When I was younger, my sister and I would sleep-walk sometimes. One night I woke up, I am awake, and I need to go to the bathroom. My sister is up and she is faced towards the front door and the front door is open. It’s the middle of the night and it doesn’t make any sense. It’s cold outside and the door is always locked, dead-bolted. So the door is standing wide open and the light from the front porch is just glowing on her and illuminating her and she’s just standing there facing the front door. And I say “Kizzy, what are you doing?” She looks over at me and, as she does, the door closes by itself.

 
My mother was a  twin, she had an identical twin sister and they had a very close, psychic connection. My mother used to get migraine headaches and one day she had a  really bad migraine. She’s lying on the bed and I’m getting her cold compresses for her head. She is really suffering. The phone rings. I pick it up and it’s her twin sister. And she says “What’s wrong with Helen?” She said “I was just napping and I had this dream that I bought a shrunken head. You had to re-hydrate it, so I put it in the sink, under the water and it blew up and it was Helen. It was your mother saying ‘Help me! ‘Help me!"

 
It was two weeks after Christmas and I was sitting at my grandma’s house, after my aunt had died. I was staying with my grandmother for the night to make sure that she was O.K. I was sitting in the living-room and it was about two in the morning. I looked over because I saw something come out of the back room and it was this short, little shadow-figure-thing and it walks from the bedroom to the bathroom. It was in the bathroom for about ten minutes and then it walks back. And I was freaking out. The next morning I was telling my grandmother “I swear I saw Auntie. I swear to God.” And she says “Probably.” I thought “I am never going into that bedroom, never, ever, ever, ever.” And now that’s my room. I’ve seen her a few times since. I’ve been in that room for three years now and I see her once in a while but not frequently, like it used to be. But she’s still there. It freaks me out but it’s kind of cool.

 
My friend says to me “After work today I’m driving to Hartford to the Bushnell to buy the tickets. You want in?” Yeah, I wanted in. It was a lot of money - $3.75 - but when would Jimi Hendrix be twenty miles from my hometown ever again? My friend and I and the two other teen-aged boys who were getting tickets all worked at The Bristol Nurseries, digging chrysanthemums, hoeing and doing landscape work for $1.25 an hour. That’s what we got paid in 1967 for hard labor.
We were all blown away by Hendrix’s albums and this was going to be my first concert ever. The Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford, Connecticut is a beautiful, old building. The place was jam-packed and I felt a little overwhelmed. We finally got seated, the concert started and Jimi did not disappoint. He played all our favorite songs and then played some that weren’t even out on album yet. He wore green, velvet, bell-bottomed pants and he was, without a doubt, the most exotic man I had ever seen. I couldn’t believe I was seeing him with my own eyes.
The next day, the newspaper reported that he had been paid $30,000 for that performance, the most money that had ever been paid to a single performer for a single performance to that date. Back then, where I lived, you could buy a house for $30,000. That’s pretty good money for a two-hour performance.


 
About two months ago I was using ropes and harness, climbing down this mountain in western Oregon. It was at about a 45-degree angle. I heard something coming up from down below. So I look over to see what it was and it was a Sasquatch! I thought “No f*cking way!” So I pull out my camera and I let go of the rope so I can photograph it and I got two pictures of it before I fall over backwards onto this cliff, dropping my camera. I’ve gone back twice looking for that camera and I can’t find it. 

 
He is a good-looking man and he came to Portland from California to visit his sister and friends for two weeks. Struck by the sight of so many homeless people, he began to sketch people sleeping in doorways, on the street. On that first day, he became absorbed, insatiably curious, fixated. Declining to stay with his sister that first night, he decided to sleep on the street. What was it like to be homeless? Why wasn't more being done to help these people? What are their stories? How do people end up on the street? He began to talk to the street people and he began to journal, collecting their stories, growing his understanding. He has been seven nights on the streets now and has slept in each of the four quarters of the city. What with police and guards moving him along and business-owners hosing down the areas in front of their shops, he has rarely been able to get more that two or three hours of sleep at a time. He now realizes that it is not food that homeless people need the most, it is sleep. And a safe place to be while they are sleeping. Rapes and assaults on street people are a daily occurrence. Your few precious things get stolen by desperate others the moment you get distracted or close your eyes. Without sleep, you go insane. Have you seen crazy, homeless people on the street? Chances are, they are experiencing long-term sleep deprivation, thought it takes only one night without sleep for the hallucinations to come, for sanity to evaporate. He says he will spend the next seven nights on the street. He says he may never go home.
 
I was surfing the internet one night and I came across a site about Samuel Clements, the real name of Mark Twain. The site talked about how he believed in synchronicity. For example, he wouldn't write a letter to a friend he found himself thinking about because he believed that meant the  same friend was thinking about him and was probably writing him a letter. So he would wait to receive and read that letter before he replied. He believed deeply that anytime someone had an idea, that someone else, somewhere in the world, was having the same idea at the same time. 

One night Samuel Clements is at a party and he is getting ready to leave. He tells the people at the party that he would like for them to witness his departure because he is having strong thoughts of a friend that he hasn't seen in ten years and he is convinced that he will see this friend just outside the door of this house. He leaves the house and runs right into that friend.

I like to go fly fishing and I tie my own flies. Later the same evening, after I read about Samuel Clements, I had the idea that I was going to teach my two nieces the basics of tying flies and then see what they might come up with. The next day I'm on this fly-fishing blog and some guy says that he had the idea the evening before to teach the basics of tying flies to his wife and his daughter to see what they may produce. The weird thing is, he signed his name "Samuel Clements."
 
I joined the Marines and I was in Afghanistan one night and I was out doing patrols, doing the perimeter checks. It was routine. And I saw my friend, who had died two weeks before, standing at the post where he was usually at. It was really odd. I saw him standing there keeping watch. It was the first time I ever had a paranormal experience, but not the last. After that, like, a door opened up. And now I see a lot of paranormal stuff… on a daily basis. But it was really scary because as I was coming up to him, as I was walking up, doing my perimeter check, he wasn't there. When I saw him he was about 80 feet away. I didn’t notice him until I got to that point. It was really weird because I didn’t realize he was there. It was one of those things where I had checked my area, clear, made sure that my six was clear (behind him), made sure that everything… He looked normal. He didn’t look like he had been shot at all.

I was drinking at one of my buddy’s graves with a couple of other guys. We were chilling out and drinking and everyone had left except me and my fiancé. So my fiancé is like “Hey, Baby, I’ll meet you at the car.” So I gave her a kiss and she went back to the car. So I sit there and I’m drinking a beer and I’m like “I love you, bud.” I was like “I wish you were still here with me.” He was shot in the throat. He had died really slowly. It was really painful. He said “It’s O.K., I’m still here.” And I heard it audible, like you’re talking to me now. It was audible and I look over and I see the image of him. He looks at me and I see a hole in his throat. It was really scary. It looked like he had a trach. He was so scary it sent a weird feeling through my body and my eyes started watering. I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t, like, scared. It was just a feeling of it.

I saw one time a kid that I had killed in Afghanistan. I had to. It was part of my job. I was told to. I was given directive. And I saw him and he gave me forgiveness.

These experiences have given me closure. Not comfort but closure. They have done something in me to calm the tides in my heart, in my soul. A lot of people don’t believe it. A lot of people don’t care. Fuck what everybody else says. It happened.


 
Late spring in 1974 I was hitch-hiking north on a secondary highway in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York when a truck-driver, driving an 18-wheeler, picked me up. He was a burly, cigar-smoking but friendly man. When he first picked me up it was a sunny day. There was a sudden rain shower and then the sun came out again. I mentioned that we might see a rainbow and we both began to look out the windows. Suddenly, he yanked the wheel to the right, slammed on his brakes, brought the truck to a stop and jumped out of the cab while yelling at me to "get out of the truck!" For some reason, I thought he was going to hit me. I jumped out of the truck, ran around to the front where he had gone and I asked "What's wrong?" He pointed into the sky and shouted "Look!" There were seven rainbows, one on top of the other, each as brilliant as you please. The end of the lowest rainbow was at the edge of the water of one of the lakes, about 20 feet from where we stood. I have seen a variety of rainbows. I have seen double rainbows and even a few triple rainbows. But this is the only time I have seen seven rainbows, and I'm 60 years old.


 
It was a full-moon night in the summer of 1994 in Nederland, Colorado. Two friends and I were walking along the bottom of the recently drained Barker Reservoir.  None of us had ever seen it drained before so this was a great adventure. The reservoir is about two miles long and a half-mile wide.  
As we walked along, one of my friends went on ahead while the other friend and I walked more slowly, deeply engaged in conversation. After a few minutes, the friend that went ahead shouted:  "There are children all around me!" I ran ahead to see what she was talking about. "There are children here! They are holding my hands and holding on to my clothes!" She stood there with her arms outstretched but there was not a child to be seen.

As I got closer, small fingers grasped the little finger of my left hand, startling me. More fingers then latched on to my sweatshirt. Even more little hands started holding the fingers of my other hand and soon there were many hands holding onto my  fingers, my arm and my clothing. I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. not children and not spirits, but anyone who has had a child, intimately knows the feeling of a three- or four-year-old child's fingers grasping one's own. And that was what was happening here. I felt that I had to walk very mindfully, careful not to step on any of the children.

On the ground where the children began to cling to us, there were about fifteen, slender lodge-pole pine tree trunks (these poles are traditionally used to support teepees), each lying neatly and tightly parallel next to each other. Each was cut to about twenty feet in length. I wondered if they might have been a raft or a bridge at one time. Before the reservoir had been a reservoir, it had been a farm.

My friend and I marveled, our arms outstretched as children clung to every bit of our clothing at about waist level. The three of us walked for another half-mile or so further into the reservoir, with the children clinging tightly to both my one friend and myself the whole way. We eventually decided to head back out of the reservoir. We made our way back to the same spot where we had "found" the children. My friend said to them, out loud "You have to stay here. I don't want you coming home with me!" She and her partner started walking home. I decided to stay there a little while longer - I felt that the children holding my fingers and my clothing were very sweet and I was in no hurry to feel their fingers let go of me.

As my friends walked away, the one that children had clung to said that the children were letting go of her and soon she said that they had all let go. I stayed at that spot for a while wondering about those lodge-pole pines and who these children might be.  I wondered what had been on this spot before the farm. I invited the children to come home with me, if they would like to. As I started walking out of the reservoir and towards home, the little fingers  let go of me, too, one by one until none clutched to me any more. I felt sad but also accepted that they had to do what they had to do. The walk home was melancholy. The physical sensation of those children holding on to my fingers was so wonderful. I reveled in the memories of when my own children had been that small and how I loved it when they held my fingers.