My Short Story Memories

No Other Place for Miscellaneous

While I am spending this winter not yet working, I am catching up with my writing. Many times I will write about a topic and have more than just this blog to put it in. For instance, when my wife and I saw a possible UFO I wrote it up and posted here and the national UFO register, allowing others to decide for themselves what it was. Some things like my Fish & Game research, like the Wolf Knows, would only be posted here, but I send copies out to people who may have missed the real impact of the true knowledge. However there are some things that are a part of my life that simply have no place to be other than here, and are so strange that it might scare people here too. Just keep in mind these short items are something that I lived through or experienced. Something real to me and therefore a part of the total of whom I am. “Cognito Ergo Sum, We are the sum total of our experiences…”

The Bedroom Visitor

One afternoon when I lived in Santa Anna, southern California, I decided to do some reading and went to the bedroom, propped up some pillows and began reading the first book in the "Illearth" series. After a while I began feeling like I was being watched, even though I knew I was alone in the apartment.

I dropped the book down slowly and standing at the foot of the bed was a girl in a bright red dress and she appeared to be about eight or ten. She looked similar to my daughter at that age and likely was. I started to ask her the silly question of "who are you?" and she took some steps backward and backed up towards the wall on my right. When she got to the dresser, she backed into it and totally vanished. It was a new and tall dresser. So it must have actually been the wall she was moving to.

I had seen dark shapes moving around in haunted houses, and I had seen the glowing globes move around in old buildings before. But a full view of a girl looking as solid as you or me and then vanishing?! I was shaken for quite a while. I saw a ghost of a girl in an apartment complex that was only about 20 years old. I can assure you, ghosts do exist.

The Only Stranger

In all my life I have seen this only once. I am a people watcher which is really good to help build profiles of characters for writing fiction. In September of 1982 I was in the Navy and had just rented a small apartment in downtown Vallejo, California. From the apartment it was a five block walk to a park along a finger of San Pablo Bay. One late afternoon I was walking from my apartment on Georgia Street west towards the bay. When I got to the intersection of Georgia Street and Sacramento Street I was walking along the north side of the intersection. On the light I crossed the street to the northwest corner and paused to look around. My attention was immediately drawn to a man standing on the southeast corner of the same intersection. There were many people walking around the intersection including a lot of auto traffic surging with the red and green of the stop lights. Even when you now play games online, the characters are programmed with ever so slight movement, even when standing still, to imitate reality. This man I saw seemed to be in his late 50’s by appearance and the way he was dressed, but he was distinctly not moving. I could not see that he was breathing, nor was there ever a shuffle of his feet. His eyes were unblinking and his hands unmoving. Many people were walking past him, or more correctly around him completely. You know that thing about we all have “space” around us that we do not like to have entered unless by someone we know? Well the space around this man was three feet in any direction, and unthinkingly, people were giving him exactly that much space as they moved around him on the sidewalk. I have been using the term “man” to identify this person, but I remember that a different term came to mind at that time. It was vampire. He definitely was not an average person, not even close. As I watched him his gaze was somewhat to the northeast of where he was standing. When the thought came to me “vampire,” his gaze slowly changed smoothly from what he may have been looking at, directly to me. He made eye to eye contact taking my breath away. I was frozen in place staring at him and it seemed nothing else existed. There were just his cold dark steady eyes looking into mine. I have no idea how much time went by like this, but suddenly he was gone. Think of it. Cold dark unblinking eyes staring into yours, locking your attention and then no eyes, no man and no comfortable feelings. I decided to rush back to my apartment. I am sure I slept with an extra pillow over my head that night for safety. Was he just an elderly gentleman who seemed different, or something else? You decide. I saw him and he was real just as I have written it here. These kinds of memories just won’t shake loose from the mind. He was the only real stranger I have ever seen.

Who am I?

I suppose many people wonder about that. For me, it seems just as important as ‘What’s for dinner?” important, to be sure, but not that important. Along the way I have been given some small clues, and some really strong clues. I have some memories that go back to age 2. At age 3 my grandmother started training me about the earth force and herbs. At age five my first father died. In the second grade my favorite book was House Wiring Diagrams and Regulations for the United States. I loved that book and still remember a lot of the content. In the fourth grade I would go to the city dump and collect discarded radios. At that time it was all vacuum tubes. I would use good tubes from one radio to fix another then take the good radios door to door selling them for a dollar. That supplemented my ten cents a week allowance. In high school my allowance was twenty- five cents a week for doing chores before and after school like feeding chickens and slopping the hogs, and I supplemented my allowance by fixing radios and TV’s. Back then most people still had black and white Portable TV’s, meaning they were on a stand that could be rotated around to point to the living room or the kitchen for all three channels.
At high school graduation in Emmett, Idaho, it was war time. President Johnson had just cancelled tuition assistance for poor farmboys like me. That meant with the draft, every young man without money for college would go into the military, generally for a one way trip to Viet Nam. The year was 1967. To avoid the draft, at age 17 my mother signed me up for the Marines in an aviation program. During my Marine years and later Navy years, many times my life would be in danger and sudden things would happen to prevent problems. People shot at me and missed or hit my radio equipment. A group of young men with knives surrounded me and a patrol jeep suddenly showed up. Things like that happened all the time. In 1998 I was stung by a bald faced hornet and totally reacted to the venom. Within 10 minutes my heart stopped and I died. I was running into the light and a woman appeared and stopped me. She said “it’s not your time yet, you have much to do.” I always thought family would meet you at the light, but I had no clue as to who this person was. Two years later, at the age of 50, I found out I had been adopted.
During all this time I had many considerable psychic abilities. Since I died, these abilities have continued to improve. I know now that I am an Indigo Adult. Although I do not know my future, I know that I will be ready when the time comes. My ability to heal with a touch is coming back to me.