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

 

by Carissa Conti
© 2001-2025
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 moving in a slow and languid way, the way Edward/Danny does in the movie.

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 all our ground floor apartment windows when I was still living with Steve, 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, dead eyed “Straight Faced Lie” where you give them absolutely nothing, and they have no choice but to walk away, empty handed, frowning, pissed off;   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 demonic possession.)

And Joe 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 Joe…..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,” the same genetics, 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 and know 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. The homeless, streetwalking prostitutes, porn workers, strippers, drug addicts, etc. That’s where they felt they could do the most good, helping the other homeless, addicts, prostitutes and such, being deep in the trenches alongside them, trying to help them any way they can, help them find God, get healed and healthy and find a way out. “Wearing a disguise,” basically. And they don’t look for, nor ever receive, attention and glory for what they do.) Because that’s how the real deal actually works. In the same way the real deal negative also works. You’ll often never know either when you walk past them on the street. Neither has anything to prove.

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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The first week in our new apartment in Rancho Santa Margarita, in May of 2000, I was playing with my new kitten named Kitty in the living room. She was approximately six months old, according to the vet who took a guess based on her size, all black with big yellow eyes, and had been an abandoned, emaciated, flea and worm riddled stray when Joe found her outside in the parking lot drinking out of a puddle. Super adorable face, and friendly but dazed personality due to being so severely malnourished, and basically just dull fur on a skeleton. Probably within a week of death, because I don’t see how she could have kept going much longer in that state. After following Joe home three nights in a row I decided to take her in, clean, de-flea and de-worm her, and begin the process of fattening her up and giving her a nice life.

She’s a whole story in itself, and was total reality creation at work since just prior to her appearing I’d thought to myself that I’d like an all black female kitten. And right after we moved into our new place, Joe crossed paths with this all black female kitten three nights in a row….and now she was mine. It was also exciting because I’d wanted a cat for years, but….Steve wouldn’t allow it. No pets. :/ Just another negative trait about him, and why I was glad to finally be free of him, on my own and doing what I wanted to do. So Kitty went from being near death, to now being at a normal weight with shiny fur, all nice and clean and lounging all day inside on my waterbed under the A/C, with plenty of food and drinking Fiji brand water, with lots of love and cat toys. :)

So as we were playing, suddenly Kitty stopped, and started freaking out. Her eyes fixated on something that I couldn’t see, right next to us, and her eyes got wild and scared. She arched her back, fluffed her fur out like a Halloween kitty, and then proceeded to gallop around and around in circles in this herky jerky way, around this mysterious something that I was just NOT seeing, no matter how hard I tried. Her eyes were locked on it. From the height she was looking, it was like she was looking up at a person. She’d stop for a brief second, making funny scared mewing sounds up at it, then start up again, herky jerky ‘round and ‘round.

My hair was standing on end and my heart was racing as I watched this. I knew that she was brand new with us, and that cats have different personalities and all that, but I also realized that this was just not normal cat behavior. And it wasn’t some bug flying about either, or a piece of lint or dust floating around.

I scooted back up against the wall, nervously eyeing the area in question, but, I didn’t see anything. Or feel anything either, for that matter. No vibes of a presence, or of something bad and negative. I would soon learn though that the one human presence we had going on there didn’t leave a “vibe” feeling when it was around usually. Not one that you would notice when you’re busy and distracted, anyway. Which was half the problem, the reason why it was always having to “do stuff” to get our attention, otherwise, people like me would never know it was even there.

After about thirty seconds of this Kitty slowed to a stop, and moved off to the side, and slowly, hesitantly sat down. She was no longer fixated on a line of site, but rather, just glancing around, nervously. Apparently it was over, whatever it was. I was really confused about the incident, only because I hadn’t seen, heard or felt a single thing. But I knew she had.

By the second or third week of being there, that’s when the stories started with Joe.

The first I heard of anything from him that I can remember, I was in the kitchen after work in the late afternoon, preparing dinner for myself. Joe came out of his room and started talking to me and nervously brought up the subject of the fact that he’s uh, had some REALLY weird experiences going on in his room lately…

Oh yeah? I asked, not really surprised. Like I’d noted before, Joe’s a magnet, since childhood.

He then started telling me all about “something” pulling him out of his body and dragging him along with it, in an astral projection sort of way. It brought Joe to this thing’s “world” and reality, where Joe basically just followed along after it, taking in the scene and tagging along.

I listened, objectively. This was pretty off the hook, even for Joe. Although, I had to remember, he was older now. He wasn’t a 12 year old little kid anymore. He’d spent the last couple of years honing his astral projection skills, and had become well acquainted with “opening windows” as he called it, and attracting in the heeby jeebies everywhere he went. So his abilities had been building up considerably since I’d last lived with him. He proceeded to describe this world where these “things” lived…It was some bare, really cold place, with a barren landscape. It was so cold that had he been in a physical body, he wouldn’t have been able to survive. And these things lived underground, where it was warmer. Their existence was bare bones. Solely about survival from day to day. He walked along with this thing that had yanked him out of his body, in the underground areas where they lived. There were also all these cylinder tube things, thousands of them, lined up as far as the eye could see, that went from the underground, to the surface, and up beyond, into the sky. He didn’t know what the cylinders did, what purpose they served.

Okay, I thought. So, what did this place LOOK like? I asked.

It was hard for him to explain, so it’s going to be hard for me to explain, but basically, he got the impression that he wasn’t seeing these beings correctly, the way that they see themselves. Because he wasn’t on his own dimensional plane. So they were distorted. They came across as looking like pure energy forms, but they might not have been, they may have actually had physical bodies and he just wasn’t seeing it, although he kind of doubted it. The overall coloring of the place was like a purple brown and black mixture, and the landscape barren and empty. Completely opposite from our own world and existence as we know it.

I believed that HE believed that this had really happened. But I didn’t necessarily believe it. But I knew Joe could astrally project, so, who knows. Maybe it did. Who was I to say, right? I wasn’t there.

For the next week or two he kept coming to me with all these wild tales of things that were going on with him. That thing came back again, yanking him out to go hang out and tag along; the way he’d feel completely wiped out after being yanked out…his room changing before his eyes into something which I didn’t understand. Something about different colors and lines, black, red, I don’t know, like a grid or something, appearing in the air, in 3D, so it was like his room was still there but overlapped with some other reality, bleeding over.

At first when he started telling me these things I was interested and objective. But after awhile, I started getting pissed. Like, REALLY annoyed. I began to think that he was seriously off his rocker, because I was absolutely not experiencing any of this. So what was he even talking about anyway? Obviously, he’s got his own very different reality from mine. There’s his world, and my world. I began to believe that he could be schizophrenic, that he definitely needs medication, that he was off the deep end. Until finally I snapped at him one day when he was in the middle of telling me yet another wild and bizarre tale of grids, and energy beings and whatever the hell else he was hallucinating about.

I flipped out and yelled at him, calling him a schizophrenic, saying that he needed to be on meds, that he was nuts, that he had problems. I told him I was SICK of hearing about this shit, it was all nuts!! So I didn’t want to fucking hear about it anymore, okay?!? So STOP!!!

He recoiled a little, looking hurt. Fine, he said. Forget it.

And that was that.

Life went back to normal. So it seemed. Let Joe live his weird ass reality that he imagines, in his room, in his own little world. Meanwhile, I have MY reality to live. I have work, and bills, and my writing. I have my normal life, in the real world, thank you. Full of financial problems that I had to deal with – Needed to get money saved for a car, then get some money saved beyond that to move out of this area, and go up north, because that was the plan, to go to the Bay area…I had all of my own distractions, occupying my time.

So that was the beginning of the summer. Throughout the rest of that summer, odd things were happening……….

Everywhere we looked, things just weren’t right. I had bought a hanging ivy plant at Green Thumb nursery in Lake Forest. Unfortunately, something went horribly wrong with it. It started emitting a red brown, blood looking liquid every time I’d water it. Mystified, I called Green Thumb, and asked if plants ever did that. Maybe if they’re over watered, and there’s something funky going on with the minerals in the soil or something…? or maybe a plant disease, or whatnot…? ? ??? Something? But nobody knew, they were completely mystified. The lady I spoke with had never heard of plants emitting bloody colored liquid, and nobody she talked to ever heard of such a thing. They probably thought I was messing with them.

I had to move the ivy plant out onto the patio due to all this red brown liquid that kept coming out of it. Otherwise it would’ve poured out onto my carpet. Since the problem wouldn’t stop I finally just gave up and tossed it. All that was left were these bloody red brown looking stains on the patio. It seriously looked like somebody had been wounded and had bled a trail of blood on the patio, and it had dried that way.

[Exactly nine months later, Joe and I would be standing on the patio, hands up in the air, with several Rancho Santa Margarita cops pointing guns at our heads. The cops were there due to an altercation between Joe and our child-abusing next door neighbors – Joe had fired his pellet gun at the next door neighbor guy who was rampaging on his family, as usual – but the rampaging neighbors called it in as a real gun being fired at them, claiming that a “bullet” had grazed the wife’s arm. So the cops thought they were dealing with an actual crazy gunman shooting at people from a patio balcony when they first arrived, trying to get a handle on what the hell was going on. Meanwhile the pellet gun was designed to look like a Glock 9 millimeter. So when Joe backed away from the balcony railing, not obeying their commands at first and reaching behind him to pull it out and drop it back inside the apartment through the sliding glass door, to them it looked like he was reaching for a real gun from their vantage point on the sidewalk looking upwards, watching through the open railings. Then the way it sounded when it banged against the wall then hit the floor – one of the cops later told me as he described seeing and hearing that from below, “You have to understand, it looked and sounded like a real gun from where we were standing…..” which I totally get.

Meanwhile once I realized the direction things were going and that Joe was out there with REALLY riled up cops getting ready to shoot at him because they don’t know WTF is going on here I realized…. I need to try to diffuse this situation. I can’t let that happen. So I willingly stepped out onto the balcony and put myself in the middle of it to not only explain things to the cops, but to try to get Joe to cooperate. He was drunk off his ass, so his responses were slowed down, and he was being quietly obstinate on top of it, thinking this was a game. So needless to say, this led to them having their guns drawn on both of us, in a standoff. The “blood stain” from the ivy plant wound up being on the same exact part of the patio where I soon found myself standing, hands up, flashlights trained on my face and guns pointed at my head. Just feeling numb, like it was surreal dream. First Joe had been standing on that spot, until a cop told me to switch spots with him “…so that when I shoot your brother, you won’t get hit….” Not if, but when. Cops. Gotta love ‘em. It was around that point that time felt like it slowed down. Wow. There were at least three cops, all with their guns trained on our heads, screaming over and over at both of us to “KEEP YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND LOOK AT THE LIGHT OR WE WILL SHOOT YOU! KEEP YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND LOOK AT THE LIGHT!!!!” with their flashlights trained on our faces. O.o I was completely blank, feeling nothing, other than marveling at how quickly things disintegrated to this point. How did this happen?

Nobody wound up getting shot, because as the cops also noted, and which made it into the five page police report which I have a copy of, I did my best to quietly “talk Joe down” into cooperating. They could hear what I was saying in a low voice next to him. Despite Joe being drunk out of his mind with extremely slow reactionary time he did listen to me and eventually cooperated, did what they told him to do so nobody got trigger happy. But the big “blood” stain on the patio indicates that it’s maybe not how things originally went. My opinion, it’s some sort of weird “synchronistic alternate reality bleedthrough” (no pun intended) and it was probably Joe who got shot. But, this whole thing happened almost a year later in May of 2001, and I’m getting ahead of myself…….]

Then, everybody around us just wasn’t acting right.

People – complete strangers – would come up to me and say nonsensical things, for no apparent reason. Then sometimes, just as quickly as they appeared, poof, they’d take off and vanish. One morning at the plaza at the lake in Rancho an older woman in the parking lot called out to me, “I made a new year’s resolution to bend over 50 times a day!” with a big chipper grin. Talk about random. Then it was like she just disappeared. I don’t know where she went. I glanced away, then when I glanced back she was gone, but there wasn’t enough time for her to have gone anywhere.

Another time I was sitting outside a bagel place in the same plaza at the lake, and a guy was getting into his parked car in front of the store when he suddenly called out to me, “HI.” in a serious and intense way. I just stared back at him like, Huh? “HI.” he yelled again, being stone faced and serious. His face and tone didn’t match the greeting, which was in actuality a statement, not a greeting, on top of the fact that we didn’t even know each other. So there was no reason for him to be saying hi to me in the first place. Then he got in his car and that was it. I was left sitting there, mystified.

Then there was the incident at Carl’s Jr., once again in the same plaza at the lake in Rancho. I was sitting in my booth, about to start eating, when a guy walked down the aisle to my right. As he approached his eyes were locked on me with a weird grin. I just sat there, feeling weirded out. He passed by me, and was now behind me. Normally I would have turned around to watch him walking past, to see more since it was all a little strange. But this time I had this weird “knowing” that if I turned around that he wouldn’t be there. And I wouldn’t be able to handle something like that. So don’t look. And so I didn’t. (Note: I’ve had other encounters with weird strangers, mentioned both in my e-book “Miscellaneous Stories of the Weird and Unusual,” and in my book, “Chasing Phantoms,” including another incident at a different Carl’s Jr. But I’ve never had an incident where I had some strange knowing/intuition that somebody wasn’t actually there, so don’t turn around and look back. That was the only time that’s happened.)

Despite this weirdness I didn’t obsess over these incidents. As noted in other writings that’s been my primary pattern in life. Things happen, and I just drift on a few minutes later like it never happened. lalala….

Then there was Joe’s stories. Of the guy he’d always see, every night, on his way home from his job at _____. It didn’t matter what time he’d leave to go home……8, 8:30, 9, 9:30, the guy was always there, wearing his blue flannel and walking his dog. In the same exact spot. Without fail. It began to freak Joe out, so he purposely started leaving at different times, just to test his theory. And the guy would always be there, no matter what.

I’d once had my own experience back in ’99 with always seeing this one old guy on a weird, three wheeled bike on a particular stretch of road in Irvine at the exact same time in the morning as I drove to work, no matter what time I passed by, so I could believe that. It did not matter what time I passed by that particular curve in the road, he was always there, in the same exact spot, without fail. And even in my dense obliviousness at the time I eventually had to notice and question this. (This is discussed in my write up “Reality Glitches” on my site.) If it wasn’t for that though, I’d be doubtful of what Joe was saying.

And then there was the security guard Joe would drive past on his way home, this guy that was always sitting around outside some high tech corporate-y looking company in one of those brand new cookie cutter office buildings down off of Antonio Parkway and Empressa. Supposedly, according to Joe, and I don’t have proof for this, I can only relay what he claimed, but this guy was always there, in the same position, doing the same thing, night after night, didn’t matter the time. Until Joe decided one day to see if this guy was even real. So he stopped and said hi to him. The guy didn’t respond. So he said it again. No response. Didn’t even glance his way, like he wasn’t there. So Joe got off his bike, and approached him. No response, no eye contact. And then Joe got in his face, yelling, only a couple of feet away. No response. The guy actually glanced down and started picking at his cuticles, bored and oblivious. Joe wasn’t there, as far as this guy was concerned. Or this guy wasn’t really there. And the freaky thing is, Joe wasn’t sure which was the case. Spooked, he took off.

Then came a Friday afternoon company picnic thing at the company Joe was temping at in Foothill Ranch. (He worked in the warehouse.) Joe claims that he was standing there, outside, watching the whole thing going down. Management and staff eating, smoking, drinking beer, doing beer bongs, yukking it up, just completely carrying on and being bizarre when there was work that needed to be done. It’s like this isn’t even REAL! Joe thought finally. For some reason to him it was all just so bizarre. He stood there, puzzled.

Then his buddy Dave came to him and said Hey. (not to be confused with another guy named Dave that comes up later in this piece. Or even the former roommate named Dave whose room I moved into when he moved out. :D Too many guys born between the 60s-80s with the same repeating names.) They both stood there, looking around at the strange scene.

“This isn’t real, is it?” Dave finally said.

Joe turned to him, his eyes big. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

“Let’s test it out,” Dave suggested. Dave was cool according to Joe, he seemed to be into the same stuff, like electronics and scanning and conspiracy theories and realizing that maybe reality isn’t what we think it is. So Joe and Dave proceeded, according to Joe, to walk around the entire complex. Going in places where they knew full well they didn’t have clearance for. And nobody noticed. Saying shit to people, getting in their faces. And getting no response. Doing whatever the hell they damn well felt like. And having no repercussions for it. Joe said they even went inside to the security desk and got behind it, poking around with the camera equipment, just totally being obnoxious, in an area they weren’t allowed in. And the guard didn’t even acknowledge them.

When Joe came home that afternoon he was so disturbed, and so freaked out about the whole thing that all he could do was pace around, going, WHAT the fuck is going on??? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!!!!!!!! What WAS that?!? He was ranting about reality, and wondering if we really are some program, like the movie The Matrix, because he had no answer for what he had just experienced. There was no logical explanation. “Carissa, I was doing whatever I fucking WANTED today! No, you don’t understand, okay, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do or get away with! I could do whatever the fuck I WANTED. NOBODY-SAW-ME. NOBODY-NOTICED. I-WASN’T-THERE. Or THEY weren’t there! ‘Cause at this point, I don’t fucking know!! I don’t even know anymore! I can go outside right now and do whatever the hell I want! And it’s not the first time this happened either!”

I became pretty freaked out myself just hearing about it. Part of me, of course, wondering if he really was suffering from Schizophrenia, or Manic Depression, and was actually experiencing one of those “delusions of grandeur” they always make mention of. Though the conviction in his voice was unnerving. So even if I didn’t want to believe it was real, I had to believe that he believed it was real. And he began to seriously wonder if he was really dead. And if he’s really dead…then what am I? Obviously then, I’M not real. To which I’d always laugh and go, Joe, I’m real, I’m alive, come on…

“Are you? Are you really?” he’d ask. “Because I don’t know that. I don’t think you are!” And he’d grin, and go back to shooting hoops, or whatever we happened to be doing at the time.

Or even better…maybe he’s not dead, but maybe he was really unconscious in a coma somewhere, and all this “reality” was really a big dream. We were pondering all kinds of explanations for what was happening. It was a pretty freaky and fun time.

Then there was my absolute strangest incident. Towards the end of July of 2000, when I was seated at my computer, engrossed in typing. It was late afternoon, sunny, warm. My window was open, and so I could hear the outside world going on. But as I was typing away, I began to notice that the noise outside was progressively getting louder…and louder…and louder…like a volume button was slowly being turned up. Kids began yelling and screaming. Parents were coming out onto their balconies, yelling for their kids. Car stereos were pumping in the parking lot, the music and bass steadily going up, and up and up. Dogs barking, car alarms going off, fire engine sirens screaming by on Santa Margarita Parkway. Just more and more noise, piling on, everything and anything that could be out there making noise. And like I said, I only first noticed it in the back of my mind, subconsciously. But as it progressively got worse, and worse, and louder, and louder, it began registering. I began squinting, and leaning forward towards my computer, trying harder to focus.

But when it got to the point where there were kids standing literally, underneath my window now, screaming and yelling at top full volume, that’s when I finally jerked my head up and thought, WHAT THE…?!?!? I turned to the right, to face towards my window, to hear it all better. Poised, frowning, listening, with brows furrowed. My ears straining. In the meantime, after all this noise finally got my attention, it began to reduce drastically, and die back down. As quickly as it started. And everything was calm again outside.

Perplexed and confused, I tried to get back into my writing.

Joe came home soon after, and I got up to go say hi. Unlike many incidents that had happened to me, I didn’t forget about it right afterwards or just dismiss it. In fact it was the first thing I mentioned to him. And I told him the whole story, as he listened, intently, with his brows furrowed too.

“And you know what was the weirdest part about the whole thing?” I asked, it dawning on me for the first time why I had been “straining” to hear the noise, despite how loud it was.

Actually, he did know, since I asked. “Yeah,” he answered. “You couldn’t understand ONE GODDAMN WORD that anybody was saying. Yeah, I know, been there, had it happen to me.” He nodded knowingly, looking serious.

“That was EXACTLY it!! How did you KNOW?!?”

“Because. It happens to me. All the time. It’s like a mistuned radio frequency. Like the station’s only half way tuned in, and you’re half in, and half out of the plane or dimension, or something.”

“That was exactly it. Because when the noise level finally got so loud and obnoxious that I had to actually stop what I was doing!”

“…to acknowledge it…yeah, I know…Like something’s desperately trying to get your attention…”

“Yeah, because it was just so loud. And it wasn’t like they were speaking another language. The problem was, it was like everything was garbled. Mish mosh. I couldn’t make out ONE WORD that anybody was saying! It was all nonsense. I was trying to make out something, anything, but I couldn’t! Not even the parents standing on the balconies, yelling!”

“Or the kids right under your window. Yeah, I know.” He kept nodding, knowingly, the whole time I explained it to him. We talked for a bit, about his theories on that, about how it’s like a mistuned radio frequency. He said it’s common with him, to be “off” with the rest of the world happening around him, like one foot’s in one plane, and the other is in another. Half way in. Half way out. And that when sound gets distorted. Reality gets strange, and things don’t follow the same rules as they do when it’s “tuned in”.

It was completely fascinating to me. I’d never had such an experience. And now here I was, going through it. And Joe was explaining to me what had happened, before I even finished my story, confirming it.

Backtracking back into June though there was a major “INCIDENT” involving Joe, and where I got * this * close to pulling the plug on all of it and moving out, but where it seems something “woo” intervened. I talk about this incident in my article “The Hidden Puppetmasters” as well.

But as I described in “Hidden Puppetmasters,” ever since bringing Joe back to SoCal six months before he’d been intermittently acting like a raging maniac. Always losing his shit, total triggerhair temper, melting down with mentally unstable rampages about stupid things. You never knew what was going to set him off. Say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing and holy shit…..WATCH out. O.o And most of the time though it wasn’t even me triggering him. He would just be “in a mood,” pissed off at not having any money, “being trapped,” etc………………….after he destroyed the car I gave him, which was his key to freedom and being able to get a job and make money.   :/   And when he’d get in those moods the rampaging meltdowns would begin, pacing around, yelling, screaming, ranting, raving…..then threatening to go out and rob people at ATMs to get their money. Kneejerk resorting to scumbag criminal behavior like we were living in New York City or something, and not suburban south Orange County. When it was still me and Steve and him living under the same roof he only acted like that when Steve wasn’t home. Of course. But I had brought him to a super nice, calm, pleasant and very wealthy area of the country where there was no winter and endless jobs and….he couldn’t handle or accept that. It was so completely foreign to him, especially after years of being in lockup with everything that entailed.

At first he marveled at the total 180 change in scenery and vibes right after arriving, especially since he’d left Connecticut in the middle of the harsh winter, and where I think there was a full on Nor’easter happening, or about to happen. Then arrives in downtown L.A., where even though it was cloudy it was also very green, with temps in the high 60s and where everything was beyond calm and placid. Then moves into me and Steve’s apartment in the middle of south O.C. suburbia, where he has his own room, custom outfitted for him, with me giving him anything he needs, and where it’s just more calm and pleasant, every day, no drama. (Even though Steve and I were getting ready to break up we didn’t “FIGHT!” like most couples do; you wouldn’t even know we were getting ready to break up, since in general I’ve done my best to avoid drama in my personal relationships after going through enough drama and childish insanity for twelve lifetimes courtesy of our “mom.” So Steve and I at our “worst” was still a million times better than many other couples at their “best.”) Versus how it was for Joe when he lived with our Dad, where all they did was fight and clash, in between just outright ignoring each other, and where it was nothing but nasty hate and angry, resentful vibes being directed at him, to put it mildly.

But that “wow……huh…..” marveling about the rapid 180 scenery shift soon changed to frustrated, even resentful rage. It was all just too nice. Too calm. Too pleasant. Where was the below freezing harsh temps and hate and fighting and struggle?!? That was all he knew……. that was his identity. “I’m Joe the druggie who steals cars and gets up to criminal mayhem and runs with lowlifes. I’m ‘the reject’ who angrily fights against the world that’s against me every single day. I hate the world and everybody in it and people are just there for me to use and exploit and hurt and stomp on. Fuck them. They deserve it.” The only things he seemed to understand was negative, nasty, mean, toxic, criminal, abuse, pain, fighting, rejection, uphill losing battles, struggle, deficit, failure, etc. This whole SoCal thing? The land of wealth and opportunity? He couldn’t deal with it. So each time these meltdowns would happen I would desperately chase around after him (like, running out the door chasing him down as he stormed off to go “jack somebody at an ATM”) and then “talk him down.”

This became our established toxic pattern. Especially once he saw that I reacted to it the first few times. It was like a light bulb went off, and now he knew how to pull my strings, get attention, etc. Just throw a temper tantrum, like a two year old, and threaten to go out and do scumbag things and boom! instant reaction from me, every time, trying to placate him, give him money….whatever’s needed to “calm him down” and “get it to stop.” Very severe personality disorder issues. He wasn’t like this as a kid though, AT all. Total opposite actually. As a baby and toddler he was extremely well behaved. No whining, no fits, no temper tantrums. And as a kid, into his early teens he was the ultimate definition of easy going – laugh everything off, play things down, make jokes and hide the pain on the inside. But this was yet another aspect of the whole “new Joe” personality change phenomenon. He was basically now an entirely different person. He looked like Joe on the outside. But he wasn’t Joe.

So with that in mind, there we were in June, when yet again he was rampaging, about who knows what. Only this rampage now involved violence. Just something I’d said about the refrigerator, that’s all I remember. Completely set-him-off. So much so that I had to lock myself in my room to keep him away from me. And now he was in the kitchen going apeshit insane, screaming and ranting and raving, taking things out of the refrigerator and throwing them around, the sound of glass smashing and breaking everywhere. Then he’d come over to my door, pounding and kicking on it and screaming some more with a worn out raspy, hoarse voice, then back in the kitchen to throw more shit around, with glass smashing and hoarse voiced ranting and raving, then back to my door to scream and pound and kick on it, then back to the kitchen with more smashing and ranting and raving, back and forth, back and forth. Just white hot rage that couldn’t calm down, and went on and on and on for over twenty minutes. (As it was there was a big hole in the living room wall from another one of his rages where he punched it full force. Had to patch that up before we moved out.)

Meanwhile I was crouched down between my bed and the wall, phone in hand, with my ex Steve on the line. In a whisper voice I asked him if I could borrow his truck this weekend, because I wanted to move out. My plan was to put my stuff in storage and get a motel room. Sounding a little confused he said Yeah…sure…..so I thanked him and told him I’d call him again later to work out the details.

And that’s where my memory of that night ends. Hanging up the phone, my plan cemented to move out that weekend, using Steve’s truck to get my stuff to a storage unit. I didn’t even really have the money to do any of this but, I obviously didn’t have a choice. Continuing to live with Joe under these conditions was no longer doable. I was going to have to accept that it had all been for nothing and I’d thrown my money and time and energy away on what was basically a black hole. I wasn’t willing to accept that for the past six months, continually ignoring and denying it all and believing he would eventually calm down and change on his own, but the breaking point had just been reached.

But literally not a single memory of anything else that night after I hung up the phone with Steve, which isn’t right. My memory then jumps to the next morning when I was now up and getting ready for work….in a muted, kind of tranced out daze. There was a letter on our door from the leasing office, letting us know that multiple neighbors had reported the altercation, and that this was our first and final warning, and if anything ever happened again we would be evicted. And now the kitchen, which I could tell had been wrecked the night before, was completely clean, like none of it ever happened. There was nothing for me to clean up. I had heard glass smashing all over the place, so this was basically an impossibility.

But to cap it all off, Joe was now a completely different person. Gone was the raging maniac from the last six months, and in its place was a new, calm, passive, docile Joe. Somebody who, if I’d wanted to, I could have cussed out and insulted up and down and inside out and he would have just stood there and blankly taken it. Not that I did that, but I knew that I could have done it if I wanted to and that he would have done absolutely nothing and just passively let me. Sure, maybe he could have cleaned everything up himself and got everything back to looking like nothing happened. But the 180 personality change on top of it? Especially when he had no idea I was even planning to move out, so had no motivation to suddenly change? No. Both together show that something strange was at work. Joe was so triggerhair before that ANYTHING could, and would set him off. And he relished being set off, loved the drama and attention and energy feeding it provided.

So there’s zero doubt in my mind as I look back on this incident that something “woo-woo”/funny business had happened. In light of everything else going on in our life, most of which I’d learn in the following three years involving the MILABs and abductions stuff, it is now very clear that “something” swooped in and did MAJOR damage control. Hit “reset!” and cleaned up the mess like it never happened, reprogrammed Joe and erased my memory, which caused me to become passively accepting of these new circumstances in a slightly tranced out daze. “Nothing to see here folks, move it along….Don’t look too closely, don’t question anything, just…………..move forward like it never happened.” So I never even thought to look into the fridge and check on all those bottles of condiments and such that I’d heard him smashing around the night before. Just moved it along in a tranced daze.

And because of his overnight 180 personality change into this new, calm, unthreatening Joe who was no longer a danger to me I in turn did a 180 and changed my mind about moving out that weekend. Tentatively and reluctantly decided to stay…..okay……let’s see how things go…….meanwhile calling Steve to cancel borrowing his truck. Continued keeping the vector of attack in my life. :/

Then in September, I found myself in the living room playing with Kitty, as usual. This time, I was blowing these “catnip bubbles” for her to chase and bat around. (bubbles infused with catnip oil or something. :D ) The lighting in the room grew dim for a split second, then brightened again. Not like a bulb flickering, but rather, like an object passing in front of a light source. Based on how that looked, my brain’s first reaction was to think that something had blocked the light from the light post outside for a second. Without thinking, I whirled my head to the left, to look outside the sliding glass doors, to the light post outside. That’s when my logic kicked in…wait a minute…we’re on the second floor. The light post is down below on the ground level. If something moved in front of it, you wouldn’t see it up here…

My head slowly turned back to the right. Towards the kitchen.

And I saw it. Whatever it was. This fuzzy, translucent sort of black shadowy thing, roughly blocky and square shaped, about three feet in length and two feet in height from my vantage point. It didn’t make any noise, total silence. And it didn’t touch the floor. It just sort of ambled along…waving along, is the word for it, because it moved like it was going up and down, like in waves…and it was coming from the area of Joe’s room, and heading towards the living room wall.

I sat there, intrigued. Leaning forward, squinting my eyes, bubble stick still in hand in mid air, thinking, huh?!?

I glanced down at Kitty. She was calmly sitting there, watching it too, her line of sight right on it, following it with her eyes.

Okay. She’s seeing this too then. I’m not crazy.

And I went back to squinting, open mouthed at this whatever it was, black shadowy translucent blocky thing, waving along, in the air, languidly. Heading towards the wall. The whole thing lasted maybe ten seconds? And the entire time I was wondering if I was really seeing this. Glanced over at Kitty again. Yup, she was still watching it too. Okay.

And it disappeared into the wall.

And that was that.

I sat there for a few seconds afterwards, confused. I mean, what WAS that? Was it even there? Did I actually see that?

I had no answers. So I just dismissed the whole thing. Oh well, I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know what it was, if it even really was there, so forget it. Shrugged my shoulders, and went back to playing bubbles with Kitty, like it was nothing. In fact, when Joe got home about ten minutes later, I had already forgotten about the whole thing, and didn’t even mention it to him. [This was an interesting phenomenon I had when this stuff first began happening to me – I would just “forget” about things. Put them out of my mind and completely forget and go back about my business. Almost as if my mind had trouble dealing with it. Just shove it aside, bury it, and keep on truckin’.]

The next morning Joe and I were standing around, in the front doorway area, directly in the path of where that thing had been moving along the night before. We were just talking about random stuff and engrossed in our conversation, when Joe glanced down quickly, cutting himself off in mid sentence. Then looked back up, confused.

“Wait…where’s the cat?” he asked.

“In your room. I saw her go in there a few minutes ago, and she hasn’t come back out yet.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yup. Positive. Here, come look…” I walked into his room, and found Kitty in his bathroom, poking around. “See! She’s in here!” I called out to him. He poked his head in, oh, okay…Then we went back out to where we were standing.

Then I finally thought to ask, “Why? Why did you want to know?”

“I don’t know…just because I thought I saw…this flash of black fur or something, right here,” he pointed down to where the thing had been yesterday. “I thought it was the cat or something running around because it was black, and moving…”

“OH MY GOD!!! I saw that too!!! Right here!!!! Yesterday!!! When you were out!!! I totally forgot to tell you!!! I can’t believe it!”

And so it began. For me, anyway. Because it had been happening to Joe for his entire life. Now it was my turn. And once it started happening, it took off.

Events continued happening, usually always in Joe’s room. I heard wild tales of what he called “Crossovers”, which is where entities were crossing over into his room, from wherever they came from. They’d cross over, then “blow through”, as he would put it, leaving, on their way to someplace else. Where, we had no clue. Occasionally he had one that would poke about in his room for a bit. Seeming to be very much aware of him, and the surroundings. Especially with his radio equipment. His room was buzzing with stacks of radios, all interconnected, and plugged into an old Brother brand word processor of mine, scanning every frequency there was to be scanned 24/7. His “system” was never turned off. And it definitely seemed to attract a few of the entities. Most though, from what he reported, seemed to be completely and totally oblivious to Joe and our apartment.

Then came the morning when he discovered the “static critters.” That’s what he named them, because they were drawn to his radio equipment, and seemed to land on the wires and suck up the electricity and energy. But Joe knocked on my door one Sunday morning, telling me I had to see this, he just found something new. He drags me into his room, and proceeds to try and get me to see these static critters that he was seeing.

Well, I could not. Much to his chagrin. This totally angered him. He went from 0 to pissed off in like two seconds. He was keyed up and agitated that I couldn’t just instantly see them, like he could. “LOOK! RIGHT THERE!! IT’S RIGHT FUCKING THERE!!! DON’T TELL ME YOU DON’T SEE IT!!! DON’T FUCK WITH ME!! IT’S RIGHT THERE!!! LOOK!!! HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE IT!!!”

I eventually was like, “You know what? I’m atta here. You need to calm down, okay? Maybe when you calm down, I’ll come back, later, and try to check it out. But I’m not seeing it, and you need to accept that. So I’m leaving right now. I’m leaving the apartment. You are way too intense right now, I don’t even want to be in the apartment with you, forget trying to hide out in my room!”

He mellowed a little and said “Look, it’s just that I’ve been up since like 3 in the morning watching this, okay? I’ve discovered a new species or something! That feeds on electricity! This is something that nobody has ever seen before! And I’ve been watching it for HOURS now! I’ve ruled out every possibility of what it could be. Are you serious though? You really can’t see it?”

“No. I can’t. Sorry.”

“Just try again, okay? Try it one more time.”

Sigh.

“Come on, just look again…” he urged.

Another sigh. Sigh again. Fine, whatever. I’m telling you though, I’m not going to see anything. I’m not like you, I can’t see all the stuff you do…

“Yes you can,” he insisted, bringing me back into his room.

So, I stood in his bathroom doorway. Again. And checked everywhere that he kept pointing to underneath his tables and desks. Again. Not seeing it. Again. And him getting worked up about it. Again.

Then, plain as day, I saw something which looked like a shadow against the wall, like a huge bug or something, about six inches long, with a tail, that was flopping around, wiggling and hyper, back and forth.

“What the hell is that??” I pointed, squinting and moving closer.

“YOU SEE IT?? SO YOU SEE IT? CAN YOU SEE IT NOW??”

“Well, I see something, I don’t know if that’s it or not. Right there. Moving around, wiggling, or something. What IS that? Is that a shadow??” I immediately began searching for the source of this weird ass shadow. It had to be coming from something. But I couldn’t find anything.

“No, it’s not coming from anything, it’s not a shadow. It’s what I’ve been trying to TELL you!! That’s one of them! So you see it, right?!? You see it?!?”

“Yeah, I see something…” I moved closer, and watched it. I couldn’t figure out how this shadow was being made. There was no light hitting that part of the wall, because it was an area that was completely enclosed by the desk. No direct light from his window off to the left. But there it was, this translucent something, moving around. By the wires.

Joe spent the next fifteen minutes trying to show me the other ones, moving about, in the air, on the wires, following their trail with his finger, excitedly yelling, YOU CAN’T SEE THAT??? YOU’RE LYING!! YOU HAVE TO SEE IT!!! IT’S RIGHT THERE!!! RIGHT THERE!!!! HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THAT?!? But I just couldn’t see them, not like the other one.

I started thinking he was a little cuckoo for cocoa puffs again. Despite my experience with the black shadowy translucent thing in the living room I’d been witness to.

I finally gave it up, despite his protests. I told him, you can see things better than I can. I just don’t have the abilities you do. Don’t get mad at me for that, I can’t help that. It’s just the way it is.

And he told me something that he’d end up telling me many times to come: That not only did I have the abilities, but mine were so strong I could blow him out of the water and I didn’t even know it, and didn’t even realize what I was capable of. He told me that he’s never met anybody who emits as much energy as I do. Which I thought was interesting, because it’s not the first time I’ve heard that. Two other people had also separately told me the same thing, and an unofficial third as well. I walked into a coffeehouse in Fullerton one night back in 1995 and the guy standing behind the counter glanced up at me as I walked through the door, looked down…then immediately did a double take back at me, his eyes traveling over my head into the air above, staring at me like, “OHHHkay.” He snapped his head back down again and tried to play it all cool. As he rang me up he quietly asked me if everything was okay. I said Yeah, in a brow furrowed, flat way.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I frowned, rooting through my purse. I wasn’t, but it didn’t matter. He mumbled under his breath something about “everybody always tells me they’re okay even though I can see that they’re not…” walking away to go make my mocha with whipped cream. Curiosity piqued, I asked him when he returned how he could tell that people weren’t telling the truth. And so he explained. He could see people’s energy. And when I walked through the door he saw energy just literally, pouring off the top of my head in a way that he’s never seen before, ever. He said with people my age (20 at the time) their energy tends to be centered in their genitalia region, not their head/“crown chakra” area. So what was happening in my situation was something beyond, just very not normal. I wound up hanging out by the counter with him, and then later out back while he had a smoke on his break, learning about chakras and how the Earth emits natural energy and so on, and how SoCal specifically has very little, if any, natural energy anymore. It’s been completely depleted for obvious reasons. He was Native American and his grandma was a healer shaman in New Mexico, he said. It was fascinating stuff and all news to me at the time. I loved it. (In my journal from that time period I’d refer to him as “Chakra Guy,” noting that he was always down for a friendly chat when I’d run into him.)

Then my buddy Mike (who is featured later in this write up in more detail) was reaching over my head one time to grab something off his shelf when he stopped in mid-air and was like, “Wow! Holy shit!” and pulled back towards my head. He took his hand and passed it back and forth over my head and told everybody else in the room, “Come check this out!” He could feel heat pouring off the top of my head. So everybody came over and passed their hands over my head to feel it too. Then my Wiccan/Pagan buddy Tiffany whom I answered phones for at work in ’99 could also see auras and said that I had more energy emanating off me than anybody she’s ever seen, and it was concentrated over my head area. The odd thing she noted about my aura was that unlike other people, mine lacked the usual variety of colors. It was nearly all completely blue, with a little bit of yellow around the head. She’d never seen an almost 100% blue aura before, or a situation where the aura is concentrated so strongly over the head. Then Joe also confirmed the energy thing independently without knowing about any of these incidents, saying that the energy just poured off me from my head and then flowed around the room. His eyes following the path of the energy trails which I couldn’t see. He said I was like a battery, literally.

But now when Joe would be coming to me telling me his stories I believed him, because of what I’d seen with the black fuzzy thing, his independent confirmation of the energy emitting from the top of my head and possibly the newfound “Static Critters” that I saw. The black thing had been coming from his room, and disappeared into the living room… blowing through, as he put it, maybe? I don’t know. And with these Static Critters, Joe said that they were very interactive. They definitely seemed to be aware of him. They were always roaming around his room, poking around, settling on wires, feeding off the electricity. He had stories about “baby static critters”…the small ones, that seemed to bounce along, like kids…and “Mama Static Critter”…the big one that seemed to just lumber along, like an adult…..and how the “babies” would “blow donuts” around his legs, chasing each other around and around and around, like they were playing. And even interacting with Kitty, trying to play with her, and landing on her and making her fur stand up and scaring the crap out of her. Or landing on Joe’s head, and making his hair stand up. He got a kick out of the whole deal, and as usual, encouraged the activity in his room whole heartedly. The more action, the better, to Joe.

During this time period I had my office day job and my evening and weekend drug store job, which I’ll keep anonymous. And this one night while working the register at the drug store Joe stops by to see me and say Hey. So I’m in the middle of ringing up some serious looking woman in her 40’s with glasses, when Joe leans on the counter next to me and starts talking “in code” about the latest static critter happenings. He was so excited about it that he didn’t want to wait for me to come home in three hours.

“I saw FIVE tonight!” he started out with.

I was bagging up the items, as the lady filled out her check.

“Five?” I repeated, raising my brows, bagging. She glanced up, puzzled, and went back to her check.

“Yeah, FIVE!” he said, excitedly. “Two adults, and three babies!”

“Really!” I said. Pause. Bagging some more. “Could the cat see them?”

The lady’s head shot up when I said that, and she looked like, huh??

Joe was grinning at me. He nodded. “Yup!”

“She could?! Wow!” I said. Which only succeeded in piquing this woman’s curiosity even more.

Then one night in October, at about 8 p.m. or so, Joe came and reported that there was going to be a crossover in his room, activity had been slowly building up for the past few hours. I myself had just gotten in from running to Albertson’s (grocery store), and was busy putting food away, full of energy, feeling distracted. So when he came to me with this, I was like, Yeah okay, sure. Whatever.

“You can feel the energy building up where the crossover was going to happen, come on, come check it out!” he said excitedly.

I was immediately like, Yeah, right. Sure. Totally blowing him off. I still had the leftover atheist/skeptic in me from my recent three years as an agnostic/atheist. Could not shake it. I scooped up Kitty to say hi to her and pet her, and carried her into his room, talking to her, not even taking the crossover thing seriously. I entered his doorway and immediately blew him off, like, pssh, I don’t feel anything (pet Kitty some more as I walked about the room, half assed “investigating”) I don’t know what you’re talking abou…WHOA. Holy SHIT!

I walked right smack into a wall or column of energy, in front of his closet doors. It was intense enough to shut me up in mid sentence and stop me in my tracks, in mid step, foot still up in the air. I immediately jumped back, out of the way. Holy shit! What the hell?? I said, laughing in amazement and nervousness. I moved forward again, more gingerly now, still holding Kitty, and stepped back into that spot. Yikes! Ugh…had to move back out again. It felt like warm, intense, tingly energy. Like if you were standing in front of an open oven, only, without the intense heat, just the tingle you’d get from the energy itself, creating a physical something in the air, even though you couldn’t see it.

I backed away again, laughing. And moved all the way back out to his door. I wasn’t going near that, no way. I put Kitty down, still laughing. She darted off, nervously, into the living room. Apparently she wanted no part of it either.

“See, I told you,” Joe said, grinning. “This has been building up all night.”

I remained in the doorway, fascinated.

“You wanna see something even better?” He walked over towards that area and grabbed something off the end of the desk/table that was nearest to it. “Look at my thermometer. It’s 90 degrees in here. And the window is open.”

“No way…” I said, taking the thermometer he was passing me. It read 90 degrees, sure enough. And his window was wide open. It was no warmer than 55 degrees outside, and you couldn’t tell, not at all. My bedroom window was closed, and had been, all night. And it was colder in my room than his. And to rule out heat generated by lighting…well, his room was lit by a neon Marlboro sign. Neon signs don’t generate heat.

“The temperature always goes up when there’s a crossover.” He carefully placed the thermometer back on the end of the table closest to the energy, so it was sticking out, to register any heat change. (and yes…I did check out the thermometer on another occasion when there was no activity happening, JUST to make sure it wasn’t broken and forever locked at 90 degrees. And that time the thermometer read 72 degrees. So yeah, the thermometer was working.)

I tried to walk back over to check out the energy again, but he shooed me away. “Don’t! You’re fucking it up for them! You’re in the way! You’re going to mess it up! Don’t stand there.”

I backed up to the doorway again. Kitty meanwhile, was completely spazzing out. Normally she was pretty mellow, unless there was a “problem” going on with Joe’s room, like now. She was tearing all over the place, in a frenzy. She’d dart from the living room, tear into his room, screech to a halt, look around bug eyed and dash back out again, and retreat to the living room where she’d gallop around in circles. Then do it all over again, over and over.

“If you look closely, you can see sparkles,” Joe said.

“What?! You can? I can’t…” I squinted.

“Just look.”

“Where?”

“Right there…” He pointed to the spot where I’d only just been standing. “I can see them,” he shrugged.

I studied the area for a short bit, expecting a loud and obvious display of sparkles, which is why I couldn’t see anything at first. Then I relaxed. And there they were. Delicate and dainty. They looked like a mixture of embers from a fire, and gold sparkling glitter. Larger bits would fly out here and there, just like embers.

“I can see them…oh my god!” I laughed again. “I think…I’m not sure…I don’t know, what if I’m just imagining this? Because you put the suggestion in my head?”

“You’re not imagining it. Just watch.”

I studied the area some more. It was amazing, I kept seeing all this sparkling gold dust stuff, sparkling through the air, randomly flying about, this way and that, some of the them looking like those embers. There was no noise attached to it.

Then the most amazing part – I watched as the gold sparkles actually COALESCED, and formed a rounded spiral, twisting elegantly down though the air, before breaking up again, back to sparkling randomly, this way and that. That’s when I knew I wasn’t imagining this.

I flipped out when I saw that, laughing in glee, giddy and fascinated and completely entranced. Without taking my eyes off it, I slowly sunk down to the floor, sitting Indian style, glued to this scene, transfixed. It was so beautiful and amazing, especially the spiral. Was that done on purpose? Or was it just accidental? I’ll never know.

“I feel like Carol Ann in Poltergeist right now….they’re heeeeere!” I giggled again. I looked just like her, the way she sat transfixed in front of the television. Kitty continued darting in and out of the room, like a spaz.

We watched for a few more minutes, until he said “Here, come on, let’s get out of here. Let’s leave it alone for awhile.” He turned serious. “Come on…I’ve got to go to the store anyway, get some cigarettes. Let’s just leave it alone.”

“Okay,” I reluctantly agreed, getting up.

“Do you want to come with me?”

“Na, I already went.”

So I stayed behind. I was so absorbed in thinking about what had just been happening that all I could do was sit in the living room, clutching Kitty and petting her, staring intensely at the floor, in deep thought, brows furrowed. I finally got up and had a snack, and went back to sitting on the floor, staring some more.

I wanted to go brush my teeth since I just ate something. Thing is though, the toothpaste was in Joe’s bathroom right now, because he had borrowed it.

I would have to go get it.

And for whatever reason, the idea of going into his bathroom right then was absolutely OUT OF THE QUESTION. Absolutely not. No way. Just stay away. I actually felt scared a little, at the idea of going into his bathroom, and I had no idea why. I wasn’t scared of what was going on in his room before. In fact, I’d watched it eagerly, and had even stood in the spot with the energy. But now…there was no way you could get me in his bathroom. Which was odd, since there wasn’t anything happening in his bathroom. It was in his room, by his closet.

Oh well.

So I stayed put, until Joe got back, after twenty minutes.

We went back into his room again to check out the scene, see what was going on now. I forgot about my earlier irrational fear of his bathroom, and eagerly went back over to the energy spot. Up close you couldn’t see the sparklies. Only from a distance. But the energy was still there, loud and clear. I giggled again in amazement as I stood there, passing my hands, palms down, back and forth, into and out of the energy spot, feeling the drastic difference. Tingly Energy!!…no energy…Tingly Energy!!….no energy. Giggle again. Joe stood back by his doorway, smiling, enjoying the fact that I could be a part of it, and witness for once the strange happenings in his room.

Still grinning, I glanced over into his bathroom to my right.

It took a second for it to register what I was seeing. My grin faded, and I furrowed my brows.

“What happened to your mirror?” I said, curiously.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“Your mirror. What happened to it??” I pulled my hands back in and walked to his bathroom doorway. I flipped on the light and just stood there. Joe came up behind me.

We stood there, perplexed, looking at his bathroom mirror which used to be a large rectangular, very heavy mirror attached to the wall over his sink – typical in many SoCal apartment and tract home bathrooms. Now, it was sitting in two pieces, having been completely sliced, diagonally, clear through from the top left corner to the bottom right corner. One half was now leaning up against the wall from which it came, sitting on the sink counter. The other half sat on the floor, leaning up against the wall. The two broken halves together formed a perfectly clean slice, in a gentle “S” shaped wave. No shards. No broken chunks. No shatter marks as if the mirror had been dropped. It was like someone had taken a laser and cut it perfectly, and threw in the impossible “S” shape for kicks, just to make a point.

I looked at Joe, and saw him with his mouth open, and eyes wide. For once he had nothing to say. He turned to me, still speechless, mouth still open.

“Holy shit…” he finally said.

“Dude, did you break your mirror??” I grinned. My first reaction was to think it was him because a few weeks earlier, his bathroom medicine cabinet had come loose, and come out of his wall. He had ended up pulling it out and just resting it on the floor, until we could get it fixed by maintenance. So since I’d seen another bathroom object with a mirror sitting on his floor, leaning up against the wall, out of order, I just assumed it was a case of Joe Strikes Again. Although, how the hell he managed to break this mirror, which is normally screwed into the wall is beyond me. He must have been removing it, to do something with it, although, what, and why, is beyond me. And if he had removed it, and dropped it, then how the hell did it break with such a clean “S” shaped slice like that? I mean, how do you even GET a wave shape like that? Weird.

“No! I swear to God I didn’t break it. This mirror was fine before I left to go to the store. There was nothing wrong with it, at all! I swear. I was even in here, taking a piss before I left. The mirror was fine!”

“Come on, you broke it…” I teased, still not believing it had anything to do with the rest of what had been going on all night.

“No, I’m telling you, I didn’t do this! I’m not lying. If I did it, I’d just tell you I did it. I wouldn’t lie, you know that. If I did it, then I’d just say, Yeah, I did it, sorry, whoops, my bad. But I didn’t do it. I swear!”

That’s true…he’s never once denied anything that he’s broken. He’ll always get that sheepish look on his face, grin, and go, Yeah, I did it…sorry! Ooops! And his reaction would be different from this. He’s never gone through trouble to put on an act of amazement, trying to play dumb, and seem like he has no clue.

“It was fine before I left. I saw it. I used the bathroom before I left.”

Then I remembered my irrational fear of going near his bathroom after he left. Well, now it was obvious why. I told him about that incident.

We looked back at the mirror, and started investigating it. No shards, no chunks, no shatter marks. Just a clean slice, from one corner to the other. We spent the next half hour or so pondering this, with me continually trying to get him to confess to it.

(One of the last things I ever asked him, the last time I ever saw him as I boarded a bus in Portland, Oregon, was whether he broke that mirror. Just admit it, I said. It doesn’t matter anymore. It was one of the big unsolved mysteries that always bothered me, right til the bitter end. He adamantly denied it, and I could tell by his voice that he was telling the truth.)

This is one of the photos I truly regret not getting in my life. But again, my camera by this point was on the blitz, only sporadically working, and there was also this strange “lalala” pressure to not be diligent in paying attention, and maybe even outright forget stuff immediately after things would happen, a phenomenon that has followed me for years, and which I discuss around my website and have had to push back against hard. Not photo documenting an incident like this for absolute proof is what helped contribute to my obsession with documenting absolutely every weird thing that would later happen, with photos, dates, and all possible information about the incidents logged, and any pieces of evidence surrounding an incident, as noted at the beginning of this write up. So in a way you could say this “S Cut Mirror Incident” was a very specific, direct influence on the entire foundation of my website.

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I wound up disappearing into my room after that whole deal, having had enough of whatever was going on in his room. As long as it stayed there, that was fine with me.

And so I went back to my room, where I sat on the floor in front of my radio, as usual, and stewed. It’s what I was always doing. Brooding, and stewing. About life. I was always brooding about everything that was wrong with my life. Because I had no working car, and was stuck way out in Rancho Santa Margarita, the middle of boring nowhere, with no way to get out and go anywhere except for the buses. Had absolutely no money, that’s how bad things were financially, and completely hated my day job with a passion, but was trapped and had to keep working there… because again, I had no money and no car, and it was a bus ride away.

Side note about the day job situation – I was working full time as a front desk/administrative assistant for the branch office of a real estate agency specializing in high end mansions, especially in Coto de Caza and Dove Canyon. This was literally “Real Housewives of Orange County” territory, which launched several years after I’d left. An original cast member of the show worked in this exact office as an agent during the six months I was there, so we overlapped. Though I never spoke to her directly, since I only actually saw her there in person once, at a company meeting. She was one of the only agents there who actually had an onsite office, though she pretty much never came in. She was already D-level famous while working there as an agent, her hayday having been back in the 80s, which is why I think she was given preferential treatment with the office. After the show launched and I saw it in the media, and saw that she was in it, I was just like OH MY GOD!!!!! HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!!!!! Meanwhile two other MAJOR cast members of the show worked out of the San Juan Capistrano office, also as agents. This job would go down for me as being the absolute worst place I’ve ever worked at for the next fourteen years, finally upstaged in 2014 by an even worse place in Boca Raton, FL.

The thing that made it so bad was the head woman/agent in charge, whom I’ll anonymously refer to as M___, as well as the women who worked in the office. What’s funny is that during my interview, when everybody was so nice and friendly, they had warned me about the potential for the agents to be very…..demanding, to put it mildly, with troubled personalities. When in reality it was the women giving me this warning who wound up being the problem. I wound up getting on with all the agents just fine, whether male or female, no problems there. The agents just wanted to be taken care of, and so long as you did that, which I did and did well, then they’d love you. The office women though? Cold, disdainful……and jealous. Something I didn’t realize and fully understand until years later. There was no getting a compliment out of them.

Lot to say about it, but I didn’t realize that my 25 year old self naturally had so much of what these crazy bitches wanted, but no longer had…and maybe never had even in their best days of youth. Long, naturally thick hair, dyed strawberry blonde, versus fake extensions; 5’3” and 105 pounds without trying, able to eat anything I wanted, no dieting required. Perfect teeth – no caps and veneers. Perfect skin and healthy looking face in general requiring next to no makeup – no wrinkles or zits/acne, enlarged pores or discolored spots. One of the middle aged female agents was admiring my skin one day with an intensely curious frown, trying to figure out what I did to get it the way it was. (Queen Helene Oatmeal ‘n Honey face scrub, baby! Followed by a good moisturizing face lotion. I was into skincare even at that age, and liked to say “If you wanna look 25 when you’re 40 then you have to start when you’re 25. Not 40.”) And another weird random thing I picked up from women along the way in life – an enviable nose. ;D One chick told me she wanted to get plastic surgery to get a nose like mine. Rhinoplasty is one of the biggest plastic surgeries going in the world of rich women. So I even had that going for me without trying. There’s a reason I was hired on the spot….but my personality and background didn’t match them, at all. I may as well have been a literal alien from another planet. These women ran in circles I didn’t understand, the extremely rich of southern California, overlapping with Hollywood, where image and looks is absolutely everything, and where every female they cross paths with is sized up and scrutinized with competitive jealousy.

Once I was brought on the weird 180 happened, and after that it was constant passive aggressive Mean Girls from Hell from the women in the office, like nothing I’d ever experienced at another job at that point. M___, who was not only my boss, but who oversaw the entire branch, didn’t speak a real word to me for almost the entire first three months I was there, other than to tersely say “good morning” to me while whizzing past up the stairs every day clutching her paperwork, avoiding eye contact. Not even kidding. Who does that?? O.o Friendly in the interview, then total switcheroo starting on my first day, leaving me to figure out the job on my own, with no feedback or input. And no matter how well I did, and how much I figured out and took on, no matter how many compliments the agents gave about me (one of the agents even hired me to work in her home a few times helping her host her personal parties) it didn’t matter. There was no getting a compliment or positive acknowledgment of anything out of the office women, whether it was my boss, or Debbie and Dawn who did whatever they did, I forget, or Lee, the Asian lady head of Marketing. With them it was fake “nice”…….then Jeckyl and Hyde switch to cold and mean, getting in weird little swipes and jabs at me, which yeah, was hurtful. I couldn’t understand why they would keep switching on me like that, pretending to be “friendly” one day, then the next acting like they hated me. The only decent people in the office other than C__ (M___’s son, whom we’ll be returning to later with a vengeance O.o :D ) were the Escrow department, who were actually cool. (In fact it was Sydney in Escrow, this hot blonde, blue eyed chick in her late 30s, who wondered, deadly serious, why I was struggling so much with work/money, and didn’t just go find myself a Sugar Daddy. She was like, You could EASILY get a rich guy to take care of you, look at you! Meanwhile I just stared at her, completely baffled, like Whaaat? um…..okay……. O.o Still baffled about that to this day. ;D I’ll never forget what it felt like to be there, in that moment, looking at her sitting behind her desk, listening to her, telling me I could easily go get myself some rich Orange County/L.A. Sugar Daddy, and trying to reconcile that with how I saw my own self. And how far away that was from “WHO I AM” on a soul level. That is NOT “WHO I AM.” I know who I am on a cosmically/density expansive soul level….which apparently does NOT match what I looked like as a human female in my 20s in the year 2000. Who I am/was on a soul level was something more androgynous. Completely removed from gender. Or at least, the cute and fun and cool and kid-like feminine tomboy, who yes, has had multiple boyfriends. So it’s weird. Hence the “huh?!?” bafflement. I never saw myself in the same category as those hot sexy sophisticated chicks who can effortlessly land rich dudes. But this moment with Sydney clued me in as to how the rest of the world viewed me.)

I immediately became buddies with the only other admin in the office, a nice girl named Shannon who was a couple of years younger than me and worked in the Marketing department. We even hung out outside of work together a couple of times. However the women in the office treated her awful, no surprise, and she was driven out shortly after I started. But this is all important to note because it will come into play later on. I’ve watched a lot of clips on YouTube of RHOC, because it completely brings me back to this time period…but not in a good way. I know what that world and those people are like, and that exact specific area of Coto and Dove Canyon, because I was smack in the middle of it, working for those just like them. For that reason it’s interesting to watch some clips from time to time to give me the “creepy nostalgic shudders.” Interestingly enough this wasn’t the only time in life I would wind up working for or around the extremely rich and sometimes famous. I’ve had several more jobs along the way, both in south Florida, including a high end yachting brokerage firm on the Intracoastal Waterway in Fort Lauderdale, and a well known construction company that builds extremely high end, multi-million dollar mansions, filled with top of the line everything imported from around the world, and sometimes owned by famous people/celebrities. Neither of those jobs were the new “worst job ever” though that was mentioned earlier. But life has put me in situations of being around the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich, and where I myself was so poor I didn’t have any food or a dollar to spare and was technically homeless at one point, and then later on rolling in dough. I’ve been up and down and back and forth and seen and experienced all sides of it. I think that was the plan though when incarnating….I wanted to experience the Full Safari, you could say. ;)

But with regards to me sitting around stewing every day about this very unhappy job and life situation….Joe began warning me about it. He kept telling me, “You gotta stop doing this. You have to stop sitting here in the same spot, every day, like, grrrrrrrrrr….” He imitated me, frowning, stewing and brooding. “You gotta stop. You’re gonna rip open a window…”

“No I’m not!” I laughed it off.

“Yes, you are. I’m telling you. I know about these things. If you keep doing what you’re doing, then sooner or later, you’re gonna rip open a window. It’s not a matter of IF. But WHEN. You gotta stop. Get up, move around, do something else, go somewhere. Just don’t be sitting there, every day, pissed off, thinking about things.” (On a side note, it was weird how there were rare times like this where Joe could sound so….mature, normal, wise and concerned. Mixed in amongst his criminal mayhem, calculated manipulations, cold indifference and times of total mental case behavior.)

“Yeah, whatever.” I blew him off. I was positive that I was incapable of such things. I’d never opened a window before. But now, after 26 years, I was going to be able to do this? riiiiiiiight.

During this same time period of “stewing and brewing,” on a non-paranormal related side note, after months of Joe shamelessly mooching off of me and no end in sight, having no impetus on his end to make any efforts for anything, I finally flipped the fuck out and verbally kicked his ass one day. A whole shit kicking rant that exploded out of nowhere, that’s it, the final straw. It was after he was pulling his usual manipulative shenanigans, when he knows he’s really starting to skate on thin ice…..so he starts “working it” in terms of pulling out the charming, sincere sounding but manipulative “talk.”

In this specific instance it was this whole speech that basically said, paraphrase, how we’re both in this situation together. He started pacing around while frowning to really convey the whole “I take this so seriously” attitude, while going on about how “it’s a ‘we’ thing,” both of us in the same boat, both of us victims in this “we” thing that’s going on, and how we have to stick together…..and that’s where I just lost it. I was finally starting to really notice how he could switch like that when needed, and just pull out the fake sincere manipulative shenanigans. All talk, no action. Smooth talking bullshit to get you pacified….then back to his shameless mooching. Stick together? Translation – “keep paying my way in life so I don’t have to work or do anything.” :/

“It’s a ‘we’ thing?!? What the fuck are you TALKING about?!? This isn’t a ‘we’ thing! It’s NEVER been a ‘we’ thing! It’s always been a YOU thing! It’s all about YOU, all the time! Me always doing everything for YOU!!! You never contribute a dime!!! You do NOTHING!!! All you do is take!!! I do everything!!! So don’t give me this shit about how it’s a ‘WE’ thing! It’s NEVER been a we thing!!!!” Just lost it, in a way that I hadn’t since he’d been back to SoCal. He just stared at me bug eyed from across the room, not arguing back. I went on, yelling at him that he was going to get a damn job!!! even if it means he has to take two buses each way!!! and get up at 5 in the morning!!! Enough’s enough!!! Because it was his own fault that he destroyed the car I bought him and hadn’t been able to get a job!!! blah blah blah!!!

It was something I wouldn’t have dared do back when he was still behaving as the raging lunatic “triggerhair temper” Joe. If I’d dared to so much as even question him back then about anything he did or didn’t do he would have melted down in a violent rage, as outlined earlier. But this was again, the New Joe. And this new, passive, docile Joe could tell that I meant business. So he immediately signed up with a staffing agency that specialized in blue collar manual labor. And immediately started getting assignments. Which yeah, required getting up before dawn and taking multiple buses out of Rancho into nearby areas like Foothill Ranch or Lake Forest. But he did it. I was actually surprised by his tenacity. They were mostly warehouse types of gigs, though he could never seem to keep any for long term. Kept quitting, acting like he had that luxury, or it was just temp assignments that would eventually run out. But at least there was intermittent money coming in. :/ But the idea of him landing some full time/40 hour a week gig that paid decently, and then managing to KEEP that gig indefinitely……it ne

ver actually happened in the entire two years he was back in my life between 2000-2002, in either SoCal or Portland.

Eventually I had my very first incident of something happening in my room. I awoke one Saturday morning at around 9:30 and was lying around in bed fully awake, but with my eyes closed, thinking about the things I needed to do that day. The sun was out, the day was bright and clear. I calculated bus times, and what stores I needed to go to, what things to do……..and that’s when I heard and felt it. The very distinct sound and feeling of somebody ever so gently sitting down next to me on the water bed bumpers. The vinyl made the noise of someone sitting on it. And I felt the presence. There was a person there, calmly and peacefully just sitting there, watching me.

My heart immediately began to race, and my body froze up, and without even having a chance for my logic to override my thoughts and come up with some explanation to deny it, I started thinking, over and over, no no no no no no no! leave me alone! leave me alone! leave me alone! leave me alone! Over and over I thought that, keeping my eyes squeezed shut, afraid to look. My body was still tense.

After a few seconds of unhospitality on my part, I felt like it was gone. I was able to slowly unfreeze, and eventually open my eyes and get up.

I didn’t mention it to Joe. As usual, I put it out of my head, because I continued to dismiss things that would happen.

Not until several weeks later when we were talking about the entities that would “blow through” his room, did the subject come up. I think I had asked if any of them were human, or if they were all “non-human”…and if they were non-human, then…what are they? Who are they? Or rather, who were they? Did they used to be alive? Are they like ghosts?

“I don’t know, but I know there’s at least one human one,” he said.

“Really?” I grinned, perking up, and leaning forward. “How do you know?? Have you ever had any experiences with it??”

“Yeah…”

“Really?? Like what?? What happens? Is it a male, or a female??”

“It’s female.”

“What does she do??”

“Not much. Usually she just sits on the edge of my bed.”

My mouth fell open. Because I remembered the gentle, calm presence sitting on the edge of my bed, several weeks earlier.

I told him about my experience with it, amazed that we had matching stories.

“Sometimes I talk with her,” he said.

“Really?!? You can talk with her?? What does she say??”

He got a self conscious look on his face, and hemmed and hawed about it for a bit, saying it was personal, and he didn’t want to talk about it, that it was between them. I kept bugging him though, Come ON! Just tell me something!

Finally, looking serious, he said, “I don’t know…She’s told me that I should be happier. That I should stop being so angry all the time. Because she can’t be happy. She’s trapped.”

How depressing.

And for awhile, that was the biggest thing to happen in my room. Activity continued to plague the rest of the apartment though.

And then came the night in November that Joe was attacked. And then me, and my attack which came several days after. And that’s when everything changed. What started out as light and amusing and cute entertainment went dark, very fast.

The night Joe was attacked, I woke up to hear him knocking frantically at my bedroom door, saying Carissa! Open the door! Open the door! Please! Carissa!

I woke up right away. Alarmed, I jumped up and yanked it open.

“What’s wrong?!?” I said. He stood there, in a pair of boxers, hugging himself and shivering with teeth chattering.

“Something attacked me!”

“Get in, come on!” I moved over to let him in. “Where’s the cat?!?” I was panicked, and squinted in the dark into his doorway, looking for her. The idea of Kitty left behind, alone, in that room, with something going on…I didn’t have to look far because as usual, she was right there. Followed Joe, going wherever we went, always our little shadow. She trotted in behind him, right on his heels.

Joe sunk down on the edge of my waterbed on the vinyl bumper, putting his face in his hands, trying to get his breath back. His breathing was labored like he’d been running or something. This was the only time I’ve ever seen him in this state. Fear, panic, being wild eyed, not in control…..none of that was Joe’s norm, to the point where it seemed like he was actually incapable of it. So this was definitely a first. I sat down next to him.

“What happened??” I asked.

He just looked up, eyes wide, mouth open a little, and shook his head back and forth in a daze. He finally started to explain what happened.

He had been awakened by this feeling of constriction. At first he thought he was tangled up in his sheets. He soon realized that wasn’t the case. What was in fact happening was that something was wrapped around him, completely around his torso and neck, under and over, leaving only his legs and arms free. And it was squeezing tighter and tighter and tighter on him. Squishing him, and cutting off his breathing. Realizing what was happening, Joe immediately started putting in the fight of his life. Started thrashing about with everything he had, full of rage and panic, but it didn’t work. That thing was latched on and going for it, giving Joe everything it had. It didn’t make any noise. Joe’s legs kicked violently and his arms flailed about, trying desperately to grapple for the edge of the bed, something, anything, to pull himself up. All the while, being unable to breathe. Then the thing would release it’s grip for a second, giving Joe just enough time to inhale a huge panic breath. Until the thing would go in for another round of squeeze and suffocate. This probably went on for up to five minutes, Joe estimates, but, he’s not entirely sure of the time duration. He wasn’t exactly focused on his clock.

Finally Joe tried another tactic out of sheer panic. Stopped putting out rage and violence. Put out a vibe of the pure opposite.

That’s when the thing dropped him. And made its first noise. Joe said it was a screeching noise, sort of like nails on a chalkboard. The noise faded out, and away. Joe was free to move, finally, and gasp for air. He immediately hurled himself towards the door, weakened and out of breath, to come hide in my room. And so here we were.

I felt bad for him…but as always, partly doubted the incident, looking for that logical explanations, that way to discredit it. That former atheist/skeptic always and forever present. I didn’t think that he was lying about it, I was just thinking more along the lines of a night terror, a bad dream. But not an entity that had just attacked him. But I believed that he believed it happened. But I didn’t fully 100% believe it myself, because I wasn’t there.

We talked about the incident for another half hour or so, analyzing it, trying to figure out what that thing was, and what it wanted exactly. Was it trying to kill him? Hurt him? If so, why? Out of rage? The sheer joy of it? Did it want to absorb his energy? And of course, I lectured Joe. I mean, there he is, encouraging these “static critters”, thinking it’s so cute watching them “play” and run in circles around his legs, and welcoming these other entities that are “just blowing through”…shit that’s tinkering with his radio equipment? Poking around his room?? Yanking him out of his body and astrally projecting him to some other world/plane of existence?? I mean, what the hell did he think was going to happen eventually???

I panicked that whatever it was, would make its way into MY room, and go after me.

Joe dismissed that suggestion, immediately turning arrogant. “It can’t. It has to go through ME. It can’t leave my room without going through me first.” He nodded, so sure of himself.

“How do you know everything about the paranormal? What, do you have some kind of Rule Book or something?” I stared at him, annoyed.

He said that he just knew, and that’s how it is. End of story, as far as he was concerned.

I didn’t buy it for one second. If something like THAT had happened, an attack, something actually physically going after him and harming him and suffocating him, then what the hell is stopping it from coming in my room?? What, WALLS? A door?? I don’t think so.

But nothing happened in my room the next night. Went to sleep, woke up in the morning, without incident. And not that I was exactly on edge, waiting for it. A big part of me still believed it was all probably a bad dream that he’d had. I hadn’t seen anything, so I couldn’t just automatically believe it.

The second night after the incident, I came home from another miserable day at my loathed job, flipped on my light, and attempted to relax and kick back, listening to my radio, changing, and forgetting about my day. Except my room didn’t feel right. At all. I couldn’t place what it was. All I knew was that not only did it not feel right, but it didn’t look right either. It had the appearance and feeling of these bad dreams I’d have as a kid…They were non-event bad dreams, dreams where I would be in my bedroom, at night, and my lights would be blazing, the room silent and calm…but yet, it didn’t look right. The vibe wasn’t of my room at all. And I’d be filled with this absolute terror. At something I couldn’t see. I’d be kneeling on my floor, gazing up at my lamp light, frozen, feeling like there was something there…invisible, behind me. I didn’t hear it, or see it. I just felt absolute paralyzing terror. And the room, though seeming to be normal, everything looking right on the surface…would no longer feel like my room. It’s hard to explain. But that’s exactly how I felt now. My room looked like my room, for all intents and purposes. All the same furnishings, knickknacks, clothes, CD’s, books…But it wasn’t my room, at all.

Turning the radio on for familiarity and voices and music and comfort actually only ended up magnifying this. It made the room seem even more distorted and out of whack. The lighting was all messed up…even though it was my regular lamp. It just looked off. Wrong. I’m looking back at it right now, trying to pinpoint what exactly was off about the lighting…The only thing I can really come up with is that it was almost like it was just a little too bright. Maybe even the color too, the hue slightly off from the norm, a little more yellowy than normal. [ Note added in: Several years later I would be reading the C’s channeling material which mentions 4th density bleed throughs appearing as a yellow colored tint to us humans. VERY interesting….)

Feeling tense and apprehensive, and horrifically tired, I decided to crawl onto my bed and take a nap. I was just so drained, but I didn’t know why. I left my light on during my nap, and the radio. Which was bizarre. I can’t normally sleep with such a distraction going on. Bright light? The radio? Usually, no way. It was like subconsciously I needed as many things as possible filling up the room, making it more safe. I fell into an extremely uneasy sleep, with bizarre dreams. Tossing, turning, drifting in and out of consciousness, with the various radio talk shows coming in to my hearing, then fading out again, into another strange, uneasy set of dreams, under the unnaturally bright and glaring and hostile looking lighting of my lamp.

Finally at 7:30, I couldn’t take it anymore. I was so uneasy and apprehensive and even scared, that I had to get the hell out. I didn’t know why. I didn’t stop to think. I just wanted out. NOW. I got up, brushed my hair, brushed my teeth, threw on my shoes, grabbed my backpack, and bailed out into the chilly and clear night air. I left my light on.

I was completely out of it, and totally feeling messed up in the head, in this groggy but uneasy daze. But it felt good to be out, walking, and feeling the refreshing air. I immediately felt 100% safer and better once I left the apartment. Just get me the hell away from here. For as long as possible. That’s seriously how I felt. I didn’t want to be home. I didn’t want to go back there, and intended to stay out and away for as long as I could.

Cars, headlights, street lamps, stores in the nearby plaza, traffic, noise, people, “bustling” life since it was only 7:30. (as “bustling” as Rancho of all places can be.) It felt great.

I got a bite to eat, never snapping out of my groggy daze. Then I went to Crown Books, one plaza over. Stayed as long as I could, until they closed at 10. And only reluctantly left. And when I did, I realized that was it. Everything was closed now. That’s Rancho for you.

I took the long route home, the back end route via Antonio Parkway, to postpone going home. And if there had been something else open later, I would’ve gone there too. And if there had been something open all night, I would’ve just avoided going home for the rest of the night. But there wasn’t. This was Rancho. And so I had to go home finally. I arrived back at 10:30.

My light was still on, my room waiting as I left it. But still not right, not by a longshot.

Uneasy, I just picked up where I left off before…Sleep. Changed, turned off the light, and crashed out under the covers.

Woke up the next morning, without incident.

Went to work. Led my life. Came home. Had a better night then the previous one. Nothing unusual that stood out. The false sense of security. When the enemy retreats temporarily and makes you think the coast is clear. Before they swoop in and strike.

Went to bed, not feeling anything bad or malicious. Fell into a good sleep.

Until I was awakened at 4 am, by Kitty. She was completely flipping out, like a spaz. Running around my water bed bumpers, digging her claws into the bumpers for more attention…she knew I hated that. (that’s how smart she was…..she’d notice any little reaction I had to anything, good or bad, and made notes of it, and then utilized it later. :D In this case continually pausing to dig her claws in to the vinyl, while looking at me with wild eyes, because she knew that was guaranteed to get me to pay attention/focus in on her.) Jump down onto the floor, spaz around the room like a nut, back up onto the bed…around the bumpers, onto my headboard, back around the bumpers. She’s been known to be active in the middle of the night sometimes, but not this bad. This was the worst I’d ever seen her carry on at this hour.

I scooped her up and put her out in the living room, and closed my door. I need my sleep. I had to be up in a few hours. In retrospect I had no idea that her behavior was indicative of something MAJORLY wrong/bad being in the vicinity. She was still relatively new in our lives, I hadn’t learned all of her behaviors yet, and especially with regards to any paranormal activity. But I definitely learned from this incident – Kitty acting like that is a head’s up that I probably need to clear out, ASAP.

I fell back to sleep again and had some dumb dream, then was awakened again one hour later, at 5 am, by a really strange noise in my room. It was coming from over my head, up by the ceiling, to the right.

I lay there on my stomach, face smushed into my pillow, facing the wall to my left. My left eye popped open. I listened, confused.

The only way I can describe the noise is to say it resembled a crackling, popping noise, similar to cellophane, even a little electric-like. So like an electrified, crinkling cellophane. Puzzled, but undeterred, I drifted back to sleep. See, fat people have their food. I have my sleep. And unless it’s a fire happening, I’m going back to bed.

The noise stopped.

A minute or so later, I heard it again. I woke up, again. Listening in the dark, puzzled. Still could not place this odd noise, this sort of popping and crackling electrically charged/cellophane noise. Now it was off to the left, and still up by the ceiling. I racked my brain to place it, but it was the first time in my adult years that there was something completely brand spanking new happening. I felt like my brain was slamming into a wall, unable to process the information as a result. You don’t realize how much of what you experience on a day-to-day basis relies solely on the fact that it’s something you’ve already experienced before – and so that neural connection has been established.

So I closed my eyes, bewildered. I didn’t drift off to sleep this time. I was wide awake, listening to this, from behind closed lids.

Now this mystery noise started coming from all over the ceiling area, traveling back and forth, left to right, front to back, crisscrossing my entire ceiling, getting louder and picking up speed, right over my head. And it was so obnoxious at this point that I popped open my eyes again and flipped over onto my back thinking, WHAT the HELL? completely confused, squinting up at the semi-darkness, trying to see the source of this noise. (The only light coming in was from light posts outside, drifting in through my closed blinds.)

I never even made it to the point where I would logically think to turn on the light, never even got to the next step, because right then, as I laid there on my back frowning and confused, searching the darkness, something swooped down and in on to me from the left. Screeching and squealing the whole time like this hideous nails on a chalkboard/high pitched feedback noise squeal.

My eyes became saucers and I gasped, seeing this pitch black shapeless form coming in on me, screeching and squealing. It went right for me, wrapping itself around my torso – from the underside up – like a burrito, overwhelming me with the way it felt and sounded. It was this tingly energy….but not in a good way. It was pure negativity, and a bizarre sensation, this buzzing, tingly energy, wrapped around me, in contact with me, this other form, thing, being, whatever the hell it was. Another brand new experience. Nothing I’ve ever felt before. And it was restraining me. I didn’t feel painful constriction. There was no pain at all in fact. Just the feeling of being held into place. And everything I’m describing here all went down in a matter of seconds…boom, boom, boom, one event after the next, overlapping, but all happening very quickly, even though it reads as if it were a lot longer.

Laying there on my back I could flail my arms and legs about, they were still free. It was only my torso area that was completely wrapped and restrained. A human’s most vulnerable part. Limbs are expendable, and not necessary for existence. But the torso houses everything that’s vital for human survival and continuation. All compacted into one little targeted area.

I sat up, straining with arms extended in front of me, taking another big frightened gasp as I tried to get out of my bed. But it pulled me back down, like Where do you think YOU’RE going? I fell back into my bed, slapping onto the water bed mattress. oh god, HERE we go, I thought calmly, feeling all the tingly electrical energy still wrapped up around me. The black colored energy form was lying in bed with me, wrapped around me, and I could hear its continuous squealing/nails on a chalkboard screech.

Very calm. Wasn’t panicked. All my panic just dissipated away as soon as it pulled me back down. I just gave up. Literally, going belly up you could say. I figured it was now going to start squeezing me and suffocating me like it did to Joe. I figured that I was going to die now. And I honestly didn’t care, either. oh well, I thought. I mean, there was no way I was even going to try to fight this thing. From what Joe had described, it was incredibly strong. And if it was all that he could do to fight it off, then forget it, there was no way I could put up as good a fight. I didn’t want to die some torturous, strung out painful death, fighting a losing battle as I’m squeezed and suffocated to death, fuck that.

Went belly up. Here, take me. Do it quick, get it over with.

And as I lay there, accepting my fate, my only thoughts were of…me. Just me, who I am, me, the essence of me, who I am as a person. Who Carissa is/was in this life. Not in words, with adjectives, and not with images of my life “flashing before my eyes.” Just a feeling in general, of what kind of person I managed to become in this life. My entire essence. Taking one final look back as I was about to be leaving this life and body for good. And it was a positive, peaceful emotion. All this came to me in probably one or two seconds while lying there, calmly accepting my fate, and filled with the emotions of all that I am as a person.

And that’s when it dropped me, and went silent.

I snapped back to attention, turned to it, like, Huh?! no longer feeling the icky tingly electrical feeling wrapped around me and restraining me, nor hearing that hideous screeching noise. But it was still there though…this pitch black, shapeless patchy looking stuff, slowly retreating away from me across the bed, breaking up into pieces.

I scrambled up, to the left, reaching out to pull myself up and off the bed to run for the door. I had to actually pass through this retreating black patchy stuff on the bed in order to do it. I didn’t care. I couldn’t feel it though when I did this.

I burst through the door, out to the hallway, and banged on Joe’s door. I could see the pink glow from his neon Marlboro sign coming from his room. He was up and about, as he often was, with his screwy semi-nocturnal schedule.

He yanked open the door, staring at me dead pan.

“What?” he demanded. Now see, THAT’S the friendly Joe I’d come to know so well. ;) :/ His usual surly self.

I just stared up at him, smiling a little weird, and looking frazzled. I figured he’d know what was going on.

“WHAT??” he demanded, because I was just standing there, looking goofy.

“Now it was my turn for something to attack me.”

He just stared at me. Looked backwards, over his shoulder into his room. Back to me.

“Nothing’s been going on in HERE tonight,” he shrugged nonchalantly.

I realized that he was so convinced that this “thing” couldn’t leave his room without going through him that he wasn’t believing me right now.

“No, I’m serious Joe, I think something just attacked me! It may have been a dream, but I don’t think so…”

He stared at me some more. Finally, exasperated, he opened his door all the way and came out to investigate. I followed.

He pushed open my door slowly and stood in the doorway, looking in, checking out my room.

I could see in too, and what I saw was a bunch of that black patchy dust stuff over by my computer, in the air.

His demeanor instantly changed the second he looked into my room. No longer annoyed and irritated, instead becoming serious and concerned.

“Your room definitely has negative energy in it right now.”

“Can you see it?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“What does it look like?” I wondered if he was seeing the same stuff I was seeing.

“Black patchy dust.”

Holy shit. He used the same exact three words I used to describe it.

“Where do you see it?!”

He pointed straight ahead. “Right there. By your computer.”

“That’s EXACTLY what I saw! It’s exactly how I described it!”

So it wasn’t a dream after all.

Joe slowly entered my room, investigating some more, as I sat down on the edge of my water bed. He walked over towards my computer, but didn’t go fully up to it. Stopped, then turned to slowly head back towards the door.

Then he glanced upwards to the area above my doorway, his eyes suddenly getting big, mouth opening a little.

“What??” I demanded, not liking that look. I knew he was seeing something. And I knew exactly what he was seeing. And I was daring him to say it.

He glanced at me, eyes still a little wide.

He closed his mouth, posture slumped a little bit, looked away, tried to play it down. “Nothing.”

I squinted at him, giving him one of my grrrrrrrrrrrr looks. I knew what that was all about, but it wasn’t something we talked about until about a month later. Because deep down, I wasn’t ready to hear it.

At any rate, I wasn’t going to just go back to bed now after that. Joe sat next to me on the edge of the bed and hung out with me for awhile. I told him the whole story of how it happened, how it sounded, how it felt, what it did, and what it was like. About how Kitty was reacting to it an hour before it happened, spazzing out the worst I’d ever seen. I was confused at the differences in what happened to him, versus what happened to me. With Joe, the thing had been silent until the very end, and only then did it emit that hideous screeching nails on a chalkboard squeal, when it was defeated. With me, it was screeching from the get-go…

“Like it was already messed up, and was going for it anyway. Like a kamikaze mission,” I joked.

“That’s exactly it,” Joe said, seriously. “I fucked it up when it came after me, I did some serious damage. Some serious damage. It recuperated for a few days, then it went for it again. At this point it’s very weak. Especially now, after another failed attack. I just think what would’ve happened had it gone after you first…”

He glanced at me, looking nervous at the thought. “If I hadn’t gotten to it first, and damaged it…” He didn’t finish the thought.

“Yeah, it just dropped me, didn’t even try to do to me what it did to you.”

“That’s because I did damage to it. It’s weak. I almost killed it. And that’s what scares me, that it’s so weak and it’s still trying, it’s going after you now. It’s desperate, and that’s not good.”

“What does it want??”

“I don’t know. A body? You have to understand what it’s like when you don’t have a body. You’re floating around out there, on this big empty highway, and the next exit isn’t for another hundred miles, and you’re running out of gas, and food. You’re on E. And you’re desperate. You don’t understand what it’s like. Whatever it is, it’s dying. And it needs a body.”

(Note: I’d love to know how “Joe” knew what that was like. Especially in light of what a very intuitive internet acquaintance would tell me years later, about “something negative taking over Joe’s body,” after “a switch was made.”)

I wasn’t so sure about that. “Yeah, so, then, why try and kill the body? That doesn’t make any sense Joe.”

“I don’t know, I’m just guessing. I’m not entirely sure either.”

And so it went, the way it would always be for as long as we lived there: No answers. We never had any clear cut answers for most of what was going on in that place.

I decided to go and get some breakfast at Carl’s Jr. across the way on the lake, since I was up now, and it was going on 6 am, so they’d be opening. Joe requested some hash browns and a large coffee, so off I went. What a contrast being outside, in the normal world, where the sun was rising, casting shadows on the purple brown tinted Saddleback mountains. The sky was crystal clear and blue, not a cloud in sight, and the air was warm and dry. Cars flew by, this way and that, off to their jobs, in the normal world. Then there was my existence.

After I brought our food back we sat on the floor of the living room/dining area and ate, and talked some more about the whole thing. Pondering explanations, possibilities for “Its” return, whatever “It” was. Then we finished up and went back to our rooms.

Under normal circumstances, once I’m up, I’m up, and awake, and ready to go, with energy. Especially when I’ve eaten, and have caffeine in my system, and especially when I’ve had seven hours of sleep already. Like what the case was then.

But despite the food, the seven hours of sleep and caffeine, it didn’t matter, I was wiped out. I literally crawled back onto my bed and crashed out. I had to be at work at 8 am. I didn’t give a crap though. I had zero energy. There was no way I could be getting ready for work. All I wanted to do was sleep for 24 hours straight.

Joe came knocking on my door at 7:55, and popped his head in, concerned. Which was completely unlike him. He was always very emotionally detached and hands-off. A lot of times just downright ornery and rude, as mentioned. He wasn’t the type to watch out for me or to care about my personal affairs and what I did or didn’t do. Exhausted, I lifted my head and mumbled, I was just taking a little nap……I’m up….

I dragged myself up and got ready for work. Well obviously, I was going to be late. Oh well. I caught the 8:30 bus, and exited at Empressa by 8:45. The day was bright and beautiful and warm, but I was so exhausted I couldn’t really appreciate it. I was literally dragging myself to work, feet shuffling along, eyes only half open, arms slack. Wishing to drink about five gallons of black coffee. Coffee was definitely the first thing I’d be going after once I got to work.

Coffee didn’t help though. I was still dragging around afterwards. And now, the pain was starting to kick in. I noticed it on the way up the stairs to the second floor. My hips of all things were absolutely killing me. I’ve never had hip problems before, so it shocked me. I even looked down at my hips, like, huh?? as I hobbled up the stairs, in pain. This was certainly new.

Then, about a half hour after that, I noticed the rib and back pain when I was back at my desk. I accidentally bumped myself as I was spinning around in my swivel chair. OW! I thought to myself, as I brushed my ribs. I felt severely bruised. I began tapping around my ribs. Ow! Ow! Ow! My whole ribcage felt like it should be a deep black and blue color, because I felt like I’d had the crap kicked out of me in a fight. I pressed my back and found the same to be true in that area also, and all along my sides. My entire mid-section in general was completely banged up. I glanced around to see if anyone was looking. Then I pulled up my shirt to take a look, seriously expecting to see black and blue marks. Nothing. I was puzzled at the lack of bruising, because it felt bruised, let me tell you.

I sat there, confused at my physical state. WHAT is going ON here? My rib cage and back feel bruised, I can hardly walk because my hips are killing me, so I’m hobbling about, and on top of that, I’m dragging around with no energy whatsoever…

wait a minute.

oh.

I was attacked this morning. By something that wrapped itself around my midsection…my ribs, chest, back, hips…and had attached itself to me…probably draining my energy, like we had theorized…

oh yeah, huh.

hello.

It was like a light bulb going off. Just cuz I’m so quick like that, you know. ;) To realize that the whole thing most likely wasn’t a dream, was even more of an eye opener. Because despite me and Joe’s “black patchy dust” matching descriptions, and all that, I still believed that it was all a dream, had to be, because come on, this shit isn’t real! It can’t be. That stuff only happens in the movies.

I’ve never before had hip problems before, or that feeling of my entire mid section being bruised, before then or since. The one and only time it ever happened to me was the morning that I was attacked. The pain ended up lasting a full 24 hours.

That’s something they don’t mention in the movies. But that was another thing…I’d wind up saying that to the people I’d end up telling my stories to…It’s not like in the movies…It doesn’t go the way it does in the movies…

[page]

Starting the very next night after the attack I began sleeping with a lit candle on, for a light source. 26 years old and afraid of the dark. There you go. At the time, the candle was sort of a symbolic thing. Light the candle, while thinking about how I DON’T want any heeby jeebies bothering me. Not that it worked. (Something I later learned is that you want to do the opposite – focus on the positive forces and energy that you do want to be aligned with, raising your frequency up/sky high, feeling empowered and strong like you’re connecting to those higher positive forces, you’re a part of them and they’re a part of you, while focusing on being protected. You don’t want to remain down/low, focusing on how you don’t want to be victimized. So, just a tip to put out for any readers who might be curious on how it’s done.)

If I’d had my way I wouldn’t have stayed in the apartment at all after that incident. It was too much. I was completely freaked out. But the fact is, I didn’t have any spare money. And no car, and no family. So where could I have gone? With what money, and what transportation?? I was completely trapped. I had no choice but to stay in that hell hole. It just made me all the more resentful towards my brother, and full of rage since it was him who was dragging me down. [All that aforementioned nonstop criminal mayhem namely, mentioned earlier. And I wasn’t at the point yet of seeing him for what he was, booting him to the curb and walking away, and taking back my own life. I had this obsessive programming that I HAD to take care of him, I just HAD to, because I brought him out to California, so, I couldn’t turn around and abandon him. I wanted to fix him. I had to be responsible…no matter what the price. ($$ quite literally $$…) I wasn’t yet owning the fact that I put myself in this predicament and it was entirely my own doing…despite whatever Joe was doing to fan the flames of the situation by being irresponsible and destructive with his criminal exploits and constantly attracting in cops. I leave the details of that part of this story out though.]

The noise that that thing made…it stayed with me for a long time after. It wasn’t something that was easy to get over. I didn’t want to ever wake to that noise again.

I knew that I was going to have to do an immediate “cleansing” of the room after that. My room was all tweaked now, and I hated it. I wanted my room back, dammit. My room was my haven, it had always been the one place in the apartment where nothing paranormal ever happened, and where I could go and be safe, know that nothing was going to bother me. Now it was tainted.

The rest of the day after the attack I mentally began planning what I’d need for this ritual cleansing of my room for that night. I went from being an Atheist only months earlier, to wholeheartedly planning a ritual cleansing, without hesitation or second thought. Now this stuff was fact to me, no doubt about it. Let’s see, I’d need white candles, and then my sage sticks…I’d need to wash everything that was in contact with that It thing, my bedcovers, all the clothes that were strewn about on my bed, where It had been. I’d have to shower, to “cleanse” myself, in preparation for my meditation ritual, and I was going to vacuum and dust and just clean every surface of the room in general.

I did my laundry, vacuumed, dusted, made sure to “touch” everything as I dusted off my computer and everything on my computer table, where we had seen the It, broken up into pieces. I wanted to put my own imprint back on everything. I showered, and then lit my white candles set up around my room, lighting every corner, the color white chosen for Purity and meditation. Then lit my sage sticks, used in ritual to cleanse and purify an area. And I settled in for my “Out Beasties Out!” ritual/meditation.

It’s hard to meditate. That’s all I can say.

It took everything I had to be able to try and focus and maintain a constant train of thought. Because let’s face it, it’s not exciting. And not only that, but I was annoyed at having to even do this at all in the first place. There were better things I could think of to be doing with my time, but yet, NOT doing this wasn’t an option. I couldn’t believe that here I was, lighting candles, sage sticks, purifying my room by cleaning it, and trying to perform some half hazard, make-it-up-as-I-go-along ritual to protect me and my cat and my room from the Heeby Jeebies. I kept thinking, Damn, if my old self from a year ago could only see me now… I didn’t even know what I was doing, really. I knew enough from what I’ve studied of my friends’ Wicca and Paganism and magic books over the years to know about the sage. But all the rest, it was mostly just common sense.

I finally got to the point where I gave up on trying to meditate the problem away, and just got down to business. Started talking outloud, to my room. I tentatively but meaningfully informed the air that “…Any negative or bad presences or entities need to leave now. You’re not wanted in here, you’re not allowed in here. You need to leave now. This is my room, and anything negative or bad needs to leave…”

Then I paused. And decided to revise that.

“Actually, EVERYBODY needs to get out! Everybody, everything, good OR bad, I don’t care, everybody needs to leave, ALL presences and entities, everything needs to leave, you’re not wanted in here…”

And right then in mid-sentence I heard the distinct sound of rustling, coming from off to my left side. The sound of somebody getting up and moving across the room and disappearing into the corner, where my radio was. My voice faltered, distracted and scared, but I realized what was happening and forced myself to keep going. Keep talking, keep it up, remain strong and commanding, be forceful, and MEAN it. And I did. I sincerely felt it when I demanded that everything needs to get out and stay out.

“…You need to leave now!…and stay out!…”

And it was gone. Sounding as if it had disappeared into the corner.

hmm. That was interesting, I thought. [In retrospect, that makes me feel kind of sad actually – any entity that would so obediently leave when you command that “everything must go – even the good stuff” – means it’s not a bad entity. Negative/non-human entities will not listen to you, at all, ever, at any point. They will not be controlled, not by some lowly human. Which means it was probably just a lonely human ghost who didn’t cross over the way they were supposed to, and it makes me feel bad that I kicked them out like that when they obviously had nowhere else to go. oh well.]

I didn’t sleep well at all the next night. I never fell into a deep sleep, I was always tense and on edge and woke every single hour, all night, 2, 3, 4, 5, over every little noise. The slightest bit of noise and I was jolted awake, bug eyed, listening frantically to see if it was that thing. And sometimes when there wasn’t even a noise, just because my body was on guard. Constantly sitting up and looking wildly about, finding a room lit by candlelight, flickering and casting shadows. But at least I could see what was going on now, if anything were to happen again.

The Santa Ana winds blew in that week, which was the source of the dry hot air and clear bright skies I’d mentioned earlier. One night that week we had a wind storm going on outside. The way the windows rattled and shook reminded me of back east, when we’d get thunderstorms, only now, there wasn’t any rain, or thunder. Just dry hot wind. I had to close my window due to the suction effect of the draft, it kept shaking the windows and was keeping me awake.

I lay back on the bed in the candlelight, trying to doze off. Only now I could hear funny noises happening. Inside the room. The sounds of something banging into everything – the walls, my printer over in the corner on the floor, the closet door, the porcelain masks on the wall, even the under side of my bed.

I kept flipping over onto my back, alarmed, looking wildly around the room and trying to figure out if it was just an audio illusion due to the wind storm outside. Only there were visuals going on too. I watched as little white balls of light moved about. They were concentrated up by my ceiling over my computer area. Would appear in the air for a few seconds and then disappear. Then I’d hear something bang into the wall…the closet door…then the windows would rattle and shake due to the wind. That whole first week after it happened was the hardest. And there was no real “break” period. Once the attack happened, it all took off rapidly after that.

I kept jumping out of bed and running to Joe’s room in a panic. I was pissed off at him, thinking it was all his fault, he’s the one who brought this shit into the apartment in the first place. And pissed off because he didn’t care. He wouldn’t get his ass out of bed to come investigate, and let me know if I had anything to worry about. And that’s how Joe would always be when it came to my room, and at the time I never understood why. Complete detachment and total lack of concern. It was like a hot potato for him…he would drop it and back away, shaking his head like, Sorry, I can’t help you…Sorry… Never wanted anything to do with what went on in my room, always saying it was “my” deal, “my” thing. It was different stuff than what was going on in his room. He couldn’t help me, I had to deal with it on my own. The more nervous I’d get, the more blank and unhelpful he’d become. He’d dismiss me, like he was this particular night. Couldn’t even give me the courtesy of opening his eyes from where he lay in bed. Wouldn’t even roll over. Would only mumble that it was fine, it was just a static critter, go back to bed, stop worrying, it’s nothing bad, blah blah blah.

It fucking pissed me off to no end. Although now looking back the whole “it’s just a static critter, go back to bed” thing makes me laugh. The idea of there being levels of woo-woo, that it’s “just” a static critter, versus a hostile entity. ;D

I yelled at him and bitched him out, and went back to bed, frustrated and nervous and pissed off, all at the same time. I knew something was going on because Kitty was nervously running around the room, on edge too. I eventually fell asleep though, amazingly. And like Joe said, nothing happened. Whatever those lights were, that were banging about my room, it was apparently harmless.

And so the banging around my room began…..A new permanent fixture and feature of my room. The sound of something banging into the wall. Into the printer. Into the porcelain masks on my wall. Or maybe clanging into the metal frame of my closet, like it did this one time while I was sorting laundry on my bed…booooiiiiiiiinnnnngggggg!…Me and Kitty jerked our heads up and looking bug eyed at the closet. Nothing there, of course. Well, that I could see, anyway. Because Kitty could. I watched her follow something with her eyes, from where she lay on the bed. She jumped up and got over to the edge of the bed, fascinated by this invisible thing in front of the closet, following it, but never jumping down to go over to it, like she does with bugs. It would bang into the metal frame a lot, and the closet doors in general, more so than anything else. Not sure exactly why.

And the “sparklies” started up. Which is what I called them, because that’s what they looked like. They were yellow-orange in color, and looked like embers from a fire. They’d appear in the air for a second, then either disappear, only to have more reappear someplace else in the air, or, they’d “fling” out, like a spark from a fire. They made no noise, and I couldn’t feel them. They were pretty though, in their glittery brilliance. They were concentrated in the corner of my room where the radio was, and where I would sit day after day after work. I’d sit in front of the radio, or eating, or writing, and there they’d be, in the air. The first few times I thought I was imagining it. But their presence increased. More of them, in a wider area, more frequently, so it got to the point where I could watch in the air and see one…and another…and another…and another…No mistaking them anymore. I was definitely seeing this. They seemed “positive,” and I thought they were cute, whatever they were. I didn’t mind, or get scared. I actually got to enjoy them, and took it for granted that they would be there when I’d sit down to do my writing in my book, or listen to the radio. But I didn’t tell Joe about it, because deep down…the skeptic in me that won’t die….didn’t truly believe it 100%.

One night when I was sitting on my bed, reading, around 8 or 9 p.m. or so, Kitty started flipping out again. Only this time, running from my room to the living room, to my room, and back again. Frantically, like a spaz, wild and disturbed. I knew by this point that something was up. I got up and went looking for Joe. I told him that something was going on, there was “activity” going on, or it was about to go on, because Kitty was spazzing out.

And of course, he argued with me. Anytime I was the one pointing something out to him, he’d get obstinate. He’d act bored and disinterested and dismissive, probably because he wanted to be the “expert” on what was going on, and if I’m sitting there telling him how it is, then I’m knocking his expertise down a notch. He thought he was the Paranormal Master or something, this know-it-all expert. I had to persistently argue with him though, to make him see dammit, that something was going on, because hellLOOO, look at the CAT…She’s spazzing out. And that always means that something is happening! Always! Anytime she spazzes out, it means something’s happening!!

“Yeah, but the cat is kind of a spaz anyway, Carissa,” he argued, bored. Dismissive.

“No she’s not!” I yelled, getting hysterical. “She only gets this way when something’s HAPPENING! Not when everything’s calm and quiet! And look! She’s doing it in MY room…She’s running back and forth from MY room to the living room, not yours. So whatever’s happening is in MY room!”

“Well, go look,” he said, shrugging.

“No, YOU go look! I’M not going in there, no WAY!”

“It’s YOUR room. You go look!”

“SO?!? I’m not going in there! And it’s YOUR fault that this is happening in the first place! So YOU go look!”

Finally, he drags himself up off the living room floor and goes to look. Once again, like the morning of the attack, he started out with a Yeah, WHATEVER look on his face as he entered my room, which soon melted to a Holy SHIT look. He was in my room for a good fifteen or twenty seconds or so. I didn’t even go look. I sat planted firmly to the floor. I was scared of this shit, and didn’t even want to KNOW anymore.

He finally emerged, walking slowly, with a very different look on his face than the bored apathetic one he went in with.

“So what did you see?!?” I asked, frantically.

“Uh, something just crossed over in your room.”

“Did you see it?? What did it look like?”

“I saw this black shadow thing moving across your room, in front of the closet. And this other sort of translucent thing moving around in the air by the ceiling.”

“What?!?” I freaked out, going off about how this was all his fault, he brought this all in, none of this would even be happening right now if it weren’t for him …blah blah BLAH….and he argued right back, No it’s not! YOU brought it in!! YOU opened a window in your room! I didn’t!! I told you it would happen!! I warned you!! But you didn’t listen!!! Noooooo, you had to sit there, day after day, in the same spot, and I told you!!! I told you this would happen Carissa!!!!!

Back and forth and back and forth…

“Yeah, but YOU opened the first window, which is how the second one opened!! If you didn’t open the one in your room first, then they wouldn’t have been able to get out to get into my room!!! You see?!?” I said.

“No, that’s not how it works!!! Your window has nothing to do with mine!! It’s all yours!!! You have abilities and you don’t even know it! You’re more powerful than I am, Carissa!!”

No I don’t!!!

Yes you do!!

NO I DON’T!!! I DO NOT!!!

The whole thing was hysterical. We were being brother and sister, all the way, there was no doubt about the fact we were siblings, squabbling and bickering, like only siblings do, just like when we were kids.

So the flare up died down, and I actually believe it or not, could accept some of Joe’s side of the argument. Put aside my “I’M RIGHT AND YOU’RE WRONG!!!” usual attitude, and was like, hmmmmmmm….maybe he is right. Maybe I did do this. Maybe it had nothing to do with him. Because after all, I didn’t have a problem in my room for months and months. Joe had problems in his, right from the first week. But my room was squeaky clean, for all that time, not one incident, nothing, nada, zip, zero, zilch. Until I spent the last few months stewing and brooding in one spot, day after day, thinking hostile violent resentful pissed off thoughts. hmmm.

hmmmmmmm.

So I told him that alright FINE, maybe you’re right. Maybe I did do something to bring this on. Hey…let’s go look in my room…see what’s going on now……

Up we stood, and went in, cautiously looking about. I couldn’t see anything myself. I was looking for the black shadow thing and something translucent hovering about in the air. However, Joe said he could still see activity.

“There’s definitely some activity in here still.”

“Oh yeah?? Where?”

“Over there.” He pointed to the corner where my radio was.

“What does it look like?”

“Sparkles.”

“WHAT?!? NO WAY!” I said. I hadn’t told him about the “sparklies” in the corner by my radio. I still thought I must be imagining it. I told him all about my experiences with them. He nodded.

“I told you Carissa…you have a lot of abilities, a lot of energy, and you don’t even know it.”

“Well, I’m sick of this crap happening in my room. I don’t want it anymore! I want it all to stop.”

“Then tell it to.”

“ALRIGHT!!! EVERYBODY OUT!!!” I yelled, grinning. “OUT!!!”

“GET THE HELL OUT!!” Joe joined in, grinning too.

“EVERYBODY, GET THE HELL OUT!! NOW!!! YOU’RE NOT WANTED IN HERE ANYMORE!!! GET OUT!!! NOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!!!”

We laughed, knowing that if anybody had walked in and saw us right then, they’d think we were nuts. It was funny.

I didn’t like the fact that there were “cross overs” happening in my room now, “blowing through” as Joe puts it. That was not cool. But after we did that GET OUT! thing, the sparklies stopped. And to my surprise, I instantly regretted telling stuff to get out of my room.

Now, I’d come home and there wouldn’t be anything there. No sparklies whatsoever by my radio. Completely bare. I didn’t realize how used to them I’d gotten until they day they were no longer there. And now the room felt empty. I felt kinda…lonely, actually. I missed looking up from my writing, and seeing a sparkle sparkle here, and a sparkle sparkle there…pretty and cute and sparkly…not bothering anybody, not doing any harm, just…there…sparkling…Sure, I sounded like a nut, but I missed it.

I went back and forth with whether or not I should invite them back.

Finally, I caved in about a week later and said, “I’m sorry, If you want to come back, you’re welcome…but JUST the sparklies, whatever you are…you can come back…”

I saw one lone blip of a sparkle, right then. I’m not even kidding. Another lone blip after a bit. But they never did come back the way they were before.

Then there was the night that there was something in our living room. Crossing over. Blowing through. Who knows what it was doing. But it was there. Kitty was wigging out, of course, again. And this clued us in that something was going on. Joe’s room was actually experiencing a moment of calmness, so it wasn’t him. And he checked out my room. And my room was fine. So it wasn’t me. So that left the rest of the apartment. Me and Joe poked our heads into the living room, to check things out.

We had the living room light off, save for the entry way light, which cast enough light into the room to see things just fine. But yet it kept it dark enough so that you could see any subtle contrast of color differences, or lighting.

“You see that?!?” Joe said, pointing up to the vaulted ceiling, on the far end of the room above the sliding glass doors.

I squinted, looking to where he pointed. Sure enough, I could see it too.

“Wow!! What is it?!” I said. What we were looking at was a shapeless blobby pale bluish white cloud looking thing, moving slowly about in the air. It slowly changed shape, moving about. It always stayed up by the ceiling, drifting only from the left to the right. Again, no noise. From our vantage point, it was about four feet in length.

Kitty was scared out of her mind. She kept darting into the living room, then would look up at the bluish white cloud blob in the air, bug her eyes out and freak out and run back into my room. Doing this over and over, as if she was trying to check and see if it had gone away yet. I finally caught her one of the times she dashed back in and held onto her. And she panicked, and began clawing at me frantically, and fighting with me to put her down, all the while, mewing these scared little mew sounds, while whipping her head backwards to keep looking over her shoulder at this thing, then fight with me some more.

The usual questions ensued…What is it? What is it doing? Do you think it can see us? Does it know we’re here?…wow!!!!!!!!

Of course, we had no answers.

I went back into my room. I’d seen enough. Our apartment was becoming like Grand Central Station.

Soon after, the “white lines” started up in my room.

The first time I ever saw them was at night. I was laying in bed with Kitty, with my purple Christmas lights on, just relaxing and spacing out. I began to realize that I was seeing these white lines in front of my closet that looked like laser lights, shooting rapidly (and silently) down from the ceiling, then moving straight, off to the left. Down, and over. Down, and over. I did everything I could think of to see if it was a trick of the eye…blink blink…rub rub…blink and rub my eyes some more…try moving my eyes around, make sure it wasn’t some illusion that happens when you stare repeatedly at one spot…make sure it didn’t have anything to do with shadows from my vertical blinds. Look away, to a different part of my room, then look back again…they were still there.

I made Joe come check it out. I was kind of hyper and excited about it, like, Look! Check it out!! Do you see it?!! Right there! See! There’s another! And another!! Can’t you SEE this?! Wow!! What is this?!

He was puzzled at first. Couldn’t see it, to my amazement. I couldn’t believe I was seeing something he wasn’t.

“How can I see them, and you can’t?” I asked, confused.

He shrugged. “We don’t always see things the same way. You have different stuff happening in your room than what I have. Plus, I just see things differently than you.”

He eventually did admit to seeing something though. He took the time to lay on my bed, head resting on his arms, to watch and make sure he was seeing the same thing. When he was able to point a few out to me, then I knew, Okay, I’m not imagining this.

“What the hell are they?!?” I asked excitedly.

“I don’t know,” he shrugged, mystified. It was a first to him too. He was unconcerned with the whole thing though, and eventually went to bed.

[page]

The second time I saw the white “laser lines” was on a sunny Saturday morning. Kitty was staring intensely and curiously at them too. Okay, so now she’s seeing them too, I thought. Hmmm. I had my arms wrapped around her to keep her in place, and every time a white line would flash down from the ceiling she would try and jump towards it, her eyes wide and locked on it.

When I finally got up after a little bit I walked over to that area to see if I could stand in the middle of it. It seemed that once I was standing in the middle of it I couldn’t see them anymore, let alone feel anything. Ha, see, figures. Trick of the eye, I thought.

Only thing is, the white lines never went away. In fact….they only got progressively stronger as time went on. And it didn’t matter whether it was daylight either, the sun didn’t affect being able to see them. There they were…bright white, almost laser looking white lines, shooting silently and rapidly down from my ceiling, and moving off to the left. By the end, before we moved out, they would be filling my room all hours of the day or night, this constant presence. And it got to the point where I could stand in the middle of it and actually still see them, unlike the first time I tried that. But I couldn’t come into contact with them, they seemed to pass right through me. It was three dimensional, definitely. They would be in front of me, going through me in my lap, on the side of me, behind me, just completely surrounding me and filling the room.

Most of the time though I just tuned them out. I learned to not to notice them because the whole thing creeped me out. I mean, what the hell are they? I’d think. What does it mean?! And since there was never an answer, I therefore didn’t want to be giving it any more thought than I had to.

Shortly after I had an experience one night where I was in bed, the room lit by candlelight, and something just felt so horribly wrong that I was scared shitless. I mean, full of complete terror. I lay there by the candlelight, looking around, seeing if I could see something, listening for any unusual sounds.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Dead silence. Nothing bumping around. Nothing rustling about. No sparklies. No white lines. Absolutely nothing going on…….AT all, for once. Which was actually a clue in itself, and a bit alarming. Almost a little like the way everything gets before a tornado strikes. And the birds fall silent. And the air is completely still and heavy and quiet.

The feeling wouldn’t go away. It was just complete terror. I didn’t want to be in my room, but out of curiosity, I was frozen in place. Waiting. To see what was going to happen. Was it that “It” thing? I figured it must be.

Kitty was trying to sleep on the floor at the foot of the bed, under the overhang of the bed. And I say “trying” because I heard her yelp, like something did something to her. She leapt up and raced out of my room frightened, into the living room. Which was a first. Never heard her yelp and dash out of the room like that before.

I looked around the room, trying to see what scared her, or what came into contact with her.

Nothing. That I could see anyway. But it was probably in plain view to her.

After about five minutes Kitty came back, tentatively, and tried to resume her spot at the foot of the bed. I tried to drift off into sleep, but the feeling of terror was too strong.

I heard her yelp again, louder, and she raced out of the room again. This time, going for Joe’s room. Except his door was closed, so there was nowhere she could go other than the living room. So she started slamming her body against his door, over and over, in absolute panic, trying to get him to open it.

!!!!!!

I lay there, listening to her do this, another first. I’d never seen her do something like that, and have never seen her do it since. I’ve also never experienced such an absolute feeling of terror before when I was awake. Only in a nightmare. But that’s what my life was at that point – A waking nightmare, in all aspects, in every way. I looked all around my room for the source of this panic, and my feelings of terror. But I still couldn’t hear, OR see anything. Nothing. It was bizarre.

Eventually I fell into a light sleep, keeping myself on guard. I would’ve liked to fall into a normal deep sleep, but my brain wouldn’t let me. Nothing ended up happening, I was very shocked. With my cat yelping and me feeling all that terror I thought we were going to get a repeat of “That Night” again. But no. And so another tired day the next morning, going to work without a good night’s rest.

Then came the night me and Joe were discussing things, and the subject of “HOW” these things were coming into my room came up. He decided to tell me finally, what he knew that morning of my attack.

“Basically, it’s like this: You have an entrance. And you have an exit. The entrance is over there, above your door. And the exit is over there. In the corner by your radio.”

Once again, I couldn’t believe it. I had never told him about my experience when I was doing my “Out Beasties Out” meditation, when I’d heard rustling, like someone getting up, and moving across the room and leaving through the corner of my room where my radio was. It had thrown me off, making me think, what was THAT all about? What, it can just get up and leave wherever it wants to? Can just walk through a wall and bail?

No, they can’t just do that. They can only leave where there’s a “door,” an exit. And I had one. Where the radio was. Joe just told me that. Once again, confirming something before I had even told him.

“How do you know? Can you see the entrance and exit?”

“Yes.”

“What do they look like?”

He tried to think of the best way to describe it. “It sort of looks like static, like what you’d see on T.V. But there’s a ring around it.”

“You can see that?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you see it right now?”

He looked over to the corner of my room by my radio. There was silence for a few seconds.

“Yeaaah…but it’s not constant. It comes and goes. It’s there one moment, then it’s not, then it’s there again, then it’s not. It fades in and out. There’s one in the corner of the living room too. That’s why shit blows through my room and exits through the living room.”

I looked over at the corner too, tried to see what he saw. I never was able to see it, with the ring and that whole thing. The most I could see was maybe, possibly, some faint static-y looking stuff, like T.V. static, same as what he said. But that’s it.

“What about above my door?” I asked.

He looked up at it, at the vaulted ceiling area above the doorway, his face growing apprehensive.

“Ohhhh yeaaah.”

“What does it look like? Does it look different?”

“No, not really. It looks like static, with a ring around it.”

He told me about how he’d seen it that morning of the attack, and he’d known then exactly how that It thing had gotten into my room.

“The thing is though, you ripped the exit first, before the entrance.”

I didn’t understand how it could be done backwards like that, but he insisted it could. He insisted I’d ripped the exit first, from sitting there stewing in one spot, day after day, after day…

“But that doesn’t make any sense. How can you have an exit first??? You need an entrance for something to come in, before it can leave…”

“No you don’t,” he looked at me like, duh. “You ripped an exit first. And when you ripped an exit, that means that these things can now blow through and leave, they have a way out…so then the entrance opens up.”

My sleeping habits were getting extremely whacked out by this time, now that my room was in full swing. For starters, my energy level was drastically drained, which was a whole other issue in itself, aside from my sleep schedule. I would be fine during the day at work, pumped up and full of energy, continuing through the bus ride home. I’d have this mental list of things I wanted to do, feeling like I could take on the world. Then literally, the second I walked through the front door into our apartment it was like ssssssssssssss….all the air being let out of me. It felt like you were walking around underwater in that place. I’d make it into my room, and whatever ideas I’d had in my head earlier about things I wanted to do were tossed out the window. I’d just become a lump. No energy, no drive, no anything. If I didn’t flat out just crawl into bed and crash out when getting home then I was going to be at 10 pm at the latest. On average though it was 8:30, 9, 9:30. That’s really bad. There were even a few times that I was so drained and wiped out after being in the apartment for a bit that I’d crash out on my floor, and never even make it to the bed, just passed out right there in front of the radio. I had books I wanted to read that weren’t getting read, writing I wanted to do that wasn’t getting done, art that wasn’t getting created. It took everything out of me existing in that place.

I tried to fight it though, I began doing workouts, inspired by Joe, and I didn’t realize until after I moved out that it was like having lead weights on me when I’d do my workout. Like someone was standing on my back when I’d be trying to do my pushups, or pushing me back down when I’d be trying to do my sit ups. Like trying to do it underwater.

I was also becoming a bit of a lush too on top of it. My whole life sucked in every way that was possible. No money, no car, working at the worst place I’ve ever worked in my life, trapped indefinitely in this hell hole called Rancho, stuck in an apartment with whacked out shit happening nonstop. No end in sight AT all to any of this mess. Just on and on and on, forever and ever. So red wine was my new best friend. There were piles of empty wine bottles slowly building up under the kitchen sink. Life had become a surreal nightmare for me. None of it felt real. It was like a slow motion movie, dragging endlessly onwards. So I was hitting the bottle all the time, and passing out by 8:30 or 9, try to drown it out and let my life pass me by until I could get out of this situation. But even if I wasn’t drinking, I was still passing out, by 8:30 or 9, which is how I know there was a literal energy drain phenomenon happening in that place. With the laser light show of white lines silently zipping downwards from the ceiling and moving off to the side.

Another thing was that for the life of me I couldn’t get a feeling for what the near future was going to bring. And previously I could always put the mental feelers out and know how things were going to go, good or bad, know which way things were going to turn. It was like the future didn’t exist. It was the most bizarre feeling for me. My mental feelers are something I use every day, just as much as I use my vision, hearing, my sense of touch and smell. It’s constantly going, reading people, knowing the outcomes of situations so I can already plan around it – or one-up people with my knowledge if they plan to try to pull the rug out from under me.

Not anymore though. Now I had zero sense of the future. The only thing I had any feel for was that M___ was going to fire me after the New Year. I just knew that to be a fact, and even wrote it in my journal, nonchalantly. Yeah, I know they’re just waiting til after the New Year to give me the boot….Even despite the fact that M___ had put out a superficial offer a few weeks back for me to come spend Christmas with her and her family, I knew it. At the time she made that offer I just looked at her thinking in my head, What?? You’re going to FIRE me after the first of the year. Whatever. But that’s how those types of woman in those circles operate – phony AF. Pretend to “be your friend”….then do a rapid 180. Because it was never genuine to begin with. Nothing is sincere with them. They don’t know how to be true humans.

[ NOTE: And they did try to fire me actually, as soon as the new year was over, exactly as I foresaw. But since I already knew I was prepared, and had another job lined up and a resignation note typed up. But more on that later. What I will say about it all though, which ties into the description I provided earlier about this place, was how the firing came immediately after the Christmas party. M___, along with women from two other departments and myself had been discussing the organization of the party the week before, when M___ turned to me and blurted out suddenly out of nowhere with this fake “sad” face, “…..And don’t worry, we’ll dress you for the party.”

I just stared back at her, puzzled. I dressed nicely on a normal basis, otherwise I wouldn’t have been allowed to work there. But they knew that I wasn’t rich like them, and assumed of COURSE I wouldn’t have anything dressy to wear to the party…I mean, of COURSE. (fake sad face.) I just stared back at her, blank and puzzled. “I’m fine, I don’t need any clothes. I have something to wear.” And I showed up wearing my nice form fitting, sleeveless, thigh length red and black velvet-y dress with expensive black strappy heels from Macy’s, knocking it out of the park. Getting smiles and “Nice!” looks of approval and nods from a few of the husbands, and looking better than more than a few of those women. Right after that….fired. Coincidence? “It’s just not working out……” Really? The agents love me, to the point where more than one wanted me to work for them personally for side gigs, including in their own homes helping to host their rich people get togethers, and including with their own children, yet, “it’s just not working out”? um hm. right. Considering that pretty much the only reason I was there was to serve the agents means, they were the only opinion that truly mattered with regards to feedback on my job performance. And they had spoken. And it was nothing but positive. If it was truly a case of “this isn’t working out….” then they would have gotten rid of me long ago.

So the timing on it all was beyond eye rollingly obvious. So it was more like, she and her clique of mean girl office women wanted to view me and treat me as Cinderella, but I showed them I wasn’t…then even upstaged a few of them.

For normal women this wouldn’t be a thing, but as I realized years later, this was a different breed of women. The rich and elite, operating with different rules and expectations. At the time though I didn’t get it, as mentioned earlier. Only after gaining a bit more experience with the world of the rich and snooty did I begin to grasp what some of the issues really were with that place. But it all ended up working out, as I already had another gig lined up, as mentioned.]

So yeah, that was the only “future” thing I could get a grip on with my mental feelers. Getting “fired.” Anything beyond getting the boot from the job was beyond me. I was clueless. And it was kind of like being naked and vulnerable.

And like I said, my sleeping pattern was also being disrupted by the random acts of paranormal popping up here and there. Like the time I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, feeling like something was there in the room with me. I was laying on my left side, face mashed into the pillow, my right eye popping open. I watched as this black circle thing, rimmed in white, drifted down from the “entrance” above my door. Kitty was lying next to me, paws tucked under her, and I glanced at her and found that she was tensely watching this thing too. So I wasn’t imagining it. I slowly put my arm around her, to keep her from jumping away, to keep her close to me, and I found myself saying over and over, No kitty, don’t look at it, no, no, PLEASE no, please don’t look at it, please, no, look over here, look over here, no, no, look over here, please, no, no…trying to pull her into to me, physically turning her body away from it. I felt like if I could get her to turn away from it, it would mean it wasn’t really there. Childish, I know. But the more I tried to turn her away from it, the more it made her crane her neck to keep her eyes locked on this thing, her body tense. There was no telling Kitty not to do something that she wanted to do, she was extremely willful and sentient, definitely had her own mind just like a person, and there was definitely no making her not look at something paranormal related. She was NOT liking this thing, whatever it was. The look on her face wasn’t of curiosity and intrigue, just a tense wide-eyed, locked stare. Almost as if she was frozen, not sure what to do.

And whatever it was, this black circle thing rimmed in white, was in the air now, next to my bed…dancing, almost….back and forth, left to right, in a an upside down “V” shape. over and up, and down…back over and up, and down…herky jerky movement. This black circle rimmed in white…Dancing, back and fourth…watching me, and Kitty.

I squinted my eyes shut, gripping onto Kitty. I don’t remember anything after that. So I don’t have a conclusion to this story. What it did next, how long this went on for, where did it go, and just how this situation ended in general.

And another incident…jolted awake again, feeling like something was in the room with me, yet again. I was on my side, my head to the right, facing my closet, as usual. Left eye mashed into the pillow, right eye flying open in panic, yanking me out of my sleep, in mid-dream. I’d fallen asleep with my purple Christmas lights on this time, so the room had a less sinister lighting effect going on. And this time, instead of some black circle rimmed in white, dancing from side to side, it was a shapeless bluish green glittering static-y looking thing. Hovering in the air, in front of my closet. It didn’t dance back and forth like the other one, it just remained there, relatively motionless, save for the subtle changes in shape. Just imagine the static on your television, and imagine it with color…sparkly blueish green color.

It was absolutely beautiful, whatever it was. I lay there on my side, with my cat, once again, watching this. Riveted. It didn’t scare me as much as the other one did. But I didn’t exactly get up to go check it out, either. I lay there, frozen in place, watching this thing for a bit, repeatedly wondering, Am I really seeing this? Is this real? Is this really happening?? Until I pulled the covers over my head, only allowing my nose to stick out a little. And I went back to sleep. ( Note: I would wind up seeing this thing one more time in life. Two years later, in my studio apartment in Fort Lauderdale. Woke up in the middle of the night to find the same sparkly blueish green static thing in front of my front door. Goes to show that time and distance means nothing with these phenomena. So whatever this was, it wasn’t about the localized “vortex” apartment itself in Rancho Santa Margarita. It was about me, personally, and it had followed me 3,000 miles.)

And waking up yet again, feeling like somebody was right there, looking at me…I was on my back this time, having a really aggro dream where I was kicking somebody’s butt. Full of rage and frustration, getting it all out in my dreams, since I wasn’t able to during my waking hours. And at the point in my dream where I was done going aggro and was walking home, my eyes flew open, startled, once again yanking me out mid-dream because the feeling of “somebody” being in the room with me was so strong. When my eyes flew open, I saw a big black circle shaped thing, with zig zaggy edges, right up close to me, almost like a huge eye leaning in. Like it had been fascinated and curious, watching me, attracted by my aggro dream and my resulting intense energy. That was the vibe I got from it – curiosity. Nothing malicious or bad, at all. (Though there is the more likely possibility that this thing was manipulating me somehow to create this negative dream that it could feed on.) The diameter of it when it was right up on me was about a foot around. But as soon as I opened my eyes, it jumped back, like it was startled. It shrunk up in size, getting smaller and smaller, as it retreated back and away from me, until it shrunk and disappeared altogether.

That’s it!!! I thought. I’m staying UNDER THE COVERS FROM HERE ON IN. I refused to sleep any other way. And until the day I moved out, I slept with the covers pulled over my head, covering my eyes and face, so I would never have another incident of waking up suddenly in the middle of the night and seeing some crazy something or other, in the room, watching me, staring at me, hovering, jerking back and forth, and back and forth, or doing whatever. I couldn’t deal with it anymore, it was too much. Too stressful.

Sometime after I saw the black circle thing, rimmed in white, I thought to mention it to Joe. See what he thought of the whole thing.

As soon as I started describing it, “…it was like those black circles you see when you’re at the theater, watching a movie…black, rimmed in white…” that’s when his eyes started bugging out.

“What?! It was a black circle….rimmed in white…” he stated back, loudly and slowly, sounding panicked. I wasn’t used to getting a reaction from him when I talked about anything that happened to me. He was usually so blase.

“Uh, yeah…Why?”

“Did it sort of move back and forth like this…” he imitated the herky jerky upside down V-shaped movement with his hands.

I hadn’t told him about that. In fact, if he hadn’t mentioned it, I would’ve forgotten that detail.

“Yeah! It did!! How did you know?!”

“Because, I’ve seen that thing in my room too. Do you know what that is?? It’s that thing. The one that attacked us. Basically, it was checking up on you, that’s what it was doing.”

“NO….” I said, panicked, and incredulous.

“YES. Trust me. I’ve seen it in my room too. It comes by from time to time, to check up on things. That is not good if you saw that in your room Carissa, it’s not good…” He looked panicked and worried. That was really unusual for him. Now I was getting panicked.

“Oh my god…Shit…What if it comes back?!?”

“Then kill it.” Deadpan.

That was always his response whenever I’d say that. So kill it.

“Whatever! I can’t kill it!! I’m not strong enough. I don’t have the capability…”

“Yeah you do.” Deadpan, again.

“No I don’t!”

“Yeah you do.”

“NOOO.”

“YEAAAH…”

“Whatever.”

Then there was the night I came home from work, and passed out on my bed. I slept until 11 p.m. or so, when I finally woke up enough to try and contemplate if I should get up…even though it was so late…or just keep on sleeping, straight through the night. hmmm……. And I laid there under the glow of purple Christmas lights, pondering this for a bit. Get up, or sleep, get up, or sleep…nah…I think I’m going to go back to sleep, I finally decided, smiling to myself, sinking further into the bed, stomach down, to get comfy and pass back out again…

…which is when I felt the distinctive feeling of human fingers scritch scratching in the middle of my back. Scritch scritch scritch. It scared the living shit out of me, because of the suddenness of it, and the intensity of it. Very distinct. When I felt those fingers scritch scratching me, I let out a little scream and flew up in the bed, involuntarily swiping like mad at my back and going AH! AH! AH! AH! Jumping all about in my bed, panicked.

I was up now, thank you very much. I got out of bed, glaring around my room, like Grrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!! That was not cool. I could just imagine it giggling to herself, thinking that was funny. Oh, can’t make up your mind about whether to get up or not? Well here you go, lazy butt, what do you think about this?? heeheehee!

I just couldn’t shake the memory though of how that felt, the distinctive touch of FINGERS, actually digging in, with light pressure. Like there was a real person there, only, they were invisible.

I was up for almost the rest of the night, refusing to go back to bed until after 3:30 am. I figured it wouldn’t do anything else to me, because again, it wasn’t malicious. But then again, how do I really know? What if it was tired of not being noticed, and this was going to be its new thing now…Touching and poking and scritch scratching, and just doing all sorts of stuff to get noticed? That scared me. I grabbed my Sony Discman, and a book, and hid out in the laundry room all night, and did some writing, to kill time. There was nowhere I could go. I had no car. I was completely trapped. As usual. Another night, without a decent sleep. As usual.

I just remember going to work during one of these nights where I only had like two hours of sleep or something, and my co-worker C___ talking about how he’d only had two hours of sleep, saying he didn’t go to bed until 4 am. Having no idea of course, that I was in the same boat. But I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t say, Oh yeah, me too…I didn’t go to bed until like 3:30, or 4. Because invariably, that would lead to the next question……Really? Why? What were you doing? since we were work friends, and talked about stuff. And what was I supposed to say to that?

Time for a little sidetrack detour: C__ was my boss M___’s son….and absolutely nothing like her. Same age as me at the time, 25, also born in ’74, same as me, an Aries/Scorpio year of the Tiger. Perfect match for my Scorpio/Virgo/Leo Tiger. Super cool and interesting. And single. Not one of those “ridiculously attractive” guys or anything, but definitely cute, and his personality and energy made him completely captivating. It helped too that he was half Mexican (his dad and mom were divorced, and now she was married to another hyper successful real estate agent, working as a team), which made him NOT look like his mother (who was all white, and also happened to look like an alien-human hybrid, complete with the blue eyes and tiny, thin-lipped mouth. One of the weirdest looking women I’ve ever seen.)

I had a type, and it was typically brunette guys with brown eyes, often something ethnic/mixed…which he was. And he was a musician, playing guitar. Over and over in life I attract in or have actually dated musicians, but in particular, guitarists. Always guitarists. Such a pattern, it’s ridiculous. (even my 90’s cartoon crush – Trent Lane, from Daria – fit the profile. ha My ex Gary that I was with in ’95 was basically the real life version of Trent, but several years before “Daria” even aired. Was Asian, so he looked similar to him, same coloring, with the black hair, dressed like him, played guitar. And even though he was super smart and very interesting….was also an unmotivated lazy potato, always flopped out on his bed, just like in that pic I linked to, unemployed and still living at his mom’s. Which is why it didn’t last.) But…that’s been the pattern.

C__ is a whole story in itself, another huge issue about what went wrong with this place causing so much intense energy generation from me during this entire time period. He started a few months after I did. And from the first moment we met/spoke, when he came up to my desk at about 4:50 p.m. and initiated a chat about something, it was like mutual googly eyed love at first sight. Both of us with mesmerized grins and eyes, something very rare for me. His personality was extremely charismatic, engaging and nice. I mean, hello…..Aries (sun) Scorpio (moon), year of the Tiger….. He was also a smart guy, the sort whose mind is always going, thinking of things and full of creative energy and ideas………more of my type. I only go for the smart ones with personality. I was so taken with him that I purposely missed the last bus of the evening at 5:05 just to keep talking, since he didn’t seem to want the conversation to end. By that point we were just talking about all kinds of random non work related things. As long as he kept it going I’d keep rolling with it. The conversation went on for about 45 minutes. Wound up walking the two miles home, but not minding at all.

His mom M___, aka the Big Boss Lady who was in charge of the whole branch, the one who didn’t speak to me for almost the first full three months I worked there other than her terse “good mornings” with no eye contact, only started talking to me once he became smitten.

“C__ talks about you all the time,” she told me in her office one morning with a coy smile, mentioning this factoid out of nowhere. This was during an out-in-left-field meeting – the first one-on-one meeting we’d ever had since I started – and where she did an abrupt 180 with me. Again, apparently only after C__ wouldn’t stop talking about me. “It’s always Carissa this, and Carissa that.” More coy smile. Totally fueling the fire. So only after he became smitten did she even give me the time of day.

Meanwhile C__ had issues, finding himself aimless in life, no direction, having moved back into his mom and stepdad’s mansion in Coto after traveling around to Australia and NYC. He was now working for her company because he didn’t know what else to do with himself, as he’d lament to me. So there was a huge insecurity/self esteem/masculinity issue happening due to not having any money nor being independent and successful, while living in his Type-A, mega successful mother’s shadow.

So we’d have these moments where we were like googly eyed little kids in love, just hitting it off with amazing chemistry, then he’d pull back….then push forward, back to being googly eyed little kids…..then pull back again. Back and forth, up and down.

One time while having a conversation with another coworker named Alma, the subject of “people dating people they work with” came up, mentioned by Alma, forget the reason why. But C__ immediately mumbled something about how “you can’t eat where you sleep,” or whatever metaphor, Shit where you sleep? Sleep where you shit? that was apparently supposed to relate to our situation as well….while making sure to quickly glance at me, then dodging eyes. But then back to being googly eyed kids later on, then pull back again…..back and forth, up and down. Total mind job of epic proportions, generating enough “loosh” energy to power a small country.

The only time I ever saw him get truly angry and fiery was the time our bully coworker Stephanie tried to interfere with us. I’d come in late due bringing Kitty to the vet (walked to the vet near our apartment, carrying her….no car!) and as I walked through the door I thought fondly about C__, and how I’d missed him and looked forward to seeing him, getting settled in at my computer. Within a minute he came rushing around the corner with a huge smile as if he’d read my mind, excited that I was finally in. How he knew I’d come in I don’t know. He was in a back office with no windows. But that’s why I said it was like he’d read my mind as soon as I arrived, sensing me. That’s a phenomenon that’s followed me around for years – being psychically connected to people that I’m intensely connected to. Where it goes both ways. I sense them, and they sense me and we read each other’s minds.

C__ immediately took a seat at the empty desk next to me, stretching his arms out forward towards me across the desk. Our energies in that moment were like excited kids, happy to be around each other, as we began talking and talking about all kinds of things……….until Stephanie burst around the corner. She said something nasty to C__ to get him to stop and go back to work, trying to embarrass/emasculate him.

Stephanie was the 20 year old daughter of one of the agents, deluding her into thinking she had some kind of power, which included always being rude to me as well. Other than C__ I didn’t have a friend in that joint now that Shannon was long gone. And while it may sound like Stephanie must have been some total hottie to be such an aggressive, confident bully………HARD nope to that. Tall and slightly overweight, always wearing long, shapeless, very unstylish figure hiding clothes for that reason, average “meh” face with a giant, bulbous nose, long fluffy/dry/frizzy black hair, versus sleek and styled. Yet, total bitch who strutted around completely full of herself. It was really weird. Not what you’d expect, at all. Like, “Girl….?! Do you even know what you look like??!” She didn’t even come close to having the looks to carry off the ego and aggressive, bully attitude she was always putting out. Society programs us that it’s always the good looking girls who become the “mean girls” and bullies. Not in my experience. More often than not it’s the unattractive, overweight and thus, insecure ones. And it’s exactly why they go around stomping all over others and being loud obnoxious bullies – it’s the only way they can make themselves feel better, more powerful and “in control.” Or outright get attention, since they’re typically bypassed/overlooked in favor of the better looking girls. (Stephanie’s current Linkedin profile pic has massive “CRAZY EYES” going on, like, holy shit level of crazy. Giant grin and psycho bugged out eyes making her look like she’s been jacked up on psych meds for years. But I saw the foundation for it all those years ago.) But in my personal life experience the truly good looking girls have so often been genuinely nice and just super cool. At least to me, anyway. The opposite of bullies. Any of the bully girls I’ve encountered were always ugly, fat, and/or both fat and ugly.

If it wasn’t for her mother then Stephanie wouldn’t be there, because she didn’t have the looks or the work experience/background, being that she was only 20. And that’s just all there was to it.

Stephanie had bullied C__ before about random things, to which he’d just passively let her, never sticking up for himself or pushing back. Which was VERY interesting, since in the Battle of Whose Mother is More Important C__’s was at the absolute top of the pyramid. She was the boss over every-last-person-in-that-place. Every agent, every department. Everybody. O.o This was her office, period. Didn’t stop Stephanie though.

But this time when her bullying involved C__ and I directly, creating that emasculating interference?………….whoa. O.o Holy shit. Can’t remember exactly what he said, but he pretty much ripped her head off, leaving her speechless, mouth agape. Basically something about It’s not your business! leave us alone! go back to work! I’ll be there when I’m ready!! etc.!! with a few other things!!! and said forcefully/angrily, with conviction, turning the tables and posturing himself above her. He’d totally fucking had it with her in that moment. Nobody there had ever seen that side of him, but that’s what it took. Put her in her place and caused her to retreat back to her office. He continued staring/frowning in her direction for a few more seconds after she left….then turned back to me, starting to smile again, resuming our conversation for ten or fifteen more minutes.

So yeah, I fell hard for him, and it contributed to so much of the problems going on during this time period due to the mind fuckery of it all. The situation couldn’t have been more custom tailored towards me if it had tried, to the point where, in retrospect, it’s ridiculously suspect. :/ Like really? This is the situation going on during my 40 hour a week day job? This custom tailored guy who hits literally every single point on the checklist of what I like in a guy? But with the whole hot and cold, “I like you but we can’t be together” mind fuck? On top of the way all the women in the office behave? Then I’m financially trapped/stuck in our paranormal apartment from hell where I can no longer get any real sleep half the time, scared out of my mind? Complete with Joe’s nonstop criminal mayhem and cop dodging putting me in the line of fire? It was truly the perfect storm of madness converging together. Just more of that “experiencing the Full Safari” thing though. Being up, down, back and forth, and experiencing all sides of it. Experiencing the pain of being in love with somebody that doesn’t work out because of his personal hangups….meanwhile I’ve been on the receiving end of different guys’ interest, but where I didn’t work out for them (and in a few cases….REALLY upset them to the point of inspiring attempted violence O.o ) because I’m just flat out not interested. We’ve all gotta go through it at some point, and for whatever the reason.

I personally didn’t care about C__’s lack of direction and success, I was just into him, but I can understand that for a guy those things can cause insecurity, especially for somebody like him who had a streak of sensitivity/self esteem problems going on anyway. (He was always making self deprecating “jokes” about himself with regards to his looks and non ideal life situation.) And especially being that he was completely submerged in the world of the Rich, where money and success is everything, just rubbing it in every day that he was a supposed failure. So I realize that he’s sitting there thinking he’s got nothing to offer…..No game plan, nothing lined up, has to work for his mom, and 25 years old but doesn’t even have his own place. How is he supposed to be out there seriously dating anybody? And a coworker no less….at his mom’s company?

And let’s be real….probably also looking at my situation and realizing it would never fly in his mom’s world. I had the right look and personality (he had a “type” too I came to figure out, and I was it) but I definitely did not have the right background. He obviously knew that I didn’t have a car and was busing/walking it everywhere, he knew the lower to mid-range level apartment complex where I lived, and that I was roommating with my brother to help him, and that unlike even just basic normal people I didn’t have any parents or other family going on in my life. Why did he know this? Because we talked. All the time. And he wasn’t stupid – because we talked all the time he managed to piece things together and knew something sketchy was going on with Joe, and that he was up to no good. Not exactly some “honest model citizen.” A couple of times he’d ask frowny questions trying to corner me about some random Joe thing, but I’d just dodge out of it.

My entire background was completely fucked up, very unusual. I wasn’t from some well put together family, living in a nice situation, driving a nice car, with the full on college degree and all those mainstream world niceties. Though I presented very nicely to the world, creating an illusion….thus, the entire reason I was even able to work there in the first place.

So we were both a hot mess, that’s all I can say. Doomed from that first googly eyed, smiley, mesmerized moment we met. I found out later that sometime after I left C__ finally just joined the military to get his shit together. He’s now married with kids, like pretty much everybody, but which isn’t something that I myself wanted or came here to do. And I knew that going back into childhood, as early as nine years old. “I’m not here to do what my parents did. I’m not here to have that life.” I talk about this in my “INFJ” article, about the nagging “splinter in the mind” I’ve had since early childhood, this knowing that I’m here to DO SOMETHING, a life mission/destiny, something bigger than just “get married, have kids, the end.”

However, unknown to me at that time I was working here and going through this perfect storm of madness, my true and actual life destiny, the big thing I “came here to do and accomplish” was about to start unfolding only nine months after leaving this place, in September 2001, which I touch on again later.   C__ and I never even came close to being on the same life/destiny page, but, there was no way to know it in the middle of it.

But back to the story…..!

And then another night where I was reading in my bed. Until about ten pm., when I suddenly just decided it would be a good idea to get up and go into the kitchen. Get a bite to eat. I always had the uncanny instinct to know when to leave my room, moments before “something” happened. And sure enough, as I’m puttering around the kitchen, I hear a loud crash bang in my doorway. Kitty had followed me out into the kitchen, my little shadow as usual, but she heard it too, and her head jerked towards the noise. She trotted back to my room, to investigate.

I myself just assumed it was Joe, coming out of his room or something. I almost even said, “Hey, Joe??” as I walked back to my room.

When I got there, I was a little confused to find absolutely nothing. No Joe.

I looked around my empty room. At Kitty investigating things, and poking about.

I opened Joe’s door a little and peaked in to his room. He was sound asleep, under the covers.

okey dokey.

I closed his door. The noise had come from my doorway, and as we knew by now, I had an “entrance” over my doorway.

I got my shoes, my book to read, my Discman, and my writing journal. Back to the laundry room. All night. Again. Went to work on like two hours of sleep. Again. Didn’t say a word to anybody because I couldn’t. Again.

And life droned on. And on. And on. The weeks passed by. Mind numbing week after week. The first of the year came, and for the first time in who knows how long, I made a list of resolutions. My life was such a complete and utter mess at that point that I needed some focal points, some goals, try to get myself back on track. And I don’t normally need to do that, but I did now. I was too unfocused and lost and disillusioned. (another reason I could totally relate to and sympathize with what C__ was going through….another reason we hit it off so well….) One of my goals was to get rid of my office day job at _____, and do whatever I could do to get another job. And I didn’t care how far away it was. I lived out in the middle of nowhere, which had been my major impediment in getting a better job all this time. But if I had to take two buses and walk for three miles, I didn’t care, I’d do it. I needed to get out of that toxic environment.

So I started job hunting through the Orange County Register classifieds during New Year’s weekend. Circled the ones that were within the local area, and were what I’d be looking for. I was looking for data entry. Something simple, mindless and easy. Where there would be absolutely no pressure on me, and I was not responsible for anything, a job where I would be left alone, and wouldn’t have to deal with people anymore.

[page]

I found a new job literally within two days of faxing out my resume. I was still at the real estate agency, and again, with no car. However one of the lead guys at the company I faxed my resume to named Christian offered to come pick me up, along with his wife, and bring me to the office for the interview, since they were in a desperate time crunch sort of situation that involved the need for a typist. And when they saw my typing speed on my resume they were like “WE NEED TO TALK TO HER.” Apparently nobody else who’d submitted their resumes had any sort of a decent typing speed. So that was a first, a company offering to pick me up and bring me to an interview, and something I was grateful for.

Sure enough, true to my vision, one morning after the Christmas party and the start of the new year my boss M____ called me into her office. I already knew though as I walked up the stairs what was going down. I had the job interview scheduled for that afternoon, with Christian and his wife planning to pick me up at 4 p.m., and had my resignation letter already typed up and printed. Except doh! I’d left it at home that morning while rushing around, getting ready. I was distracted that morning knowing I had the job interview lined up. oh well. It would have been nice to have it on hand to prove my claim about already quitting anyway, and offset whatever she was about to try to dump on me, but ultimately it didn’t matter.

I sat across from M___ at her desk, her calmly giving me the “this just isn’t working out” b.s. schpiel, thinking she was springing something on me. Meanwhile I just shrugged nonchalantly and let her know that Actually……I was already planning to give my notice today, and had a resignation letter prepared but which I’d accidentally left at home this morning. But at any rate, I have a job interview scheduled for this afternoon at 4. So if you don’t mind I’ll need to leave early. They’re coming to pick me up. Etc. Etc.

Just calmly and nonchalantly laid the counterattack on her which she didn’t see coming. And I say “counterattack” because there was something vindictive/“revenge” about her attitude, which became REALLY obvious when she heard my response. She went from having a small “pleased with herself” smile of vindictive glee on her face, thinking she was “springing” some surprise firing on me (talk about sick/toxic)……to eyes getting wide, looking slightly WTF?? It was priceless. But that’s how I knew for sure what her motives were. Still boggles my mind that C__ was her son, and somehow came from this woman. He couldn’t have been more different.

But the problem wasn’t that I was “wasn’t working out,” as already noted. The problem was I didn’t need her to “dress me” for the party, politely turned down her fake ass Christmas dinner invite to be her charity case, because I already knew she’d be letting me go within a month, tops. Then showed up to the party looking awesome. Even upstaging a few of the female agents. Her dinner invite was very disingenuous, with “ick” underlying energy. Not coming from a place of truly warm sincerity and concern. Especially since she had refused to speak to me or have anything to do with me during the first three months I was there, and still remained cold, detached, “fake” friendly and disconnected during the last few months. You can’t be like that to somebody….then expect them to fall for disingenuous “charity” that they didn’t ask for in the first place. “Oh, yes please, dress me for your ball! I am but a poor peasant with nothing but rags to wear! Bring me into your home and feed me, for I only have but measly scraps of morsels! Show the world what good, kind and giving people you are! Bask in the praise it will generate!”

Please.

And actually……there was even slightly more to it than just that. Because at some point during my final three months M___ expressed an interest in the idea of her and the other women agents “mentoring” me in some fashion into the world of real estate. Just something about wanting me to want that, wanting to see this desire in me, and seeming a bit…..disappointed that I wasn’t expressing an interest in going down that path. It wasn’t just disappointment that I wasn’t interested in striving for the extreme wealth and lifestyle that they all had, but paraphrasing the idea that was being conveyed: She saw herself and these other higher level agents as people I should feel privileged to work for. I should be recognizing them for the opportunity that they are, and doing everything in my power to want to be part of that, and to learn from them. (I remember something about that phrase – “learning from them”…..)

And admittedly, when it came to the world of real estate, M___ was extremely successful and well known, no doubt. She was a big deal in that region, and her and her then-husband were probably the richest people I’ve ever known or worked for, to this day. Turning over multiple, multi-million dollar mansions in Coto and Dove Canyon every single month…..after month….after month……with their commissions. I processed their spreadsheets, keeping track of the sales and commissions that needed to be sent to corporate. So I know. They had more money than they would ever know what to do with. And then there was me……not recognizing her greatness, was how she seemed to be seeing it. And this was extremely perplexing to her. Talk about out of control, narcissistic ego, viewing “others” as mere objects, simply there to reflect you. Versus real people, with their own individual needs, wants and goals.

But she wanted to see that “thirst” in me you could say…..me wanting to be under her, having her lead me, where I become her project. She could not conceive of how a young, thin, cute, 25 year old female surrounded by them, and this lifestyle, wouldn’t want this. “How could you not want this?!? How could you not want to be us?!! What’s wrong with you?!? Something has to be wrong with you for not wanting this……”

Nevermind though that she, and some of the other women, treated me in a totally cold, disconnected, unfriendly way. :/ And in some of the women’s cases….were downright mean to me at times. Who cares! I should still desperately want to be around them, and doing everything in my power to be “allowed” into their privileged inner circle! I should be grateful to be in their presence!

But I had beyond zero interest in being a real estate agent – I loved office admin work. That’s my thing, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do to make a living. Starting at 18 right after high school when I’d comb the classified ads in the Orange County Register every day while eating, honing in on all the office admin jobs and wishing to someday be able to have a job like that, mentally noting all the requirements. Day after day after day after day combing those ads………. talk about reality creation/manifestation. O.o Then it finally happened, a few years later, due to crazy bizarre serendipitous circumstances, and became a meteoric rise. So I wanted to be the one working for the real estate agents…..not being an agent myself. And my energy is not about “the weakling who needs to be taken care of,” or “kissing up to mean girls with a desperate need to be accepted.” AT all. TOTAL opposite. Nowadays they have a terminology for this type of chick, one that’s neither the dominating, bullying Alpha, nor the weak, submissive Beta. They call it “Sigma,” and there’s entire vids about it on YT, if people are interested. Sigma was me back then, and now. The powerful outsider, who knows her own way and doesn’t cave to bullying and group think, but who also doesn’t want to dominate over others either.

But, M____ needed my place to be “under her thumb,” the “lowly charity case” that they could do their fake “sad” faces to while proving what “good people” they were as they “helped” me, patting themselves on the back. Meanwhile, as they took the needy, thirsty peasant girl under their wing to guide towards a better future. And…………I kept slipping out of that, not playing the role. I was obviously weird for not wanting what they had, and I wasn’t validating M____’s sense of self importance. And in the end, not validating M____’s ego trumped actual job performance and reliability. But since she obviously couldn’t admit what was really going on here it instead became the cockamamie, “this just isn’t working out…..” vague excuse, with no actual details to back it up.

So I took the power away from M____ as I sat there completely unaffected, shrugging, like “Yeah, no problem….” already planning to leave, and with a job interview scheduled for that very afternoon on top of it. It was very satisfying.

Sure enough, Christian and his wife Patty picked me up at 4 in Patty’s new model VW Bug, as M___ watched me go from the second story landing. (She actually came out of her office to see for herself. I think some part of her didn’t believe I really had an interview.)

So that’s how 2001 started for me. Paranormal activity peaking, and with a new job. After Christian brought me to the office for the interview they explained how they had this massive, emergency word processing project that needed to be completed in a week. Hard deadline. They were a geotechnical engineering firm at the border of Lake Forest and Irvine, with about twelve in-office employees, as well as field employees. Christian was one of the project managers who’d been tasked with overseeing this particular project. I wound up being hired on the spot due to my typing skills – at that point it was about 65-70 wpm (it’s now 90+). So there was something “data entry-ish” about the job when I responded to the ad. And hey, if it all went well with the big project then they also needed a receptionist/admin person. So finish this big project first, then we’d all go from there, see about turning this into a full time permanent position.

I’ve always said that out of all the classes I ever took in school, the only one that was ever of true use to me out in the world in terms of making a living was……typing. “The class so nice I took it twice.” Took it the first time in 10th grade in Connecticut, then again in 12th grade in California…..just because. I was caught up on my credits by my last semester of 12th grade (actually ahead, weirdly enough….it amazed me that despite going to a public high school in rural Connecticut of all places I was ahead of what the urban SoCal school system required by 12th grade; so the rural northeast U.S. had higher and stricter educational standards than urban southern California did. Had to take more classes every year than what SoCal required. Kids absolutely WERE held back if they didn’t pass muster. And I knew MULTIPLE fellow classmates who were held back over the years. It was no joke. You either kept up or you failed and got held back. The threat was real. Fellow classmates I was alongside in Connecticut one minute, but were left behind the next…. And that eventually included my own brother Joe who got held back in 7th grade in his school in Old Saybrook where our Dad was now living, after he left SoCal and moved back to Connecticut. He couldn’t get away with what he’d gotten away with in 5th and 6th grades in SoCal. Connecticut doesn’t mess around. And with regards to higher Math – in my Connecticut highschool those classes were not in the same order as SoCal. SoCal was a joke compared to the Northeast. So it was no wonder that I was multiple steps ahead when I transferred in to SoCal from Connecticut. Had that wiggle room that natives of SoCal didn’t have.)

But I still needed to take an elective course as a requirement. So I signed up for typing. Called “keyboarding” by that point. Again, just to be able to brush up on things, because at that point I was only doing 25 wpm. I just had a very strong compulsion to do this, that I NEEDED to focus on typing. I enjoyed it, but I wanted to be GOOD at it. (Another elective “course” I took was to work in the school’s office during 3rd period in 11th grade, answering the switchboard and helping the secretaries for the Principal and Vice Principal with admin projects. “Working in offices” was just always going to be the destiny. )

And lo and behold, once I was out there in the world working in offices my typing skills became an EXTREMELY important “selling point” for me getting job after job, whether on my own or through staffing agencies. And in this specific case with the geotechnical engineering firm, being hired on the spot no less, solely because of typing skills. And which became my golden ticket out of very shitty circumstances.

I finished out my one week’s notice at the real estate agency during the day, and meanwhile after work I worked diligently on the word processing project from home, often late into the night, using my own computer. All the while with those “white laser lines” shooting down from the ceiling, all around me, of course. O.o My friend Julie meanwhile (more on her later) couldn’t even believe I was willing to give the agency a week’s notice, and was arguing with me via email from her job about it, like, Fuck them!! They don’t deserve notice!!!! You should just leave!!! :D

I finished the word processing project on time, no issues, fulfilling my end of the deal. Then was hired on to be their new receptionist/administrative assistant and accounting assistant. A slight bit more intensive than “data entry” ;) but it was all good.

My new boss Felicity, who was the office manager/accounting manager and the owner’s live-in girlfriend, wound up making the gig as pleasant as it was. And the job itself would wind up paying me the most money I’d ever made so far at that point, in early 2001, from a single job. Felicity was 37 at the time, originally from Australia, tall, with short, moppy looking dyed blonde hair and blue eyes. She was very kick back and friendly and mellow, and just liked to have a good time in general. She was very down to earth, a good listener, very generous and giving, with a good sense of humor, and acted like she was everybody’s friend from the moment she met people. She was just everything that Australians typically are: friendly, happy, down to earth, generous, loves the outdoors, loves to party. And she was everything that the female office staff at the real estate agency wasn’t. So far my New Year’s resolution/focused intent to drastically turn things around was working spectacularly. This new job was the major key to my entire life getting back on track, forever indefinitely.

Right off the bat when Felicity learned that I didn’t have a car and was taking two buses and walking two miles, each way, she immediately made arrangements to pick me up at Portola Plaza, which was half way to work from where I lived, and right near where she lived. Eliminated me having to be up by 5:45 every day, to catch the 6:30 a.m. 82 bus out of Rancho, transferring at Portola Plaza to the 89 at 6:50 am, going down El Toro, where I would exit at Rockfield at 7:10. And walk for like another two miles at a fast clip, getting to work by 8 on the nose. Now all I had to do was take the 82 bus out of Rancho, to the end of the line at Portola Plaza, and she picked me up from there. And at night she’d drop me off there, so I could catch the 82 bus home. Even if she hadn’t offered the rides though I would’ve gone through all that, JUST to not have to work at my previous job. ANYTHING to not be there, and in that situation, with those “people,” anymore.

Meanwhile the activity in my room never slowed down. If anything, it was growing more powerful every day. In essence, what was happening was that it was feeding off of me, and my energy. And growing. And that’s why I always got so exhausted and wiped out after walking through the front doors of our lovely little “home.”

There was an interesting little incident around this time, one Saturday morning. I was laying in bed, watching my little personal laser light show of white lines going on. They had extended as far over as my bed now. I was watching them shoot silently through my bed covers, right next to me, and through my arms, and through Kitty. Kitty kept flinching and tensing up as I lay there with my arm around her. I couldn’t feel anything, but apparently she could. Then I noticed this shapeless orange yellow fire looking blob in the air, over by my closet, smack in the middle of the white lines. It was about six inches off the floor, and no bigger than a foot around, but it definitely looked like yellow orange-y fire. I don’t know what it was, but I was wondering if I was really seeing it. Until Kitty jumped off the bed and ran over to it, and tried to bat it around, to no avail. Her paws passed right through it. It’s interesting how some of the manifestations created perky curiosity in her, like this one, but while most just generated fear, causing her to spaz. Possibly revealing the nature of what’s what in terms of the various phenomenon.

I no longer worried if I was really seeing this. The thing that’s obvious by this point in this write up is just how instrumental Kitty was as a corroborator of things. Without her eyeballing up the same things I was seeing, trying to interact with them, or flat out running away from them, as well as seeing and reacting to things I couldn’t….but which Joe claimed to be seeing…..then I’m not even kidding, I either probably would have gone slightly nutso, or just eventually dismissed everything outright, as a coping mechanism. And then none of this document would ever have been compiled, let alone posted online. But because Kitty was there – the stray kitten that we’d rescued on the brink of emaciated, flea and worm-riddled starvation – it meant that she corroborated over, and over, and over that NO, I’m not imagining these things, and I’m not crazy. And she was also my adorable little furry companion in need of care, attention and love, keeping me company and helping to reduce a lot of stress. Both of which were vital for maintaining my sanity in all of this. Without her….I would not have made it through this situation, and nobody would even be reading this. So when people say “Who rescued who?” about their rescue pets, they’re not kidding. Nobody would be reading this were it not for a little stray kitten. And that’s just what it is, period.

The entrance above my doorway pretty much began to “glow,” as Joe termed it. I couldn’t see it glowing, literally. But I could feel it. I didn’t notice it until the night that Joe came knocking on my door to ask me something. Well I’m standing there in the doorway, talking to him, growing more and more antsy and fidgety and uneasy with every passing second. Not consciously realizing it though, even though I’m shifting from foot to foot, looking around, antsy and impatient…until finally I couldn’t take it anymore and I interrupted whatever it was he was talking about and said, rather hysterically, “…Okay, WHATEVER! Do you have to stand here and talk about this right HERE?!?” (I was backing away from the doorway, watching Joe’s puzzled look on his face) “I mean, why can’t you come IN the room!?!? Why do you have to stand in the DOORWAY?!? Why can’t you come in HERE?!?!” (continuing to back away, until I’m way in my room now, far away from the doorway.)

“What’s wrong with you?” Joe finally asked me, calm, but puzzled. “What’s your problem?!”

I stopped and stared at him, realizing that hey, that was a weird reaction. Hey, what is wrong with me?? I thought. What’s the problem here? Why am I acting like this?

I just stared at him, blank, staring back at me, puzzled.

“I don’t know…” I said slowly, thinking about it. Then I began to realize it.

“It’s the doorway…” I said, looking up at it. “Something just felt really WRONG when I was standing under it. It was like these waves of chills were coming down over me. Pulsing down on me. I didn’t even realize it consciously when I was standing there, but now I realize what was bugging me…”

Joe stepped into the room, peering up at the vaulted ceiling over the door, interested. He stood under it, now staring intently down at the floor, focusing on it, seeing what he could feel.

“Yup…there we go…there’s one… (pause for a few seconds) …there’s two…(pause for a few seconds)…there’s three…”

“So you feel it too then?!”

“OH yeah. There’s another…and another…”

“Let me try it again…” I edged him out of the way and stood under it again. Steady pulsing waves of icy chill were coming down from the spot above the door. And it wasn’t a drafty chill breezing over the surface of your skin, giving your goosebumps. You know, like something normal. This went through you, feeling like nails on a chalkboard. Meaning, it made the nerves in your rib cage area tingle and cringe, like when you scratch a chalkboard. It felt gross. And it was extremely difficult to maintain standing underneath it for longer than 30 seconds. Because your first instinct is to want to get away from it. So to continue standing there is to override a very strong impulse.

Shortly thereafter, Kitty started getting weird about that spot under the doorway. If there was ever a doubt in my mind that it was just a “draft” going on, there wasn’t after this one night, when I watched her act like a freak underneath it. I was in my room just up and about, doing whatever, when I noticed she was pacing in circles under the doorway, staring intently up at the ceiling, where the entrance supposedly was. She was pacing in circles, and mewing, and pacing around some more. Then she proceeded to pull a “Poltergeist” and got up on her two hind legs, like a prairie dog, or, like the dog in the 1982 movie “Poltergeist” did, with her two front paws hanging limp. Eyes locked on that area, mewing nervously. Back down on all fours. Crouched in a subservient position, mewing. Eyes locked upwards at that spot, never letting it out of her sight. Then she got up a little, eyes still locked on it, and did the absolute freakiest thing…She began jumping as high and as hard as she could, straight up towards that area. Like she was on a springboard, boing boinging straight up, over, and over and OVER and OVER and OVER. Like she was trying to leap up into it.

I was so scared watching this, all I could do was sit on the edge of my bed, frozen, heart pounding, hair standing on end. What the fuck is going on??? I thought. I kept looking at the spot, but no matter what, I couldn’t see anything. At best, there was one time I think I may have seen some static-y looking stuff, like what Joe described, but I believe that was just wishful thinking on my part.

This went on for a little bit, with her boing-boinging straight up at that spot, until she calmed down and went back to just pacing in circles and mewing, eyes still locked on it. Then she eventually gave it up.

Okay. So what do we have here then…We have a spot above the doorway that Joe says is an entrance, and that he can see with his eyes. I can’t see it however – but I can feel it. And so can he. And I’ve watched something drift down from there one night, which in fact had woken me up. And I watched my cat watching the thing too. And Joe confirmed the thing I had seen drifting down from there by providing a more accurate and detailed description of it than what I had given, including details I would’ve actually forgotten about. And now there’s this. My cat completely wigging out under the spot. Trying to propel herself into the spot.

Did I believe now, at this point that there was an entrance?

Absolutely. 100%.

Unless of course, I was too busy questioning it and doubting the whole thing.

And one night in a moment of defiant cockiness, fed up with the entire situation, I stood in front of my doorway looking up at the vaulted ceiling and basically just RAGED at it. I stood there and thought the most nasty hostile I’m-Gonna-Kick-Your-ASS! thoughts. Over and over I was thinking FUCK you! FUCK you! FUCK you! FUCK you! I’ll fucking KILL you! FUCK you! FUCK you! I’ll fucking KILL you, come on motherfucker! I know you’re there, come on! Bring it on! FUCK you! FUCK you! I’m sick of your shit! FUCK you! FUCK you!

I raged at it internally with everything I had, for a good minute, full of passion and vigor and hostility.

When I was done, I stood there, by the light of my lamp, my radio going in the background. Staring up at the spot.

And then an cold icy wave came down, INTO the room, where I was standing, and went right through me. I stood there, as it passed through me, and my whole body quivered and shook with the chill, and I even said, “uugggggghhh!” outloud, shaking it out of me, my rib cage tingling like nails on a chalkboard.

I felt it was there, circling about me in the room. Waiting.

oh shit.

this is bad, this is bad, this is NOT good, I fucked up, I fucked up, oh shit this is bad, oh shit…And I grabbed my phone and called my friend Julie, in a panic. Her apartment complex was right down the street from mine, within easy walking distance.

“Hi Julie, it’s Carissa…I’m sorry to bother you but I was wondering, is it okay if I come over and hang out with you guys for a little while? I did something REALLY bad here, I fucked up, I fucked really bad, and I can’t be here right now, it’s really bad, I have to get out of here…”

“Yeah, yeah, no problem, that’s fine. Mikey’s here right now too. We’ll all hang out.”

As an add on that’s kind of funny in retrospect that I could just…..call her up out of nowhere saying something like that and she in turn would just roll with it and remain nonchalant. But you would have to have known Julie to understand. Just the most chill, laid back, nonchalant, wry/sardonic chick you could imagine. Nothing ever fazed this girl. No matter what was happening she dealt with it with that eye rolling, sardonic humor. Coping mechanism, basically. She’d learned long ago to give up getting stressed about life because it didn’t matter anyway. Besides, that’s what alcohol was for. (She’d been through the absolute ringer in life. Plus, she was schnockered on wine half the time anyway, same as me. But it means she had an “it’s all good” attitude about most anything.)

Julie and I technically first met when we were both Juniors in high school, but then became friends in our Senior year when we were sitting next to each other in Psychology class. The whole reason we became friends in the first place was because we were the only two chicks that we knew of who were in the same messed up life situations; both having bad levels of different types of abuse in our background, and then both of us on our own, supporting our own selves, with no parents/family or help while all the other kids at school still lived at home. (Her abuse involved full on rape/molestation, and from more than one source; She’d lived with her aunt and uncle since the age of 13, due to her mom passing away and her dad bailing out when she was young. But since her Aunt’s husband wouldn’t stop molesting her she finally moved herself out on her own at 17, in 11th grade.)

So she’d already been at the whole “living on her own” thing since 11th grade, a full year before me. She was the old pro by the time it happened to me. Interesting that life put us right next to each other in the same class at the same time. The only class we ever had together, and during the time period when I was now out on my own, and needing to find somebody who was in the same boat who could relate and provide any useful tips.

Julie once mused about both of our “places” at school as “There’s the jocks, the cheerleaders, the (this group, that group, another group…another group….just started ticking off the different cliques/groups of kids in our SoCal highschool, which I don’t even remember by this point, but which was very different from the cliques we had in my old school back in Connecticut…….and which I very much DO remember all these years later……..) And then…….there’s us. We’re just here, because we have to be.” So true. That last part I will NEVER forget.

Even though I never told Julie outright she could tell how I felt about things. I viewed school as this literal prison I was stuck in, and couldn’t wait to be done with, ASAP. Since I didn’t transfer in until 11th grade I therefore wasn’t part of any “groups,” didn’t join any clubs, and in general didn’t connect with or identify with our school. I had nothing personal against the school itself, it was a million times better than the one I’d gone to back in Connecticut. But I didn’t identify with it. I also wasn’t doing anything to prep for college, because I knew I wasn’t going. And my friends were a total random hodge podge, but definitely included girls who’d been beat up on in life. Julie wasn’t the only one. Funny how we all gravitated to each other. :/

Highschool for me was just this childish nonsense that was holding me back in life. I went because I had to, by law, in between working….which was what I actually enjoyed. Since 13, when I went into business for myself. But I just wanted to be out there, already on my own, working and taking care of myself. It’s all I ever wanted since 9 years old. So let me OUT already, let me get GOING with it all. I’m too old for this shit. It’s like taking a 40 year old and forcing them to be back in high school.

After graduation during the summer of ’93 Julie and I ran into each other one afternoon at Taco Bell, total fluke. And where I learned she was now married…..and about six weeks pregnant….and homeless. She was living with her now husband Jeremy, whom she’d only married weeks before, along with his puppy in her car at O’Neill Regional Park/campgrounds.

As soon as I heard that though…….? “You REALLY should come stay with me…..”

I told Julie and Jeremy about the guesthouse I was renting from my then-boyfriend K___’s parents. Mainly because Julie was pregnant. If she hadn’t been I wouldn’t have be so insistent. But this was now a full blown SITUATION. Living in a car/in a tent in the middle of the blazing hot southern California summer, while pregnant, without proper food storage/cooking facilities to eat decent meals?? Are you freaking kidding me??? No.

So Julie and Jeremy moved in with me for several months until she could get things sorted out. But now with a roof over her head, A/C, kitchen w/ full refrigerator and stove/oven, a full bathroom and access to a free washer and dryer. Jeremy had just turned 19 in June, same as her, and was a total fucknut (a June 8th Gemini year of the 1974 Tiger) since her inner compass/gauge for judging guys was completely screwed up. He wound up briefly in jail for something by the end of the pregnancy, so no surprise that they didn’t last. But her daughter Katelyn was born in March of ’94….though Jeremy later refused to admit that the kid was his, even though she looked like him. Then bailed out of California entirely for Arizona, spending years playing “dodge the child support” by continually quitting jobs and bouncing around to evade the child support authorities who wanted to garnish his checks.

What was funny was that Julie and I looked so much alike that my then-boyfriend K____ said that from a distance he couldn’t tell us apart. Nearly same height and weight, same clothes, same long blondish red hair (hers was natural, mine was dyed), same dark brown eyes. She was part Native American, giving her that “something ethnic” factor, while I had the Italian. Even the astrologies were near identical, with her being the Water sign Cancer sun, Earth sign Virgo moon, Year of the 1974 Tiger, and me being the Water sign Scorpio sun, Earth sign Virgo moon, Year of the 1974 Tiger. Like me Julie wasn’t religious/spiritual at that time, but also like me was actually pretty psychic/intuitive. (Water signs – Scorpio, Cancer, Pisces – pretty much always are.) And both of us had the same “simultaneously feminine yet no-nonsense tomboyish” vibe. Which means we were both mellow/low key……..but tough, fearless and kind of crazy in how we were living our respective lives. We were not operating like typical girls. We’d both been left hanging out to dry in life, bouncing around, wayward and on our own, making it up as we went along, getting into crazy adventures and situations as a result. (Me moreso though…..WAY moreso…..)

Julie and I both initially came across as harmless, but we both knew how to take charge. Which means, push either one of us too far and….watch out. O.o Like most of the hodge podge friends I had in high school Julie was a shitkicker. We all were in our own ways. We had to be.

Any guys that were into Julie usually also were into me as well, so we wound up with at least one boyfriend in common. (My ex Steve, mentioned briefly in this piece; Julie and Steve had a casual thing during ’94-‘95, but he and I wound up as full fledged boyfriend and girlfriend, living together for years, and now recently broken up right when “The Vortex” started.) As well as a guy named Cliff that I’d been friends with and had a flirtation with at 16/17 years old in ’91 before even meeting Julie. Several years after that he became Julie’s serious live-in boyfriend for at least two years, and substitute dad for her daughter Katelyn. I’ll never forget that moment in 12th grade psych class where once again Julie was laughing about her boyfriend Jeremy’s friend Cliff, who went to a neighboring school. Cliff this, Cliff that…….this Cliff guy was always up to antics. And it sounded IDENTICAL to the Cliff I’d met and briefly knew the year before. Frowning I asked her “Is his name Cliff H____?” She looked back at me, shocked. “Yeah…..how’d you know??” I burst out laughing. “OH MY GOD! I KNOW HIM!!!!” I proceeded to tell her how I knew him, which I’m not going to even get into here.

Julie liked to joke about this guy “overlap” thing, finding it amusing. So there we were on Easter Sunday ’95, as I found myself hanging out with Julie on that day and being invited to dinner by the people she rented a room from, along with Julie’s new boyfriend……..Cliff. All three of us were 20, born between ’74-75, and had no real family to speak of. Three orphans, basically. Abused and let down and abandoned by the parents who were supposed to be there for us, but weren’t. So it was fitting we were all together. (Cliff’s situation was so bad he’d been removed from his parents at nine, and placed in foster care for a period of time. He still had all these scars on his body from what they’d done to him, cigarette burns, healed over cuts, etc. which he showed me back when we first knew each other at 16/17. Abused kids always find their way to each other. “Stay with your own kind.” Truly.)

So as we all sat around the table Cliff and I had a moment where we looked at each other and he grinned shyly, marveling to me that here we were……reunited, four years later, and somehow sitting next to each other at Easter dinner of all things. We both agreed that this was massively surreal. He was truly somebody I never imagined I’d run into again, considering the bizarre circumstances of where/how we knew each other in the first place back when we were 16/17………and also being that we hadn’t even gone to the same school. So, yeah….it was crazy that we even met at all in the first place at 16 back in ’91. So in some ways you could say we shouldn’t have even crossed paths years ago….but we did. And now here we were…..crossing paths again in ’95, against the astronomical odds.

The universe felt we needed to know each other, for whatever reason. “Carissa, this is Cliff….Cliff, this is Carissa…..welcome to 1991!” um…okay…..so, yeah, I mean, we both like each other…….but now what? “Nothing….just wanted you to meet and hang out for a short bit and “LIKE EACH OTHER.” We’ll have you meet again in ’94 when Cliff has to go to a DMV-mandated traffic school, being held on a Saturday morning, at the same hotel you’ll find yourself working at as a front desk clerk. He’ll hang out with you at the front desk whenever he’s on break, giving you his phone number on a Post-It note. But you don’t end up calling because you know you’re completely incompatible, despite how attractive he is to you. Then we’ll have you meet up again in ’95, just for the hell of it, when he’s now dating your friend. And that’ll be that, forever.” ummm….okey dokey….!

Once out of high school neither Julie or I went to college (technically I did actually cave in and tried community college twice, but dropped out both times, couldn’t deal with the whole “sitting still and being forced to learn b.s. I have no interest in” thing). Julie and I both worked low rung jobs; me at a spate of hostessing/waitressing/cocktailing gigs, as well as a hotel as front desk clerk, and she at places like Builder’s Emporium (a mom ‘n pop equivalent of Home Depot back in the day in Mission Viejo) and The Wherehouse. (Big time SoCal music store back in the day, back when they actually still sold tapes.) But we’d both managed to work our way up in life. So during the “Vortex” time period of 2000 we were now both working at nice office jobs. More things in common, considering there’s a whole world out of there of money making possibilities. We’d both started out as equals at the bottom, working equivalent low level retail/service jobs, and were now exactly equal equivalents during this time period as respective office chicks.

Julie’s day jobs were always mortgage-industry specific, since her aunt had given her a piece of advise that she adhered to religiously – Get yourself into the mortgage industry [which she herself worked in] and you’ll have a job for life. So Julie took that advise to heart. When Julie had enough of making $4-6 an hour at bullshit low rung jobs she found herself an entry level office job at a mortgage company, as an underwriter, and began working her way up from there, always staying within the mortgage industry. (Same as me, Julie also presented well despite the crazy background, so had no trouble landing and keeping jobs. You’d never know by looking at either of us that things were SERIOUSLY askew behind the scenes. Unlike a lot of girls from troubled or rough backgrounds who look it on the exterior, with their clothing styles, crazy hair dyed crazy colors, piercings all over their face and body, tats, etc., we didn’t have any of that. Neither one of us even wore makeup, mostly because we didn’t have any quality female influences that would have showed us how….though being real, we didn’t need it anyway. We were both in our prime with naturally youthful good looks. But the “no makeup” thing was another way in which we looked alike.)

And it turned out Julie also now had an all black cat during this Vortex time period…..same as me. The only pet both of us had. And now we were living right down the street from each other, within walking distance…..and not the first time this had happened to us in life, and the odds of which are astronomical. But back in ’94 it turns out we were both renting rooms in condos in the same exact complex in Aliso Viejo, off off Alicia Parkway, which is how we became reunited once again after not seeing each other since the summer of ’93.

In the seven years since we’d graduated I’d lived all over north and south Orange County, and even spent a brief period of time back in Connecticut during the summer of ’95 after driving across the country with my then-boyfriend Gary. (Julie, along with a couple of coworkers of mine from two different jobs, wanted me to send postcards as we traveled so they could live vicariously. So I did, keeping in touch from all the major cities along the way……..Vegas, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, etc.) So considering that neither of us were even from Rancho, and considering just how ginormous Orange County is (about the size of Rhode Island roughly, in terms of total land area) and considering all my unstable/cuckoo travels and life adventures then it really is…….a little weird that we wound up right next to each other in life, in Rancho Santa Margarita. Yet AGAIN. Started out right next to each other in 12th grade Psych class, and years later…………still right next to each other, oddly enough, in a county of 5 million people.

And it had also happened back in ’98. Julie wound up living in the same exact apartment complex as me and Steve, in Lake Forest, despite the ridiculously large number of apartment complexes available all around south Orange County. Which is how she and I wound up spending 4th of July ’98 together, with her newest “boyfriend” Joe. Who was one of Cliff’s friend’s. Julie and Cliff had now broken up, and at this particular point she had literally ten guys going at once O.o including this Joe dude. So there Julie and I were in Joe’s giant modified old pickup truck thing with the scuffed up paint job and no muffler, blasting Gwar, driving through the streets of south Orange County, as he continually tossed lit M80’s out the window, exploding on the streets as we headed to the fireworks show. :D Between the no muffler and Gwar and the exploding M80’s it was deafening in that pickup cab. Julie had literally begged me to come along with her and keep her company, so I did.

Life would keep taking us in different directions. But then we’d keep crossing paths, again and again and again. It was nuts.

And there’s even more stuff “in common” that Julie and I shared, but which I can’t even get into publicly. But it’s a very nutso spiderweb, is the only way to put it. Everything that happened to me post-1994, every friend/boyfriend who was in my life in SoCal, and any crazy adventures that came about as a result of any of those friendships and relationships, either traces directly back to Julie, or connects to her in some way. Every last thing. And even though we weren’t hanging out together for that entire time. Even the aforementioned boyfriend Gary. Despite Gary being from Buena Park, about 25 miles away in north Orange County and seeming like the last person who could possibly be connected to Julie, he was only one degree of separation from her. Again, in a county of 5 million people. Gary and I had a mutual friend named Paul, whom went to high school with Julie and I in south O.C., and whom I became buddies with since we had two classes together……and Paul briefly “went out” with Julie for a couple of days. But………it was actually because I was casual buddies with Paul, the guy who briefly “dated” Julie, that I indirectly wound up even crossing paths with Gary later, after graduation, in the first place……..through another guy named Mike (that I full on dated), from south Orange County, but who was friends with Gary, from north Orange County. Who I also dated……and who became one of the most important people ever to be in my life. O.o (I describe the Gary situation in more detail in my Astrology write up, which is linked on my home page.) So in some bizarre, indirect way that makes absolutely no sense, I owe Gary to Julie.

Julie and I would finally part ways in life as friends for good in mid-2001, because we’d just gotten so completely opposite in vibes. Mainly just the way she was living her life in general. She lived in south O.C. suburbia, worked full time and had a nice apartment, while always driving a new leased VW Jetta. So it all looked good on the surface. She’d come a LONG way since that summer of ’93, no doubt. She was now doing WAY better than me, no thanks to my brother Joe. But her behavior was emotionally stunted/toxic, unable to mature and progress. The whole “constant cheating and endless fighting” dynamic in particular with every single guy she was ever with, was a HUGE problem to always have to hear about. And her current boyfriend Dave being no exception. She craved conflict like normal people need oxygen.

In particular she loved the idea of being able to cheat on Dave right under his nose. As well as having guys lined up waiting on the sidelines, “just in case.” Then bragging about how she would get drunk almost every night with Dave (he himself was a full fledged Scorpio alcoholic, a VERY specific stereotype I get into in that aforementioned Astrology writeup….. ) and pick fights with Dave just for fun, and how these fights would go on for hours. (energy vampire alert….)

And meanwhile I was just….not like that. To put it mildly. AT all. My idea of fun was being by myself. Hanging out in bookstores, libraries, or writing, writing, writing……either in my notebooks at the freight train tracks of north Orange County and south L.A. in the middle of the night. (Literally…..sitting ON the train tracks…….and literally, in South Central L.A. where all those gansta rap songs go on about. ;D ) One of my truly literally all time coolest life memories is from there. At the huge train track interchange of the very industrial City of Commerce, in south Central, under the orange street lights….sitting on the far right side of the I-5 freeway overpass. Vans sneakers feet dangling, backpack on, in the middle of the night. The Los Angeles city skyline lit up behind me to my diagonal north/left. Watching hundreds of cars rush by underneath me in the middle of the night. The same skyline that I had tacked up on my bulletin board in a postcard image back in rural Eastern Connecticut in 1990. Now I was there, for real, years later. ~2 am, soaking it all in, psychically and physically. Wondering if any of them even see me, off to the far left as they travel north. A small body, just sitting there, legs and feet dangling. Contemplating life.)

And I just got sick of hearing about Julie’s stupid shit all the time. Childish and tiresome broken record. She’s a mom, with a six/seven year old. Time to grow the fuck up already. And yeah….it became a problem to be hanging out with her and Dave, knowing what she was doing on the side with other guys which he had no idea about.

And yeah, Julie was definitely a bad mother in a million different ways to Katelyn. She was always nice to her, but seemed to have an inability to be truly connected to/bonded with her. I never saw her pick Katelyn up once and hold her or cuddle her. Nothing. Just weary, far away and disconnected. Meanwhile as Katelyn was basically raised by others for the first couple years of her life. (Namely the landlords that Julie was renting a room from in the mid-90s, this couple named Mike and Sandy. Different Mike though from our mutual friend Mike. Katelyn spent most of her time with them, but mostly Sandy, while Julie was either working. But also out partying, and hooking up with guy after guy after guy after guy after guy.)

On that aforementioned Easter Sunday in ’95 when Julie, Cliff and I were hanging out all afternoon, then arrived back to the place where Julie was renting a room, we walked into the kitchen, where Sandy was cooking. Sandy had Katelyn set up in a playpen while she cooked. Katelyn began smiling and bouncing up and down while holding onto the edge of the playpen as soon as she saw Julie enter the room after being gone for hours. Meanwhile as Julie just smiled at Katelyn in her playpen…..in this kind of wary/weary way from the other side of the room. Acted like she was looking at somebody else’s kid, a total stranger….then left the room. O.o Didn’t even go over to say hi, give her a hug, kiss or cuddle.

(That’s crazy to think back on, as I simultaneously hold an image of a 27/28 year old Katelyn in my mind from 2021-22, on her Facebook. Full CosPlay makeup, dyed blue-green hair, fully see-through CosPlay outfits showing off large C/D-cup size [making it “obscene”] breasts, same as Julie’s, and nipples covered by upside down crosses………face looking like the exact spitting image of her mom Julie in her teens and 20s. With the makeup Katelyn turned out stunningly good looking. All of her social media posts are of her done up in her Goth-y CosPlay getups with the full makeup and looking like a professional print model. Always with the cool clothes and makeup that we didn’t have, because we were poor with no female influences. And I admit, my pushing-50, mostly conservative self is a tad :/ disappointed, though completely not surprised, at how Katelyn turned out. Upside down crosses?? Pentagrams are one thing, but upside down crosses are a whole other thing, an actual “anti Jesus”/“I Hate Jesus” statement. And yet there’s 100% understanding, because like with my brother Joe, I was there before she was even conceived. I knew the shitstorm her mother was dealing with. Then during the pregnancy, then the years after her birth. So I know. I was there. I was a witness. She didn’t stand a chance being raised by Julie.)

By the time Katelyn was four, when Julie and Cliff were now broken up, Katelyn had seen an endless parade of guys come and go. Julie would brag about how smart Katelyn was that she could keep all their names straight. At only four. O.o (During that particular conversation it was ten different guys that she was rotating through that Katelyn was able to keep straight. Julie was the complete by-product of molestation/rape. It often results in out of control sexual behavior. And I’m thinking it started before her uncle, since she once mentioned offhand in her typical wry, sardonic “laugh everything off” way back in 12th grade that “my mom tried to sell me to the old guy down the street when I was nine.” O.o So there was a lot more to that sexual abuse story.)

So that was really hard to watch on the sidelines as well, having been on the receiving end of that kind of indifference from my own “mother,” who also never picked us up and cuddled me and Joe, and usually wanted nothing to do with being around us. Julie was 19 when she had Katelyn. My “mom” was 21 when she had me. That’s the common denominator. Too young. And from a fucked up background, including molestation, parental death and abandonment, life upheaval and instability, and with zero family support on top of it. Same template, repeating in two different females, decades apart. Already permanently damaged/can’t be fixed by the time they reach legal adulthood. Damaged kids having kids. Same template. If our “mom” could have had somebody else care for me and Joe the way Julie had with Sandy and Mike taking care of Katelyn, she totally would have, in a heartbeat. Would have dumped us off with somebody else and never looked back. As it is she spat at me when I was 17/18 that she would have undid me and Joe’s existences if she could. So…….you know……………

The very first time I ever met our mutual friend Mike, who was just mentioned, it involved us….babysitting Katelyn together when she was only a few months old, while Julie ran off to go meet up with Jeremy who was newly out of jail and see about “reconciling” maybe. And in that instance Julie never picked Katelyn up nor interacted with her either, before happily bailing out and leaving Katelyn to me and Mike. The situation with the other Mike, and Sandy, acting as the primary babysitters/caretakers of Katelyn, eventually did come to a head as people reading can imagine, where Julie refused to hear any of their concerns, and felt that they were overstepping and trying to take over her life……leading to her abruptly moving out. So the primary caregivers of Katelyn’s entire short life abruptly disappeared overnight for her. Same as Cliff, when they broke up. Cliff had even started telling people who didn’t know that Katelyn was his daughter, because he’d bonded to her and wanted to be a dad. Then overnight he was out of the picture, never to see her again. Is it any wonder she wound up with pics of her online at almost 30 years old dressed hardcore Goth, like a teen, with blue green hair and upside down crosses covering her exposed tits.

When me and our friend Mike were visiting Julie and Dave though we’d always play with Katelyn. I never liked doing the whole “everybody sits around on the patio drinking and/or smoking and having mundane grown up chat” while Katelyn is inside by herself, being ignored. I always wanted to be hanging out with kids. Way more fun and full of energy and enthusiasm for the world. So I’d be running around giving Katelyn piggyback rides, or Mike and I would bail out on the “drinking/smoking patio chat” and take Katelyn down to the apartment complex playground so she could have fun. When Katelyn would see me and Mike her face would always light up….since we were the fun adults that actually paid attention to her. Mike and I were ourselves just overgrown kids, mature and responsible in the ways that mattered, but very kid-like at the same time. One of my all time fave life memories – and I’m not kidding when I say all time LIFE memories – is all three of us down at the playground, sitting on these little animal things that are mounted on springs, so they bounce up and down and move back and forth. Mike was whipping back and forth on his, and Katelyn was laughing hysterically, then she and I started whipping back and forth as well on our spring-mounted animals, all three of us just being silly and laughing and laughing, the way 6/7 year olds love, meanwhile as the “grownups” were back at the patio smoking and drinking and having stupid conversation.

But during this particular time period, which was now late 2000, Julie was still in my life, and we had been talking about some of the paranormal stuff happening in my apartment. In particular we’d email each other during the day while at our respective office jobs, talking about all kinds of random things. Including the one time she emailed me with nothing but “Tell me a story.” ;D Julie loved my weird tales of strangeness about what was going on in the apartment, and it helped keep her amused while she was at her boring mortgage company job.

Not unlike my website now does for people I’m sure. Same thing, MUCH bigger scale. Hence, why I could just call her up randomly, saying something really bizarre, and she’d just be like, “Yeah, sure, come on over, Mikey’s here too.” She was already familiar with the whole situation, and again…..nothing really fazed her anyway.

We hung up, I grabbed my Vans skater shoes (literally, boys size 5 skater shoes :D ) my backpack, and bailed out. I left my light on, my radio going, my door open, I didn’t care, I just bailed, leaving everything as is, trying to get out of there as soon as I could. I stopped by Joe’s open doorway and told him I had to go, I screwed up and did some really bad shit in my room, and I was going to go to Julie’s. !!!! And I practically ran out the door, into the night.

It was easy to get to Julie’s apartment because it was only about a half mile away maybe at most, as mentioned earlier. And the streets were calm and empty as they usually are in sprawling south Orange County suburbia at night. I arrived at her unit and hung out with her, Dave, and our old friend Mike in the living room. I’ll get back to the story of Mike in a moment. Katelyn, who was five and a half by that point, was asleep in her room.

Dave had heard that I had some weird things going on in my apartment, but he didn’t know any specifics. He wanted to hear what exactly was going on. Sounding skeptical. Not because he didn’t believe in the paranormal – it was quite the opposite, he was a firm believer. And because of the fact he believed in the paranormal it made him feel like he was an expert on the subject. He wanted to see what exactly I considered to be “paranormal.” I could tell by his attitude that he seemed to think that he was the expert on all this, and I was just some stupid girl, only thinking I had supernatural stuff happening. It was obvious he thought I probably had some really lame shit happening, and I blowing it all out of proportion and just being hysterical, wanting attention.

After about fifteen minutes of me rehashing some of my stories of what we’d been going through in that place, mainly, me and Joe’s attack stories, he went from pacing about the living room looking skeptical and dismissive, to sitting on the floor hanging on my every word, absolutely fascinated. His tone of voice went from cocky and skeptical, to really??? Whoa…..

Julie was silent during my stories, sitting on the couch holding onto a pillow with scrunched brows. At first I thought it was because she didn’t believe me and thought I was a freak. She explained that it was actually because I was “scaring the shit out of her,” and that she “hates this kind of stuff.” (truly the first time I ever saw her get fazed by something. !!) And Mike listened attentively too, next to me, staring straight ahead into the air, focused while I spoke. Going from looking objective and nonplussed, to having furrowed brows, and looking concerned.

I never even got the chance to tell everybody what had just happened earlier, prompting my visit in the first place. We got so sidetracked on the other stories I was telling, and with Dave talking about his beliefs on the matter, that we just didn’t get a chance to get into it. Before I left, Dave gave me a book from his collection, called “Seth Speaks” by Jane Roberts. He told me that I really should read this book, because from what I’ve been telling him, a lot of what I have happening is mentioned in the book. I skimmed the first few pages, as everybody around me talked, and realized it was a book done by a woman who claims to have channeled this entity named Seth.

Channeling.

I don’t think so.

I was skeptical of the book, and told Dave, “Yeah, you know, I don’t believe in this channeling shit. I think it’s just people’s overactive imaginations…”

“No, no, just give it a chance. I’m telling you, it’s a really good book. Just try it out. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. But I think you will. She gets into some of the same stuff you’ve been talking about. Hey, it doesn’t hurt to give it a chance, right?”

“Okay.” He was right. It wouldn’t hurt to skim it. He was pretty good at convincing me.

Me and Mike left at 10 pm, because Julie and Dave had to go to bed. I had the book with me.

Mike drove me back to my apartment, so I wouldn’t have to walk. But I didn’t go in right away. I sat with him in his car and talked with him about everything for an hour and a half. Til 11:30. Keeping in mind that Mike and I were literally BFFs, again, courtesy of meeting through Julie back in ’94. So this situation makes complete sense. From the first moment Mike and I met on the night we wound up babysitting Katelyn together it was like I’d known him forever, and all my walls went down. Something pretty rare for me at that time, since I was always on guard with people, with all my walls up. But with Mike it was truly like I’d known the guy my entire life from our first five minutes of meeting, something I’ve never experienced with anybody else before, or since. It wasn’t just a matter of “being comfortable” with him. It was like I knew him already. There’s a difference. But it’s why I felt comfortable enough to stick around and help babysit instead of bailing out. So something that could have just been a one-off meeting, hanging out that one time to babysit Julie’s kid and never hanging out again went on to become its own years-long friendship, including me crashing on his floor for months, his invite, when I was homeless and needed a place to stay, then becoming one of his full on roommates from ’95-‘97, and completely independent of Julie.

Mike was three years older than me and Julie, born in ’71. Our situation was always platonic though, I viewed him like a literal brother, and meanwhile from Day 1 of us meeting he was hopelessly in love with Julie, for years….which she was well aware, and took full advantage of. She hooked up with him a few times to get him reeled in and permanently hanging on the line for years after, always toying with him….and especially when she had boyfriends. That’s where it got fun for her, in a very mindful, manipulative way. She had a thing with needing to know that there were multiple guys all in love with her and/or lined up waiting, wanting her. That was her deal. And guys actually physically fighting over her?! Oooooohhhh….she couldn’t get enough of that. (eye roll.) But with Mike and I there was never any weird dynamic between us like that, even though yes, he was also physically attracted to me when we met. I knew it at the time, but I also knew that he was INTO Julie, so I didn’t take it seriously and just waved it off. The very first time I showed up to the guys’ house, his invite, where he was roommating with all the guys – my soon to be future roommates – I went upstairs as directed and found Mike in a state, leaning against his dresser drawers like “ ! :( ! “ because Julie was downstairs flirting with Steve (my future mega serious, years-long live-in boyfriend, unbeknownst to me ;D ) So I was like Heeeeey…..how’s it going….seeing the state he was in and hearing his explanation for it, then proceeding to try to distract him, lure him away from his own thoughts and cheer him up, “look at me….focus on me Mike…..look at me….let’s go find fun things to do…..” ;D )

So while it was a case of “Yeah, he’d bang you in a second if you said yes…….but he’s IN LOVE WITH Julie, so don’t take it seriously.” Which is why I never did. Just because a guy would bang you doesn’t mean it means anything. I knew that even at 21, don’t ask me how, but I just did. I was just as attractive as Julie, but Julie was the one that actually tortured him, the love object, but not actual friend, whereas I was the one to go places with and have fun with, the one who he considered an actual friend. The first person you reach out to when you have exciting news to share, or are bored and want to go out and do something. Being that role to a straight guy as a super cute straight, charismatic female in her prime was a pride and joy achievement. Anybody can be the lust/love object. But not everybody can become THE #1 GO-TO FRIEND and source of comfort, reassurance and fun, and in such a short time period. Both a source of intellectual stimulation and feminine comfort. And there was absolutely no doubt that I became that for Mike from the moment we first met, for anecdotes I’m not even sidetracking into here.

It was later confirmed to me by a very psychic acquaintance named Leslie who tuned into the situation that Mike was a “higher density walk in,” something I’d already guessed based on the million indicators he exhibited, but which I never mentioned to her. Leslie went on to note that Mike and I “went WAY back.” (One of the big reasons I knew Mike was a walk in, besides the fact that he said he doesn’t remember the first eight years of his life, and life began for him at age eight when he woke up in the hospital with a leg broken in three places, surrounded by “family” that he didn’t know……I’d never met anybody else so uncomfortable and unhappy in a physical body as Mike. O.o Dude was NOT cut out for physicality, and was always complaining about it. I realized after the fact though. I had all the same complaints he had and was exactly the same in that regard…I just complained about it way less. :D But neither one of us seemed to enjoy being here, especially with all the limitations there were. Can’t fly. Can’t move objects with your mind. Can’t have automatic telepathy all the time. Have to eat. Have to “maintain a body!” Nobody else around us seemed to have these problems. Everybody else was all like, “OH MY GOD! FOOD!!!!” and meanwhile me and Mike were begrudgingly eating because we “had to” and couldn’t care less about anything to do with food, the entire idea annoying both of us. Even showering annoyed him. He did it, every day, but thought it was such a complete and total annoying waste of time. Same here. And then due to Mike’s inability to ever seem to get the hang of having to navigate the world in a human suit, always bumping into everything, I bought him a card one time at Urban Outfitters that had a bandaged up ‘Mr. Bump’ on it , from those childhood “Mr. and Mrs.” books we all read. He kept that card taped up on his wall, next to various other things I gave him. One of which included a sample of the metallic blue and metallic purple gift wrap papers that I’d used to wrap his three favorite books from childhood that I’d hunted down for him, which also included a gift tag with a quote from some Oasis song lyrics. I love how when I gave him the books gift he held up the wrapped package, smiling, trying to determine what it was….then used his psychic abilities to determine that not only was it books, but which books it was. ;) Kind of took the fun out of the surprise on one hand, but also made it super cool on the other, because he was demonstrating his psychic abilities and how in tune we both were with each other.

But Mike was absolutely instrumental in my survival in life in general post ’95. Despite me giving it 200% at all times and always working multiple jobs, it just wasn’t enough. South O.C. is insanely expensive, even back in the 90s. So were it not for him and everything he voluntarily did for me to fill in those gaps when 200% just wasn’t enough I wouldn’t be where I am today. (And I never asked for any of it. But he always insisted. Partly because I would never ask, and tried to do it all myself.) I’d slept on his floor for three months when I needed a place to stay in late ’95, his invite. Then was invited by Steve, the leader of the house, to become one of the official roommates once their other roommate Dave moved out in ’96 and his room became available.

It’s funny how Julie lived with me for a few months in ’93 until she could get herself sorted out, and now it was my turn. This time helped by a close friend of Julie’s. If I hadn’t stepped in and insisted on helping Julie, and thus kept our contact going post-graduation, then I wouldn’t have later met Mike, who in turn helped me when I had literally nobody else. Mike loved to mention this factoid when introducing me to his friends whom I hadn’t yet met. “This is Carissa……she used to sleep on my floor.” He just thought that was a funny way to get a conversation going.

The guy roommate situation was initially Mike, Steve, Todd, a guy named Dave (not Julie’s later boyfriend Dave, a totally different Dave) and some guy named Jason when I first met Mike. With this chick named Daylene who was Steve’s casual girlfriend (mentioned more in depth in my Astrology write up) and would sleep over and use the house facilities. She wanted to be a full time girlfriend and be invited to live in the house, but he refused to do it because he didn’t feel the same. Steve and Mike (along with Todd) knew each other since grade school, and basically grew up together. Then it became me, Mike, Steve and Todd, along with a part time fifth roommate named James who sometimes crashed on the couch. Until Steve and I became a full on thing, moved out and got our own place together. Steve’s prompting, not mine. Once we became a thing Steve wanted us out of the house within only months, so he could have me on guaranteed lockdown I guess would be a way to put it. Just me and him, no other guys around. Very primitive/anthropological. ;) And even though Mike and I weren’t roommates anymore by that point we still did pretty much everything together, often times along with Steve. Kind of like the Three Muskateers. Mike and I though were all about getting into adventures and just having fun.

The other major important thing worth noting, and which comes into play with this particular “vortex” adventure, was how insanely psychic Mike was. I’ve described him as the most accidentally psychic person I’ve ever known, as opposed to those who actively try to hone their skills and use them to make money. Too many stories to sidetrack into in depth, but it was just next level with us, like nothing I’ve ever experienced with anybody else. Part of him “being there for me” was the way he always kept a “psychic ear out for me,” which is the only way to explain it. So there were times when he knew when something bad was going down in my personal reality, and would just……show up, and bail me out. We also had an issue where he said my “loud thoughts” would bleed over onto his, “like a radio.”

But Mike and I were so in tune and in each other’s heads all the time that it just got to where he hardly ever had to complete a sentence. He could just be like, “You remember that time when….” “Yup,” I’d nod, immediately knowing what he was referring to, and then tell him. “You remember that chick we met at….” “Yup….” “You remember that guy that one time….” “Yup…” Which was funny considering just how much stuff we’d done/places we’d gone/people we’d crossed paths with. But I always knew exactly what person/life adventure anecdote he was thinking about. Even the time he came home marveling about some awesome song he’d just heard on the radio in his car, but had no idea what it was. Without him even trying to hum or sing any of it I just immediately knew as I listened to him rave about it, with my mind blanked out/relaxed……“Solsbury Hill, by Peter Gabriel,” I said. Then proceeded to sing/hum it to him. “YES!!!!! THAT’S IT!!!!! OH MY GOD!!!!! HOW DID YOU KNOW?!?!” he said. :) I just did. Or the time he stumbled into his apartment after having waking surgery with mild sedatives, feeling dizzy and nauseous as he flopped down on his bed, thinking about how he wanted to call me at work and tell me all about it. Meanwhile there I am at work, heading back to the switchboard from the kitchen……suddenly dizzy and nauseous out of nowhere, something I never experience. I practically fell into my seat at the reception desk from the dizziness, feeling sick in my stomach, answering the ringing switchboard only to hear Mike’s stoned voice on the other line. “heeeeeyyyyyyyyy…….!” he said, laughing. Totally felt everything he was feeling in that moment when he was in the process of reaching out to me. It just goes on and on though, all the psychic phenomenon we experienced over the years.

All in all Mike was the only person I’ve ever actually truly “Functioned As One” with, in my entire life, because our minds were just so in tune/in synch. No boyfriend ever came close to this day, no matter how psychic I may have been with those boyfriends and no matter how long I may have been with them. I find it crazy that the one guy I could truly function as One with, our minds completely plugged in and in synch, wasn’t able to be a boyfriend, because it just wasn’t like that. There was only one time in the entire time I knew him, when he was 24 and I was 21, where I was looking at him from across the room as roommates, when he was wearing his mechanics coveralls, mussed up from working on his car, and in that moment saw him as hot/attractive in that kind of-ish way, which is why I remember it. But that was it. It was fleeting and unable to stick. But I remember trying to make it stick, see if I could get this to work in that kind of way, since we were so insanely connected, which would make it to so convenient and perfect. But it didn’t. He never knew. If we could have been boyfriend-girlfriend, on top of functioning as One, I can’t even imagine what that would be like. It’s like it’s not even allowed, because the universe would explode or something. ;D “You can either be best friends plugged into each other as One at will when desired, or be boyfriend-girlfriend, but you can’t be both.”

But as far as the “psychic ear” thing goes, the best incident worth mentioning, since it’s paranormal/supernatural in nature and is thus a bit fitting for this piece happened back in early ’96, when I was 21. I was roommating with all the guys, and had just “graduated” from crashing on Mike’s floor for the past three months to moving into the room Dave vacated after he moved in with his fiance Jaquie. (Something that did NOT go over well with Steve’s casual “girlfriend”/fuck buddy Daylene as I later learned, because she thought she would have first dibs and be made a roommate. Steve, who was the unofficial leader of the house, skipped over her and offered the room to me, because as I later learned, he was into me from the first time I showed up at the house to hang out on Mike’s invite. Had everything committed to memory – the dress I was wearing, my body, the whole deal. Had no idea at the time, and didn’t even see him in that kind of way. I do remember though that first meeting when Mike was showing me around and we were standing in Steve’s doorway, seeing Steve standing there in his room, looking back at us. Had NO idea “yeah…this dude who’s Julie’s cheating side piece that she wants to be her actual boyfriend is gonna be YOUR future longterm serious live-in boyfriend….” O.o Both Daylene and Julie wanted this guy desperately as their BOYFRIEND!!! and meanwhile the girl who was completely oblivious and disinterested wound up being the one he HAD TO HAVE. But it was that total lack of sexual interest on my part that fueled the desire. I was super cute, friendly, down to Earth, smart, funny, charismatic (as Mike noted) and fun to be around, and super responsible/hardworking, always with multiple jobs, all of which were desirable traits as a potential girlfriend…..but behaved completely asexual. I even dressed like a tomboy once I moved in with the guys. Abandoned my cool/stylish and sexy feminine clothes that I used to wear when I was with my ex Gary for oversized guys’ baggy T-shirts, jeans and boys Vans skater sneakers to better blend in and not be seen as female/sexual. Didn’t work. ;) I was the challenge. And the more time that went on, where I was right under his nose all the time, but not dating any guys, saying no to everybody, just made the whole “I HAVE TO HAVE THAT” worse for him. A challenge. “I’m going to be the one.” And when he finally got it it was like a flag got planted, rubbing it into the other guys’ faces, a triumphant conquest that had been built up in his mind, immediately moving us out of the house and into our own place, lest he risk losing me.)

But one night I was by myself in my room doing my writing, while drinking, and listening to NIN/Pretty Hate Machine by the light of my purple Christmas lights. I could hear the voices of the guys – Mike, Steve and Todd – out in the kitchen, as they hung out talking and laughing at the kitchen table. “Head Like a Hole” was on, and in a very much buzzed trance-like state I was sitting in my rattan chair and singing the lyrics “head like a hole…..black as your soul…..i’d rather die…..then give you control……head like a hole…..black as your soul……i’d rather die…..then give you control…….” to myself.

After a minute or so I suddenly felt a very strong, defined presence behind me, to my right. Just appeared there.

Without thinking I whirled around…..seeing nothing….but feeling it standing there, plain as day. It was as if a real person was there. I eyed the space up and down, then cautiously said “Hey………” Waiting.

After a few seconds there was a knock on my door. I got up, opening it, finding Mike in my doorway.

“Hey…..how’s it going?” he asked, smiling, feigning casual nonchalance.

“It’s going good, yeah…..just hanging out, doing some writing…..”

“Yeah, hey, why don’t you come out, come hang with us,” nodding towards the kitchen. Smiling, keeping it light.

“Um, I don’t know, I’m good…..think I’ll stay in here…….”

His face changed, getting more serious. “How about hanging with us for a bit. Come on…..” Gently commanding me now while nodding with his head again for me to follow him. “Come on…..” again. This wasn’t really a request anymore. More like, You need to get out of your room. NOW.

“Okay…..” I nodded, noticing the look and tone change, thinking about the invisible presence, realizing yeah….he’s probably right…..probably best to get out of here right now…..

After we got out to the kitchen I told him what had just happened in my room, while he nodded knowingly, looking serious. “Yeah, I felt something was really wrong all of a sudden with you, and knew I needed to get you out of there.” He went on to explain that he didn’t know what specifically was wrong….just that something was. Like “danger” level wrong. Not sure what would have happened had Mike not gotten me out of there. I myself had no fear, so he wasn’t picking up on my own emotions. But obviously something negative was about to happen. O.o

But that was Mike, and like I said, if it weren’t for him being in my life throughout my 20s then I wouldn’t have made it.

So as Mike and I hung out in his car I told him more detailed stories of what had been going on in our apartment. But still, I never mentioned the icy chill thing to him, which is important to note, for reasons that will be evident in a moment. We talked about other stuff too, but mostly the supernatural stuff. Finally I admitted that I was too petrified to go back inside. I told him that I had provoked it earlier and fed it and given it just what it wanted, and that if I went in there tonight, it was going to come back.

We both decided to have him come inside with me and do a protection/cleansing meditation with me. He was eager to help, despite the fact he had to get up early for work. Early, as in, 3:30 am. I was surprised about that, but I think it was because his life was so boring and predictable that he welcomed something interesting like this to stir up the schedule, even if it meant it would disrupt his sleep. I mean, nothing ever happened to him that was out of the ordinary anymore. He was also curious about my apartment, and wanted to see if he experienced anything for himself.

So inside we went. As soon as we were through the front door, Joe popped his head out of his room to see what was going on. Which in itself is unusual. Joe normally couldn’t give a shit about anything I did. “Immediately popping out of his room” the second I walk through the door had never happened until this night. I told him what we planned to do……And he became totally obstinate about it. Mike and I went into my room, and I turned on the light, getting things ready for our meditation. Candles, sage sticks……and then Joe came in and sat languidly on my bed, half laying down, and started being arrogant about the whole thing, but in a low key, forced nonchalant way. Saying it wasn’t going to work, why bother, don’t even try to do it, it’s pointless…….

And when that wouldn’t deter me, he flat out started mocking me and making fun of it.

I was thinking, WHAT is his PROBLEM??? Why is he acting like this??? Why is he trying so hard to deter me??? Finally I got so pissed I started yelling at him, just like when we were kids…GET OUT OF MY ROOM!! NOW!!! GET OUT, OKAY??

And just like when we were kids, it didn’t work. He wouldn’t get up and go, just continued to lay there, languidly, with a cocky arrogant attitude, trying to mock me and deter me. Just super bizarre energy coming from him that I’d never seen before. But I kept screaming at him to leave, as Mike looked on, perplexed about the whole deal, until finally Joe did leave. Reluctantly.

“WHAT IS HIS PROBLEM?!?” I demanded. As if poor Mike on the sidelines could provide that answer. :D

Mike shrugged. “I think he knows that you CAN get rid of this stuff. That you ARE strong enough. And he doesn’t want it to stop. He likes this, remember? He’s scared that you’re going to stop it.” (Ran out the door earlier, scared because I’d screwed up, then came back later with reinforcements, ready to combat it head on like the fucking Ghostbusters. ;D )

“Yeah. That’s kind of what I was just thinking.”

That whole incident right there should have tipped me off to some things about Joe, but as usual, I didn’t see things when it came to him. I was too close to the situation.

We got everything set up, turned on the purple Christmas lights instead of the bright obnoxious lamp, lit the candles, lit the sage, and sat down on my floor, Indian Style, eyes closed, to calm my mind and get ready for the task at hand. Considering the distractions I had going on – It was already really late, we both had to get up for work tomorrow, Joe’s attempt to deter me, the fact that I have no real proven experience with being able to meditate, and the power of what I was up against – I was oddly calm and level headed and focused. And determined. I was on a mission. I fully believed in what was happening, and I fully believed that I could do something about it. I was very determined. There was something I wanted more than anything – to be safe – and nothing was going to stop me from getting that. In retrospect whatever was piloting Joe obviously knew this, and hence….his bizarre behavior and mannerisms like I’d never seen before.

Mike took the lit sage stick and began to slowly walk about my room with it, as it burned, moving it in circles in the air.

“I’m just going to walk around and see if I can sense anything, so don’t mind me…”

“Okay…” I continued to sit, up against the closet door, eyes closed, focusing, and determined.

“You know, to be honest, I don’t sense anything,” he said after about thirty seconds. “It doesn’t mean that it’s not happening, it’s just that I can’t perceive it.” His tone of voice was matter of fact, and I could picture him shrugging nonchalantly, like, Oh well. “I haven’t seen or heard anything since we’ve been here.”

I appreciated the honesty. I preferred someone who was neutral and objective over someone who was a sheep…meaning, someone who’s going to get all hysterical and start imagining stuff that’s not there, just because they’re caught up in the moment. That’s why I wanted Mike to help me. He believes in this stuff, he’s open, he’s very “in tune” with things like that. Yet, he’s still neutral and objective and doesn’t just automatically believe something just because you tell him it’s so. He always has to see for himself. He’s not about bandwagons. He was absolutely the most perfect person for this situation.

“Well, I told you, it’s not like the movie Poltergeist where Carol Ann’s room had shit flying around in the air, non-stop,” I joked. “It’s a little more subtle than that.”

I went back to clearing my mind and getting ready. Mike walked about my room, circling the lit sage stick, over my bed, around the whole perimeter of my room, being objective and open to this. Kitty laid low, under the overhang of my bed, watching us with wide eyes.

Mike came back over to the area where my computer was, a few feet from me, and I heard him go,

“uuugggghhhhh!” And shake himself vigorously, as I had done, a few hours earlier.

My eyes shot open.

“What?!” I demanded. I was thinking, Wow, don’t even tell me he just felt the chill…

He stood there, looking confused, shaking the last of whatever it was out of him, looking about the room.

“I just felt this icy cold chill go right through me,” he clenched his fist up against his ribs and stomach, to indicate where he felt it, moving the fist about that whole area. “And it wasn’t a draft either, like on the surface of my skin, I know what THAT feels like. This was different, it went THROUGH me.” He looked about the room. His expression was now one of interest, like, Hmmmm!

“Something’s here, and it doesn’t like me,” he said, getting a mischievous smirk.

I told him about how that had happened to me, earlier this evening. And it was the reason I fled my room, because I knew it was out and about in the room with me, and it was feeding off me and it was going to “get me” now that I had provoked it.

“You think there’s something really here right now?” I tried to re-confirm. I was forever reconfirming over and over the obvious.

“OHH yeah,” he looked about. He sunk down to the floor, Indian style too, next to me. He put the sage stick on the small plate and closed his eyes, to join in.

We sat like that for a bit, in silence. We never talked about what I was actually going to meditate on, it was just sort of understood that it would involve something to do with protection. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t have any fancy, poetically worded spells or incantations to chant. I had to wing it, make it up as I went along. Common sense instinct. I began to imagine a white bubble of protective energy encircling me, picturing myself on my bed, with the ball around me, and then around the whole bed, then extending outwards to encompass the whole room. Envisioning the room as if I were above it, hovering in the air, looking downwards at the bed from the vantage point of my ceiling above my computer. The same vantage point the thing had had when it swooped in on me the night it attacked me.

Then I envisioned myself getting up and walking about the room, still surrounded by this white bubble…

“Whoa, whoa WHOA!….WAIT a minute, HOLD on!…” Mike said, cutting into the silence. He sounded confused and intense.

My eyes opened. “What?” I asked, surprised.

“What were you just thinking?” he asked, slowly and intensely.

“What do you mean?”

“What were you just thinking? Right now? What were you imagining?”

“I was imagining this white bubble of protection around me, you know, and then I imagined I was getting up to move around the room, taking it with me…”

He smiled, and nodded. “Okay, that’s why then. See, I was sitting here, following along with you, and then all of a sudden there was movement. Like you were moving around suddenly, and I was like AH! What are you DOING?? Stop moving around! Okay, well, now I know why. You can’t move around, okay? You have to stay still. Stay in one spot. Imagine the bubble filling up the room, but don’t move around the room. STAY PUT, woman!” he grinned.

“Okay,” I nodded. I was shocked, but not really, that he was able to read my mind like that. As mentioned earlier we had a crazy level psychic connection, and his abilities were next level.

I went back to my meditation. I was expecting it to go the way it had the other time I’d tried to meditate, during my “Out Beasties Out” escapade. It had been difficult, and near impossible for me to remain focused. I had started to fall asleep even, from sitting so still and quiet for so long, which was why in the end I had to resort to talking outloud. I couldn’t do it through focused mind meditation.

But now…It was completely different. Not only was my focus strong and intense, but the longer I focused, the stronger I became. It was like I was rolling downhill, picking up speed and strength along the way. I was on a roll, imagining the white ball, filling the room, seeing it covering the walls, the floor, the ceiling, enclosing my room completely like a white sheet, blocking off my room. I extended it to include my bathroom, all four walls, the ceiling, the floor, and then focused especially on the spot where the entrance above the door was.

I imagined the entrance doorway as a rectangle, and imagined a plug of white protection, covering it. Pushing back the thing. Pushing back everything. Keeping everything out. I imagined as these things were trying and wanting to get in, but sorry, unfortunately, you can’t…it’s closed off…sorry…I’m so sorry…and I picked up more speed, on even more of a roll, now focusing on the It thing itself, doing what I knew would repel it the most…Feeling love and sorrowful feelings of sympathy towards it. And sincerely meaning it, sincerely feeling. And it was so easy to get in that frame of mind, I was on a roll, rolling down the hill, gaining speed and strength. I apologized over and over and over to it for yelling at it earlier, and meant it. I told it that I’m so sorry for whatever happened to make it the way it is, I’m really sorry, I’m sorry, I feel bad for you, but you can’t be in here…I’m sorry…I wish I could help you, I wish I could fix it, whatever it is, that’s making you this way, but I can’t, and you have to go…you can’t be in here…I’m sorry…And I envisioned pushing it back through then entrance, hugging it as I did, truly feeling bad for this thing, and its plight, and then closing off the entrance. With that plug of white. I’m sorry…I’m so sorry…I’m sorry…feelings of love, over and over and over.

I imagined myself as a kid. All my favorite happiest memories of being a kid, everything that was good about being alive, everything pure and fun. The sheer joy of my life as I knew it when I was 4 and 5, which were the happiest times for me. Winter, spring, summer, fall…different memories from different seasons, me, and all my friends…Pure goodness, at it’s best. THIS is me, THIS is Carissa. This is who I am, and what I’ve experienced. This is what surrounds me, protects me. And you can’t take it, and you can’t hurt me. I’m so sorry…I’m so sorry…

And as I was doing this part of my meditation, I noticed that I felt the pleasant sensation of this warm tingly feeling moving downwards through my arms, past my wrists, into my hands, and filling up my fingertips. I sat there, with my eyes closed, leaning up against the closet, feeling this new phenomena, and smiling, mystified at how and why it was happening.

I did a couple of more mental imagery of hugging this thing and sending it on it’s merry way, back through the entrance, back to where it came from, and plugging it up and keeping it plugged up, and then I was done.

I opened my eyes.

Mike opened his.

Wow…I said. I marveled at the warmth filling up my arms and hands and fingers. I marveled at how strong and intense and focused my meditation was. I couldn’t BELIEVE it! It was so…so…EASY!! WOW!!

“It’s because I lent you my energy,” Mike smiled to himself, looking tired and weary.

“Really?? I believe it, because it was so easy! It was like I had a boost, like somebody was holding me up, and feeding me as I went! I’ve never been able to do that on my own! It’s like impossible for me to do it on my own. It’s so hard!”

“I know, meditation IS hard. But not if you have somebody helping you. And that’s what I did. I gave you my energy.”

He looked wiped out, but happy.

“God, I’m so tired right now,” he said. “But it was worth it. I wanted to help you with your room. You needed it.” He laid down on my floor, and spread his arms over his head, closing is eyes a little.

“Wow…Thank you SO much. You have no idea. I couldn’t have done it on my own. I’ve tried before, and I can’t do it. It’s just too hard for me to focus. Not this time though!”

I marveled too at the fact that I had no embarrassment or hang ups about doing this whole thing. A year ago, there was no way I could have been so open about doing something like this. But now, I believed this 100%. That’ll eliminate any embarrassment, let me tell you.

And how did the room feel now?

Completely okay. It was completely “empty”, and clean. There wasn’t one heeby jeeby thing in the room, anywhere, to be found. Nothing.

“It feels tented!” Mike smiled.

“Doesn’t it?? It does, huh?” I looked around, feeling the vibe now. The air glowed purple from the Christmas lights, and the room was filled with sage smoke. And it felt exactly like if you were inside a tent and you reached up to zzzzzzzzzip it shut. Tented off. And protected. Absolutely no vibes of bad presences, roaming about, up to no good. Like usual. Before this, my room had a bad, unsafe exposed and vulnerable vibe going on, 24/7.

Even Joe had noticed it and pointed it out. Only because he remembers the way it felt before the attack. My room truly had been the one safe spot in the whole place. But not after that. Afterwards, it had felt open and raw, and just negative. He often commented (when in a “normal” mode) that my room “…doesn’t look right right now…it looks really wrong…” Again, part of that phenomenon where the room not only felt weird/wrong/raw/exposed, but too bright/glaring, and with that yellow-y colored tint to thing going on that I would later learn can be indicative of a 4th density (or other dimensional) bleedthrough. So he knew.

“I mean, it really really feels okay…” I said to Mike.

“Yeah, it does.”

I was filled with glee, you have no idea. Just giddy giddy giddy, because for the first time in so long, my room felt clean and safe and positive. I had no qualms whatsoever about Mike leaving me alone in my room now. There wasn’t a chance of that thing coming back tonight to “get me”. I knew it with everything I had. Didn’t even give it a second thought when he left.

And I was right. Nothing happened that night. For the first time in months, Kitty slept peacefully, for the entire night. Calmly with her paws tucked under her, looking relaxed and tranquil. Never once nervously pacing about, like usual, running in manic circles, disturbed by presences, like usual, playing with shit I can’t see…or sometimes can. And the same went for me. I fell into a deep sound sleep, enjoying the tented feeling. The sinister look and feeling of my room was completely gone.

Woke up the next morning. Immediately felt the “tenting” effect, and the complete lack of presences going on. It was soooo nice. I was so full of giddy giddy glee. Smiled to myself as I got ready for work. Went to work. Came home, excited to be going into my room for once. Walked into the room, and could still feel the tenting effect, loud and clear. Giddy giddy again! It was still clean and safe and empty and positive. The look of my room was normal again, no sinister bad dream look. yay!

Went to bed. Experienced a second night in a row of complete tranquility and safety. Kitty completely calm and quiet throughout the entire night. This was good! Life is awesome now! I’m so loving it right now! YAY!

Got up again, went to work, came home. Burst through my door into my room, to drop my backpack on my bed, and immediately noticed that

….the tenting was gone.

[page]

I frowned in the dark, with the dark blue light of dusk coming through my open blinds. I turned on my lights and closed the blinds, feeling the old “raw” and exposed feeling again.

The tenting is definitely gone. And I’m in denial. Total denial about it. NOOO! it can’t be so. No no no no no, I won’t accept it.

So I ignore it. I don’t say anything to Joe about it, and go about my life, as if everything is still perfectly calm and happy and back to normal. Make my dinner, eat, hang out with Joe. All the while, I’m in and out of my room, feeling the lack of tenting every single time I’m in there, refusing to admit it though. I can’t handle it. I can’t deal. I’m so in denial.

I make myself some raspberry tea, and curl up on my bed to read the Seth Speaks book. Which I was really digging, actually. It was turning off to be anything but what I expected.

And as I’m reading this book, I keep noticing the small black circles and white balls that are popping up here, there and everywhere around my room, in the air. NO NO NO NO NO! I say to myself, and go back to my reading. But they’re there. They don’t make any noise, but I can sense them, and keep looking up in time to see a few more, popping up all over the place. NO! It’s a trick of the eye, I tell myself. This room is CLEAN. Me and Mike CLEANED it, we took care of business, okay?? There’s no WAY anything could be in here!!!

yeah, but I felt the tenting was gone….

NO!!! NO NO NO NO NO!! You’re WRONG!

Back to reading.

Keep looking up, because the white balls and black circles are everywhere.

And Kitty is absolutely flipping out.

I mean, FLIPPING OUT. Racing about, in a frenzy.

At one point, she’s back up on the bed with me, as I’m reading, and she’s calm again. Giving herself a bath. One leg thrown back behind her head, licking and chewing at her fur. I’m staring at the air, to see these circles and balls that keep appearing everywhere, with my book open, in my lap. And right then, a white ball appears over my computer desk, and remains there for a good two seconds. And even though they’re audibly silent, something about them is “loud” and gets your attention. I watch as Kitty jerks her head up right then, and looks directly at the white ball, eyes bugged out. So both of our lines of sight are on the same spot. Her leg frozen in place, tense, still up in the air. She slowly lowers her leg, looking puzzled, and abandons her bath.

I go back to my reading. Knowing for certain now that okay, this is really happening. Kitty is seeing them too. We both were looking right at one at the same time.

While I’m reading, I start thinking about Steve, my ex. Something I’m reading triggers my thoughts. And I decide to call Mike and ask him what he thinks about this whole thing I’m thinking about. He’s home, and picks up his phone, and we talk for a bit. Me working through my post break up issues, even though it’s been like seven months, and despite the whole recent C___ mind fuck of epic proportions at my job.

And, Kitty is still flipping out like mad. Getting worse, and worse, and worse, as me and Mike’s conversation wears on. She’s spazzing out so bad, and tearing up my water bed bumpers so hard that I interrupt my conversation with Mike and yell at her,

“KITTY!!!!! STOP IT!!!!!” I yell, scared. I know that for her to be flipping out that badly means there’s something serious and major going on, or about to go on. And that scares the shit out of me. I can’t handle this anymore, I can’t deal with it anymore, it’s too much, too stressful. I just want it all to go away.

Mike sounds concerned now, as I nervously explain that she’s flipping out like a spaz. I tell him about the 2D black circles and 3D white balls I’ve been seeing all night, and how the tenting affect was gone today. I laugh nervously, only admitting it reluctantly for the first time. I tell him how Kitty looked at one of the white balls too, so we were both seeing it.

I eventually get off the phone with him. Sitting there, on my bed now. Sip my tea. Book in my lap. Watching Kitty run around.

I decide, as usual, to Exit Stage Left just moments before it all goes down. And it’s literally, stage left, since that’s where my door was, to the left.

I go knock on Joe’s door, to see if anything’s “happening” in his room. I find him lying on his bed, legs hanging over the side, head resting on his arms. When I ask him, he smiles and says, “Ohhhh yeaaah. All night.”

I tell him about what I’ve been seeing in my room, the circles and balls.

He smiles and nods. “Yup. I’ve been seeing them too.”

“Really? Wow…” I laugh.

“Look, they followed you…” he laughs a little, and lifts a hand to point behind me.

I turn and look.

Sure enough, behind me in the hall in the air I see black circles and white balls popping up here and there, like they’ve followed me out of my room. The light is on in the hall area, very bright, but it doesn’t matter, you can still see them, plain as day.

I run back to my room to grab my phone and call Mike back, and tell him the update. I was already dialing it as I went back out to Joe’s room. Got Mike back on the line as I hit Joe’s doorway again. Talked for a few seconds as I moved inside his room, telling Mike all about it. Saw as a few more circles and balls appeared in the air in the hall behind me again. Joked, “Ah, go away! Leave me alone!” grinning, and started to push the door closed, kidding around. “They’re in the hall way again, behind me,” I explained to Mike. “They followed me out of my room.”

Joe was still laying on the bed, head resting on his arms. As I began to close the door, I watched as Joe’s smile faded from his face, looking out into the hallway through the small opening in the doorway.

“Open the door,” he said, sounding serious, talking very low. He was slowly sitting up.

“Why?”

“Open the door,” he said again, still low, but more intense. “Open it, quick…”

I stopped smiling, not liking the look on his face. What was going on?

“Hold on,” I said to Mike on the phone. I turned and pulled the door back open again. Joe was up now, and next to me in the doorway, looking out into the living room.

“What’s going on?” Mike asked.

“I’m not sure…hold on…” I said.

I looked out into the living room too, where Joe was looking.

There, straight ahead, in front of the window covered by blinds, was a large, bluish white entity. Stretching from floor to ceiling – which was ten feet high – and slowly moving about, changing shape.

“THAT just came out of your room,” Joe informed me, dead pan.

“WHAT?”

“When you were closing my door…I watched it, coming out of your room and moving down the hallway…Hoh-leeeee-SHIT…” he said. “Do you SEE that???”

“Yeah…I think I do…”

The next few minutes were a blur of me excitedly narrating to Mike what we were seeing, live, as it went down. Explaining the color, the shapelessness of it, as it slowly stretched and moved about. I could see a long tendril looking thing move upwards towards the ceiling, and back down again. Joe had a matching description, of a “tentacle thing that reached up and slapped the ceiling!!!” There was just a whole lot of “oh my god”s and “did you see THAT?!? Do you SEE it?” And the best one,

“Yeah yo, we’ve got some new and IMPROVED shit goin’ on!”

That was Joe. I couldn’t help but laugh, even in the middle of it all.

Mike listened, from his end, sighing, saying, “I wish I could be there to see it. Too bad you can’t take pictures…”

Me and Joe wondered if it could see us. Does it know we’re here? Can it even perceive us? What is it doing? Where is it going? What IS it?!? But there were no answers. We had no way to tell if it was seeing us. It was silent, and it wasn’t coming into contact with us. It had just come out of my room, and was standing before us in the living room, stretching from floor to ceiling, slowly moving about.

Kitty came over and sat down calmly between us, watching it too. No longer spazzing out. That was pretty interesting. So it was Joe, then Kitty, then me, all in a row, standing before it.

Finally the thing left the room, and silently exited through the corner of the living room.

Me and Mike hung up. Now Kitty was back to life again, galloping in circles around and around and around and around the entire living room. The black circles and white balls were back now, along with my old pals the “sparklies.” Yellow orange sparkle ember looking things were all over the air, along with the balls and circles popping up. Residual energy? Kitty continued to gallop around…and was doing something really amazing. She kept detouring from her circle and making a mad dash for the corner of the living room…where the exit was. Run right over as if she planned to go through the wall, like she could see an opening. Only at the last second would she stop, stunned, realizing there was a wall there, and that she couldn’t go through. Then she’d go back to galloping in circles, around and around, looking up into the air, at all the sparklies and white balls that were popping up everywhere. Then make a dash for the exit again. Then back to galloping around.

Joe was excited about it for a good half hour afterwards, going off about the sheer size of this one. He couldn’t get over it. We nicknamed it “The Granddaddy of Them All!!!” because it was huge.

And once again, Kitty had known about the cross over. Not that it was anything new at this point. It was just surprising to have such a big one in MY room. I usually got the smaller stuff.

Which led me to have to deal with the fact that me and Mike’s tenting thing hadn’t lasted. Although, technically, it had worked and did last, if you were only considering that one It thing. The It thing never came back again, for the rest of the time I lived in that place. So really, the tenting did work, permanently…..but just only with the one thing I intended it for.

There was another night where I was getting ready to go to bed. Like usual, I needed to light my candle, for light. I had no matches though. doh. Well, Joe probably has some, I figured. So off to his room I went. I knocked a little on his door, knowing that he was already in bed though. As I opened the door and peeked in, Kitty tore out of the room, dashing between my legs, looking terrified.

I glanced about his room, lit by some of his own candles, on top of his dresser. I gave the room a quick once over. See if I could see anything, the reason for her terror.

It was a pretty quick glance though. I wasn’t that interested in seeing it, whatever it was.

I snagged some matches off his dresser, and closed the door.

Went back to my room, lit the candle, turned off the light. And then, like usual, I made sure Kitty wasn’t in my bathroom, before I closed the door. I didn’t leave the bathroom door open anymore, only because she would always end up jumping up on the toilet tank, making a lot of noise and knocking things over, waking me up. So I eliminated that by keeping her out of the bathroom.

I crawled into bed, and was there for only about 30 seconds, with my eyes closed, but still awake, when I heard my toilet tank slam around.

Kitty! I thought. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to lock you in the bathroom, I thought, getting up. I walked to the bathroom and flung open the door, fully expecting to see her, and yet, confused too, because I was absolutely positive she wasn’t in there when I checked.

“Kitty!” I said, as I opened the door and clicked on the light.

No, no Kitty.

The bathroom was empty.

Confused, I went back into my room, checking around. Kitty was laying on the floor, under the overhang of my bed. Paws tucked under her. Looking up at me.

Huh, I thought. I shrugged, and turned off the light and closed the door. I honestly didn’t think anything of it, or get scared. I was tired, and wanted sleep. So that’s what I did.

The next night, I was on my way out the door to go over to Julie’s and hang out with her and Dave and Mike for awhile, when I thought to ask Joe about his room. I was remembering Kitty’s terror.

“Hey, did you have anything going on in your room last night?” I asked.

“Um, nooo…” he said, looking puzzled.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah…I think…why?”

So I told him about me going into his room, and Kitty being terrified. But I didn’t mention the time to him. Or mention anything about my own incident with the toilet tank.

“Oh wait, yeah, something did happen last night…around 9:30, right after I just got into bed. I heard my TOILET flush, and the toilet tank was slamming around against the wall. By itself. I got up to go check it out, and when I turned on the bathroom light the bathroom cabinets were open, and the medicine cabinet too. Everything that could be opened was opened, and the toiled was finishing its flush….”

“NOO! No WAY!” And I remembered about my toilet tank incident. At the same time, in my room. I told him about it, very excited about it.

When I left, I was like, Bye Joe! Bye Kitty!!….Bye, everybody else! Bye!! See everybody later! Have fun!!!

I just felt it would be weird to only say goodbye to Joe and Kitty, when there were other things living there too. ;)

And then there was the incident where I was sitting on my floor in my room, listening to the radio, eating my dinner, totally absorbed in the program. Kitty was lounging on the bed behind me, not moving.

Suddenly I heard the distinctive sound of three loud knocks on my headboard.

My head jerked behind me, towards the headboard.

So did Kitty’s.

We both sat still, staring at it, wide eyed and perplexed.

“Hi…” I said, tensely, to the air, where the knocking had come from.

It’s always good to acknowledge a human one. That’s usually all it wants. So just give them what they want, dammit, so it doesn’t get even more pissed off, or frustrated. O.o

But just to make sure, I got up and went to Joe’s room, and knocked on his door.

“WHAT?” he said, annoyed. I opened the door.

He was laying on his bed, in the middle of writing. He glanced up, annoyed, and slid his headphones off his ears. “What?”

“You didn’t just knock three times right now, on the wall or something, did you?”

“No,” he said, annoyed.

“Didn’t think so. But just checking. It’s just that, me and the cat heard something knock three times on my headboard…”

“It was probably her.”

“Yeah, I know. But I’m just checking, you know, JUST to make sure.”

He wasn’t interested. He was already going back to his writing, itching to slip his headphones back on.

The last major incident that happened while still living there was in April. And I specify “while still living there” only because there was a major incident that happened after we’d moved out, and had gone back for a visit. But that comes later. So there was a night where I kept getting bothered by something, and it kept attaching itself to me, over and over. It first came around about 2:15 in the morning. I woke up to the sound of it flying around the room in the air, which created this indoor wind sort of whooshing noise. The sound of it buzzing about, basically. It kept swooping down, attaching itself to me, and sticking to my back, butt and thighs, because I’d made the mistake of letting the covers slip off of me. And it was the most BIZARRE feeling, like being electrocuted. But not in a negative way. I could tell this one didn’t have malicious or negative intent. My whole body would pulsate with the weird electrical energy, feeling pinned, and paralyzed from it. I couldn’t let it stay on me, of course, and had to keep shrugging it off me. Which wasn’t easy, let me tell you. Because I couldn’t move from the intense energy of it. So I’d have to give it everything I had to shrug it off, and become “de-paralyzed”. Then I’d hear it circling about overhead, this wind, movement, pressurized whooshing noise, as I’d try to fall back to sleep. Then it would do it again. And I’d have to shrug it off.

I never got scared though, amazingly. And you’d think I would be, after that one attack. But I think I wasn’t scared because there was nothing hostile about this one, whatever it was. The vibe I got from it was almost like an excited puppy dog or something, all hyper and happy, continually latching itself onto me. For whatever reason. I even tried “talking” to it, not outloud though, but in my head. I was calm, laying there, as it was stuck to me, like some happy drooling puppy dog, and I was saying, “noooo…” like the way you slowly reprimand a puppy, or a little kid or something. “nooooo…get off me…come on, get off….nooooooo….noooooooo…” Didn’t work. But I tried, just to see what would happen. Then I tried to see how long I could let it cling on to me, to see if would give it up and let go after awhile, just out of curiosity. Nope. It was clingy. And determined. “Velcro Critter.”

I was able to fall back to sleep for intervals of time before Velcro Critter would try again, and latch on to me. But it finally got to be such a hassle that I got up early, at 6 am, because it just would not leave me the hell alone. I couldn’t take it anymore. I wasn’t going to spend the next hour wrestling with it or something, forget it. I was up already, thank you very much.

When I got up the sun was already coming up, and dawn light was coming into my room. And I could still hear this thing, loud and clear, flying about in the air above me bed. Damn! I thought.

On a sidenote: As I add in this edit all these years and many more entity encounters later, I can say that something like this is very rare. In my personal experiences, pretty much all entities I’ve encountered have occurred in the lower astral plane, while I was in a state of being half awake/half asleep, and where the etheric energy body becomes loose-y goose-y, popping “upward” into the astral. Very few have ever fully manifested in our physical reality. The “big attack” being the absolute most spectacular incident that I’ve ever experienced in my entire life, to this day even. To be able to not only cross over into our physical realm, but then actually grab onto and yank a human around like a ragdoll, gaining the physical upperhand and siphoning away their life force energy in the process, leaving them feeling like they had the shit kicked out of them, is just beyond. Nothing has come close to that. There were also the benign “blueish white blob/cloud” looking ones, including “the Graddaddy of Them All!” but none of which I’ve ever actually come into physical contact with. They don’t seem interested in that. Whatever they are they just show up and kick around for a short bit, maybe observing, I don’t know, then move on.

So for this phenomenon to persist in the room, while I was fully awake and walking around, and while the sun was already up, is amazing. Because another aspect of entity phenomenon I’ve also noticed is that these things don’t really manifest during daylight hours. Pretty much always in the safety of night. Something about the sun, the light, the UV radiation, whatever it is that the sun and its powerful energy does to our realm, it’s too much. So they mainly stick to the safety of night. “When the sun’s away the heeby jeebies will play.” O.o This is something that Robert Bruce also noted in his book “Practical Psychic Self Defense.” “….the subtle energies of which Negs and ghosts are composed are damaged by sunlight.” (page 74) There are endless things in that book, as mentioned, which align to what we experienced while living in this apartment. Again, wish I’d had it when I was going through all of this. What a difference that would have made, just for the corroboration alone.

Kitty wandered into my room just then, hearing that I was up. As soon as she meandered into my room she stopped, startled, and looked bug eyed up at the ceiling, like, WHAT the…?!?

Then she spazzed out, looking wildly up at the ceiling where I could still hear the wind/movement noise spinning around in the air. She’d dash around, stop, and look up at the ceiling wildly, then dash off to a different spot, and stop, and look up wildly. It was funny. And once again it proved I wasn’t imagining this.

It came around a few more times after that, over the next few weeks, waking me up with it’s pressurized whooshing movement wind noise, circling about overhead. But I got smart. I tried crouching myself up into a fetal position, with the covers completely covering me, so it wouldn’t have a way of attaching itself to me. I was on my side, for starters, crunched up, and under the covers. So, ha! Good luck! And it worked. I’ve since learned that these things can attach to you when you’re splayed out, either on your back, or on your stomach, open and vulnerable, half out of the covers. When you’re crunched up, under the covers, you’re okay. (Basically the same thing Joe had figured out as a young child back in Connecticut, as mentioned at the beginning of this write up, and why he was resorting to zipping himself into a sleeping bag every night in his enclosed closet to sleep, versus being vulnerable/exposed on his bed in his wide open room.)

And so, yet another event that I couldn’t talk about to anybody. Felicity picked me up from our usual meeting spot down at Portola Plaza, and I couldn’t say a word about it. I had another night of minimal sleep, because of an exciting and interesting incident, of the paranormal variety, no less, but had to keep all this exciting stuff to myself. As it was I’d recently learned that Julie didn’t truly believe me, deep down. Mike had told me that they were talking about me one night when he was over visiting with her and Dave, and when he asked her if she believed me she had said, “Honestly?” (taking a big drag off her cigarette, as he relayed, since they were out on her patio.) “No.”

Whatever, I thought, when I found out about that. It hurt a little, only because she acted like she believed it, always emailing me during the day asking me to tell her a story, talk about whatever latest thing was going on, but never saying, You know what? I think you’re nuts. There’s no way this shit is really happening to you guys! So after Mike confessed their conversation I emailed her and told her, being totally huffy, that if she doesn’t believe me then fine…but just SAY so. Tell me. Don’t act like you do believe me, so I tell you more and more stories, then turn around and tell Mike that you don’t think it’s real. Just tell me if you think I’m crazy, and I’ll just keep it to myself.

She emailed me back, insisting Oh no, I never said that, I DO believe you!!

I’ve gone through this before though, with Julie and Mike. The whole He Says, She Says deal, where one claims that the other said something, and then the other vehemently denies it, up and down, backwards and forwards, and neither one will admit who’s being the liar. Long after that Mike continued to insist that she really did say that. In fact, he brought it up out of the blue months later when we were talking about Julie. He wanted me to know that he wasn’t being the liar, that she really did say that. I was like, Well, whatever. Doesn’t matter anymore now, I guess. I actually believe Mike in this instance. What he described of what she said and how she said it was totally Julie, just a dead on imitation. She wasn’t the most sincere person, let’s just put it that way. Because not only did she not take life seriously, she didn’t take people, and thus, any of her personal relationships seriously. There was no real connection or concern happening on her end for anybody or anything. It’s why she could cheat on every boyfriend she was ever with without a second thought, no guilt, shame or remorse, and also why she never showed appreciation for anything that so many people had done for her and Katelyn over the years. And I’d seen her two-face other people over the years, including Mike, which I never told him. So….you know…….kinda easy to know who to believe in this instance.

By spring of 2001 Julie and I finally had our falling out, brought on by her complaining for the billionth time about Dave to me. I had no sympathy for anything about that situation since I knew her too well, and knew what sort of things she was getting up to behind his back. Just endlessly going in circles, always complaining about the same stupid shit, it just never ended with her. Boring broken record. No progress. No growth. No light bulbs ever going off. She belonged to the school of females who think life is about sitting around with your group of female friends, smoking cigs while rolling your eyes as you endlessly trashtalk men, clucking about your boyfriend and divulging intimate details about your relationship/sex life. (something she actually complained about years back – wondering in a mildly annoyed way why I wouldn’t tell her details about my “personal business,” when meanwhile she was always telling me all the details of hers. Even though I never asked. Her way was to air personal dirty laundry, always be “jokingly” roasting whatever guy she was dating, but especially if he was right there to hear her “jokingly” shit talk him/emasculate him to others, divulge “TMI” intimate details, and just being disloyal in general. And once again….I’m not like that. 180 opposite.)

So fully realizing the fallout that could happen with what I was about to say I just blurted it out anyway, because I’d reached my threshold. Basically, You know what? You can either accept him and the situation for what it is and stop complaining, or……..leave! Break up! But MAKE a fucking decision, instead of just complaining about it all the time!

Annnnnddd….cue the defensive, indignant response, as I kind of expected. I just didn’t care though. Insert a big “oh well” shrug of DGAF indifference. Sure, I probably could have worded it a little softer, but at the same time I just no longer respected her for so many reasons, including things I don’t even delve into here, so….I just didn’t care enough to try to tiptoe nicely. She didn’t bring anything constructive to my life, and I was tired of being around her immature dysfunction that seemed to only be getting worse as time went on, despite the exterior appearances getting better. And after that we just stopped talking. No more emailing each other during the day while at our jobs, no more hanging out with her and Dave. It wasn’t some explosive fight or anything. It just….quietly ended, nine years after first meeting, and all the endless crazy life adventures we’ve individually gone through but where reality kept putting us back in each other’s paths, over and over again. And that was it.

Not long after that Mike also cut the ties with her, after finally waking up to how she’d just been using him and toying with him the past eight or so years, but had no intention of ever actually making him her boyfriend and running off together. Despite the few “freebies” she’d doled out here and there years back. (Even though she hadn’t doled anything out recently there were however several times just prior to all this when Mike was visiting, and Julie pulled him aside and started making out with him in one room, while Dave was in another, just right under Dave’s nose basically. Just because. But talk about messing with Mike’s head.) He finally faced reality though. Again, no explosive fight. Just a quiet parting of the ways. He just stopped calling her, stopped going over to her and Dave’s, and it all just faded away. And despite how long he’d known her, since early ’94, she surprisingly – although kind of NOT surprisingly – just let him go. No questions. No concern, like, What’s going on?? What’s up?? Where are you?? Basically just “Oh well.” Drifting on with life, like he hadn’t been actively in the picture for almost seven years straight, doing all kinds of things for her. Proving that he didn’t mean anything to her at all, and never did. So I know that was a bit of a hurtful wakeup call for him to have to face. But that was Julie for you. There was no loyalty or devotion to anybody – friends, boyfriend, nobody. Talking shit behind everybody’s backs, including making fun of and mocking her supposed friends, zero gratitude for anything that so many people had done for her and Katelynn over the years, never saying thanks to anybody for any of it, nonstop cheating and betraying, accepting people no longer being in her life without a second thought, unable to express affection or create a bond with her own daughter. Just floating through life with no higher soul spark or life purpose, empty, detached and dead inside. But Mike finally letting the idea of her go and no longer holding himself in some weird emotional limbo opened him up to finally meeting his future wife in 2002 and getting married in 2004. So it was a very good move on his part.

But once again, back to our paranormal adventures…… O.o

Then came the day during this same time period when Mike and I parted ways with Julie (around March of 2001) where I was filing in Felicity’s office. It was one of those large file cabinets that was about four feet long, and where the files hung sideways, versus the vertical filing cabinets with square shaped drawers stacked on top of each other. I had been in there for a good ten minutes, with the long file drawer open, doing my thing, as she sat at her desk working on her computer. We chatted a bit, and I left to go get something, leaving the drawer open.

Well apparently after I left the room, a cold drafty breeze started stirring around her office. Pouring out…from the filing cabinet.

Felicity’s office didn’t have A/C.

She sat there at her desk, looking around the office, puzzled. Thinking, what the HELL??

She slowly got up to figure out where all this cold air was coming from. When she realized it was literally pouring out of the filing cabinets, where I had just been standing, she froze. (no pun intended.) She called for the nearest person who was around, to come and check this out.

“Jan! JAAAAAN!!!” she yelled.

Jan got up from her cubicle next door and came over.

She pointed it out to Jan, and they both investigated, checking all over and all around the area, for a logical source of this cold air pouring out. But the filing cabinets were completely enclosed, and there weren’t any vents behind the cabinets, on the wall. There was no way for a draft to be generated, let alone to actually be flowing, as if it were A/C.

They were both mystified.

I came back into her office again. Felicity was looking at me VERY strangely now. She had never looked at me like that before. She told me to check this out…and showed me the phenomenon. She couldn’t get over it. It actually made her a little nervous. She puzzled over it for the rest of the afternoon, that’s how much it freaked her out.

It was definitely something, but, I still don’t have a viable explanation for what it was. It could have been what Joe called a “Hitchhiker.” Hitchhikers were ones that basically attached themselves to you and followed you out into the real world. This supposedly happened to Joe all the time. He was always piggybacking some hitchhiker around with him. They were harmless he claimed. All they wanted was a ticket out into the real world, to be able to get out. And they needed a body to attach themselves to in order to do this. Thing is though, it came with a price to the person giving the piggyback. They completely drain your energy.

[NOTE: This was yet another spot-on match from Robert Bruce’s book, “Practical Psychic Self Defense.” He talks about all of this, and uses these exact terms, “piggybacking” and “hitchhiking,” as well as talking about how the earthbound spirits or Negs who do this to people drain their energy in order to accomplish it. So, Joe definitely knew what he was talking about when he explained this concept to me. Pretty much everything Joe ever told me about “how things are” wound up eventually being corroborated by multiple other sources, and/or where direct evidence eventually did come in for it down the line, even if it took a few years. As mentioned in “Chasing Phantoms,” this kid was walking around with knowledge that he shouldn’t have had, and there was absolutely no way to account for it by mainstream conventional means. He didn’t read books about metaphysics, spirituality, the paranormal, conspiracy or abductions of any type, instead spending his free time playing around with his electronics and radio scanners, or engaging in criminal mayhem. Yet he just…….inexplicably knew everything he knew about things he’d never researched.]

But that’s why I didn’t necessarily think that the filing cabinet incident was a hitchhiker, even though Joe did, and other people who’ve since heard the story do. I didn’t feel drained. At least, I don’t think I did. So I was like the only one who didn’t fully buy it. But then on the other hand, I was always so drained by that point from the activity going on in our apartment 24/7 that maybe I wouldn’t have even noticed the difference.

[page]

I saw one of the hitchhikers attached to Joe, so I know they do exist. It’s pretty trippy. I was in my room one afternoon when Joe got home from work and blew past my doorway, with an intense look on his face, heading into his room…….with a trail of sparkling orange-y gold sparkles trailing behind him, like a comet tail.

“Uh…Joe?” I finally managed to call out to him. He was in his room now, door open, and had headed into his bathroom.

“Joe??”

“YEAH?” he called out, sounding as intense and annoyed as he looked.

“Um…I just saw the weirdest thing…You had like this trail of sparkling sparklies attached to you…when you went by me in the hallway…”

I didn’t hear him say anything for a second. But that was because he was coming back out to talk to me face to face.

“Yeah, TELL me about it,” he said, sounding intense still. “I’ve been hearing about it all fucking day at work. People have been coming up to me saying they see stuff around me, and on me…”

“Wow…”

“It’s one of them. The hitchhikers,” he rolled his eyes. “I’ve been hearing about it all day. Trust me.”

Trippy.

But I didn’t end up telling Felicity about the fact I had supernatural stuff going on in my apartment until about a week after the filing cabinet incident. And it was by accident, it just slipped out. She was driving me to Portola Plaza on a Friday afternoon, where I always picked up the 82 bus to go home, and asked me if I had any plans for the weekend. I was fishing around in my back pack that was on the floor at my feet and without realizing what I was saying I replied, “Um, no, not really. My big goal really is just to hunt down some infrared film…”

whoops. I looked up from my backpack, frozen.

“Infrared film?” she asked, puzzled. “What for?”

I was just so used to talking about this stuff with Joe and Julie and Mike and Dave, that I didn’t think before I opened my mouth.

“Um…” I hesitated, smiling, not sure if I should go forward and tell her. Fuck it, go for it, I thought.

“Well, we sort of have some paranormal stuff going on in our apartment, and we were thinking that maybe we’d be able to catch it on infrared film. We’ve tried regular film, but nothing came out…”

She was grinning, and jerked her head backwards a little to show surprise, like, WOW! Where’d THAT come from?! This is interesting! Cool! She wanted to hear all about it. So I told her some of the most basics of what was going on.

“Wow, so what were you thinking when that thing happened in my office? Remember, a week ago??” she was grinning.

I just laughed and shook my head.

“You must’ve been thinking it was another one of those incidents!”

“Yeah…actually, I kind of was…I just wasn’t going to say anything about it.”

She was still grinning, and shaking her head, remembering back to that whole deal, only now, with a new perspective on it, thinking about what must’ve been going through my mind.

So we talked for the rest of the ride about all this sort of stuff. She listened, intrigued. She didn’t disbelieve me that I had things happening. In fact, she started telling me about her own various stories from over the years of things she’s experienced. You know – Those miscellaneous puzzle pieces that we all have.

I never really wound up getting into too many details with her about the stuff that went on at our apartment though. She was my boss, after all, and I didn’t know that deep down she wasn’t going to think I was insane. I already learned the hard way through Julie that somebody could act like they believed you, wanting to hear more and more stories, only to ultimately think you’re making it all up. :/

Shortly before moving out there were some smaller incidents. Like the time when I was up and about this one night, around 9 pm or so, in and out of my room, doing things. And as I crossed into my room and passed by my closet door to my left, I was hit with a blast of heat, like if someone had opened an oven door.

I kept walking, it taking a second to register what I’d just felt. Then I slowed, and stopped. Stood still, looking up into the air straight ahead, going hmmm…

Back up, reverse, back to the spot, more slowly now.

I ducked my head down, and around, in the general area from where I’d just passed by. I discovered that it was coming from right next to where I had this Railroad Crossing sign, leaning up against the sliding closet doors. (Joe had jacked this unused RR sign from up at Commerce that was knocked over/laying on the ground in the rail yard.) But that’s where I was feeling this blast of heat emanating from. It was kind of coming from in front of it, and sort of to the right. It was hard to pinpoint. But it was definitely a “blast” effect, just like an oven, enough to make me scrunch up my face and eyes from the force of it.

I stuck my head around where the sign was, feeling it again. Blast of icky heat, just like an oven. Ugh. And it made me feel nauseus as well. Which was the bizarre thing. So I kept sticking my head in, a few times, over and over, scrunching up my face, feeling my stomach roll from the nausea, being curious and masochistic, at the same time.

Finally I just stopped, being creeped out. I don’t know what that is, I thought, and I don’t wanna know. So I left it alone.

And soon after that, there was the night where I was up and about, like usual, around 9 pm, and I came into my room and plopped down on my waterbed bumpers, just vegging out. I noticed that the usual white line activity was magnified. Like by 100 times. The white lines were coming fast and furious, zoom! zoomzoomzoom! zoom! Just a whole bunch, all at the same time, going completely aggro. And not only that, but there were big black lines as well now.

Well THIS is a first, I thought, watching this, fascinated, and a little nervous. I was watching it the way one watches T.V. The black lines were THICK though, not thin laser lines, like the others. And they were completely aggro too. White lines, black lines, everything aggro, out of control, in front of me, right up ON me, in my face, in my lap, completely all around me, surrounding me. I was flinching and ducking and covering my face even though I couldn’t feel them. It was an involuntary reaction. Until I finally jumped up and ran into Joe’s room and told him excitedly to come check this shit out!!

He came in, and curiously looked around. Maintaining his usual blank look of objectiveness. But even he had to raise his brows, because it was so obnoxious.

“What’s going ON?!?!” I said. “Why is it LIKE this right now? What does it mean? Is something happening?”

“Uh, yeah, something’s happening…you have something in your room right now.” His eyes were looking up at the ceiling, behind me.

I turned to look where he was looking. I didn’t see anything.

“I don’t see anything.”

“It’s right there…” he smiled a little, pointing to it. He kept his finger extended, keeping track of where it was moving, so I could follow along. I looked again. Still didn’t see anything.

“What do you see?” I asked him.

“Just a translucent thing. Floating around up by your ceiling.”

“Oh. I can’t see it.” I sat there calmly on my waterbed bumpers, in the middle of this. White lines and thick black lines going aggro and making me flinch, and some supposed translucent thing floating about up in the air.

Just then Kitty wanders in, off in her own little world. She didn’t even look up at us or anything, just jumped up onto my waterbed and started poking about through my stuff I had on my headboard. My bookmarks and trinkets and stuff. She was always playing with that stuff. (In retrospect she really did act like a three old human child, moreso than a cat. It’s something I noticed even back then about her and always loved, just how smart and people-like and curious she was. Just so much personality and expression in her face, like a human. “Poking through your personal belongings” is exactly what little kids like to do. She loved to investigate my stuff, sniffing, touching stuff with her paws, batting stuff around. :D )

“I wonder how long it’ll take before she notices it?” Joe smirked, eyes going from her to the thing up by the ceiling. She was oblivious to anything at that moment, continuing to poke around through my stuff.

I watched her, and watched Joe watching her. And then, as if she just heard something that startled her, she jerked her head around, eyes going right for the ceiling where Joe had been tracking the entity with his finger. Her eyes went from startled, to wide and shocked and scared. She jumped a little, jerking back in surprise at what she was seeing. Then she mewed, sounding scared, and jumped down from the bed and bolted out of the room.

Joe and I just cracked up over that.

Not too long after that, we finally moved out.

[There was all kinds of stuff happening at this time, but in short, we were evicted, due to the incident mentioned at the very beginning, where the cops showed up, then thought Joe had a real gun, but which was actually a pellet gun, etc. etc. Joe was arrested that night and taken off to jail in Santa Ana. It all fell into place on May 27, 2001. Exactly one year to the date of moving in. Mike had to help me pack up Joe’s room, because there was no way I could handle all that electronics equipment on my own without Joe there to help. Then I ended up securing a lawyer, who was a contact of my friend Tiffany, who worked in a law office at an executive suites in Newport Beach that I used to answer phones for, mentioned elsewhere in this piece, and bailed Joe out of jail. Which in retrospect I should not have done, and the current me wouldn’t do it of course. But the me back then was still in “Save Joe” mode.

[After Joe got out of jail in June he was originally going to go up to the Bay area, same place I was heading in the near future, but he wound up going to Portland instead. And now that I had a high paying full time job I had the money to fix my Nissan that had been dead in the garage for most of the past year. Joe determined what parts were necessary to fix it, I gave him the money and he bought the parts and installed them, since he was good with all things mechanical and electronics. Sure enough he got it working again, but later on in June I ended up just giving him that car so he could get to Oregon. The second car I’d given him. :/ Only this time he didn’t destroy it. Again, since I now had the really good high paying job I knew I would be able to save enough money in no time to get my own used car. But for him to save money to get a car? Was never going to happen. The only hope he had in life was for me to give him this one. He had my work phone number, and would keep in semi-regular contact by calling me from pay phones while I was at work during the day, and meanwhile I would regularly wire money to him via Western Union at a Ralph’s supermarket customer service desk, several hundred at a time, to keep him afloat. Still in devoted sister mode. Insert huge eyeroll.]

I needed to get some assistance from Mike in dealing with Joe’s stuff as mentioned, and his half a room full of radio equipment, because there was no way I could’ve done it all on my own. Mike, being the good friend that he can be, agreed right away. I offered to pay him (everybody wanted some of my money right then, the movers, my new landlord-to-be, the lawyer…what was one more person, I figured. Take it while I’m doling it out.) But he refused, and said no way would he take my money.

As soon as Mike stepped foot in Joe’s room, and took a look around at the enormous volume of electronics going on…scanners stacked upon scanners…the radar dish…the word processors, hooked up to it all, processing…he just shook his head like, WHAT the…? He’d never actually seen the inside of Joe’s room before. So this was a first.

“You know, and he wonders why he had all that…PARANORMAL shit happening in here! I mean, LOOK at this place! This is why you guys had so much activity going on. That stuff is attracted to this! I mean, LOOK!” He was yanking at wires and unplugging random shit, just trying to make sense of the jumbled mess of electronics filling half the room.

I just looked at him, grinning.

“I never told you about most of the stuff that went on in this place,” I said. “One of the things I never told you about was that some of the ‘things’ that would pass through here would play with Joe’s electronics. They would poke around and push buttons and turn knobs and stuff. They were drawn to it. Then he had what he nicknamed the Static Critters. I never told you about those either. They were here solely for his electronics. They’d float around his room, and interact with him and Kitty, but most of all they’d land on his wires and soak up the electricity. They lived on his equipment.”

He was nodding his head and frowning the whole time I was talking. Yanking more wires, unplugging more equipment.

“I believe it,” he said, tossing wires up into the air. “LOOK at this place!!”

When I showed Mike the huge broken mirror with the “S” shaped curve in the bathroom, his response was, “That’s impossible!”

We managed to get all the electronics disassembled and packed up in a matter of two hours. He even helped me haul all the furniture down to the dumpster. Which was very helpful. Then the Mexicans raided the dumpster and took all of what used to be Joe’s stuff for themselves. But it was never Joe’s stuff actually. It was stuff he begged, borrowed or stole from others. Recycling!

Moving day arrived – May 25, 2000 – Joe was still in jail in Santa Ana, so I packed up both of our stuff. The day was cloudy and rainy. I was still in my “devoted sister” mentality so planned to rent a storage unit for his stuff so that he would still have everything when he got out. I’d hired a guy from a local waterbed company to come drain and dismantle my waterbed, which he’d done the night before, and I’d also hired a local moving truck company to come move our stuff. They were scheduled to arrive at 2 p.m. Sometime around 1:45 my phone rang. I was standing in my now dismantled, empty bedroom lit by the natural white gray lighting from outside when I answered it. A friendly sounding woman from the moving company was informing me that the truck with the two moving guys was on its way. Everything was on schedule and they’d be there by 2 p.m. as planned.

The moving truck was on its way!!!! To hear those words…..it created the happiest feeling I had felt probably in years, seriously. Exhilaration soared up. I hung up the cordless phone and turned to my kitty and said something to the effect of “Kitty!! They’re coming!!” She just looked up at me with big wide eyes as she always does whenever I say things that she doesn’t understand but which have a meaningful voice behind it. :D Freedom would finally be mine, the movers were on their way, I would finally be leaving this paranormal hellhole after being trapped for so long.

I couldn’t contain my excitement and felt compelled to dance around and around and around in my empty bedroom in manic glee. In a big circle I danced, letting out the excitement. Then Kitty joined me. !! She ran around in circles with me, looking up at me with her big yellow eyes and little kitty face the whole time as she did so, her little legs running along. Around and around we went. It was one of those magical sorts of moments that don’t happen too often. In retrospect I’m surprised she did that and joined in, seeming to understand what was going on, versus being spooked by all this sudden manic movement, and running the other way. She got it though. I danced around until the mania wore off and then I flopped on the floor, laughing as Kitty rubbed up on me.

Sure enough, the movers arrived at 2 p.m., loaded up the mid-size truck with all our boxes and stuff, and we were on our way. First stop was Pouch Storage in Lake Forest, to rent Joe a unit. (small unit, $60 a month….) I led the way in my Nissan that was now working thanks to Joe being able to fix it, so long as I provided the right parts. Next stop was the new room I was renting off of Rockfield Boulevard. On to my new life.

Within days Joe was released from jail, courtesy of the lawyer I got him in my misguided devotion, and so now he had a CalTrans sentence he was supposed to complete in lieu of jail time. As mentioned I gave him the Nissan because again, I was quite misguided and very devoted. I would have done anything for him to make sure he was okay, and part of that was to give him the car. So I got him sprung from jail, saved all his stuff in a nice little storage unit, and in the meantime he was living out of the Nissan while he figured things out. I’d let him use the bathroom in the house I was renting to shower and such. Anything beyond that and it was pushing the limits of what the landlord woman (named Laurie) would allow. But more on her and THAT situation in a moment.

And it was during this time period that we decided to pay our old apartment a visit. Joe never did get to say “goodbye” before being abruptly hauled off to jail in cuffs. So he wanted that closure. And to see what his room was up to.

I’d been out for six days at the time we went back. So I was curious myself to see if the place would still be “lit up.” Mostly, I was curious about the white lines. That was the number one thing I wanted to check out. To see if they would still be there now that I was gone.

I still had the key to the place, because I never turned them back in to the office, being that we were evicted. We parked the car across the street at the Albertson’s, to avoid the security that the complex was now employing, and we walked over to the complex.

Nobody was around, so we silently ducked up the stairs to our old place.

The door was wide open.

Joe looked a bit surprised about that, but then I pointed out that the door was freshly painted, and probably some of the walls inside. So they were airing the place out.

Oh, he nodded.

We slipped in to the place. All the lights were off, and the only light was the light coming in from the outside light. Which was very bright, and cast light into the living room, kitchen, and both bedrooms. So we could more than adequately see our way around the place.

I headed right for my room, and Joe to his.

I stood there in the middle of the room, lit by the outside sidewalk lights coming through the blinds, and the light from the front door. I let my eyes adjust to the semi-darkness for a minute or two.

Then I saw them. The white lines.

They were very weak now. But they were there. One…and after a long bit….two…and after another long bit…three. Very slow. And few and far between. But they were still there.

WOW! I thought, completely floored. It just hit me. The realization that the reason they were so strong and powerful and constant…was because of me. I was the cause of them. I was the reason they were there. And without me, they would eventually just fade away. And die off. Like they were now. They were barely going right now. And given another week, they’d be gone completely.

Then I noticed the shapeless blob sort of whitish blue thing in the area where my computer used to be. It was just there, hovering and blob like, slowly moving and changing shape.

okey dokey.

And I left the room. Joined Joe in his room, to check out the scene in there.

I’d pretty much avoided Joe’s room if I could during the last week I was there, packing everything up. I didn’t like being in there. It was bad enough I had to spend five hours cleaning up all the grime in the bathroom. That was five hours spent in his room when I didn’t want to. And on an important side note, all the grime in Joe’s bathroom was completely inexplicable to me even at the time. I didn’t understand how it had formed. It was this layer of brown grime that completely covered the walls, but especially in the shower area, as well as coating the sink, and completely coating the toilet. Not shit, btw. Something else inexplicable. That’s why it took five hours, because whatever this was it wouldn’t come off. I had to get those Oxi Clean effervescent tablets because bleach powder and a toilet brush alone wouldn’t work for the toilet. Multiple tablets after tablets, plus the bleach and heavy duty scrubbing by hand wearing gloves. But after that, unless I absolutely HAD to be in there, I wouldn’t go in there. Kept the door closed off. Didn’t allow Kitty to go in there while I had to be in there cleaning. The vibe was “scary”. Not to sound corny, but, that’s the only way to put it. It was just wrong, and very scary, a very evil feeling, and not something I could handle being around. Definitely not safe for a little Kitty either. Joe’s room didn’t start off feeling that way when we first moved in, or even during the ensuing months with the rampant paranormal that was already in full force at that time. But by the end things had taken a bad turn, and now there was an actual truly evil feeling about it.

Years later after the Vortex I came across a story in Paper Magazine about C level actor Michael Rapaport talking about how he owned an apartment building in NYC and rented a unit to actress Natasha Lyon………who at that time was a hardcore drug addict. And the damage she did to that apartment was like nothing he’d ever seen in his life, and cost him tens of thousands of dollars to repair. Everything was broken, including the plumbing, the floors were destroyed, she had explicit porn mag cutouts taped up all over the walls everywhere…..and there was this layer of grime coating everything that matched the description of what was happening in Joe’s bathroom. I wasn’t stupid. I know Joe was doing drugs, big time, even if he kept most of it hidden from me. And meanwhile all the rest of what Michael described matched up in an uncanny way. Joe had his porn mag stash, wound up breaking and destroying everything he touched, which in a way was also inexplicable…..and there was that mysterious layer of almost impenetrable brown grime coating everything in his bathroom. As soon as I read Michael’s description of Natasha’s destroyed apartment my first thought was that it was the fingerprints of the same demonic activity plaguing Joe. Demons revel in filth and destruction, squalor and darkness. Drugs, sickness, hatred, debauched porn, garbage, everything dirty/unclean, depraved, broken, ugly. Demons hiding in the dark corners like roaches and fungus. The opposite of God, love, beauty, order, health, happiness, wholeness. And whatever that bizarre impenetrable grime is, it ties into that energy. Something equivalent to “ectoplasm.”

I realize when looking back that the change in Joe’s room mimicked the ongoing negative descent that Joe was also going through, mentioned at the beginning, culminating with the way he was by the end when we permanently parted ways in Portland, nine months later. Someone who had so fully embraced all these entities and constant paranormal manifestations that he no longer looked, acted or felt fully human anymore.

Joe was just walking about, stopping here and there to “feel” things out.

“Yeah, this place is definitely lit up. STILL!” he laughed. “I feel bad for whoever moves in here after us.”

“I know,” I agreed. “Come here, come check out what I did to the bathroom…” I made him come look. I flipped on the light, and showed him five hours of effort. The place was spotless. The only unsavory remnant of “the situation” being the broken mirror, still leaning up against the wall, sliced in two, with that lazy “S” shaped wave.

“Damn…” he marveled at how clean it was. He smiled at the mirror, and the memories attached to it, and ran his fingers along the slice.

We flipped the light back off.

“Come check out my room…You can still see the white lines. They’re really faint and weak, but they’re still there…”

We went and checked out my room together now.

We stood there in the middle of the room, hearing our old trashy neighbors yelling back and forth with some friend of theirs who was standing under their window, talking to them. The same neighbors that Joe had had the run in with (because the neighbor guy had been rampaging on his family, as usual) and which resulted in Joe getting arrested. We rolled our eyes. Real life, in the “normal” world, crashing into our bizarre existence in this apartment. Joe looked around. He could see the faint and weakened white lines too.

The bluish blob thing was also still there.

“Do you see that?” I asked him finally, breaking the silence. We both had been staring at it.

“Uh…yeaaah…” he said, seriously.

“Okay, so you DO see it too then…that thing…right there…”

“Yeaaah…the bluish white blob thing…”

He used the same word choice I did. “Yeah. That.”

We stared at it for a bit.

okey dokey.

Back to his room again.

We stood in the middle of his room again, for one last time, checking things out.

And that’s when I saw the thing in his room. I had had the shapeless bluish white blob in my room. He had some white thing with…stringy looking tendrils coming out of it. And it was moving towards us, in slo mo, with all those stringy things coming off of it, in every direction, moving around. In retrospect it looked exactly like a nebula. The Tarantula Nebula, to be specific.

I stood there, head cocked, staring and staring at it, wondering if I was seeing this. I glanced at Joe to my right, and saw that he was staring at it too.

“Do you see that?” I broke the silence again.

“Yeah, I do. It’s time to leave.”

“What IS it?” I watched as it continued to slowly make its way toward us.

“I don’t know. But it’s time to leave. Go.”

“What IS it though??”

“Just GO.”

“But what IS it???”

“GO!”

So I did. Turned and headed for the door. He followed, still looking warily back at it. It was still slowly making its way to where we had just been standing. On a mission or something. (Makes me realize that its sense of time may be different from ours. For all we know, this thing was barreling straight at us from its own point of view, experiencing the passage/rate of time very differently from how we experience it. But meanwhile for us it appeared to be moving in suuuuper sloooowwwww moooooo……. And maybe to it we appeared to take off and leave so quickly that it could barely keep up. Like those UFO stories, of which my dad also experienced firsthand. The jet fighters were barely off the ground at that military base in Da Nang during the Vietnam war, scrambled to go investigate the two UFOs that had been hovering over the base, and in a flash the two UFOs were already gone, zzzzip! whoosh, over the mountains. And the jets were just now in the air. Too late, boys. ;) You’re never going to catch up to one of those things in the air, not unless they allow you to, to toy with you. John Keel has talked multiple times in various books how the Men In Black are always concerned with what our rate of time is “here.” Time is operating very differently in different realms, and when something from one dimension enters into ours, they’re not always functioning at the same time rate.)

We headed back down the steps, onto the sidewalk below. Leaving the whole thing behind. A year’s worth of memories, good and bad. Things we’ve never experienced before, and probably won’t, ever again.

“So you saw that too then, right?” I brought it up again.

“Yeah. It had all these stringy things coming off of it…” he said, as we walked along.

“Yeah! That’s exactly how it looked! All these stringy little tentacle things coming off of it.” It never ceased to amaze me, even to the day I moved out, that Joe could accurately describe the phenomenon to me. Verifying it.

“So what was it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like that. That was new. Did you see how it was coming right for me?!?”

“Yeah! It was moving in slo mo, with those stringy things coming off of it…”

“Like uhhhhhhhh….” he imitated it with his hands, doing an “I’m coming to get you!” noise.

“That was trippy. God, what WAS it? That’s what I’d like to know!”

“I don’t know. I just know that I’m not lettin’ it attach itself to ME. No thanks, I’m atta here. No hitchhikers, sorry. Find somebody else to attach to.”

I laughed. We got back to the car, got in, and went back to Lake Forest to drop me off at the room I was now renting. Joe would be spending the night in the car, as was his new routine. Usually he’d park against the curb on the street where I lived, other times he’d go up to the train tracks I’d shown him a few times up in L.A. in Commerce, and he’d park in the large train station lot there, because like me he enjoyed the urban L.A. vibe and trains.

Joe didn’t have a job or any money, and should he manage to get one he’d have to somehow juggle his CalTrans sentence with it. Something he wasn’t in the mood to do. It’s a whole story in itself what was going on during this time period, but in the end he refused to deal with CalTrans and wound up skipping out of California altogether. So in June I watched him drive off down the street in my old Nissan, away from the house I was now renting a room in, on to bigger and better things in Oregon. And that would be the last time I’d see him until November, when I later moved up there myself to join him.

[page]

This new room that I moved into in was completely different from our old apartment.

It was empty.

And not the “tenting” empty, where it’s just staving off something that’s only right behind the “entrance”, but EMPTY empty. There was nothing there.

I felt the physical improvement on my body from the first night I was there. I was no longer moving around under water. My body was awake and full of energy. Not dragged down, and fighting off the energy drain. I did my workout on the second day there, fully expecting it to be the usual chore. It was always so difficult for me to do the pushups and all that. Like somebody was standing on me.

But now, when I got down and started doing that, I was literally, light as a feather. I was flying up and down, up and down, like I had no weight, like it was nothing. I was stunned, and stopped myself and sat up, not sure what to make of this. Ohhhhhh-kay, I thought. I haven’t done push ups in weeks! This should be difficult! This should be straining me! I shouldn’t be flying up and down, feeling weightless!!!

I did something like 100 push ups, taking advantage of this.

And from that first night, and onwards, I was staying up til 1 am, like it was nothing. There was no way I could’ve made myself go to sleep at 8:30 or 9 even if I’d wanted to. I had too much energy. Even though I was still in the same situation – no car, no money (and REALLY with no money now, after my brother’s jail fiasco, and losing my $1,300 deposit due to being evicted.) I should’ve been depressed. But it was never depression that had been dragging me down. It had been the place I was living. Sucking off of me. Draining my energy. This was the way I should be, I realized. NOT the other way.

I reveled in this new me. Soaked it up. I reveled in the complete lack of white lines, and “entrances” that emit waves of chilly icy air that make your ribs tingle. Reveled at the lack of entities crossing over, at all hours of the day. No sparklies, no white balls, no black circles. No more energy things attaching themselves to me and disrupting my sleep, and no more attacks. No more waking up suddenly in the middle of the night and always finding something there, watching me. No more blasts of heat like an oven in the middle of my room, making my face scrunch up and giving me nausea. No more human ghosty woman, knocking on my headboard, slamming my toilet tank lid around, scritch scratching my back, and sitting on the edge of my bed. No more bluish white blobs of shapeless energy blowing through my room and leaving through the living room, or hovering in the air in the living room, scaring Kitty. And no more cat spazzing out. Kitty was completely calm, every single night that I was there. Not once did she spaz out.

Unfortunately, the roommate situation itself didn’t work out. I ended up fleeing that place after only three weeks, because the landlord lady named Laurie, this middle aged white woman, was a total nightmare. Somebody who liked to take in people who were in vulnerable, down and out situations……so she could exploit them. :/ During the brief time I lived there we had two other females also renting rooms – one 30-something chick going through bad financial difficulties, admitting that she was completely trapped and unable to move out, and a girl who was 17/18 and had “run away” from home, creating a ton of drama that Laurie just ate up and couldn’t get enough of.

The drama centered on the fact that she “ran away” when she was technically underage at 17, but then turned 18 soon after. (That’s why I put “running away” in quotes – she had been on the cusp of being a legal adult.) So now there was nothing her family could do, but they weren’t giving up, and creating lots of drama. Which Laurie absolutely thrived on. This runaway girl became Laurie’s new hobby, basically. Laurie wasn’t somebody who just rented you the room and stayed out of your business. She wanted your business to become her business……so she could get an upperhand and start controlling/manipulating things. Demanding more and more money, all the while getting you to sign “legal contracts” that she would try to hold over your head to force you to stick around and be “under her thumb.”

So Laurie and “runaway girl” were always having big fights because Laurie was completely suffocating her, would not leave her alone, acting like it was her own daughter and she owned her. So I’d frequently hear runaway girl screaming “LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!” and doors slamming, and Laurie standing outside her locked room in the hall, whining and pleading and pestering for her to open the door! Please! Let me in!!

“NO!!! LEAVE ME ALONE!!! GO AWAY!!!” Runaway girl traded her bad homelife for a bad room rental situation that she was now trapped in, with no car and barely any money.

But since Laurie’s exploitation schtick had always worked with the other people (all females) that she’d rented to, all passive and weak and in very bad life situations, it never occurred to her that anybody would ever rebel. I think I was the first. I don’t do “thumbs.” Big fuck you, and abruptly moved out after only three weeks, pretty much daring her to do something about any of it legally. She never did, because guess what…it was all nonsense.

So I’d hopped online to the Pennysaver website, and I found a new place within one day of deciding I wanted out. It was only a few blocks away, on El Toro Road. Mike gave me a lift over there to check it out and meet with the guy Dominic who was renting the room. It was another beat up old house, with crazy roommates, but, whatever. The bedroom itself was twice the size of the one I’d just been renting, for the same price. $500 a month rent, $100 a month flat rate for utilities. It was more than fair for the size room I was getting, with a/c, and a fireplace, and even came with a couch. Right on.

My new roommates were Dominic, who was the landlord, and was usually never home. One of three Leos living there at the time. Italian, over 6 feet tall with black hair and dark skin. And as I would gradually come to discover…..not “all there” mentally. When I was first moving in he warned me with regards to Kitty to be careful, because of his dogs in the backyard. He had these empty cage enclosures set up in the backyard and a “Beware of Dog” sign on the fence gate leading to the backyard. But…….there were no dogs. And hadn’t been in who knows how long. Yet he would sometimes make reference to them in the present tense as if they were actually out there. That was just the tip of the iceberg of his mentally off-ness. O.o

Then there was Todd, 32, and going through a divorce, with two boys who would visit every other weekend. (This was the second time in life I had a roommate named Todd. The other one was mentioned earlier, whom was one of the roommates with me, Mike and Steve.) Todd was over 6 foot as well, with meat on his bones, a shaved head, tats and a boyish face. I came to discover he was a compulsive liar, and most of his personal story was…..greatly embellished, or completely fabricated. Another Leo, and who had a loud, boisterous, self absorbed extroverted personality, loved to be involved in everybody’s business, creating drama and mayhem (harmless, but still annoying), and in general acted like a little boy in a kid’s body. He liked to be social, so was always knocking on doors to see who wanted to hang out. We weren’t actual friends-friends, but I could get along with him because he was so friendly and talkative, and so we did hang out a lot. (I didn’t really have much choice anyway…..didn’t have a car, couldn’t go anywhere.) Todd liked Kitty, and there were times when he’d knock on my door and be like, “I’m not here for you, I just want to see your cat.” :D Only Todd could get away with that. Kitty in turn liked him and seemed to find him interesting.

Todd’s four year old son Connor was a total mini-me replica of him in terms of looks, but personality-wise he was like an old soul adult in a kid’s body, so their roles were reversed. It was funny to watch. Todd would be going on in his boisterous voice, “BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!” about who knows what, and meanwhile Connor would be sitting there staring at Todd’s TV with an annoyed old man’s look on his face, trying to tune him out in a quietly exasperated way. Todd was playing the role of the loud obnoxious kid always looking for attention, while Connor was the annoyed parent, wishing for some peace and quiet. Connor was a cute kid who could be a kid, but also had moments of acting like a wise old parent in my experiences with him. Like the time Kitty’s bowl of crunchy cat food accidentally got knocked over, so I started picking the pieces up off the carpet and putting them back in the bowl. Connor squatted down next to me to help, but then in a nice, but “correcting” parental tone and with a facial expression that conveyed “We know better….” he said “We should throw them away and put new food in the bowl.” I was just like “uh…..okay…..sure…..” nodding with wide eyes. O.o He was four!!!! :D It was wild.

Then there was Marilyn from Brazil who was also of Italian descent with dark hair and skin. And she was also a Leo, with the fiery, feisty, crazy personality, a lot of angry energy for whatever reason, could get riled up about anything, and who carried herself as if she were a Queen. (Three crazy Leos under one roof…..yikes…..) She was 40 but looked fantastic for her age. She had learned English by watching TV she said, and had a funny way of pronouncing words. She always pronounced the “ed” at the end of words. Walk-ed, talk-ed, etc. By the time I moved out of that place half my silverware had gone missing, and I was 100% positive Marilyn’s the one who stole it all since she had a table and chairs, mini fridge and dishes in her room. oh well.

And then there was Denise, who was 37. She definitely had mental issues, including an inability to handle any amount of stress as she told me. She was short, slightly overweight, with long fluffy light brown hair and huge pale blue eyes that had a perpetual “deer caught in the headlights” blank/shell shocked look. Something not right there. So she was relegated to working at Burlington Coat Factory, as a greeter, because she admitted that it was pretty much all she could handle. She said she wished she could have a job like mine, working in an office, being an admin assistant and all that, but again….said she wouldn’t be able to handle the stress of it. She couldn’t multi-task or handle too much coming at her….which is what being an admin assistant is all about. Doing things for multiple people in the office at any given point, being given responsibilities that the bosses trust you will handle without them needing to keep an eye on things…..deadlines…… So, yeah. She had a daughter with her ex husband that she married solely to help him get his green card, but she didn’t have any custody. When women in our mother-biased society don’t have even part time custody, and sole custody is given to their immigrant English second language husband instead, then you know the situation is bad in terms of their mental state.

I also learned that she was a bit of a compulsive liar as well, so between her and Todd it was really screwball. They would get exactly like Julie and Mike, with the finger pointing he-said she-said, both insisting up and down and back and forth that they were telling the truth and that the other one was lying. And with total passion and conviction too, even yelling and screaming, so you couldn’t tell who was the liar. It was nuts. Then there was how Marilyn and Denise would get together in Marilyn’s room every night and talk for hours about all of their personal problems and woes, complaining and co-miserating. And both of them as I learned could, and would, turn on you on a dime. One minute they were your friend, trying to engage in you long winded heart to heart female chats, then the next…..switcharoo. o.O Total backstabbing attack mode.

One night a couple of months down the line they pulled a sudden attack mode right after I’d just brewed myself a little pot of green tea and was carrying it back to my room, about to watch a movie. (With a really nice TV and VCR that Mike gave me that he didn’t need anymore. I didn’t have cable hookup though, and wasn’t interested in that. I just used the setup to watch movies.) I found myself suddenly cornered by Denise and Marilyn outside my door, holding my pot of tea. Inventing some nonsense to pretend to be mad at me about they started in with a tag team attack….that I fell for. Instead of saying “Whatever…..” and continuing into my room and locking the door the way I should have I stupidly started engaging with them, trying to understand wtf they were talking about and defending myself……..which proceeded to go on for another full hour.

It was completely cliche “girl world nonsense” that so many females engage in, finding stupid shit to pick a fight about, then sucking you into a round and round….and round and round and round and round…..that never ends, has no point, and keeps spinning off onto 5,000 other things. The point is that there is no point. It’s just straight up energy vampire feeding. Same shit Julie pulled with Dave, as mentioned. Same shit my previous landlord Laurie used to pull with everybody she rented to in the house. Same shit my mom used to pull with me on the regular. The me back then hadn’t realized some things yet about this reality, so again I stupidly fell for it, allowing myself to get sucked in, not realizing that it was “the fight to nowhere.” But that’s why I used to LOVE living with guy roommates………. lack of drama. Straight forward. Uncomplicated. Honest, blunt, to the point. No “pst pst pst!” gossip and two facing, no games, no energy vampire round and round nonsense. And I fit right in with that, which is why we all lived together for as long as we did. It was very compatible, and we all just had fun going places and doing stuff together, and just being. Always joking around, always laughing and having fun. The only reason it ended is because Steve and I hooked up and became a thing, and he immediately decided to pull the plug on the house situation and move me and him out to our own apartment.

But after I’d finally managed to extricate myself from the Marilyn and Denise situation I was sitting in my room, completely wound up now and frazzled, unable to proceed with watching my movie as originally planned, wanting to GTFO, ASAP. But of course realizing there was no place for me to go…..because I didn’t have a car yet. I was still in the process of saving. So all I could do was just sit there, angry, frazzled, frustrated and trapped.

And within a couple of minutes of sitting there feeling these intense frazzled feelings it’s suddenly “DING DONG!” Front doorbell rings. Curious I got up and left my room to answer it. Opened the front door and who should be standing there out of nowhere at like 10:00 at night, with a knowing smirk on his face? Mike.

“Oh my God…..you have NO idea how glad I am to see you…..I just had this big fight with Denise and Marilyn….” I started to explain in a lowered, intense voice.

He nodded knowingly, still smiling. “Yup, I know. Come on. Let’s get atta here.” He looked over my shoulder at Marilyn and Denise who had emerged behind me in the hall to see who was at the door. I went back to my room to grab my backpack and close up my room, taking off with Mike out into the night, just SO happy to be getting out of there. Later on when I asked him how did he know?!? He said he’d been on his way home, driving down El Toro Road, but wasn’t quite ready to call it a night just yet. Decided to tune into me, see what I was up to, whether I was still up and would want to hang out and go anywhere. Then completely felt the angry, frustrated, panicked, trapped “HELP!!!!” vibes coming off of me, sensing that some sort of big fight had just happened with the roommmates. Then was like, “Welp…..time for a detour…..” and immediately headed over to the house.

So yeah, once again…..Mike and his “psychic ear” saved the day. And there were several more incidents besides the ones already mentioned here that have happened over the years. When you’re that psychic you don’t need a phone.

So with all of those roommates, plus me, that made five people living in the house. Too many people. Dominic converted the garage into a little living quarters/room for himself, and that’s where he crashed when he did come home. Though as I discovered when he was home he would often hide out in the garage writing these long, crazy rambling notes to Todd threatening to evict him and for all the reasons why, but never following through. Todd had all these pages of handwritten rambling notes saved and showed them to me once. The way Dominic wrote was like gibberish. English words strung together, but they didn’t formulate coherent sentences. Another time when it was just me and Dominic that were home, Dominic showed me the latest note he was putting together for Todd consisting of more rambling gibberish. His eyes were glazed over and nobody was home as he rambled on and on about all his complaints about Todd. I just listened and nodded my head. O.o

There was an incident towards the end of my time there where Dominic and Todd totally got into it while I was at work. During that big fight/argument Dominic told Todd that all the roommates, including me, hated his kids, and were always complaining to him about them. O.o When Todd relayed that to me and Denise it was the only time I’d ever seen him show genuinely hurt feelings. For starters I’d never heard anybody there complain about Todd’s kids, and for me especially nothing could have been further from the truth. I liked both of his boys, they were genuinely good kids. But Connor in particular was my favorite, just because he was like this wise, 80 year old dude trapped in a kid’s body. :D There were times towards the end when it was Todd’s weekend to have his kids and they’d burst through the front door, full of energy, and make a beeline right for my door, knocking excitedly, wanting to see me and Kitty. But especially Kitty, whom they liked to play with. Another time right after they’d gotten there Todd was distracted in his room, then realized…..where was Connor?? as he later relayed to me. Couldn’t find him in the house, then rushed outside, worried….and found me helping a happy Connor ride his bike down the sidewalk. Todd told me that made his day to see that.

So yeah….that was a real asshole move from Dominic to say something like that. He knew what he was doing though, going for a below-the-belt attack using innocent kids as the weapon. Before I thought he was just harmless crazy, but after that I realized there was darkness going on there. It was also the same nonsense tactics that so many snake-in-the-grass pot stirrer females engage in. Very un-guy like behavior. So between all the rambling gibberish letters and the imaginary dogs in the backyard and making up low blow lies to start shit between the roommates he was just beyond. Also interestingly enough…..Dominic was the only one in the house who wasn’t interested in Kitty, at all. Just ignored her. That also kind of revealed his core/soul.

Annnnddd….that was the roommates situation. As Felicity even noted to me, people of their ages, renting a room? “Something is wrong with people like that. You’re in your 20s, so that’s okay. But by the time you reach their ages you’re not supposed to still be renting a room.” True. Todd was going through a divorce and no longer living with his wife. Denise admitted to having mental problems and didn’t have even part time custody of her daughter. Dominic clearly demonstrated mental problems. And Marilyn was an English second language immigrant who was full of inexplicable anger and stole things. They all had problems and no money.

Interestingly enough, towards the end of my time there I was on friendly terms with Denise and Marilyn, despite their big Attack Fight they’d cornered me into towards the beginning. To the point where Denise was even loaning me her Mazda 323 to run errands, without me asking. Her offer/insistence. And Marilyn was also offering to give me rides here and there in her VW Cabriolet convertible. But the big reason for that seemed to be because of the way I handled the situation. After that night I just……stayed away from them/avoided them. But didn’t engage in any negative retaliation shenanigans, which as it turns out, Denise was completely expecting as she relayed to me, after having gone through that with another female roommate. (Seems she had a habit of fighting with female roommates.) But I just kept to myself and did my own thing, staying away, like we were ships passing in the night. After that they apparently realized I was alright, so hey…..let’s all get along! What a novel idea! :/ Denise offering to loan me her car, completely entrusting me with her sole source of transportation, was the ultimate olive branch though.

(On a side note – Kitty would wind up being very popular with the house. Like the time Marilyn had some friends visiting, and she stopped by my room to see if I could show them Kitty and let them pet her. :D Kitty was a really good looking cat, one of the cutest little cat faces I’ve ever seen, always getting compliments about her looks. And she was very comfortable and friendly with people, as most black cats are. Her breed was the Bombay as I’d come to figure out, a cross between a black American shorthair and a Burmese, and she had all the physical traits from head to toe, and every single personality trait on the checklist. So she wasn’t just “a black cat.” Bombays are very intelligent, curious, friendly, sociable, and lack the usual fear/skittishness that most cats typically have….hence why they’re so sociable with people and curious. They’re also talkative, and athletic/active, which Kitty definitely was. So in a lot of ways they’re “dog cats,” as I’ve described them. The kind that can play fetch, and will wait for you by the door every day like a dog. Later on Tom verified that Kitty would always get up from her naps when I’d be on my way home from work. She always knew. So when I’d arrive home she’d be there waiting for me next to the front door. :) The thing about Kitty is she knew she was “one of us,” because right from the beginning Joe and I always treated her as such. I was constantly talking to her and interacting with her like she was a person (or human child, would be more like it), never ignored her, and anytime Joe and I were hanging out, talking, she would always be right there with us – sitting between us with her little feeties tucked underneath her, looking back and forth between us as we talked, all perky and curious. Later on with Tom and I it was always the same thing – always situated next to us, listening and just “hangin’ with her peeps.” Always, that was her deal. She was one of us. But this is definitely why everybody gravitated towards her. She wasn’t like a normal cat. She had tons of personality and expression in her face. Just the way she looked at people….it was like people energy. Just really alert and curious and open, and letting people pet her and fawn over her. She was a cuddle junkie. And it drew people in. To me she was just the coolest cat there ever was.)

But anyway, once I was settled into my new room I realized within the first 24 hours…..Houston, we have a problem.

Not a problem like with our old apartment. But, we still have a problem.

After settling in, I realize that this new room felt like I was sort of underwater again. It was back to “that” feeling. I felt drained. Low energy. I felt like the vibe in my room was heavy, thick, intense. I was now more psychically attuned to sense such things, versus the old me from a year before. I was already a different person now due to everything we’d gone through. My mindset was neutral and curious and observant. I no longer spent loads of time second guessing and doubting and going in circles. Now, I knew.

Then immediately, the “banging around” started. Something banging around into things, into everything. Getting Kitty’s attention too, when it would happen.

Oddly enough though, she never spazzed.

But I just knew, there was something going on. What, I wasn’t sure.

One late afternoon I was laying on my bed, sleeping. I woke up when it was nearly dark out, and just lay there, on my mattress, staring up into the air. I kept swearing I could see these white things appearing and disappearing around the air. Naaaa…couldn’t be, I thought. This room can’t have something going on in it too. That would just be NUTS!

Still, I lay there, languidly, no fear, convinced that I was definitely seeing something. Figured it must be a trick of the eye…but wishing I could see one long enough to get a good enough look at it. And then I did. One of them appeared and stayed there for a good second. It was shaped like a white “Y”, but a bubble Y, not a thin stick Y.

“There you are!” I said to myself. Bingo.

And it disappeared again. A few more popped up here and there. I was a little excited, but apprehensive, wondering what this meant. Did it mean it was going to turn into an all out bad situation like the other place?! I hoped not. I couldn’t even deal with another repeat.

I decided to get up and go out. I turned on my light, and got myself ready. And when I was slipping on my shoes, and grabbing my backpack, I heard something crash into my framed Andromeda poster that wasn’t yet hanging up, and was leaning against the wall.

Kitty jerked her head up and looked at it too, from where she was sitting next to me. We were across the room, by my door.

Okay, I thought, as both of us watched that area, looking for something. Didn’t see anything though.

So I left.

After that I had a few incidents here and there. For starters, like I said, the air was definitely “thick” in this room, or, as Mike put it, “I feel like my energy gets drained when I’m in your room. It’s like being underwater. It’s just a different medium, that’s all.”

He’s the one who gave me the “underwater” phrase, btw.

But just to check something, I asked him,

“You remember the last place I was in, right, where I lived for three weeks?”

“Yes.”

“You were in that room, hanging out with me. Do you remember how it felt?”

He thought about it. “Yes.”

“Did it feel the same way?”

He thought about it again. “No. There was nothing in that room.”

“Bingo.”

He nailed it exactly, and confirmed to me the same thing. That room was empty, and “light.” This room was heavy, and drained your energy.

Shortly thereafter, I was laying on my air mattress on the floor, after work one day. Feeling unmotivated and drained, as I usually did in this new room. I wasn’t asleep, just laying there with my eyes closed, awake. I’d only just lied down, and had only been laying there for a minute, at max. And then I felt the distinctive feel of a person kicking the foot of my mattress. I felt a FOOT, dammit. My mattress shook with the kick.

I lay there, eyes squeezed shut. I knew what that was. And I didn’t want to look.

Still…could be the cat, I reasoned.

I opened my eyes to check.

Kitty was next to the mattress, on the floor to the left. Sitting calmly and quietly. Not at the foot of my mattress where the kick came from. And she was looking up at something I couldn’t see, following it with her eyes, as whatever it was apparently moved away from my mattress to the other side of the room.

Calmly sat there, watching it.

That’s it, I’m atta here. I got up and grabbed my stuff together and bailed out, went somewhere else to go hang out.

Every single night I was now being woken up out of my dreams by the sudden, alarming feeling that somebody was in the room with me at the foot of my bed. I could feel somebody – a distinct he/male energy – standing there, staring at me, pissed off. I’d always refuse to look though. Didn’t want to see. Don’t want to know. I can’t handle it. Not again. I’d lay there, under the covers, eyes squeezed shut, scared, until I’d drift off to sleep again. I’d experienced a lot of different phenomenon in our previous apartment, and a few random anomalous things when I was a kid, but never that specific type of incident – feeling like there’s somebody actually standing at the foot of my bed, watching me, pissed off. And this went on every-single-night, waking me up with a sudden “!!” start from a restful sleep.

But yet despite that it didn’t actually register right away that this was going on. Because after a year in our old apartment, there were certain things that I had just grown so accustomed to that I learned to tune stuff out. Or put it out of my head. Only after a solid three weeks of this, and after the kick, did it register that there was a real, true problem here that actually needs to be full on “dealt with.” That this isn’t normal, healthy stuff. It needed to be stopped.

So I had to do another one of the Meditation things.

This one was a whole lot less formal than the one that Mike and I did. I had a much easier time with it, and was able to focus clearly on what I wanted. And once again, it was like I was picking up speed, rolling down down a mountain. What I did with this one was to envision that protective bubble, and to demand that anything with any sort of bad vibes, negative intentions, etc. were to stay away from me. Stay out of my space, stay away from my cat, leave us alone. No bad vibes or negative energy is allowed near me, or my room, or my cat.

But I didn’t flat out ask “it” or “they” to leave. I didn’t have the heart to. It didn’t seem like it was anything close to what we’d been experiencing at our old apartment, so it didn’t seem like there was a need to banish it. I mean, it can still be here in the house…Just not around ME.

I thought that was a fair compromise.

I felt like a million dollars after I was done. Completely protected, and light and free. It was awesome.

However, it didn’t go away. Not entirely.

There was the night I was coming home and just as I hit the front door, pulling out my keys, the outside light clicked off. Not burned out. But clicked off. I hurriedly opened the door, expecting to see a roommate there walking away from the light switch.

But no. Everybody was tucked away in their rooms. Nobody was anywhere near the door.

Okay, I thought. Whatever. And like I guessed, it wasn’t the bulb burning out, it was the switch being shut off. That’s small beans though to me, compared to what I’ve been through.

Then a few nights later Todd came home at 2:30 am, and found the front door wide fricking open. Even though I distinctly remember closing it earlier. And the door sticks too, so, when it’s closed, it sticks closed. No drifting open again. But it was wide open. Todd mentioned this to me the next night, when I looked into his room to say hi. His door was open, and he was watching T.V.

After he mentioned it, I said,

“You KNOW that we have a ghost here…don’t you? I mean, you KNOW that, right?”

He just stared at me, silently, from his lounge chair.

“We have something going on here. And I’ve noticed it from the very first day I moved in. I’ve already done a little something in my room to keep it from bothering me anymore, but, we’ll see how that goes.”

He kept staring at me. I figured he thought I was insane. I giggled a little.

“You’re kidding, right?” he said, dead pan.

“No. We have something in this house. I’m not exactly sure yet what it is, but there’s something here.”

“No, see, because I’ve never told anybody this, but I’ve had all kinds of weird shit happen to me in this place. No, you don’t understand, I’m serious, I’ve had some FREAKY-SHIT happen here. Some FREAKY-ASS-SHIT, okay?” Todd looked at me, serious and intense.

It’s amazing what happens when somebody has the balls to come forward and be the first to admit something. Then it’s like the floodgates open, and everybody starts crawling out from under their rock!

Todd told me his stories, about the noises he hears which scare him because he can’t tell where they’re coming from. He described hearing footsteps…walking on the roof, and also of getting the feeling that somebody is outside his window, watching him. Which is the same story I later heard from Denise, that she was freaked out, so sure she could feel that somebody was outside her window, staring in. And he told me how whatever it is has done things to fuck around with him, like mess with his laundry…when nobody else is home, so he knows it’s not one of the roommates doing it….

“Yup…and playing with the door, leaving it open, and turning out the outside light when I’m standing in the doorway, and kicking my bed, and standing at the foot of my bed, watching me, in the middle of the night…Uh huh, I know ALL about it…” I said, smiling knowingly. Sounding like Joe now. Now I was the Old Pro Expert know-it-all. And Todd was the Newbie.

“So…what then, did somebody die in this house? Isn’t that how you get a ghost? Doesn’t somebody have to die?”

“No, not always. Presences can be brought in. They’re attracted to negative energy. And this house is crawling with it. Between Dominic, and Marilyn, and Denise, with all their problems, and the way all three of them sit around brooding about their life, and complaining, and all the other whack job roommates you guys have had that you were telling me about [including one girl that Todd said used meth on the regular, including in the house….] this place is prime for it. I don’t think anybody ever died here. I think it was drawn in to the negative energy. They feed off of it.”

“What??” he was confused. Never heard of such a thing. He was new to this stuff. Wasn’t aware of “windows” and “feeders” and things like crossing over from one plane of existence to another. He was spooked out and mystified. This was all brand new to him.

Then there was the candlestick incident not too long after that. I was on my way out the door, had my headphones in my ears, and was rummaging around my table “desk,” looking for something before I left. And I heard a loud crashing noise, coming from behind me. I could hear that over my music.

I hesitated, half turning around to look. Kitty was sitting on the floor next to me, startled from the crash bang whatever it was. I couldn’t tell what made the noise, and didn’t want to. I knew it was the “it”, whatever it was.

Then, I watched as the candlestick and candle on my television flew off and landed on the floor in the middle of the room.

Okay, I’m ATTA here, I thought, as it hit the floor. I didn’t even try to pick it up, I just left it there and bailed. That was probably the most sensationalistic ghost/paranormal happening I’ve witnessed involving the manipulation of an object. Whatever this thing was, he was all about the manipulation of objects. Kicking the bed, throwing stuff around, turning lights off, opening doors, and even messing with Todd’s laundry apparently, if Todd wasn’t lying about that. He behaved as if he were a real physical human, only, invisible.

Then I actually saw him, it, whatever it is, for the first time. Todd and I were hanging out late at night in the kitchen, eating and talking. His bedroom door was open down the hall, and his T.V. was on, blaring, as usual. Kitty was roaming around free, and at that moment she had been in Todd’s room……had been, until it looked like she was being chased out of his room.

I looked up from the kitchen counter where I was leaning. I was facing in the direction of the hallway and bedroom doors, and something had just gotten my attention. It was Kitty scampering out of Todd’s room. Except she kept fearfully looking over her shoulder. Run a few steps, pause and look back, jerk forward again for a few steps, stop, look back over her shoulder, then jerk forward again. Like she was only reluctantly leaving his room, because she was being forced/scared into leaving his room.

And then…a black shadowy looking figure (the size of a human) appeared in the doorway – stood there, like it was looking down the hall to make sure my cat was leaving. Kind of like, “Yeah, that’s right, you better go.” I saw the head, and the whole right side of his body – shoulder, arm, torso and leg – as he stood there, watching my cat leave, not seeming amused, at all. And then he slowly turned and retreated back into Todd’s room. No wonder Kitty was scared.

I watched this happening, my mouth opening a little. My end of the conversation halted. Eyes big.

Then I grinned. There’s really nothing else you can do in a situation like that. Just go with it. Have fun. It had all become one big joke by that point, a game. So enjoy it and go along for the ride.

“Wow,” I said.

“What?” Todd asked, looking up in mid bite.

“There’s something in your room right now.”

“NO there’s not,” he tried to blow it off. Put the spoonful of mac and cheese in his mouth and chewed.

“Uh, YEAH there is. I just watched whatever it is chase my cat out of your room.” And I described to him what I just saw. Only he wouldn’t listen. Tuned me out, kept changing the subject. Todd’s like that though. He totally hates this possible ghost stuff, and waivers back and forth from saying stuff like, “We have ghosts, don’t we?” being serious. To which I’ll go, “Yeah. Well, we’ve got SOMETHING, anyway.” To then going the other direction and saying, “NO we don’t…” “We don’t have GHOSTS…” “NOOOOO…” Then sometimes being in the middle, going, “Well, if we have a ghost, then what does it want? Is it a dead person??? What if it tries to hurt somebody??” Sounding like he’s genuinely nervous. It all depends on the mood he’s in. When he’s in a confident mood, like when he’s on his way out the door to work, well then shit like that doesn’t exist. But when he’s tired, beaten down, maybe bummed out or whatever, then it probably does exist…and it kind of makes him nervous.

But after that happened I had a realization about the colors of entities. I wonder if the reason I saw the something in Todd’s room as a black shadowy fuzzy form is because it’s negative and bitter. I could never see the female one in our old place, no matter how hard I tried. She was completely invisible to me. And – she wasn’t negative in any way. And the other one that I called Velcro Critter, which was like a happy puppy dog – it was invisible. And the other stuff that was blowing through our apartment on their way to bigger and better things? All of which never hurt us or did anything negative? Usually all bluish white. And the energy remnants that looked like sparkles? Bright orange-y yellow, or glittery gold. And then the thing that attacked me…….it was pitch black. Seems to be something to the color thing. Black seems to be equated with something that has a bad vibe, or hostile intentions, obviously. Blue, white, blueish white, invisible, sparkly gold, all seem to be connected to neutral entities just off doing their own thing.

Later on after this incident, there was one more biggie that happened. It was the middle of the night and I was curled up in bed with Kitty, under my trusty purple Christmas lights, when I became aware of the sound of something moving about my room. Picking things up on both of my “desk” tables, then putting them back down again. Just poking about, exploring, looking at my stuff. I could hear the objects and papers being quietly picked up and rummaged with.

Kitty tensed up, flicking her tail wildly from underneath my sleeping bag. I laid there, a bit frozen…..but no longer full of the old paralyzing fear that I used to have. There was an incident identical to this that had happened to me as a kid, when I was about nine, back in Connecticut, where something was in my room rummaging through my stuff. And I failed miserably during that incident with my level of terrorized fear. My back had been faced toward my room during that incident, I couldn’t see anything, because I was paralyzed from fear, unable to turn around. But I listened as whatever it was moved about my room, poking through the things on my desk and my dresser, including this tin I had full of push pins, and the distinct noise that made when picked up and jiggled, and then put back down again. I’ll never forget that.

This time, I laid there, eyes open. Actually facing my room, where this was happening, although my sleeping bag was blocking my view of the room. My eyes were focused on Kitty.

I heard it quietly moving across the room, then approach my air mattress bed.

There was an orange juice container next to my air mattress on the carpet, and I heard the distinct sound of the cardboard juice container squeeze in….then out again…..as if being squeezed by a hand.

And then I felt it, him, just standing there, over me, looking at me and Kitty.

That’s when Kitty completely froze. Her tail stopped in mid whip, and her eyes bugged out as she looked upwards at it. Paralyzed. She was positioned in such a way that she could see beyond the sleeping bag cover. She was looking directly at him.

I was brave enough to hold my ground…but not brave enough to glance up and see if I could see him. :) The sleeping bag was over my head, and I didn’t try to see beyond. Then again……..I didn’t need to. I’d already seen him before, that one night when me and Todd were hanging out in the kitchen, and this ghost thing had chased Kitty out of Todd’s room. I knew what he looked like. An all black “shadow person.” The same form as a human adult male, but, all black in color.

There was a few seconds of silence. I didn’t feel any hostility from him though at that moment. Not like when I first moved in, and I’d keep waking up, night after night, for weeks, feeling an angry presence staring at me from the foot of my bed. The same angry presence that Todd described, and Denise. And which Marilyn probably also experienced, but didn’t want to talk about.

This time though the vibe was completely neutral.

He just stood there. Finally I said “Hey…” acknowledging it. The same as that one incident back in 1996, mentioned earlier, when Mike had to knock on my door and intervene, get me out of my room when “something” showed up in my room when I was drunk and listening to NIN, and where I also said a matter-of-fact “Hey…..” to. O.o But I felt like I should say hi at least. You know….since he was standing there.

More silence. Then I heard it walk away and fade out.

In retrospect I look back and realize that whatever he was, his attitude towards me changed at the end, just before I moved out. Gone were the days of random crash bang noises all around my room, kicking the bed, throwing a candlestick and staring angrily over me as I lay in bed. Now he was calm. At least with me. Maybe because I acknowledged him when nobody else would. The more he did to get the roommates’ attention, the more scared they got, and the more they refused to acknowledge any of what was happening. I’m not saying he was a good manifestation – he was black in color, versus white/blue/gold/etc. like other neutral/harmless manifestations I’ve experienced. And dude obviously had some issues. Nobody kicks beds and throws candlesticks unless they’re pissed. ;D But I can have some sympathy for whatever he was, and whatever his situation was. He acted like the house was his and that WE were the intruders. And he kept trying to get our attention, and nobody would give that to him. Then I show up like, Yeah, we have a ghost here, didn’t you know? I’ve tried talking to him, yeah, you know, he throws stuff around and kicks the bed and stuff…hey look, there he is in your doorway Todd! Wow! haha! Hey ghost, you can hang around any place you want in the house, just don’t bother me and my cat, okay? ;D Must have been unusual after all that time of being ignored.

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By this point, when our resident ghost decided to calm down, with me at least, it was fall of 2001. A lot started to happen come September 2001. Not least of all 9/11. Then immediately coming across David Icke within a week of that in a completely “woo” way, and who was for me a personal game changer, leading to my entire conspiracy awakening. As well as my renewed interest out of nowhere in researching alien abductions. Followed by meeting Tom (montalk) at the end of the month online, and then experiencing my first known, overt abduction in early October, and which is documented in full in “Chasing Phantoms.” Reality was just packing it in on all fronts. O.o

During the same time where I had my first overt abduction (and scary attempt at a second follow-up a week later, which I dodged, and both of which took place while renting this room in the house of crazy roommates and which are detailed in Chasing Phantoms), Joe revealed over the phone from Portland about his own recent “coincidental” October abduction experience. It was the first time ever experiencing/remembering one in full detail, of course, “coincidentally” ;) and was the first time he was finally told what the deal was with him, me, and our entire situation in general. But he didn’t want to talk about it over the phone, of course. ;) Would only talk about it in person.

Talk about total carrot bait. And me being me, totally crazy and impulsive at the time with nothing to lose? “Alright then….I’m going to Portland.”

During what turned out to be my final week or so of being in SoCal, but which I didn’t know yet at the time, I decided I was ready to start looking into buying a used car, since I’d finally saved enough money. (And it’s not like it took me all that time to save a few grand, it’s just I had other people to pay back first. Getting the car was the last thing on the list, only after anybody else that I owed money to was paid back. First and foremost being the lawyer I’d hired for Joe. So everybody had been paid back, and now I’d managed to save several thousand more on top of it.) It wasn’t super urgent though, just that I was now ready to start looking.

I was at work when I decided this, thinking about how I kinda wish Mike could help me with that, since he’s good with cars (he knew cars like nobody’s business, and used to work for years in a garage). Buuuut….I would never actually ask him to do that. So I put it out of my mind again.

But within a few minutes after thinking that…..the switchboard rang at my job, and guess who it was. Mike. Just calling to check in on how I was doing with the whole car situation. Did I think I might be ready to start looking soon? O.o :D Just…..wow. Once again, Mike’s “psychic ear” strikes again. I told him I was actually….had even just been thinking about that…… O.o He asked what type of car I’d be interested in, and the price range, then said leave it to him, he’d see what he could find. I was looking for something Japanese – Nissan, Honda, Toyota, Mazda. Few thousand at most, ideally. (In ’01 that was the average price for a good/excellent condition used mid-range car in SoCal.) For Mike the idea of hunting down a car for me was fun, since he loved cars anyway.

He came back with a candidate in a short time – a ’93 Mazda Protege, in excellent condition, for only $2,200. So off we went later that night to check it out up in Santa Ana. He negotiated them down to two grand, and that became my new used car. It was eight years old at the time but ran like new. It was amazing, and I wound up having that car right until 2013. Twelve years. So it was 20 years old by the time I finally had to get a new one. It was always a super reliable car with a naturally good engine.

What’s funny is that after driving Denise’s Mazda 323 and really liking the quality of it, and getting rides from Marilyn in her VW Cabriolet, with her leopard print steering wheel and seat covers that I thought were cool, I wound up getting a Mazda….that came with leopard print steering wheel and seat covers. The first and only car Mike and I looked at. It all just….came together, and was a synchronistic match. The car also came with a bumper sticker (that I scraped off, because come on…) that said “This is what a Princess looks like.” Which was another synch, since that was the nickname given to me by my super psychic, Filipino former boss Edwin back in ’96. “Princess.” His inside joke, tying into past life stuff. Have also been called “Princess” by a few other people over the years, going back into early childhood, which is interesting, considering I tended to have slightly tomboyish vibes, and often lived life the opposite of a princess. But that was the energy people were sensing underneath all that, something regal/royal, contradicting outer appearances.

Also during that final week in SoCal I was sitting at my desk at work one day thinking about how I’d like to have a cell phone. I’m tired of being without a phone, and since I’m getting ready to move forward to the next stage of life it would be good to have one. (If I wanted to stay in touch with Joe after he left for Portland he would have to call me at work during the day.) But…I don’t want to have to bother with going out there and trying to find a place that will sell me one. I’m lazy. :D It would awesome if they just like……came to me or something……..and it would be SUPER awesome if it didn’t require having to deal with any contracts. (back then in ’01 cell phones pretty much always required having a contract, that you had to be approved for.) So then guess what happens next. The very next day a traveling sales dude walks into my job, seeing if anybody there would be interested in purchasing any cell phones through WorldCom Wireless. No contracts required. O.o Went home that night with a new cell phone.

So after landing a new set of wheels and a cell phone, all within days of each other, and which equates to freedom, and still having several thousand dollars extra to spare, I gave notice, quit my job, packed up my room and walked away from the dead end, empty life in SoCal that was going nowhere. Ran off to Portland with Kitty to get those answers from Joe. (Only back in ’2001 could having a mere few thousand dollars be enough to do something like this. At this point as I go back and edit this several decades later the level of inflation that has hit the U.S. is beyond insane. ~$2,500 will get you nowhere nowadays in that same type of situation. :/ But at that time that was a way more than enough to run off to Portland where I knew I could live for free with Joe. )

Even though my job was nice and paid me the most of any job I’d had yet in life, and I liked Felicity as a person, and both she and the owner, who was her boyfriend, had always been awesome to me, the company was completely disorganized, like nothing I’d ever really seen before. Just total mayhem. I was helping out with random accounting/invoicing stuff in Quickbooks (as well as handling everything to do with the time cards, payroll generation and check distribution for 2-3 dozen Hispanic under-the-table field workers they were employing for job sites, since it didn’t require dealing with taxes; it’s just straight up calculating time from all their timesheets and cutting straightforward checks for “pay rate x hours,” no deductions). But it’s how I know they had 2 million in uncollected past dues from clients….but also owed 2 million to various vendors. But could never seem to get it together to collect the 2 million that was owed from all these people over here to pay off all these other people over there. Probably because Felicity and the owner/her boyfriend were too busy running off on periodic vacations. Just always running off on trips, all the time, like they were literally trying to run away from their lives, and most of which they didn’t tell anybody about, so we never knew what was going on. Field supervisors would need to talk to them about important time-sensitive job site issues….but it turns out they’d run off again.

The entire office was a messy disaster of paperwork and blueprints and nonsense everywhere, including all over the floor, and meanwhile the owner’s psychotic Scorpio ex wife Jolynn was also working there…….as blackmail. It’s a WHOLE story in itself, but basically she threatened all kinds of shenanigans involving custody of their two daughters if he didn’t “let” her work there. So the mayhem she was creating to sabotage his business……as he meanwhile had to just……look the other way and let her do her blackmail thing in order to make sure she didn’t take his daughters away, and Felicity also had to bite the bullet despite being his new, live-in girlfriend……..wow. O.o Jolynn was the epitome stereotype of “Demented Scorpio Woman Gone Wrong.”

So even though the overall vibe of the office was mellow, and none of the relationship related negativity directly affected or involved me, it was still a major problem just knowing that all of this was going on around me, having to hear about it and witness it all the time, when the office was so small to begin with. Then adding in all the other chaos and business mismanagement on top of it…..it had just gotten to the point of “yeah, this has totally run its course. I’m over it. I don’t care how much money I’m making. There’s a whole world out there. Time to move on.” And move on, I did. Getting answers from Joe about our abduction situation mattered more than anything else, including money.

So I was in Portland for three months total, signed on with Manpower Staffing based out of downtown Portland, worked at a temp gig at a really nice office also located downtown, roommating with Joe, once again, along with Kitty. Just like old times. All of us reunited, which I wasn’t sure would ever happen back in June when he drove away down the street in Lake Forest in my old Nissan, destination unknown. Except things were now a lot darker, as mentioned at the beginning of this write up. Joe was deeper down a demonic energy path. Life was very, very weird. Portland was the weirdest place I’d ever been in, hands down, on top of everything going with Joe. But meanwhile contrasted by my completely normal, nice, full time day job in a downtown high rise building, which helped keep me grounded. But I have to say, it was REALLY nice to be living in HIS (studio) apartment for once, and to not have to pay rent or bills after all the “taking care of him” that I went through for several years. Total novelty. It was like being on vacation.

But I got the supposed answers. Lotta lotta details, all of which I logged onto my computer in our apartment in Portland at the time it was all happening, and just put on the backburner, because I had no concrete proof for most of it. Many of those details are also recapped in “Chasing Phantoms.”

I will say this – it took me almost another 20 years to come to terms with many of those answers. I say that I put them on the backburner, but in truth I pretty much rejected them. Only to discover the long hard way over many more years of experiences and personal research that pretty much everything Joe ever told me about anything was most likely true. I just couldn’t deal with it at the time. But yes, corroboration did eventually come in over the years from multiple other sources for nearly every single last thing Joe ever said or claimed about supposed every day conspiracies happening around us (all those endless stories going all the way back to when he was still in highschool in Connecticut that I just didn’t know whether to believe, most of which I don’t get into in this write up), our personal abduction situation and the entire nature of this reality in general. Things that he claims he was directly told by “Them” during that overt October 2001 abduction, and/or super specific things that he witnessed all around him during that experience in the underground base/facility he was taken to. All of which he should have had no way of knowing, and yet….there were sources upon sources, eventually all validating/corroborating his wild sounding claims about everything.

This was also the time period when I saw my first real world UFO, versus some “dream” and/or possible abduction memory. Two, actually. Variable sizes, changing from large to pinpoint small to large again, rotating through an array of colors not used in normal human aircraft, including purple, gold, orange and green, while idling in place. (Some bold ass shit right there…..just parked, right next to PDX…..waiting……daring somebody to do anything about any of it.) And when they suddenly went white and started pulling completely impossible, rapid speed, multiple right angle maneuvers over the north Portland/south Vancouver Washington sky as if showing off and continuing to dare people to do something? Yeah, I’m atta here. :/ “I’m going inside, in case they come for us!” I told Joe, running inside from the fire escape where we had been watching this crazy situation overhead. (Not so “coincidentally” within a day or so of that incident there was a huge bruhaha of fighter jets tearing all around the north Portland/south Vancouver sky directly overhead at 8:30 p.m., going after something we couldn’t see and scaring the shit out of everybody since this was right after 9/11, along with a fake ass “cover story” trying to explain/dismiss it in The Oregonian newspaper the following morning.)

Once again though, it had been Joe who spotted the UFOs, running inside to get me to come out and see, all excited. Were it not for him I would never have seen them. I refused to even believe him aft first when he burst into the apartment saying “Carissa! There’s UFOs hovering over PDX!! Come out and see!” GTFO I thought. There’s not UFOs just….hovering over PDX. WTF. He wouldn’t give up, so I finally relented and got up to follow him out to the fire escape to see these supposed UFOs for myself. And yeah…..there totally were UFOs, hovering right next to PDX in the distance. Holy shit. O.o It was always, and had always been about Joe, going all the way back to early childhood. He attracted in stuff like a magnet, and was always in the “right place at the right time” to witness an endless litany of conspiracies, just because his personal frequency was so off kilter. I was “locked into place, and always had been for the most part, so things didn’t just happen to me, and I pretty much never just stumbled across things on my own. An entire section of reality was sealed off from me due to frequency alignment.

And funny enough, when things like “the dude on the three wheeled bike in Irvine who was always on the same stretch of road every day no matter what time I passed by” happened, mentioned briefly at the beginning of this piece, it was only after Joe was back in my life on an active basis via phone……..telling me all about his adventures with the “woo.” Like somehow by being in contact with him on a semi-regular basis, even long distance, and always hearing his stories and psychically connecting up to him, it started rubbing off on me. But before we were back in contact like that? I don’t have any recollections of glitchy weirdness in my reality. That was “Joe territory.” As far as I can tell it only started kicking in once I was connected up to Joe on the regular, post ’98 and into ’99.

But….I was at least open to it all, so there was that, and would willingly follow Joe around to witness or experience whatever he was, therefore giving me some of these experiences after all, even if “secondhand.” But that’s just it….I had to be pulled into it. And even then I couldn’t always see what he was seeing, as with many of the entities, and “doorways/entrances/exits” in our old apartment, and people’s personal energy/auras, etc. His vision was on the level of Kitty, since cats can see energy/auras and ghosts/entities, etc. But even better, since humans see full color, unlike cats. So both of them could be hanging out, with lines of sight tracking the same thing in the same spot in a room, but I would be the odd one out, unable to see most of it. It’s basically the equivalent of being partially handicapped.

Another conspiracy that Joe discovered and demonstrated for me during our time in Portland was the “Portland hum.” He claimed that there was a low frequency hum that was pulsating through the city, but which you could only hear if you put your ear down to the floor or against a surface of some sort, and at night. I think I remember him telling me about it over the phone while I was still in SoCal, but now that I was here in person he was able to actually show me. I didn’t really believe him, but complied with putting my head down to the floor late at night, just to see, why not. I laid there still for a short bit and……wouldn’t you know it. It was real. There was a pulsating low frequency hum of some sort going on. When I lifted my head up it stopped. Put my head back down….there it was. Over and over I tested it out, and I tried it on several nights. It was consistently there. Joe said he’d tested it out in different parts of the city in the middle of the night, and no matter where in the city he went it was always there. But you could only hear it by getting your ear/head down to the ground or a floor. Even if you were in a multi story building like we were it worked. It just required being against a hard surface.

Shortly after talking Joe down from the big “MK assignment” mentioned at the beginning, that one that would have made national headlines had he succeeded, he was arrested one more time for petty nonsense, and of course leading the Portland cops straight to me, where I was intensely questioned. That entire situation lasted for hours in the middle of the night. And then one more time after that of me having to deal with the cops because of that incident, for follow up questioning. I know how to deal with the cops so they got nowhere fast with me and had to give it up. Same tactics I used when dealing with them back in SoCal because of Joe. They put something out there relating to whatever Joe is accused of, trying to rope me into it, then stare me down, waiting for my response, to which I just stare back at them, unfazed, going, umm…with a little nod. Like, “That’s interesting. ANYway.” I’m not the one running around doing things, and I’m not the one they’re after, so I don’t owe them any input. People make the mistake though of falling apart at the seams the second the cops show up, running their mouths, overly defensive and saying all kinds of things so the next thing you know they’re being handcuffed and arrested because they make themselves look guilty of something, or somehow accidentally incriminated themselves with their nonstop nervous yammering. If you’re innocent and it isn’t even about you then you don’t owe them squat in terms of a response. Keep your yap shut. From the first moment I ever dealt with cops at 20 years old I “knew” this, don’t ask me how, considering I grew up innocent in the rural northeast. In all seriousness I do believe it was part of MILABs training, tying into my book “Chasing Phantoms.” I’ve fearlessly handled cops like a grown man with actual training even as a young female and there’s no conventional explanation for it.

This latest Portland cops bruhaha was after yet ANOTHER incident just prior to this, also while in Portland, where he also led cops straight to us, but where he wasn’t arrested, but we were both questioned. (There’s a lot more to that little story, but, I’ll keep it simple. But it involved some “woo” help to get me out of it, since the two cops in question were riled up. It was literally almost a repeat of the big “COPS WITH GUNS” incident back in SoCal, because the incident started out on the fire escape, with both of us looking down at two cops in the parking lot looking up at us. The same way the previous incident started on the apartment balcony, looking down at two cops on the sidewalk. And once again, because of something Joe had done. Only this time I learned from the previous incident and bolted inside, along with Joe. I’m not going to wind up with guns pointed at my head again. They followed us into the building however, and were banging on our door. But as mentioned there was intervention to abruptly stop what was happening, unlike the last time.)

I’d only been in Portland three months and this was the third time in as many months that I was having to directly deal with/answer to cops, because of him. It was the final straw. I’d warned him before though…..one more time Joe!…..one more time you get arrested and bring the cops around I’m done!……annnndd….he did. Full on arrested, tossed in jail. (though he was released within days due to “overcrowding.”)

I meant what I said, so true to my word I finally ditched him permanently in life. Two years long overdue. Joe was arrested over the weekend, and meanwhile I was already in the process of entering into the last week at my temp gig. My final day was that Friday, almost a week to the day that Joe was arrested, complete with a nice little going away party from my coworkers. And the next morning, on Saturday, me and Kitty were loaded up in my car and heading back south on the 5. So it all just……..worked out. Kind of too perfectly, like everything else during this time period. :/ Joe arrested and neatly removed from my reality – decision made on my end to permanently part ways – temp gig finished, with a nice little party – back to SoCal.

When we crossed the state line in the mountains with the “Welcome to California” sign I involuntarily started cheering “WOOOOOOO!!!! WE MADE IT KITTY!!!!!” startling her. :D She jumped, looking up at me wide eyed from where she lay curled up in my lap. Never thought I’d make it out of that crazy place. Portland was so nuts I used to have an entire write up on my site devoted to it. Strangest place I’ve ever lived or even been to, hands down, no contest. It’s just shocking to me that it even exists, it’s just that weird. Like, “this place is really REAL? This is happening??” O.o

Landed back in Orange County, where I hung out for two days. Stayed in a motel with Kitty in Santa Ana while regrouping, and also hanging out with Mike at his place, mentioned earlier. But also visited Venice Beach for one last hurrah, with Kitty in tow. That was cool after 3+ months of absolutely bizarre-ness up in Portland, with its gritty, run down, weird vibe, rampant poverty, and the way in which everywhere you go everybody absolutely reeks of mildew, all over their clothes, because of the excessive rain/humidity of the Pacific Northwest. And where it was just always rainy and/or gray and full of conspiracy, 99% of which I don’t even touch on here. Just being able to sit on the sunny, cheerful beach under a palm tree in L.A., with Kitty in my lap, right next to the famous Venice Beach drum circles, pretty much my all time favorite thing about SoCal….it was just really nice to be there again. (btw….Venice Beach now, in 2021? Homeless Tent City from what I’ve seen online. :/ But it wasn’t like that 20 years ago, AT all. Back in the day it was pretty awesome. But all of that’s gone now.)

Kitty also got some attention, since it’s not every day you see somebody toting a cat around at the beach. So for a few hours I got to be one of the kooky weird people that one typically sees in Venice Beach. While watching the drum circle under the palm tree with Kitty in my lap a homeless dude came up to me to marvel about Kitty, in a kind of serious “wow….” sort of way. He noted that he’d been sitting over there, watching her for awhile, because of “the look in her face.” It wasn’t like a regular cat, he noted. Just the way she was scoping everything out. It was like a person he said. Just…very interesting and unusual. So, that whole thing again. ;) “Kitty people face,” like me and Joe used to say.

The first time Kitty laid eyes on the ocean though….. ;D

Her eyes bugged out like WTAF?!? and you could pretty much see her brain trying to understand what she was even looking at as she clocked the wide open horizon, something she’d never seen before, and the sight and sound of the waves. It made no sense to her. This big wide open, moving…..thing. What IS this?!? Eventually she stopped looking at it, just ignoring it. “lalala….” ;D I could tell it was a purposeful ignoring too, because of being weirded out. I’d seen Kitty do that before….when she’s truly weirded out in an actual scared sort of way, or annoyed, she’ll refuse to look at something. That’s what she was doing now. She couldn’t deal with seeing the nonsensical loud, moving ocean. The sand was freaky to her too. I put her down on it and she just got this weirded out/skeeved out look on her face and went passive, gingerly just sinking down into it like “eww help!” I laughed and picked her back up and put her in my lap, petting her, and kept her there for the rest of the time I was there on the beach. Pulled my windbreaker over her body and part of her head, to give her that sense of protection/cover, which I knew she liked. Once on my lap, mostly covered, she relaxed and just started checking out the scene from under the windbreaker.

My intention was to hang in there for as long as Kitty wanted to hang in there. Basically, “You let me know when you’ve had enough and want to go,” as I told her. And she hung in for a few hours. When we finally found ourselves surrounded by what she felt was too many people on the boardwalk she gave a worried meow, while looking at me with a “!!” face. She’d never seen that many people all at once in her life. ;D I laughed and was like, Okay, we’ll go. You did good Kitty! You hung in there! But that afternoon was a celebration that me and Kitty and my car made it out of Portland, all in one piece.

Meanwhile as I teetered on the edge of the “do I get in my car and drive across the entire country by myself to get to Florida, or do I stay here??” cliff. As fun as it was to be back in Venice Beach, SoCal still felt like a dead end to me. I’d been in Cali for ten years total, and so much of it was just completely soulless. (and meanwhile the vibe in L.A. itself was straight up intolerably, incompatibly negative. By the end of my time there the only place in L.A. that I was able to handle anymore vibe-wise was Venice Beach. Any other part and I’d get driven out by the whirlwind of negative/evil feeling vibes that permeates everywhere you go. A phenomenon Mike independently corroborated as well when we both tried to go together one afternoon. The day was seemingly calm and beautiful, but the vibes were so “ick” we had to bail…..his initiation. He looked around on Melrose Avenue, frowning, and commented that we needed to get out of there. I readily agreed, completely feeling it too. oh well! We tried. The Venice drum circles full of people of all backgrounds united in music and dance on the beach, along with all the artists and creative people selling their wares on the boardwalk, was literally the only thing left I could do up there. Being on the outermost edge of the city, on the beach/along the water, and surrounded by people who mostly all had good intentions was the difference; go inland even just a few blocks and watch out.)

But I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. It was time to continue with the change. I wanted to finally experience Florida.

Deliberated for two days (“but….but…..Texas! oh my god! I don’t want to drive across neverending empty Texas!!!!! I’ve seen that shit on a map!! It never ends!!!!!! A bunch of land, with no towns!!!”) then finally decided to make the big leap after all. Hit the 5 freeway in the morning, pitstopping at Mike’s then-job in Commerce/south L.A. right off the freeway to say bye. (He was now working as a machinist.) He took a break and hung with me outside in the parking lot for about 15 minutes, including inspecting my tires and getting under the hood of my Mazda to make sure everything looked good for a cross country roadtrip.

And then it was our final goodbyes, the last time I ever saw him in life in person. Though we remained in touch for several years after, with instances of our psychic bond still rearing its head. 3,000 miles of distance didn’t affect it, it’s nuts. I even put him on the phone once with Tom later on in Fort Lauderdale, so they could meet. The entire reason I managed to survive the 90s and make it to Tom, so we could wind up doing what we came here to do (of which I’ve had several pre-incarnational memories of), is owed in such large part to Mike, so it was fitting. Mike’s role in my life was basically The Ferryman, ushering me through dangerous territory and across unpassable and dangerous bodies of water, so to speak. The protector guide who helps get me to my destiny, is the way I now see it looking back on it all these years later.

Joe even told me this in the winter of 2001-2002, after we began talking about his abductions. Turns out that one of the bezillion things he was told by “Them” is that Mike “is here for you.” Meaning, that’s why he came here. He incarnated for me. Earlier I mentioned how it was confirmed to me by a psychic woman I knew named Leslie that he was in fact a walk-in, something I had already figured out on my own, and it makes sense since Mike didn’t remember the first eight years of his life. Life for him began at eight years old, when he woke up in the hospital in Illinois with his leg broken in three places due to some near-death accident. He had no idea who his so-called “family” was, or who he was….though he said he never let them know this. Whoever their son was before that accident was not the same one who woke up in the hospital after. Looking at family photo albums did nothing to trigger memories. Mike just quietly accepted this life he suddenly found himself in and moved forward. IMO that’s obviously where the walk-in transition happened, though Leslie couldn’t have known that. In the same way I myself almost died as a child, due to Meningitis that was ignored for too long by my so-called “mom” who was more interested in her precious TV time. I think that’s where my own walk-in situation happened. Because it stands to reason that if my immediate good friend in life was a walk-in then so I am. And that’s actually another thing “They” told Joe about me. So…you know….. The original body of Carissa did in fact die, because it was in fact too late. But “stuff” revived the body, and here I am when I shouldn’t be, with zero traces that the Meningitis ever happened….including the deafness being reversed, as told to me by another psychic lady named Nancy around 2007. She had no idea that I’d had Meningitis. All she could tell me when I asked her WHY they were taking me?? was that “Your hearing was restored at one point as a child.” That’s all she knew about whatever had been done to me by “stuff” during an abduction. I was patched back up again like it never happened. But forces can’t just take a valid body I’m guessing. It has to be somebody who was going to die anyway. Then the body is taken, and repurposed. The astrological and genetic configurations aren’t always ideal either, but it has to be worked with. There’s no choice. Square pegs into round holes, basically. I arrived first on the timeline, then Mike arrived “after” in ~1979, even though he was born three years before me, taking the body of that eight year old kid who also originally would have died. Then we finally met up years later.

So “They” now had their eye on Mike as well as I learned and figured out, probably because he was vital to my personal survival. My “dad” even became suddenly obsessed with Mike once I arrived in Fort Lauderdale, as mentioned in “Chasing Phantoms.” Never paid attention to Mike for the entire time he was physically in my life in SoCal – seven years – never once asked about him or acknowledged him in any way, even though we were roommates for such a long time and I even lived on his floor for months. Never, not once. But now that I’d made it to my destiny and Tom…….it became total obsession. Any time I would mention Tom to my dad on the phone he’d go silent……then coldly ask me if I’d heard from Mike lately? Tell him something else about Tom…..cold silence……Do I think Mike will be visiting me in Florida soon? This went on for a bit of time too. He never once acknowledged Tom in any way during the one year he was back in my life again. Always went stone cold and just skipped over any mention of him and would bring the conversation to Mike. Same with Kitty. Wouldn’t even acknowledge a single mention of her either. “Fuck Tom, fuck the cat…..What’s the deal with your personal protector who helped ensure that you’d actually succeed in your mission, so Tom could succeed in his???” It was just all about Mike, a guy he’d never met and never would.

I told Mike about it over the phone and he immediately recognized what was going on without me even having to say it. I could hear him frown as he said “hmmm. Something’s interested in me, and I don’t like it.” So he knew. “Neg stuff,” operating through my “dad,” trying to get info on the guardian ferryman, so to speak. Where was he? Had he been in contact? Were you planning to visit? If so when? Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike. Just bizarre. It doesn’t logically make sense, because what does it matter what Mike is doing now that I’d finally made it to Tom? It’s like, Sorry to tell you guys, but you’re a day late and a dollar short. If you were so concerned about the Ferryman you should have been paying attention years ago. ;D It makes me wonder if there was some sort of “block” or “shield” in place preventing the Negs from being able to see/perceive/know about me and Mike’s soul connection, and him being here to help me, exactly so he COULD get me to my destination. Then the second I stepped off the ferry and onto land, at my destination so to speak, the block/shield lifted. And now they could see exactly who he is and what had been happening all this time right under their noses, and were now scrambling, trying to play catch up. Trying to pretend they were still winning. Hence, my “dad’s” icy cold disdainful tone of voice. “awww, is somebody pissed off?” ;) ;) (that is one of many things I’ve learned about the higher level, cunning Negs, which also go by other names, such as demons – they’re absolutely delusional and egotistical, and refuse to admit they’re not the ultimate ones in charge here, and will never admit defeat.)

As crazy as that sounds it’s the only thing that can account for their day late and a dollar short sudden onset obsession. And as I’ve written about elsewhere on my site, and discussed in interviews, the level of attack that Tom and I started experiencing from demonic neg elements once we were together in Fort Lauderdale just went through the ROOF. It’s a whole story in itself, told elsewhere, but if it seemed the negs/demons were interested in “the Ferryman” then it was nothing compared to what happened once Tom and I actually got together. They absolutely lost-their-shit and threw everything they could at us for a very intensive period of several years. We would not have survived it without direct, outside higher positive intervention, is all I can say.

Once Mike got married though his new wife Melissa forbade him from having any female friends…..including even long distance ones like me. O.o (meanwhile she felt she was perfectly entitled to have all the male friends she wanted, lavishing attention on her……so basically, the same energy as Julie, but repeated through a different female. :/ ) So once it became serious with her that was where we trickled off and amicably parted ways, onto the next chapters of our individual destinies. There was no formal discussion about it, it just…happened. I became completely preoccupied with the Tom situation, and he was now absorbed with Melissa, soon to be fiance and then wife, and with a whole new circle of friends.

Mike later psychically “reached out to me” (putting it mildly….that guy’s got powers!) in 2004, from 3,000 miles away to get me to track him down. Thoughts of Mike suddenly invaded my brain very intensely one afternoon in the middle of work in Fort Lauderdale at the high end yachting brokerage, located on the Intracoastal Waterway, where I was the receptionist/admin girl. The thoughts became so overwhelming that I was like FINE! oh my god!!! and hunted down an old email of his in my inbox. Then simply sent the following message:

!

An exclamation point. That was it. He’d “get” it. ;D (translation = “holy shit dude! I HEAR you!” haha) He immediately wrote back all excited that the “wish magic” as he called it had worked. He’d lost my contact info, but really wanted to let me know that they’d gotten married. (true friends – the first person you excitedly * NEED * to reach out to when you have awesome news of any type. :) And whom you can do so through psychic powers alone, because you’re so in tune that it doesn’t matter that you’re 3,000 miles apart, or that it’s been a couple of years.) We touched base one more time in 2005 via some emails, when Tom and I were now living in Virginia, and, that was it. From time to time he’s appeared amicably in dreams over the years, so I’m pretty sure that’s just him stopping in to say hi, the same way I once popped in on my friend Tiffany, mentioned at the very beginning, where I saw her in real time. Shirley and I also did that a few times over the years with each other, which is how I kept up on what was new with her despite her being back in Israel.

Anyway, drove cross country with Kitty in my lap to a new life in Florida. And yeah…..Texas went on for about 850 miles. O.o The first time I drove cross country in ’95 with Gary we did the I-40/Route 66 route, so we only had to deal with the pandhandle. But this time, driving on I-10 that cuts across the whole state end to end, El Paso to Houston…..yeah……entire stretches for miles upon miles where it was nothing but empty land, and no towns. After driving all freaking day starting outside of Mesa, Arizona, through New Mexico, into Texas and still not making it through the entire state, seeing pretty much nothing but dry, barren land, it even traumatized Kitty. :D There I was the next morning after all that driving, packing up in my motel room in San Antonio, and as soon as Kitty realized what I was doing…….oh shit, she’s packing up, I’ve seen this before, this means……back in the car……..NOOOOOOOOO! I CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE OF THIS!!!!!!! she went from calm, to alarmed, tried to hide by wedging herself between the two nightstands, her rump sticking out. “If I can’t see her then she can’t see me!!!! Then I don’t have to get back in the car!!!!” I just laughed, feeling so bad for her, pulling her out and cuddling and apologizing to her and giving her kisses. “Just hang in there Kitty! Soon we’ll be there!”

Got pulled over for speeding outside of Houston :D but the cop let me go when learning that I was en route to Florida from California….by myself. Wondered if I had any friends or family waiting for me? Nope! I smiled and shook my head. Did I know where I was going to live? Nope! I’ve narrowed it down between Tampa and Fort Lauderdale though, as I explained. I’ll decide though when I get there which one I’ll pick, still haven’t made up my mind. (Obviously wound up being Fort Lauderdale, as now mentioned multiple times.) He glanced warily at my cat, and my leopard print seat and steering covers, with the stickers on the dash board, including the psychadelic frog on a ‘shroom. All my stuff packed in the back seat.

oookey doookey. Decided to let me go with a warning.

Hit Louisiana, and raced on through the entire state, hitting minor commuter traffic at one point in Baton Rouge in the late afternoon. My plan was to stop in New Orleans for the night so I could do some sightseeing. The only city on the entire trip that I wanted to visit and make a day (or two…) of. Was so excited that I was going to finally see New Orleans!!! woooohooooo!!! The architecture and crazy cemeteries! The food! The music!! The culture and all that rich history!!! Was aware that I was passing by Lake Pontchartrain, though I couldn’t see it in the darkness. And as I was hitting the outskirts of New Orleans, racing through the night with the skyline up ahead, I suddenly found myself hitting…..a wall of “evil energy,” is the only way to describe it. Like driving through an actual energetic forcefield, comprised of evil energy. It was so powerful it slammed me back against my car seat. Never in my life had something like that happen. Stunned, I continued driving, trying to make sense of what was happening here….expecting it to be a brief hiccup that would go away. But it didn’t. That forcefield that I passed through was basically the “boundary/edge” of a “bubble/dome” or something that enclosed the heart of the city, and I was now fully in it, so the feeling wasn’t going away.

As my car raced along the 10 I could feel this intense evil energy all around me as I lamented to myself “noooooooooooo!!!!” I wanted so badly to be able to visit New Orleans! But now….HELL no. !!! If this was how things felt there was absolutely no way. I thought I had a handle on bad energy after hanging out in Los Angeles/Hollywood so many times, but this….this was like NOTHING I’ve ever felt before or since. It was straight up overt, in-your-face, no hold’s barred demonic. At one point as I raced along on the 10 I could see a city street below the elevated highway, on my right, with the New Orleans architecture and people in the streets, milling about. Seemed to be the French Quarter. But I just raced on past, desperate to get away from this evil feeling. I’d say that the feeling peaked in that area where the French Quarter was. That moment in time stands out in my mind because I could see “fun city life” actively happening down on the streets below, people milling about like everything was normal and cool, but meanwhile I was feeling overwhelmed by this evil energy all around me.

I have no explanation for it, other than Tom’s theory about the hundreds of years of Voodoo and various Satanic/witchcraft happenings. I finally did a search on this recently, with the advent of A.I. helping to aggregate the entire internet and summarize/distill all relevant results, and sure enough I’ve learned that this is indeed a major thing. “Yes, many psychically sensitive people, as well as paranormal enthusiasts and locals, have reported feeling intense or “evil” energy in specific areas of New Orleans, often linked to its tragic history of slavery, disease, and violence. New Orleans is widely considered one of the most haunted cities in America, known for its rich but often painful past that many believe has left a strong spiritual imprint. […] General Atmosphere: Some sensitive individuals visiting as travelers have noted a general “uncomfortable feeling” or a “dark energy” in certain parts of the French Quarter, distinct from the more benign, earthbound spirits that locals often cohabit with.” And from an actual website: “The French Quarter was designed in a military-style grid of 70 squares and founded in 1718 as the first colony in the territory. The ensuing three centuries have born witness to pervasive natural and man-made events that have incessantly manipulated how life is lived in one of the world’s most famous social microcosms. Many of these events, along with the unknown components that concern those of a more scientifically-minded paranormal bent, have amassed a supernatural sphere of existence unrivaled by other haunted locales.”

A.I. doesn’t mention Voodoo, witchcraft and Satanism, of course, which are still going strong today, but that has to absolutely be a factor in things. There’s also the all around debauchery that’s celebrated there, especially during Mardi Gras. Whatever is going on there I seemed to feel it times a million. Not some vague feeling of malevolence like less sensitive people may experience, but rather actual defined evil, with a full on border going on, enclosing the city within it and which was able to physically slam me back against my seat due to its power. THAT’S how incompatible my presence was as I entered its boundary.

The evil energy waned the further away from the city I got as I raced on the 10, continuing towards Mississippi, eventually hitting the “Welcome to Mississippi” sign. Passed through the bottom of Mississippi, and stopped for gas in Mobile, Alabama at around ~10 at night. Getting through both states on I-10 at the bottom of each was maybe about 70 miles, tops. And by the late evening Kitty and I were in another motel room…..this time in Pensacola. We’d officially made it to Florida.

After checking out of the motel in Pensacola it was back on I-10, heading east on the panhandle. When I arrived at the junction of I-75, seeing the sign for Tampa, I literally did an eeny meeny miney mo to make my decision….Fort Lauderdale or Tampa? At the last second it wound up being Fort Lauderdale as the exit was right there. Stayed on I-10. :) Deep down I always figured it would be Fort Lauderdale, and that’s where my heart was set on, but I was open to the Gulf side as well. I’d also done my research on both cities/sides of Florida back at the library in Portland, in terms of populations, economies, etc. The Gulf side seemed a bit too sleepy for me at that time in my life, but even though my mind wasn’t fully made up I still printed out a big list of all the motels/hotels in Fort Lauderdale from a library computer to take with me. I already knew. ;)

Once in Jacksonville I merged onto the 95 south. Got one more motel room though that night somewhere south of Jacksonville. The reason for getting so many rooms along the way, and not sleeping in my car at a rest stop for several hour intervals the way other people might do (which admittedly saves money!) was because of Kitty. Kitty wouldn’t use the litter box (which was on the passenger side floor of my car) or eat anything or even take a drink of water so long as she was in the car/traveling, period. Not happening. So I got multiple motel rooms along the way for her sake so she could be indoors and relax, relieve herself, eat and drink water, and sleep all night on a nice bed, stress free. She would always get happy and perky once we were in a new motel room, off the road and out of the car.

Also talked to my dad again on the phone that night from the motel outside of Jacksonville. He was detached about the entire solo cross country move and anything I was doing in general. Zero real connection, as usual, though I was trying to give it another go with him, trying to have a dad in my life. Most dads would be concerned to hear about their 27 year old daughter (who looked 15-16, as I was forever hearing from so many people) driving alone over 4,500 miles from one corner of the U.S. to the other. Not him. Felt nothing, and had no real genuine interest or curiosity. Engaged with me out of obligation. First marriage leftovers that he was always hoping would just go away once and for all and never bother him again. Try to pretend me and Joe never happened, sweep it under the rug. The very reason I would later finally give him the permanent boot a year after this.

The next morning it was back on the 95 south….Fort Lauderdale, here I come. Once I hit West Palm Beach I pulled out that print out of motels from my glove compartment and started making one handed cell phone calls while driving, with Kitty in my lap like she’d been for the entire trip. :) And miracle of miracles I managed to find a motel on the A1A/beach that actually still had a room available, despite it being the height of season, and nailed down a one week reservation. I’d start with one week, and hopefully that would be enough time to find a job and an apartment. My first introduction to life in south Florida was being stuck at a drawbridge on Oakland Park Boulevard in mid afternoon. ;D Welcome to Fort Lauderdale! It was awesome. Mostly cloudy, since it was February, but warm and humid, temp around 80, with greenery and flowers and coconut palms everywhere. Back in Portland it was often in the 30s and 40s, gray and/or actually raining, and even a little bit of snow here and there. The only thing I would ever miss about Portland was the spectacular view of a snow capped Mt. Hood against a blazing red fiery sunrise sky from the office windows of Blue Cross Blue Shield in downtown. People in the office would gather at the windows on clear mornings to see it. I’m glad I had the opportunity to experience that in my life. I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been willing to take the risk of quitting my dead end life in SoCal and following Joe up to Portland to see about getting those answers to our abductions situation.

Once at the motel, located at Oakland Park and the A1A, I checked in with the mid-30s Latina woman at the desk, whose 13 year old old daughter sat next to her off to the side. She was one of those “too familiar too fast” types of women, telling me all kinds of weird personal details about her life as I was checking in, including her daughter’s rebellious/defiant attitude she’d recently been picking up at school, and how she’d never had to slap her daughter ever until after they moved here to Fort Lauderdale and the bad attitude started happening due to all the bad influences around her. But last week she had to slap her right across the face! she earnestly relayed to me with wide eyes.

I just nodded as I filled out the paperwork, like “wow….yeah……” feigning monotone interest, glancing over at her slightly chubby daughter who just sat there matter-of-factly, not seeming embarrassed that her mom was divulging all of this to me, then paid for the whole week in cash upfront.

After I had my key I thought to mention my cat back in the car.

“Oh….we don’t allow pets……” the clerk woman noted in an “uh oh….” kind of way. But then immediately did an about face. “Well, since you paid for the whole week in cash I’ll pretend I don’t know.” Money always talks. Especially larger than normal lump sums in cash. ;) Plus it helped that there was the illusion of “bonding” since she’d been telling me about smackin’ her daughter around.

Within one week to the day of arriving I had a nice studio apartment and a waitressing job, both in Fort Lauderdale. Both procured with a huge dose of “woo”….of course. ;) Key strangers crossing my path, both of whom gave me invaluable tips/advise for job searching or apartment hunting, synchronicity, reality creation, intuition and following loud but invisible nudges that were screaming in my ear you could say, the whole works. Basically “magic” you could say. Nothing that was just ho-hum straight forward. A big part of that included switching out the apartment I was originally going to be getting in Pompano Beach for a different one, in Fort Lauderdale off of Broward Boulevard, due to that invisible nudging “screaming in my ear” in the middle of the night. The first apartment allowed cats, but only if you declawed them. I had no intents of declawing Kitty EVER, that’s horrific abuse, but I planned to try to find a way to sneak around that with lies….that apparently weren’t going to work out, or blow up in my face I take it, I don’t know. So I finally listened to this “screaming nudge” for lack of a better way of putting it (it’s not a voice, just a nudge, but a “LOUD!” nudge that’s akin to a silent scream…) sat up in my motel room bed at like 3 in the morning after being kept awake by this nagging “silent intuitive scream,” flipped on the light, grabbed the apartment finder book on my nightstand and started re-combing through it…..finding the correct/better apartment that I would end up getting. I knew it the second my eyes saw the ad, that this was the correct one. I would call them in the morning. Then the nudge “screaming” stopped. And I went back to sleep. And that indeed was the apartment I got. They accepted cats, and did not require declawing. So I wouldn’t have to sneak around with lies.

Not long after getting settled into this new existence I was lounging on the sand of Fort Lauderdale Beach underneath coconut palms, with my head resting on my backpack, much like Venice Beach only two weeks before, but minus the coconuts ;) ruminating on the wild ride that was the current state of my life. Within 14 months I went from living and working in SoCal and hanging out with Julie in her apartment in Rancho with Dave and Mike, telling them about me and Joe’s supernatural happenings and our neg attacks in “The Vortex,” as well as telling Felicity about it all, and dodging cops all the time thanks to Joe, to living and working in Portland, Oregon, courtesy of my new car, with more cop run-ins, thanks to Joe, to hanging out in Venice Beach for the afternoon with Kitty debating my future, to lounging on Fort Lauderdale beach two weeks after that, 3,000 miles away, under coconut palms, with a new apartment, a new job and an entirely new life, never to see any of those people – including Joe – again. May not sound like much in writing, but look at that shit on a map. !!

Back when I still worked in SoCal I told Felicity exactly what was going to happen when I eventually moved to Florida – I would get a cocktailing job, on Fort Lauderdale beach. (As mentioned, I kind of always knew it was going to be Fort Lauderdale and not Tampa.) Close enough. And I could have had that cocktailing gig in a bar on the A1A in Fort Lauderdale beach actually. Made it past the initial “interview” (like two questions, but mainly just a sizing up of my looks/body type) had the second/final seal the deal interview in the bag if I wanted……but decided to pass/forego it, for the full on waitressing job instead at a restaurant. Also on the A1A…..in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, right next to Fort Lauderdale Beach. ;) Damon’s Grill, serving ribs and steaks and such, attached to the then-Clarion hotel along the beach. (Both of which are gone now, converted to a new hotel with a new restaurant.) In the end the cocktailing gigs in Fort Lauderdale had a more skeezy/off/“devil vibe” than the richie-rich/upscale/fun/innocent cocktailing gigs in Orange County that I was used to, in Irvine, Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. Mainly because south Florida is heavily populated by skeezy meatballs from the Northeast, unlike SoCal. I didn’t realize it would be like that, so Fort Lauderdale bar work ended up being a pass for me. I greatly preferred the safer, family-friendly and innocent restaurant patronized by nice people.

Trained/shadowed for two days then was already on my own, pocketing money. Was there for over a month, from February – April 2002, making good money until Season was over and all the Snowbirds, tourists and college kids on spring break had abandoned south Florida, and most of the restaurant’s business that heavily relied on the hotel fell off a cliff. Gave notice and segued right over into full time office admin work, which I found through the classifieds of the Sun Sentinel. And that was the last restaurant job I’ve ever had in life.

A huge split was happening in my reality, with a very distinct “before……and after……” delineation. The previous life with getting kicked out before graduation and the unstable rough start introduction into “LIFE,” all the job hopping, with up to three jobs at a time, the cross country roadtrip with Gary and total crazy life adventures, sleeping on Mike’s floor and then living with all the guy roommates, dressed like a skater chick, in what was at first abandoned/re-possessed houses O.o and the cop dodging and actual cop run-ins that went with it before they went legit, and which is a whole story in itself; then being with Steve the hardcore anti-spiritual/skeptic/Atheist, literal energy vampire who’d drain you dry merely by being in his proximity, as Mike even verified, and emotional/psychological abuser who continually ground me down/undermined me and drained my lifeforce energy for 3+ years, until I barely recognized myself anymore (but which already was in process before we hooked up, and which I fully saw, those red flags were already there…but in the end I decided to ignore them….so that’s on me……); trying to rescue Joe, and all the crazy paranormal insanity, and his endless criminal nonsense and cop dodging that came with it, and all my wandering around SoCal by myself, desperate to find any other interesting and aware people. Always looking for meaning, always scribbling in my journals everywhere I went, in the middle of the night, feeling empty, restless and waiting for when it was all going to finally START……..

Well now it was. Everything that came before was just the pre-game warm up. As “busy” as it sometimes was in those previous years it was mostly meaningless nonsense. Fun, sure, adventurous, yeah, providing the most extreme levels of high and suicidal low and everything in between, giving me some 3rd density physicality-based experience….but nothing that fulfills an actual soul mission/destiny. Nothing that provides true purpose. The next stage was about exactly that, and more.

Backing up again……….By the time I left Portland Joe had already left as well, via bus, a few days before me. As I was heading east on I-10, approaching Phoenix while talking to my dad on my cell phone, he thought to mention that he’d heard from Joe…. who was now in Phoenix.

I stared at the night time Phoenix skyline lit up ahead of me, eyes bugging out “!!!!” when hearing those words. Hit the gas and made sure I didn’t stop for the night until I was well outside of Mesa. Make absolutely sure there was no way I’d accidentally run into him.

Later found some arrest records for Joe for Phoenix. Figures. Almost everywhere he went after that he left a trail of arrests. Joe would later wind up in Florida as well, in 2005, in Key West. He missed us by months, after Tom and I left Fort Lauderdale in the Fall of 2004 and moved to Virginia. No arrests in Florida/the Keys that I could find though. Based on the timing of when he lived there and left, it seems the only reason he left was because they were popped with bad hurricanes, during what ended up being the worst hurricane season in Florida’s history, and some of which put Key West under multiple feet of floodwater. Bad luck and timing on that one. He finally made it to Florida, which was the Big Dream for both of us for a long time. Even got a Florida driver’s license as I saw in my research, only to choose the one area that got majorly popped…the Keys.

I admit, when I saw that during my tracking/research of his movements I actually felt bad for him. Despite everything I never stopped rooting for him to make it and just find somewhere he could land and be happy, and hopefully, successful. But it never happened. I was so happy to see that he’d made it to the Keys, then disappointed/sad to see he’d gotten driven out by forces beyond his control. I can’t be a part of his life anymore, but I want him to be okay and to make it. But it was literally not possible for him to be normal, and maintain a normal life. He also spent time in the New Orleans area, but there don’t seem to be any actual arrests there either. Then onto Savannah, Georgia…where he was in fact arrested. Later when Tom and I were looking into the (admittedly, very remote possibility) of Burlington, Vermont…..guess what…….that’s when I discovered Joe had been there too. And had been arrested, and which full on made it into the Burlington news no less. Mugshot and everything. We scrapped the Burlington idea for our own reasons, namely, harsh winters with lake effect snow. No thanks. !!! But knowing Joe had been there helped influence that decision. Not interested in moving to any cities where he’s already been, engaging in criminal nonsense and getting on local cops’ radar, and even in the news on top of it. Especially since we have the same, VERY uncommon last name, among other reasons.

It was creepy though how Joe kept just “missing” me like that. For years it caused me to feel like I’m always looking over my shoulder for him. For several years after we parted ways I was truly afraid that he’d show up on my doorstep one day. I would have been happy to see that he’d landed on his feet in some other part of the country. But showing up on my doorstep was crossing a line. O.o So I had to think about what I would do if that ever actually happened. If anybody had the ability to just impossibly appear on my doorstep it’s him. And let’s just say he did impossibly “show up on the doorstep” once before, when there was just absolutely no way. “ding dong!” doorbell in the middle of the night, standing on the doorstep when he shouldn’t be, like a horror movie. And where he even admitted “….I don’t know how I got here….” (after he was arrested in Portland, and was mysteriously released…..then showed up in the middle of the night, 20 miles away from the jail, on the doorstep of the condo I was staying at with my coworker Penelope, in Tigard……in the middle of February with 22 degree temps. As Joe relayed, one minute he was walking out of the jail, the next…..he was at the bottom of the hill leading up to Penelope’s condo complex, 20 miles away, late at night, with no recollection in between of how he got there.) So, I always knew it was a very real possibility/threat. The “Stuff” that controls him can put him anywhere, at any time, in totally impossible situations.

So what was my final conclusion, of what I would do if faced with my own little brother that I helped raise, standing before me on a doorstep?

I saw myself with phone in hand, and 9-1….already dialed. Ready to dial the final 1. That’s what it had come down to. I understood by this point that this isn’t my true little brother. I don’t know what this thing is, but he’s not the real Joe. And I’ve had two female psychic acquaintances independently verify separately that “Joe” as I describe him isn’t “out there.” He doesn’t exist in the world, to both of their puzzlement. Here I am describing him in the fullest of detail and conviction as being still alive, but neither of them can psychically “find” him out there in the world. He’s not out there, as they both reported. Even though he was showing up as alive with current arrest records. One of the those psychic ‘net friends, named Leslie, did finally find Joe…..the real Joe…….trapped in some astral plane place, surrounded by demons/negs as she reported. She’s the one who saw the situation play out in her mind, the way he’d experienced too much by the age of 17 and “made the switch” with a demon that was waiting in the wings, mentioned earlier.

For years I was too scared to try to get involved in the situation with Joe’s soul, because I’ve seen what these things are capable of when they believe you’re interfering with what they KNOW is “theirs.” You’re as good as (attempted) dead. But I did finally attempt to help a few times with getting Joe released and saved from wherever he was being held/trapped. Here’s where it gets next level “holy shit”….. Years ago when Tom and I lived in Virginia we used to keep a audio-activated handheld Sony tape recorder going in our bedroom when we slept, for abduction monitoring purposes. And one night the recorder captured a really strange and unusual sounding “ping!” noise that we’ve never heard before. Tom took the recording and ran it through a software program that allowed him to slow it down and play around with it. Nothing discernable resulted. Then finally he resorted to playing the slowed down “ping!” noise in reverse. And clear as day was Joe’s voice. Saying “Save me Carissa.”

There are no words for what that moment was like for me, hearing Joe’s voice after years of not seeing him, and knowing for a fact that I never would again. I couldn’t speak when I first heard it. It was like the wind was taken out of my lungs. Finally when I could, with bugged out eyes, I told Tom “That’s Joe….!!!!” And then after a few more seconds of stunned silence on both of our parts, “Well, now you know what Joe’s voice sounds like.” O.o After I got my wits about me I made him replay it multiple times, over and over and over, to be able to hear Joe’s voice again.

The obvious question though is, Was it really Joe’s voice? I don’t know. I tend to think it’s Negs, fucking around, doing the same thing John Keel reported in detail in “The Mothman Prophesies.” Apparently they’re very good at not only imitating human voices in general, but imitating specific people perfectly. But just in case I did attempt a few times to help Joe’s soul, and get him freed/rescued from wherever Leslie saw him being held/trapped, surrounded by demons.

Since parting ways though the (reanimated) body known as “Joe,” whatever it really is by this point, has basically crisscrossed the country as a homeless vagabond criminal. At last count he’d been arrested in and/or has warrants for his arrests in, in order, Connecticut, California, Oregon, Washington (apparently during the time when he was up in Oregon before I got there, but which I didn’t know about….our dad found out somehow and let me know in 2002), Arizona, Georgia, Vermont and Maine. It’s now been over two decades since I’ve had any contact with him. I don’t even know if the body shell is still alive. From everything already mentioned it’s clear that his soul has long since exited stage left, and was trapped in some other negative place.

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The one thing I can say, about our old apartment, and the place after, is that it’s not like the movies. In the movies there’s always a plot, a beginning, a middle and a climatic end and resolution. There’s a point to the mayhem. But in real life, there isn’t. There are no answers. It’s all random, it’s all sporadic, and there is no point. In the movies the supernatural is very action oriented, and exaggerated, with the walking rotting dead, and the closet door that’s the fiery, windy entrance to the Otherworld, objects flying all around the room, the ghoulish faced demons and the white apparition ghosts with clearly defined human faces.

In real life though it’s all subtle. It’s mostly just silent, shapeless blobs of translucent cloudy energy, drifting about, slowly changing shape. Just passing through. Just living its existence. Leaving energy remnants that look like fire embers, or glittery sparkles. Even the attacks on Joe and I, from the all black thing, as dramatic as it was to go through was still very anti-climatic by Hollywood standards.

In the movies, I’ve never seen one reference to “energy drains.” But yet, that’s the first and foremost sign that something is amiss. Your lack of desire and motivation, feeling like the life is being sucked out of you. Feeling like you’re walking underwater. And in the movies, it’s all “cold spots.” Never hot spots. Yet our experiences were mainly hot spots, with the exception of that crazy entrance spot over my door. Tingly hot spots, hot spots that blew hot air, like an oven, that make you nauseated.

[ NOTE: I’ve since come across reference to the hot spots in the works of Fortean/Paranormal/UFO investigator John Keel. I highly recommend both “The Mothman Prophesies” and “Operation Trojan Horse” in my Recommended Reading section. It’s 2020 and I’m only now just reading another book of his, called “The Eighth Tower,” from 1975, mentioned at the beginning, and on pages 30-31 he has this to say: “Infrared is invisible to the eye but can be felt because it is heat. Suffocating waves of heat are often radiated by UFOs and seen by some ghostly apparitions….” So, yet another random corroborative tidbit I’ve now come across in the works of Keel validating something I have experienced…..but have never seen discussed anywhere else. As noted in my assessment of Trojan Horse, all researchers into the “woo” are indebted to Keel’s efforts. To say he had the “alien’s”/UFO’s/paranormal’s number is putting it mildly. He was on to their tricks/deceptions, and general modes of operation, as well as seeing all the patterns in the chaos, decades before everybody else, coming up with very viable theories for what’s really going on with so much of it, clearing through all the mis/disinformation that leads so many people astray. I haven’t read all his books, but I’m now realizing I probably should because maybe then I’d probably find answers to everything I’ve gone through. ha]

And in the movies, they don’t ever talk about “windows” being ripped open that look like static surrounded by a ring thing, and which the family pet thinks it can jump into. In the movies the window thing is exaggerated, and becomes “THE FIERY EVIL GATE TO HELL!!! mmmmwaaaahahahaha!!!!!” It’s not just some ho-hum spot over your door where an icy chill comes down in waves and where you sometimes see and feel stuff wandering down from. And which elicits strange reactions from the cat. And in movies, you never see a character like my brother, who’s a natural magnet for these things, starting from when he was a baby, and for what are most likely a complicated set of reasons that are really far out there. Someone who you don’t want to let move in with you because you know that he’s going to bring shit in, and pollute the place up.

I’ve come to learn that abductees usually always have some form of paranormal/supernatural occurring in their lives, and that these phenomenon are not separate. They’re actually overlapping. Which means discovering/confirming me and Joe’s statuses as abductees/MILABs in the early 2000s put an entirely new spin on everything presented here. Especially after realizing some of the phenomenon I documented here and elsewhere on my site was mentioned by Keel with relation to UFO activity. It also means the “aliens” are not what we think they are. But, John Keel figured that out too, which is why he renamed them Ultraterrestrials. And it means this reality isn’t what we think it is, and doesn’t function the way we’ve been taught. But guess what, he figured that out as well, decades ago.

Our experiences were interesting and important enough to document, but overall there were no answers. There was no point. It happened solely because it could happen, because the windows were ripped open, allowing for Grand Central Station to occur. Because some people have it, and others don’t. And that’s just the way it goes.

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Articles in this Section

• » Mind Over Reality: 8 Part Podcast Series with Tom/Montalk and Myself - September 2023
• » 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
• » What the @#%! is going on in Oregon?! - Includes photos
• » Weather Anomalies - Includes photos - Revamped 10/3/09
• » The Vortex
• » Biorhythms - in Relation to Hyperdimensional Activity