When My Life Became Uncustomary

Although I didn't know it then, working as a movie publicity writer for Paramount Pictures while in my spare time researching and writing about the paranormal would provide me with a unique perspective upon finding myself experiencing a sequence of events that went beyond anything I'd seen at the movies or had read about in case study books documenting unexplained phenomena.  I was living in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles at the time.  I'd always been attracted to books that might possibly provide some manner of insight about life.  At an early age, several strange incidents (1, 2) had compelled me to begin contemplating the boundaries of what we understand as consciousness.  

Something I'd begun to learn was that omnipresent 'God'/'Spirit'/'The Christ Force' has always manifested in unusual ways around individual people who find themselves a focus for patterns of phenomena that make possible metaphysical insights for others.  This Force is a subject found in many transcripts of transcendental communication.  Two recent articles in this series of autobiographical remembrances provide a way for readers to learn about some of my specific steps to expanded consciousness.  (1, 2)  This article describes other revealing occurrences leading to my unusual spiritual awakening.   As I mentioned last month, some of my initial steps to expanded consciousness can also be yours.

Below are photos of Echo Park Lake expressing these years when I was a movie studio publicity writer prior to becoming a metaphysical author in 1997.  After my unusual spiritual awakening in 1995, my calling was to help expand the spiritual consciousness of people instead of engaging in the film publicist's occupation of encouraging people to occupy their minds with fantasies.  I sometimes referred to Paramount as representing 'the Hollywood dream factory' during interviews after becoming an author.  Some of the movies I'd helped publicize had metaphysical aspects.  (1, 2)  I began blogging in 2009.  The mountain is equated with revelation in traditional religious lore and my own trip to the mountain was a symbolic one.

Between 1989 and 1996 I lived in a condominium complex situated on the western hill overlooking Echo Park Lake, a Los Angeles city landmark known for its fountain, bridge and lotus flora.  My condo was southwest of the famous Angelus Temple that had been built on the site selected by evangelist and spiritual healing facilitator Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923.  A Bodhi Tree grew at the center of the condo complex after being planted by the previous residents at the site.  Some unusual occurrences happened to me at this Clinton Street address in Echo Park, before and after the trip in August 1995 to investigate a ‘talking poltergeist’ haunting in rural Oklahoma.

Researchers who take the time to fully investigate such subjects as diverse aspects of mediumship (including trance, materialization mediumship and Direct Voice phenomena), channeling, spiritual healing, etc., know that for the most part that the documentation found in most case study books is authentic.  Hundreds of articles at this blog profile a small portion of this data.  However, most people who occupy themselves only with the mainstream media remain uninformed about these subjects.  At the current time celebrities such as Kanye West are reaching people at the traditional levels of spiritual discourse about God.  Something to consider is the predicament of the One/ones who manifest the phenomena.  Actually, I experienced such diverse reactions about the published case study book—including those from people who'd made assumptions about me without even bothering to learn anything about what I've written—that it made me contemplate the realization that the name 'Earth' is an anagram of the word 'heart' as well as of the word 'hater.'

The predicament of the 'Christed one' is the subject of such books as J. Arthur Findlay's The Psychic Stream (1939) and by Kersey Graves The Bible of Bibles; Or, Twenty-Seven "Divine Revelations" . . . (1879) and The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors Or, Christianity Before Christ (1919). People each have their own beliefs and perspectives of 'reality' after all yet these are continuously evolving as one goes through life.

While researching talking poltergeist and other paranormal cases (such as the 19th Century 'Bell Witch' case), there had been one incident that made me ponder my predicament as a paranormal researcher.  It happened one day while I was at work in the publicity department of the Paramount Pictures studio lot here in Los Angeles.  My office in the Zukor building was located next to a small room with a coffee pot and sink.  One morning at the time when I'd been reviewing 'Bell Witch' materials during my free time at home, I overheard a co-worker proclaim while washing a coffee cup, "She’s a wicked witch and I hate her!"  It was an unnerving coinciding moment with what I'd been reading.  I was reminded that some corporate relationships can be frustrating and we are all children at heart.  The description of the Haunting Presence as a 'witch' during the earlier epoch was the result of people expressing something by using a slang word equated with the supernatural or enigmatic.

Another unusual coincidence happened one afternoon during a lunch break while working at Paramount when I was at a small Greek restaurant with a coworker.  I was telling her about my research into the Bell Witch case when I noticed that the lights had gone out.  A waiter announced that the restaurant had suddenly lost all electrical power.  “It must be because I mentioned the Bell Witch,” I told my friend, who then commented that I was scaring her.

During this time in my life, a phase of increasingly strange occurrences transpired.  Some of these were relegated to whatever improbable explanation I could surmise yet others remained baffling as fully recounted in my case study book of 1997.  The events most difficult to describe took place on two separate nights many months apart.  Because what happened was so unusual, I typed my impressions of each experience onto a computer file immediately afterward on each occasion.  Each occurred during the time I was asleep yet these interludes were far more vivid than any usual dream.  The correct term to describe the first seemed to be "rapture of Christ," something I’d researched while writing a play and screenplay based on events in the life of Mary-Catherine Cadiere and Father Jean Baptist Girard that culminated with the last formal trial for witchcraft in France.

In recording what had occurred during the first event, I entitled my recollection "Last Night I Experienced a Night of God" and this is how the quickly written description began:

Last night I experienced what were once called raptures of Christ.  I had asked God to allow me to encounter him in some way and so he did.  It was the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me.  Every previous experience culminated in the dream.  I call it a dream because I don’t know what else to call it . . .

It was impossible to minutely describe the vast expanse of the experience.  The second event also seemed impossible to convey in words yet immediately afterward I tried to capture the feelings aroused by the experience.

You go there in your mind.  In your dreams.  In your heightened state of reality.  You visit the room of ever-changing reality.  It is what people adapt to their own preconceived notions, the fairies, the abductions.  It is a room of surprises.  Where dolls become beings and you wander on.  Where art and possibilities collide.

You are spoken to on your visit to the room of ever-changing reality.  It is like shopping at some wondrous antique store of ideas.  The only explanation necessary—or is it a reminder—that in God’s mind, everything is possible, everywhere, but most obviously so in the room of the ever-changing reality.  It was what people confuse as being in an unearthly spaceship.  It could become this for a moment’s miracle but there are so many things to browse and ascertain.

Beyond the often mundane dreams that seem to be a synthesis of our thoughts and memories, there have been several times throughout my life when a 'dream' has seemed closer to a living and thinking experience than usual.  At other times, dreams have had a narrative structure and complexity that made them comparable to movies.  Keeping notes about dreams occasionally over the years, some were trivial and nonsensical.  Some seemed to be scenarios expressing unconsidered fearful occurrences, a few of these each leaving a definite impression.  There was one startling experience that wasn’t a dream.  One night while residing in Echo Park, as I was preparing to go to sleep, I heard a strange voice.  At that time, it was the only other occasion I’ve had such an experience since hearing my name called as a child yet I didn’t make any note of the precise date.  I didn’t realize the incident could be related to any of my other experiences or would become meaningful in relation to future experiences.  I was laying in bed and abruptly a man’s voice resounded in a tone that could be described as emphatic and devout: "Father, I have waited so long."  I opened my eyes wide with surprise and thought, "What was that?"  I felt fear because this was something totally beyond my understanding.  Slowly I became more calm because the voice didn’t say anything more.  I didn’t attempt to compare it with any other experience and at the time didn’t connect it with my childhood event.  I could only keep wondering about what on Earth had just happened.  It wasn’t a case of myself assigning additional meaning to one of my own thoughts.  This occurrence was a very odd moment of my passing reality that didn’t prompt analysis or introspection until years later.

The memory of the first two times (among a few occasions since then) that I heard an apparently disembodied voice has returned when I’ve read or heard about other people with such an experience. 

Something uncanny also happened while I was watching a poltergeist telefilm on network TV utilizing a cable hookup.  I had been recording the show on a VHS cassette at the time.  It was probably "Grave Secrets: The Legacy of Hilltop Drive" (1992) starring Patty Duke.  The previous year, a similar program had been "The Haunted" (1991) starring Sally Kirkland, as I routinely watched programs dealing with this subject matter because I was always curious to see how the cases were being depicted.  I don’t remember at what point during the two-hour narrative that this occurred yet at one point, with no obvious correlation to the telefilm, a superimposed image of a bald man—comprised from white lines that could perhaps be compared to static—could be seen undulating on the screen and advancing in a way suggesting multidimensionality within the space of the flat screen.  The image of the head turned from one side of the screen to the other as if glancing around my living room before retreating backward without turning around and gradually receding with the image decreasing in size before vanishing.  My first estimation was that this was some kind of spirit manifestation over the TV.  My second thought was that perhaps this was a carefully crafted special effect that had been inserted into the telefilm by the producers yet it seemed too subtle to be some kind of publicity stunt.  I soon decided that my first response was probably correct. 

After studying historical accounts of talking poltergeists, experiencing 'raptures of Christ' and other unexpected dreamstate incidents, hearing an unexplicable voice, and seeing an apparent paranormal entity on the TV screen — it still didn’t occur to me that the phenomena could escalate in many other ways.

There were two occasions when apparently anomalous events resulted with my calling the fire department.  The first time was at dusk on a Sunday in the summer of 1994.  I was upstairs and noticed a lot of smoke in the air outside.  Going to the large wall-to-wall eastern window, I saw that on the hillside directly beyond the parking area and walkway some bushes were engulfed in flames.  Concerned that the embers could set the roof on fire, I dialed 911 and then went outside to wait for a fire engine to arrive.  Since the fourth of July was approaching, I wondered if someone igniting a firecracker might have caused the fire yet I didn’t see anyone at all in the vicinity.

A couple days later I was thinking about the burning bush incident and began considering the possibility of a pyromaniac living in the area.  In the afternoon I was working at my computer downstairs and noticed some telltale wisps of dark smoke start to ascend in the air beyond the balcony.  Moving to the balcony wall, I spotted another large outgrowth of shrubbery on fire.  After being put in touch with the fire department, I raced downstairs determined to catch a glimpse of the pyromaniac who’d selected my condo complex to begin a campaign of terror.  Again, there was no sign of any interloper and the fire engine arrived in just a few minutes and extinguished the fire.

This is a photo of the two clumps of bushes that inexplicably went up in flames outside my condo (fourth from the left, second and third floors).  Regarding the two burning bush incidents, here is a portent of there later being a second President named Bush.  Considering the Clinton Street address of my condo, several years after moving in William Clinton began his tenure as U.S. President in 1993.   

There was a constant stream of messengers coming to my condo to pick up publicity materials on computer diskettes during the years I was working as an independent contractor for Paramount after a corporate downsizing.  As a freelance publicity writer, I looked forward to the day when I could turn down assignments and devote all my time to my own screenplay and book projects.  The next occurrence of significance that occurred was at a bookstore.  At Crown Books in Glendale I saw the latest edition of Fortean Times, a magazine subtitled The Journal of Strange Phenomena.  The current issue, number 79, offered three cover blurbs about articles inside, the last being “Getting Stoned — America’s Talking Poltergeist.”  I was astonished.  My first reaction was that this could be an opportunity to witness and research this phenomena firsthand yet for some reason this possibly significant article hadn’t been selected for the cover art, which instead featured a photo of the Sphinx with the headline  “Sphinx Shock: Who Built It — and When?”  To give you a further idea about the magazine, a strip along the bottom of the cover listed other articles: “1995 Strangeness Index,” “Einstein’s Eyeballs,” “Illinois Enema Bandit,” “Doppelgängers,” “Drug Mugging in Colombia.”

Immediately in the store, I began reading the article (the complete article may be read online) and found the report wasn’t just a retread about the Bell Witch or the result of some trivial incident being exaggerated.  A complex sequence of events was being recounted by a rural Oklahoma family by the name Mc Wethy.  The heading on page 29 was followed by a brief description.

THE STONE-THROWING SPOOK OF LITTLE DIXIE

In deepest Oklahoma, an ordinary family living in a sleepy hamlet has had its life turned upside down by a talking poltergeist with a fondness for chucking stones.

KYM B. CHAFFIN travelled down Highway 3 to see what all the fuss was about

The first manifestations described were stones striking the house from an unknown source, starting in mid-June 1990.  Chaffin related that the stones continued into July when town residents began considering a supernatural basis for the stone throwing.

Someone had a good idea.  They marked some of the stones with nail polish and tossed them into the dark in different directions.  Within minutes they came sailing back.  Someone else had an even better idea.  They threw the marked stones into a nearby pond.  Within moments they came flying back . . . wet.

In mid-August, a sheriff’s deputy was called to investigate and witnessed a “barrage of stones” but could find no “miscreant.”  Coins also began to be flung, then “bottles, eggs and whatever odds and ends happened to be lying around,” while sheets and blankets would be removed from beds and placed upon two or more chairs to form makeshift tents.  The family remained indoors in the winter and began hearing “a high-pitched ‘pssst’ sound around the house.  Then the sound resolved itself into a voice.”

Chaffin described his visit of July "last summer," finding a group of expectant witnesses gathered in the house.  Among them was Shirley Padley, who told him she had tape-recorded “a high-pitched metallic sound, not human, that indeed seem to be saying, ‘This is Michael.’”  Chaffin attested:

My writer friend Peggy was in the kitchen.  Soon she called out: “Come in here, I hear him!”  I went and sat at the kitchen table.  The ghost had apparently arrived a few minutes in advance of Twyla.  I could hear a high-pitched mewling sound, like a cat only different.  It was roaming around the house, from room to room, one minutes seemingly next to us, the next minute far away in one of the bedrooms.

When Maxine’s 22-year-old daughter, Twyla, arrived, she answered Chaffin’s query, “What is this thing?”

“I think it’s an alien,” she replied.  “I really do.  Once he took me to a field and showed me a place where all the grass had been pressed down, like something had landed there.”

“A spaceship?” I asked.

“He says he’s from Saturn,” she said.  “And that he got left behind.”

The alien aspect was something new in relation to the talking poltergeist accounts I'd found yet some of the other situations reminded me of eyewitness observations from other paranormal case chronologies.

“He followed me home one time,” said Shirley Padley.  “On the way home my daughter said she felt something in the car with us and when we got there we could hear him wandering around the house and the phone kept ringing over and over but no one was there.”

After “an electromagnetic breeze” brushed by his shins, the writer soon departed the Mc Wethys’ house; however, I’d read enough to eventually decide to contact the family and arrange a visit.  I wrote to them care of the local Centrahoma post office.  My letter was dated July 21, 1995 and requested the family to call me collect.  I informed them that I wanted to speak to them as I was astonished to find a contemporary ‘talking poltergeist’ case encompassing so many of the witnessed phenomena recorded in previous centuries. 

When I first spoke to the mother, Maxine, she used both the pronouns 'he' and 'they' in a sentence so I asked her about this.  She explained: "Well we've had quite a few of them" (different entities manifesting) so I asked her: "Do you feel there’s a ringleader or it’s the same consciousness taking different forms or —"  She replied, "We can’t figure that out.  We’ve tried to think of everything like that.  We don’t know whether it’s just one acting like a lot of them or what."

I found out about this new case just as I had finished the first draft of my nonfiction book about historical 'talking poltergeist' cases.  Making the most of this opportunity became a new priority.  Perhaps, in addition to gathering some firsthand information, this case could also be a compelling basis for a case study book and/or screenplay.  I decided to schedule a visit to take place as soon as possible.  (During my interviews in Oklahoma when I personally heard the 'mewling sound,' it sounded to me like "a transmission from outer space" — as I wrote in the case study book Tape #2, Side #1 transcript.)

I arranged to fly to Oklahoma City on Thursday, August 10.  The date was two days after my birthday and I estimated this to be an interesting way to begin my fortieth year.  It astounded me when during my interview with the mother, Maxine, that there was Bell ancestry among family members so here was a link to the famous 'Bell Witch" talking poltergeist of the previous Century.  

The week of the trip, I dropped by the Paramount publicity department as customary to turn in invoices and pick up copies of completed press kit materials for my file.  I turned in drafts for press kit production information for “Vampire In Brooklyn,” “Jade” and “Nick of Time,” so I was planning to be able to give my full attention to preparing for my interview with the family.  I even left a copy of the Fortean Times article for Cheryl, the department head.  Taj, one of the new assistants on the staff told me, “You look like a wise old owl.”  He explained that this was the first time he’d seen me wearing glasses.  I thought it was fortuitous (and later portentous) that a bunch of “Star Trek Generations” bookmarkers bearing the message “Boldly Go!” were spread out on the courtesy table.  Following the visit to the studio, I unexpectedly received a call from a director of publicity to write drafts of news releases for two films being announced: “Thinner” and “Night Falls on Manhattan.”  I found myself staying up late on Wednesday to complete the assignments, which would be the last I'd ever accept from the studio staff.  

The golden rule is something you probably won't find in any corporation bylaws yet this profound and consequential truth should always be expressed.  A spiritual lesson needed in the world today is the understanding of 'assumed imperative' as a factor in 'karma' — a negative form of this manner of 'corporate thinking' would be when a group of individuals ignorantly or duplicitously contribute to making a decision or judgment without accepting personal responsibility for the actions of their principality (company/government/agency/organization).  Instruction about karma and other evolution processes of individuals is found in transcripts documenting many cases of transcendental communication as reported in many previous blog articles.  

When the day arrived for me to go to Oklahoma, early that Thursday morning I boarded a shuttle van to go to the airport.  When the driver placed my credit card in the device to process the payment I was irked to see the card get stuck in the machine so that it was mutilated and almost severed into two.  Things never go as smoothly as one expects, I reminded myself.  One of the lessons that would soon become distinct beyond all expectations is how spiritual wealth is a more important ideal than material wealth.

In the summer of 1995 when I experienced the beginning of the culmination of my unexpected path of spiritual discovery, a veritable cascade of phenomenal events and synchronicities would bring about my unusual spiritual awakening and encourage me to reflect about occurrences in my life as chronicled with a documentary style in the case study Testament (available in a free Internet edition) with details also now presented in the current series of articles.

Posted 17th November 2019 by Mark Russell Bell