- Ever since Shadow World (Anomalist, 2007) was
released, I have received dozens of remarkable accounts from individuals
who claimed that they had experienced encounters similar to those reported
in my book. They, too, had interacted with mysterious multidimensional
beings who have entered our dimension of reality for purposes that as yet
appear to be beyond our present capacity to understand.
-
- Certain of my correspondents inquired whether or not
I had any accounts of individuals, such as they, who had somehow entered
the strange dimensions of Shadow World and returned. As I read through
the fascinating new accounts, I found many comparable cases in my files.
-
- In February of 1971, shortly after an article of mine
on Time Travel had appeared in Saga magazine, I received a letter
from a gentleman named Al Kiessig, who claimed the ability to walk through
"doorways" between dimensions. In subsequent correspondence,
Kiessig, whom I found to be an open and sincere man, shared numerous extraordinary
experiences.
-
- It was in Missouri that Kiessig fonnd the "West
Door," the door of evil, and the "East Door," the entrance
into the Spirit World. According to Kiessig: "At the West Door,
the wanderers of the spirit world can leave and enter our world clothed
so as to be seen as one of us--and no human eye can detect the difference.
-
- ''There are two places, one in Missouri and one in Arkansas,
where I walked into this next door neighbor of ours. It is very silent.
It looks like our world, but there is no sound, no wind, no sun, even though
it looks like the sun is shining.
-
- "In the state of Missouri I found two fields that
had doors, or what I call 'vortexes': No matter where you walked you would
come back to your starting place, and if you hit the center of the vortex,
then you would come out from a mile to two miles beyond the place you entered
in a section that would be unrecognizable to you until you stopped and
regained your inner balance. Then the surroundings would gradually become
familiar.
-
- "Each door is different, but it is my belief that
if one conId recognize these door openings, one could pick the door in
Arkansas that would permit me to step into your front yard in Iowa.
-
- "In the region of the Ozarks, it was nothing for
me to see into this other dimension. I could not enter, but I could see
into it, as if through a large window; and I could see the people, live people,
who entered our world or dimension, using the same mode of transportation
so as not to give themselves away as aliens. The question is who are they?
-
- "I have entered these 'doorways' while driving and
saved myself hundreds of miles of driving. Unfortunately, the reverse has
also happened to me.
-
- "Some of these doors to other dimensions open like
an elevator door with no elevator there to step into. Others open into
a land of no life. Some take you back into the past, and some take you
into the future on this world. Then there are doors that open into chambers
that send the body to a distant star.
-
- "This world we know as Earth is not the only world
inhabited by people like us. We must keep our minds open wide.
-
- "There is no way that I can prove any of the events
stated in this letter," Kiessig closed in one of his long letters
to me. "My word, which is well known hereabouts to be good as gold,
must do."
-
- Is it possible that some men and women may have a peculiar
psychic make-up which permits them to transgress the boundaries between
this plane of reality and other dimensions?
-
- Can these men and women be possessed of abilities which
enable them to travel to realms of being normally unobtainable to those
in the physical body?
-
- As Al Kiessig admitted, he had only his word to substantiate
his claims, and even though his friends and neighbors in Arkansas might
swear by his promises and his oaths, such testimonials do not stand up
well under the critical scrutiny of the scientific testing laboratory.
-
- In the September, 1956, issue of Fate magazine,
Miriam Golding related an experience which occurred to her in the fall
of 1934 when she stepped out of an elevator into another plane of existence.
-
- Miriam and her fiance were riding a crowded elevator
in a Chicago music store when she inadvertently got off at the wrong floor
and found it impossible to push her way back into the crowded car. Miriam
sighed, prepared to await the elevator car's return. Then looking around
her, she was astonished to see that she was not in a downtown music store
at all, but a large railroad station.
-
- She watched crowds of travelers hurrying about. Railroad
announcers gave times of departures and arrivals. People bought tickets,
grabbed sandwiches and snacks from lunch counters, idled impatiently in
waiting rooms. Miriam approached the Information Booth, but stalked away
indignantly when the girl seemed to completely ignore her repeated inquiries.
-
- At last Miriam noticed a to-the-street sign and followed
its direction into the open air. It seemed to be a beautiful, mid-summer
afternoon. A new red brick building was being constructed across the street
from the station. Crowds of people jostled by on the streets. But everyone
ignored Miriam and she had no idea where she was.
-
- She wandered aimlessly for several minutes until she
noticed a teenaged boy standing near the center of the sidewalk, staring
in all directions. She approached the blond boy, hardly daring to hope
that they might establish contact with one another. Then he noticed her
and smiled: "I guess they let you off at the wrong stop, too."
-
- Miriam immediately understood that however fantastic,
the same thing had happened to both of them. Their mutual plight created
a bond between them, and they continued together down the broad avenue.
-
- The boy explained that he had been playing tennis in
Lincoln, Nebraska. He had gone into the locker room to change his shoes,
and when he came back out to the courts, he found himself in that same
railroad depot. The two of them marveled at whatever strange force could
transport a tennis player from Lincoln and a shopper from Chicago to the
same unknown train station.
-
- Eventually they found themselves in the open country
where, amazingly, Miriam saw her fiance's sister on a sandbar with a number
of other girls. They noticed her, too, and they began to call her name
and wave at her.
-
- Her new friend became very excited. Perhaps the girls
formed some kind of connection or link between dimensions. He hurried out
of his clothes until he stood only in his tennis shorts.
-
- "It's not far to swim," he told Miriam. "They
see us! I know I can make it to them in a few minutes."
-
- The figures of the girls remained on the sandbar, but
the teenager, even though he was a strong swimmer, could get no nearer
to the girls and the hoped for link between worlds. Exhausted, he returned
at last to shore and fell to the sand in complete discouragement. When
they looked again at the sandbar, it had disappeared.
-
- Miriam felt despondent. Would she be forever trapped
in this other plane of existence? Then she became suddenly enveloped in
darkness. She felt as if she were floating through space.
-
- With a jolt she found herself on a stool in the music
store, a magazine spread out before her. A clock was signaling closing
time, and the clerks were directing impatient glances her way. Miriam looked
about for her fiance, but she could not see him. She decided to go directly
to his home, but this time she would take the stairs and avoid the elevator.
-
- "'When I got to my destination," Miriam Golding
wrote, "my fiance opened the door. He certainly looked relieved. He
said he'd lost me on the elevator. After stepping out on the main floor, he
had been unable to locate me. Thinking I had gotten off on some other floor, he
had waited for a while, then decided to go home."
-
- Miriam entered the home and was surprised to see her
fiance's sister with the same friends she had seen on the sandbar. The
sister smiled and teased her that she had seen her in town, "but you
were so engrossed in each other you didn't even hear us!"
-
- Where had Miriam Golding been during those strange hours
away from conventional reality?
-
- What distortion of Time and Space made downtown Chicago
appear to be a river and a sandbar?
-
- How had the girls been able to serve as a kind of link
between dimensions, so that at least some kind of communication, even though
false (they saw her with her fiance rather than a blond teenaged boy; she
saw them on a sandbar rather than a crowded Chicago street), had been established?
-
-
- Mr. R. W. Balcom of Live Oak, California, contributed
a personal experience shared with his wife. According to Balcom, the two
of them were traveling to Lake Tahoe during the early morning hours. A
few miles east of Placerville on Highway 50, they stopped to eat at a quaint
and rustic-styled restaurant, which neither of them had ever noticed on
any of their previous trips to the region.
-
- The food was excellent, and the waitress and cook were
so friendly that the Balcoms truly meant their promise to stop back again.
-
- They tried to do so on their return drive from Lake Tahoe,
but the restaurant was nowhere to be seen.
-
- The Balcoms traveled that route three successive weekends
in 1962, searching for the friendly little restaurant with the good food
that had simply vanished into nothingness.
-
- "Since then we have journeyed over Highway 50 to
Lake Tahoe many times," Balcom concludes, "never again finding
the little restaurant·
-
-
- Frances E. Peterson of Keokuk, Iowa, remembered the Sunday
afternoon in 1935, when she, her husband, and their four children were
returning from a weekend visit in Missouri. They decided to take a shortcut
on a dirt road. They drove down a hill into a valley, then as they reached
the rim of the valley, they were astonished to see a well where women in
sun bonnets and long, full skirts covered by large aprons were drawing
in a wooden pail by a windlass. Other women were carrying the water in
pails balanced on wooden yokes across their shoulders. Bearded men, who
were tending sheep and gathering wood, wore loose-fitting tronsers, smocks,
and large black hats.
-
- The Petersons had never heard of such a settlement in
the area of St. Patrick, Missouri, and as it turned out, no one else had
either.
-
- "Many times since then we have looked for this lovely
Old World settlement," Mrs. Peterson commented. "We have inquired
of old settlers and relatives in the area, but no one knows of such a valley.
Did we ride backward in time?" (Fate, April, 1959)
-
- The men and women who have had the experiences cited
above may always wonder whether or not they had some kind of collective
psychic experience or whether their physical bodies somehow managed to
pass into another dimension. For other individuals the answer becomes a
bit more clearly stated, although no more clearly defined or explained,
for they were left with undeniable physical evidence that they had been
confronted with some force as yet beyond the grasp of orthodox
science.
-
- Thirteen-year-old Michael Helferty of Picton, Ontario,
Canada, was last seen walking along Lake Street toward Ontlet Beach to
go swinnning on July 30, 1960. Then he disappeared.
-
- By the time he was found sleeping in a nest of grass
alongside the Canadian National Railway tracks west of Picton five days
later, his frantic parents had posted a five hundred dollar reward for
information on his whereabouts and police, friends, and volunteer searchers
had painstakingly combed the area.
-
- Michael was unaware that any more than a few hours had
passed since he set out to go swimming, and he had no memory of where he
had been. He showed no signs of exposure, sunburn, hunger, or thirst. He
was fresh and alert and not the least bit tired. The Helferty family physician
declared him well-nourished, well-cared for, and clean. Strangely enough,
his clothes were perfectly dry, even though there had been a heavy dew
during the night.
-
- The only thing at all unusual was that Michael was wearing
his swim trunks, rather than his underwear, under his trousers. Since
he had set out to go swimming with his trunks in his hand, it appears that
he at least may have entered the water.
-
- Michael himself found it difficult to believe that he
had "lost" five days, and he insisted that he had no knowledge
or memory of where he had been.
-
- His father could only shake his head and utter: "It's
a mystery, but somebody's taken care of him, that's for sure."
-
- Michael Helferty swore that he had no conscious memory
of where he had spent his strange five-day vacation.
-
- Little Kathy Cramer may have remembered where she disappeared,
but she was not telling anyone.
-
- The six-year-old girl disappeared from her home on Park
Street in Wood's Hole, Massachusetts, about 7:00 P.M. on August 15, 1960.
Local police officers, state police, firemen, a crew of volunteers, and
two police bloodhounds meticulously scoured a two-mile area, while a Coast
Guard vessel patrolled the adjacent water front. At 9:00 P.M. two hundred
airmen from nearby Otis Air Force Base initiated a search-march for the
missing Kathy Cramer.
-
- It goes without saying that the Cramer household was
carefully searched before the original alarm concerning Kathy's absence
had been issued. In addition, Falmouth Deputy Police Chief Antone Morgardo
and Rev. Wilkin J. Kingwell, rector of St. John's Church in Newtonville,
testified that they had carefully explored the house three times. Yet,
incredible as it may seem, the six-year-old object of the massive search
was found at 3:00 A.M., peacefully sleeping on her bed.
-
- When gratefully weeping yet stunned and incredulous parents
asked Kathy where she had been, the six-year-old stubbornly announced that
she was not telling.
-
- Stern police officers, solicitous neighbors, coaxing
relatives all got the same answer: "I'm not telling'"
-
- Had some kidnapper decided better of his dangerous gambit
and returned the child, desperately making a game of it all with her,
making her promise not to tell where they had been?
-
- Or had some cosmic, interdimensional being removed the
child for a time for some purpose of its own, then brought her
back to our plane of reality with a promise not to betray the "Good
Fairy's" secret?
-
- There may be a number of other possible explanations,
but one that we should consider is that the child herself may have discovered
the marvelous, albeit awesome, secret of psychically "crawling"
through the cracks and crevices between spheres of existence.
-
- In 1953, a schoolboy in the Philippines was seen
by many to disappear from closed rooms, then, incredibly, to reappear in
another section of his city of Manila.
-
- In 1965, United Press International correspondent
Vicente Maliwang interviewed Cornelio Closa, the famous "Invisible
boy," who was then a twenty-five-year-old married man, the father
of two children, in order to record his impressions of the astounding events
which had taken place in his life thirteen years before.
-
- The strange, frightful experiences began for Cornelio
in September of 1951 when he was a sixth-grader at the Zamora elementary
school. One day he met a beautiful girl dressed in white with long blonde
hair reaching down to her waist. She was barefooted, about Cornelio's age,
but the boy noticed she floated, rather than walked, when she moved beside
him.
-
- Although the girl did not open her smiling lips, Cornelio
was able to "hear and understand" what she said. When she touched
his hand, he felt different, very light. He became unaware of his surroundings.
-
- The beautiful blonde girl came often. Cornelio remembered
that the things around him looked real and natural, but somehow he had
the feeling that he was no longer real.
-
- "There were many times when the girl and I would
float around and go to many places in the city," Cornelio told the
reporter. "We went many times to movie houses and visited the International
Fair that was being held in the city. When I was with her, I didn't feel
exhausted or hungry."
-
- The strangest thing, Cornelio recalled, was that nobody
seemed to notice them.
-
- Soon, Cornelio's schoolteacher complained to his parents
that he had been skipping school. Father Closa put the law down to his
son, but even an enforced march to school would not prevent the ethereal
girl from snatching the boy away from his classroom.
-
- The girl would appear before him in school. She would
hold out her hand. Cornelio would feel some "sensation," then
there would be no other thought in his mind but to go with her.
-
- "Even with the door closed," Cornelio remembered,
"I was able to go through it, just walk through it as if it were open.
Then I would hear my classmates shouting, 'Cornelio is gone!'"
-
- At home, the Closa family would lock all the doors and
windows, but to absolutely no avail.
-
- "I kept on seeing the girl, and I was able to go
out with her despite the closed doors," Cornelio said. "Sometimes
I would be gone as long as three days, although I had no knowledge of my
own how long I had been away."
-
- Finally his despairing parents sent Cornelio to a mental
institution, then to a welfare institution. Authorities said that he was
a normal boy who would be better off living with his parents, so Cornelio
was sent home. The drastic measure had accomplished the cessation of the
strange girl's visitations to the young boy, however. Two pastors added
to the separation by intense prayers, and Cornelio's nightmare was over.
-
- Although Cornelio Closa's bizarre adventures came to
an end, we are still left with the great mystery--where had he been? One
would write the schoolboy's "lovely blonde girl" off to an energetic
adolescent imagination if it were not for the fact that he really did disappear
from closed classrooms, surrounded by classmates and teacher, and locked
doors and windows, ringed in by members of his family.
-
- An item in the Lock Haven, Pennsylvania Express for
June 7, 1956, told of the fantastic experience of Thomas R. Kessell, a
brewery worker from Johannesburg, South Africa, who regained consciousness
walking a street in New York City with no memory of how he had come to
be on that particular scene beyond a dim recollection of exiting from a
Johannesburg tavern in April.
-
- Is it possible that a human being can walk around a dimensional
"bend" and find himself mysteriously transported to a place far
from his destination?
-
- The shortest distance between two points may not be a
straight line, after all.
-
- It would be quite understandable why someone such as
Thomas Kessell who had undergone such an experience as interdimensional
transport, would undergo a loss of memory. Perhaps an amnesiac reaction
would be necessary for survival.
-
- Charles Fort tells in one of his books of a naked man
who suddenly appeared on High Street, Chatham, Kent, England, on January
6, 1914. People walking on the same street testified that the man had quite
literally appeared from nowhere. He was just suddeuly there, confused,
frightened, without a stitch on a bitterly cold day.
-
- In Lo!, Fort writes that six people were discovered
wandering on the streets or near the small town of Romford, Essex, England,
between January 14, 1920, and December 9, 1923. None of these mentally
distraught individuals were able to tell how they had got there or anything
else about themselves.
-
- The enigma of Thomas R. Kessell and his claim that he
suddenly "found" himself walking a street in New York City after
leaving a pub back in Johannesburg, is reinforced by the problem of just
how the man could have entered the country unnoticed. The man did not recover
his memory until he had undergone a couple of psychiatric sessions. He
had no passport, yet he could not have boarded either a ship or an airplane
without one.
-
-
- I could not finish this article without including an
account of a being who appeared to come from within the darker dimensions
of Shadow World and walked about on some undisclosed mission until she
was suddenly found out.
-
- Joseph Kerska of San Francisco told of the incident involving
seventeen-year-old Carmen Chaney on one hot summer day in Fresno, California,
in 1936(Fate, January, 1961).
-
- Carmen Chaney first noticed the strange old lady in black
as she crossed Tyler Street at the intersection. The old woman moved slowly,
with difficulty, as if her legs were not functioning properly. Assuming
that the lady must be ill, Carmen and her aunt Frankie ran out into the
street to help her.
-
- When the old lady saw the two solicitous women approaching
her, her reaction was far from that of relief at sighting succor on the
way. In fact, she reacted with panic, as if she wanted no one to approach
her.
-
- Kerska writes: "Only 20 feet from her now, they
were fascinated by her large, blazing eyes, set deep in a chalk-white face,
the skin of which appeared to be stretched tightly over her skull. She
was about four feet, 10 inches tall, thin and scrawny: snow white hair
showed in wisps under her large black hat; she wore a highnecked, long-sleeved
dress and high button shoes of a decade gone by. The black of her hat,
which was pulled down low over her face, as well as that of her dress,
was old to the point of decay, as both had turned greenish. She carried
no bag or purse. Altogether she was a pathetic figure."
-
- By now several of the neighbors on the block were watching
the strange old lady retreating from the two well-meaning young women.
The old lady hobbled into an alley, then she looked around helplessly,
as she realized that more than thirty people were intently observing her
bizarre behavior.
-
- "She stopped for a brief moment," Kerska said, "then
she vanished. Disappeared in the blink of an eyelash!"
-
- The many witnesses to the fantastic disappearance excitedly
exchanged opinions and speculations. Police officers who were summoned
to the scene chose to believe that the old woman had been ill and had simply
stumbled out of sight of her observers. But an extensive search of the
alley and the houses on either side revealed no such person of that unique
description.
-
- Who might these "angels" or "devils"
be who walk about in our very midst, while we either entertain or reject
them, totally unaware of their true nature or their true purpose?
-
- Whether there truly are "holes" and "doorways"
between dimensions of reality, whether there may exist kidnappers or interlopers
from other planes of being, whether swirling vortexes may snatch up unsuspecting
men and women and send them spinning into another Space-Time continuum,
remain among the many challenges to be explored in these encounters with
the Shadow World.
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