Poverty Pond Poltergeist

This story comes to us from MMer Mike who lives on Poverty Pond in Shapleigh. After a long day of ice fishing Mike retired to his kitchen for a hot cup of cocoa and as he was looking out on the lake he saw a figure moving around carrying what looked to be a manual ice auger. It was strange to Mike because just a few minutes earlier he had been completely alone on the lake, but he quickly got over the unnerving feeling.

As Mike began moving around his kitchen, whipping up a quick ‘suppah’ he paused every now and then to look out his front window. In the moonlight he could see the figure pausing for a few minutes to drill a hole, then it would get down on its hands and knees and it looked like it shoved his whole arm into the whole he just finished. Mike thought this was a bit odd, but maybe the man just had a few eccentric fishing habits. However everytime he paused in making his dinner Mike saw the man further down the lake, making a long string of holes, and every time he would stop and push his arm deep inside. “He must be freezing by now” Mike thought to himself, so he put on the tea kettle to make the man a bit of hot cocoa. By the time Mike had the cocoa ready and flipped his floodlights on so he could avoid the holes the man had drilled, the figure was gone.

Photo sent in by Mike, we have circled all the holes drilled by the figure

Was this just a man who had a strange way of trying to catch fish? Someone trying to fish something out of the pond? A ghost looking fruitlessly for something it had lost? Or something more Sinister. In our humble opinion at Malevolent Maine this sounds like a poltergeist of some sort, no other phantom could interact with the real world like that.

In any case avoid Poverty Pond at night unless you have a nice shack to stay in to avoid interacting with whatever is out there, stay safe out there, Maine!

Needle Ghost Mayhem

We hear a lot about ghosts here at Malevolent Maine, but this one is crazy! At a mental health institute up in Augusta we have reports of a terrifying and powerful apparition haunting the halls. Jeff Patrick, former night janitor and caretaker of the facility, has reported that he had an encounter with the ghost, and it changed his life in the worst possible way. 

Jeff reported that the institute gave him the creeps since the very first night, “I came in for my shift on the very first day, and there was this super weird sound coming from the second floor. I went to see what was up, and there wasn’t anything at all. Second night same thing but there was a weird floating orb. I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t stay there long after I saw that I ran back, put my headphones in, listened to some Floyd, and went about my night.” 

Jeff said he avoided whatever made the noise for a few months after those first encounters, but one fateful night two months ago had a different outcome. “It was time for me to mop the second floor hallway, so I got my bucket ready, headed up there, put on my tunes real loud so I couldn’t hear much then I went at it. Halfway through I look up and I see this half see through guy just drifting past me, heading down the hall towards the pharmacy. I yell at it but it just keeps on drifting. I watched it disappear into the pharmacy and I tried following it. Usually the pharmacy is locked up but today for some reason it was open. I go in and see this thing just hucking stuff every which way, I go to reach out and stop it and I feel this sharp pain in my arm. I pull my arm out of the ghost and sticking out of it is a syringe. It must have been some kind of pain killer or sleep medicine, because I woke up in the morning with the security guard standing over me with a big frown on his face.” 

The institute fired Jeff for stealing, and doing drugs on the job, there is even a pending criminal case. Jeff claims that he had nothing to do with the theft and that the “damn ghost” did everything. 

We believe Jeff and truly feel sorry that he lost his job and might end up going to jail over these supernatural shenanigans. If you are ever in Augusta avoid the mental health institute, the ghost there might just get you like it got Jeff. Stay safe out there, Maine!

Letter from the Future

Just a quick one for you this week, MMers. Meagan from Falmouth wrote in with story about a former co-worker of hers. Meagan works at an insurance office and tells us that the guy who worked in the cubicle next to hers claimed to be from the future.

"Brandon was always a weird guy," Meagan told us. "Kept to himself a lot. Maybe because no one really believed him when he talked."

As Meagan tells it, Brandon claimed to be from the year 2076. He was born in the year 2040 and had traveled back through time in an experimental procedure at his job at Jackson Laboratories. When he first started at Meagan's work he would always talk about all the things he knew. This would have been somewhere around 2008 or 2009. 

"He would tell us stuff like, did the plane crash happen yet? Did Tom Brady win his seventh Super Bowl? What about Trump? We thought he was just weird, ya know?"

Brandon kept trying to tell people what he knew of the future, to warn them of things that were coming. No one took him too seriously, and after three years, he simply disappeared one day. "He didn't show up to work. No one really knew much about him socially, but eventually HR had the police go to his house. They didn't find him, but his walls were covered with weird math equations. You know, like in Good Will Hunting or whatever? And there was a big scorch mark on the floor and wall in one corner, like something had exploded."

That was the end of the story, except that a few weeks later, Meagan received a letter in the mail, from Brendan. "It was postmarked from right before he disappeared," she told us. "Maybe it got lost at the post office or something, but when I got it gave me a shock. I hardly ever talked to him even though we worked right next to each other. He was nice enough, but not so much that I figured he'd write me a letter."

The letter explained that Brandon had finally figured out how to go back to his own time. He was going to conduct the experiment the night he disappeared. "Before he left he wanted to warn me or some things coming," Megan said. "He told me to invest in Bitcoin. This was back right before it boomed in 2010. He mentioned the pandemic. A lot of what he wrote has come true, so it's got me a little worried about the stuff that is still to come."

Brandon's letter to Meagan,
reprinted with her permission

Stay safe out there, Maine.

Mirror, Mirror

Happy Valentine's Day, MMers! We've got a great story for you out of Garland, up in Penobscot County. Curtis Walker claims he's from a parallel reality, one very close to this one, but with several key differences. Walker tells us one morning, two years ago, he was out in his front yard trying to start his weed-whacker. It didn't start on the first pull, but that was nothing new. It was on his third tug of the pull cord, when he claims he passed through some sort of membrane into this one.

"It was like being encased in Jell-o," he said. "Except I didn't move. I wasn't the one in the Jell-o - the whole world was. It was like a thick, jiggling wall that I was being pushed through. It was only a second and then the feeling was gone."

The membrane between worlds or tasty dessert?

Walker's weed-whacker started right up and he went to town edging his lawn. When he was done, he put the wee-whacker away in the shed and came inside to cool down. That's when he realized something was wrong.

"There's a woman standing there in my kitchen. I lived alone, you see."

After a moment, Walker recognized the woman as Alice Kramer, a girl he dated in high school, twenty-five years before. She didn't think anything of it, but he was shocked to find her standing there. As Walker explained it, in this world - our world - Curtis Walker and Alice Kramer married young, right out of high school, but in Walker's original world, Alice Kramer died in a horrible car accident right before graduation. 

But that's not the only difference. In his world, Russia landed on the moon first, Jeb Bush won the presidential election in 2016, and Tom Selleck was Indiana Jones. Walker went on to note a bunch of other differences, but he said none of them seemed all that important. The world was pretty much the same, just some of the details were different. 

This makes us wonder who played Han Solo?

After the car crash in his world, Walker's heart was broken. He never quite got over losing Alice at such a young age. Now, suddenly here in our world, it was like waking up from a bad dream. 

"It's my second chance," he told us. "And I'm not going to waste it."

For her part, Alice says she believes her husband. "He just knows too much about this other world to be making it up. No offense, but Curt was never that smart."

According to public records, Curtis Walker and Alice Kramer married in 1995. He has worked for the post office mechanic pool for twenty years. He's been to birthday parties, holidays, sporting events, you name it. No one noticed a difference on that day in the summer where Walker crossed over.

It does beg the question, however, if this Curtis Walker crossed over to our world and was reunited with the love of his life, what happened to the other Curtis Walker, the one that was from this reality? Still, one can only help but feel happy for Walker, who wakes up everyday next to a woman he thought he'd lost forever.

Stay safe out there, Maine.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Secret Cypher?

Here we are, MMers. We're back with another strange story. This time from Norway... Maine that is, up in Franklin County. Anyways, let's dive right in. So, Charlotte was cleaning out her dad's house about ten years whens he came across something strange taped to the back of his computer. Charlotte's father worked for years at National Semiconductor and in the last decade of his life worked for the government, though he was never too clear on what department, exactly. 

"Dad died unexpectedly on the job. They couldn't tell me a whole lot because it was classified," Charlotte told us. "They did let me know it was an unfortunate accident and that my dad was an exemplary employee and man. There was a pretty large severance too, which was nice."

Charlotte wound up inheriting her father's home and with all the expenses paid, she all but forgot about it for a few years. She finally found the motivation to sell the old place, but before she did that, she had to clean it all out. "I wouldn't say my dad was a hoarder or anything but he didn't like to throw out anything that was still useful in his eyes. Different parts and pieces of tools and machines. He always thought he'd be able to fix them back up. Why, I don't know; it's not like he needed those things or couldn't afford new ones. That's just Dad for you, I guess. I was cleaning out his computer room - what kind of electrical engineer still had a computer room in 2012, right? and he had this big, boxy desktop computer. I went to unplug it, figuring it was all trash. That's when I found it."

Taped tot he back of the computer tower was a piece of paper folded into quarters. It was old and had been mended with tape in a few places. Written on the paper were the words, "For when I'm gone," in her father's handwriting. "I about freaked when I saw it," Charlotte said. "I mean, who knows what it could have been. And sitting there this whole time?"

What it was, however, was another matter entirely. When eh unfolded the piece of paper she saw that it was a series of numbers and letters arranged in groups. "It looked like nothing to me," Charlotte said. "Like some sort of weird code or something." Charlotte thought it might be some sort of serial number or password, but something about it just seemed odd to her: "The way it was written. All those numbers and letter jammed onto the page? It just didn't feel like my dad. There's a pattern there, but I can't figure out what is."

Whatever the strange message meant, Charlotte hung onto that piece of paper for ten years, trying to solve the riddle. It wasn't a serial code, not to anything that existed in the public world. It wasn't a password to any of the electronics her father had. Charlotte thought it might be some sort of coded message, but no amount of deciphering has made any sense to her. In frustration, she reached out to us at Malevolent Maine."

"Look, I know my dad did some top secret work for the government, but I don't really know what he was into. Maybe this is something to do with his work. But the message on the back... 'For when I'm gone,' that tells me that Dad knew something could happen to him, and he wanted someone, the right someone to get one final message. I just wish I knew what it was."

So how about it, MMers? Charlotte sent us a pic of the strange message and we've posted it below. What could it be? Some technical code? A secret cypher? Is it related to his mysterious death? Get sleuthing, and stay safe out there, Maine.

What could this coded message mean?