The Grey Fool

There have been a lot of uneasy nights for our readers lately. Olivia from Bangor has reported to us here at Malevolent Maine that she is dealing with dreams that involve a terrifying figure. She hasn’t slept well in weeks and it is beginning to affect her life. “I’m an accountant” Olivia told us, “And as I was processing a client’s taxes just last week I dozed off. I’m just so tired all the time, and every time I fall asleep I’m afraid I’ll see him.” 

Olivia told us about this figure she sees in her dreams, and we have to say, we can’t blame her for not wanting to fall asleep. “You know those old timey jesters that kings used to have, the outfits they wore? The patches of different colors? He wears clothing like that but instead of it being colorful it is all in black, white, and grey.  He doesn’t have the weird hat, but he does have the shoes with the little bells at the end.” 

A jester in Motley

You’d expect someone dressed like a jester to be happy and bounce around right? But the way Olivia describes this figure is ominous at best, and terrifying at worst. “His skin is ashen grey, not a normal color at all, and his neck is bent at this weird angle. He just stares at me, occasionally he will walk towards me or point. That might not sound bad but it always makes me so uncomfortable. It feels unnatural to be near him.” 

We hear at Malevolent Maine like to take reports about strange dreams, sleep paralysis, night terrors and the like with a grain of salt. And Olivia’s report of this Grey Fool was disturbing, but it wasn’t much to go on, just a standard nightmare. That was until we got another report similar to her’s. 

You might remember Javier from when we talked about shared dreams last time, he was constantly waking up in a desert full of bleached bone trees. He was frustrated because he felt like he was looking for something in his dreams and never could quite reach it. Well Javier thinks he finally found what he was looking for. 

“What was over the horizon was this weird upside down pyramid. It was the color of jet or maybe obsidian. And well I call it a pyramid because that is what it mostly looked like, but every
time I leaned one way or the other and looked at it that way it seemed to have sides that folded or unfolded, like the shape was something I couldn’t fully understand.”

A black upside down pyramid?

It doesn’t end there though, eventually Javier made his way inside that oddly shaped building. “The hallways were black too, and smooth as glass...it was like a labyrinth in there, hallways that twisted and turned, dead ends. I felt like Jack Torrence at the end of The Shining.” Then Javier went on to describe a figure that he met inside the structure. “He wore motley like a  medieval jester, but it was colorless, just like his face which was this grey color. It looked like his neck was broken the way he held it.” 

Unlike Olivia, Javier has only experienced the Grey Fool that one time, “I never found him again, and have only dreamed of the inside of the black pyramid a few times since.” 

Has this being been making people dream about him and the realm he lives in? Is he in control or just trying to warn these people of something worse? Either way we will continue to investigate these dreams and the effects they have on people. Stay safe out there Maine!

Rapid Fire: July 2020

Strap in for another RAPIDFIRE Malevolent Mainers! Its been a while so lets get straight into it: 

• Orbs over Dexter: MMer Natalie from Dexter reported that in late June there were several orbs of various colors that floated through the sky of her hometown. The orbs ranged in color from yellow to dark red, and moved oddly. Natalie has a strong suspicion that they are spirit orbs, a phenomenon where human spirits are unable to make their way to the afterlife and thus wonder around the material plane and appear to us as orbs of different colored light. Most of the time these orbs are harmless but some can be curious about people and drift near them or even follow them home. Go to Dexter if you want to watch some orbs in person!

An example of what a spirit orb looks like

• Sharpshooter of Roque Bluffs: An odd phenomenon brought to us from Ted of Roque Bluffs, Maine. He says since he was a kid there was a legend that if you left a silver half dollar at a tree stump up on a certain bluff that if you went back after the next full moon you would find your coin had a perfect bullet hole in the center of it. No one has ever seen the figure or heard the shots, but more often than not when people come back to the stump they find the perfectly pierced half-dollar. Is it the spirit of a long passes sharpshooter, an old man with an odd hobby, or something else entirely, we will let you decide! 
• Animals Missing in South Portland: Stacy, an MMer from SOPO has told us that the community is experiencing a series of missing animal cases. We urge all MMers in that area to keep your small animals indoors for the time being. This could be the work of a psychopath, the first sign of such a person is hurting small creatures. It could be there is a satanic cult forming in the area, or a new witches coven, both of which will use small animals as sacrifices in their day to day rituals. Either way keep your pets inside. Stay safe out there little fur-baby MMers!
• Dinner with a Stranger: This is an odd one. A man from Windham who preferred to be left unnamed has reported that after visiting a local pawn shop looking for antiques he was approached by a portly older gentleman who invited him to dinner. He found that no matter how much he didn't want to go to dinner with the man, he couldn't refuse. He went to dinner, they took a long drive and the next morning the man took him to a street art exhibit in Portland, and for lunch they had lobster rolls by the sea. It wasn't until after this lunch that the man could return to his family. Please be on the look out for this man, entity, or whatever he is. We at Malevolent Maine have decided to call him the Portly Man. 
  

  

  Drawing of the Portly Man's face
  
  Stay tuned for more stories coming soon MMers, and if you have any weird stories please share them with us, we couldn't do this without you! Stay safe out there, Maine!

Black Tarot Part III

It's been a strange morning, MMers, and things are starting to get a little freaky. Let's start with the Black Tarot cards we collected from Brenda Williams. You'll remember from Part II that Brenda received a set of creepy tarot cards in the mail. A previous recipient, Larry Gilbert (see Part I), reported that his set of cards disappeared from his home, a story corroborated by the other three original individuals. 

As you know, we kept Brenda Williams' cards in our office. Every day we check them to make sure they're still there. Well, here's where things get creepy. This morning, after our morning meeting, we went to check on the cards and they were gone! Now, to be fair, the cards weren't locked up, though they were secure in a drawer of a file cabinet. There were no signs of any forced entry into our office and a check of the security footage reveals nothing. Like Larry told us, the cards just disappeared.

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Just an hour or so later, we received an email from a reader in Lisbon, Andrew Poulin. We decided (with his permission) to reprint his entire email below. We've added links to the posts he mentions to aid our readers:

Hello MM!

I was reading your post about Flight 129 and you had an update on Larry Gilbert going missing. That led me to do a deep dive on your site and I noticed a couple of interesting things. First off, I noticed that all of the Black Tarot cards have an artist's initials in the corner. I had to zoom in, but I could make out the letters: MB. That got me thinking about that Midnight Magician, Malachai Blackstone. Could he be connected to all of this somehow? Magicians use Tarot cards, right? Well, that got me thinking about the monolith thing in the Crannog's Field. Maybe this is a stretch, but you said the stone was covered in soot, so like a "black stone." Black stone...Blackstone...what do you think? Anyways, love the blog. You guys rule!

The initials MB appear on each card. We checked.

Thanks, Andrew. We're sending you a Malevolent Maine shirt, so look for it in the mail.

We're not sure about all of the connections Andrew is making, but we're definitely going to look a little more into Malachai Blackstone and see if he could be connected to the Black Tarot.

The Insubstantial Earth

We need your help MMers, to solve the strange and tragic disappearance of Owen Avery. Owen was ten years old in 2010. He was just your average 5th grader, he loved Transformers, Pokemon cards, and Beyblades. However, towards the end of the school year he started to become more withdrawn and nervous. His teacher and the school counselor quickly suspected something was wrong at home, however the family had already put two children through school and there had never been any issues with them. When the counselor was granted permission to do a home visit by the parents themselves, they could find nothing wrong. The family was perfectly normal if not loving. 

Madeline Hopkins was Owen’s councilor, “The family was welcoming and warm, they seemed to care deeply about Owen” she told us.  “They were concerned with his recent personality change too. Finally we all sat down with Owen and he told us what he was so worried about.” 

Owen had recently watched several movies that featured quick sand including The Princess Bride.

Princess Bride Quicksand Scene

He was growing increasingly worried that he would be sucked down into the earth, never to be found again. “We all tried to comfort him”, Hannah Avery, Owen’s mother, said. “We told him that only happened in movies, that quicksand wasn’t real and that he didn’t have to worry about the ground he walked around on. But he just kept crying, it breaks my heart knowing that he was so scared, I just miss him so much.”

For the next few weeks Owen kept confiding in anyone who would listen that he felt the earth wasn’t solid. Bruce Avery, Owen’s older brother was one of those confidants, “I always thought he was messing with me, Owen always had an active imagination. He said that every step he took the earth would move a little, either shake like jello or  try to suck at his shoes. I didn’t believe him, thought it was just a game he was playing.”

School ended and summer began for Owen and his siblings. Owen's parents still had to work but their children were old enough to fend for themselves over the summer. Owen was still afraid fairly often, but being out of school and around his older brother and sister he seemed to be getting better, and braver. “We played outside a lot,” Bruce said. “We started to forget all about Owen’s fears, and he seemed to be happy. Every once in a while he would be following us and we would look back and he would be stopped or pick his next steps very carefully, but we didn’t think anything of it.”

Owen went missing on July 8th 2010, “We were going to go swimming in the pool,” Bruce said. “I was changing but I told Owen he could go out to the pool, but not get in until I was out there too. I went out to jump in, looked for Owen but he was nowhere in sight, the gate to the backyard was closed and the only thing out of place was a large spot of disturbed dirt like a big mole hill. I never saw him again.” The Avery house was pretty close to the road but the backyard and pool are completely enclosed by a fence. Could Owen have been abducted? Could he have been right all along, did the earth open up and swallow him whole, did he fall right through? Either way no one has seen Owen since that day in 2010. 

Computer render of what Owen would look like at 20

If you have any information about Owen, or the phenomenon he said he was experiencing please reach out to us at malevolentmaine@gmail.com. 

Watch your footing and stay safe out there Maine!

Flight 129

Hello and Happy Fourth of July Weekend, MMers! We got thinking about the brave men and women who fought for our independence and it got us thinking about that growing collection of military-related oddities we've accumulated. So today, we thought we'd share the story of missing Flight 129.

Happy 4th of July!

This story takes place in 1976 (the year of our nation's Bicentennial, by the way) and it involves a plane full of military personnel and their families flying from Boston to Loring Air Force Base, in Limestone, Maine. The military had chartered Flying Eyes Flight 129 to take sixty-eight passengers (27 soliders and their families), along with ten crew members, from Logan airport to Loring Air Force Base where they would be stationed for the next several years. It was a routine flight, one taken multiple times by the Flying Eyes crew, who were often used to transport troops.

A propliner plane, similar to Flight 129

The pilot, Captain Stephen Gregory, noted that the night was clear, visibility was great, and there was no turbulence. The flight itself was just over sixty minutes and Flight 129 should have touched down somewhere around 11:30 PM. Instead, it was never seen again.

The last radio transmission from Gregory was brief, but ominous. To this day no one knows exactly what it means. Here's his final transmission, in full:

"We're at 35K. Clear skies. Moon looks amazing. We're over... what is that, Jim [Coogans, the co-pilot] Moosehead Lake on our left. We should be - hey, what is that? What the hell is that? I've never seen colors like that before. My mind. It's inside my mind. And it's so small. And so big. I can see it all. I can see forever. The beginning. The end. It's al right here. I think... I think we're going. Tell June... tell her I lo-"

This was at 10:59 PM. It was the last known transmission from Flight 129.

The plane never landed in Limestone. No wreckage or remains of the plane were ever found anywhere along its flight path, somewhere just northeast of Willimantic. For years both professional and amateur sleuths have scoured the entire state looking for any trace of the missing plane. No trace of the seventy-eight people about Flight 129 has ever been discovered.

The official story is that Gregory must have gotten turned around somehow. Perhaps a faulty meter indicated they were higher than they believed. They most likely crashed into one of the mountains, including Maine's tallest, Mt. Katahdin. This has never been confirmed, of course, and no evidence to support this has ever been discovered.

Where is Flight 129?

So what did Stephen Gregory and Jim Coogans see that night? What were those colors that defied words? And where did the passengers go? Did aliens attack the plane? Did they somehow crossover between realities? It has been almost forty-five years since Flight 129 disappeared and the families of the missing still have no answers.

Stay safe out there, Maine!

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Update: We wanted to give you a quick update of a story we've been investigating regarding what we're calling the "Black Tarot" deck. You can read our first two entries here: Part I and Part II. We wanted to inform you that one of the people we spoke to, Larry Gilbert from York has gone missing. He has not been seen in three days. Friends say he didn't show up to work, hasn't taken any calls, and appears to have simply disappeared. If anyone has any information about Larry Gilbert, please contact the Maine State Police.

Larry Gilbert, last seen 6/29/2020