Genius Party

Here's one that might be music to your ears, MMers. A sixteen year old minor from Falmouth (who we won't name for his protection) recently hosted his sixteenth birthday party when things got a little strange. The boy was acting as DJ for his party while his friends - other kids from his school - danced and cheered him on. 

It was at a birthday party just like this.

"I had the whole set up, my laptop, my Pioneer 4-channel controller, I even had my dad's old turntable, you know, a record player," the kid told us. "I had been mixing for a little while. Everyone was really into it, you know? I'm a really good DJ. I thought I would mix some of my dad's old records in. Like, the old school scratching thing."

After playing through various pop hits of the 80s, the boy pulled out a record he didn't immediately recognize. "It was black, right? I mean, they're all black. But the label in the center was black too. There wasn't anything written on it except, 'Adolphus Winn,' my great-grandfather."

Adolphus Winn was born in 1895 in Portland. By 1916 he had become an accomplished composer and musician. He released several compositions which had gained him some acclaim, but in 1916 he largely disappeared from public life. He continued to compose and record music by himself. By the 1930s he had fully embraced the new technology - vinyl recording.

Adolphus Winn's record looked something like this

What his sixteen-year old great-grandson had discovered was one of Winn's private recordings from his "quiet years." 

"I thought it would be pretty cool to put it on, maybe I could freestyle over it," the boy told us. "So I started spinning it, but it was all this weird piano music. So I thought, I'd reverse it."

When the sixteen-year old DJ played the record backwards that's when everything changed.

"They all stopped dancing," he says. "They just stood there. Then they... they just went crazy."

There were twenty teenagers at the party. Upon hearing Adolphus Winn's music played in reverse they froze for a moment before running around. They all grabbed for things to write with and started scribbling furiously. When they couldn't find pens and pencils, they grabbed whatever they could find. One boy used the frosting from the three tier birthday cake. A girl used a knife to scratch into the wood floor. Several kids tore into their own flesh and used their blood to write on the walls, floors, and tables.

"It was crazy," the teenager told us. "It was like they were possessed or something. They just kept writing. They couldn't stop until I stopped playing that song."

All in all, the episode lasted one minute and thirty-nine seconds before the plug was pulled on the speakers and the adults rushed to quiet the manic teenagers. As the music ended, they began to calm from their frenzied writing, but a new panic had set in. They could not recall what had been happening or what they were doing.

Like this if everyone was writing down genius level thoughts.

When asked about what his friends were writing, the aspiring DJ had this to say:

"I don't know. I couldn't see it all. [One kid] wrote a bunch of math problems, like crazy advanced equations and whatnot. One of the others drew like plans for some kind of machine. It didn't make any sense to me, but it looked advanced, like really complex. I think one of the girls was writing a play. She... she was using her own blood. She'd covered one of the white table cloths."

Four minutes after the music ended, the birthday boy says, men in black suits and cars arrived. They ushered everyone out of the room and began taking pictures. They wouldn't say what had happened or what the writings meant. In the end, of the twenty party-goers who had been affected, eighteen were sent to local hospitals. All are expected to make full recoveries. By the time the boy and his family were allowed back into their home, the entire place had been cleaned.

"It was like nothing had ever happened," he says. "There was even a new cake waiting for me. They  took my great-grandfather's record, though."

What exactly happened when Winn's composition was played backwards? Did it somehow inspire over a dozen youths to spontaneously create. Were they channeling some strange energy?

For now, no one is saying anything. The boy's parents did not want to be interviewed for this piece, nor did any of the victims or their families. For now, this will have to remain just another unsolved mystery.

Stay safe out there, Maine!

Lady in the Closet

There is no sweeter story than a young couple buying a new home to fix it up and make it a wonderful place to raise a family. Until they find out that the house has an unwelcome presence within it! This is what happened to Jessica and David Smith when they bought what they thought would be their forever home, up in Caribou. 

Jess and David were high school sweethearts, both are very religious, and before dealing with the being in their house they didn’t believe in the supernatural at all! It started simply enough with their dog Barney, a great pyrenees being uneasy with the closet in their spare bedroom. First he would just stare at the door, then eventually he would begin growling, and it got to the point he would bark at it almost constantly. 

“It was super weird,” Jess said. “Barney was always such a sweet dog, before we moved he never barked at all. Now he wouldn’t stop barking, until the day he came limping up to David with a bloody paw. We don’t know how it happened but he avoided the closet from then on and would not make a peep when he was near it.”  

But the weirdness doesn’t stop there. Eventually Jess would walk by the spare bedroom and she would hear scratching noises from within the closet. “I went in there, flung the door open and all over the inside there were little crosses scratched into the drywall. I called David and asked if he was pranking me, but he was just as shocked as I was. I avoided the spare room from then on, but sometimes I would wake up at night and David wouldn’t be in bed, so I began to get suspicious. I bought a little baby monitor camera and set it up across from the closet, to see what was going on. On certain nights David would go into the room and stand in front of the closet door, then the door would slowly open on its own and I would catch just a brief glimpse of a young girl with long dark hair. David would go into the closet and stay there almost until dawn.”

Eventually Jess tells us that David started acting even more strangely, his normal talkative self gave way to a quiet and serious person that Jess hardly recognized. She decided that it was the Lady in the Closet affecting David in some way. She contacted the pastor at her church who put her in touch with a priest who specialized in exorcisms. Jess didn’t want to talk about the exorcism too much but she said as the Lady in the Closet was forced out in the open she saw a figure with long dark hair in a white dress with long claws on her fingers. David recovered after the exorcism and the couple quickly put the house on the market, and moved away before the house even sold. 

Whatever this phenomenon was, a ghost, a demon, a crazy woman, the fact remains that this couple went through hell, but came out alive, and that is all that matters. If you are up in Caribou and notice a house for sale, maybe give that one a pass. Stay safe out there, Maine!