My Story:
So we here at Strange Uncles, thought it would be a good idea to shed some light on who your hosts are, and why we cover the topics we do. Well, I picked the short end of the straw, so my story will be the first, for you the audience, to lay your eyes on. We each bring something odd of sorts to the table, but talking with Josephina and Luis, I think I perhaps bring the larger abundance of odd. So, grab a beer, a crucifix, and read on.
Born in the 70’s, I am the byproduct of what is known as the Generation X timeline. Fuckin degenerates through and through, raised on early punk rock and the ideologies at the time of what our government was, where we were as a country, and to slim down the microcosm even more, how we lived life in a small rural town in Montana. Yes. I said a small rural town in Montana. If you listen to us you have heard this before, but I grew up with two channels, and one radio station that sadly enough was AM country. I was the remote control of the family, so whenever the channel needed changing, I was up off the floor and turning that big clunky dial knob on the side of our RCA wooden console TV. If the President was on, I was fucked, because my dad would just have me go back and forth, between channel eight and channel 13, until the President was done with his yapping and we as a family, could get down to more important shit, like watching Magnum PI or Cheers. Born to a father that was a Hot rod builder back in his day, to a Trucker for over 30 years, and to a Mother who proudly served in the Army during the Vietnam War. She signed up solely to be sent to Vietnam to help the soldiers. But when she found out she wasn’t going, she quickly made friends with the Captain of the base, where she was released with an honorable discharge three years later, which broke her four year contract. But I’m sure with the help of her friend the “Captain”, she was released to be free and live as a civilian. Whatever capacity or type of relationship my mom had made with the Captain, I don’t care….but one could guess I suppose. Dad was raised pretty loosely without really having an interest or background in ghosts and such. He used to always say, “If you don’t believe in them, they can’t hurt you.” I suppose he was right, but I never was that lucky. Even though he wasn’t raised believing in those kinds of things, I remember Grandma (my Dad’s Mom), talking about watching UFO’s land on Mt Rainier in Washington. She made it sound like it was no biggie, kind of a 3 or 4 times a year occurrence. She said they would hike up the Mountain and find round burn marks in the meadows where they took off. Again, it fascinated me but grandma? Not so much. There was only one other weirdo on my father’s side that blew me away, and that was Aunt Edith. Now Aunt Edith was a very eccentric bird to say the least. I remembered when I was eight or ten years of age. I was over at her house so I actually could watch Cable TV, and she would be vacuuming in the distance. I became used to the sound of the vacuum washing back and forth over the yellow, green, and brown shag carpet, and I was very used to what that sounded like. So when the vacuum stopped but remained running for an indefinite amount of time, my curiosity got the best of me and I went to investigate. There was my Aunt, hand on the vacuum, vacuum running, but not moving. She was just dazed off into the distance, almost like she was just stunned or in a trance. Then she left the vacuum running, and walk over to the kitchen table, and scribbled some random shit on the corner of the newspaper that was laying there, without even looking at it. . Then she stopped, came to her senses, looked down and just went, “huh”. She got up and threw the paper away and that was that, as she went back to vacuuming. Years later I would find out from her daughter, that she did that all the time. On one occasion her daughter actually took a piece to the Missoula University where she was studying, and had a professor look at it. He thought mostly gibberish, but did openly say there were mixes of ancient language, and recognizable hieroglyphic signs that could be matched to writings found in Egypt. So there was that.
My Pop....I loved that man, even though I found out at 25, that he never was my dad. Still my Pop at the end of the day, despite it all...
Now let me introduce my Mother. Raised Catholic but deathly afraid of the religion because of what the Nuns would do to her in school, my Mom was full of experiences that I have never seen in my life, and could probably write a book on her pretty easily. Obviously we have no time here, but a few examples are necessary to explain this woman, and perhaps my issues over years of my life. Mom completely, through and through, believed in ghosts, UFO’s, strange occurrences…all because she lived through most of these things. She survived the largest Earthquake Alaska ever had in 64' and her mom soo after shipped her to MT. I remember when I told her that I saw weird things. Faces, little kids following me, spheres outside my bedroom window. She would say, “Honey, their trying to communicate with you. You have a gift, don’t ignore it, and use it.” I can safely say, that was easier said than done, especially when every night of my life from the time I could remember to about 17, I slept on my stomach, hands hid, and blankets pulled over my head where all that could be seen was my nose so I could at least breath. Don’t get me started on the bi-weekly nightmares where I stutter, shake, and try to scream to wake myself up. At 45 years old, I still have them…and my wife hates it, lol. Mom played with Ouija boards at an early age. When she was 15, she asked when her mom was going to die. When it was right and here mom passed on the exact day that it gave, Mom never touched a board again….until this one weird Thanksgiving. She had a friend that brought over an Ouija board for some after dinner fun. I wouldn’t call that after dinner fun, but whatever. After much persuading from Laurie, mom agreed. She told me to go get a notebook and a pen. I spent the next few hours writing as fast as I could write, everything coming out of the board. Half the time, their hands weren’t even on the reader. It was moving so fast they couldn’t keep up. Suffice to say there were things that came to fruition that turned out true. Mom would also discussed seeing ghosts all over, and had dabbled in everything from astral travel to Automatic writing. She told a story onetime where she worked in an insane asylum. No windows to speak of, and all the “really bad ones”, were locked up in rooms in the basement of the facility. She said that even though they had no idea of night and day, whenever there was a full moon, all of them would absolutely go apeshit for no reason. Our Family were avid alien watchers as well. This is one thing that Dad actually was interested in. I remember a story he told about Mom and him, following a UFO across three towns before it finally just up and disappeared. Mom talked about one event when she was young. She lived close to an Airforce in Alaska, where she saw a silver hotdog just floating in the sky. It made several moves. Up and down, left to right. Then the Jets from the base showed up to chase it, and it just left the Jets in the dust and disappeared. The stories of my Family, especially my Mother, could go on. But this isn’t about them I suppose. I just wanted to give you guys a platform to explain my kooky shit.
My Mom. Wonderful, crazy woman. what she must have seen throughout her life is staggering. But she was bullheaded, to say the least, That's where I get it from I suppose.
I remember the start of my problem's. I still call it a problem to this day, because it has caused a lot of grief throughout the course of my life. I remember seeing stuff even when I was young that I couldn’t explain. Some of it more than likely was nothing, but now' years later I still wonder what was real and what wasn’t. I remember at around 10ish? I was in the kitchen when my grandmother was on a stool getting something out of the cupboard, when I had a flash of her falling. Very much Deja' vue, and I grabbed the ladder, as it started to tip. That sort of stuff would happen all the time. I would dream just small little chunks in time, only to remember weeks or months later when I was in the real life scene. When I was around 12, I would get to go with dad during the summer on trucking trips. We had directions to go to a place to meet the owner that was building a log home. As we drove up to this turn of the century farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in Idaho, I knew.... I “knew” this place. We walked up to the porch, the man’s wife opened the door, and as I stood in the foyer, I knew where everything was. Rooms, what the yard looked like in the back, everything. When we left and I mentioned it to my Dad, he wanted nothing more than to not speak another fucking word about it. So we drove in awkward silence for about 50 miles. First lesson for me that I do not, under any circumstances, talk to my Dad about shit I didn’t understand. Then of course my teenage years got the best of me when I toured graveyards with my friends, scared as hell, played with Ouija boards, and all the other fun stuff. In talking about playing with Boards, I had a spirit (supposedly) contact me by the name of Allen. He was a boy evidently, because he couldn’t spell right and sounded fairly young as far as putting sentences together. When I asked him how he died, he spelled out “hackle broke”. Not knowing what that meant, assuming it was a spelling error, I really didn't pay much attention. When talking to mom later, she yelled at me for playing around with it. That’s when I heard her story of her Mom previously mentioned. But I asked who she was talking to, and she said, “Oh a little boy named Allen”. He was in a stagecoach accident where the horses broke away from the carriage and it went over the cliff.” Weeks later I found out what a “Hackle” was. It is what some of the old codgers called the harness that connected the horses to the carriage….go figure. Joining the Navy was another experience of weird shit all around. Everything from Japanese spirits haunting the train I would ride every weekend to go visit my Girlfriend, to stumbling on weird underground shrines in Malaysia, to getting drunk and wandering around the dirty backstreets in Pusan, where I stumbled on a opened warehouse full of old carnival rides. All stacked up with music that I followed through the warehouse, to a stairwell leading to a closed door with bright lights shining through it. I recognized the music to be somewhat Carnival themed, but it didn’t drown out the whimpers and cries I heard coming from behind the locked door. When I bailed out of there and found a street cop, I never wanted anything more at that moment than to know how to speak Korean. He just chalked me up as a crazy drunk American trying to get attention. I lost quite a few nights sleep over that one, wishing I could have done more if something Evil was afoot.
My Son... When he was to young to know what I dressed him up as for Halloween. I got tired of him being Batman 3 years in a row...
This continued throughout my Navy day’s right until I married and discharged....the Navy I mean... My Ex wanted to make a career out of it, and it was easier for her to advance then me. Then, due to unforeseen circumstances in my Marriage, I was the one that picked up my bootstraps, and raised my son. Losing everything in the marriage….the House, my Navy savings, and my pride. I struggled through 2 ½ years of fighting for custody and bouncing from rental to rental trying to provide for my Son and stay sane. All at the same time having nightmares, and seeing people standing on the edge of bridges….Voices from behind me at the worst possible times. Some of this could have been me just wrapped up into my own self-loathing, but still didn't help, however it manifested itself. I even tried moving into an old cabin up in the woods, where I hoped to get some peace of mind, only to have people…or things.. Staring down atme from the loft. It even rubbed off on my son. I was working at the time as a Contractor where some of the tasks were moving deadbeat’s furniture out when they couldn’t pay rent. On one job, I felt uneasy and nervous throughout the entire thing. As I finished loading the last of the crap in the trailer, I had backed into the garage, I closed the door going into the house, only to find scrawled on the sheetrock behind the door, “This house is haunted”. Then my son started to have nightmares at night when he was around 3, especially when I spent the weekends at a girl’s house I had been seeing for a few months. She had bought an old house built in the 70’s, and had two kids, 11 and 8 respectively, which was great for my son, because her kids loved dressing him up like he was a play toy. And of course, he loved the attention. I woke up one night with him yelling in the spare room. I ran in to find him standing up in the crib, staring at the corner of the room towards the ceiling, just crying. This happened a few more times until I was fed up. Katy reached out to a friend of hers who happened to be a clairvoyant.... I guess.....anyway, I’m not sure. Still out on the whole clairvoyant thing. a lot of hocus pocus in my opinion... Anyhoo, I told my mom about what was happening. A Funny thing happened after that, speaking of hocus pocus. Mom called back later that day and said she had a vision of an Indian woman who lived with either a trapper or hunter of sorts on that property. Mom just knew he was white, and wore a lot of fur for warmth. Evidently the Indian woman’s child died, and because of my sons ethnicity (his mom is Black), the spirit of the Indian woman was attracted to him. That’s what he was seeing in the corner of the room. So bare with me, it doesn’t stop there. Katy’s friend the next day came to us, explaining the exact same story, but also knew, or had a dream that the reason for the death was because the child was sick. The Trapper had gone into town about 14 miles away, and by the time he got back to the homestead, the child was dead as well as the Indian woman. After this, whenever I walked through the family room to the kitchen, I pictured out of the corner of my eye an old woman sitting in the corner. Not sure if it was the spirit of the Indian woman, but I do know when “Witchy Woman” from the Eagles would play, I would feel her get up and literally chase me out the front door of the house. Weird I know, but I can’t help what I felt. There are so, so many stories that I haven’t even touched the tip on, but hopefully this sheds some light on my “weirdness factor” of sorts. I still see, from time to time faces or shadows. I can still tell you what places are haunted the minute I step foot into them. I try in my middle age to be a little more Courageous and approach these things head on…of course with the support and caring of my Wife, who has seen me wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweat, mumbling and whimpering like a child, As stupid as that sounds. Mom and Dad are both deceased, so I have no one to share these continued Adventures with, except my wife and Luis.
Truly, the love of my life....She saves me everyday and she doesn't even know it.