Some Random Creepy Autobiographical Stuff:
Small taters but true: I was in the kitchen preparing the post-pills snack I’m supposed to have. The floor was clear. I know this because I’d dropped a fork. Went into the living room to eat, realized I’d forgotten my water. Went back into the kitchen. In the middle of the floor lay a guitar pick. It was a thick, the kind you’d play bass with. No one had been in the kitchen in that moment I’d stepped out, and I did not recognize the brand of pick. Oddly, I’d found a green one, same brand, a thin, for strumming, on the floor of my office and had thought nothing of it. It did not match my own picks, but I had given it no thought at the time, being busy. Now I compared: Same brand. Not mine.
Are apports a new advertising gimmick?
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My maternal grandmother knew I love books and gave me a very old Bible she’d found at an Amish jumble sale. Very early 1800s imprint, heavy, partly falling from its binding. I put it on a shelf at right angles to a window. From the moment I got it onward I’d hear a sustained shrieking sound, screaming, as if in my head. It would wake me at night and the first thing I’d see when I woke in the night was moonlight illuminating that particular book. That and the noise it made, in my head, caused me to give it back a week or so later. Hated it, couldn’t stand it. She smiled and said, “That’s what I felt, too,” and she got rid of it somehow.
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We were teenagers determined to explore an abandoned farmhouse, sure we’d find ghosts. We went in about an hour before dusk. It was mostly just delapidated. Mold and falling through rotting floor-boards were the main threats. We found evidence of squatters, even a place where the idiots had built a small campfire on the floor of an upstairs bedroom .
Nothing was bad until we went back to the ground floor. We were standing in the kitchen when a wild, rapid knocking came on the cellar door. We all froze, shocked, until my friend Dan strode forward, threw open the door, and charged down the cellar stairs.
Turned out to have been a bird. The puzzle of a bird trapped in a basement was solved when we all went down and found one of the walls had crumbled, showing open sky. It was a large enough gap for us to climb out of, had there been need.
Back in the kitchen, we rallied and were about to dare each other to stay the night when a voice said, “Leave.” We looked around in the fading light, wondering which of us had said it. We all looked freaked out. Then it came again. “Leave. Now.”
We heard it in our midst, clear and low, like an adult male trying to keep his temper.
Naturally, we bravely ran like scattered chickens. As I bounded off the back porch and angled for the woods, I noticed the headlights of a truck bouncing along coming across the fields toward us. It was the owner, and had we lingered even a few more minutes we’d have been caught. Trespassing would have been the charge, or possibly vandalism if they chose to blame us for some of the damage we’d found already there.
Later some figured the voice was imagined, others said it was possibly a squatter we hadn’t noticed, hiding somewhere, wanting us gone. The voice, though, had seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and felt as if it were right next to all of us.
Ghost? Ghost story? Either way, it was a creepy old farmhouse.
/ Art Wester
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I’ve been dead. Flatlined. Was talking to a med tech at the time. Doctors had slammed too much morphine into me in ICU. They dived over my legs to reach the machine, and I broke a cold sweat. The monitors all flatlined and howled for about a minute, until they got things back. I kept talking to the med tech. Afterwards, they asked me if I’d felt anything. Just the cold sweat. Never blacked out. Unless I did and don’t know it. They claimed not.
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Oh what a tangled plate we serve
When the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Makes us swerve.
The fault lies not in ourselves, but in our pasta.
/ Frater Puttanesca
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Genuine writers cannot tolerate bad writing. As Tom Waits said, “The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
/ Art Wester
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Not in specifics, but in the patterns, and rhythms, and clusters, cattle mutilation parallels the Missing 411 cases of mysterious disappearances in National Forests and wilderness areas.
Linked?
Coincidence and three-quarters if they’re not connected in some way, if not directly.
Yes, I’m aware where this line of thinking may lead. Once again, the ETH, which may be Earthly but transdimensional or something.
Yeah, frustrating to be led so consistently away from the empirical, which strikes one as disinformation, until you see how many such events happen, how wide-spread, and how they are rooted in history. Unlikely to be a single human agency or group of mercenaries or troops. Too seamless; never a mistake? Over decades? Thousands of instances?
Anyhow, just struck me that mutes and vanishings may be linked, how or why or in what way is anyone’s guess. Empirical evidence would be greatly welcome.
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So we are now limited to writing only what we know, not what we can find out. All hail the death of creativity, smothered by the terrorism of political correctness and cultural bigotry.
Burn your copies of Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and all other works that do not reflect ONLY the writer’s EXACT experience.
No exploring of other or else allowed.
Science fiction, fantasy, and horror are now declared impossible.
OR: Stand against fascism in all its guises, write what you want, and do not ignore, ATTACK the martinets who’d shut down your voice for not conforming to bowdlerized, hidebound, constrained views defined by the politics of exclusion and squinty, narrow paths we are expected, by them, to stick to, on penalty of being ostracized.
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Sep 13, 2016 4:17pm
Once, same house where my Ouija planchette levitated, upstairs this time, our little dog Taffy, a Chihuahua/terrier mix, erupted in angry barking, almost frenzied. My sisters screamed.
I ran upstairs along with my Dad and Mom to see what was going on. We found them in their shared bedroom cowering as our little dog barked furiously in the doorway.
The dog ignored us as we entered the room, continuing to bark at something. Its gaze was fixed across the hall into the bathroom, which had a light on. Nothing was in there, as we could all plainly see.
Dog disagreed. It kept barking upward, sort of at the light, or as if a tall person were standing there. My father bravely told me to go check it out. told him to do it, then shrugged, not really being afraid. In the back of our minds we were thinking maybe a bat had gotten in, or a mouse or even racoon.
As it turned out, there was nothing there. The dog whimpered and snarled as I entered the room, and kept barking when I had finished my inspection. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, it stopped barking and acted normal.
We asked my sister why they were screaming and what had scared them and started the dog barking. They both claimed to have seen a shadow move in the bathroom, which alerted the dog and scared them. That was it.
Ghost? If it was a moth, say, no one ever saw or found it. No bad, no mouse. Nothing in that small room, and I checked even in the cabinets. Just nothing. Except what the dog saw.
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Deplorable, adj – disgraceful, shameful, dishonorable, unworthy, inexcusable, unpardonable, unforgivable; Trumpers, the GOP.
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Want creepy? Happened in the 1980s:
Met a guy once, while waiting to get my tires changed. He was waiting too, slender, half-hispanic fellow. We began talking. He said he was an interrogator. I said, Cool. I knew such were on that base. I busied myself filling and lighting the pipe I smoked then. He said, “Want to see something?” Pulled out a pipe tobacco pouch, the zippered kind. Opened it, and held it open toward me.
Human finger in it. Real.
Said it was a “souvenir” he took from his last session, which he claimed happened “south of the border”.
Pre-GITMO, by the way.
Bullshitting me? No.
I was there. He was not bullshitting. He scared the fuck out of me. I remained outwardly calm, but he was the real deal.
Remember, too, I’ve studied the deniable realm for years, and all he said jibed with what I knew from many other sources.
Also, hate to tell you, it’s fairly common for combat types to keep body parts as souvenirs. Everything from fingers and ears to vaginas and penises.
Oh, and when you see a detached finger, and smell it, you know. He told me he was curing it in tobacco.
Adding to his collection.
/ Art Wester
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Friend and I, high school age, were using a Ouija board when the planchette slid off one side of the board, which was between us on a small table. The planchette did not fall, though. It stayed in the air, and we snatched back our fingers in surprise. It hung in mid-air for several seconds, no wobble or anything, then flew off under a larger table. My friend refused to continue.
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I was born in Altoona and raised in Munster and Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, in the Laurel Highlands, and I once, with a friend, found what would later come to be known as a grassman nest, a domed structure big enough for us to stand up in, with fresh timothy bedding and a horrible stench on Cresson mountain.
My friend and I felt watched and saw shadows and it was dusk, so we split, rather fast. We did investigate slightly, the horrible smell was off-putting and definitely not a hunter or what not.
We were little kids at the time and my friend’s father forbade us to go back up that far, and since we’d been spooked, we complied. We’d found evident sleeping spots where ferns were pressed down and so on, closer to his house, (base of the mountain), but had not made the connection. We regularly played in those woods.
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