Living for a year with my brother in a paranormal apartment…
and some stuff beyond that

 

by Carissa Conti
© 2001-2023
Revised and edited, 2022
carissaconti@protonmail.com

 

Note: I wrote “The Vortex” in 2001, after leaving the “apartment from hell” as I came to call it, and while the events were still fresh in my mind. There were so many events to document and conversations that took place, if I hadn’t written it down right then, then it would be highly distorted were I to go back at this stage and try to remember it all. Back then I was a bit ADD, even though I don’t actually have ADD. But being able to complete something that I started was an unusual feat for me at that point, since my mind was scattered and I lacked any sort of direction or purpose in life. So it was a triumphant moment when I finished this piece, but it’s because I was absolutely driven to get it all down. I’m glad I did, in retrospect. This document is actually a “mini book”, not a regular article, so, just to point that out. (click on the numbers at the bottom to move forward through each section.) I know a few people have begun reading it only to realize Wow…this is long. Indeed, it is, but, it’s a mini-book, and the only one like it on this site. So, just think of it in those terms if you choose to embark on it. Also, the later pages of the document have more “woo woo” stuff happening than what was initially going on at the beginning. Things didn’t just start out in an explosive way right from the start. It built up and built up, gradually getting worse and worse, until it became all out.

2000-2001 ended up becoming my crash course introduction into the rest of my life. Things decided to take a turn and veer off into a full time study of the paranormal, something I’d always been interested in as far back as nine years old, but which wasn’t actually happening to me (or so I thought) until now. After this, I would move on to my crash course in conspiracy and MILABS/mind control research, and discover how me, my brother Joe, and now my current boyfriend Tom fit into the picture. We learn in stages, and usually don’t move to the next stage until we’ve completed the preliminaries. Much like school. “Something” (my higher self?) decided I should be enrolled in some crash course schooling in 2000, and this is an account of that. It’s the ultimate example of living in two worlds.

The brunt of the events of this write up took place between May 2000 – May 2001, during the year where Joe and I were rooommating in an apartment that I nicknamed “the vortex.” The adventures didn’t end there though, as I found myself experiencing more paranormal weirdness, but of a different variety and for different reasons, after we moved out and I was now renting a room in a house during the summer to early fall of 2001. So the end of the document covers that whole situation. Unfortunately though I’m lacking specific dates for when all the anecdotes took place that are covered in this document.

However, a few years ago I re-discovered that everything discussed in this write up was in fact documented in written form. In one of my boxes of life memorabilia were a bunch of journals from over the years, including one from this time period. And towards the end of that particular journal I was writing about “all the paranormal stuff that’s been going on in our apartment,” as I’d noted. In between talking about my work and money situation, Joe and his crazy life “adventures” (i.e., constant cop dodging criminal craziness) and other assorted daily life happenings and musings, I would resume trying to get this whole paranormal story down. Including descriptions, dialogue, and sometimes even little drawings and all, picking up where I had left off in previous entries. Though usually it was stuff that had already happened months ago, so I was trying to play “catch up” to get the story to the present. Hence, why there’s the lack of specific dates for most of these events. I see where in my journal it says things like, “Other random incidents since that time…” or notes like “To be cntd. tomorrow, or whenever, Topics to be covered: [followed by a list, itemizing out various events to be documented]”

It’s weird because I’ve pulled this journal out before to re-read some parts of it (after not looking at it for years), but because I was specifically looking for entries concerning Joe and his life (again….endless cop dodging craziness that directly impacted me….) I didn’t really pay attention to the rest of the contents, of which included this material. So I totally forgot that I had a handwritten record of much of what happened. Including a couple of very minor incidents that I decided to leave out of what eventually became this final version of “The Vortex,” only because they seemed so petty compared to some of the larger than life things that were going on. So, this explains why I was able to “remember” so many details when it came time to type it up, including the back and forth dialogue. It’s because I had a written record to refer to if needed.

And I really wished I’d had a good camera, or even better, a video camera, to try to take pictures or vids. But the camera I had at the time was nearly busted, and I didn’t have a spare dollar to my name back then to buy a new one, let alone a video cam. (as readers read this though they’re going to no doubt notice….okay, well, you seemed to have spare money for wine, soooooo…… ;D Yup. Not gonna lie. When I did manage to have a few spare bucks, yeah, it went straight to brain inebriation, not towards “saving for a new camera!” But I never had enough spare money all at once to make a major difference in anything.)

I also seemed to have a force squelching me down, trying to get me to not do anything in the way of documenting things even with a semi-busted camera. (As it was, I did actually have two photos at one point that seemed to show some stuff, but they’ve since mysteriously disappeared.) This probably played a big part in my later obsession with documenting my weirdness in full detail, with a log book, exact dates and times, and shit loads of photos (taken with a brand new camera once I had spare money) that all had notes written on the backs, as evidenced by the write ups that formulate the foundation of this entire website. A case of “Not going to let things slip through the cracks again.” So I learned, BIG time.

Something kind of funny I noticed years after writing this was the way in which I always seemed to be pummeling Joe with questions. Readers will notice that so much of the dialogue is me interrogating Joe to get to the bottom of things, since he wasn’t very forthcoming with information. I never consciously noticed that way back when. But a large part of why this write up exists is because I did that.

When I took a look at this piece after having not read it in a long time the wide-eyed innocent voice of it all really jumped out at me. I don’t have that voice anymore. Joe and I were caught up in something that I wasn’t fully comprehending at the time, and I had no idea just how serious of a situation I’d gotten myself into. At any rate it’s a snapshot of who I was at that time. In order to get here, and be who I am now, I had to go through there. Which is something that most people can relate to, and why many people wouldn’t trade their earlier negative or crazy experiences for anything, because they are what shape us and spurs us into growth. Throughout this piece I’ve since gone back and added various non-paranormal scenes of the everyday aspects of life at that time that were left out of the original, because it helps to flesh out the story a little better (in my opinion), including some additional insight at the end.

But just know, that as much stuff as I get into here, the complete story of what I went through in bringing Joe back to California and our time roommating together, until I finally parted ways with him in life for good in February 2002, is so complicated and so over the top that there is absolutely no way to get into it all here. There was his constant cop and criminal drama as mentioned, since Joe just couldn’t seem to stop being a freaking criminal, mixed up in amongst all of the “Vortex” happenings, as well as the abductions/MILABs undertones, of which I wasn’t even consciously aware of yet at the time. So the main focus of this write up centers on the paranormal happenings, with very little of the side drama. I did take the time however to compile the entire sordid story together in a book for myself (quite literally a book, which I had printed via Lulu Press), but which can’t be shared with the public due to the nature of the constant criminal/cop nonsense. It actually overlapped with MILABS mind control/“agent provocateur programming” as I later figured out, and some of which I do touch on in “Chasing Phantoms,” if readers are interested.

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Preface

It might help the reader to understand who Joe was before digging in. When people read what went on in this apartment, they may start to wonder “wth?? How??” It all traces back to Joe at the core, although certainly I have to take some responsibility as well. So as a preface, I’ll try to summarize the life and times of Joe as best as possible, to not only explain why he was the way he was, but why either one of us even found ourselves in a situation like this in the first place. (and all the peripheral life situations that were happening to both of us during the same time period.)

People who come from happy, healthy families don’t wind up in these sorts of situations. Everything about our lives were topsy turvy and completely abnormal. I’ve personally never come across anybody other than Joe and I who’ve experienced the level of bizarre, “woo-woo” paranomal craziness on top of the all around life chaos that both of us experienced. Most people have lives that make sense, and they’re operating in a “paint by numbers” fashion. There’s a long checklist of “life milestones” that they’re expected to achieve, and they do. Even if it’s out of order, even if it takes several years longer than others, they still achieve the checklist, and have what’s considered a “normal” life. We however weren’t those people. Not by a longshot. It’s all really almost impossible to describe, very convoluted, but here goes:

My brother Joseph, or Joe as I started calling him (don’t ask me why, but I’m the one who renamed him Joe as a baby, and my parents were the ones who followed along with my renaming, which is weird and interesting), was 6 years younger than me, born 1/31/81. With dark brown hair and fair skin, he took after our mother with the Scotch Irish genetics. I took after our dad who was Hungarian/Italian/English, with my light blonde (then dark blonde, then brown blonde) hair, dark brown eyes and Italian, golden-olive complexion. Joe was a really cute kid, facially perfect, and didn’t have the problems I had with bad eyes and needing glasses and eye operations and such. Whereas I was genetically flawed, he in turn was the strong, healthy, good looking kid.

An important thing to note about Joe straight off is that when he was a baby he’d had several accidental head injuries. Yet, this never seemed to really register with our “parents” (when referring to them they should always be put in quotes….) about why he was the way he was. Joe’s whole personality overall was very detached from reality. Very mellow, laid back, quiet, well mannered, spacey, and very much off in his own world. I do believe these traits had everything to do with the head injuries affecting some things about him, making him come across as if he wasn’t sharp. Even though he actually was. Seeming to be unconcerned and out of it all the time, yet very observant, perceptive and alert, with an excellent memory, as well as decisive and fast acting when needed. A bit of a contradiction.

From the time Joe was a toddler, he was attracting in “stuff” it seems. A better way of putting it would be that he seemed to be harassed by Negs. As a tot he didn’t want to stay in his room and would keep leaving to come in my room, sometimes even sleeping in my bed to hide. Starting at age three or so, when he was better able to communicate, he would say that he heard “breathing” in his room. Something was there in his room, “breathing” and it obviously scared the crap out of him. My mom never took him seriously – she was emotionally detached (and downright unfit to be a mother), but that’s another story. So she didn’t believe him, nor care, because he was interfering with her TV time. She’d just keep putting him back in bed, brushing it off. Sometimes our “parents” would outright spank him for it, then try to block his doorway with something to keep him forcefully barricaded in his room. Weirdo abusive behavior that I delve more into in the “Appendix” section of my book “Chasing Phantoms.” Something I’d forgotten about for years until I was about 30 was the way in which these “blockaded in the room” incidents resulted in him having to pee either in the corner of his carpeted room, or standing on a small chair out his bedroom window, since even leaving his room to use the bathroom was prohibited by our “mother.” Just hearing him moving around upstairs to get to and from the bathroom when she was trying to watch TV and forget that she had kids would send her into a tizzy.

Joe began showing signs of obsessive compulsive disorder starting at age three. OCD manifesting in a young child usually indicates that there are some stressful things happening. With Joe, he developed this thing about his feet. He always had to have sneakers and socks on, even in the baking hot summer, and his socks had to be tight, and his shoes laced up skin tight. He would never in the entire time I knew him, ever wear sandals or flip flops. I remember him crying silently to himself at the age of three because he couldn’t make his shoes tight enough on his feet. In retrospect, I think this “foot binding” thing had something to do with energy, and grounding himself. Joe was not grounded in this reality as a kid, which is why stuff was happening to him.

By the time Joe was in kindergarten and first grade he was already gravitating to the troubled kids for friends. He already had problems with school work, due to a learning disability (later self-diagnosed by him as being dyslexia…it’s the reason he had such trouble reading, and insane trouble with numbers) and he wouldn’t listen to authority of any kind. But he was always so nice and mellow and laid back and charming about it all that his teachers and school administrators couldn’t help but really like him and be taken with him. He came across like a nice kid who just kept making bad choices. And in a way that’s the truth – he wasn’t a schemer who manipulated people in a calculated, devious way. He just did what he felt like, off in his own world, and didn’t listen to the rules, and wasn’t affected by guilt, threats, or authoritarian instruction. You could yell at him and his response was to just stare back at you, turn around…and do it again. And again. And again.

(Being an actual schemer and manipulator though….that didn’t come way later, as an adult. As an adult he would morph into a full blown manipulative and cunning sociopath who always knew exactly what he was doing in a very intelligent, hyper aware way. Pretty much every conversation, no matter how seemingly friendly and innocent, and every action had a calculated self serving purpose and agenda. Almost nothing was ever said or done for the sake of it. He didn’t know you or give a shit about you until he needed something – then it was “strike up the innocent and friendly conversation,” either for sleight of hand distraction, manipulation to get money or favors, or part of some multi-step shenanigans he was carrying out, as I would eventually figure out the hard way. Almost all “friendly chatty niceness” was just an act. The morph from one to the other wasn’t an overnight occurrence, it took years of negative and traumatic life happenings to reshape him, as we’ll see.)

When Joe was seven, he started drawing the morbid pictures, of cemeteries and dead bodies coming out of the ground, corpses with knives sticking out of their bodies, blood dripping everywhere. They were actually kind of comical and demonstrated some artistic talent. Everything he did was cloaked in a layer of humor. Laugh things off, play stuff down. And it might not seem like much except…….Joe wasn’t exposed to horror movies. (I myself also did not grow up watching any of the well known horror/gore movies of the 70s and 80s. They weren’t allowed in our house. Which as a side note I can say I’m actually grateful for in looking back. Kids shouldn’t be watching that shit.) And we only had basic cable, and this was the far less complicated 80’s when it came to television options, so….it’s not like there were even TV shows where he would have been exposed to this sort of imagery on any kind of a regular basis that could account for where these pictures were coming from. And he didn’t have any friends to go hang out with, where he would have been watching stuff at their house. Just…..felt a compulsion to draw pics of what he was seeing in his mind. Bodies being stabbed to death, blood everywhere. In retrospect I think it was neg entities feeding these images into his mind, since he showed multiple other signs of being harassed by negs.

I still have one of these pics actually, since I saved a group of his drawings that he’d done around this time period. Including one of a UFO. The UFO one was very telling, because that was another thing he didn’t really have exposure to. So why was he drawing that? During the time period when he drew this UFO I had a “dream” (also discussed in “Chasing Phantoms”) of standing outside our house in Connecticut in the middle of the night, off to the side of the cul-de-sac, just….watching, as a UFO was parked over our house. Removed from the situation, observing in a calm/neutral/matter-of-fact way on the sidelines. I don’t believe it was just a dream. Not when factoring in how, during the Vietnam war, our dad and a military cohort found themselves with two UFOs hovering directly over their heads at a base in Da Nang. The UFOs didn’t show up on radar, so the military brass inside the base didn’t realize what was happening and had to be manually notified by those outside. My dad and his cohort stood there with their rifles, looking up at these things directly over their heads, scared. Jets were immediately scrambled, but the UFOs zipped away at lightning speed, over the mountains, long gone before the jets were barely even off the ground.

But out of everybody those UFOs could have parked themselves over at that base it just so happened to be my dad. The incident went on to become classified, of course, but he told me about it when I was about 12 or so. This was the same guy though who, at 16, had inexplicable knowledge that there were secret facilities located within the Adirondack Mountains of New York, where he lived, and would repeatedly tell my mom when they were dating with a straight face that he was an alien. Never smiling/laughing, never letting up on this “joke.” Just always the same deadpan assertation/“revelation” to her that he’s an alien. Bit of a bizarre thing for a 17/18 year old guy to insist. Then there was the “dream” I had at around 13 or so, but which “retroactively” took place when I was about two, when we still lived in Westfield, MA. I was in the field behind our apartment complex on what looked like a warm summer morning, with the golden sunlight……watching as a silver UFO disc was flying away. Without me. I began running after it, feeling desperate at the fact it was leaving me behind. My little legs running as fast as I could in fierce determination, reaching up towards it, projecting strong willful thoughts about going with them, until my body began lifting upwards in the air, body hovering in mid air, feeling exhilarated that they weren’t going to leave me behind after all. End of “dream”/memory. So needless to say I don’t believe Joe’s picture of a UFO was just nonsense. There’s a history there with our family.

All in all Joe’s personality was someone who didn’t want to be a nuisance, to anybody. He played with his toys, Legos and matchbox cars, drew, and spent the rest of the time riding his bike or roaming around in the woods outside our house. We had an isolated existence, due to our Borderline Personality Disorder mentally ill mother keeping us away from our entire extended family on both sides, save for only our maternal grandmother. While I at least got to meet some of my cousins when I was very young, before everything was permanently cut off, Joe never was able to meet any of his numerous cousins, aunts or uncles, or his paternal grandmother, grandfather and step grandfather while he was growing up. On top of the fact we lived in a semi-rural town with absolutely nothing going on. So this isolation also played a major role in what shaped him. Total lack of social stimulation, and alone day after day with a stay at home “mother” who didn’t interact with him at all, no hugs, no love, just total stone faced emptiness, which my dad never realized. But, not that he was a some great, nice guy himself who would have cared or done anything had it been brought to his attention. I myself was at school all day, so I also didn’t know. I only found out about her total lack of interaction with him when he was home with her during the day once he was older.

When Joe was about nine or so we all woke up hearing loud banging going on in his room. It was Joe, in a terrified state, trying to get away from whatever was in his room. He kept smashing into the wall and closet door over and over, seemingly unable to actually get out of the doorway right next to it. He was so scared he could barely talk and could only say something about “the lights…” Just kept talking about “the lights” in his room. And the breathing. Years later my dad would relay a paranormal “woo-woo” story that happened sometime when he was a teen, 15-17 or so, about “lights” in the backyard of his family’s house in upstate New York, at night. Whatever it was it had scared the shit out of him and was so whack that he was unable to effectively describe what it was, or what exactly even happened, even as an adult all these years later. Just something about “the lights,” that’s all I managed to get out of that story. Exactly the same as Joe.

If my parents thought that Joe’s constant talk about the “breathing” going on in his room at night and other strangeness was just a phase, or the imaginings of a small child then they were wrong. If anything it just kept getting progressively worse the older he got. So by the end of our time living in that house, before we moved when he was ten, he was taking his sleeping bag and sleeping in his closet to try to hide from whatever it was that was apparently comin’ round practically every night to harass him. It was safer to be in a tight, enclosed space wrapped in a bag that you could completely zip yourself into, then to be out on his bed, exposed in the open.

Fast forwarding a couple of years, to 1991, when my parents were divorced and we were now living in Orange County, California with our “mother.” At this point in the game she was almost completely copping out on being a “mom” since there were no eyes on her. It left her free to do and behave as she pleased now, total freedom with zero repercussions, which she took full advantage of, disintegrating into crazy abusiveness. (Prior to the divorce she hid her abusiveness from my dad, letting loose as soon as he was at work, acting like a total lunatic half the time, then snapping back to “normal” once he was home.)

Joe was eleven and twelve at this point, and was running around being a delinquent. Stealing and shoplifting food, candy, clothes and miscellaneous items, starting fires, smoking cigarettes, and getting weed and alcohol from his friends when he could, sneaking out of the house to run wild in the middle of the night and jumping out of his second story bedroom window to accomplish that. He had detention too many times to count, had been suspended a few times as well, and was even arrested at one point, for something, I don’t know what. And then ran away. More on that in a bit. His OCD was also in full swing at this point, and he was changing his clothes three times a day, showering several times a day, rubbing his mouth and lips into a raw rash, so convinced was he that he had “food on his face”, as well as constant q-tipping of his ears and blowing and picking at his nose – a general obsession with keeping orifices clean – and then the ongoing feet/shoes/socks issue that was as strong as ever, dating back to when he was a toddler. Later on when I got him back to California he had even more OCD traits going on, which I’ll get to in a short bit.

At this point Joe had also begun consciously astral projecting – something that my dad and our paternal grandmother can apparently do, and do/did often. I’ve never had an interest in it, and instinctively shied away from it. In fact, I adamantly opposed it when my dad tried to convince me when I was 15 that it was neat and I should try it. No thanks. Instinct told me it was an area that was bad news, something where one could easily get in over their head if they don’t know what they’re doing. But Joe fully embraced it.

On top of the delinquent behavior Joe had begun demonstrating some psychic skillz and phenomenon as well, with the onset of puberty once we were in SoCal. Psychic abilities is something happening on both sides of our family, and both of us inherited it. Though we both demonstrated very different abilities, manifesting at different times in our lives for different reasons/triggers. He had “his stuff,” which was always over-the-top and bizarre, and I had mine, which was subtle and “normal.” Once it kicked in for Joe though it didn’t take long to figure out that some really off the wall “stuff” happened whenever he was around, and that he’s a total magnet for it. When I was by myself…nothing, nada. But as soon as Joe showed up…cue the three ring circus music.

The next few years would be absolutely crazy with everything that went on, for both him, and myself. It would fill a book. So the highlights that are relevant for this are that our “mother” got a new boyfriend, this rando divorced guy named Ray with two young kids from three houses down. Started dating in November of ’92…..had him moving in after four months, in March of ’93, along with his two kids Steven, who was eleven and in the same class as Joe, and Amanda, who was seven. So yes, a whopping four months and she’s combining families and desperately trying to make Ray, some total rando stranger, Joe’s new “father,” complete with discipline. :/ Steven, whom Joe wasn’t friends with at school, was forced to share a room with Joe, and Amanda had to sleep in my room. It all just made no sense. But that was our “mother” for you. A two year old trapped in the body of an adult, emotionally stunted/immature, volatile, mildly cognitively impaired, needy, desperate, co-dependent, motivated by fear of abandonment, extremely irresponsible, zero common sense, poor judgment and decision making capabilities, zero self awareness or self control, all the while always ranting and raging and completely melting down at me and Joe…….but when nobody was around, of course. Being sneaky about it all. Again…….Borderline Personality Disorder, and to the highest degree.

Right after they moved in there was an incident at the dinner table where Ray apparently thought Steven wasn’t being serious and ramrod straight enough, being too “giggly” I guess with Joe and Amanda, so he threatened Steven to a go out in the backyard and fight him. Staring Steven down with his empty but fiery, hateful pale blue eyes from across the table with his usual stone face. Meanwhile as our “mother” just looked on meekly/passively, giving silent support. Ray was 37 at the time, five years younger than our “mom,” but actually looked older. This scrawny, pale, wan looking guy with the “Authoritarian Moustache” and zero personality. He loved to threaten to beat up kids “in the backyard” and posture himself as all powerful, meanwhile…..as he relied on heart med pills everyday to survive. Both he and our “mother” shared the same empty, stone faced, cold, completely humorless, disturbing non-human demeanors, like nothing I’ve encountered in anybody else, before or since. They didn’t smile, they didn’t laugh. They only seemed to operate in two modes – blank, or fiery/hateful, and both were extremely hypersensitive, to the level of paranoia, to any behaviors or reactions being generated by us four kids. Always reading into things, hypervigilently misinterpreting things, ready to pounce at the slightest imagined anything and dish out disproportionate, abusive punishment that didn’t match the crimes. So it was weird that they were so much alike in that way. They weren’t people.

Poor Steven was terrified of his dad, but Joe…..that was a whole other ballgame. Joe wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody, and so if Ray thought he was going to be able to dominate Joe? Think again. Joe came across as quiet, but was one of the most willfully stubborn and determined people I’ve ever known. His astrology configuration of Aquarius sun/Scorpio moon pretty much guaranteed it. Two of the four fixed/“power” signs as I call them. Nobody was going to tell him what to do or cage him in. It soon became a battle of wills.   Joe and I also soon had our phrase, “two against four.” Pretty self explanatory, but basically it was me and Joe, vs. “not our people.”

So within two months of this blank but angry and hypersensitive, empty eyed, rando guy moving in he was kicking me out, six weeks before graduation, and with our “mother’s” full blessing. She was the type of “mother” who stands by and allows men to do whatever they want, even to their own kids, so long as it means they will stay with her. ANYTHING to please and keep a man. Completely incapable of surviving in the world on her own without the help of a man, or using money that ultimately came from a man/was earned by a man and forcibly given to her. So she was DESPERATE to keep Ray, and allowed him full reign from the moment she moved him in, which not only involved kicking me out, but then going to work on Joe.

I was now out of the house, but hearing about how Joe was being locked in his room with alarms on the door, and other assorted things. Joe and I would make plans to meet up late at night at some predetermined meet up point to hang out, with him jumping out his second story bedroom window, threatening Steven not to rat him out before jumping. My then-boyfriend K____ would be the one driving, and then we’d all go somewhere to hang, and where I’d buy him a meal or something. (One of those times he accidentally kneed himself in the eye when he landed on the ground and into a roll, giving himself a black eye. O.o He thought it was hilarious though. So part of our meal that night, which was at at Taco Bell, included a big cup of ice for his eye.) Then he’d sneak back in at some point late in the night/near dawn, after running wild when we’d drop him back off. But they eventually figured out what was going on, hence, the alarms and locks. (which also trapped Steven in the room as well, caught in the crossfire.)

Or like the time Ray thought that the best way to handle Joe apparently putting the pots and pans away in a slightly messy manner was to grab Joe by the scruff of his shirt, drag him across the floor and up the stairs to the bathroom, depositing him on the floor and then demanding that Joe scrub out the toilet with his own toothbrush. O.o :/ Heard about that after the fact. Had I been there when that happened all hell would have broken loose, no lie. I wouldn’t have tolerated that. Joe was the complete opposite of Steven though, and not only refused to comply, but called Ray on his bluff of threatening violence. So, no toilets were scrubbed with any toothbrushes, ever. Ask Joe if he’d like to go out and fight you in the backyard? He’d jump at the chance, didn’t matter that he was only twelve. But he wasn’t going to be all “terrified and intimidated!” like Steven always unfortunately was. This was completely new territory for Ray. He’d been so used to always having the upperhand and being the abusive bully with total power, and thought he could move into somebody else’s house and just take over, business as usual. Welcome to the wrench in the works though known as “JOE.”

The battle of wills escalated with Joe running away in July of ’93. He biked all the way from Mission Viejo to El Toro, where I was living in the guest house of my then-boyfriend K____’s parents, and called me up from a payphone at the then-Rite Aid pharmacy at the corner of El Toro and Rockfield. Alarmed I told him to stay put, I’ll be there as soon as I can, I’m leaving now. As I was hurrying down the driveway on foot, since I didn’t have a car, an Orange County Sheriff’s cruiser rolled up to the end of the driveway. Our “mom” had told them where I was living and sent the cops there to question me, knowing that Joe was most likely going to run straight to me. K____’s dad had seen me hurrying down the driveway looking upset and asked what was wrong, right as the cops showed up. I explained to the cops that Joe had just called me, he was at the Rite Aid, and I was heading there now. K____’s dad offered to give me a lift, and the cops said they’d lag behind about five minutes, give me the chance to get there first, alone, and not spook him. I reluctantly agreed. Ultimately I wanted to go get Joe and bring him back to live with me, but there was no way to make that happen. He was only twelve, and I had no money and no car.

Joe and I had exactly five minutes together outside the Rite Aid. It was baking hot, as one would expect in SoCal in the middle of summer, and he was sweating profusely after biking for miles in the sun. I told him that the cops had rolled up on me when I was leaving, so….they know. And they’re coming, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Mom sent them. He understood and took it in stride. I got him a drink from Rite Aid, and then the cops did indeed show up in exactly five minutes. They didn’t mess around. Ray followed close behind, in his truck. Our “mother” was nowhere to be found though. That’s because for Ray, this had become personal. Joe was challenging his “man“hood, so he wanted to be the one to go get him, be able to dominate him. Ray looked at me with his usual blank, stony look, saying “Hello, Carissa.” All formal with no personality, other than seething rage under the surface.

The big takeaway from the whole thing, besides the fact that Joe was forced to return back “home” with Ray, was one of the cops pulling me aside, telling me he could tell that “Joe looks up to you…” and that “you’re important to him.” Wanting me to realize/see this, in case I didn’t, so try to be there to steer him in a good direction, basically. I knew that though, that I was literally the only person in life that Joe listened to. So a total stranger who’d only just met both of us, watching our dynamic for only about ten minutes, saw that immediately. Little did he know how futile that would be though. This entire situation was above and beyond anything he could realize. It looked simple and straightforward from the outside, but was anything but. And it was never going to end well, no matter what I did. It really just killed me though to see Joe having to climb into Ray’s truck and go back to them. I desperately wished I could have taken him in. Everything I did years later to “get him back to California” and “save him” was in large part motivated by this specific incident. There was nothing I could do for him in ’93…..but there was by 2000.

Not long after that incident Joe ended up begging and pleading to go back to Connecticut to live with our dad, in August of ’93. He had no established bond with our dad either, but he was the lesser of the two evils for him at the time, and he couldn’t handle another minute of living in the same house with those two inhuman weirdos. So when 7th grade started in September he was back in Connecticut, with our dad. I was glad he wasn’t living with “mom” and Ray anymore, but sad that he was now going to be 3,000 miles away, and we’d now no longer see each other. He wrote letters to me though, all of which I still have.

Joe wound up being held back a year, because that’s just how bad his behavior and school “participation” had disintegrated. The American public school system is awful, they’ll pass kids along who can’t even read, so if a kid gets full on held back then you know it’s bad. My best friend Shirley, who was from Israel and whom I experienced strong psychic abilities with (and is a whole story in itself), was the one who actually let me know about what Joe was up to back in Connecticut. She and Joe had always gotten along really well. She thought he was super cool and unlike any of her other friends’ brothers, meanwhile joking to me if only he was a few years older, and meanwhile as he was mutually crushing on her wishing she was a few years younger. :D I had no idea of his school problems though, since my dad wasn’t telling me anything. But Shirley told me about the dreams she’d been having, where she saw Joe in class, mouthing off like a clown, giving teachers a hard time, and knew that he’d been ditching all the time, and just running around getting into trouble in general, as she described it. Only later on after he’d been left back did I learn that everything she’d reported to me from her dreams was valid, to the letter.

Then when Joe was fourteen, in 1995, something snapped. He broke into a gun shop and stole a gun, then went on a convenience store robbing spree. With the money, he got himself a motel room, with the intention of catching a train first thing in the morning to New York City. The motel clerk checked him in just to humor him, like, Yeah, sure, no problem…..acting like it’s the most normal thing in the world to check a kid into a motel room by himself late at night with a wad of money.

(And even though he was 14 he looked about 12. So it was even more obvious just how young he was. Joe’s growth was stunted in my opinion due to the malnutrition he experienced while still living with our “mother,” where he wasn’t being fed half the time, and during the crucial time period of the onset of puberty where boys in particular need all the food they can get. In fact if anything, it was full on “games with food” when it came to what our “mother” was doing with Joe from what he later told me. When I still lived at home I’d help fill in the food gaps [and clothing gaps, since she decided she just wasn’t going to buy him any anymore….] but once I got kicked out I wasn’t able to do that for him anymore. He told me years later that when he first arrived at our dad’s house at 12, in August of ’93, he was so hungry all the time he was resorting to eating straight up butter as a “snack.” But the lack of food and our “mother” refusing to buy things that he needed was his primary motivation for teaching himself how to shoplift in the first place. It was either steal food, or go hungry. He learned real quick how to steal, as well as how to scam. He and his friends would steal entire cases/boxes of candy for instance, then take them and sell them door to door to get cash, pretending it was for their school. By the time he was an adult he could steal shit right out from under a person.)

Once the motel clerk had Joe contained and thinking everything was good he tipped off the cops, who soon had the motel surrounded. They got him by climbing in through the bathroom window, as my dad later relayed. The night it all went down thoughts of Joe suddenly invaded my mind from 3,000 miles away in SoCal. The thoughts became louder and more maddening “joe….joe….joe….joe….Joe…..Joe…..Joe……Joe….JOE!! JOE!!! JOE!!!!! JOE!!!!!JOE!!!!!JOE!!!!!JOE!!!!!JOE!!!!!…” overtaking everything else in my mind. I finally had to just stop what I was doing in the middle of work and go find a payphone outside to call my dad back in Connecticut, see what was going on. And that’s when I learned what happened, and that Joe was now in jail. He spent the next three years in various juvee jails and psych hospitals, including one called Vitam.

And that’s what finished Joe off. You can see it in the pics that were taken of him when he was 15, 16 years old, when he was on home leave, visiting my dad and his new wife and their new baby daughter. You can see it in the face and the eyes. He looks deadened and haunted. I only heard a couple of minor, surface level stories about what went on at Vitam, and it wasn’t pretty. The only time I ever witnessed Joe get emotional, start to actually cry, was when he was trying to let me know what was done to him and the other boys while in lock up by guards. Whatever I do know about it is bad enough, but it’s not even the half of it, I know.

After Joe got out of Vitam, and was “mainstreamed” back into the public high school, he lived a paradoxical life. He worked at the local bicycle shop and became quite the expert on bikes, with bikes becoming his life – fixing them, customizing them from pieces parts taken from different bikes, and riding them everywhere. He pulled honors and A’s in school, shattering everybody’s expectations. (I saw the certificates, showing the honors/high honors semester after semester. And a couple of years ago when doing a search on Joe’s name on the ‘net, which I periodically do, a search result came up which I’d never seen before for an archived Hartford Courant newspaper entry listing Joe for the high honor roll for ’99. Not just regular honors, but high, which as far as I understand means straight A’s)

But all the while doing drugs, stealing cars for joyride personal fun as well as chop shop revenue, since he found his way in with the local small time criminals, and running wild. Weed, alcohol, coke, smoking heroin, he did it. (Needles were out of the question though, according to him, since he claimed to be phobic about needles.) He’d disappear for days at a time – a week at a time – then re-emerge out of nowhere and ace tests and pull high honors. Then turn around and get yanked out of class and sent to the principal’s office, because he stood up in front of the class giving a report about why he sympathized with the Columbine killers (this was in ’99, so Columbine was still a fresh event), or maybe because he’d shown up at school totally shitfaced, yet again, then puked Jagermeister all over the principal’s shoes.

The cops were making regular visits to my dad’s house, yet it was all so confusing because he was so damn charismatic and likable. Even the cops liked him, as my dad relayed. The cops always coming around to my dad’s house didn’t want to have to bust him for anything. Over and over he was given multiple, endless chances by cops and judges to change his ways, but he never did. (Something I would later witness for myself during the incident in 2001 where the cops would have guns pointed at us, coming up later. Joe started out cuffed in the back, the normal way, but after an hour of chatting with the cops he was cuffed in the front to make him more comfortable…….smoking a cigarette……and shooting the breeze with the cops in his room about all his scanning/radio equipment. They still booked him, but it was a major sticking point that the lawyer I hired used to get him off. Her argument to the judge was basically a big “Really?? They recuffed him in the front…..and then gave him a cigarette. Then hung out with him in his room talking about his electronics.” Talk with him for ten seconds, no matter who you were – even a cop that had only just had a gun pointed at his head – and he could reel you in.)

During 1999 Joe and I were back and forth on the phone, a lot. More so than ever before. But we had his personality change to thank for that. It started in late 1998. Previously, trying to talk to him on the phone was like pulling teeth. All you’d get were one and two word answers, and then he’d get annoyed and bored and go. I never gave up though, and was always trying to maintain contact with him. I had that intense – and inexplicable – concern for him and bond going on that didn’t make much sense to anybody around me at the time. The amount of money I sunk into him, and the fact I was willing to die for him, literally placing myself in the line of police guns at one point, was…….insane I guess. I have yet to meet anybody who was so insanely latched onto a sibling with intense concern as I was for him. It was obsessive. It’s what drove me in all of my interactions with him, and why any of “The Vortex” even happened…and continued to happen….long after I should have walked away. So sometime around ’98 he changed, and I remember having our first meaningful conversation one afternoon, where he actually talked to me, and I think it had to do with something woo-woo. After that, things took off.

It seemed to be by design in retrospect. I think something wanted us to connect, and wanted him to be in my life for what was in store down the line. There seems to have been a plan shaping up, which I was completely clueless about.

Throughout ’99 Joe entertained me on the phone with his endless adventures of supposedly investigating illegal chemical waste dumping being done by Amtrak. He was even supposedly shot at one time, while trespassing and poking around on Amtrak property. He proudly kept that bullet holed T shirt tacked up on his wall in his room. The enter and exit hole go through the armpit, and you could see the faint drips of bloodstain…not from his blood, but actually from his friend who was with him, whose arm was grazed by the shots. I myself had absolutely nothing of interest going on in my life at that time, so the conspiracy kept me riveted. He also reported that he had all kinds of paranormal happenings going on in his room in my Dad’s house, and again, I really dug his stories, and didn’t doubt it, because I’d seen the foundation for it when he was just a kid.

Then there were the “THEMS.” Joe was now being followed and monitored by “THEMS” in black cars. They would park on the curb outside his work, watching him, he claimed. An unmarked van supposedly tried to run him off the road one night when he went for his usual nighttime bike ride. Weed-induced paranoia? Or the truth? All I know is he also claimed that They were tapping into the phone line……and I do actually have proof for that. Several of our conversations had obvious, unexplainable audio “disturbance” and overt interference, the same identical type experienced by me and my boyfriend Tom when we would be talking to each other over a landline phone years back. Joe and Tom are the only two people I’ve experienced that audio disturbance with. In one of those instances it was near identical to what’s featured in the 2001 movie “The Mothman Prophesies,” where Richard Gere’s character is on the phone with the non-human entity “Indrid Cold,” and there’s suddenly a loud blast of sound blaring through the phone receiver, causing him to jump and pull the receiver away from his ear. Same exact thing, this sudden loud, terrifying and bizarre sound that just burst through the phone in mid sentence, like nothing I’ve ever heard, causing me to jump and yank the phone away. Only my incident happened two years before the movie was even released, and before I’d heard of or read the book by John Keel that it was based on.

Joe also mentioned happenings that sounded like flashes of abduction memories. Including the one that coincided with him being gone/missing for almost a week. During that week he remembers being in some facility and being wheeled down a hallway on a stretcher sort of thing; the hall connected/passed through these all white, rounded dome shaped rooms; He was being wheeled to one of these rooms, where “something” was done to him.

One of the most insane sounding stories though was first relayed to me by our dad. Pretty much everything usually annoyed or outright pissed my dad off, especially anything Joe did or said, but this was the first time he sounded truly…..concerned, for Joe’s sanity. But he relayed to me how one of the endless conspiracy claims that Joe kept talking about was something about “poisonous mists,” or “poisonous mist clouds” or something that would show up in the middle of the night in the town where they lived in southern Connecticut. (keeping it anonymous. Different town from where we grew up. When I was growing up we’d lived in a total blue collar, lower class, rural hellhole former mill town with zero opportunities and no culture in eastern Connecticut, ten miles from the Rhode Island border. I wished we’d lived in the town/region where my dad was now currently living, on Long Island Sound, which was totally happening and all middle to upper class/wealthy, including multiple famous people that either lived there or in the surrounding towns. Life would have been so much better.) Joe mentioned this whole “poisonous mist clouds” thing to me at least once on the phone as well, but I couldn’t get a clear handle on the situation. Just something about weird toxic mist clouds, and stuff getting on his arms/skin, and only at night when everybody was in bed. Joe was always up at night, getting into adventures, so of course he was there to witness it.

It was a true “WT actual F??” befuddlement, and like I said, it was the one thing that made my dad actually genuinely concerned/worried sounding for once for Joe’s mental state. It made Joe sound truly schizophrenic. But then fast forward to earlier this year, 2020, as I add a bunch of edits and add-ons to this write up, and there I am reading John Keel’s book “The Eighth Tower” from 1975. And buried in the middle of the endless litany of woo-woo anecdotes and musings that comprise the book is something about……. reports of poisonous/toxic mist clouds showing up in the middle of the night in the middle of some small town. O.o The exact thing Joe kept claiming he was witnessing, but which of course nobody believed. Who’s ever heard of such a thing, right? Well, John Keel apparently, in his extensive research in the annals of woo-woo history. And Joe. Because again, he attracted in stuff like a magnet, and as I would come to figure out, was always in the “right place at the right time” to witness endless conspiracies and woo activity, just because his personal frequency was so off kilter. I’ve never met anybody else who always found themselves “caught up in the middle of witnessing things we’re not supposed to know about or don’t normally see” as much as Joe. Most of it I don’t even get into here. But it just never ended with him, to where it became overwhelming, and eventually I’d just numb out when he’d start in with yet another wild tale. Because the John Keel book wasn’t mine I didn’t highlight anything, so trying to find those random couple of sentences about nocturnal poisonous mist clouds is going to be a needle in a haystack, but if I can I will come back in and excerpt it.

The conspiracies and intrigue were growing by the week, and I was totally hooked. Joe had no reason to make it up, I thought. Why would he invent something like this? See, the thing about Joe that would keep you hanging on was that every once and awhile he could actually generate some proof. I saw that bullet holed shirt. I saw the high honors certificates and heard my Dad’s confirmations about Joe’s almost unbelievable performance in school. (and have now seen it archived online.) I heard the phone tapping craziness. I’d been witness to the paranormal woo-woo that followed him around like a magnet. There was tangible proof for this wacky, paradoxical life he was leading.

Bizarre shit just followed this kid around in life ever since he was a baby……….and that’s not even counting the two separate kidnapping attempts in two different states. The first when he was 9-10 while we were still in Connecticut. As he told me after the fact, he’d climbed up to a low hanging branch of a tree in the woods behind our house and was just sitting there, relaxing. There were woods surrounding our entire neighborhood, but the stretch of woods behind our house specifically, located on a cul-de-sac, had recently been largely cut down and paved over with roadway for the impending construction of an industrial business park.

So apparently while Joe was sitting in the tree he watched as a truck parked itself on the nearby road, and a guy got out…..and started barreling through the thin layer of woods between the road and the tree where Joe was. Kind of like, “i’m comin’ for you….” Joe said it took a few seconds to fully realize/process what was happening, continuing to sit there on the branch watching this dude running towards him, like, “wtf???” Then he said he was like “oh shit….!” fully realizing what was about to happen, jumping down and tearing back up the small hill to our house, getting inside our rec room and locking the sliding glass doors with the handle lock and wooden stick reinforcement. Once it had become “too late” the guy stopped, just kind of looking at our house, then turned around and left. Just absolutely bizarre.

The other when he was eleven to twelve, after we’d moved to Mission Viejo. Joe was on La Barca, near the intersection of Marguerite Parkway where our neighborhood was. A white van with no windows pulled up quickly along the sidewalk, throwing open its side door and where there was either one or more guys, can’t remember, who started leaning out of the van/about to jump out of the van to grab him. Joe was quick though with his reflexes and awareness and took off as fast as he could back to our house.

Meanwhile, for some comparison about the stark contrast of how it was for me as a small child versus him, who basically had a bullseye on his back since he was born – when I was a small child living in Westfield, Mass, my mom allowed me to wander around outside, unattended, for hours at a time starting at the age of 1 1/2 to two years old, while my dad was at work and had no idea. Anything to get rid of me, pretend she didn’t have kids so she could do whatever else she wanted to be doing instead. At that point we were living in apartments right there off of of busy Route 202, with no fencing or anything to box things in, which means I could easily have gone right out into the street if I wanted. I didn’t…but could have. And where, by the time I was four, when we were now living in a duplex in a different part of town, I was being given money and allowed to hoof it by myself to the local AM/PM Mini Mart to go buy candy for myself. (Used to be located at the corner of Greenwood and Vernon Streets, but which has since been razed.) Shoving some money at me to go find some candy, where I’d be gone for awhile, was the perfect pretense to get rid of me again. So I was navigating through traffic to get there, picking out what candy I wanted, waiting for my turn in line amongst the tall adults ahead and behind me, and reaching upwards to give the guy behind the register my dollar. Also by age four, once Kindergarten began, I was walking to/from Moseley elementary school multiple blocks away by myself, or with my six year old neighbor/friend Justin every day. Again, navigating traffic. Another time when I was six (this was ~1980) I fully wandered blocks away to a neighborhood of houses along Dartmouth Street, found another little girl playing outside in her yard, made friends instantly, since as a kid I’d talk to any little kid like we knew each other forever, and was invited inside for spaghetti lunch. Still totally remember her smiling mother and the watery spaghetti sauce that wasn’t good. :D Even my six year old self knew bad spaghetti sauce when I tasted it. haha (insert some joke about my Italian genetics making that possible.) Then went home later on, with my mom none the wiser. I’d been gone for hours, full on been inside some stranger’s house, eating, and she didn’t know, and was never concerned about my whereabouts for all that time.

There’s even more examples of navigating the world on my own at a very young age, which yeah, helped foster emotional and physical independence, as well as the ability to competently “take charge,” of both myself and anything else around me (to put it mildly…) but still, it just goes to show the crazy level of indifference as I was left to my own devises. (In 2010 or so I was laughingly showing some coworkers the busy streets on Google Street View that I was navigating by myself in Westfield, including North Elm Street, heading north where it becomes Route 202. It tied into whatever we all were talking about, something about “keeping an eye on your kids” or something. But I had a friend from school named Sherri who lived on North Elm, so I’d often go to her house. And one of the coworkers, a woman with a five year old son, was truly speechless, looking back and forth between me and Street View as I laughed “….imagine seeing some little six year old girl walking along this roadway by herself, just…..walkin’ around….” As a mother of a kid that was pretty much the same age, um, no, she couldn’t imagine that, at all.)

I look back on it all and truly believe by this point that on a deep down subconscious level my mom wanted me to get killed, or kidnapped/“disappeared.” And yet despite all that wandering around alone as a toddler, navigating urban traffic at only four, and coming into contact with strange adults and being an easy grab in general due to being a tiny little female, never once did anything like what happened to Joe ever happen to me. And it doesn’t mean I don’t believe him, I absolutely do. But all of this is why, when I later had full knowledge about the “Thems” and their involvement in things, I just assumed it was completely all about Joe, and had nothing to do with me. I couldn’t even comprehend that I was on anything’s radar. It was all Joe, and had always been about Joe, as far as I was concerned. I was nothing. He was the one with all the powers and abilities, he was the one who had several attempts at kidnapping, he was the one who’d been actively harassed on a nightly basis by paranormal stuff since he was a toddler, he was the interesting one with all the first hand street smarts and the exciting life, always getting into adventures.

And on a random note, there’s also how a major accident happened to Joe when he was three where he should have died, but where intervention happened to undo the damage, of which I witnessed happening before my eyes in slo mo. O.o So in the end it was like it never happened at all, and life resumed as “normal.” Things you can’t really talk about with people in the everyday world, because let’s face it…..who’d believe that? :/ But it’s just one more thing to add to the endless pile of craziness that followed Joe around since early childhood.

Joe reached the end of the line in his senior year when my dad told him that he was out of the house on June 1st, and the locks would be changed. Of course he would pick June 1st……couldn’t wait another three weeks until Joe at least graduated. No. Let’s make this as fucked up and difficult as possible by picking a random date before that. :/ Even by 1993, when I was kicked out of the house in SoCal, there was no longer anything “human” about the way my dad behaved anymore. Let alone by that point in 2000, when Joe was now faced with the same exact situation. Just so many creepy, callous, off-the-wall anecdotes of him displaying a complete lack of empathy or normal human anything, with so much ugliness, sometimes downright demonic sounding, coming out of his mouth. But I still futily chased after him for years, trying to have a normal relationship, even from 3,000 miles away. Something that my roommate/future boyfriend Steve (not stepbrother Steven, obviously! O.o ) as well as my roommate/BFF Mike (coming up later) pointed out to me in a concerned/frustrated way – that I’m always chasing around after him, always calling him, always the one trying to initiate a visit, always trying to make it work, but it’s never the other way around. They’d just watched it from the sidelines for so long and finally couldn’t stay silent about it anymore, trying to make me realize what I wasn’t seeing. But that’s why I always say at this point about both of our “parents,” and the second marriage weirdos that both of them wound up pairing up with post-divorce, “They weren’t human.” It’s nuts that this is what we were unfortunately surrounded by in terms of parental units. I hope in another life we both get dealt a better hand of cards as far as family goes, that’s all I can say. But this is when I began shaping up a plan to bring Joe back to SoCal, so he could come live with me and my then-boyfriend Steve.

Then his high school informed Joe in January of 2000 that despite his grades, he would not be eligible for graduation, because he’d missed too many days of school. So now my “bring Joe back to Cali” plan was speeding up.

As soon as I heard that I called up his school in the middle of the day from my then-job just to verify this myself, asking to speak to the principal. The secretary sounded suspicious when I announced who I was – “Joe C___’s sister Carissa, from California….” – and the principal sounded downright leery when he first picked up the line. I was truly surprised she actually put me through, and that he accepted the call. I wasn’t expecting to get anywhere. But then again, Joe was so notorious there was probably a part of him that was genuinely curious. And as I explained to him, I had to confirm things for myself, whether it’s true that he’s really not being allowed to graduate for missing too many days of class……only because Joe is always telling so many stories you just can’t know what to believe. Before I bring him out to California I just have to know whether he’s telling the truth, I explained.

Once he heard me admit to the fact that Joe’s always telling so many stories that you just don’t know what to believe he actually loosened up and relaxed. Probably figured he was dealing with a sane person if I recognized that about my own brother. But yes, indeed, it all turned out to be true. Joe was not allowed to graduate unless he completed summer school requirements. Which, considering my dad was kicking him out three weeks before graduation, means it wasn’t going to be possible. Not for Joe, and how he was. I knew him enough to know there was no way he would try to juggle being homeless and “completing bullshit summer school requirements” (despite the fact he’d pulled down all A’s semester after semester). Not happening. He was too touch and go. Joe was better off being brought out to southern California, “the land of opportunity,” to come live with me. Coming to California, with me paying for everything and helping him get started with a new life meant he actually stood some sort of chance. Being left in Connecticut as a homeless kid with no real money, no car, just a bike, no other family, surrounded by the biggest low life druggies you could imagine when he was a total addict always needing something to numb his brain, and being expected to show up to some bullshit summer school schedule on top of all that, for classes he’d already gotten A’s in….he stood absolutely no chance.

In fact this entire time period I later described as “beat the clock.” The race was on to try to get Joe out to SoCal before he died. There was a short time period where I was not in contact with him in ’99 because he’d been so nasty and rude to me over the phone that I stopped my desperate reaching out to him. But then I’d had this hyper realistic “dream” one night where he died. And thus overrode my anger/frustration and called him up anyway, extremely concerned about his well being, and resuming our long distance contact. I later found out that during that exact time period when I’d “dreamed” about Joe dying he’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger….but the trigger “jammed.” I now realize/recognize in retrospect that my hyper realistic “dream” wasn’t really a dream. It was a real memory of the way things had originally gone. There are some HUGE implications there, but, we’ll just leave things at that.

So that’s when I brought Joe out to California, trying to beat the clock for when the next death attempt would happen. Between him putting guns to his head and his drug use and crazy lifestyle it was only a matter of time. January 25, 2000, he stepped off a train at Los Angeles Union Station, running from Connecticut. I felt triumphant, feeling like I did it, I’d beaten the clock and won. I look back at that and laugh……totally fucking clueless. O.o

Joe was 19 now, although he looked no older than 16 (same problem I’ve always had, looking younger than I am) but it was also due to being only 5’6” (the aforementioned stunted growth thing….) and lacking muscle bulk. After getting to California Joe began working out religiously every day, sit ups and push ups, and within a year had packed on his desired muscle bulk in the arms and chest, and even appeared to have grown an inch or so, and finally began looking more his age.

His preferred look I’d come to learn was the tight white Hanes T-shirts, his huge Paco jean shorts down to his knees with the duct tape wrapped around the edges that were falling apart :D and at first his Nikes, but which later changed to black steel toed boots. He kept his head shaved short and had a couple of homemade tattoo symbols etched into his arm, done himself with a needle and ink bought from the store. He also had a “tool belt,” for lack of a better term, which consisted of his various knives, and at one point a Motorola hand held police scanner thing. He was never at any point not armed and fully equipped. His look was reminiscent of Fight Club’s Project Mayhem “space monkey” army, and factoring in his very white Irish/Scottish/English skin, several people mistakenly took him for a skinhead. The closest mashup rendition to Joe that I’ve ever seen in a movie would be Edward Furlong as Danny, in “American History X.” His personality/demeanor is so completely Joe at age 12, before moving back to Connecticut and before he changed. And his physical look, with the shaved head and his facial features, is so strikingly like Joe once I got him back to California at 19. It’s uncanny. The scene in the bathroom where Danny silently confronts a black kid bully who was beating up another white kid, stepping up to him face to face, staring him down impassively right in the eyes, blowing cigarette smoke in his face, is so Joe there are no words. For starters, going after the bullies. That was always Joe’s thing, going back to Kindergarten. Defending the underdogs. And afraid of nothing, staring threats down impassively with his deadened eyes, and always with the smokes. And again, Edward looks so much like Joe in that movie I can’t get over it.

As mentioned earlier Joe developed even more OCD traits by this point in life. One of them was his whole bit with “hoarding,” a trait associated with OCD as I only just learned. He was a complete pack rat, stuffing his room with stolen goods that he hoarded, stuff he didn’t even need, to the point where his room was a cram jammed filthy disaster area. He was worse than a raccoon. But paradoxically he was obsessive with the hygiene as always, such as the need to keep his fingernails clipped down to the quick – anything longer than that was dirty – as well as shaved head at all times, because hair was dirty too, burning the leg hair off his legs with a lighter !!! and slathering deodorant on throughout every day. And his “feet binding” thing progressed to point where he would wear several pairs of socks with steel toed boots. ALWAYS had to have his feet and ankles bound up and sealed off tight, and was never without this set up unless he was sleeping. He had a LOT of weird OCD quirks.

At the beginning Joe lived with me and Steve (whom I was about to break up with anyway) in our spare room. Then we moved into our own apartment as roommates on May 27, 2000. The apartment was what I’ve come to call The Vortex, in Rancho Santa Margarita, (south Orange County). The apartment was middle of the road, not super fancy, but not ghetto-y either, on the second floor with dual master bedrooms, each with their own bath, along with the large main living room/dining room area, kitchen, and a small balcony off the living room with the sliding glass doors, and like many apartment complexes in SoCal came with a garage as well. Though we didn’t have any money, so the only furnishings to be found were in our respective rooms. So the living room/dining room area remained as one big large open room that Joe stored some of his things.

(I’m really flying along here, leaving most everything out, for space constraints. It’s just to give the bare bones surface scratching explanation of who my brother is, why he would have attracted stuff in and what our situation was in general, so readers will have a foundation for what they’re reading.)

After Joe got to California, “stuff” broadcast loud and clear what was really going on with him. Before “stuff” breaches your realm in such a major way it seems they have to. Free will. It’s something I’ve since learned, concerning the “occult rules.” As I wrote in my article called “The Hidden Puppetmasters:”

“For those who aren’t familiar, before flagrantly breaching your reality in some freewill violating way, neg forces need to let you know who they are, whether point blank stating it outright, or giving you these hint-hint, read-between-the-line statements, and thus get permission from you to proceed. Because that’s just how this place operates. They know what this place is and how it operates, and the way they look at is, it’s not their fault if you don’t. Not their problem if we haven’t taken a good look around, noticed things, questioned things, put any of the quite obvious pieces together, and/or have chosen to listen to the many “nothing to see here, move it along” “Gatekeepers” who do their best to ridicule any consideration of that aspect of reality. That’s on us. But they upheld their end of “abiding by the rules” and letting us know what the deal is with them. So if you choose to proceed anyway, and invite them in despite what they’ve point blank told you and revealed….then that’s you agreeing. Now they have more freedom to breach your realm and violate you in ways they weren’t allowed to before. And the longer you allow them to stick around, the more and more they can do to you, and the more your personal reality/realm can be breached.”

Had no idea about any of this though back at the time Joe first re-entered my reality. Since Joe would be responsible for almost getting me killed on three separate occasions (one of those three times being when I had police guns pointed at my head, referenced earlier) as well as almost getting me arrested, and end up costing me thousands of dollars, it had to be announced. But I didn’t listen, pay attention or see it. Because I didn’t know. And I also didn’t recognize what he was. I naively thought I was just dealing with my brother, a regular person. But this is why awareness is everything.

Joe flat out told me on a number of occasions, “Am I real, Carissa? I sure don’t feel real. You don’t feel real to me, none of this does.”

“Of course you’re real Joe…” I would answer, frozen.

“Am I? Are you sure? Are you sure about that? Am I real?” He looked at me with a smirk. Like a predator, toying with its prey.

Then there was the night that he got drunk in February of 2000, shortly after arriving in SoCal. It was the drunkest I’ve ever seen him, so bad that I actually hid the rest of the bottle of brandy so he wouldn’t do any more damage and kill himself. In that drunken stupor he relayed to me, “The only reason I’m here…is because of you. You wanted this so badly that you made this happen. I’m supposed to be dead right now Carissa…I’m supposed to be dead. Don’t you understand? You made this happen….it’s all you….I’m supposed to be dead. You wanted me here so badly that I’m here…I’m alive….but I’m supposed to be dead…It’s you…”

I froze up, paralyzed when he said that. I couldn’t speak. Went blank. On a subconscious level I recognized what he was saying. Coming to terms with that wouldn’t happen for another two years though. Some things take time to process, and have to happen in their own time, when the mind can finally handle it. It took two more years of “happenings” to get me to a place where a bombshell like that could be processed.

Also straight off the bat when Joe arrived to California he was demonstrating his newfound “inexplicable” knowledge of radios, electronics and all things techno-gadget. By the end of us being roommates he would have half his bedroom filled with electronics, police scanners, radios, stolen satellite dishes (the kind people mount outside their homes or apartments) and converted word processors to “process” it all. He demonstrated how he could pick up transmissions from NASA 3,000 miles away and he tuned into MIR so I could hear, back when it was orbit. Not that we could understand what was being said. A few times I’d hang out relaxing in the rattan chair I gave him, just listening to the Russian jibber jabber, appreciating that I was listening to people up in space.

The first time he was demonstrating his equipment when he’d first moved in with Steve and I, I asked him – How did you learn all this??

The Joe I knew growing up was not like this. He was off in his own world, and never played around with electronics. This “New Joe” was something else entirely. He looked at me with a strange smirk and those glassy, far away eyes that he’d get many times. “I don’t know Carissa. I just know it. It just happened.” He would always answer that way any time I asked. He just “knew” how to do this one day. It had just “happened.” Just inexplicably had the knowledge. He also had this weird thing about drawing some kind of strange “grid” thing. He said it was just “in his head” and said he showed the drawing to somebody and was told it had to do with “Earth’s ionosphere.” I had no idea what the “ionosphere” was and had never heard of it, but later found out it ties into what the HAARP array in Alaska is involved in.

[Joe in his room. This pic shows a lot of different things, including the phenomena I mention at the end of this intro, about how in two years worth of photos I never managed to get one photo of Joe looking straight at the camera with both eyes unobstructed. Also, the gray bullet holed shirt that he tacked up on the closet door is visible, towards the right side of the photo. And then of course, all the electronics, including the Brother word processor, the satellite dish, some large aluminum tube “antenna” thing, regular antennas, and the various radio equipment. The rattan chair is something I gave him, and it’s what I’d sit on when listening to the transmissions from NASA and MIR. There’s even an “orb” going on, whatever those are. And as noted by a ‘net aquaintance whom I showed the pic to, there’s the multiple sticks of deodorant on the top of Joe’s dresser, something I didn’t pay attention to but which she noticed right away. But it illustrates what I mentioned earlier about the way Joe’s OCD manifested with regard to hygiene. Just obsessive to the point of multiple sticks of deodorant going at the same time. This pic was taken towards the beginning. By the end, fully half the room was filled with electronics, once he inherited my ex boyfriend Steve’s cast off equipment that he was trying to get rid of, to the point where I needed my friend Mike to help me dismantle the craziness when it came time to move and Joe was in jail. If I’d had the kind of digital camera I had now, versus the old school film camera I had back then in 2000-2001 that was breaking down on me, I would have gotten more pics obviously and even video. But this was back in 2000, I didn’t have much money back then.]

 

Joe was also now a perfect shot with a gun, as demonstrated to me with his pellet gun that was designed to be a replica of a Glock 9 millimeter, and quite the expert with hand-to-hand combat. He would always practice his mish-mash version of martial arts/hand to hand in the living room, trying to show me moves that I could use to defend myself. I remember Steve sitting across the room, glancing sideways at us, VERY nervous as Joe did this – not nervous for my safety, but nervous at the presence Joe emanated. To say he put out a feeling of “power” is putting it mildly. It was something else. Later on at a liquor store in Portland in the middle of winter in early 2002 a couple of tough looking black guys started moving in towards me, but then stepped aside and looked down at the floor when this little 5’6” white kid charged down the aisle towards me. It probably didn’t hurt either that the temperature was in the mid-20s and Joe purposely had no shirt on to make a point to people. O.o

I realize now that Joe had been programmed/mind controlled at some point during his time in lock up, and possibly at other times in his life as well even before that (if we’re going to say that we’re both abductees dating back to childhood), as well as after he was released. He was clearly a MILAB, all of which I delve more into in more detail in “Chasing Phantoms.” The giveaway was when he revealed that he had an alternate personality that he called “Shawn Hill” who would run around doing (criminal) things that Joe could barely remember. One time when I had been trying to speak to him on the phone long distance, before he moved back to California, he was in “Shawn Hill” mode, which was short, brusque, and a bit nasty, and he did not want to answer to the name Joe. He insisted I refer to him as Shawn. I had laughed nervously, but refused to comply.

And later on, right before we permanently parted ways in life Joe began talking about how he was being given “assignments” by “Them” (that I had to forcibly talk him out of) to “prove that he was ready for the next level.” I would later discover it was all word for word verbatim what Gunther Russbacher outlines in his article ““Mind Control in Amerika – 5 Easy Steps to Create a Manchurian Candidate,” where he discusses kids who are caught up in the jail/juvee system being taken and programmed with sleeper agent/“agent provocateur’ programming, and where they must take on various assignments to prove to their handlers that they’re ready to move to the next level.

While in Portland he was apparently given a doozy of an assignment, something so big that had he been able to complete it would have made national headlines, especially considering this was fresh after 9/11. Within a year of that, after parting ways in life with Joe and moving on to Florida, I was reading a conspiracy book by author Kathleen Keating that was touching on the whole MK Ultra and programmed agent provocateurs/sleeper agents subject. In that book she mentioned that one of the “assignments” that these black ops projects will often give to their mind controlled pawns was the exact hyper-specific thing Joe was told to go do. And he was already a third of the way to the goal. The hardest part involved procuring a very specific set of blueprints of the target, which necessitated a corporate break in and bypassing electronic security. I saw the blueprints myself, so, I know he wasn’t just bullshitting. Parts two and three would have been easy peasy as far as somebody like him goes. After that…dunzo. National headlines, here we come.

As Joe had stood there telling me about the Thems and the this insane, hyper-specific, Big Leagues level assignment and having to “prove himself to move to the next level” his eyes were glazed over, far away, in a relaxed, compliant mode, speaking as if he was literally rehashing something he had been programmed to say. I was fucking PISSED listening to what was coming out of his mouth and did everything in my power to talk him down from things. To the point where in retrospect I believe I exerted actual telepathic control over him, subduing him. Because after that he just……dropped it. Bit of a tug of war going on in that situation. In 2013 Tom and I were meeting up in person with a longtime reader of both of our sites and I rehashed this story to the both of them, experiencing body shivers/chills and teeth chattering while doing so. Just a really intense full body emotional reaction after not really thinking about it for all those years, and realizing just how close he had come. Just the story of how Joe procured the blueprints via the corporate break in alone is freaky, due to its total impossibility, as well as a secondary layer to it all that I can’t even get into. But then there’s the outcome that was averted.

Just seeing Kathleen talking about that very weirdly specific thing in her book though…..realizing that what he was going to do really is an actual “thing” in MK…..proving definitively to me once and for all that all this abductions/missing time, disassociated alternate personas, tapped phones/being monitored and tailed, “Thems” and their “assignments” that he was always going on about was really real, that he wasn’t imagining it or delusional, and he wasn’t making it up………………wow. yeah. So that’s the piece of the puzzle that for me proved what was going on with him was genuine.

Joe emanated both power, and quiet/intense “loose cannon crazy.” And part of me admittedly kind of dug it for a period of time, before things went completely off the rails. But there was a reason for that. After being alone in life for so long with no real family – even alone while in relationships – and always finding myself unprotected and vulnerable, it felt REALLY good to finally have somebody around who had my back, for once. A literal bodyguard, anywhere we went. I already got into detail about what our “mother” was like. But with regards to our dad, he’d always been completely useless as a protector, mentally/emotionally checked out, and where it was made clear that Joe and I were first marriage leftovers, as I’ve termed it, an uncomfortable intrusion into his new life, with his new wife, and their new house, and soon to be new baby.

And as our “mother” even admitted during our August ’98 fluke meeting (the one and only time I’ve spoken with her in person in 25+ years now; as of 2020, when updating this document, she’s now dead) “You were thrown to the wolves!” (making sure to say this using the passive voice, instead of active voice. I “was thrown,” by some mysterious unnamed force that like, jumped out from behind a bush or something and “GOT ME!” Not “I threw you,” using the active voice, which would mean she would have to take direct responsibility. But this is the same woman who always referred to herself in the third person, and my brother as “your brother.” Not “Joe” or “my son.” Just always “your brother…” So, no surprise I guess. :/ You know, this kid who somehow belonged to me, and was my deal, not hers, and not connected to her in any way. Your brother. Yours. Which I realize in retrospect was very telling. Joe was always my deal apparently. From the moment he came home from the hospital, when I was six, and over the next few years where I was constantly admonished to back off from always standing over her when she did anything with him, and trying to jump in and full on take over, because “….you’re not his mother!” as I was always told. The reason for my constant hovering and trying to jump in was twofold – one, I was just super excited to have a baby brother and always wanted to be helping out and involved, and two, on some level I didn’t trust her, or feel like she could do the job herself.

The latter was most likely due to Joe’s first head injury accident, which was 100% her fault and completely avoidable. Being the total incompetent dum dum that our “mother” was who never should have been allowed to have babies, she was changing his diaper one time when he was about six months old on the actual kitchen counter instead of on a safe surface. As she full on stepped away from the counter to get a diaper that was on the kitchen table, leaving a vulnerable baby lying there unattended………he quickly rolled over to his left, right off the counter, smacking the hard floor. At that moment I was in the doorway of the living room and kitchen, watching this horror show from afar, with nothing I could do to stop it. So that’s most likely what helped fuel my “hovering protectiveness.” And as Joe even told me when he was ten years old “….I consider you to be my mom, instead of Mom.”

But now here was Joe, basically acting as my personal bodyguard whenever we were out, having my back. It felt absolutely awesome. In public when we were together Joe was always eyeing everybody and everything up, on top of things, hypervigilent, always alert and ready to pounce. It was the equivalent of having a pitbull with me wherever I went. I had absolutely nothing to worry about in terms of anybody messing with me, or us. It felt REALLY good to have that……….for once in my life. Joe demonstrated that protectiveness when he was a kid. But back then he was just a kid. He could only do so much. Now… he was old enough to follow through and actually do serious damage to people.

The irony is that Joe could protect me like a personal bodyguard in life, seeming to have my back…….while simultaneously almost getting me killed three times, acting as a walking portal and a “vector of attack.”

*****

When it comes to my “family,” the theme of this entire timeline is me – futilely – trying to step in and help/save/protect/rescue Joe, since the day he came home from the hospital to the last time I ever saw him in 2002, to no avail. Having to witness his lifetime of neglect and various forms of abuse (haven’t even gotten into how our “dad” treated him…..but Joe didn’t receive any genuine love, concern or affection from either parent), and being powerless to stop/reverse/undo any of it, to the point where it haunted my dreams for years. Very literally. A repeating dream theme, of “trying to rescue Joe.” I did what I could, but it wasn’t enough, because I was just a kid myself.

But it’s pretty much why I went completely nutso trying to help him when I did get him back to SoCal, going above and beyond. Trying to make up for everything that went wrong for him before, but also trying to make sure he never experiences what I experienced when I was booted out. I wanted him to have what I didn’t. Which means, not long after he arrived back to California I even bought him a used car of his choice….because if you’re going to get a job and succeed in SoCal you need wheels. You’re not going to make it without that, especially where we lived, in the middle of spread out south Orange County suburbia. For whatever reason he wanted a Chevy Cavalier. So, I found him one in excellent used condition for two grand. And within a month of buying him the Cavalier? He destroyed it. :/ Blew the head gasket trying to race some guys on the freeway in the middle of the night, had to ditch the car on the side of the road. So his story goes. :/ Who really knows though if that’s what actually happened.

But that was Joe for you. Anything he touched, he destroyed. Not as a little kid, but by the time he hit his teens he didn’t value or respect anything, and just broke and wrecked anything he was given. There was zero guilt, shame or remorse on his end after destroying the car I got him. Just an amused “oh well” attitude, like he broke something meaningless that only cost a couple of bucks and could be replaced in a snap. (in retrospect the name “cavalier” is um….really fitting, considering Joe’s attitude. That’s actually really weird/creepy in retrospect, a connection I never made at the time.)

If Joe hadn’t destroyed that car then everything would have been completely different for us, but especially me. For starters he would have had unlimited ability to work anywhere in the region, and not been limited by the local staffing agency office, and whatever piddly bits of work they could conjure up in a very limited area of south Orange County that was accessible to Joe by bus. With a job and income coming in he could have upheld the original intent – for him to start paying his 50% of the rent and bills, and buying all his own stuff. With the financial burden off of me, I would in turn have been able to save money.

Instead, he didn’t work for many, many months, with me footing 100% of the cost of everything – rent, bills, food, clothes, anything, you name it – for me, him and of course the costs for our cat Kitty. On a limited salary. What defines my time in “the vortex” as readers will see was the way in which I was completely trapped, with no extra money. No money means……can’t move out. So no matter how bad things got, I was stuck. I didn’t have the money needed to get my own car “street legal” by Cali’s standards. If he’d had his car though, and had been working? Then I would have. So even though I “had a car,” I technically didn’t. It just sat in the garage, unused, until eventually it died. So we were both completely car-less. More stuck. I did manage to land a job later on in July of ’00 that was about two miles away down Santa Margarita Parkway, enabling me to take the bus, and which I get into a little bit later on in this piece, so I lucked out in that regard.

So him destroying that car was yet one more way in which he was a vector bringing destruction into my life. Just another form of interference. And it completely changed the course of everything, derailing what was initially a solid plan with good intents. “Bring Joe to Cali, get him set up with anything he needs, including a car, then he’ll get a job too, and it’ll all work out.” What’s that famous phrase? “The best laid plans”? yeah.

There’s SO much more to the whole situation with both of our jobs and money and cars and all that, and the various other forms of major interference I experienced to wreck things, but I don’t get into it here because it’s just too much. Ultimately the focus is on the paranormal…..but then again, to understand why so much of the paranormal was even happening some of the back story is necessary. Because personal frequency plays a huge role in things in life as mentioned all around my website, and this situation was no exception. I delve into another aspect of the financial issues though in my latest article “Conspiracies in the Workplace.” It’s the anecdote concerning the front desk/admin gig I had for an engineering firm in early 2000. That anecdote is pivotal to also understanding so much of what went wrong financially for me/us during this time, and why things were so nutso. I had the perfect job. And I got Joe his car of choice. Everything should have worked out. But both were taken away. And those were the crucial Jenga pieces that toppled it all, leading to an escalating downward spiral.

But me being there in Joe’s life since Day 1, seeing what he was subjected to by both of our “parents” is why, despite anything he’s ever done I could never hold onto a single bitter, negative grudge holding thought for him. I parted ways with him because I had to, to preserve my own life, quite literally. But there’s no anger or bitterness. He’s stolen from me, dragged me repeatedly into his messes with cops by leading them straight to me whenever he was in trouble, leaving me either to have to run from them, hide (literally…scooting around this way and that on the floor of our apartment, behind this wall, then over into the doorway, arms tight to my sides, then back into the hall again, trying to dodge the cops’ flashlights shining into our windows because I didn’t have enough time to get into the bathroom to hide before they suddenly showed up looking for Joe, beating on the front door with their batons but getting no response….) or face them head on for questioning, where I had to learn real quick the art of the blasé “Straight Faced Lie”; used, lied and manipulated, cost me almost ten grand, part of which included the lawyer to get him out of jail, the car that he wrecked, the apartment deposit we didn’t get back because he caused us to be evicted, and even more money beyond that which I may as well have just thrown out a window; almost got me arrested to where I was cuffed for an hour and a half, almost got me killed three separate times, the worst with cops’ 9 millimeters pointed at my head, said terrible things to me, just worse than anything anybody else has ever done to me.

And yet…….I just shrug. Zero negative anything. Nobody else could ever elicit such an indifferent reaction from me for such mega bad behavior. But it’s because I was there since his literal first week. As a newborn, home from the hospital, holding onto my six year old finger with his dimpled little baby hand. It means I know. Therefore I can never hold a single thing against him. Total understanding.

(This is the way in which I imagine higher positive stuff, who are known to be able to love unconditionally, can be that way despite whatever heinous atrocities a person may have committed while alive. They have to have some “all knowing” factor that enables them to see every last little detail about a person’s entire incarnational history, to give them the entire full picture of what that soul was dealing with and what they were up against, including possession.)

And he in turn saw everything I was subjected to, and our “mother’s” laser beam of hate and rampaging abuse obsessively directed at me for years, while he stood on the sidelines as a child, powerless to stop it. I’ve tried to explain to others here and there what my “parents” were like, what their behavior was like, the various things that happened to me, to Joe, to our pets. But even if I were to talk for hours and hours it still only scrapes the surface, and will never fully allow for the other person to truly know. But with him…..no explanations necessary. I didn’t have to imitate them to him to try to illustrate something. He could imitate them to me. We were both there, created by the same two “people” and living it together, 365 days a year for years on end, while simultaneously being cut off/isolated from 99% of the rest of our extended families on both sides, making it so that each of us is the only other person on the planet who fully knows. Add in having to step in and take over as his surrogate mother, and all of it created an intense bond, which I think a lot of other victims of abuse and neglect can probably relate to with their own siblings.

*****

What stepped off that train in Los Angeles was not my original brother. I didn’t realize until two and a half years, and two states later, while living in Fort Lauderdale and buzzed on wine one night that in the two years worth of photos that I’d taken of Joe you can’t see his eyes directly in almost any picture. Originally I had written here that you couldn’t see his eyes in any of the photos except for in one, however, there are actually two as I now realize. In the first photo taken in Portland, Oregon, he was working outside on his car with the front hood up, and I tried to grab a shot of him doing that. Right as I was taking the shot he scrunched up his face to make a weird expression to ruin the shot, and so you can actually see one of his eyes open in that pic. The other is squeezed shut however. And there’s some weird distortion going on with his wrist/hand area that I can’t figure out and have never seen before with anybody else in a photo. Maybe it was the angle but it doesn’t look right.

And in the second photo where I finally managed to get an eye in the pic it was actually part of a series of three pics, also taken in Portland. I took the first shot of him from a distance, but then had an invisible voice urging me to get closer with my camera. So I did, and took another. “Get closer………….closer…………….closer……” it urged, and I did, unconsciously reacting to this invisible prompting, taking the third and final shot from only about a foot and a half away.

In the first two shots, like in every other picture, there’s an excuse for why you can’t see his eyes – the brim of Joe’s hat is bent down, obscuring them. (the brim of his hat where he used a marker to scrawl all the strange symbols that he was always seeing in his mind, symbols he would later tell me he saw in an underground base during one of his abductions, symbols that researchers say are “alien” in nature.) In the third, because I’d been “urged” to get up as close as I could to him, I managed to actually get one of his eyes on camera, from a side angle, looking at the right side of his face. And it’s completely red. And I don’t mean camera “red eye” – his pupil itself is red, from the side angle. His face is extremely pale white, there’s dark shadows under his eyes, his face is frozen in a strange blank/empty look, and he looks like a zombie corpse. Photoshop’s “red eye” remover doesn’t remove the red either, which Tom later tried for fun, just to see. I showed this photo to my dad when trying to explain to him what Joe had turned into. You can even see some of the scrawled alien-esque symbols on the underside of the hat brim, like the icing on the cake. But it didn’t register with my dad at all, which was nothing new. He himself walks around in a programmed daze, mentally checked out, his alters popping up from time to time, giving clues, as I note in my book.

I had the photos developed while Joe was still in my life back in Portland – but didn’t see them until after I got to Florida. When I saw it, my stomach did a flip flop. I clamored over to the box where my pictures were kept and yanked them out, and began sorting through them like mad, trying to find the other pics of Joe that I’d taken in the past two years. I pulled them all out, there were maybe a dozen total, and began flipping through them. Flip, flip, flip, tossing them off to the side. With the exception of that other pic where he’s working on his car and his face is scrunched, showing only one of his eyes, over and over again there was an excuse for why you couldn’t see his eyes. Right as I would take the shot he’d just happen to glance down, or to the side and away, or around completely so I’d get the back of his head. Or his hat was covering them. In another shot, the picture mysteriously cut off… right at his eyes. You see his grin, and his nose…but his eyes are cut out of the shot. There was one photo where I took a pic of his face, full on, for fun while he was standing right next to me one night. (He wasn’t amused however. The look he gave me was nasty.) And that pic never came out on the developed roll. There was an “excuse” though…..that was my old camera, which was breaking on me, and sometimes pictures just wouldn’t come out. Since it wasn’t the only picture that it happened with, I didn’t even question it at the time. But later on, pooling that together with all the other shots……well, you know.

What this means is open for interpretation. It usually isn’t that difficult to get a picture of somebody straight on, with both eyes open, looking directly at the camera. And yet I can say that I never actually managed to do that. During the two years he was back in my life I don’t have even one picture of him where he has both eyes open, looking at the camera in any kind of normal way. The odds on that are pretty weird, to say the least. Eyes are supposed to be the “window to the soul” as they say, and so the lack of pictures showing both of his eyes, open and clear and unobstructed, seems to be symbolic of something going on with him on a soul level.

On a side note, there was another bizarro phenomenon with Joe during the same time period in Portland when I took those zombie corpse looking red eye photos. We were hanging out in the apartment and Joe suddenly wanted to show me (with what I now realize is the telltale “glinty eyes” and “predatorial smirk” of “something else” speaking through a person) the “smoke blowing phenomenon” he could do.

He wasn’t smoking a cigarette at the time he did this demonstration, just to note. And turning his head sideways he slowly exhaled outwards…….and a full cloud of white “smoke” looking stuff emerged. Then he turned back to me with a smirky smile and glint.

I just stared at him like, wtf?? “Do it again…” I demanded.

He did. Again, and again, and again. Able to generate bottomless lung fulls of this strange white “smoke” stuff at will, for no apparent reason. (Tom likened it to ectoplasm, when I described it to him.) Several more times while living in Portland I’d ask him to demonstrate it randomly, and he always could. It was just always there, and again, had nothing to do with him smoking in the moment. To say Joe had become downright “creepy” by the end of our time together is an understatement. At least when he first came back to SoCal there seemed to still be something “human” about him….even if only intermittently. By the end there was almost none of that left in him. This new “smoke” thing was one more clue that showed that. By the end his energy was very much “demon.” Those glinty eyes and predatorial smirks while saying or revealing something very “telling” and “pointed” is the giveaway of that. I’ve encountered it in several other “people” over the years.

Joe had zero interest in reading, researching or pursuing anything relating to witchcraft, Satanism, demonology or the paranormal/supernatural….because he didn’t have to. He was the walking supernatural, without even trying. Meanwhile other people are desperate for that and spend their lives chasing it around, wearing their goofy goth clothing and makeup, and jewelry adornments, trying to do all these rituals to summon things, killing animals on their little alters with pentagrams. But that’s how you know the difference between poseurs, and the real deal. The real deal just is. No costumes. No alters. No symbolisms carved everywhere. No rituals. No pomp. It doesn’t need that. It walks right past you on the street wearing normal clothing, and you’ll have no idea what it really is. The same goes for the highest of the high positive as well. It doesn’t need to loudly proclaim how righteous they are, making sure the world sees and acknowledges all the good works they do, patting themselves on the back all day long while being sure to align themselves with some church to help legitimize themselves to the world. It doesn’t need to. It just is. Blending into the background in public, so nobody has any idea that they just walked past the equivalent of an angel in human form. (I’ve come to believe, due to personal experience, that there are higher positive beings here that are purposely choosing to incarnate into bodies of people that are considered society’s….less fortunate, to put it mildly. Outright homeless and such. That’s where they felt they could do the most good, helping the other homeless and drug addicts and such, being deep in the trenches. “Wearing a disguise,” basically. And they don’t look for, nor ever receive, attention and glory for what they do.)

My psychically inclined internet acquaintance Leslie relayed back in 2005 or so that the real Joe exited stage left when he was about 17, after drawing in neg entity attachments due to his heavy drug usage. She had no way of knowing that as I hadn’t told her about the drugs, but she could see things play out in her mind, and that’s what she saw. She clearly saw all the drugs, and then how something…..“happened.” An event. And the way she carefully said that word was a read-between-the-lines hint that he had either been witness to, or had been directly involved in, something EXTREMELY negative, something so bad he literally couldn’t handle it on a soul level and bailed out. And that’s when the switch/deal/agreement was made, with something negative, who’d already been waiting in the wings, and took over the body.

She was extremely puzzled about this as she relayed it to me over the phone, as she was unaware that something like that could even happen, and kind of trailed off in confusion to ponder on it for a short bit. She reported that the Joe that came back to me was not the same Joe. “A few of the original cells, but not the same core,” as she wrote in an email. What the true story is of Joe, I’ll probably never know. He could have had a co-pilot (or several…) navigating his wheel along with him, or he was gone completely, leaving behind a shell being piloted and controlled by who knows what. Whatever he was though by the end it wasn’t the real Joe. It was definitely not my brother. Just some sort of reanimated biological vessel, containing relevant memories and newfound hobbies and interests and likes/affiliations that exactly matched me, things he was never previously interested in or liked before, but which now conveniently linked us together for manipulation purposes, being used by “stuff” for multiple agendas, including to get at me/derail my life.

Joe and I were always two very different people, with completely different energies, personalities, astrologies, temperments and physical looks, and which also means totally unrelated interests and talents. We were so different that people would have a hard time believing we were related, yet alone full siblings from the same two parents. As adults pretty much nobody believed we were related. (Our genetics worked out so that every genetic trait I inherited from one parent he got the same trait from the opposite. So I had our dad’s skin and hair type and color, while he had our mom’s; I had our mom’s eyes while he had our dad’s; I had our dad’s body type while he had our mom’s; I had my mom’s mouth and other facial/cheek characteristics, while he had our dad’s, and some unknown other source; I had my paternal great-grandfather’s eyebrows on my dad’s mother’s side, while Joe’s eyebrows were from our mother’s side; I had our mom’s voice, and he had our Dad’s, to the point where we could do imitations that were so spot-on they couldn’t be distinguished from our actual parents. O.o Came in handy when I once called Joe’s school, posing as our “mother,” calling out sick for him so he could ditch and help me move out. They couldn’t tell the difference. And anytime I called my dad’s house looking for Joe I always had to ask who I was speaking to when one of them answered, because they were exactly the same. The traits we did share in common were our nose, jaw/chin, all of which came from our dad’s side, and the lines along the sides of our mouths. But people only see coloring, and nothing else. Otherwise we DID look alike.)

But when Joe returned he was now superficially the “male version of me” in several key areas. I don’t get into the newfound affiliations/hobbies aspect of his return back into my life here in this piece, but that was definitely another component of the endless strangeness I experienced when he returned back into my life, and which I did notice and wondered about at the time…….but didn’t yet understand.

And that’s the Reader’s Digest condensed version of Joe. Charismatic, intelligent in many ways, dumb in others, good looking, a magnet for the paranormal, abduction/mind control victim, funny, afraid of nothing, professional criminal, and sociopath. And I say sociopath, and not psychopath, because sociopaths are created, whereas psychopaths are born. And the hallmark trait of a psychopath is abuse and killing of animals, something Joe did not engage in. As a child he loved nature and animals, and post-lock up animals were literally the only thing that could even get through to him anymore and elicit any kind of genuine niceness and compassion, what he referred to as “fur therapy.” In fact towards the end of our time in “the vortex” he actually rescued a super cute, all black mixed breed boy puppy that had been abandoned/tied to the dumpster >:/   by some Mexicans with a note scrawled in Spanish, and a bag of generic dog food. He brought the puppy inside, upset that anybody could do that. (I’m kind of seeing a pattern of a prejudice/superstitiousness against animals that are all black in color, getting abandoned.) We kept the puppy for several days, where he slept with Joe in his bed at night, until we could find a new home for him. I bought canned puppy food at the store, and meanwhile he shit everywhere all over the livingroom carpet since he wasn’t housebroken. O.o :D Necessitated having to get the carpet cleaned afterwards. But us being able to keep him wasn’t doable, at all, since dogs require training and are very high maintenance, unlike cats. But leaving him tied to a dumpster like he was a bag of garbage and just….looking the other way was also not an option, obviously. So thanks to the complex’s maintenance man we were able to have the puppy placed, since he knew somebody who was already an experienced dog owner and who could take him in.

When the maintenance guy came to fetch the puppy from us to bring to his new owners and saw Kitty he perked up – “It’s Cascade!” immediately recognizing her. That had been his nickname for her when she was a stray kitten as he relayed, because it turns out she was friendly and always trying to go into people’s apartments, and I guess had wedged herself one time between somebody’s cabinet and dishwasher. He was called in to get her back out. :D Hence him naming her “Cascade,” after the dishwasher soap. After he extracted her he released her right back outside, back to being a stray. He was happy to see she had finally been taken in by somebody and was doing well. Also made me realize how many other people’s paths she’d crossed before finding her way to us, and how lucky I was that none of them wanted her. And of course, speaking of Kitty, Joe was also the one responsible for rescuing her. But this is the reason I said earlier that by the end there was “almost” none of the real human side left in him anymore, versus just straight up “none,” and that’s due to animals still being able to get through to him – the only thing that could get through to him.

Around 2009 or so I came across a write up somewhere on the ‘net talking about the link between sociopathy, and……injuries to the frontal lobe of the brain. As mentioned earlier, Joe had experienced frontal lobe injuries (that again, were played down/ignored by my parents) and the traits listed in the article matched Joe to a T. The learning disability/trouble with school, the inability to learn from his mistakes, and the way he would not listen to authority, period. And then his lack of fear, leading to his penchant towards criminal behavior. (fueled by his astrological configuration which was very……willful, to put it mildly. Aquarius sun, Scorpio Moon, Sagittarius rising, and Chinese Year of the (troublemaker) Monkey. O.o )

I’d also come across a write up/compilation article of some sort on the web detailing all the traits of a sociopath, things that were so specific that it was like I was reading a personality profile of Joe himself. It had checklists from different sources, DSM IV manual excerpts, psychology report excerpts, and even the author’s own commentary too it seems, and it was just absolutely uncanny in how accurately it portrayed Joe. I copied and pasted the write up into a Word doc, which I still have, but I never noted the URL or source, so now I’m unable to find it on the web to post a link to. Because instead of trying to sum up Joe, going on and on, which I could do all day, I would prefer to just link people to this write up. Be like, “Here, read this. With the exception of these five things, all the rest is completely Joe. THIS is who Joe was.”

Joe IMO was one of the most dangerous kinds of sociopaths – extremely charismatic without even trying, can reel anybody in after only ten seconds as mentioned, and can steal anything, anytime, anywhere, and right out from under you before you even know what’s happened. And all the while feeling zero guilt, shame or remorse for any of it. There’s just this….emptiness inside, that doesn’t care. Being “cute”/“good looking” also helped, creating even more of a danger, since people are wired towards beauty. When I was looking at an online story of one of his arrests I saw one comment, from a female of course, who was hoping the judge would go easy on him……solely because of the way he looked in his mugshot. :/ I shook my head, thinking of the total havoc he would wreak in her life if she knew him in person. He would rob her blind, utilizing his charm to manipulate her into giving him everything he could take before moving on, like a plague of locusts, seeking the next naive victim. Let’s see what tune she would be singing after that. I guarantee it wouldn’t be “go easy on him!”

And while he would never physically hurt a female, kids or animals (he’s the guy who’d kick somebody’s ass for doing that, if he either directly saw it or even just heard about it), if you’re a fellow adult male? And you’re in his way in life? Providing some sort of competitive threat? Or make the mistake of directly threatening him in some way? It’s game on in terms of physical violence, as far as he’s concerned. In a lot of ways he kind of reminded me of “mafia,” with the way he operated. Mafia guys, no matter what the nationality, be it Italian, Russian, whatever, are total psychopaths/sociopaths….but who often operate with a strange code of ethics, certain things they won’t do, and certain behaviors they won’t tolerate. There’s another trait Joe had in common – I was once watching a clip from “The Sopranos” online when Meadow was telling her dad, Mafia boss Tony Soprano, about something untoward that had been said to her. The way Tony (James Gandolfini) just stares at her while she talks – “calm” on the outside, but raging chaos on the inside – and the way he later delivers a beat down of epic proportions to the guy in question in retaliation for daring to disrespect his daughter – was EXACTLY Joe. I learned real quick – be very careful what you tell him. He may be listening with that same intent but “blank” look on his face…………..but rage is brewing on the inside, and he’s going to go out and mad dog whatever guy you’re complaining about. One dude in particular in 2000 (during the whole “Vortex” time period, when we were living in Rancho) wound up getting a brick smashed into his face, his bike tires popped and bike tossed into the lake (his only/sole source of transportation) merely for screaming something very disrespectful to me. The next time he saw me, on a public bus, after Joe had gotten a hold of him and destroyed his bike, making it so he now had to ride the bus, I could see he was raging angry…..but he kept darting his eyes away from me and kept his lip tightly zipped. Knowing better. Say a word to me and get your face knocked around and your shit destroyed….AGAIN. So I learned very quickly to keep my mouth shut to Joe about those kinds of things.

Also worth noting is that several years after experiencing the supernatural events I’m about to get into, I came across the book “Practical Psychic Self Defense – Understanding and Surviving Unseen Influences” by Robert Bruce and let me tell you….I REALLY could have used this book back when living in this apartment. Seriously. His book describes so much of what I experienced here, to a T. I had nobody to go to when all of this was happening, nobody recognized any of what I was describing when I told them and some even thought I was making it up, or going crazy. So I really wish I’d had his book back then. Unfortunately it wasn’t published until 2002, a year after I moved out.

My then-boss Felicity found what bits of paranormal stuff I was willing to divulge amusing, and didn’t disbelieve me, but she was no help. My Wiccan/Pagan buddy Tiffany, whom I used to answer phones for at an executive suites in Newport Beach, and remained in intermittent contact with for years after had no clue what I was talking about, and I figured she might know since she’s a practicing Wiccan. But being Wiccan doesn’t automatically equate to being paranormally aware. She wasn’t knowledgeable about the “cosmic stuff,” as she jokingly told me. My friend Mike also couldn’t help me despite the fact he was next level psychic/intuitive with me (outlined later in this story), and also going in the Wiccan/Pagan direction at the time. He helped me “clean” my room after I was attacked by an entity but, that’s about all he was good for. He didn’t understand most of what I was experiencing, had never seen or heard anything like it. My buddy Julie acted as if she believed me, always wanting to hear more and more stories, but deep down thought I was making everything up, as I later learned from Mike. And my ex Steve, the hardcore anti-spiritual Atheist skeptic probably thought I was going crazy, based on the way he talked to me over the phone in a tone of voice that was a mixture of befuddlement, and cautiously humoring me because he had no idea what to do or say about anything I was claiming.

(On a side note, in case it sounds weird that I was mentioning this stuff to somebody I answered phones for – Tiffany wasn’t a normal situation by any means. She was somebody that I later on highly suspected of being a MILAB, due to her genetics, family’s military background and multiple symptoms she exhibited, once I learned about MILABs. We clicked since the day I started working for that executive suites, becoming work friends, and proceeded to stay in contact intermittently for years after working together, long before the invention of social media made this the norm….and despite me living in three other states. To stay in touch pre-social media meant having to make sure to hold on to people’s email addresses and not lose them…..for years.

(And then there was the impossible, jaw dropping “spiderweb connection” moment in 2005 involving Tiffany – I’d been gone from SoCal for four years and now living in Virginia with Tom, after living in Fort Lauderdale for 2 1/2 years in between. In the meantime I’d become online/offline friends with a woman named Pam from Tom’s then-messageboard forum called Noble Realms. Pam was not only a MILAB and extremely intuitive/psychic, but the sister of an extremely prominent female “woo” researcher, author and counselor whom I’ve met and am connected to, having even done a couple of round table interviews with. O.o But Pam lived in SoCal, and as it turned out….worked at the same psychiatric facility as Tiffany in L.A. county. Once Pam started describing to me on the phone where she worked I was just like…..wait a minute…..realizing she was describing where Tiffany worked. O.o Then I got the email and confirmed it with Tiffany, telling her about Pam. So I was in contact with both of the separately at the same time. And one day I came home to find a voicemail from Pam letting me know, guess who she finally met/ran into today at work?…….Tiffany. They normally worked on opposite ends of the facility, but were brought together for some meeting, and each one having heard about the other from me. So when they met in person they immediately recognized…..“Oh yeah, you’re ____ ! You know Carissa!”…..from 3,000 miles away……and a full five years after I had last even seen Tiffany in life, and had never even actually met Pam in person. O.o What are the odds that two actual MILABs and one suspected MILAB would all be connected like this? I even found myself visiting Tiffany/popping in on her in the dream state one time around 2006 or so, to see how she was doing. Saw her teaching a class, looking super happy and relaxed and in her element, and now with short hair. (she used to have long blonde hair all the way down her back.) I stood in the back, watching and smiling. The next day she “coincidentally” decided to reach out to me after being out of contact for awhile, and confirmed everything I saw. She was now teaching a psych class, and had chopped her long blonde hair. So…..there was just something very unusual going on there. But that’s why I felt comfortable enough when we worked together to divulge what was happening at home with all this paranormal insanity, when normally I would NEVER talk about it with people I work for/with.)

So Robert Bruce’s book is basically a comprehensive handbook of what neg influences are, where they come from, what they do, how they operate, and how to rid them. And it’s full of so many uncanny details that match up to what you’re about to read here, from the interdimensional portals/doorways, the “disembodied hand,” the golden “sparklies” and floating white balls and black circles, the “hitchhikers” and energy vampire nature of entity presences, the “large creamy blobs” as he calls them which I describe as the blue-white shapeless blobs, stuff crashing and banging around into stuff in my room, the knocking on the headboard, the waves of cold chills emanating from a localized point, on up to the full on physical attack from an entity that sucked the lifeforce out of me in order to keep itself going. And just tons more stuff. My copy is all highlighted up for that reason, because it’s nonstop stuff I’ve experienced. It’s all in his book, and I can’t say enough times that I really wish I’d had his book back then. So if anybody reading this is also experiencing anything like what you read here……….then get his book.

So, with all that in mind, let the games begin…

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Articles in this Section

• » Interview with James Bartley, Tom/Montalk and Myself: The Cosmic Switchboard - April 2023
• » My Fourth (2-Part) Interview with In Other News Radio - December 2021
• » Discussion with Dr. Randall Nozawa and Patrick Herbert RE: Negative Forces - Sept. 2020
• » Interview with James Bartley: The Cosmic Switchboard - July 2020
• » My Third (2-Part) Interview with In Other News Radio - November 2014
• » "Love Bite+" Roundtable panel discussion
• » Headline Dissection - updated 9/16/13
• » My Second Interview with In Other News Radio - 2014
• » Flickr Pics & YouTube videos - Continuously updated
• » Leaving Florida
• » Weather Anomalies - Includes photos - Revamped 10/3/09
• » The Vortex
• » Biorhythms - in Relation to Hyperdimensional Activity