Muse

On that occasion, this figure, and he said the figure, because the guy was like seven feet tall, he was like maybe even taller, and he said he was, you know, almost like disproportionate. It was the middle of the winter and the road had been plowed. There was like a small berm about two and a half feet high. The figure stepped over it and just sank down. It was gone. Because my brother at Rose didn't know whether he, because he was like most of the way the bus stopped, it was over a mile back to his, he's like, what do I do, what do I do? then the figure just just disappeared

welcome back i am here with author laird baron and before i get started those who follow the channel closely know about the recent substack of this kind of sequence of dream events and there's a brief allusion to my friend. I've also on live streams kind of described him as a horror writer. And today, after getting his permission and agreement, that person is Laird Baron. So I'm not going to try to make you blush, but I think you are, if not the one of the finest horror writers of this generation i think you're better than like people in the prior generation as well who have been mainlined i'm not going to mention names but it rhymes with fring and i think the reason that you are is because what you write on an intuitive level seems to touch on the darker aspects of reality that people don't see but they kind of know at a visceral level have some truth to them. Anyway, with that introduction, how are you doing, man?

I'm doing okay. Thanks for having me on the show. It was nice to talk to you again.

Okay. So I think what we're going to try to do is go all the way back to the beginning, because you've had a series of experiences that I think in our private conversations, and as you've had time to do some soul searching and thinking, you realize they're kind of not quite typical for the average human even with me you're like this hasn't happened to you it's like no no that hasn't so where did that stuff start do you think you know and it was actually speaking

with you about this that's when it began to dawn on me that wow you really have had a lot of strange stuff occur, you know, way beyond, way beyond what I'd ever even really stopped to consider. And what's going on with me is I'm just for the audience out there, I'm kind of at the end of life. Kidney situation, the latest thing that happened is my kidneys failed. So I'm on dialysis, very ill. I bounced back a little recently, you know, this time, two months ago, we couldn't have this conversation. But I've been essentially, for the last year, fighting the kidney problem on top of everything else. And we kind of haven't stabilized. But one thing that I've noticed, I've kind of had a lot of time to think about my life, think about what I want to leave behind. But inexplicably, some of these strange occurrences that I dealt with and then kind of just shuffled to the back of my mind i wrote them off over the years like oh they're cute little anecdotes have really come back to you know not to be cliche but to haunt me to the point where i've reached out to you and a couple other friends of mine you know what you know what's happening with me why am i finding so much trauma in these weird incidents that in the past in the moment they were a lot of times scary but you know i was able to you know suppress them it started when i was a little kid i had cancer my dad was a marine in vietnam we think that he was exposed to folium agent orange just because of some of his health problems i developed cancer at just a little bit over a year i was 14 or 16 months old when i first developed cancer in my right eye and it was removed when i was about 18 months old and that you know obviously affected the rest of my life and its early childhood development is radically affected by sensory changes and it's been shown that whether you lose your right or your left eye it will affect that part of your brain as you're developing so you know in a secular sense you know That totally makes sense. But not long after that surgery, I began to experience nightmares.

which have persisted you know i'm 56 now so i've had nightmares for 54 years of my life not every night but frequently and when i was in my teens i had my first recurring sequence of nightmares and there were two types one was an apocalyptic sequence and when i say recurring. They're the same. I mean, there's different scenarios, but the actual structure of the dream, the world that was within the dream is identical. It's very consistent. The other one concerned a person whom I named Jake. It kind of came to me. A very tall, pale, i have to say sort of demonic figure that began to haunt my dreams when i was about 19 years old and what's remarkable about it isn't that that that dream has persisted or that i keep seeing that figure in my dreams for the last 30 something years it's that other people have seen him too in their dreams and allegedly my youngest brother has seen him in the flesh when you say your youngest brother has seen him in the flesh say more about that right so i suffered through these nightmares with this entity for years and basically he would fit the prototype of like a serial killer big tall guy very pale carries an axe or a hatchet and it's just you know evil grin menacing and normally not menacing me but menacing people i care about he isn't going to come after me he in the dreams a lot of times he's going to you know kill someone or hurt someone that i that's dear to me so i started having these when i was living in alaska obviously and i in my mid-20s i moved to seattle and so i was separated from my family by quite a distance there and the dreams went away for a few months and then i had a bad one and all of a sudden out of the blue i got a call from my middle brother who said that my mom was worried you know so i wasn't really in contact with my parents at all but my mom was very worried about me because she had had a nightmare and it featured that you know she knew nothing and keep in mind that none of my family had ever heard i've never talked about this to them we weren't really on great speaking terms as part of the reason you know it was often it was very sporadic that we talked and so she goes yeah and she this guy was trying to kill you in a nightmare she had she said it was so vis you know so visceral and my mother had had occasionally precognitive dreams like she would dream something bad would happen and sure

as hell it did and not all the time but just often enough that you pay attention when she has almost like a vision and so i started telling my brother about it he says oh my god i this is my middle brother and he goes oh my god i've you know i've dreamt about this guy and his dream it was i mean the skin's crawling on me right now because of the just the descriptions of what happened in those dreams and how similar they were to mine so then we get a hold of my youngest brother and he said well i've seen him and so he told me the story of seeing him the first time my brother saw him was back in 1982 or so and this is before i'd ever dreamed about him and there was a big sleepover with my cousins and stuff and they were all like in a big basement daylight basement with a pool table and things like that and everybody was just sleeping on the floor and my brother's in alaska right yeah this is in alaska 1980 82 or so so my brother was about five or six years old and i don't know where i was i wasn't there at that particular thing but my brother he said it was dawn it was just starting to get daylight and he rolled over and he saw one of my uncles and they were like in their 20s tall guys standing there one of them was standing there on the other side of the pool table staring at the kids and he thought it was like i said he I thought it was one of my uncles. And then as he kind of woke up, he realized it was not. It was the stranger. So basically described the same person that I was seeing in my dreams. And he said that this person was almost seven feet tall. They were just horribly tall. They leaned over the table. He thought they could lean all the way over the pool table. They were so tall. And the guy just grinned at him and he went. And then he sank down behind the pool table. and my brother was just you know petrified and of course there was nobody there and i don't even remember if he even told anybody but

they would have just dismissed him anyway and said, oh, it was your uncle's. But years later, after the family had moved, you know, my grandparents had moved out of that house, which is out in the country. It was kind of at the end of a dirt road. My brother was still living there.

We're in Alaska? We're in Alaska just to.

So. Like where? Like specifically. It's a place called Big Lake. It wasn't on the lake. It was kind of in a swamp actually near the lake. But yeah, Big Lake. So your viewers or listeners can look that up. And actually, the whole area burnt down a few years ago. It had a big forest fire.

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But as it happened, my dad and mom moved into that place a few years later and spent a couple winters there because my grandparents had died. And so my brother used to walk, and he's at this point, he's 10, 10, 11, and he's walking about two miles to the bus stop. And it's on a dirt road, gravel road, goes through the hills, and it's kind of like a subdivision. There's houses, but not that many. They're really scattered out. And, you know, this is Alaska. This is Alaska in the middle of the winter. It's 25, 30 below. And he said on two or three occasions, I don't know at least two, that when he was walking to the bus, he was confronted by someone walking on the road. And he said one time they were way behind him, like they were trying to stalk him. And the other time they were in front of him. At the time they were in front of him, he actually got a look at him really close, like 50 feet. And same guy, pale, creepy, grin, might have been carrying something in their hand. He couldn't really tell. All black. and this figure usually wears like old army jackets and pants and things like that they're not military but they wear that kind of loose fitting kind of drab garb and on that occasion this figure and he said the figure because the guy was like seven feet tall and he's like maybe even taller and he said he was you know almost like disproportionate it was bill the winter and the road had been plowed there was like a small berm about two and a half feet high the figure stepped over it and just sank down and was gone. Because my brother had froze, didn't know whether he... Because he was like, most of the way the bus stopped, it was over a mile back to his... He's like, what do I do? What do I do? Then the figure just disappeared. And it was dawn. You know, there was light, but it wasn't that light. And then the last time... And there's kind of an ending to this story. It actually has an arc. The last time was when he must have been 20. And he was living in the cabin. Not the same place it was a few miles up the road probably about 40 miles up the road and he was living with the lady a girlfriend and they had this cabin out in the woods you could drive to it but it was like a generator they weren't on the grid and his girlfriend said she came into the house and it was getting dark and she said there's somebody watching us and so he went and looked who didn't see anything and she goes i thought i saw somebody you know watching us she goes i got just a horrible feeling of like it's horrible it's pad like somebody really wants to do something awful and my brother you know what's he gonna do and he looked around nothing he's like okay well i'll keep an eye out it got full dark he walked out to his truck and he had a floodlight on in the yard the generator was powering a big like a floodlight it brightly illuminated the yard and everything else was just up around the trees were just black.

It was very, very dark. And he got something out of the truck, and he could just feel it. Somebody was looking at him. And he turned, and he looked, and he couldn't hear much because the generator was making a lot of noise. But he looked, and there was this giant figure standing in the light just at the edge of the property out in a snow bag, snow up to his knees. and just watching him and he said it was him he had not changed he looked exactly the same as he had when he was five years old and he said that he said the guy did the same he went like that and then he just stepped back into the trees and he watched him melt he didn't disappear like he walked away he just he stepped back so his face was in silhouette and then he just just dropped into the ground and was gone my brother you know i've always wondered what happened to my brother because he had never been religious within a few months of that incident telling me about that incident he broke up with his girlfriend they've been together for like three years broke up with her started

dating somebody else and joined a Pentecostal cult, basically. And we'll not talk about this at all. Like if you were to drag him in front of you right now, he would, you could put hot irons on him and he wouldn't talk about it.

Why do you think he won't talk about it?

Terrified him. Also, you know, I don't quite know how his faith works, but in relation to this, I think they think, at least, you know, his family thinks to look at something is to invite it back type of thing. But I do know that he's, and my brother's a tough, you know, he's a construction guy. He ran sled dogs. He was, you know, hunted, fished, lived out in the woods. I mean, he's no fragile flower, but this really scared him. And all to which is to say, this is the same guy or entity. I guess I'll just refer to it as an entity. You know, I'm not saying I know or that I believe in demonic presences. But there's something there. There's, you know, it's very strange that the three of us and my mother, you know, all have had visions of this. And, of course, it persisted when I lived in Seattle, other people I knew. started running into this thing.

Yeah, and I think it's fair to, like, we don't know what this is. We just know that these incidents did happen. We can't explain them. But it's something that's not normal, let's just say, or something that's not like an everyday thing that people see. Has your brother had any experiences since then, or maybe he just, if it did, he wouldn't talk about it?

We're not really in touch, but from what I understand is that, no, he hasn't had any experiences, but also even if he had, he would never acknowledge it. My middle brother is the same way, just less extreme. He's had a few experiences, too, but he won't. And, you know, the vividness of the dreams and the absolute malevolence of this character are such that, you know, the three of us, I'm the only one that's really curious about it. My other two brothers are like, no, we've seen this horror movie. We're going to go do something else. but the other problem is is that for me it's not even a problem but the other i think defining characteristic and why we're different of how we treat this differently is that i've had i think i'm more open and sensitive to this stuff than they are just intrinsically and i've had so many other strange things happen that are not dream related that i i can't really ignore i especially here at the end of like i don't want to quite say i'm at the end of life but I'm definitely not, not doing great. And it's, everything's a struggle. And so I'm much more reflective and I'm finding that these strange events that you alluded to at the intro there, they didn't bother me before, but they bother me now. They loom really large in my mind now. It's almost like I've stopped taking a breath and now I'm actually looking at, you know, I'm kind of reviewing everything that ever happened to me for the first time.

Now, in dreams where this entity would appear, what sorts of scenes would unfold? Like, was it consistent or was the only consistency the presence of this figure?

There were recurring themes, but I would say that if I just had to pick one thing, it would be that the figure was consistent. I had a shared dream one time, and I've mentioned this before. As a matter of fact, me and I may have even talked about it, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself. But for people who, if you haven't heard about this, I'll just lay it out there. So I was about 19 the first time I ever, and I probably dreamed about it before then, but that was when I really, I first, you know, remember it. When I was 23 or so, I had spent the summers fishing, either on a fishing boat or in a factory. And so I'd had a girlfriend that year, and we were really close. But she lived in Maine, and I lived in Alaska, and it just wasn't going to work out. So she went home. And it was kind of a bitter – we were both pretty sad about it. And about a week after she had left, the rains came and.

And a lot of times this stuff happens. For me, historically, I would have these terrible dreams when it rained heavily in the fall. And so I was having this just brutal nightmare about wandering through a swampy forest. And by the way, I ended up putting this in a story. I mean, a lot of these dreams have gone into stories. People ask you where your ideas come from. I'm like, well, my nightmares generate a lot of them. But I'm wandering through the forest. And the reason this dream is relevant is because she was in it. But I didn't see her. I could hear her calling to me from the woods. And I knew with the dream logic that he was there. I never saw Jake, never saw this creature, but I knew he was there and he was stalking us. And so I was trying to get to her and I could hear her calling me and I was calling out to her. But instead of finding her, I came into a little clearing and there were a bunch of backpacks from different eras. And they were all just lying there rotting, dozens of them. And as vivid as me talking to you, this is how vivid this dream was. And I knew with dream logic, once again, that, ah, this was like a trophy room. Then I woke up, I got up. I very seldom have ever done this. I grabbed a notebook and I, I wrote down the dream and I wrote like this little poem that was inspired by the dream. I was compelled to do it. So I'm sitting there drinking a cup of coffee, and the phone rings. And lo and behold, it's my ex-girlfriend on the phone, four-hour time. So it's like 11 o'clock in the morning where she is. She waited until just absolutely the moment she figured I'd be up. And she said, I had to call you. I had the most horrible nightmare. Her nightmare was identical to mine, except she could see him coming through the trees behind her with an axe. and she couldn't see me, but she could hear me calling to her. So I don't know what to make of something like that. It's hard to believe something like that. But when she called me, I knew even I could feel the coldness go over me that she had had that dream.

Did you recognize the place as anywhere that you knew of in Alaska or anywhere else?

It wasn't specific, but it was definitely Alaska. That's the thing about a swamp in Alaska. One looks just like another one, but there was no landmarks that I could see. And another strange, you know, characteristic of the dreams about this guy is that after a while, the dreams became more tricky. i would have a dream where i would be interacting with a rude customer at the store or having a beef with somebody at the construction site or on a fishing boat or whatever and i would lose my cool in the dream and the minute i did whomever i was arguing with would laugh and start transforming into him so like i would think i'm arguing with you know a short stocky little little guy and the next thing I know the mask comes off and it's, you know, the seven foot tall demonic figure that was mocking, you know, had been baiting me the entire time. It's kind of how it is kind of how it felt. And I, I have literally had in the, what is it? 30 something, 36, 37 years. I've been having this. I've had dozens of these, like dozen, you know, this is not like, oh, it happened three or four times, which would be bad enough. No,

this is like i've had like 30 or 40 of these in alaska there's a lot of missing people like it's like a trope almost but in kind of the area you grew up or grew near where there's lots of swamp and could easily have been this location are there instances of a lot of like missing campers over a long stretch of time that like any hot spots particularly in alaska where this may apply to i'm not saying it does but i'm just trying to think outside the box it doesn't jump

out that way but as a whole there's some things you know there's some things about alaska that are really consistent no matter where you live people disappear all over the state is kind of what i'm getting at and i would write a lot of that off to geography it's just it's a vast place if you go you know if you don't file a plan about where you're going to go and disappear nobody's going to find you most likely but there's also another element and that element is a lot of murder up in alaska and a lot of missing bodies you know that they think you know somebody got them that's pretty common i can't think of anything particular though about lots of missing campers anywhere near where i was living but as a whole a lot of people Thank you. do disappear up there now this is kind of a little bit more speculation but and again i haven't looked at this is why i'm asking you is the murder rate in alaska kind of much higher than kind of what it might be for the continental united states and if so what are some of the theories that are out there as to why that is i mean it could be as simple as lack of sunlight causing people to act crazy who knows but do you have a opinion on that i do well it's i don't know if i have an opinion

but i certainly have some observations it's true everything you say they do write off a lot of it for seasonal affective disorder but i think that makes it i think that's that's an easy an easy out because some of the things that happen you just you just shake your head and go that doesn't there seems to be in the 80s at least there was several people who came to alaska just to kill people you know they didn't go there and go crazy they were they were on you know there was something wrong before they ever even stepped off the boat so to speak like alaska is a destination for most people very few people are native to Alaska. You have the native people, obviously, but actually born in the state and not native, that's a lot tiny. That's a pretty, pretty tiny population, actually. And so Alaska is kind of, I don't know if unique is the right word, but it's definitely rare in the sense that it's just a destination for, I would say, 80 to 90% of anybody who's ever lived there. And so I don't know you know i have never really given that part huge thought but it's in an abstract sense my mind is trying to make this connection just out of reach but i feel like the fact that it's a destination plays into why so many people go berserk i think it attracts certain types of people you know when we moved there part of the reason that people had been moving there like my family my parents and stuff was because of the oil fields you know there was a reason to move there these days i'm not really sure quite what the reason would be to move there besides you know aesthetics yeah natural beauty quiet sure yeah try and disappear there's a lot of people who don't fit in elsewhere and will move there you know by no means is the majority of people moving there doing so for nefarious reasons. That's not at all what I would. I'm just saying that some of the nefarious people were nefarious before they got there. And I do think that seasonal affective disorder probably has played a strong role in some of it, but not all of it.

And what sorts of people do you think it attracts? And we're going to get back to your story. I'm just trying to just taking us along this thread for a little bit,

but this is my story. I don't think I would be the person I am and certainly not the writer that I am if I had been raised elsewhere. You know, and the thing about Alaska is you start talking to somebody from the heartland, from the mid, you know, the deep Midwest who lives on a farm out in the stick somewhere, you know, or if you someone who lives in the backwoods in Tennessee or Louisiana, we all have commonalities. It's not like Alaska is sui generis, just, you know, like the only weird place. No, no. A lot of the bedrock things that make Alaska Alaska are found in less populated areas all across the United States. But it is a magnet, that state is a magnet to people who want to start over again or disappear. And there's a third kind of classification. There are people who only go there like college kids who go there for the summer to work, you know, for the adventure. But the people who move there with the intention of spending any real sojourn are running from something or running to something.

All right. Now, going back to your story. So you had these dreams. There's typically a flavor of this dream. what other sorts of events outside the dreaming world did you confront through your life that i don't know if they've been constant that they've escalated or if they've kind of peaked and then troughed after right and actually it's the preponderance of other

events besides the nightmare you know besides the entity and the nightmare I don't know. that have caused me to take so much pause and to reflect on this stuff. You know, dreams you can write off. You know, even less so maybe the strange coincidences with my family and other people who have seen things. But it's still pretty easy just to say, okay, you know, they're dreams. Don't get too worked up about it. But as you allude to, I've had way too many other physical events happen over the years that are not necessarily related to that, that are impossible for me to ignore, especially here where I am in my life. They have diminished recently. Like over the last, since I moved to New York state, actually, they've calmed down, but I've still had a couple. but when i lived in alaska they began they escalated when i moved to and i would say crescendoed when i was living in a washington state strangely enough you would think of strange things happen to you would mostly be up in alaska some stuff did but it was a washington state was the the most dramatic but i've had and we could talk about any of these but shadow people i guess just for want of a better term, poltergeist activity, strange messages on the answering machine that left messages that were impossible. I wouldn't say impossible, but improbable that anybody would know what to have left that kind of a message, you know, details about my life. Can you give an example of that? Sure. That you're comfortable with? Sure. So we were living, my girlfriend and I became my wife. We were living in an apartment in seattle and this is back in the late 90s nothing special about the apartment the big security building and to be honest a lot of stuff you know relatively speaking quite a few of these events in my life happened there we never found out any strange history of it so i'll just get all that out of the way it's just a 1950s or 60s apartment building they had to have a key to get in and just strange things started happening around the apartment i actually had my own I actually had a room of my own elsewhere. We weren't quite living together, but I was over there all the time. Part of the reason I started spending more time over there is my girlfriend started getting nervous about the place. And she said, things are being moved around. And I wrote that off. I think I was sure. And it was a lot. It was a lot. Pictures, photographs would disappear under the magnets on the fridge and then turn up. Some of them turned up months later, buried under boxes with dust on them.

so things like that were happening but you know once again you just go in that is literally classic poltergeist activity right by the way and yeah you know but you still go what do you do with it you know you're saying whatever you know it's trivial but then the reason that i started spending more time over is it escalated to she goes i heard someone in the apartment a few hours ago she was in the kitchenette and it was just a one-bedroom apartment living room kitchenette bathroom bedroom that's it and so she had her back turned and where the kitchenette is the front door is near there and behind her and she heard she was singing she was like a semi-professional singer and she was humming to herself and she heard someone like mimic her behind her like humming and then they laughed and i said like what kind of laugh and she said you know like a little person she's it was like this evil little laugh like a little kid would do or someone imitating a kid and i was like oh i just i didn't believe it i didn't want to believe it was like okay it had to be the neighbor you were hearing somebody from another apartment whatever typical dude in a horror movie won't believe you know anything anybody tells him so a few nights later, I was sitting on the sofa watching a show and she was in the kitchenette again, right behind me on the other side of the partition. And to my left is a big beanbag chair. And so I can't remember quite what it was, but I said, Hey, I love you. And she goes, Oh, I love you. And the third voice to the left goes I love you just like that I probably about four feet from me five feet I froze trying to process this did I just hear that and then behind me she'd been rattling pots and pans they stopped and then she said did you

say that i said nope and she goes that's the same voice it sounds like the same voice that she had heard giggling or not even giggling tittering behind her believe you me i tore that beanbag chair apart looking for a mic nothing okay you could write it off you could say well somebody was playing with us somehow somehow they got that voice in there i mean that's possible but keep in mind it's in conjunction with all the other weird things that are going on

next weird thing that happened more and plus if i took an extreme thing and said maybe the government was testing like skull to voice technology or whatever sure there would be no reason why you and your girlfriend would be targets you weren't working in national security you weren't affiliated with the foreign government you were just kind of living your life so that

would be implausible as a potential yeah and if i've been sitting there alone i would have probably written it off i'd probably just be well i imagined it because it didn't repeat so and this all happened over the course of the next year on another occasion you know because we walked everywhere and we were young where i was in my late 20s and i had a job but it was sort of weird the hours were weird so during the day i had lots of time so we would like think nothing of just let's go get coffee that's what you do in seattle you go to a restaurant you do whatever to come back and so we'd be like in and out of the apartment and one time we went out of the apartment we were gone 20 minutes came back and i heard her scream from the bathroom i ran in there and i couldn't understand what she was she was just staring shaking and i looked over at the shower and we had a shower curtain it was a cutesy it had these cutesy frogs on lily pads it was reversed somebody had pulled it off the rack turned it and reattached it you know and we don't let me go on a few minutes our landlady and this you know this apartment building probably had i don't know over 100 people living in it i mean it was a decent sized apartment building but the landlady was in her 70s and could barely she had we lost our keys one time and she came up and she it was hard for her to get up there and help us so it possible that's because if we're thinking of anybody who had a key besides us it was her that was it on another occasion and this was really disturbing we were sitting at a coffee shop about a mile from you know we walked down about a mile had our coffee and i remember saying she bought the coffee or something and i said oh you're so sweet and she goes no you're so sweet you know all that bullshit we walk back to the apartment and from the time that we had uttered those words and walked back to the apartment we were on our way back so 10 minutes 15 minutes whatever it was we just leisurely walking along we walk in and the answering machine is blinking and i forget how we figured out we realized once it was all said and done that the message that was on there came from the intercom. If you wanted to buzz up, you would hit the button for that apartment, and it would ring your phone. So someone had called us from the street. We could hear it in the background. We could hear cars and stuff. So it was somebody on the front steps had called and left a message on our answering machine. And that message was, and I can't really do the voice justice, but you're so sweet. It was worse than that.

It was this horrible Hollywood, like, someone really wants to scare you. You're so sweet. And actually, there was almost like a, it was more in the throat. You're so sweet. There you go. That's closer. I can't communicate the evil and the malevolence. You know, it's one thing me telling you, relating it as an anecdote, hearing it was traumatizing. And she started, I mean, tears streaking down her face. She was just shaking, like, what is happening to us? It was so bad we called the police. And I've never been one to want to call the police. But we called, we reported it. A police officer came, listened to the message. And I kid you not, he turned a little pale. I said, I know you guys can't do anything. I said, I just want to get this on record. He goes, oh, that was smart. He goes, if I were you, I'd leave.

Thank you.

for a while if you can i said really and he goes yeah if he goes i came home and this was on my recorder he goes i'd be scared because i said to him i said well are we overreacting and he goes

no he goes that was horrible he goes that's awful so not to mention how did they know whoever let's assume it was a pedestrian explanation right or like an eventual explanation how would someone have known that you said those things to each other and then gotten back to your apartment before you did in order to deliver that message right and that was the part that

really disturbed me because it did occur to me that could be paranormal just because so many strange things that are inexplicable had been happening but i was actually more worried it was a person but either you know i'm just a regular person who's stalking us but either way i'm not sure which is worse you know so a bunch of other stuff happened but i'll give you one more from the apartment it's kind of the grand finale so i hurt my back severely that winter yeah it was a winter of 90 late 98 99 so grand christmas so it was this it was basically late winter in seattle and it was like february of 1999 in seattle which is different than say new york where you have a lot of snow and it's cold it was kind of pleasant but my back was so damaged that i couldn't sit up to type and i was working on my first novel and so what i would do is i would lay my three ring binders and all my stuff on the living room floor we cleared off an area and i would just lie there on a pillow and on my stomach and right and i didn't even bother to pick it up most of the time i would just leave everything there my girlfriend would literally have to drag me to my feet and then you know i would come back later so one morning i managed to get myself out of bed and it was daylight but not bright you know it was still that twilight kind of thing And I walk out of the bedroom and I'm standing in the hallway and I could feel it. There was just this presence. And I realized, and I'm about 15, 18 feet away from it, probably 18 feet. In the living room, there is where my stuff's lying on the floor. There's a cat. And my first, my brain goes, how did a cat get into the apartment? the windows are all closed how big is the cat too i'll get to it there okay there's a sliding glass door right so like if you're looking into the living room there's there's a tree on the other side so it could have climbed up a tree those little balconies that like one person can stand on you could put a grill on it that's about it so that we had a little balcony there and there was a sliding glass door and so of course i'm thinking the cat somehow got in through there that was just this all happened two seconds three seconds at the most but as i look at this cat i'm like that's a really big cat that's a really dark cat this object this cat the more i looked the more i realized that i couldn't tell how big it was initially because it was so black that all of its features were kind of it's kind of like you were wearing black and then you were standing

against a black background and you covered your face with like a you know a sock cap or something you'd go invisible maybe you could just see your eyes floating that's kind of how this was except it was sitting in daylight and it was just dark like it looked like you could stick your arm through it like a black hole and i'm looking at it and i realized that it did have distinctive like it had a body but i couldn't make out any particular thing or feet limbs or anything and it had a head and i thought it had cat ears but i realized later well a couple seconds later there were actually probably horns or other types of protubances they weren't normal cat ears and it was looking down at my book it was for all the world it was just like hunched They're reading my, probably critiquing my crappy novel I was working on.

Which specific book, by the way?

It was a book that no one's ever heard of and probably never will. It was a fantasy horror novel. And what was interesting is it started off as a straight fantasy novel. And by the time this had happened, it had turned into a horror novel. Like it had gone really dark. and it had included a horse turning into a demonic monster, all kinds of crazy stuff that I do.

But it was never released? No. It's not out there? Mm-mm. Is there a reason it was never released? It just didn't find a buyer?

I pulled it. I wasn't. I'll give you that story at some point if you want it. I pulled that novel. I did have an offer to represent it, but I realized it would damage my... I figured it would be something I would have to live down. I didn't have much faith in it, so I pulled it.

It was basically... You want to cover that? Yeah, cover that really quick, I think. Because we have a whole other episode after this. I think we're just going to continue the story into the next episode. Okay.

oh you want me to finish what about the book yeah all i would say about the book is i just i had never written a novel and what i had when i was a little kid i wrote three novels back then but like this is as an adult was my first coherent effort and i worked on it for about a year it was almost 300 000 words it was a thousand pages handwritten over a thousand pages handwritten And I sent it out to a few places, got polite rejections. And then I sent it to, this is kind of a funny story. I was doing transcription work for a guy that was doing an unauthorized biography of Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft. They were not happy about it. And so he was like, I was taking, I was transcribing all these interviews he did with people from Michigan who had grown up in the auto industry. you know, the wealthier people and he managed to snag these almost like ambush interviews from all these different people gathered all the dirt on bomber he could find and then wrote a book and got paid handsome. Like he got paid a six figure advance for it. And he was like living in a garbage can when I met him. So the whole thing was like Hollywood. So he was so grateful though. Cause I had faith in him. I was working on my novel, you know, and he was like, yeah, I paid an electric bill one month. You know, I just felt bad for him. I had met him at the coffee shop. And so he did me a good turn when he got this advance. He's like, you can do the transcription work for me and I'll pay you X amount for each tape. So I did it and I didn't know how to type or anything. It was a lot of work, but I did it. And then once he had all his money and he moved out of the garbage can and was heading off into the country, he goes, let me introduce you to my agent because I know you've got your novel. so his agent reluctantly looked at my novel and she just said this is basically what she said she's like uh uh she goes you got talent but uh she was so she marked up the first she marked up the first five pages and she sent them back to me and she said make these changes apply them to the rest of manuscript and then i'm gonna she goes i will not represent you but i will introduce you to somebody at tor tor books she goes and i'll get them to read it she goes i can't promise anything and i said thank you and i applied those changes and i went this patient's dead i took off my gloves and rolled it into the morgue and that's what happened because i just i realized oh god all it was for her to show me what I was doing wrong and I went yeah start over again and I did I started writing short fiction and I had improved I owe her a great debt because just she spent like

two hours three hours marking up my manuscript and it changed my life probably now what do you

again this is a speculative question this thing that you perceived in the room that was reading this manuscript what would you speculate would be the reason why something that malevolent would read the manuscript i don't know that it was malevolent because this is the funny thing

i definitely had well let's backtrack so i walk in i see it you know i can't say that it was reading the book but you see you've seen cats or dogs look at something on the like they're very interested and something that's just what was going on it turned and it looked at me and like i said it was black on black but it definitely had a neck definitely had a head but it was all much more compact than i thought at this point i realized it was probably around if it had mass it was probably 30 pounds maybe 35 pounds it was pretty solid and it looked at me i could feel the weight of its gaze you know when somebody or something's looking at you i could feel it and then it turned it kept turning and it was looking back toward the wall at this point in profile to me and it headed for the wall made no sound there was no odor there was nothing as it moved at first it was just and i could see that it had limbs but i couldn't tell you whether they were they could just been arms and two legs in the back i know it was hunched and the impression i had at that moment just for a split second was a gargoyle just like you see on the notre dame wherever now i don't know whether my mind created that was it paradoxical or whatever but at this point i was like it looks like a little fucking gargoyle and then it elongated it took a couple steps very quickly I might add. Very smooth, very quick but then it kind of leaped and as it leaped it's hard to describe this but it's like a piece of taffy, it just stretched and as it stretched it became ephemeral it hit the wall once again no sound and the whole of its body stretched out, kept falling like an accordion into the wall and for I would say two seconds there was a rippling black it was almost translucent at this point it was like vaporous and it was just like little vapors there and then the vapors dissipated it was just the cross hatch from shadows from a tree outside so it just melded in with that and of course i'm just standing with my mouth open if it only been a couple seconds once again i probably would have thought you're imagining things now this encounter was probably you know whenever you hear something like this people are it's like it couldn't have been a minute i'm like you know how long a minute this was like seven eight seconds you know how long seven or eight seconds is count you know one two three it was like seven of those i saw i mean that's how long i was interacting but to get back to

your question about why what how i didn't get any malevolence off it a few other things in my life that have happened to me physically that were far less dramatic. Like, this is the most dramatic thing. These other things scared me a lot more than this did, strangely enough. Like, this made me nervous in the same way you walk around a corner and there's a wolf. One time I walked around a corner and there was a wolf trying to dig into a garbage can. Wolf was probably 150 pounds. He was probably 20 feet away. Bigger than me. And you're not scared. You're just like, oh, my God, that's a wolf. you're aware, you're aware of each other. You're aware there's danger, but the wolf wasn't planning on eating me, you know, and that's kind of how this was. There might've been danger, but I didn't get any kind of malevolent vibe from it. It was more, I don't know. I don't know. You know, assuming this was all connected, there was something there that was very interesting to us and it might've been interested in, in tormenting us, but I'm not sure that we were necessarily in any kind of real

physical danger. Have you ever considered it might've been interested in what you write?

Well, yeah, actually, you know, like once again, I've always been a skeptic and that's the strange thing about the old stuff I'm relating to you. Guess how much time I spent thinking about this? like a few days very little yeah oh okay okay a few days and then i would think about it every now and then it never like haunted my mind until the last few years well the last five or six years all this stuff that's happened it's like i finally am coming to terms that it really happened but in the past oh i had filed away because i'm a writer you know you know i didn't pretend it didn't happen and i also didn't dismiss it like you know as if there's a rational explanation you know i'm gonna make one fit no matter what it was more just well i can't do anything you know what am i supposed to do about it and i just let it go but now i don't feel that way now i feel compelled and i think it's you know i think part of this is just me being where i am and how you my age, my health, all that stuff. But I find myself really obsessing over it these days. It's sort of like delayed post-traumatic stress, especially when I take it all, you know, we spent 20 minutes, half an hour, I was giving you this one story. I mean, I've had way more stuff happen. That was just some of the more, you know, in one area, kind of almost like there's a little, there's like a little arc to it. And yeah, it could have easily been, you know, if these things exist, if you're outside of our realm, physical realm, why wouldn't they be interested, you know, in what we're doing?

Okay. Let's, I think now is probably a good time to take a break and then we can continue this discussion.

in the next episode. But before we do that, are there any books that you would recommend people who don't know you should get started, at least on the horror side, in terms of your collections,

things like that? Oh, sure. You could start with, I think starting with one of my older collections would be The Way to Go, Imigo Sequence, Occultation, or The Beautiful Thing that awaits us all they kind of encompass one sort of style that i specialized in for 15 years

and the imago sequence is the book that you well we'll get into the whole dream sequence in like literally recent weeks that we went through but the just as a kind of a teaser The Imago Sequence is the book that that elder gentleman kind of showed up in a dream and said it's like a masterpiece, but it opens doorways.

Right.

All right. I think we'll leave on that note. Any final words for the audience for this episode?

No, just thanks for listening. You know, it's nice to be able to talk about this.

All right. I look forward to continuing this story in the next episode. All right. Thanks, Laird.

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