Strange Brew: The Mothman Mystery

I like nothing better than to discuss and trade theories on crypto-zoology, UFOs, and all aspects of the unexplained with other curious minds. One of my new co-workers is a sharp, eccentric, funny guy who, like yours truly, is interested in the weird and the arcane. The other day at lunch, he and I were mulling over tales of a number of strange phenomena and our discussions harkened me back to some of the better books I have read on this type of subject. There exists for me, no tastier food for thought.

One of the weirdest, most unexplainable (in ordinary terms)cases of strange sightings, is the puzzle of West Virginia's Mothman. The late paranormal investigator, John A. Keel wrote the ultimate account of the happenings, a classic documentary of weirdness, from which a major motion picture was eventually developed: The Mothman Prophecies.

This book chronicles decades of sightings of a seven foot tall, brownish-gray being with leathery, bat-like wings and blazing, red eyes, reported by average folk in and around the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. As if being terrorized by a giant, demonic bat-man wasn't enough, at around the same time, these simple, church-going, working-class people also experienced multiple UFO sightings, as well as visits from the notorious "Men-In-Black", those odd-looking, humanoid types in rumpled, ill-fitting, three-piece suits, well known to those familiar with UFO lore, who ring the doorbell after you report that you've seen something strange. Various and sundry giant birds, Sasquatch creatures and other bizarre things also popped up along the dark roads of West Virginia in those days and still do from time to time.

To my mind, the best and most thought-provoking thing about Keel's master-work, with its exhaustive research and scrupulous regard for detail, is the theory he puts forth to "explain" this unexplainable wave of weirdness that has held a community in its' grip for decades.

Rather than being distinct, separate, strange phenomena, Mr. Keel seemed to think that all this weirdness is, in fact, the same thing...or at least, it emanates from the same source. He stopped short of postulating exactly what he thinks it is, or who (or what, exactly) is behind it all, but he hinted that it may be the fault of a lapse of the veil that separates the dimensions. He suggested that we are not being visited by the denizens of far-flung galaxies, in other words; they are here among us already, and always have been, along with big-foot, wolfmen, ghosts and yes, mothmen...we just don't perceive them except under special conditions. Those conditions were surely present in the hills of West Virginia in the late nineteen sixties, and in many other places throughout our world, before and since.

Having read extensively on spirituality, metaphysics, and a bit about quantum physics, I have come to understand that our visible, material world is far from the only "reality" that there is. I find these accounts fascinating and I never tire of hearing or reading about them; one person can hallucinate, one person might be crazy, drunk or lying, but dozens of otherwise reliable, sane and honest people seeing the same something that can't possibly be real? How is that possible?

John A. Keel passed from this reality on July 3rd of last year, but he leaves a legacy of intelligent, matter-of-fact investigations into the unknown, along with his paranormal classic, The Mothman Prophecies.

No Explanation

I sat in my window on a sultry summer night, staring at something I could not comprehend, trying to wrap my mind around it. Curiosity quickly turned to abject terror as I watched this strange white fireball do something I would have thought completely out of character for a natural phenomenon. Rolling along in a straight line was one thing, suddenly taking a sharp, ninety degree turn as it did almost seemed to indicate intent...or...intelligence? I was struck by the sudden thought that somehow it was aware of me! Crazy! But I wasn't taking any chances and I did just what any coward would do under the circumstances... I slammed the window shut and locked it. Then I slammed the other window in the room shut and locked that one as well. I pulled both window shades down tightly and sat there hyperventilating for a while. It quickly became sweltering in my little room, but there was no way on God's green Earth that I was opening those windows that night. I remember imagining it outside underneath the window. I pictured myself lifting the shade and seeing it there. I didn't sleep very much that night, or for several nights immediately afterward. I tried to tell my parents about it the next day, but they didn't seem too concerned. I suspect they thought I was "imagining things" and I didn't waste much time trying to convince anyone. I knew what I had seen...I just did not know what it was!
Since then in the many years that have passed, I think about what it might possibly have been. The "willow-the-wisp" answer seemed plausible until I thought about that sudden sharp turn it took into my driveway. Ball lightning was a major contender, but the fact that there was no sound at all, no thunder heard or lightning seen that night at all, seemed to rule that out.
It occurred to me that perhaps it was not a natural thing at all, and I could not rule out extra-terrestrial(or extra-dimensional?)possibilities. In general, I have a very open mind. I definitely believe that there are unseen forces, energies and perhaps, entities that have not been officially documented. It seems to me the greatest arrogance, to dismiss something simply because we have not personally experienced it, and science has not, or cannot prove its existence.
The relatively recent emergence of the incredible world of quantum physics has validated much that we would have previously thought impossible. There is much we still don't know and cannot explain about this universe. I still don't know what it was, but I would love to find out!

A Mid-Summer Night Mystery

As I have mentioned before, I've experienced several very strange things that I have no good explanation for in my life thus far. One of these incidents happened when I was roughly fourteen or fifteen years old. I lived in a town not far from here with my parents and siblings, on a side street just east of a main road. The house we lived in at that time was on a little hill and my bedroom was located on the west side over the garage. There was a west-facing window in my room from which I looked out over the driveway below. Beyond the driveway was a fence surrounding a neighbor's yard and their home beyond. Further west, beyond the neighbor's property was the aforementioned main road. My bed was positioned lengthwise along the west wall of the room, and I was in the habit of sitting on the end of the bed, elbows propped on the window ledge. Many an evening would find me in that spot, admiring the sunset or watching the cars go by out on the main street, on the way into or out of town.
One very hot and muggy summer night, I was gazing out my window watching for fireflies and listening to the katydids murmur. The rest of my family had retired for the evening. It was a week night, well after ten pm and all was quiet, but we did not have air conditioning in those days and I was too hot to sleep. The neighbor's home on the other side of the fence was completely dark. They were an older couple whose children were grown and gone, and I guess they too had gone to bed for the night.
Suddenly, without warning, a dazzling, bright light about the size of a soft-ball rose up from behind the fence right in front of me! It looked as if it was burning somehow, with white fire, like a sparkler that children wave as they run across lawns on the Fourth of July, but there was no hiss or crackling sound and not a soul was in sight. It was totally silent. It rose up a few inches above the top of the fence, only about 5 or 6 yards away from where I was sitting behind the window screen. It hovered for a second and then disappeared behind the fence. My initial reaction was one of intense curiosity. What the heck was that?, I asked myself. I had heard of "willow the wisps" and "St. Elmo's fire", rare phenomena related to swamp gas or electromagnetic anomalies. Maybe this was something like that. I'd read about something called ball lightning, but I recalled that it was usually accompanied by thunder storms, and tends to explode loudly shortly after forming. There was no sound to this at all. I didn't know anyone who'd ever reported seeing anything like this. I was sitting, calmly pondering this with no sense of fear or anxiety at all, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw it again. Moving up the street now, flashing brilliant white sparks, it rolled slowly along in the gutter. It did not appear to bounce at all, or veer off course as you would expect a natural thing might do. I sat puzzling over this, watching as it steadily approached the end of our driveway.
Then, it did something totally unexpected and utterly terrifying. When it reached the end of our driveway, it suddenly took a razor sharp right turn and started rolling up the driveway directly toward me. More later...

Voice In The Night, Epilogue

The events I have related in the preceding posts actually happened, and are presented here to the best of my recollection. Over the years when the subject of strange phenomena comes up in conversation and I tell the story, people inevitably come up with what they think are the most probable explanations for what I experienced. Some say that I was most likely asleep and dreaming. Others suggest that someone was playing a trick on me. Still others think that perhaps an actual, living person was out there, trying to lure me away and harm me. I have examined all these theories and I am convinced to this day, roughly forty years later, that none of them apply. First, I remember thinking that I must be dreaming at the time and literally pinching myself, hoping with all my heart that I would wake up. I was, and still am, certain I was fully awake. Second, there were no kids near my age in that neighborhood that I was aware of at the time, and certainly no one who would have known my name or been aware of my obsession with cats, as I lived nearly an hour's drive away and had never visited for more than a few hours at a time before that night. My grandparents were pretty serious people, and elderly, certainly not prone to fooling around or playing jokes at two or three o'clock in the morning. Third, if there was a pedophile out there with bad intentions, he would have had to scale the concrete and stone wall with no stairs or ladder and without being detected, and since the door was open and I was completely defenseless, why didn't he just come in and get me? I don't know what it was that I heard, but I believe it was something that could best be defined as paranormal. I have had several other weird experiences, including two occasions when I saw things that I could not and still, to this day, cannot explain. Maybe I will tell you about them sometime.

Footfalls In The Darkness

A week or so after my ill-fated sleep-over, I was visiting again, during the day, this time with my mother. "Nanny", I said, "I think your house is haunted".
"Well, child", she began slowly...
My grandfather, who was puttering around in the dining room laughed, "Don't listen to her, she's from the old country, ya know! She believes in leprechauns and banshees, she'll tell you a fairy story!" he chided.
"Tell me!" I demanded, and my grandmother began a tale of a time when she had just moved into the three family house on the south side of Boylston Street as a young bride, fresh off the boat from Ireland.
Pa was a policeman working the night shift in those days, and Nanny was at home alone from dusk until dawn. It was in those days before children had come, and she had only a small dog to keep her company.
One quiet, late evening as she occupied herself with household tasks, she became aware of the sound of footsteps coming from the bedroom. Her little dog was standing in the hall, in an alert position, his ears cocked, growling low in his throat and peering into the dark room. In the far, northwest corner of her bedroom, there was a pass door into the tiny back room. The footsteps sounded as if someone was walking back and forth from the back room into the master bedroom. From the small dog's reaction, it was clear that he thought so too! Nanny waited up all night until Pa completed his shift and returned home. In her shaken state, she told him what she had heard.
Pa thought that she was simply suffering from an over-active imagination and downplayed the incident, but the next night the footsteps came again, and the next night as well, until Nanny insisted that Pa board up the doorway that joined their bedroom with the little back room.
Nanny held out hope that this would solve problem, until later that evening when Pa was gone off to walk his beat in the city, and the knocking started! Something was pounding on the boarded up door between the rooms! Her little dog barked and whined furiously while she quaked in terror!
The next day she wasted no time in calling a priest from her parish, who came over and blessed the house. After the blessing, they hung a large picture of Saint Theresa, The Little Flower in the boarded-up doorway. Things were reportedly quiet from that day forward.
I turned to my mother and asked whether she had ever experienced anything out of the ordinary during her years of occupation of the back room and she dismissed the question with a laugh and a wave of her hand; "I never heard anything!"
My brothers had also scoffed at me...none of them had ever had anything happen to them in the back room either. But Nanny didn't laugh. She completely understood why I would never spend the night again.

The Terror In The Night

Around the time of my first sleep-over at my grandparent's house, I can remember having a major crush on Rex Trailer. Rex was the dark haired, lasso swinging good guy with a beautiful buckskin horse who graced Boston television in the sixties. Every Sunday morning for years I could be found watching Rex, Pablo and Sgt. Billy round up the posse in between the Hercules and Touche' Turtle cartoons.
That night as I waited for sleep in the back room, I was thinking pleasant thoughts of the kid's cowboy show as I drifted off, the lights and sounds from the busy road coming in through the door, which was open to the piazza. I felt comfortable and happy. Several hours later I awoke with a start in the darkness. I felt that I must have been dreaming, because I thought someone had called my name, waking me. It was long after midnight. My grandparents were in their seventies at the time, and fast asleep at that hour.
I have always loved animals. My mother harbors fear and loathing for anything with fur, so the only pets we were allowed to keep were goldfish, turtles and parakeets. More than anything else in the world, I wanted a cat, but it was not about to happen. Even so, I took every opportunity to beg and plead for one, and I fed every stray I could find in the hope that someday, I would get to keep one of them.
Alone in the dark room that night, I suddenly heard meowing. I pushed myself up a bit on my elbows, trying to determine where it could be coming from. Then I heard my name called in a loud whisper. I was wide awake now and there was no mistaking it. It was almost a hiss and it shot a bolt of fear through me. The sounds were coming from the doorway to the little stone balcony. Whatever was calling me, it was out there waiting. I suddenly felt certain that it wanted me to get up and walk out there. It was luring me with something it knew I wanted; a kitten. Strangely enough, I knew instinctively that it was a fake meowing. I knew there wasn't really a cat out there. The traffic was all but silent now in the dead of night, but the meowing continued and then it came again, louder this time...the hoarse, stage whisper...one word...my name. It had an other-worldly quality to it. Since the door was open, there was nothing to prevent the whispering thing from entering the room. I laid back slowly and drew the covers up to my face as I shrank down under them, paralyzed and barely able to breathe. I shut my eyes so tightly, they hurt. I felt like I was about to die, and I started to pray silently. I kept that position for what seemed like an eternity, afraid to open my eyes, afraid to breathe. At some point, I must have either fallen asleep or passed out from lack of oxygen.
In the morning I told my grandparents that I wanted to go home. I would not spend another night in that room. As I recounted the events of the night before, I saw a strange expression cross my Nanny's face and she turned to Pa with a knowing look. "Now Nell, don't be frightening the child with stories." warned Pa, before she could speak. I was not the first one to be visited in the back room at night! Eventually my grandmother told me whole story, and I will tell it to you in the next post.

Memories Of The Strange

One of my guilty pleasures has returned to television with new episodes recently. It's a reality-based show about college students who investigate paranormal phenomena and I find it addictive. It has had the effect of reminding me about some of the very strange things that happened to me when I was a child that were both terrifying and intriguing. One of the more memorable events occured when I was about twelve years old.
It was late in the nineteen sixties, and my mother's parents lived in an old three decker in Brookline, Massachusetts. The Boston city limits were a mere half mile away from their front steps. During school vacations, my brothers would take turns spending a few days with Nanny and Pa on the edge of the big city. This meant homemade chicken soup, puff pastry with real whipped cream and fudge sauce, swimming at "the tank",(an indoor municipal pool), a new Archie comic book and a fountain soda from the "Cypress Spa" with Pa, and fishing at Hammond Pond or the Brookline reservoir with my uncle Tommy. Since these pursuits were thought of by my parents as only appropriate for the boys, it was many years of lobbying and whining before I was allowed to have my turn, too. It sure beat hanging in the boring suburbs all week.
In the back of the house there was a small, cement patio area with a thin border of plants and trees surrounding it. The space was enclosed by a high fence, thus sheilding it to some degree from the raceway that was, and is Boylston street. The cement floor of this tiny yard was flecked wih pieces of blue and white pottery and cats-eye marbles imbedded here and there in the concrete with no particular pattern. When I close my eyes I can still see the bushes waving on a sultry day and smell the air of that place. Car horns, sirens and the barking of Lassie, the collie next door, created the soundtrack for my days there. It seemed to me it was a special little world.
At the very back of the house, off the kitchen was the smallest room. This had been my mother's childhood bedroom and now served as the guest room. My grandparents referred to it as "the back room." It was where all the grandkids slept during visits. It had a door leading outside to a little stone and concrete balcony (the piazza, as the family referred to it) that overlooked the patio/yard below. The first night I slept there was to be my last. More to come...stay tuned.