Here's one right from the horse's mouth, MMers. Tom and Chris, two of our lead investigators here at Malevolent Maine, recently experienced a little firsthand unexplained phenomena of their own. They were driving to investigate  a claim about a so-called "witch tree" in Limerick (check back soon for the complete story). They were traveling along Route 5 when they saw signs indicating a town up ahead.

The map clearly shows no suck town exists.

"We're pretty familiar with the area," Tom said. "So the sign - you know one of those green signs that indicates the miles to the different towns - had a name we'd never seen before."

The sign indicated a town in between Waterboro and Limerick called Wilton Hills. This wasn't a town either of them had ever heard of before, and so they took a slight detour, following the signs that led them to this town.

"To be clear," Chris said. "This town is not on any map of Maine. Now, maybe that's not that unusual a little farther north or for those tiny little towns of only a handful of people, but this wasn't the case for us. This was a town that did not exist - could not exist - and yet, we were pulling up to their main street, just as real as the day." 

Our intrepid investigators found a thriving little town similar in size to say downtown Saco. There was a general store, diners, a barbershop.. They passed an elementary school, a fire department, pawn shop. You name it, the town seemed to have.

"It was quaint," Tom said. "Like the kind of little downtown you'd see in a movie or tv show."

The two got out and walked around for a bit. "We talked to some people on the street, just as normal as could be." They even went into a local coffee shop and got some java and a bagel. "The food was real. It tasted just fine," Chris said. "It was real good, actually."

Shocked and surprised by the town that had seemingly sprung up out of nowhere, the two made sure to take a lot of pictures.

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."

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!

Midnight Mansion

Off the beaten path in Hallowell, Maine sits a mansion, now well past its prime. MMer Willy took care of the place for a few winters around fifteen years ago. The owner had passed away even before Willy took over as winter caretaker, but the family kept paying for someone to stay there in the winter months, just to keep the pipes from freezing and animals from chewing on the wiring.

Willy thought it was a pretty sweet gig he had going, he was given a food budget, got to spend time in the big house all by himself, and all he had to do was little maintenance tasks to get paid. The house wasn’t in the best shape however, even when Willy took over he realized it would need larger renovations than what he was capable of, and every time he talked to the owners he brought that up, but they refused to do anything major.

The strange part comes in when Willy would wake up in the middle of the night for a snack, a glass of water, or a refreshing mint. As he would walk toward the kitchen, every part of the house that the moonlight hit as it streamed in through the arched windows would look brand new. The faded wallpaper would look vibrant in the silver light, the scuffed tables and chairs looked freshly stained and polyed, the dusty threadbare rugs would be lush. It was strange but he always chalked it up to bad eyes, and his evening double whiskey or three. He never saw anything else strange, but every once in a while he would catch a drift of music throughout the house, some bop from the 50’s he couldn’t recognize.

Willy says the mansion is still there today but it wouldn’t be safe to enter it. He left his job as winter caretaker when the ceiling of one of the rooms on the third floor collapsed, and the family refused to spend money on having it fixed.

Not the actual Mansion, Willy wouldn't share a picture or a specific location

While it would be fascinating to see this midnight transformation in person, we would suggest that no one look for or enter this mansion as it is falling apart, and would be dangerous for anyone to explore. Stay safe out there, Maine!

Az'azouzis

 It's been a wild couple of weeks here at Malevolent Maine, MMers! A lot has been happening behind the scenes, and a lot of it has to do with our encounter with the Midnight Magician, Malachai Blackstone. There's a lot of moving pieces when it comes to running an investigative blog and often times these things take some time. As you'll see, we also weren't able to talk about this until now because of police involvement. 

After our discussion with Professor Carter Derwent, a history and linguistics professor from Bowdoin College, about Az'azouzis, a word we first encountered when we investigated the six people in Crannog's Field with no memory of who they were or why they were there. We heard the word again from Malachai Blackstone when we "interviewed" him last month. Blackstone claimed the word meant, "the end is not the end." Professor Derwent discredited this and translated it instead as, "dark watcher from beyond the stars."  

Derwent did a little more digging for us, reaching out to several colleagues from different universities. He was able to piece together a pretty clear description of Az'azouzis. Here's Derwent:

Az'azouzis, the dark watcher

Az'azouzis is a creature from beyond our plane of existence. Some call him a god, others refer to him as a beyonder - a being outside the known world. He is said to be watching the world, waiting for a way into this world. Over the centuries there have been various cults and groups dedicated to finding a way to open a doorway or portal for Az'azouzis to enter the world. One group, the Order of the End, was active in Europe from 1800 until about 1840. And here's the interesting thing, one of the high ranking members emigrated to America, specifically the New England area.

We also heard from one of our contacts in the local occult scene. He didn't want us to reveal his real name, so we'll call him Desmond. He's been a practitioner of occultism for several years and has been one of our sources for all things paranormal. Here's a transcript of a voice mail call we got from Desmond:

Hey, guys. It's [Desmond]. I have to tell you about a session I just came from. There's been some talk in the past few months about that guy Blackstone, the magician. He's been coming around to different groups, mostly doing lecture stuff, but he's been leading some ceremonies too. He's deep into the occult stuff. So the other night, I catch wind about a ceremony happening on Frye Island, in the middle of Sebago Lake. I decide to go, and when I get there, it's him, Blackstone, clearly running the ceremony. There were probably twenty of us there, no names. This was a black robes and hoods kind of event. We're all standing in a circle and that's when things start to go crazy.

Blackstone starts chanting, pretty typical occult stuff at first, but then he gets going. He starts talking about how the end is not the end. "There are tremendous and treacherous things beyond." All this kind of stuff. He starts talking about Az'azouzis, and I recognize that from your blog, right? That's when we hear this great roaring sound. It sounds like the sky is splitting open and some big angry animal is coming through. You know that long rumble of thunder you hear sometimes? It was like that times a thousand. The ground starts shaking, like an earthquake. Out of the ground comes this big stone pillar, like the one from your site. 

Occult ritual

It grows out of the ground, rising up, and then the air around us goes red. Not the light, like from the fire, but the air itself. I can't really explain that, but it's what happened. Then this rip opens up, like in the air itself, this big black void, and through it walks three naked people, two men and a woman. The whole time Blackstone is chanting something, I can't make out the words, but then I realize everyone is chanting along with him. I mean everyone, me included. I don't even understand what I'm saying, but the words keep coming out as that portal opens and those three people walk out.

And then it's done. Everything goes back to normal. The air, the sound, everything. Blackstone is standing there, looking down on those three naked people and he says to us, "The end is not the end. We will bring them, one by one, then thousands by thousands. The Army of Az'azouzis, his Chosen People, the ones who will usher in his everlasting darkness. We send you, brothers and sisters out into our world, Beyonders. Tremendous beings. Treacherous beings. Go and bring about your master's will."

It was right around this time that we were contacted by the Maine State Police. It seems that Kerri Delong had gone missing. You'll recall she was in the second batch of Black Tarot cards. She was the only person we could to receive the cards who had not gone missing. That wasn't the only reason the police contacted us, however. You'll also remember we received another set of cards from a reader going by EroDemon96. It turns out EroDemon96 is a woman named Rebecca Wentworth, aged 29, from Porter, Maine. She too had gone missing. When the family went through Rebecca's emails they found her messages to us.

We went out of our way to prove to the police that we were not involved. That included turning over lots of our emails, as well as the details of our meeting with Malachai Blackstone. In the end, the police dismissed us from any suspicion.

We find it interesting though that after the disappearance of the original four recipients of the Black Tarot, four people appeared in Crannog's Field. After the disappearance of  Brenda Williams, Kerri Delong, and now Rebecca Wentworth, three more people appeared during the ritual Desmond witnessed. Could Malachai Blackstone be the heir of the Order of the End, obsessed with summoning the being Az'azouzis to our world? Could he be somehow marking people by sending them a spread of Black Tarot cards? Could he be using their lives to open a portal to... Beyond and bringing forth new people-looking things, minions of Az'azouzis? 

We told the police everything we knew about Malachai Blackstone and everything we suspected. They were skeptical, of course, but in the end they agreed to at least talk with Blackstone. At the time of this writing, we believe Malachai Blackstone is on the run. He has not performed any magic shows in several weeks, nor any occult rituals. His whereabouts, as well as the whereabouts of the three "Beyonders" who walked through the portal remain unknown, though Blackstone's picture has been distributed among law enforcement agencies. 

Desmond believes that Blackstone was harnessing the energy of the people who visited his shows. He thinks that the password system, combined with the timing of Blackstone's performances, was a ritual derived to funnel the aether from the audience to create his Black Tarot. These marked members were somehow sacrificed to power the portals beyond. Desmond believes that after a certain number of these "Beyonders" had been summoned then they would be able to open the door for Az'azouzis, himself. 

We hope that we have disrupted Blackstone's rituals. We believe that now on the run from authorities, Blackstone will not be able to perform his ceremonies. Since the police began searching for Malachai Blackstone no new sets of Black Tarot cards have arrived and no new missing persons reports have been filed. We believe it's finally over.

Stay safe out there, Maine.

---

UPDATE - 10/23/20: 

Since we originally posted this on 10/21/20, we received a black envelope in the mail. There was no stamp, no return address, something that will be familiar to our readers. We were hesitant to open it at first, but after much discussion, we decided we were not going to let Malachai Blackstone control our lives, and that we would not live in fear of him.

Inside the envelope was just a single card of the deck we're calling the Black Tarot:

Sit down with the Midnight Magician

 Okay, MMers, we've got a lot going on this week, so let's dive right in.

It took us awhile but we were finally able to track down the Midnight Magician, Malachai Blackstone, or more accurately, he tracked us down. Before we get to that, however, we have to tell you how hard it was to learn anything abut this guy.

Marty's Magic Shoppe

Our research brought us into contact with one Martin Ellison, owner of Marty's Magic Shoppe in Dover, New Hampshire. Marty was an accomplished magician in his younger days, performing under the name the Magnificent Marty. After he retired from the traveling scene in 1987, he opened Marty's Magic Shoppe to service all the regional magicians. Marty's is a one stop shop for costumes and magic tricks, as well as training, books on the craft, and just a general place for magicians both up and coming and well-established, to come and share secrets. It was Marty that gave us our first real clue about contacting Malachai Black.

Marty Ellison

"He's an odd one, that guy," Marty told us, his voice still thick with a New York accent. "Yeah, I know him. Knew his parents too, God rest their souls. They said it was one last effect - a magic trick if you will - that did them in. The Blackstones were the best in their day - Prospero and Evanora. Kinda goofy names if you ask me, but what I can say, I called myself Magnificent Marty."

Marty didn't know much about Blackstone's current whereabouts, but he did tell us that from time to time Blackstone has had use of Marty's shop. He explained to us the old means of contacting a magician:

"They say in the old days if you need a witch or a warlock, you left a coin outside your house, on a fence post or windowsill, with the face side scratched with an x. After a day or two, the coin would disappear and soon after you'd be contacted by the wizard. Complete rubbish if you ask me, but Blackstone seems to use that trick. I don't know how he does it, but it's worked for me the few times I've needed him."

It seemed ridiculous (and we're guys who hunt for Bigfoot and write about ghosts for a living!) but we were desperate, so we tried. He carved an x into a quarter and left it outside our office. Sure enough, the next day, the coin was gone. Inside, on our desk, we found a black slip of paper with an address, a date,  and a time written on it in the same silver ink we had seen on the black envelopes.

We went to the location, which we're keeping secret for now, at the assigned time (11:45 at night). We knocked on the door and after a moment a mysterious figure opened it. For the first time, we were face to face with Malachai Blackstone.

Not quite Malachai Blackstone, but pretty close

He was taller than expected. Thin, but strong. He wore a black dress shirt and black pants, but honestly, he would have looked just as comfortable in a black hooded robe. There was an aura about him that was hard to explain. Icy was the best way to describe it. Or like that feeling in the air right before it snows. Except this wasn't going to be a shake of the snow globe kind of storm, this was going to be a blizzard that dumps over a foot of snow and knocks out power to half the state. There was an air of mystery about him, but a dangerous type.

He gestured for us to take a seat in a high-backed velvet chair. Two had been set up in the middle of the room, which was large and completely dark except for the small circle that illuminated the chairs. Where that light came from, we never knew; there were no visible light sources anywhere. He wouldn't allow us to record his voice, but we can tell you it was deep and yet soft at the same time. His voice was like a cobra waiting to strike.

We asked him about the Black Tarot and he scoffed. He claimed no knowledge of them despite his initials appearing on the cards, though he did admit that "the tarrocchi are often a useful tool for the true adept." We asked him about the people who received the cards. Again he maintained he knew nothing of them. This wasn't getting us anywhere, so we asked him to tell us something about himself.

"I was a practitioner of the arts before I ever knew it. My parents, as you know, were some of the finest artists the world has ever known, but from a young age, I knew I was different. I could hear it. You don't understand, but it whispered to me. This world is too confined. There are tremendous and treacherous things beyond. If we could pierce the veil, lift the shroud that covers this world, we could see it all. I'm doing that. With my rituals, I am showing the world beyond. Az'azouzis."

When asked what he meant by that word,  he explained it meant, "the end is not the end." It was a phrase he had learned from his masters. 

"I'm changing this world," Malachai Blackstone told us. "I am opening the forgotten doorways. I'm bring it through. You don't understand, but you will. I will remake this world into the infinite and we will see plain what stares at us from beyond."

Readers, we have to warn you, what we're about to describe is 100% impossible. This blog is pretty comfortable with the unexplainable, the mysterious, and whatnot. What happened next does not fall into this category. It is something else entirely. After he spoke, Malachai Blackstone turned to water. His body rippled like a current on a river, and then he simply collapsed, as if a water balloon had suddenly been popped. One minute he was whole and solid and sitting across from us, the next his entire form turned to water and washed away. There was nothing left except a now wet chair where he had once sat.

We're still processing everything we saw and heard, but we do have one small addendum. We finally heard back from a linguistics professor who claimed to have some knowledge of the strange word that had been carved into the stone monolith in Crannog's Field and that Malachai Blackstone had said to us. When we told Professor Carter Derwent what Blackstone said Az'azouzis meant, he had this to say:

"He's lying. Or he's wrong. It's an ancient word, predates the Babylonians, but it most certainly does not mean, 'the end is not the end.' It roughly translates to, 'dark watcher from beyond the stars,' but it probably means something more like Satan or the Devil. It is the name given to the great adversary of mankind."

Az'azouzis, dark watcher from beyond the stars

Stay safe out there, Maine.

Do You Copy?

Who is on the other side?

Hey, MMers. Today’s news comes out of Damariscotta. Marc Henderson, a husband and father in his late thirties, was playing a game of “hide and seek” with his son over the Walkie-Talkies Marc had bought young Peter for his birthday. We were able to get a hold of Marc over the phone for an interview.

“Yeah, it was weird,” Marc recalled. “We would play hide and seek and give clues to each other on where we were hiding. It was fun. But one day, when Petey was out hiding out in the woods...well, all of the sudden his voice changed. It’s hard to describe, but it honestly sounded like me on the other side of the Walkie-Talkie…”

Though Mark and Peter had played this game countless times, this was the first time something like this had happened.

“So, I kept walking on, but it wasn’t Petey. It was someone, something, else. When I asked for a clue, he said ‘right where you and your wife made that brat of a son of yours.’ - I went out into the woods and found the small clearing laden with birch trees where Maddie and I would go for a nice picnic, sometimes with wine or cocktails…”

The birch tree clearing

Marc went on to describe what he found out there, but the first time it was nothing. No one was there, and he found Peter hiding in a pile of dead leaves on his way back to the house. A week later, Marc had a similar experience. He was led to the same clearing again, hearing himself over the Walkie-Talkie. When he got to the clearing, he saw a blanket laid out with a basket of food. He was trembling with fear and started screaming out to whoever was on the other side of the Walkie-Talkie.

“I kind of freaked out. I was stressed, and I didn’t know where Petey had gone, or who had put out that blanket. So, I turned to go back to the house, and I saw a man, dressed in the same clothes as me, running away towards the house. I ran as fast as I could, but I couldn't catch him, and then I tripped over a rock and fell and scuffed up my arm pretty good. I lost him, but I know he was there.”

Who knows what crossed signals are out there to be intercepted, MMers? Maybe you might even end up talking to yourself…
Stay safe out there, Maine!

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!

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!

---

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

Rapid Fire - May 2020

 Eyes open, MMers!

This week, we've got a ton of smaller, one-hit stories, we've gathered from our loyal readers. We're coming at you rapid fire! Let's dive right in.

• Tina up near Presque Isle spotted a UFO flying over the Walmart on Route 163. It was a cluster of three lights, moving in erratic motions in the sky. It moved too fast to be a plane or a helicopter, darting first left, then right, then up. She  watched the craft for about five minutes before it suddenly stopped moving completely. It stayed for just a second before flying off. "It moved so fast it practically disappeared," Tina writes.  Definitely fits the mold of a typical Tri-clipper. Any else spot this space craft? Let us know.

What did Tina see?

• Bruce spotted a large, hairy creature in the woods around his camp in Whitneyville. He was out hunting when he heard some strange grunting and growling sounds that he couldn't identify. He followed a trail that led to a stream. There he saw the remains of an animal he identified as a deer. It had been ripped apart, as if by an animal. He spotted the creature he believed had killed the deer. It was "large, bigger than a man, and up on two feet." Sure sounds like Bigfoot to us. Keep your eyes on the woods up in Whitneyville!

• Clara, who only wanted to be identified as living in Franklin Country, sent us the story of the grave of an unknown soldier from the War of 1812. The grave is in a small family plot on Clara's property and every spring she heads out to clear up the little cemetery. For the past five years, she's talked about some sort of stain on the stone that is spreading. No matter what she does, how she scrubs it away, it always comes back a little bigger. Well, this year she was finally able to make out what shape the strange shape was forming. Turns out it's a gentleman's hat. The strange part? Clara tells us that int he early part of the Nineteeth Century, there was a haberdasher (that's a hat maker for you laymen) located on the property where she now lives. Connections? We'd say yes.

  

  How about a close up next time, Clara?

  
  

• We had another sighting of Saco River Sara. That's the fifth one this year. Maybe someone should head up Fryburg and burn some sage. 

• Have you ever heard of a ghost bridge? We hadn't either. That is until Don from Turner sent us this curious story. He claims he was driving along a stretch of Route 4 one foggy evening. Don tells us he's driven that stretch dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but this night was different. All of a sudden, Don felt like he had no clue where he was. "Nothing look familiar," Don writes. "It was like I was in some stretch of road I'd never been to before." Suddenly, Don drove over a bridge - and not just any bridge! He said it was wooden, an old fashioned style, he remember growing up as a kid in the 1950s. Don said he slowed down, suddenly unsure if the bridge was safe for his truck. He soon crossed the bridge, and though quite freaked out, kept driving. Soon the fog parted a little and he recognized the road again. He was home in no time. The next day he went out to check for the bridge, but it was nowhere to be found. He swears he never left Route 4 and in the weeks since, he can't find that stretch of road or that wooden bridge anywhere! Eerie!

  

  Artist's interpretation. NOT the actual bridge!
  
  

As always, MMers, if you encounter something spooky, something unexplainable, something supernatural or otherworldly, send it to us. Who knows, your story might just make the blog?

Stay safe out there, Maine.

Desert of Bone

Good evening MMers! We hope you all have sweet dreams tonight, unlike several of our readers have been having lately. Normally weird dreams aren’t something to write to us about, but we have been getting reports from all over the state of people having the same strange dream. 

“It starts with me waking up in a desert,” Katie from Freeport told us. “The sky is grey, the sand is this really deep red and feels really scratchy. All over the sand are these white trees, or at least they look like trees that are this bleached white color. I feel like I walk for hours in this dream and never get to where I am supposed to be, and the whole time I just feel scared.”

The desert and trees have a similar feel to this

Joe from Standish has reported a similar dream, “Its been happening for a few weeks now, I go to sleep and almost immediately wake up in this freaky desert. The sand is coarse and gets everywhere, and there are these white pillars everywhere. At first I thought they were trees, but when I got close they were bleached bone. And not regular bone, it was covered in these tiny spurs almost like there was something wrong with whatever died and left them.”

What does Javier see in the distance?

Javier from York reported that he has had these dreams for months now. “I get a little further towards my goal every time. I have no idea what ‘the goal’ is, but I feel like I’m getting very close. I saw something in the distance last night, but the heat coming off the horizon kept it obscured, whatever it was was dark and huge.”

Whatever this dream is, it seems to be affecting a large amount of people, we can only hope it is something innocent and not a portent of something dark looming on the horizon. If you or anyone you know is experiencing these dreams please write to us. Stay safe out there Maine!

Look out for the Lobsterman

We know it's still winter, but here's a story  that will send a chill down your spine during even the warmest summer months. This one comes from Lubec, and while we first heard it from Mary Wilkes, just last week we received another siting from Simon Bagwell. We'll start with Mary Wilkes' tale.

Mary tells us that all of the old-timers of Eastport know not to be on the shore during a full moon. She said she heard it from her grandmother, who said she had heard the story from her own mother. The fishermen and their families know that on nights of a full moon, the best thing to do is stay inside and lock the doors and windows.

There are reports of a shadowy figure, a man or a man-shaped thing. They say it walks along the shoreline and the nearby neighborhoods. The figure wears some sort of tattered brown robe and its hands appear to be mishapen, swollen things, looking more like lobster claws in the dark than hands. Mary says the old-timers will sometimes leave small baskets of fish, crabs, clams, or mussels out for this strange figure.

No one knows who or what this "lobsterman" is, but his regular appearance during the full moons for the past sixty years (at least) is cause for some concern. As of yet, no one has reported any nefarious actions by the so-called werelobster, but at least for the people of Lubec, they're not taking any chances.

Which brings us to Simon Bagwell. Simon says he's "an old duffer" who has lived just outside of Eastport in the little town of South Trescott his entire life. Last September, after the flatlanders had left for the summer, Simon was coming home from a night at a local watering hole. He was driving down the South Lubec Road, where the road winds real close to the shore, when his pickup got a flat tire. A real "popper" as he explained it. He pulled over to the side of the road, but didn't have a spare tire. It was late, and Simon wasn't too far from home, so he figured he'd just walk.

He hadn't gone too far from the truck when he heard something walking down along the shoreline. He thought it might be an animal of some sort, but whenever he stopped, the footsteps down on the sand seemed to stop as well, only to continue when he started up again. He called out, thinking it might be another person, but he got no response. 

Simon kept walking, picking up the pace. Whatever it was down on the shore seemed to match his pace. Simon got to a place where the road started to pull away from the shore. As the ground turned from soft beach sand to harder gravel, Simon claims to have heard a scuttling sound, like a dozen little legs all clicking-and clacking over the ground. Simon started to jog but the thing matched his speed, coming closer and closer to him.

Simon ran as fast as he could, but he knew the creature was gaining on him. There was a salty, briny stench in the air, and suddenly the night seemed much colder than it should in early September. Just as he was sure the thing that followed him was about to reach him, headlights splashed across the road. It was a trucker heading north. 

Simon whirled around quickly and saw a blur diving back into the darkness on the side of the road. It was huge, he said, larger than a man, and dressed in some kind of simple, ragged brown robe. Simon swears the creature had some sort of brownish-red shiny skin that looked, "like armor or a shell." Then it was gone.

"I don't know what it was," Simon said, "but I know it scared the pants off me. I ain't never seen nothin' like that in my entire life."

So if you're in the Lubec area during a full moon, be careful!

Stay safe out there, Maine!

Is this what Simon Bagwell saw?