ANOMALIES

Encounters with the Unusual and the Unexplained

[These are excerpts from a chapter from my book The Sky Stretched Out Before Me]

“The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole.”

—Carl Jung

Shortly after the turn of the millennium. My friend Tim Boyd asked me if I would give a talk about Egypt to a small study group of his on the south side of Chicago. I took the train from the western suburbs into the city and then down to the south side, where I described some of my experiences in Egypt, showing some of my photographs from that region, and addressing some of the mysteries surrounding that culture.

The question invariably comes up during such gatherings about the supposed “curse” associated with the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb. It’s a complicated topic but an interesting one. Among the unusual deaths following the opening of that tomb, I explained, was a fellow named Richard Bethell, the personal secretary to Howard Carter, the chief discoverer of Tut’s tomb. Bethell was found dead in his bed one day, suffocated with a pillow; then, his father, Lord Westbury, fell to his death from a seventh floor window. Different theories have been suggested to explain those deaths (including one proposing they were actually murdered by none other than Aleister Crowley). But to date they remain unexplained.

After the talk was over, I got back on the train with my photographs and my notes and headed back to the western suburbs. But upon arriving home, I realized I had left my photographs on the train; the envelope they were in had slipped out of my satchel and slid off to the side of the seat. Since they were expensive, high-quality prints, I was upset, and made a point of calling the railroad’s lost-and-found office the next morning to find out if they had been turned in by someone. To my relief, they had, and later that day I headed back downtown on the train to retrieve my photos.

On reaching the lost-and-found office, I was greeted by a young-ish man behind the window who said to me, while handing over the folder with my photos, “By the way, I saw your photos, and they were really interesting. I have a family connection to Egypt, you know.” Oh, really? What is that? “A couple relatives of mine who were involved with the King Tut discovery died mysterious deaths.” At that, I looked down at the young clerk’s I.D. badge, and saw that his last name was Bethell. As it turned out, he was directly related to Richard Bethell, the aforementioned secretary to Howard Carter, and to Richard’s father, Lord Westbury—the same figures I had just spoken about on the south side of the city. If I hadn’t misplaced my batch of photos on the train that day, I would never have met him.

I’ve always been fascinated by odd and unusual experiences like that, by phenomena or coincidences that didn’t quite fit into ordinary notions of reality. Part of that was simply for their “entertainment” value, I suppose, since strange events broke up the routine order and mixed things up in unique and thought- provoking ways. In a word, they were different.

But there was always something far more to it than just that. For me, these experiences hinted at truths about life very different from what I’d learned from textbooks, TV, or for that matter parochial grade school. Anomalies can be paradigm-shifting, and serve as haunting reminders of life’s mysteriousness, prompting us to peer just a little bit further behind that cloudy veil of appearances.

I’ve had quite a few such encounters with anomalies over the years; what follows are a few of those, and that prompted me to look more closely behind that veil for myself.

*******

One afternoon when I was 11, I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother when she stopped dead in her tracks and exclaimed, with a sense of urgency, “Something’s wrong. . .” My dad was working downtown on a construction site at the time, but my mom claimed she heard him cry out her name, as if in pain. She quickly set about trying to find out what happened, but wasn’t able to get through to him. She paced furiously for the next 30 minutes, worried to death about his condition. It was roughly a half-hour later that the phone rang; it was a call from a doctor’s office downtown. My dad wanted to let her know that he’d been injured on the site— and it happened right at the time she heard his voice. The injury wasn’t deadly serious, fortunately; he’d stepped on a nail and it went all the way through his foot. Painful as that was, it didn’t become infected so he was able to return to work within a few weeks. But I’ll never forget my mother’s behavior that day, and how she somehow seemed to know something was wrong with my father.

*******

When I was 12, I saw a segment on TV about an opera singer who could supposedly shatter a wine glass using only her voice. (This wasn’t the famous recording tape commercial some readers may be familiar with that appeared on TV some years later.) That so intrigued me that the next evening I got it in my head to attempt this feat on my own, using a crystal bowl on our dining room table as my target. I sat down in a room adjacent to the dining room, roughly twelve feet away, and began letting out a high-pitch “EEEEE!,” all the while focusing my attention intently on that crystal bowl.

My parents wondered what I was doing, but they were so used to me doing odd things by then that they paid scant attention after the first few seconds. I let out my ear-piercing screech several more times—when on the fifth or sixth try, the crystal bowl on the table shattered and collapsed into pieces across the dining room table. Though I had secretly hoped that would happen, I was nonetheless surprised it actually did. The sound of the bowl splitting apart on the wooden table made enough noise that my mother rushed in from the kitchen and asked, “What in the world happened?” When I explained to her how I shattered the bowl using my voice, she was incredulous. But she could see I wasn’t anywhere near the bowl, so she didn’t quite know what to make of it, and examined the glass pieces hoping to find some clues as to what really happened. Years later I mentioned the incident to a sound engineer; like my mother, he was skeptical as well, saying that the notion of shattering glass with one’s voice is more of a myth than reality. Yet it did happen—or rather, something happened. Was it a “paranormal” event? Maybe not, but it certainly wasn’t normal.

*******

It’s no doubt significant that most of the anomalous events I’ve experienced in life occurred for me roughly between the ages of 10 and 16. As all students of the anomalous and the paranormal know, that’s often the case, and possibly related to the fact this period also happens to be ground zero for puberty, when our vital energies reach a bursting point and may well overflow into externalized manifestations and synchronicities of one sort or another. For me, that’s included numerous sightings of unusual lights in the sky.

As one example, I was about 13 when I happened to look out the window from an upstairs bedroom in our house one afternoon and saw a strange set of lights off towards the Eastern horizon. They looked to be over the city of Chicago, connected to one another, and were cruising slowly from south on my right to north on my left. I grabbed the set of binoculars I’d just received for my birthday and focused on the image more closely. What I saw were two rows of very bright lights, one atop the other, looking almost like passenger windows from a jet airliner, lit up from inside. Except this was the middle of the day, a time when one normally can’t see lights inside of a jet cabin. Plus, I distinctly saw two rows of lights, one atop the other, not just one.

The craft—or whatever it was—continued on its slow northward drift until it finally disappeared from view somewhere north of the city. The next day, I combed the newspaper to see if there was any mention of this event—and was pleasantly surprised to see there was. In a small article on the front page of our main Chicago paper was a story about reports from around the area of an unusual craft with two rows of lights seen cruising over the city, moving slowly from south to north, exactly at the time when I had my own sighting. There was never any further explanation or suggestion as to what those lights might have been, and I imagine the incident was completely forgotten by everyone except me.

*******

It was around that same period I was sitting in the kitchen of our house talking with my mother about her own mother, my grandmother, who passed away a year earlier. In the midst of reminiscing about her mother, we heard a loud “klanging” noise coming from the basement. That was wholly unexpected, and we went downstairs to investigate. There, in the middle of the basement floor, was a metal dinner tray—the same one my grandmother used to eat food on during her final years living with us. It had been lying flat up on a shelf, and not positioned in such a way that any slight movement would have likely knocked it off. (A mouse certainly couldn’t have done it.) Try as we might, we couldn’t determine how that tray would have been dislodged and knocked to the floor. Not surprisingly, my mother took it as a sign of acknowledgement from her late mother, especially considering the timing of when it happened.

••

During my college years I agreed to help a classmate named Alan do some painting in the old house on the north side of Chicago that he was renting. That first day, he was off in the back of the house painting one room while I was painting an empty closet in the front of the house, when I suddenly felt someone touch my shoulder. I turned around expecting to see my friend, Alan—but to my surprise, no one was there. I chalked it up to a case of a random muscle twitching and continued painting. Then, ten minutes later, I felt the same sensation on my shoulder again, but this time it was more forceful and distinct. There was no mistaking it: someone was definitely touching me. But like before, I turned around to find no one was there. I was beginning to feel a bit rattled at this point, but my friend was a down-to-earth type who didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t touch or see, so I decided to be cautious and not say anything to him about my experience.

Several weeks later, I was surprised when Alan confided to me in guarded tones that he thought his house was “haunted.” When I asked him why, he cautiously began describing a series of bizarre experiences he had at the house, all considerably more dramatic than my own. They began with the sound of playful laughing whenever he would undress, then climaxed late one night when his bed started shaking, awakening him abruptly. It was almost like an earthquake, he said, except nothing else in the room was shaking. He quickly climbed out of bed—at which point he found himself pushed up against the bedroom wall, as if by unseen hands. “It scared the living shit out of me,” he said. When I told him about my own experience two weeks earlier, he seemed relieved to hear he wasn’t the only one who experienced strange things there.

As it turned out, both of us knew a young woman at our school— Debby, the same one who first exposed me to the Hermetic axiom “As above, so below,”in fact—who said she knew a psychic our own age named Jim, who might be able to do a “clearing” of sorts in the house. So she arranged to bring him to the house one afternoon to see what he could pick up. Though Alan said nothing to Jim about his own experience beforehand, Jim walked through the house and claimed to pick up impressions of a female spirit—one who had grown quite fond of Alan, in fact, and who was basically being mischievous. Jim did a ritual cleaning intended to send the spirit on its way. Did it work? All I know is my friend Al never had any problem with those disturbances again.

*******

During the early 1970s while studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, I became close friends with a fellow film student by the name of Bill Hogan. Early in 1972, he hatched a plan for us to shoot some footage along the coast of California for an experimental film he was working on, and I thought to myself this might be a good chance for me to capture some footage as well. We even managed to convince our one instructor John Scofill to join up and drive all of us to the coast in his car during spring break. He’d lived in California before moving to Chicago, where he organized film screenings on the Berkeley campus, and saw this as a chance to go back and visit old friends there. So on April Fool’s Day of that year, John, Bill and his girlfriend Debbie, and myself set out from the slushy, snowy Chicagoland area for the sunny seeming utopia of California.

We spent a little over a week exploring the Bay area, including San Francisco, Mill Valley, and Berkeley, as well as several days around Big Sur. I’d been to California once before during a family trip when I was twelve, but this was an altogether different adventure. This time, I felt like Dorothy stepping from her black and white world into that other one of stunning technicolor. There literally seemed to be different hues in the environment from anything I was familiar with back home; the skies seemed bluer, the violet blossoms of the Jacaranda trees around Berkeley had an ethereal quality, and there seemed to be an energy in the air which I found intoxicating.

The week we spent out there opened my mind in any number of ways, and some of that due to the hallucinogenic experiences we had during that time. The first of those was in the otherworldly landscape of Big Sur. John dropped Bill and I off at the nearby campground there, where we stayed and shot film for several days while John went off to visit old friends around the Bay area. Several days earlier, we caught wind of the fact that one of John’s friends had access to some supposedly pure LSD, and we managed to convince him to give us some. Bill and I brought it along, and we ingested one dose each at the Big Sur campground, then set off on foot down the long and winding road to Pfeiffer Beach, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I had no idea what that route looked like beforehand. As the drug began taking effect, the journey down that road took on quasi-mythic proportions for me. The landscape evolved and transformed in astonishing ways, and after what seemed like an eternity, we finally emerged from out of the tangle of trees and sand onto Pfeiffer Beach itself—a staggering natural site which harbors a mystical ambience that can’t really be put into words, nor should it be.

But as powerful as that experience was, an even more mind-altering one unfolded for me several days later when the five of us traveled to Mills College and situated ourselves in a beautiful natural area behind the college proper. This spot struck me as kind of a well-tended swamp, or what some call a “wetland.” Thick with fauna and vegetation, I found it idyllic in a lush sort of way. On arriving there, Bill and I ingested our remaining LSD, but in a slightly larger dosages this time, and the results were transformative.

My perception of the world became profoundly synchronistic, as I began to notice how everything around me—sounds, feelings, images, actions—seemed to be interwoven within a larger, cosmic symphony of meaning. Several years later I read Andrew Weil’s book The Natural Mind and was struck by a phrase he used in connection with an experience reported by users of hallucinogens in the Bay area during the 60s—”positive paranoia.” Simply, that’s a sense that everything happening around you is a conspiracy for your benefit. In many cases, no doubt, that perception is little more than a drug-induced fantasy. But there are times, whether drug-induced or otherwise, when it seems unmistakably real. For me, this was one of those—and it would become one of the early experiences that eventually fueled my later studies with synchronicity.

As the minutes rolled on, it felt as though the psychic barriers armoring my perception dissolved and allowed me to intuitively tune into the emotions of everyone—and everything—around me. While talking to Bill, I somehow knew what he was going to say before he said it. As surprising as that was, there was an even greater shock awaiting me, as I explored the fauna and flora of the surrounding garden. I gradually began to sense faint sounds com- ing from a long row of nearby bushes and flowers. They weren’t audible in any normal sense, but were more like “feeling-impressions” of sounds, for lack of a better description. At one point it finally dawned on me that the sounds were originating from the plants themselves—and they were consciously communicating with me.

With that moment of shocked recognition on my part, a ripple of laughter peeled through the rows of plants, as if they were aware of my surprise and even delighted in it. It reminded me of yet another iconic scene from the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy hears the tittering noises coming from the plants when she entered that technicolor world. Over the next hour—though for all I know it could have been just ten minutes—I proceeded to communicate with the plants, or at least believed I was, as I projected different emotions outward towards the plants and they responded collectively as if in response.

After returning home from that trip, I was determined to find comparisons to other, more familiar sounds they could be likened to, and eventually settled on Ravel’s composition “Daphnes and Chloe, Suite 2,” with its opening bars of rippling, cascading notes. That intro expressed much the same quality as what I heard that day, except what I experienced that day were more natural and organic sounds than anything created through human-made orchestral instruments.

Despite how vivid and “real” all this felt to me, I naturally had nagging doubts. I wanted an informed second opinion, so several years later asked Goswami Kriyananda for his thoughts on what I’d experienced. On hearing my detailed description, he responded quite matter-of-factly, “Oh sure, it was real, but it was very limited.” What do you mean by “limited,” I wondered? “You see, everything is conscious,” he said. “But your awareness opened up only far enough to pick up the consciousness of the plants. Had it opened up farther, you would have been able to sense the awareness of the rocks, the clouds, the trees—everything.”

(Curiously enough, several years later Kriyananda described an experience of his own that was similar to mine, but even stranger. While coming out of a deep meditation one day, he opened his eyes to see his dog lying on the floor chewing on a bone. But to his surprise, he sensed a consciousness stirring in the bone which expressed itself essentially as, “It’s so nice to be enjoyed!” The bone not only possessed a rudimentary awareness, in other words, but appreciated being devoured by the hungry dog. That came as a shock to Kriyananda, a down-to-Earth double-Taurus who never even considered the possibility something as inanimate or seemingly “dead” as a bone could be conscious, let alone that it might derive pleasure from being consumed.)

*******

There have been times in my life when I entered a new environment for the first time and seemed able to pick up impressions which were accurate about that place and its history. One of those occurred for me during the early 70’s while staying at the summer cottage of my childhood friend Kirk during the early 1970s. I’d driven up from Illinois across the border into Wisconsin to spend the day with him, and when it came time to retire for the evening, I headed off to the side bedroom to sleep for the night.

While lying in bed, though, I was surprised by the wave of peculiar images I saw floating through my mind. I was completely sober, yet it felt as though I’d taken a hallucinogenic drug, the colors and forms were so vivid and surrealistic. Even more surprising was how foreign all this mental pageantry seemed to me, as though it had erupted from someone else’s imagination. The ideas and environments were different from anything I was familiar with from my own dreams and hypnagogic reveries. Even the faces on the people flashing by seemed new and different somehow. It went on like this for well over an hour, until I finally fell asleep.

The next morning over breakfast I mentioned that to my friend, who laughed when he heard it. When I asked what was so funny, he said, “That’s the bed I used to lie in whenever I did LSD or mescaline back in the old days. I must have done 40 or 50 trips lying on that bed in that room.” It was hard not to think I might have been immersed in a veritable cloud of residual thought forms and fantasies lying there that warm summer night, all of them likely “borrowed” from the mind of another.

*******

That wasn’t the only time I had a sense of an environment and its impressions. The year was 1982 and I was getting ready to embark on my first trip to England, and had been contemplating the places I hoped to visit while there. I’d read a bit about the history of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when William the Conqueror came ashore with his army of Normans and overthrew the reigning king of England. Something about that historical episode called to me, and I started thinking about visiting the site of that historical battle.

One week before I was set to leave on my trip, I was standing in line at the bank ready to withdraw some money, when my thoughts turned to this possible destination and whether I should make a side-trip to Hastings to explore it. Exactly at that moment, I happened to notice the fellow standing in line in front of me; he was scratch- ing the back of his head and had a check in his hand, apparently intending to cash or deposit it. The number of the address printed on that check? 1066. That was surprising enough, but then I saw the fellow’s name on the check: Norman Wave. That settled it: I included Hastings in my itinerary.

Once there, I walked around the battlefield, which struck me as unusually peaceful in a pastoral sort of way. Nothing particularly stood out for me, however, and I eventually made my way over by bus to the ocean, where I wandered along the beach and climbed amongst the ruins of an ancient structure constructed by William the Conqueror after settling in as England’s new monarch. I had been up most of the previous night, and at one point decided to lie down and rest, at which point I drifted in and out of sleep. It was then, on that ethereal threshold between waking and sleep, that I heard a deep-throated, guttural voice in my head saying, clear as a bell: “...fear of Saxon power.” That immediately woke me, since it was so distinct. Was I picking up on impressions that locals in the area felt centuries earlier about the impending arrival of William’s army? I have no way of knowing. All I can say for sure is the voice was unlike any I’d heard before.

Nine years later I was living with my wife in the western suburbs of Chicago, in a tiny house in the woods. (And I do mean tiny: the foundation of the house measured 11 x 22 feet in all.) This was during the mid-1990s, and late one night I laid in bed next to her, mulling over some problems I’d been experiencing at work that week. She had fallen asleep, but I was restless, and tossed and turned on the futon mattress we were sleeping on for several hours. At one point I heard the distinct sound of heavy footsteps walking across the floor from the back of the small house and proceeding directly to the side of the bed where I was lying. The sounds of the steps finally stopped just inches from my head. Whoever this person was, I thought, they must be large and were wearing heavy boots, judging from the heavy klop, klop, klop of the steps.

I was petrified. I knew I had locked the one door into our small house, I assumed this stranger must have broken in somehow, and likely didn’t have our best interests at heart. I was at a complete loss for what to do, since I was in a helpless position with this stranger now standing directly over me. (Was he holding an axe? A gun? My imagination went wild.) For lack of a better strategy, I decided to play possum and simply lie there motionless until the stranger started walking away, at which point I could possibly devise some further plan.

Yet to my surprise, there were no more sounds, no further “walking away” of the footsteps. After about fifteen very tense minutes of lying there perfectly still, I finally opened my eyes and peeked upward to see where the unwelcome intruder was— only to discover no one was there at all. I got up and carefully searched the small house, went to check the front door and found that it was still locked. How was that possible? The next morning I told Judith about the incident, and she mentioned how on one other occasion she had the same experience, with the sound of the heavy boots moving across the room. It was also around that time she learned that the previous tenant in that small house had been an eccentric fellow who lived there by himself for decades, and wore heavy boots much of the time because of the damp ground in the surrounding woods, where he would walk out every week to shoot squirrels and birds with his shotgun.

*******

So those are a few.

All of which brings me back to a central question: What do these experiences mean? In the next chapter of my book I presented some ideas about a more symbolic and synchronistic approach toward unlocking that mystery—that chapter has been posted online and can be found here, at the Daily Grail website: https://www.dailygrail.com/2017/05/portals-of-strangeness/. As I hope to make clear, it’s not really possible to separate happenings like these from the consciousness or even destinies of those experiencing them.

Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer based in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, most recently In the Company of Gods and So, What Am I Doing Here, Anyway? His Websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.