The Source Recordings, Volume 1

SpectreVision Radio What is it about the supernatural that's captivated us for generations? Is it the mysterious allure of the unknown? The heart-pounding thrill of an unexplainable sighting? Or the creeping fear that a life-changing encounter could happen to you. Sightings is the new series that puts you at the center of the world's strangest unexplained events. From Roswell to Amityville to Loch Ness and beyond, each episode combines a never-before-heard story of an infamous supernatural encounter with mind-bending investigations that will leave you questioning what's real and what's impossible. Enter the unexplained with Sightings. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Kelly Chase. Four years ago, my life cracked open. I experienced something I couldn't explain, and I haven't stopped chasing it since. And I'm J. Christopher King. I've been having anomalous experiences my whole life. This work, it's not just what I do. It's who I am. This season on Cosmosis, we're going into the field, to places where the veil is thin and where the signal of the phenomenon breaks through. We're meeting the researchers, experiencers, and witnesses who live in its wake. From UFOs to near-death experiences, from cryptids to channeling, we're diving into the high strangeness that challenges everything we think we know. Because reality isn't just weird. It's weirder than you can imagine. We don't know what we'll find, but we're going to follow the signal wherever it leads. And we're taking you with us. Be sure to follow us on Spotify so you never miss an episode of Cosmosis. Coming to you from SpectreVision Radio. voice sighing and i moved around the room and the boys moved with me when i was a little kid i used to see like the medicine men have to go outside and chase away skinwalkers clairvoyance is seeing mental images symbols why is it that so many dmt experiencers report being pulled into alien realms we have hundreds and hundreds of people who have seen these ufos i am desperately afraid of being seen as crazy the weird borderline between dream and reality we're at the cemetery there's something moving through the woods that stand right outside of our light. From behind the fridge door comes a big dark figure, and I could just see the small red beady eyes. He got really close to my face, and he said, stay away from things you don't understand. Spectre Vision Radio, a strange podcast network for strange times. Many of the stories you've heard in this series trace their roots to what I heard on what I've come to refer to simply as the source recordings. I'm obliged to keep their origins and their location confidential. I listened to them and I chose to adapt them because nuancing relatable prose from these felt safer somehow. Having heard all the source recordings and even handled them, I still can't totally vouch for their authenticity. And so for the time being, they have to remain for me in the category of fiction. It was a bad time in my life back then. I was about to get evicted from my apartment. I was drinking a lot. one night I was in this little Irish pub I used to go to and some guy came over to me he had been listening to what I was telling the bartender about my situation kind of rude maybe but he said he'd pay me to drive him out to Fulton and pick him up again the next morning and this was kind of serious money I don't trust strangers but I kind of had no choice back then so I kept listening he didn't want to call the cab because he needed someone to help locking up some house as part of the deal. He had this desperate vibe around him. He didn't look well at all. He said he was running out of time and we'd have to leave right away. I was like, okay, well, if you prove to me you have the money, I'll do it. Where he wanted to go was the industrial side of Fulton. Kind of depressing. I asked him some things about himself. It was weird just being there in the car with him. I tried to have a conversation he'd been in the Merchant Marines all over Japan, Africa I forget where else now he was on disability I asked him if he got hurt on the job and he said I was abducted from a port that's how I got hurt so you know I didn't pursue that I had to keep asking him if he was okay because it was like he was having some kind of withdrawal or maybe just getting a really high fever. He was really worried we were going too slow. I remember a couple of fingers on his left hand were taped up. He was just a mess. But I kept telling myself, this is a half-month's rent, man. This is a half-month's rent. It took about an hour to get all the way out there. It was just about dark. And added to that, there were all these dark clouds coming along. We were getting hit by storms right around the same time every night. Real scary ones sometimes. he had me go to the edge of some residential neighborhood not very nice and there were these cement barriers blocking the way in he said the whole place had gotten bought out by some hotel chain and they eminent domain to all the houses and all the streets everyone was gone and i said well how can you still live here and he said he just stayed in one of the old houses when he needed to. I was getting pretty nervous about this now. And he saw that. And he paid me right then and there. Which didn't mean he couldn't knife me out there and take my keys or something. But I wasn't getting any kind of a criminal sense from him at all. Just desperation. I figured, okay, drug addict. But that wasn't something I hadn't seen before. Well, we got out and we walked into this kind of surreal end of the world landscape. All these little working class houses boarded up and all the lawns overgrown and absolutely no one in sight. A little graffiti sometimes. We went about six or seven blocks and then got to this padlocked house. He had a key to it and I sort of half followed him in. He had a little penlight on his keychain but I made sure to keep the door open behind me. now I'm trying to think of at some point he started like really not wanting to show me his face and his voice was getting really hoarse I think it was those last couple of turns before we got to the house anyway in the house there wasn't anything but a table with a lamp on it you know an old school oil lamp he put the padlock key on the table and told me to please lock him in and leave I had to have him say the words again because it was like he had bronchitis suddenly or something he said he needed to be in here because sometimes he got attacks real bad and got violent but I absolutely had to come back and let him out tomorrow I absolutely had to because with the lock he had no way out otherwise and before I could even really register this I think he felt something overtaken him because he grabbed the key and forced it out to me and told me I had to lock him in right this second and get out because his eyes had changed. They looked like they were bulging and red. One of his cheeks had this huge bruise on it suddenly from nowhere, all black and blue. He might have been sort of drooling too. His lips were real wet. I grabbed the key and his hand was ice cold. I was out of there quick fast. I locked the door and I took off. We had a full moon but it was still really dark and I hadn't memorized the turn so I started to panic some trying to get my way back to the truck. I wasn't even totally sure I was getting further away from the house. Everything looked the same. Every house was the same creepy boarded thing but I remember just enough to fix the one really wrong turn I made and I saw my truck finally. Then from somewhere way behind me there was this huge thudding sound. it was like a sledgehammer hitting something or just maybe someone taking a running start at a wall or a door and here comes from around the corner a couple of dogs running not trying to attack or anything more like running away from something they went right past me so that was all I could take I got in my truck and I gun didn't head it back I just I don't know what I was supposed to do I had just gone to bed and the storm hit us in Delgado it really felt and sounded like a small tornado we got totally pounded I eventually got up and watched it it was pretty scary trees coming down and stuff I couldn't even really get back to sleep so as soon as the rain stopped I decided to head out to Fulton and get there right around dawn get this unlocking thing over with as soon as it was light. Finish the bargain with this guy. It took a little longer than usual to get out there because a couple of the roads were washed out. But I finally did. I parked next to the cement barrier from the night before and you could see that this neighborhood had gotten hammered just as bad. There were tree branches all over the roads. As soon as it was light enough to see by, I walked in. You could see the branches on the roofs of a lot of the houses. A big oak had come down in the middle of the road, near the house where my rider went. Some tree had hit the house directly, right where the pipe fin went up through the roof. There was a big hole there. I went up and knocked on the door to give the guy a chance to answer, but no dice. So I unlocked it. the lamp was off and all the guys clothes were on the table shoes, socks, pants, everything I went into the back room and you could see the top of that tree it was poking down into the roof there was all this blood all around the hole I saw right away it was blood and I figured, my God for some reason the guy tried to climb out he tried to force his whole body through that little hole and it ripped him up bad no other explanation there was hair all around there too I actually touched it it was real thick didn seem like it comes from that guy not at all So I went out of the house and I wondering if the guy lying in the woods behind the backyard and hurt There was more blood. I could kind of follow the trail if I got down real close to the ground. I could see how he probably got out. Once he had squirmed out of that hole, he'd probably tried to shimmy down that tree. I went into the woods but it got tougher to trace them because the blood stopped I was just pawing my way through all these branches and it was starting to rain again I just kept calling out hello, hello there was no end to the trees but I did hear the highway off at a distance they couldn't go on forever then I saw him on the ground he was face down and he was naked his upper half looked like he'd been through a machine but I don't know what actually killed him if it was destroying himself getting out of that house or if it was getting shot because he had bullet holes in his chest when I turned them over someone shot him from the front but he didn't look as sick as the night before he looked kind of peaceful anyway I had my reasons for not wanting to get involved in anything back then I'm different now but that was then that was a real different time I took off I spent a lot of time worried the cops would come I kept my head down and a couple of years went by and I started going back to that bar where I'd met that guy I gave their owner a ride home sometimes his name was Buddy and one night I was doing just that and he asked me if I remember what happened when I gave that sick skinny guy a ride off to Fulton a ways back I said I didn't even remember that happening but he knew I was lying he said it was okay that I lied turns out that guy had been his brother he'd been kind of a lost soul screwed up a lot went off to the Merchant Marines and got hurt bad somehow some abduction situation started having freaky violent episodes after that Buddy was always torn between helping him and trying to have him committed he said if I wound up staying with him just a little too long that night and having to defend myself because he changed that was okay or if not me then somebody else so I told him the whole story and we never talked about it again I rented kayaks and jet skis to people in Iona Beach for like eight years. And there was a stretch out there. It's called the Braid. It starts a few miles from the public beach, and it's just dunes. You know, there's these huge rolling dunes right up against the ocean. And the only way to navigate them is four-wheel drive. And, you know, usually you have to have paddle tires, too, because the sand is really deep. You know, it's really soft. You can't even build out there. You know, the rich people all up and down the coast would have loved to build there, but you just, you know, you can't do it. and one day, it was January, this guy named Tom came in to see if he could pay for a ride out to one of the old shacks. I think there were only six of them left back then. I used to belong to the guy's uncle, you know, otherwise it would have been off limits, and he wanted to pay to have food and things delivered to him every couple of weeks, and I said, sure, I'll take that. You know, it's easy money because business was, you know, was next to nothing in the winter. So I brought some supplies out to him about a week after, you know, propane and stuff like that. Place had no electricity. You know, you got your water from a pump, but that's, that's all he wanted. You know, he said he just quit his job. It was some fancy corporate thing, you know, he wanted to get away. And I I thought, well, you know, the parade will teach this rich guy up quick, you know, about isolation and being deprived of things. The place played tricks on people, you know, like little visual things and sound things. The sand demons freaked people out a lot. These swirls of sand danced around when the wind was right and they looked like ghosts, you know, waving their arms. he told me he'd already had something weird happen his first night he saw a bright light somewhere on the dunes kind of like an old lantern not moving but he could never find it the second time I brought stuff to him this was just before February now he said he'd been out one night tramping around and he saw someone standing you know far away on on a dune and he thought it was a man in some kind of a white raincoat you know when he had he had twine or something wrapped around his face and grass or moss or something packed into the twine you know real strange um and he told me he felt like he was being watched sometimes and he tried to laugh it off but he seemed kind of afraid you know and I figured yeah he'll call for a ride out for good pretty soon. But the thing is, there's been ghost stories about the Braid all my life. My grandfather told them to me starting when I was just a kid. He was county sheriff for a few years, and he knew all of it. He'd say, this place is one big graveyard. And if you start reading about it, yeah, I mean, it goes way beyond the times of the pirates and them raiding the early settlements and everything. That was all pretty bloody. But stuff went all through the 1800s too. You had the drug trade. You had opium and so forth. And then the fishing wars actually got violent. And all of it right on the shore there. And there was a commune that went bad sometime around the Civil War. People murdering each other. So you're going to get ghost stories. Someone gets cabin fever out there getting away from civilization or drops some acid and wanders around the dunes all alone and they see phantom lanterns and strange beings standing in the sand. You know, that was the braid. So a week after that, I get a call from the sheriff's deputy. This was about midnight, and he's asking for a favor. A woman from Tribune reported her boy missing, you know, 16 years old. and he said, hey, I'm not supposed to go out, you know, tromping off after some teenager's been gone for just a few hours. Can you maybe take a turn through the braid just on the off chance you come across him? And if not, I'll come out officially. Just buy me an hour or two. So what had happened was, and this was all from his mother, apparently the kid got a little bit obsessed with the braid because of some old book, you know, like a puzzle book. and in there somewhere there was one puzzle where if you put the clues together and if you looked hard enough at a particular photo of a sand dune there was supposedly a buried treasure you know a real one somewhere around it five thousand dollars buried in a chest somewhere in America whoever found it got it and this kid Anson it was Anson was his name he'd he'd been piecing all the clues together. He was really smart. And he thought the treasure was buried somewhere in the braid, but he had no way to get out there. And Tribune was 20 miles away. That's the poorest section of the county. So it looked like he'd maybe convinced a school friend of his to drive him out there in the middle of the night, because that boy was suddenly gone now too, was both of them. And the thinking was, you know, they were probably afraid their folks wouldn't let them go. So, uh, so they'd snuck off and, you know, he, he was, he was really clever to figure that out about the money. Um, he tracked down where the author of the book was born and it was, it was Chancellor County and that's when he knew. So, so I said to the deputy, you know, I knew him real well. I said, sure. Okay. I'll head through there, do him a favor. And, um, anyway, I get the keys to the Land Rover and Grandpa was up and I told him where I was going and he looked at me and he told me not to go you know real firm like like no don't do it um he said he didn't want me going out there alone and he insisted on coming with me and that that was kind of out of nowhere you know he almost never never wanted to go out back then you know but he's 78 and his mind had been kind of going for a while he was dreaming a lot about dead relatives and stuff at a certain age you just do what they want so I took him with me and he started saying things as we went down 40 to the braid I was looking out for any cars parked along the road and I told him who we were looking for and he said if they started digging around there, they're already gone. He started talking about just all kinds of, I mean, talking about the Druids who lived there before anybody else and what they supposedly got into and weird sea worshippers who came along and slaughtered them. And, you know, I said, like, Grandpa, what is this all about? and his point was that there were generations of bad men who wouldn't want their secrets found you know the things that they buried out there and you know I said but they're all gone now but he just said doesn't matter I said doesn't matter that they're gone I don't know Um, you know, maybe there are some places on earth where things just happen. I mean, I mean, I had been out in the braid at night in winter, probably at least 10 times and never felt anything truly off. But there was this point where we had to go off road. It's just, it's like a little gravel passage that goes into the dunes, you know, official vehicles only. and everything suddenly felt so different. You know, I was, I want to say tingling, but that's not the right word. I just didn't want to be out there that night. That was the kind of sand driving that always, you know, already always gave me white knuckles, especially in the dark. You know, you got to have some real skill not to get stuck or topple taking some of those crafts, even in a rover. And I wanted to stop at that guy Tom's shack. You know, why not check in? Tell him to maybe be on the lookout for a couple kids. And he didn't answer my knocking, so I kind of walked around the place. I looked in the windows. You could definitely tell someone was living there. You know, there were no signs of distress or anything. It was just the one room. I went in, and it, you know, it wasn't locked. and there was actually a radio playing, you know, a little battery-powered radio. You know everything seemed fine like you just gone out to get some firewood maybe So I just started cruising around in the rover with Grandpa just looking for any sign of anyone at all out there, all around the dunes. But he really seemed like he was in a bad way. And at one point, he says, I saw something, I saw a light. and I saw it too. This flicker in the dark, you know, way up ahead, kind of a burnt orange color and right away it was obvious we couldn't get to it because somehow it just kept moving. You know, I could only go maybe 10 miles an hour in the sand but that should have been plenty enough to overtake it but we couldn't. And it finally just wasn't there anymore. and then I drove right over a shoe, a woman's shoe. It was a sneaker. I got out, and oh my god, it was cold. There was a wallet, too, and a plastic bag, and the sheriff found out it was tangerine in it. That was a big street drug in the county back then, And so I opened the wallet, and it's some woman's, and I catch the renewal date on it. And she had renewed it five days earlier. So the wallet getting dropped was obviously a really recent thing. And things began to feel really strange at that point. You know, because you just wouldn't have had these different people out in the braid in those conditions. It just never happened. You know, it didn't even get patrolled in the winter. So I got back in the rover and I think, okay, well, what I'll do is start at the pump house and head to the water from there because the pump house was the one, you know, built thing that you might go toward if you got confused at all about where you were in the dunes. It's a good place to check out. You can stand against it and be out of the wind a little bit too, you know, about a quarter mile away. But grandpa is just totally silent at this point. He just looks scared. We get to the pump house. It just looks like a big dark hump. You know, it's all sealed up. And plain as day in the headlights, there's two shovels and a backpack sitting in the sand. And there's a couple maps, you know, done by hand in there, maps of the area. So I call into the deputy. It's time they got out there. And I yelled out a few times to see if anyone could maybe hear me. but the acoustics out there were brutal. So I told Grandpa, look, we're going to go to where the braid ends, to the west. We're going to turn around, head back down along the tide line, and maybe we'll summon a Sierra Lights, you know, and we'll get home soon. And I don't know, it was like he didn't even hear me. He says, Jimmy had a bad thing happen out here once. He was talking about his friend Jimmy Del Norrie. He used to be a drinking buddy of his, and they were in the army together. And this guy, he wrote novels sometimes, you know, crime stuff or whatever, this unpredictable old guy, a big drinker. And he said Jimmy went into the braid once to bury something, money, actually, to try and promote one of his books, some book, and he saw something that tried to carry him away. and I almost hit the brakes you know I thought did he actually just say Jimmy buried money out here once I mean there are coincidences and then there are coincidences so that was you know I started to feel like things were really meant to converge that night in a bad way. And there I was with a helpless old man, basically alone. And then right after that, I did stop the rover because I saw something out my window. It was a really bright light, but tiny. It was bigger than a flashlight, though, but maybe 100 feet away. And Grandpa saw it too. Somebody was there. They were coming toward us and they must have spotted us and they were holding a big lantern. But when I finally saw the person with the lantern, his arms were down, like at his sides. But the light kept floating along beside him when he walked without him carrying it, like floating. and the guy's face was painted or maybe he was wearing a mask or something um you know a mask made of made of grass and he had a raincoat on uh the kind that wraps around you without any buttons and I put the rover in neutral and I started to open the door but grandpa yelled at me to stop like like desperate he um he took off his seatbelt and he leaned over and he was he was pressing something into my hand and he said if you have to go out there for god's sake, hold this. And I looked, it was a little silver medallion. It had St. Agitur on it. You know, he's a patron saint of drowning victims. But the guy wasn't, he wasn't out there. When I got out, he was gone. You know, just in the time it took me to open the door, he had vanished. So we kept driving, we got to the Tideline, and it was, at that time it must have been 1.30, and I have this woman's wallet kind of cradled under my thigh on the seat. It turned out to be some poor drug addict, you know, she was running from her boyfriend, some awful, you know, abusive guy. And just that night she had run off from him when she got too scared, you know, from Kurova. And she hitched a ride. And at some point she must have gotten into it with the driver, you know, and he'd set her out on 40 and driven off. He just left her there out in the cold. She was in terrible shape. She'd never seen the braid before in her life. And she probably couldn't flag another ride. So at some point she just started walking into it. And who knows why, just right into the dunes. I don't know, maybe she thought she'd be warmer there. But me and Grandpa were in the rover. We had the ocean off on our right, and it was, I remember it was so dark. And there were some lights way up ahead, these tiny little lights. and I stopped, you know, because we were, like, we were far away. We really were, but I saw, um, I saw a group of people, and they were all walking into the water. They were walking into the ocean in the dark. You know, it wasn't much above freezing, and these other people there, they were sort of, you know, guiding them in. you know they were holding they were holding these lanterns or something you know and they were all dressed the same and they were just pointing like showing these people where to go and the ones the ones walking into the waves just didn't stop you know but to do that on purpose with the water that cold that I mean that would have been suicide and um grandpa wouldn't let me drive ahead he was he was ready to fight me for the keys if he had to so um so we were just watching that happen you know but then and then the lanterns all went out and um i think the people were up to probably about their waist at that point and you know, it was so dark, I just chickened out. I, I, I turned us around, and I drove us right down the tide line all the way, all the way to Iona Beach, you know, all the way out. I, um, I called the deputy, I told him right where to go, and, yeah, I feel awful about it still, but I, I thought I was gonna die, too. I really did. You know, me and Grandpa both. so it wound up being four four disappearances the guy Tom, the woman and both the kids, you know, the teenage kids and they never found any of them you know, they dragged the surf and no sign of them, they just all they were in the same place at the same time for different reasons and they all wound up gone there's there's this book grandpa made me read just before he died this history of the braid and in there it talks about how wherever the water met the land in settler times you know when people struggled to survive there was conflict and there was anger and there was death you know good people, bad people it was just hard and into the sand went the secrets and I think yeah there might be things that don't want anyone digging there out there in the braid, it doesn't really matter why I didn't used to be superstitious but then I saw those lights and things are a little different for me now yeah anyway yeah it was Jimmy Del Noir who buried that money to get some publicity for a book turned out to be long gone by the time those kids got out there you know someone found it like a year or two before but they just they just never knew I drove out to West Virginia Way out to this really tiny old mountain town Grenzo It was a winter break from college It was a Sunday morning I didn't care much about snow warnings or anything It started snowing halfway there Got icy, but I figured I had plenty of time If I got a little stuck, whatever. Grenza was just a few houses. No real town center at all. Totally isolated. I got to this B&B and got the car stuck in the snow in the driveway right away. But that was okay. I was just going to settle in. My host was in the big main house up the road. She was an older lady. I walked up there and she told me that the couple who had ran the post office left on Thursday to go see their kids. So that basically left no one in the town at all. Everyone else who technically lived there was way down the road. The host, her name was Laurel. She told me to be real careful walking around. She was real specific about me not going past the mill or wherever that was There were bears and mountain lions and whatnot She showed me where all the food was in case she wasn around and I got snowed in because there was really no chance of going into Elkins to shop if that happened. One thing that really stood out inside the main house was this watercolor on a wall. It sort of looked like a bird's eye view of the town from high up on a mountain. There was a trail of footprints in the snow that stopped on a ridge, but you didn't see the person making them. There was actually a caption. The painter had painted it on. It said, Walking people go back. And I asked Laurel about this. She got a little weird. She actually didn't want to talk about it. Her son did the painting. He lived in Montana now. all she said was that no one in Grenza wanted to see the walking people ever come again and she put the painting up sometimes when it felt like they were watching or that they were near maybe there was some early stage dementia going on here or something else I couldn't really deal with so I didn't say anything more I started to get a vibe that maybe I had overshot my tolerance for seclusion. I walked back to the guest's house, and there weren't even any locks in the doors anymore. It was kind of run down, too. I sat there looking out at the mountains, and I thought, yeah, this is a little much. A little too quiet. So what I tried to do before it got dark was trudged around town. It was flurries for a bit. I saw the mill and some buildings with the first printing press in the area you had been. It was all closed up to the public. The only other place worth seeing was this place called Backmire Cemetery. It was down a little trail. I didn't stay long because it was just getting absolutely freezing, but I read some of the headstones. I remember it was hard because the slope of the place was really dramatic. I had to sort of angle my body to the side sometimes as I went, otherwise I might have slipped. A lot of German names. Nobody buried there recently. Like, for decades. I saw that somebody jammed a huge wooden cross into the ground. It was even bigger than most of the headstones. There was a wreath nailed to it. And it was odd. You had the usual sort of ivy and pine pattern. But then, woven through that, I could only really figure out by taking off my gloves and feeling it. What went through it was this dead snakeskin. It even had the real snake head attached at the very end. And someone had written some words on the cross. Real small. So that the walking people may not come often. I was feeling really exposed somehow. I never felt that alone. I really didn't understand a town where everyone seemed to be totally gone. No one seemed to have cars in the driveway. Some of the houses I did see had wreaths on the front door, kind of like the cemetery one. But this was February, so obviously this had nothing to do with Christmas. I wiped myself out walking back. I collapsed on my bed and slept for a bit. It was full dark when I woke up, snowing hard. I started to think, well, what if I go up to the main house and ask Laurel how easy it would be to get my car unstuck, who I should call. And maybe I'd just say to them, Hey, can you tow me all the way out to the highway and put chains in my tires? I want to go home. I don't feel like lying here all night listening to the wind. I'll go insane. I went over there. It wasn't locked, of course. I went in and almost all the lights were off. Which seemed weird because I thought it was so early. But it wasn't early at all, actually. There was a grandfather clock that said it was 8.30. and that I almost could not believe because it meant that I had slept for six hours. Just no way that would ever happen to me. I wasn't someone who ever just passed out for that long. I looked out the window and Laurel's pickup was gone and there was a note on the kitchen table. She said she had gone to see her sister in Morgantown and that she was sorry she couldn't stay. So she just picked up, gone out on freezing roads in the dark. pretty much abandoned me. I had food and the run of the house and everything, but I guessed right at that moment that I was the only living person in Grenza. So I was like, no more of this. I had an awful feeling about all of it. There was a phone. It was a landline back then, and the yellow pages were right there. The first towing service I called told me there was no way they could get me out till morning, but the second guy said he was willing to come for some insane price and he'd get me exactly where I needed to go to get to safe roads. He'd be at the house by 11. I had really gone into this full state of paranoia by then. I went back to the guest house, and I remember trying not to make much sound as I walked up the stairs, like I wanted to stay undetected. From what? I don't know. I turned one light on, but then I turned it off right away because I felt better when I was in the dark. I felt hidden. I kept torturing myself with those negative thoughts. I kept thinking, you are completely alone. You are completely alone. So it was about quarter after ten, maybe. I was sitting on the sofa downstairs and looking out the big window. Out there was Acorn Road, going from left to right. You wouldn't have been able to get a normal car down it because there was just too much snow and ice now. I started to feel this ringing in my ears. It wouldn't go away and my head began to hurt and my hands began shaking a little. It made no sense. Around about 10.30 was when it happened. I saw a man up there walking along Acorn Road. He came out of the blind spot to the right, moving real slow, right down the middle of the road. He had a beard, I remember. No coat, no hat, no scarf. What he did have on was not at this time period. Someone else came behind him, and he was looking up at the sky. When they talk about farmers or blacksmiths of long ago, hundreds of years, that was what they were wearing. Then some woman came next. One of the tallest women I've ever seen, real thin. She was wearing a long black dress and barefoot. They were all kind of close to each other, walking along a real slope, but they looked like they had no awareness of each other. and then there was this one other person a man who had no arms both arms were gone otherwise he was just like them moved just like them they were there about two minutes in my sight line the second they were all gone off to the left on the road I got up and got upstairs and closed my door and just sat there out of my mind Maybe ten minutes later, I swear I heard the front door open downstairs It was very clear and never closed again You could hear the wind come in It didn't even occur to me it might be someone friendly I was in a bad state I went to the window and I pushed it up There was no real hesitation with me trying to climb out of it It was probably just weird decision making because I was in shock It was a tight fit I didn't even care about frostbite I was that scared The goal was to get to my car Now I'd done that kind of dumb risk on a roof as a kid But not since then obviously I had to push myself out backwards Then twist myself around from the waist up To be able to get all the way out And then I was on the roof Which had a pretty good slope to it It was slippery So before I could even get into position to maybe jump off I had to lie all the way back to get stabilized That was just the worst wet cold I've ever felt. I could feel how dangerous it was to be out there. Windy. It seemed really important to close the window again because I had this sense that something was coming. So I gave it one shove with my free hand. In the dark, I chickened out about the drop because it was too tough to see exactly how far it was. So I tried to wait. but just when I really had to make that choice to jump I heard someone slide the window up a bit. Two inches then it stopped. I let myself slide down and I hit the gutter hard and it banged my hip and I caught most of a hedge on the fall but I was okay. I didn't hit the ground hard. My keys were in my pocket but I could barely feel them and when I got in the car instead of starting it up to keep warm, I spread myself across the front seat and kept my head out of sight. I was shaking all over, but I wanted to keep totally hidden. And it was maybe three minutes before I sensed headlights washing over the car. The tow truck driver. He was really patient with my panic. I forgot exactly what I tried to explain to him, but I had a sense enough to keep it vague, so it wouldn't sound crazy. I think I said I had thought someone had broken into the house and I had gone out the window. I'm sure he thought I was strange, but he actually offered to come in with me. So I went in so I could get warm. The front door had been closed again at some point, but Laurel's truck still wasn't out there. It hadn't been her. When we drove away, we had to go right over the spot where those people had walked down Acorn Road. I didn't see any footprints. I asked the driver if he ever heard of some kind of local legend, the walking people. He said no. He wasn't really from around there. That was all the explanation of any of it I ever got. I drove through there last summer. Nothing really changed in twenty years or so. Laurel's house was still standing, but it was really run down and it was for sale. The guest house was gone. The cemetery was still there. so was that weird cross which meant that someone must have been really trying to maintain it but the words on it they'd worn away now receiving frequency transmission Are we, as individuals, part of the universe? Yes, but where do we end and the universe begins? Where does the universe end and we begin? breaking our bodies down into particles and even smaller light waves is the universe conscious yes we are the universe transmission complete stay tuned to specter vision radio stay Stay.