“Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.”

- Mark Twain

These accounts ended up taking about twice as much space than I’d originally thought they would. Some of these true accounts I’m about to relate I haven’t really thought about in a great many years. As I’ve been writing, and updating this, I keep suddenly remembering little details I’d otherwise forgotten. I hope these have helped!

For starters, let it be said right from the start that I was a very strange child! To begin with, I was conceived in the wilds of Maine when my mother was nearly fifty, well after she thought had been safely into menopause. She remarked once to me that when she told my father the news, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. That was quite funny, she then said, because my dad was so stoic that he rarely did either. All but one of my older brothers and sisters were all grown up, out of the house, and really well out on their own now ... and then I came along. Surprise! It was a lot (entirely actually) like growing up as an only child.

Even from early on, I was told later by my mother, I was ‘exhausting’ to deal with. Supposedly, even as a young child I regularly ‘knew things’ that I shouldn’t have known, and had more than my fair share of ‘invisible friends’ I’d constantly talk to. I could give several examples, but the most interesting story is that when I was a three or four year-old toddler, I’d just ‘know’ when someone was about to come to the door, and I’d toddle off and sit by the front door and wait for them to arrive, about five or ten minutes later. Stuff like this, with variations.

So, just after the time I turned four, I’d just about given my now middle-aged mother a nervous breakdown, and I was sent to go live ‘for a while’ with an older sister who had just finished her PhD, living in Alexandria Virginia and doing research at the Smithsonian Institute 6-1/2 days a week. So, I can quite truthfully say that I grew up in the back halls, basements and attics of the Smithsonian. Learning how to operate a microscope and pick out microfossils from a dish of sediment at the age of six would warp anyone, even if I wasn’t already plenty odd enoough!

I (mostly) lost this precog sensitivity as I grew up, but I still get rather strong occasional ‘déjà vu’ moments at random odd times ... usually about meeting people for the first time. I think to some degree, most children are born with this sort of thing, being much more in contact with their spiritual selves, and we all sadly lose it as we get focused upon life, school, and the real world. I can’t say if this is a good thing or not. It’s still sort of handy and fun sometimes to be thinking about a song and then hear it being playing on the radio a few minutes later. Or I think about an old movie I haven’t seen in about forty years, to then see it scheduled on TV a few days or weeks later.

When I have sudden impulses these days, it’s never about anything important, sadly ... but the entire life experience has made me unusually interested in most aspects of High Strangeness ever since.

Some of these stories I’ve told to my wife in the past ... but most of them I’ve kept to myself, not from fear of ridicule, but mostly to a general inability to fully explain most of these events reasonably in a world dominated by reason. I hate uncertainty, so if I’m confused or perplexed, I just mull on it indefinitely, like a cow chews its cud, long after eating.

So now, I’ve decided - given the state of my health, it’s about time to pass a few of these stranger events onward for someone else to consider and ponder. If nothing else, these stories here explain a lot about the weirdness of many of my SOL tales.

This is not a work of my fiction – all of these stories have the additional added benefit of being True. Some of these tales are a little rough around the edges, but I wanted to keep the authenticity of the perplexing events and not smooth away most of the rough edges ... as if I were there right now, telling the story in person, warts, and imperfections ... and also quite a lot of peripheral rambling.

Story #1 – A Premonition of Death

When I was six or seven and already in second grade in Alexandria, my parents took a holiday to drive out to visit us, from where they were living at the time in Iowa. My dad had driven the whole way non-stop, except to stop and buy gas and a few cokes and arrived very late that night, perhaps about midnight, after I was already in bed and asleep. I’d been told by my sister that mom and dad likely wouldn’t be here until tomorrow sometime, so when I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night with the overpowering need to see my father ... right then and NOW, it was a surprise to everyone.

‘No,” my mother said wearily, “he’s very tired and has just gone to bed.” I remember pitching an absolute fit – I NEEDED to see him, NOW, I kept insisting. Eventually, scared that I would wake him up, I was carried off literally kicking and screaming back to bed by my sister.

“You can see him as much as you want in the morning,” she said. And so ... he died of a massive heart attack in the early hours of the night and was already gone, taken by EMS off to a funeral home already, before I’d even woken up. The floor was still covered with syringes, gauze, and other medical gear the techs had used on him, in vain. I hadn’t seen my father in over a year and I really had very few strong memories of him at all before that, many of which soon greatly faded over the years. Now, I just remember the thin, almost elderly worn face of a very quiet man who often appeared to look sad in most old family photographs, likely true, as he had bad frequent periods of depression that had plagued him most of his life.

I held a lasting grudge (encased in hardened steel) over this incident for much of the rest of my life. I have absolutely no clue how any six-year-old could have saved his father’s life – in any circumstances, but I believed for a great many long years that IF I’d been allowed to see him, perhaps my mother or sister might have noticed then that he was unwell, and not just tired, and perhaps (weasel words here) EMS could have arrived even a few minutes sooner and saved him. Perhaps, I still believe this now.

Just last year, while I was in ICU and settling over old lingering family grudges, past histories and long decades of resentments, my sister admitted that she’d felt considerable guilt about this event for many, many years afterwards, and since that time she had tried to be the mother for me that my own, natural one, couldn’t be. Honestly, she was the better of my two mothers. “You were absolutely right – and we were both wrong,” she admitted.

As an unrelated side note, my mother actually knew very little about my father’s work, as he was a very quiet man and didn’t much chatter about how his day ... or week had been. In his late years, he was always working remote somewhere and visiting home on the weekends. All she knew was that he worked government projects at various midwestern Air Force bases and at several missile silos. She never had any of the details. His assignments moved around so much at by this point my father was working in a different state from my mother entirely, just so she could keep the same ‘home’ for longer than six months.

When I joined the Air Force in the 1980’s, I had to do an initial interview with AFOSI, before getting a provisional security clearance, so that I could get orders to report to my assignment with AWACS, in Japan. The officer was nice and I answered all of his questions. The FBI had already interviewed friends and family (and taken my now wife out to lunch when interviewing her).

“Do you know what your family did?” He asked me, and I told him that I truthfully didn’t know, except that he was a senior electrician and he might have worked a few times at Air Force missile silo sites.

“Well, this might surprise you then, but did you know that he helped design the electrical systems for NORAD, at Cheyenne Mountain, and had a very high security clearance also. It’s all here,” he said with a laugh, pointing at his computer screen.

I think this was the first time that I’d ever felt proud for my father’s achievements, instead of feeling sadness for his loss.

Story #2 – I almost meet Big Al

In the early 1970’s (winter of 1973 or very early 74, I think), my middle school class took a day field trip on a cold wet day to Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay. It had only recently been taken over by the US Parks Service and they were now allowing tours of the old historic prison. The park rangers giving the tour were still pretty new and inexperienced, but very eager ... and they gave us a long, about three-hour long complete tour of the island from top to bottom. Nowadays, the tour lasts barely an hour and much of the prison is off-limits now ... so on this early visit we had the complete experience then that few, if anyone, could enjoy now.

We also might have been the only other tour group on the island that day, so maybe this was something arranged by the school with the Park Service, as a special event or dress rehearsal ... a few days or weeks before the general public tours began. I definitely don’t remember seeing anyone else but my school group and a couple of Park Service rangers on the entire island that morning.

None of the prison had been renovated, or received the slightest bit of significant maintenance since the facility closed in 1963, but all (or most anyway) of the electro-mechanical cell doors and the various electronic security doors that the guards had used still worked, so we could in totality recreate the full daily activity of a typical prisoner or guard, from start to finish. Which was really, really cool!

They locked us all up into individual cells and electronically shut the doors – ground floor of cellblock A, if I remember right. Then they blew a whistle and let us out, lined us up for a head-count, and then march us off to the chow hall. No talking kids, since prisoners on Alcatraz were never allowed to speak. We got to see where and how the famous 1962 ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ occurred, the cells that had been tunneled through and even the pipe vents they’d climbed up to the roof. Then a trip to the laundry and the work houses where the prisoners had jobs, and then we got to run around and play for a half-hour on the prison exercise yard ... right at the exact moment that the carrier USS Enterprise sailed under the Golden Gate and we watched it go right past the island to port somewhere else in the bay. Docking at Hunter’s Point or Mare Island, probably.

Almost last on the tour, was a trip down into the basement where the showers were, some old 19^th century storage facilities from when the island was an army base, and of most concern to this story – the infamous solitary confinement cells.

Our class was about 20 kids, and they split us up into groups and the guides told us that we’d been naughty – since talking was against prison rules. Laughing, they locked up us into the solitary cells. My memory said that there were three of these, but I read somewhere else much later on that there was a fourth one. I just remember that I went into #3. Then they shut both doors. The inner door of the cell did let some small amount of light through, as I remember it being fairly bright in that basement hallway, but when the bigger, thicker, outer door was shut – it was as dark and quiet inside as a tomb. The walls and floor were iron or steel and there was a small hole in a corner where the prisoners could do their body functions.

Freezing cold! Yes, as Mark Twain once quipped, the coldest winter he ever spent in his life was in a summer in San Francisco ... and this was mid-winter. It was a cold wet brisk sort of day outside, but in this cell, it felt cold enough to see your breath (if you could see anything). We were only locked up inside for about a minute maybe, but that was quite long enough for me. I just felt an overwhelming aura of sadness and gloom, but nothing concrete enough so I could remark afterwards and say, ‘well that was weird’.

Most of the girls (maybe all of them, I’m not sure now) were all together in #2, and after maybe 20-30 seconds I could hear a girl pounding upon the inner steel door or the walls, sending vibrations of sound into our #3 cell as well. They, the two ranger tour guides, started letting the girls out immediately, and then us guys next, but unlocking those two different heavy doors took about a minute, even when done in a hurry.

The girl, (let me call her Annabella, since I ‘think’ she was the one, but I wouldn’t 100% swear to it) was now screaming at the top of her lungs until she was released, and then she kept crying for at least another five minutes afterwards until our guide called on her radio for help and another ranger arrived to take her and one of our teachers together, back upstairs to, where the ferry boat docks. She was still a complete wreck and was continuing to shake when we met her back at the dock about half an hour later.

“He’s crying!”, she said, “I could hear him sobbing uncontrollably ... and then he touched me!” That is exactly what I remember her saying, right then and there at the time, before she was taken away upstairs. She might have also said that ‘his hands were so cold!”, but I just can’t remember that last part for certain.

Afterwards, on the boat back to the city, or anytime afterwards at school, she’d never speak of the experience again. Ever ... or at least ever to me. We weren’t friends. She and her blonde best friend might have been two biggest bullies in the school.

She was a weird girl to begin with. Honestly, I think she had some gypsy blood in her as her skin was a bit olive colored, and mother was a professional fortune teller and ‘spirit guide’. She was tall and had long dark hair, and likely was going to grow up to be extremely ‘decorative’, probably a real beauty in the future ... but she was a very cold, cold person inside. Very bitchy and a ‘what can you do for me’ sort of girl back then.

Another girl in this class (not one of Annabella’s girlfriends) had a mother who claimed to be a white witch! My best friend had a serious crush for her, and she was actually a very sweet girl ... but I digress.

Ah, San Francisco in the 1970’s, where the seeds of many hippies had borne fruit. We had one of my schools (in a lower grade) the sons of two different famous 1950’s beat poets. Both were assholes of the ‘my dad is famous’ variety. I eventually got to be fairly friendly with one of them, enough so that I once was invited to stay at their cabin on Big Sur (a stones throw from the beach, and later, a night at the beach house on Malibu. I used that short trip, and my walk of this very restricted private beach as my main influence for my ‘Breaking like the Waves at Malibu’ story. I sort of wonder what ever happened to that kid.

Writers ... the only good advice I’d ever received from other published authors was “Write about what you know.”

In humorous moments now, I ponder if one of my teachers at that school was in fact the Zodiac. We had a lot of rather weird students (like me) and some really weird teachers! Here are several rather amusing coincidences:

1. The school was near the Presidio about half a block away from the Paul Stine murder site, near Maple and Cherry streets.

2. The getaway path from this crime scene led to a local wood-covered park (now gone, sadly), and through a ‘hidden’ gap in the fence into the Presidio. This was pretty invisible, covered by a bush that I didn’t know was there until another kid showed me, which demonstrated unusually good local knowledge.

3. Our school picnic and overnight camping trip in 1975 was held at the Lake Berryessa (Marin County) 1969 murder scene.

4. At least one of my teachers had a great fondness for Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘The Mikado’, whose lyrics are used in several of the generally accepted authentic Zodiac letters. We even had a special class trip to the San Francisco Opera to see a matinee performance.

5. One of our senior teachers had an immense hatred of our school’s travel bus, which he was the only teacher that could safely drive that big damned (and temperamental) thing. On class trips he joked (like in the Zodiac letters) about blowing up that bus someday, maybe with it being full of kids ... ha-ha, just kidding.

Back on topic.

When I next took the Alcatraz tour, in 1984 I think, with my then wife and her young daughter, the tour was barely an hour long, and mostly just a walk through cellblock A, which had been painted and renovated for filming Clink Eastwood’s ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ movie, just a couple of years before. Cellblock B, were told, had not been refurbished and painted by the movie crew, and was only briefly shown to us via an open door. It looked very rusty. All of the A-block cell door equipment worked well now, we were told ... but they didn’t allow anyone to even enter the cells anymore. As for Cell Block C, where the Birdman of Alcatraz had been kept, upstairs on the top floor, with a cell window facing the city, this wasn’t on the tour at all (that was the place my ex had most wanted to see).

The solitary cells (and the entire basement) were off of the 1984 tour entirely. “We don’t take visitors down there anymore,” was all my guide would say, when I asked her about seeing the solitary cells again. Now that I remember that conversation, I think my guide looked ‘scared’ when I told her the story of my school class being shut inside down there, just after the prison had been opened for visitor tours. I also asked her about strange noises, ghosts, and other high strangeness at the prison, especially after dark ... but she wouldn’t answer me, and scampered off fast, ignoring me from the rest of the short tour!

On that much shorter last visit, there was one small feature that was new that had not been available in the 70’s. On weekends that summer, there was a special event each weekend where a couple of ex-inmates would give a short lecture outside in the prison exercise yard. I was told the former prisoner’s name, but I can’t recall it at all. Our weekend tour had hundreds of people on the island at the time, so I really only had the opportunity to very quickly tell him about my experience with solitary cell #2.

I’ll remember the answer he gave me to the end of my days, “That’s Big Al, ‘Scarface’ Al Capone, she met. He was already half crazy before he came here and after spending a month inside solitary, they said he came out a completely broken man. I never got put into solitary, but I’ve heard everyone who ever went into one of the solitary cells left something of themselves behind when they were let out. Man, there are ghosts, unhappy ones ... all over this island, then and probably still now. If you gave me a thousand dollars, I wouldn’t set foot inside my old cell block (B I think) after dark. I’ve heard a few stories from a couple of the rangers and the stories they’ve heard from the night security crews, but I’ll get in big trouble if I tell them and they’d lose their job here for sure. They’re told to not talk about it, ever. Me, I get paid a bit to give a little speech here and let the kids shake the hand of a real former prisoner, but I now walk straight from the dock directly to the yard here, and back. Couldn’t pay me enough to ever go inside there again,”

A few minutes later, another visitor asked him about other ghosts in the prison, and he laughed and named off a few sightings that other inmates had told him about, but he’d only ever personally one, a shadowy figure that walked through the infirmary wall one night, when he was an overnight patient up there. Oh, and did the three 1962 escapees succeed and make it to freedom, everyone wondered. In his own personal opinion, “Absolutely!” and he gave us a wink. Lecture Q&A over with, and we left shortly afterward. Short, short tour.

Variations of this same story started appearing in paranormal books about The Rock starting in the late 90’s, so I assume some paranormal writers later heard this same prisoner talk, or some of the other inmate speakers telling the same sorts of stories. The park ranger staff certainly knew way more than they were saying, and likely a few of them have told stories, very privately, over the years since. I think both Hans Holtzer and Charles Berlitz both wrote ghost books in the 90’s including the story about the ghost of Al Capone still moaning away, unceasingly in solitary cell #2, so a lot of people must have related that story.

I’d known nothing about any of this before my original tour.

Oh, at about this same time-frame, I had a brief UFO sighting over Bernal Heights in San Francisco, and no ... no drugs were involved. I was a very naïve and very innocent kid in those days. Since there’s nothing much to tell about it other than ‘I saw it hover, it was bright and flashes colored lights, and then shot off nearly instantly across the sky and across the bay’, it’s not worth more than a brief mention. It probably took longer to read about it than the length of original event itself.

As a side note, one of my sisters lived in an apartment on Delmar Street in the 1960’s directly behind 710 Ashbury Street, the home of the Grateful Dead. If I remember right, she moved there in either ‘65 or ‘66, and was there for the ‘Summer of Love’. She used to hang out sometimes with Pigpen, back before anyone outside of in the Haught-Ashbury had ever heard of them.

I told this story to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top once, while we were discussing old 78-rpm records. ‘Hey, I think one of my older sisters used to ball (i.e. fuck) with members of the Grateful Dead!’ What a small weird world, we agreed ... and yes, I had a rather strange family.

Story #3 – A close brush with death, or worse

In the summer of 1974, when I wasn’t at camp, I had a summer job helping to collect and recycle aluminum cans for the local Coors distributorship, right at the end of Army Street (now called Caesar Chavez Blvd). Aluminum cans were a new thing then, and it was a big deal in the media, TV and radio, that these could be recycled unlike the prior steel cans, that 2/3rds of beer were still canned in.

Volunteering for a new youth recycling program got me brownie points with the local Boys Club (now called the Boys and Girls Club) on Guerrero Street, enough with the other volunteer work that my mother sometimes did there, to get me a free month in summer at their camp in northern California for a couple of years ... and more importantly to me, I earned a recycling fee per pound, usually about ten to fifteen dollars for a long Saturday’s work. For me, that was a lot of money ... and I used it to buy old WW2 army surplus stuff, 78-rpm records and pulp magazines from the 1930’s at the numerous local thrift stores in or near the Mission.

It was a pretty informal job; they’d give me a huge ‘contractor’ sized plastic trash bag that was as tall as I was, when full, and it had Coors Recycling printed on it, so it looked reasonably official. Saturdays, I’d roam the streets and parks of the lower Mission, Bernal Heights, and Potrero districts, loading up on ‘almost free found money’. It’s hard to go more than two blocks anywhere in the city without finding a small park, so I could usually get a pretty full bag of cans out of public trashcans in an hour or two of time. Then, I hit what I thought was the motherload!

Since we lived on Folsom Street at the time, I knew everything within a few miles of me like the back of my hand. One day I thought to myself, “There’s a couple of bars further north on Folsom. It’s walkable (barely, with a full load of can packed tighter than Santa’s toy bag), and I haven’t walked that route in quite a while, so let’s go check it out! And I can also stop at the St, Vincent de Paul thrift store two blocks from there to look for records!” I thought to myself. Brilliant!

Yep, there was the proverbial motherload of cans, right there for the taking, in the dumpster at the back of the bar. I stuffed just over $20 worth of cans into my bag and it felt like a hundred-pound weight by the time I’d dragged it back to Coors and cashed out. The owner or Saturday morning bartender present was certainly nice enough, and when I told him I was doing an Ecology project for the local Boys Club, they thought it was worthwhile, and the guy said he’d set aside a trashcan just for the aluminum ones for me, and I gave him my spare Coor Recycles bag.

He wasn’t in the least bit creepy, so I said, “yeah sure”. So far, so good.

What I didn’t really comprehend, in the early 1970’s (even San Francisco) was that it was one of those bars. Teddy boys dressed in full black leather with studs, chaps, and splendid vintage porn mustaches. Nope, as I think I said earlier, I was VERY naive!

You’re all laughing now ... go ahead, but honestly, I didn’t know what a gay bar was back then!

Anyway, I came back the next few Saturday mornings and gathered up a record haul (for me) of cans that I had to literally drag off, (pun not intended, this wasn’t that sort of bar), but I didn’t see that same nice owner or manager again, not after that first time. For the next two weeks it was different guys present, who were all pretty much harmless and nice. The cans (mostly) were all presorted and crushed flat, so I could load up and get in-out (also no pun intended) within a few minutes. Five at most. No harm – no foul. It was a bitch dragging that heavy plastic bag of cans for twenty city blocks to Coors (way too big and heavy to lift) but the payout was worth it!

On the next following Saturday, there was only one guy there, all dressed up for rough riding, and when he handed me (with a big grin) a cartoon porn pamphlet with very graphic illustrations (Tom of Norway stuff, I think now), I got the inclination about just what sort of place this was.

He wouldn’t leave me the fuck alone while I loaded up my bag, even offering me a beer (which I didn’t take). He then touched my shoulder and offered me a ride to the Coors plant (and probably to a remote spot afterwards). I was stupidly naïve ... but not quite that dumb! Little alarm bells started going off in my head.

Then a voice said in my head, as clear as any normal verbal voice, ‘Run NOW, forget the cans ... just run!” And having at least some sense, I booked my slender thirteen year-old ass out of there fast! And never went back again. I’d miss the easy money, but I had the strong overwhelming feeling that I’d just barely escaped something awful. If I was lucky, I might only have been raped. Or I’d be one of those kids who just disappears from the streets, and into a grave ... or worse.

I don’t know ... but that’s what the voice in my head projected, and I didn’t argue, ever, with it. I never told my mother about the incident, but I may have once told one of my much older sisters who was extremely ‘street smart’. She said, without a blink, that ‘my guardian angel must have saved me, and likely was highly stressed from all of the overtime work!’ I don’t disagree.

To this day, I do not like being touched, especially by surprise on the shoulder, by anyone. Probably PTSD from this event

Story #4A – Kids Meet Bigfoot

An abbreviated (and slightly sanitized) version of this story has been sent to the Buckeye Bigfoot YouTube channel, and will probably be read on or near Halloween weekend 😊

<Edit>

Since posting, and thinking out what stories to tell the other night, I’ve remembered one or two small other details that are (perhaps) worth mentioning ... and at worse, provide a little bit more color to the tale. Also, when my wife asks me (again) in exasperation why I’m often fascinated with watching bigfoot videos or listening to podcasts, I can just point to these encounter stories.

Sometime in the mid-summers of both 1974 and 1975, I was sent off by mom to a Boy’s Club summer camp for city kids, up in northern Mendocino County, northern California near Ft. Bragg ... and right on the historic Skunk Train railroad line. Beautiful, beautiful country up there!

Camp was actually a lot of fun, but frankly I would just as soon have been home, watching SF Giants games and reading books. It was not without some benefits, as at least three of the kids in my 10-person bunkhouse all had brought at least one Playboy magazine along, and some other rather innocent kids like me, now got to compare female physiology for the very first time! Even then, right from the start I think, I preferred Brunettes.

Year One Encounter?

My first year at summer camp was really wonderful for me since I was a city boy in San Francisco and had never spent any time out in nature, and it fascinated me. I’d spend most morning fishing, then take a swim, go to lunch, and then spend the afternoons doing nature or Ecology things, which we also got Nature Points for, and the kids with most points at the end of the month got recognized at a final awards party ... and I wanted to win!