastical detail pulled from a fairytale, but deputies working for Master Deputy Ryan Flood searched the forest and found a house matching this exact description after following a trail - but it was completely empty and didn't contain any 'clown paraphenalia'. Every time they investigated this house, they continually failed to find 'clothing or anything else' that might've indicated that anyone lived there. Flood stated that he didn't think there were any circuses in town, and that there was apparently no history of unusual clown sightings in the area. Interestingly, he also stated that there were no CCTV cameras installed anywhere that the clowns had allegedly been spotted, and so the reports were all impossible to substantiate.

Nothing Spreads Faster Than Fear 

It took three days for the clown hysteria to spread beyond Fleetwood Manor. On the 23rd of August, Greenville City Dispatch responded to a late-night call from Shemwood Crossing on Shemwood Lane about a menacing clown which had made its getaway in a dark car after being confronted. The residents told a crew from WSPA News that they had been alerted to the presence of more clowns when their children had told them that the costumed freaks were lurking by the local playground. They chased after the clowns, whereupon the odd characters high-tailed it out of there in a mysterious vehicle. This took place at roughly 9:00pm. The police were planning to increase patrols in this region.

The letter sent to Fleetwood Manor tenants
Just because it had spread didn't mean that it wasn't still holding Fleetwood Manor in its clown-gloved hand. On the 24th, the manager of the apartment complex sent a letter to all their tenants warning them about the alleged presence of the clowns and encouraging them to call the police if they saw anything strange. Greenville County law enforcement was apparently conducting routine patrols around the apartments in light of the reports. A community activist by the name of Bruce Wilson noted that there were between 200 and 300 children in the area, and told WDTV News that he was now getting involved in making sure that the police are 'doing the right thing'.

It was 8:20pm on Monday, August 29th when the Greenville Sheriff's Office received a panicked phone call from a 12-year-old girl on White Horse Road. She was calling from Emerald Commons apartment complex, and she told deputies that she had seen a man riding on a blue bike taking photographs of children from around her backyard area. Shortly after she noticed this, a man wearing a black jacket and a clown mask emerged from the woods 'before going away'. This newly-infected apartment building was 20 minutes away from Fleetwood Manor.

The Lakehouse

In October of that year, Matthew Teague and a team of reporters for the UK newspaper The Guardian ventured to South California to report on the clown situation from the scene of the crime, as it were - and they found that things had changed quite considerably. The clown panic had already gone global, stretching across the United States and then spreading to the United Kingdom. Within the next few days it would move to Spain, Chile, Singapore, Brazil, Sweden, Mexico and Denmark.

When the news crew got there, Donna Arnold was still eager to tell them about the clowns she had seen with her son, and she pointed them towards the woods and explained about the abandoned house from which the clowns had allegedly originated. Intrigued, the reporters followed the odd little path down towards the house in the forest - and found it just as derelict as it had been initially described - but something odd had happened in the two months since it had been reported on. Although the balcony was sagging down and someone had boarded up the windows, a modern security system had been installed outside it, apparently quite recently. New bags of potting soil had been left near to the basement door. It still looked as if nobody had lived in it for years, but it seemed that someone was now planning something.

Perplexed, the confusion felt by the reporters would only grow in strength when a gleaming white Mercedes of a new model pulled up to the house shortly after sunset. The driver stepped out of the mysterious vehicle - which 'looked as out of place as any clown car' - and she was immediately ambushed by the waiting pack of reporters. They asked her about the house and she said that she had bought it recently as an investment due to it sitting on a free space of five acres in an area that was otherwise quite densely populated. Interestingly, she refused to give her name - and was wearing an in-ear headset which meant that it was often quite difficult for the reporters to tell if she was talking to them or to someone on her phone. When they asked her about the clown sightings, she scoffed at them and asked why none of the children had taken photographs on their phones - which they could obviously work far better than she could and so it made no sense to her that there was still no evidence.

Thinking that this information would comfort Donna, Teague naively went back to her house and told her this. She laughed at him and then invited him to come round to the back of the home. The house backed onto the dense woods in which the clowns had first appeared - and Teague couldn't help but notice the ugly dent in the back door where the paint appeared to have been chipped away. With complete conviction, she told him that the clowns had hit the door with a chain. She had seen them hit the door with a chain and then run off into the forest as soon as she approached them with the intention of making them answer for their crimes. She was now certain that there were men dressed as clowns in the forest out to torment the good people of Greenville.

Sources 


Monday 1 November 2021

A Visit to the Puppy People

 Like most good things, the book first appeared in October. Skinwalkers at the Pentagon was independently published on the 10th of October, 2021. It tells the story of a program known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) that ran out of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2008 to 2010. It investigated UFOs and other paranormal happenings. A special focus of the program was on the 'Skinwalker Ranch' property in Utah's Uintah Basin - and an alarming discovery was made through study of this site. It seems to be possible for paranormal experiences to move among populations as if they were infectious agents. A contagion of the impossible. 

One documented case of this apparent infectious capability of the Skinwalker Ranch phenomena was told in the first chapter of the book. Jonathan Axelrod (likely a pseudonym) was a senior aerospace engineer in Naval intelligence, and had been involved with the AAWSAP program since the beginning. He had been sent to Skinwalker Ranch in July of 2009, and there - along with two of his team members - he had an encounter with a bizarre unidentified flying object. After he went home from this mission, however, it would soon become apparent that what he had seen on the ranch was not content to stay on the ranch. 

Among other escalating anomalies on the Axelrod property, one of the details I was shocked to see in the DOD-cleared book was a description of a strange animal - or animal-like entity - that menaced the aerospace engineer's family. This beast was said to resemble an enormous wolf. It stood on its hind legs, and ran bipedally with no qualms. It seemed highly hostile towards the family. Both Axelrod's wife and two children saw the hairy horror prowling their property. If the Defense Intelligence Agency - and by extension the Pentagon itself - takes reports of werewolf-like monsters seriously, then perhaps it's time we should too. If we take this plunge, what kind of nightmarish wonderland might we find ourselves in? 

Well, there's a story that I heard coming over crackling airwaves one night which might shed some light on that question...

Dial D for Dogman

Every time young James went to his aunt and uncle's house, he would ask to go to the room with the phone booth. It was an eclectic little space, filled with all sorts of retro paraphernalia. The phone booth was in one corner - it was a wood-framed glass box with bi-fold doors and a nice bench. There was no phone in it, but rather simply an empty box where the phone would've been. It still worked well enough to have a light and a fan that came on when he closed the doors, though, and so it was good enough for him - he was only five or six years old, after all.

James' mother and his aunt were really close, and so he has many fond memories of going over to that house in the evening with his grandmother, so that the three adults could catch up and play dice together. His cousins were all significantly older than him, and so he often found himself simply marooned all by his lonesome. It was him and the phone booth. 

One evening in the late 1980s (either '87 or '88), James and the cousin who was closest in age to him were playing in the yard of the aforementioned house. They were tossing a softball and their grandmother had stashed in the yard back and forth between them in the dusky light. His cousin threw it a little too high for him to catch, and so it flew over his head and over the rusty chain-link fence that surrounded the yard. Presumably grumbling to himself, he approached the fence and moved towards the overgrown alleyway just behind it - and as he did so, he could hear something moving. Getting closer, he could now see movement. 

The thing behind the fence had brownish fur, and at first he assumed it was a dog. Then he realised it was too big to be a dog, and that its body looked wrong. It looked like a man, lying down on its belly. There were distinct hands, holding onto the chain-link fence. It had a pointed snout and long ears, and it appeared to be attempting to drag itself down the alley. James froze, staring at the creature. The only word his young brain could conjure was 'monster'. 

Finally snapping out of his dazed state, James ran back into the main section of the yard to fetch his cousin. "Hey, there's something crazy in the alley back here!" He explained that he'd seen something weird, and then of course his cousin wanted to see whatever it was too. They headed back towards the alleyway together, but by the time they arrived there the creature had vanished. James pushed it from his mind, and thought nothing of the crawling terror until his sophomore years in high school, when it would force its way back inside his head. 

During his teenage sophomore years, he would always get home from school, have a quick bite to eat and then go to his bedroom and lie down before even thinking about doing homework or going out anywhere. He was always tired. One night, he was lying in bed when the distinct feeling of not being alone anymore came over him. It was dark in his room and it was dark outside, but his bedroom door was open a crack. Light came in from the rest of the house, meaning that the room wasn't totally pitch black. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he noticed a number of figures stood around him. At first he thought it was his parents, but then he noticed that they didn't quite look human. They were too tall. His heart sank as he thought back to the alleyway. There were at least three or four of the monsters in his bedroom. He lay there for a moment - paralysed with fear. He closed his eyes for a split second, and then when he opened them again the beasts were gone. 

In the years since, he tried to rationalise this experience away as a dream. A hormone-fuelled nightmare. But it didn't feel like a dream - it felt physically real, it felt like they were there in his room. He said that he felt like he was being observed by the creatures. 

The next time he would see one of the monsters would be 2005, when he was working at a Borders Group bookstore. He had a large group of friends, and they would often go to eat out at a restaurant in the same shopping centre as the bookshop. On the nights that he wasn't working, they might all drive to one of their houses and share in merrymaking and a few drinks. One of these nights, however, it was just James and Gary going to a friends' house. Gary was James' boyfriend at the time - later his husband. They drove up to the house, stayed for some appetisers and perhaps a beer before they felt the need to go home and unwind. As they were driving down a rural road, just a few blocks away from their house, James noticed that there was something in the road. 

He slowly stopped talking and started to focus solely on the strange thing in the centre of the road. Gary followed suit, and soon the two lovers were sat in silence in the car. The weather was misty, but not too foggy to impede visibility. The object blocking their path was an animal. It had a long snout and pointed ears, like a dog. It was on all fours at first, but then it stood up on its hind legs - showing that it had a torso and arms like a man. Its legs were digitigrade - bent backwards like those of a dog, not plantigrade like a human's. The horrifying apparition looked towards them, and then faded out of visibility. "It was just sort of not there anymore". 

All the other encounters, James could at least try to rationalise. Maybe the creature in the alley was just an injured animal that had managed to drag itself out of view before his cousin saw it? Perhaps the entities in his bedroom were the product of a hormonal teenager's nightmares? But this experience was something beyond that. There were multiple witnesses, as Gary would later confirm to James. He wondered if perhaps the werewolf-like creatures really were from his mind, and that he had somehow 'projected' it into the street. But they felt physical every time. 

As he thought more about it, James realised that he was the common denominator in all of these experiences. The wolfmen had followed him from his grandmother's house, to his parents' house and now to his own house. They were stalking him. Seemingly unprompted, he started to think back to his times playing in the phone booth. It felt like it was connected somehow. He called his mother and asked if she remembered it - to which she replied by confirming that she did. He asked her what he had told her he was doing in there, and she was unsure. She said that he would just sit on the bench, giggling and talking to himself. A little while later, however, she called him back. She'd remembered something about what he had said about his time in the phone booth. James had said that he would go to visit the 'Puppy People'.

Source

Radio Rental: Episode 13

Friday 16 July 2021

François Bertrand: The Monster of Montparnasse

Content Warning: This article discusses topics related to sexual crimes. Reader discretion advised.

A 1936 illustration of the case
Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the beautiful city of Paris, and despite the peaceful veneer it now possesses, it was the site of the first encounter with a ghoulish spectre that would come to briefly govern a reign of pure terror throughout Paris for several months in 1847. This foul creature was known to visit cemeteries in and around Paris, scaling tall walls and inexplicably resisting attacks by guard dogs in order to violate and even devour recently-buried corpses. Eventually, however, the perpetrator of these gruesome attacks would be apprehended - but far from solving the mystery, this turn of events would present investigators with what nowadays looks very much like a real-life mirror of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde...

A Nocturnal Violation

It would glide behind the rows of tombstones, and the guards of Père Lachaise Cemetery were seemingly powerless to stop whatever nefarious business it was carrying out. It was described as being 'partly human and partly animal' and would vanish like an illusion when the guards attempted to capture it. The guards' dogs refused to attack the beast - barking and howling with 'abject terror' when deployed to catch the thing.

The next morning a truly foul scene awaited the terrified guards of the cemetery. Graves had been dug up and coffins had been burst open. The contents of these destroyed caskets had been scattered all over the ground, and had - horrifyingly - been partially eaten by the same ghastly thing that had visited the graveyard the night before. This horrifying cycle would continue 'at length' - with the phantom always evading capture and violating yet more resting places in search of its sickening meals. When consulted, medical professionals announced that the damage to the cadavers had been done with human teeth, which I can imagine was somehow both comforting and the exact opposite at the same time. The quantity of guards watching over the cemetery was doubled, but no sign of the true culprit of the raids was ever found. A young soldier attempting to meet with a friend at the cemetery was arrested under vampiric suspicion, but he was found not guilty and released.

It must've seemed like the terror in Père Lachaise would be unending - and yet eventually it suddenly drew to an abrupt halt. However, the monster was not quite finished with its rampage, and instead of vanishing entirely it had merely relocated its horrific crusade against those who rest in peace. A young girl - 'greatly beloved by her relatives and friends' - was to form the monster's next meal. Her funeral was attended by a large group of saddened onlookers, and so of course the outrage was truly enormous when her coffin was discovered to have been exhumed overnight so that some mysterious pervert could feed on her body. The girl's father was briefly listed as a suspect, and was actually arrested for the crime, but his innocence was quickly established and he was released. Some members of the public were now beginning to suspect that perhaps the perpetrator of these horrific crimes was not of flesh and blood - seeing as the cemetery in which the girl had been devoured was protected by 'very high' walls and massive iron gates kept shut all night. It seemed as if no mortal man would be able to scale these obstacles.

However, these walls, which had once seemed to throw a hefty spanner into the proceedings of the investigation in the matter, would soon become what would ultimately lead to the capture of the culprit. An old army officer crucially noticed that there was a certain point on one of the walls that showed signs of having been frequently scaled. Although it was nearly 10ft tall at this specific point, precautions to catch a human perpetrator were taken just in case. The aforementioned officer constructed a booby trap - consisting of a tripwire attached to an explosive - on the wall in question, meaning that nobody would be able to climb it without causing an explosion. Sure enough, an explosion was heard from the vicinity at around midnight that night.

The detectives that had been tasked with keeping watch over the beseiged graveyard rushed to the scene of the detonation. There, they caught sight of a humanoid figure stood at the base of the wall. Immediately opening fire upon the apparition, they were seemingly able to wound the creature but unable to capture it - seeing as it supposedly dashed up the wall with prodigious speed, moving 'with the agility of a monkey'. Despite its escape, it was the beginning of the end for the Parisian prowler. A trail of blood had been left behind when it scaled the wall, and there were scraps of torn uniform scattered about the scene. It was thus concluded by the onlookers that the perpetrator was wounded, and was a soldier.

This might not have been enough to catch the one responsible if it weren't for mumblings between members of the 74th Regiment which were overheard by some local grave-diggers. These soldiers were talking about how a sergeant of their regiment had been taken to Val-de-Grâce Hospital after being badly wounded the night before. This seemed like a promising lead, and so the identity of this sergeant was at once found out and he was questioned. Sergeant François Bertrand was interrogated and freely confessed his guilt.

The First Necrophile

Sergeant Bertrand seemed to present himself as being as much of a victim as his deceased prey. He claimed that he had been being controlled by some external force, and that this nebulous force would never leave him. He appeared to be a victim of possession - being unable to describe his sensations while he was under the thing's influence but knowing that he was 'not himself' while thus controlled, and was instead some vicious and ravenous animal. He told of how he didn't require any instruments to dig up the bodies - instead just tearing through the soil and the coffins with his bare hands under the moonlight, like some starved beast. He confessed to having once exhumed and bitten fifteen bodies in one night.

A 1936 illustration of the Sergeant

Apparently he would always fall into a very deep sleep after his nocturnal activities - during which he was aware of his body undergoing some inexplicable type of metamorphosis. He told the court that he had first fell into one of these literally transformative slumbers after an excursion to one of the secluded locales he often liked to visit when he was younger. He was apparently something of an introverted youth, preferring the company of animals to that of his fellow man - and often choosing to spend his time in isolated regions such as moors and deserts. The evening after he first fell into his supernatural sleep, he was passing a cemetery in which some grave-diggers were busy covering a recently interred corpse - and was seized by a sudden urge to enter the site and watch them at work. He was unable to resist this, and when a sudden bout of rain prompted the grave-diggers to briefly abandon their work (leaving a cadaver unattended) - he found himself afflicted by 'horrible desires'. His head throbbed with pain and his heart felt like it would break out of his chest.

He was only prevented from feeding on the corpse before him by the arrival of some of his friends on the scene. He was thus able to resist the temptation, but for many a night in the future he would not be so lucky. He claimed that the same grotesque urges would invade his mind every night from then on, and he would often find himself figuratively (and perhaps literally) transformed into a man-eating monster. He would eviscerate the corpses of his victims before masturbating - experiencing pleasure that was 'nothing in comparison' with what he could experience with living partners.

Once the trial, held in front of a military counsel on the 10th of July, 1847 and presided over by one Colonel Manselon, ultimately concluded that Bertrand was guilty of everything he had confessed to - and sentenced him to one year in prison. His case would become the inspiration for Joseph Guislain, a Belgian physician, to coin the term 'necrophilia' to refer to the condition under which people gain sexual pleasure from dead bodies.

Werewolf or Pervert?

Interestingly enough, I don't think that the reports of Bertrand being 'partly human and partly animal' have ever been properly addressed or explained. Although some more sensationalistic sources have called him a vampire, I would instead be driven to conclude that his case more closely fits the folkloric definition of an Arabic ghoul. These gruesome spirits would feed on the flesh of the dead, prowling cemeteries at night and hunting in packs. They were also said to be capable of shapeshifting to deceive humans and blend into their society. While deliberate shapeshifting seems not to have been an element in Bertrand's case, the description of a morphing monster feeding on corpses sounds very much like a classic ghoul. Obviously, another folkloric connection could be made to the legend of the werewolf. The description of Bertrand scaling a 10ft fence at extreme speeds also seems not to fit with the notion of this being a purely mundane crime spree, and of course his testimony of not being in control of himself during his ghastly excursions becomes a lot more interesting when viewed through a lycanthropic lens. This same lack of control has been reported in other cases involving cannibalism and other such abhorrent crimes, in the case of Austin Harrouff for example. 

Sources

'Werwolves' by Elliott O'Donnell

'François Bertrand' on Wikipedia