July 14, 2025 • 22 mins
Archive 177 Alien Abduction
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
All right, here's a story, and it's one that I
never do. Let me explain. When someone sends me an
email and they say, well, I've already submitted this to
so and so so and so, so and so, and
I'm submitting it to you right now, I usually just
delete the email. We don't. None of us out here
(00:26):
who do this want to duplicate stories. So that's a
little hint for people. If you've already submitted your story
to another channel and they've done it, especially if they've
done it, or even if they haven't done it, you
picked who you wanted to send it to and leave
it at that, don't send it to me. That's not
really fair. I know people want to get their story
(00:48):
heard all over the place, but it's anyway. It kind
of annoys me, is what I'm saying, and when I
see that, I delete them. However, this story that I'm
about to share with you was actually shared on another channel.
It was shared on or narrated on Carrie Arnold's Excuse Me,
(01:09):
Carrie Arnold's channel The Shutter. He did a storytelling channel
at one time during the COVID shutdown. He didn't have
much to do, He wasn't working. He actually called me
and he said, I want to do this. I'm like,
you should do it. You've got a great voice, and
you know you read really well, and you should be
able to do it. Just in honor of Carrie. I
(01:32):
wanted to redo this story. It's pretty good. It's a
pretty good story. The title of the story is twelve
Big Creature. It's written by Daniel McCall and this was
posted on Facebook, so I'm assuming he posted it on
his Facebook channel under his name, so I don't mind
saying his full name because he's taken full credit for this.
(01:55):
He writes. My maternal grandfather, d Calvin Howell was born
in Jefferson County, Florida, in eighteen eighty six and grew
up in I can't pronounce this town name Willkissa w
wasisa Wacissa and the Cody area, hunting, fishing, and roaming
(02:15):
the local woods. When as a teenage boy he was
old enough to go to work, he began working in
logging camps which were all deep in the woods, accessible
only by rail that was laid to access in haul
out the timber. He was an excellent woodsman. He was
a hunter and he was an expert with firearms. It
was generally well known in the area that the men
(02:37):
of the Howell family would not back down from a confrontation.
Calvin Howell was not a big man, but in that
respect he was very much like the rest of his
Howell relatives. He married my grandmother in nineteen twelve and
continued working and living in logging camps until nineteen twenty nine,
when his employer, Standard Lumber Company went broke as a
(03:01):
result of the stock market crash and left him and
his family stranded in a logging camp in Lofayette County, Florida.
When he managed to get his family out of the
logging camp, he became a sharecropper farmer in the area
of Mayo, Loafayette County, Florida. In nineteen thirty eight, when
he bought his own farm in Leon County, Florida. He
(03:23):
died in nineteen fifty one when I was thirteen years old.
A few months after my grandfather died, I came to
live with my grandmother and I lived with her until
I graduated from high school and joined the Army in
nineteen fifty five. When I was growing up, one of
the family stories I heard from my mother and grandmother
(03:44):
was about an encounter my grandfather had one night during
the years that he was sharecropping in Lofayette County. This
was during the Great Depression and the family was struggling
to survive. Their only means of transportation was a mule
and a wagon or walking. One night, my grandfather was
walking home from a place I no longer remember. It
(04:06):
was after dark, but it was a clear night, and
there was enough light from the moon or the stars
for him to be able to see the road for
a little way ahead. He was walking along a dirt
road in a wooded area that was sparsely populated with
no houses. When he approached an intersection in the dirt road,
he saw what appeared to him to be a large
(04:27):
man standing erect and silent in the intersection. He couldn't
see it well enough to tell if it was a
big man or something else. Being a lifelong woodsman and hunter,
he was well aware of all the animals that lived
in the area, including the black bear. He was also
aware of all the domestic animals, which at that time
(04:49):
were allowed to roam free on the open range, and
he knew most, if not all, of the men who
lived in the area, but he didn't know anyone that large.
In the darkness, he could not identify this person or
animal or creature or object standing in the intersection. He
couldn't pass through the intersection without walking close to the
(05:11):
unidentified manner object in the intersection. Being very apprehensive about
approaching an unknown person or animal under those circumstances, he
stopped twenty yards short of the intersection and challenged what
he thought was probably a large man to identify himself,
and he received no response. After challenging the man or
(05:35):
the creature several more times and receiving no response, he
eventually said something to the effect of you're going to
speak up now, I'm gonna shoot you. After receiving no
response once again, he fired two shots from his Smith
and Wesson thirty eight special revolver into the center chest
area of the object. Considering his expertise with the revolver
(05:59):
and the close range, it is not likely that he
missed his mark. After he shot the creature, it moved
off into the woods in an upright position without making
a sound. After a few minutes, my grandfather continued on
his way home. The next morning, He and others, who
were all well armed went back to the intersection in
(06:21):
the daylight to find the creature, or at least find
its tracks and determine what it was. They didn't find
the creature, nor did they identify any tracks. No man
or animal was ever reported as having been shot or
seen at that time in location. Could this have been
(06:42):
a bear, maybe, but there are some things that seemed
to indicate that it was not a bear. He was
a woodsman, and my grandfather knew what black bears looked like.
And also, a black bear will generally run away when
approached and verbally challenged by a human. And it's also
unlikely that a black bear would walk away on its
(07:02):
hind legs after being shot twice in the chest by
thirty eight special Normally, in either case, a black bear
would run away on all four legs. The creature was
never identified in the mystery was never solved. Recent stories
about people's encounters with bigfoot type creatures made me remember
(07:23):
the story and wonder if it may be what my
grandfather encountered back in the nineteen thirties. I was allowed
to begin hunting squirrels with a single shot twenty two
when I was ten years old, and I grew to
love hunting wood ducks and turkeys and deer, and I
hunted them until twenty fourteen. During the sixty plus years
(07:44):
that I hunted in North Florida, I never saw an
animal or a track that I could not identify. I
did hear an occasional strange noise, but I attributed those
to hogs that were always in the areas where I hunted.
I had asked many questions and written down the story
back when I first heard it, and I was young
(08:05):
and thought I would remember everything. And that's the end
of the story. And again, this story has been recorded before.
Carrie Arnold did it on his channel, The Shutter. There'll
be a link in the description, and I miss Carry Arnold.
I did this story kind of in his honor. It's
not a big tribute to Carrie. But when I saw
(08:28):
at the end that the man had said he sent
it to Carrie, and Carrie did it on his channel,
it just felt right to do it. This story is
true by all that is holy, and I'm not kidding.
I would prefer to keep my name out of this,
but feel free to use it, not use it, do
whatever you want to do with it. I finished it
(08:50):
a couple of hours ago, and I feel like a
whole lot of weight is off my shoulders now. It's
taken me decades to be able to relate the events here,
and I'm still not certain that I'm all that ready.
I've told only my wife about the event, and she
did not want to deal with it, so I figured
that it was a story that just shouldn't be told. However,
(09:12):
my life was forever changed by what happened to me,
and others were impacted even more so I'm hoping that
putting this story out will help get fully past it.
When I was young, I had fears of being taken, assaulted,
or abducted. Whatever words you may choose for characterizing a
child that had these fears is okay with me. It's
(09:34):
the fact that it happened that counts. The image of
big eyed pictures of children or owls always freaked me
out and I couldn't deal with them. I'll begin by
relating what happened when I was twelve. I lived with
my mother and older brother, and we had a really loving,
secure home. She worked hard to keep a roof over
(09:55):
our heads, and she was worn out and napping after
work whenever possible. Soon after this event, she remarried a
good guy that paid the bills, so she didn't have
to work anymore. My mother was blessed in life, and
my stepfather was all of our blessing from God. This
story is prior to that happening. My mother decided to
(10:18):
send us away to visit her family out in Illinois
for summer vacation so we could get to know them
better and vice versa. We were living in a city
back in Ohio and hardly knew her family. We stayed
for a while with my uncle, who had a small
grocery store with a home above it on the second floor.
(10:38):
And after we arrived there, my night fares became more intense.
I noticed that he had an old refrigerator case out
in the garage that he was going to get rid of.
It was still plugged in, and though it wouldn't cool anymore,
the fan motor in it was still working. I was
an industrious little pest of a kid, and I asked
(10:59):
him if I could have the fan motor, and he said,
have at it. An hour later, it was in my hands.
It had no protective screen around it, and it needed
a plug, all of which didn't bother me. When I
returned home, I attached a new plug to the wires
and bolted it to the headboard of my metal frame
bunk bed, and with an extension cord, it worked fine.
(11:23):
The humming helped me sleep, provided I didn't bump into
those fan blades. Everyone thought I needed the breeze at night,
but my needs were not about more air. What I
was hoping was that fan would prevent whatever was bothering
me at night from ever returning out of fear that
they would be cut to pieces. That is the way
(11:43):
it was for me as a kid, loving the world,
curious and scared sometimes. At the age of thirty eight,
I had just remarried. I had joint custody of my
two children, and I was living with my new wife
in a ranch house on the outskirts of the city
on a rural wooded light. The house wasn't much, but
(12:06):
I liked the location and the acreage and the trees
that surrounded the house. It sort of shielded the ground
from the light, so we didn't have to cut grass
very much. Plus, because the trees had few low branches,
so you could see the other homes one hundred yards
or so in every direction around us during that first spring.
(12:26):
We seemed to be unnaturally surrounded with wildlife night and
day in that house, and it was a little unnerving
for a city boy like Meat. If you walked outside
at night, there were always deer staring at you or
running around scaring you, or even raccoons or birds. Owls
seemed to hang out there too. Especially weird was the
(12:47):
big hawk that would land on the branch in front
of the living room picture window, causing the branch to
drop down just low enough where the hawk could peer
into our window, and he did all the time. Many
times I'd just sit and we would stare at one
another over my morning coffee. One day I found him
in another branch looking into the breakfast room window. Seems
(13:11):
like we were just never alone there. I had just
gotten married to my second wife, who was twenty seven
at the time, and she had moved with me into
this place. She was trying to fit in, and things
were a little dicey still with her relationship with my
ex and kids, but that is the way it is
with blended families. One morning, something happened that I'm going
(13:34):
to tell you about because it was really strange and inexplicable.
My wife and I had a sleep routine in her
habit where she would always wear my pajama top and
her own shorts to bed, and I would wear the
matching pajama bottoms and a T shirt. She was a
fitful sleeper and I was a sound sleeper. In the mornings,
(13:55):
her side of the bed was a mess. Blankets were everywhere,
but on my I just slip out of and never
even had to make the bed, so I never did. So, okay,
we were lazy about making the bed. Big deal. Well,
this one morning, I woke to light coming in all
the windows as if I'd been sleeping for days. It
(14:16):
was ten am, and I had never slept past seven
am in my life. Kids weren't with us that night,
and the wife started to stir in bed at the
same time as I did. I remember looking at her
and she looking at me, saying to one another, what
happened last night? We had gone to bed uneventfully very early,
(14:38):
and both of us had no recollection of getting up
at all, no watching the TV in the room, no
bathroom visits all night long, nothing, which was very strange.
We laid there in bed feeling like we were sleeping.
Something off but we weren't drinkers and hadn't had a
thing the day or night before. As I tried to
(14:58):
turn over and get out of the bed, I realized
I couldn't move very well, and it took me a
few moments to figure out why. It turns out that
our blankets and bedspread had been pulled tightly and tucked
in all around the sides of the bed, so securely
that we had difficulty kicking them loose to get out
of the bed. It was as if we had been
(15:20):
deliberately secured into our own bed. Furthermore, she had on
my T shirt and I had on the pajama top
she wore to bed, which I hate wearing, and the
top was buttoned. Who does that. We were both groggy
and unable to focus very well and were freaked out
about what had just happened. Months later, my memories began
(15:44):
to return a little at a time, and I remembered
what had happened. She never did. We were taken to
a place that I was familiar with, but she was
new to and she was in a complete panic, and
neither of us could move. That was making me angry,
which is why I think I remembered what had happened.
(16:05):
There were other people there, and I used the term
people loosely because what I really saw weren't people like
you and I. However, I seemed to be familiar with them,
and they were with me as if we knew each other.
This had happened to me before, but this time it
was different. I insisted that they stopped doing what they
(16:26):
were doing to us, and they just continued on with
their task, as if my words or her fears were
unimportant to whatever task they were intent on completing on us.
I remember being emphatic and unrelenting, as I was not
concerned about myself but my new wife, and what I
perceived was an attack on someone who was innocent. My
(16:49):
own personal experience was one of passivity, except for defending
her in this heated moment. Then, out of desperation, I
remember yelling these words words in the name of Jesus,
the Father and the Spirit of God, I demand that
you stop doing this to her immediately. For the first time,
they all sort of stopped all at once, and a
(17:12):
few of them actually turned their heads towards me, then
to one another, and without speaking or using any obvious
other form of communication, which I still don't exactly understand.
They simply stopped. They seemed stunned or disappointed, or maybe
even angry. I remember being carried or floated quickly back
(17:34):
to the bed. She was carried to the other side
of the bed. We were both hurriedly tucked in and
put to sleep. The memories were never fully completed, just
the ability for me to resolve it well enough to
move past it. Things were never the same after that morning.
It took a couple of months for the reality of
(17:56):
what happened that night to reveal itself, but from then
on she was not interested in living in that house
or even on that side of town. We argued about moving,
and then one day a couple of months later, we
found a lump in her breast. The doctor said she
needed surgery right away and began to treat her with
radiation and chemotherapy. She was determined to move somewhere else
(18:20):
and went looking for a place as far away as
she could find. During this time, I was dealing with
my own trauma, as I was having one dream after another,
one building on top of the memory of the one before,
over and over, gradually revealing to me what had happened
that one strange night we had somehow as a couple
(18:42):
been moved to another location, and I remember seeing her
on her back being moved as I was on my back,
both being transported through the air. We were renting this
house and I had a lease, and I wasn't interested
in moving to the other side of the town because
my business, kids and friends, her doctor's everything was nearby
(19:04):
and very convenient. Nevertheless, she decided to get out on
her own and rented an apartment and moved out. She
was scared and legitimately frightened about the possibility of the
spread of her cancer. It was beyond my ability to
understand how to help her. Once she moved out, she
(19:24):
was resolute, and I understood and accepted her decision. I
also got out of that house. A month later, I
broke the lease and rented a place nearer to my kids,
and I felt safer there. My wife was getting treated
and she became more and more emotionally and mentally stressed,
and I offered for her to move back in with me,
(19:46):
which she accepted. None of the treatments or therapy slowed
her cancer down. I even paid out of my pocket
for a bone marrow transplant, and while she was in
the hospital, the cancer spread everywhere. Within three months, she
was diagnosed as terminal, and she decided to leave the
country and move to Europe. She was a sad, loss confused,
(20:10):
frightened woman who just wanted to live. Ultimately, she ended
up returning from Europe and we divorced on good terms,
and I kept her medical coverage intact and offered for
her to move back in with me to continue her treatments.
I never discussed that strange night of the year prior
ever again, except for her to say that she never
(20:32):
wanted to hear me speak of it again. So I
was never able to reveal what I had eventually remembered,
and I always wondered what she remembered, if anything, and
if those memories possibly contributed to her belief that the
events of that previous year with me had caused her cancer,
a belief which I heard almost daily without details, which
(20:54):
she could not bear to engage in. After a few months,
she moved back to her mother home eight hundred miles away,
and then to a hospice, and then a year later
she passed away. It has been almost twenty five years
since then, and I've since remarried for twenty three of
those years now, and these events still affect me on
(21:15):
a regular basis. I'm not certain there is any way
to resolve things like this unless you talk about them. However,
I'm certain that my demand, backed by my statement of
faith that night, completely stopped any other event from happening
ever again. At one point, though, about five years later,
(21:35):
my twelve year old son had something happen. One day,
when I was cleaning his room, which was in the
third floor loft looking out over the little acreage of trees,
I found a crudely drawn picture of what appeared to
be a bird with huge eyes. When I questioned him
about it, he very calmly said that at night, something
(21:57):
like a dove was tapping at his window and even
waking him too early in the morning, which would have
been impossible based upon where his room was situated, and
that he drew the picture of this hawk and taped
it to the glass looking outwards because he had heard
that other birds were afraid of hawks, and he hoped
the picture would stop them from bothering him at night.
(22:20):
We moved again after that, and my son has had
no more experiences, though truthfully, we don't speak about it.
Maybe we should
All right, here's a story, and it's one that I
never do. Let me explain. When someone sends me an
email and they say, well, I've already submitted this to
so and so so and so, so and so, and
I'm submitting it to you right now, I usually just
delete the email. We don't. None of us out here
(00:26):
who do this want to duplicate stories. So that's a
little hint for people. If you've already submitted your story
to another channel and they've done it, especially if they've
done it, or even if they haven't done it, you
picked who you wanted to send it to and leave
it at that, don't send it to me. That's not
really fair. I know people want to get their story
(00:48):
heard all over the place, but it's anyway. It kind
of annoys me, is what I'm saying, and when I
see that, I delete them. However, this story that I'm
about to share with you was actually shared on another channel.
It was shared on or narrated on Carrie Arnold's Excuse Me,
(01:09):
Carrie Arnold's channel The Shutter. He did a storytelling channel
at one time during the COVID shutdown. He didn't have
much to do, He wasn't working. He actually called me
and he said, I want to do this. I'm like,
you should do it. You've got a great voice, and
you know you read really well, and you should be
able to do it. Just in honor of Carrie. I
(01:32):
wanted to redo this story. It's pretty good. It's a
pretty good story. The title of the story is twelve
Big Creature. It's written by Daniel McCall and this was
posted on Facebook, so I'm assuming he posted it on
his Facebook channel under his name, so I don't mind
saying his full name because he's taken full credit for this.
(01:55):
He writes. My maternal grandfather, d Calvin Howell was born
in Jefferson County, Florida, in eighteen eighty six and grew
up in I can't pronounce this town name Willkissa w
wasisa Wacissa and the Cody area, hunting, fishing, and roaming
(02:15):
the local woods. When as a teenage boy he was
old enough to go to work, he began working in
logging camps which were all deep in the woods, accessible
only by rail that was laid to access in haul
out the timber. He was an excellent woodsman. He was
a hunter and he was an expert with firearms. It
was generally well known in the area that the men
(02:37):
of the Howell family would not back down from a confrontation.
Calvin Howell was not a big man, but in that
respect he was very much like the rest of his
Howell relatives. He married my grandmother in nineteen twelve and
continued working and living in logging camps until nineteen twenty nine,
when his employer, Standard Lumber Company went broke as a
(03:01):
result of the stock market crash and left him and
his family stranded in a logging camp in Lofayette County, Florida.
When he managed to get his family out of the
logging camp, he became a sharecropper farmer in the area
of Mayo, Loafayette County, Florida. In nineteen thirty eight, when
he bought his own farm in Leon County, Florida. He
(03:23):
died in nineteen fifty one when I was thirteen years old.
A few months after my grandfather died, I came to
live with my grandmother and I lived with her until
I graduated from high school and joined the Army in
nineteen fifty five. When I was growing up, one of
the family stories I heard from my mother and grandmother
(03:44):
was about an encounter my grandfather had one night during
the years that he was sharecropping in Lofayette County. This
was during the Great Depression and the family was struggling
to survive. Their only means of transportation was a mule
and a wagon or walking. One night, my grandfather was
walking home from a place I no longer remember. It
(04:06):
was after dark, but it was a clear night, and
there was enough light from the moon or the stars
for him to be able to see the road for
a little way ahead. He was walking along a dirt
road in a wooded area that was sparsely populated with
no houses. When he approached an intersection in the dirt road,
he saw what appeared to him to be a large
(04:27):
man standing erect and silent in the intersection. He couldn't
see it well enough to tell if it was a
big man or something else. Being a lifelong woodsman and hunter,
he was well aware of all the animals that lived
in the area, including the black bear. He was also
aware of all the domestic animals, which at that time
(04:49):
were allowed to roam free on the open range, and
he knew most, if not all, of the men who
lived in the area, but he didn't know anyone that large.
In the darkness, he could not identify this person or
animal or creature or object standing in the intersection. He
couldn't pass through the intersection without walking close to the
(05:11):
unidentified manner object in the intersection. Being very apprehensive about
approaching an unknown person or animal under those circumstances, he
stopped twenty yards short of the intersection and challenged what
he thought was probably a large man to identify himself,
and he received no response. After challenging the man or
(05:35):
the creature several more times and receiving no response, he
eventually said something to the effect of you're going to
speak up now, I'm gonna shoot you. After receiving no
response once again, he fired two shots from his Smith
and Wesson thirty eight special revolver into the center chest
area of the object. Considering his expertise with the revolver
(05:59):
and the close range, it is not likely that he
missed his mark. After he shot the creature, it moved
off into the woods in an upright position without making
a sound. After a few minutes, my grandfather continued on
his way home. The next morning, He and others, who
were all well armed went back to the intersection in
(06:21):
the daylight to find the creature, or at least find
its tracks and determine what it was. They didn't find
the creature, nor did they identify any tracks. No man
or animal was ever reported as having been shot or
seen at that time in location. Could this have been
(06:42):
a bear, maybe, but there are some things that seemed
to indicate that it was not a bear. He was
a woodsman, and my grandfather knew what black bears looked like.
And also, a black bear will generally run away when
approached and verbally challenged by a human. And it's also
unlikely that a black bear would walk away on its
(07:02):
hind legs after being shot twice in the chest by
thirty eight special Normally, in either case, a black bear
would run away on all four legs. The creature was
never identified in the mystery was never solved. Recent stories
about people's encounters with bigfoot type creatures made me remember
(07:23):
the story and wonder if it may be what my
grandfather encountered back in the nineteen thirties. I was allowed
to begin hunting squirrels with a single shot twenty two
when I was ten years old, and I grew to
love hunting wood ducks and turkeys and deer, and I
hunted them until twenty fourteen. During the sixty plus years
(07:44):
that I hunted in North Florida, I never saw an
animal or a track that I could not identify. I
did hear an occasional strange noise, but I attributed those
to hogs that were always in the areas where I hunted.
I had asked many questions and written down the story
back when I first heard it, and I was young
(08:05):
and thought I would remember everything. And that's the end
of the story. And again, this story has been recorded before.
Carrie Arnold did it on his channel, The Shutter. There'll
be a link in the description, and I miss Carry Arnold.
I did this story kind of in his honor. It's
not a big tribute to Carrie. But when I saw
(08:28):
at the end that the man had said he sent
it to Carrie, and Carrie did it on his channel,
it just felt right to do it. This story is
true by all that is holy, and I'm not kidding.
I would prefer to keep my name out of this,
but feel free to use it, not use it, do
whatever you want to do with it. I finished it
(08:50):
a couple of hours ago, and I feel like a
whole lot of weight is off my shoulders now. It's
taken me decades to be able to relate the events here,
and I'm still not certain that I'm all that ready.
I've told only my wife about the event, and she
did not want to deal with it, so I figured
that it was a story that just shouldn't be told. However,
(09:12):
my life was forever changed by what happened to me,
and others were impacted even more so I'm hoping that
putting this story out will help get fully past it.
When I was young, I had fears of being taken, assaulted,
or abducted. Whatever words you may choose for characterizing a
child that had these fears is okay with me. It's
(09:34):
the fact that it happened that counts. The image of
big eyed pictures of children or owls always freaked me
out and I couldn't deal with them. I'll begin by
relating what happened when I was twelve. I lived with
my mother and older brother, and we had a really loving,
secure home. She worked hard to keep a roof over
(09:55):
our heads, and she was worn out and napping after
work whenever possible. Soon after this event, she remarried a
good guy that paid the bills, so she didn't have
to work anymore. My mother was blessed in life, and
my stepfather was all of our blessing from God. This
story is prior to that happening. My mother decided to
(10:18):
send us away to visit her family out in Illinois
for summer vacation so we could get to know them
better and vice versa. We were living in a city
back in Ohio and hardly knew her family. We stayed
for a while with my uncle, who had a small
grocery store with a home above it on the second floor.
(10:38):
And after we arrived there, my night fares became more intense.
I noticed that he had an old refrigerator case out
in the garage that he was going to get rid of.
It was still plugged in, and though it wouldn't cool anymore,
the fan motor in it was still working. I was
an industrious little pest of a kid, and I asked
(10:59):
him if I could have the fan motor, and he said,
have at it. An hour later, it was in my hands.
It had no protective screen around it, and it needed
a plug, all of which didn't bother me. When I
returned home, I attached a new plug to the wires
and bolted it to the headboard of my metal frame
bunk bed, and with an extension cord, it worked fine.
(11:23):
The humming helped me sleep, provided I didn't bump into
those fan blades. Everyone thought I needed the breeze at night,
but my needs were not about more air. What I
was hoping was that fan would prevent whatever was bothering
me at night from ever returning out of fear that
they would be cut to pieces. That is the way
(11:43):
it was for me as a kid, loving the world,
curious and scared sometimes. At the age of thirty eight,
I had just remarried. I had joint custody of my
two children, and I was living with my new wife
in a ranch house on the outskirts of the city
on a rural wooded light. The house wasn't much, but
(12:06):
I liked the location and the acreage and the trees
that surrounded the house. It sort of shielded the ground
from the light, so we didn't have to cut grass
very much. Plus, because the trees had few low branches,
so you could see the other homes one hundred yards
or so in every direction around us during that first spring.
(12:26):
We seemed to be unnaturally surrounded with wildlife night and
day in that house, and it was a little unnerving
for a city boy like Meat. If you walked outside
at night, there were always deer staring at you or
running around scaring you, or even raccoons or birds. Owls
seemed to hang out there too. Especially weird was the
(12:47):
big hawk that would land on the branch in front
of the living room picture window, causing the branch to
drop down just low enough where the hawk could peer
into our window, and he did all the time. Many
times I'd just sit and we would stare at one
another over my morning coffee. One day I found him
in another branch looking into the breakfast room window. Seems
(13:11):
like we were just never alone there. I had just
gotten married to my second wife, who was twenty seven
at the time, and she had moved with me into
this place. She was trying to fit in, and things
were a little dicey still with her relationship with my
ex and kids, but that is the way it is
with blended families. One morning, something happened that I'm going
(13:34):
to tell you about because it was really strange and inexplicable.
My wife and I had a sleep routine in her
habit where she would always wear my pajama top and
her own shorts to bed, and I would wear the
matching pajama bottoms and a T shirt. She was a
fitful sleeper and I was a sound sleeper. In the mornings,
(13:55):
her side of the bed was a mess. Blankets were everywhere,
but on my I just slip out of and never
even had to make the bed, so I never did. So, okay,
we were lazy about making the bed. Big deal. Well,
this one morning, I woke to light coming in all
the windows as if I'd been sleeping for days. It
(14:16):
was ten am, and I had never slept past seven
am in my life. Kids weren't with us that night,
and the wife started to stir in bed at the
same time as I did. I remember looking at her
and she looking at me, saying to one another, what
happened last night? We had gone to bed uneventfully very early,
(14:38):
and both of us had no recollection of getting up
at all, no watching the TV in the room, no
bathroom visits all night long, nothing, which was very strange.
We laid there in bed feeling like we were sleeping.
Something off but we weren't drinkers and hadn't had a
thing the day or night before. As I tried to
(14:58):
turn over and get out of the bed, I realized
I couldn't move very well, and it took me a
few moments to figure out why. It turns out that
our blankets and bedspread had been pulled tightly and tucked
in all around the sides of the bed, so securely
that we had difficulty kicking them loose to get out
of the bed. It was as if we had been
(15:20):
deliberately secured into our own bed. Furthermore, she had on
my T shirt and I had on the pajama top
she wore to bed, which I hate wearing, and the
top was buttoned. Who does that. We were both groggy
and unable to focus very well and were freaked out
about what had just happened. Months later, my memories began
(15:44):
to return a little at a time, and I remembered
what had happened. She never did. We were taken to
a place that I was familiar with, but she was
new to and she was in a complete panic, and
neither of us could move. That was making me angry,
which is why I think I remembered what had happened.
(16:05):
There were other people there, and I used the term
people loosely because what I really saw weren't people like
you and I. However, I seemed to be familiar with them,
and they were with me as if we knew each other.
This had happened to me before, but this time it
was different. I insisted that they stopped doing what they
(16:26):
were doing to us, and they just continued on with
their task, as if my words or her fears were
unimportant to whatever task they were intent on completing on us.
I remember being emphatic and unrelenting, as I was not
concerned about myself but my new wife, and what I
perceived was an attack on someone who was innocent. My
(16:49):
own personal experience was one of passivity, except for defending
her in this heated moment. Then, out of desperation, I
remember yelling these words words in the name of Jesus,
the Father and the Spirit of God, I demand that
you stop doing this to her immediately. For the first time,
they all sort of stopped all at once, and a
(17:12):
few of them actually turned their heads towards me, then
to one another, and without speaking or using any obvious
other form of communication, which I still don't exactly understand.
They simply stopped. They seemed stunned or disappointed, or maybe
even angry. I remember being carried or floated quickly back
(17:34):
to the bed. She was carried to the other side
of the bed. We were both hurriedly tucked in and
put to sleep. The memories were never fully completed, just
the ability for me to resolve it well enough to
move past it. Things were never the same after that morning.
It took a couple of months for the reality of
(17:56):
what happened that night to reveal itself, but from then
on she was not interested in living in that house
or even on that side of town. We argued about moving,
and then one day a couple of months later, we
found a lump in her breast. The doctor said she
needed surgery right away and began to treat her with
radiation and chemotherapy. She was determined to move somewhere else
(18:20):
and went looking for a place as far away as
she could find. During this time, I was dealing with
my own trauma, as I was having one dream after another,
one building on top of the memory of the one before,
over and over, gradually revealing to me what had happened
that one strange night we had somehow as a couple
(18:42):
been moved to another location, and I remember seeing her
on her back being moved as I was on my back,
both being transported through the air. We were renting this
house and I had a lease, and I wasn't interested
in moving to the other side of the town because
my business, kids and friends, her doctor's everything was nearby
(19:04):
and very convenient. Nevertheless, she decided to get out on
her own and rented an apartment and moved out. She
was scared and legitimately frightened about the possibility of the
spread of her cancer. It was beyond my ability to
understand how to help her. Once she moved out, she
(19:24):
was resolute, and I understood and accepted her decision. I
also got out of that house. A month later, I
broke the lease and rented a place nearer to my kids,
and I felt safer there. My wife was getting treated
and she became more and more emotionally and mentally stressed,
and I offered for her to move back in with me,
(19:46):
which she accepted. None of the treatments or therapy slowed
her cancer down. I even paid out of my pocket
for a bone marrow transplant, and while she was in
the hospital, the cancer spread everywhere. Within three months, she
was diagnosed as terminal, and she decided to leave the
country and move to Europe. She was a sad, loss confused,
(20:10):
frightened woman who just wanted to live. Ultimately, she ended
up returning from Europe and we divorced on good terms,
and I kept her medical coverage intact and offered for
her to move back in with me to continue her treatments.
I never discussed that strange night of the year prior
ever again, except for her to say that she never
(20:32):
wanted to hear me speak of it again. So I
was never able to reveal what I had eventually remembered,
and I always wondered what she remembered, if anything, and
if those memories possibly contributed to her belief that the
events of that previous year with me had caused her cancer,
a belief which I heard almost daily without details, which
(20:54):
she could not bear to engage in. After a few months,
she moved back to her mother home eight hundred miles away,
and then to a hospice, and then a year later
she passed away. It has been almost twenty five years
since then, and I've since remarried for twenty three of
those years now, and these events still affect me on
(21:15):
a regular basis. I'm not certain there is any way
to resolve things like this unless you talk about them. However,
I'm certain that my demand, backed by my statement of
faith that night, completely stopped any other event from happening
ever again. At one point, though, about five years later,
(21:35):
my twelve year old son had something happen. One day,
when I was cleaning his room, which was in the
third floor loft looking out over the little acreage of trees,
I found a crudely drawn picture of what appeared to
be a bird with huge eyes. When I questioned him
about it, he very calmly said that at night, something
(21:57):
like a dove was tapping at his window and even
waking him too early in the morning, which would have
been impossible based upon where his room was situated, and
that he drew the picture of this hawk and taped
it to the glass looking outwards because he had heard
that other birds were afraid of hawks, and he hoped
the picture would stop them from bothering him at night.
(22:20):
We moved again after that, and my son has had
no more experiences, though truthfully, we don't speak about it.
Maybe we should
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