Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Time Slip in Oregon

Wedding guests at the Troutdale, Ore., resort Edgefield in the summer of 2006 had an urgent request for the catering staff – more wine. Michael Reed worked that wedding and didn’t expect this moment of celebration to burn terror into his memory.

“I had not worked there long, maybe two months,” Reed said. “We were catering a wedding at another building off the main one when a coworker asked that I retrieve more wine from the main building’s basement.”


The main building, a historic three-story brick structure built in 1911 as the county poor farm, is a National Historic Landmark. The structure has been a winery, hotel, restaurant, and for many years abandoned. Reed approached the expansive building that sits on 74 acres on the edge of Portland, and walked into the kitchen.

“The basement had a few entrances but the main one that we used was off the main house kitchen,” he said. “There was a stairwell as well as a small elevator for carting food and beverages.”

The chef scowled at Reed as he went through the kitchen, descended the stairs and began his trip into the unknown.

“I entered the central hall in the basement and began looking for the room where we kept the wine,” Reed said. “It was two rooms down the hall from where I exited the stairwell, so not a long journey in this massive basement.”

Reed counted the rooms and turned into the second room from the stairs only to find it empty.

“I thought, ‘Oh boy, I miscounted the rooms or something,’” Reed said. “So I checked the next one, but not before making a mental note that the room I checked looked quite run down. I just figured that was why it was empty.”

In the next room, water slowly dripped from a stained ceiling and into a dented, rusty bucket on the floor. The rest of the room was bare.

“I thought (dripping water) was strange considering the floor above was immaculate,” he said. “But I didn’t over-think it and proceeded to the next room.”

But Reed knew something was wrong at Edgefield, in this basement. His heart beat heavily in his chest as he stood in the doorway to this damp, deteriorated, abandoned room beneath the busy, modern resort.

“I had always had a very powerful fear of getting lost,” he said. “I was afraid of being erased.”

Panic pulled at Reed as he stepped into the next room, almost a quarter through the basement. It was just as empty, dark, and dank. He had to leave.

“I turned around to go back to the staircase,” he said. “I was terrified to see that the steps leading up to the kitchen were rotted and many of them were broken.”

Those were not the steps that took Reed into this empty, moldy basement.

“I looked around in growing fear, opening rotten doors that should be much newer,” only finding age and disuse, Reed said, “raced toward the darker half of the basement where I knew there were doors to the outside. The whole time afraid that at any moment someone would jump out and grab me.”

Reed’s race through the basement showed no signs of the restored Edgefield – only decay.

“I never saw anything remotely familiar as having any newness to it and to be quite honest, I thought I had fallen back in time to when the hotel sat abandoned,” he said. “I yelled out a couple of times thinking that this couldn’t be and maybe to prove to myself that I still existed.”

No one responded.

Reed ran through the basement toward a set of doors he knew should take him outside to safety.

“I found the door I was looking for and pushed it open,” he said. “I walked into a sunny normal world. People were walking here and there and all was fine. The door closed behind me, but even if it hadn’t, I had no intention of going back in the same way.”

Reed walked back to the wedding reception and told the coworker who sent him on the errand that he couldn’t find the wine.

“She looked at me with this strange expression,” Reed said. “I knew why. It was not hard to find. She asked if I used the kitchen stairs and I told her I had. She explained where it was in the second room on the left and I trotted off again feeling like a fool for returning empty handed and feeling embarrassed because I could not tell her what really happened.”

Reed walked slowly back to the main building, through the kitchen, down the stairs and to the second room. Crates of wine sat waiting for him.

“I grabbed four bottles and ran back up the stairs to the kitchen,” he said. “I was so scared that it might happen again that I nearly dropped the wine on my way up. I ran into one of the kitchen wait staff at the top. She looked at me as if I were an idiot. I smiled dumbly playing the part of (the) dumb new guy.”

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

The Time Travel Reporting Center

The light in the sky shown white, far from the greens and reds Jake saw during the great Aurora Borealis of 2004.

Jake, 15, stood outside his parents home in the Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., around 10 p.m. May 28, leaning against a truck and looking into the night. He’d been to the local premiere of the climate change disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” with high school friends and just wanted a glimpse of the northern lights before going to bed.

He didn’t know his life was about to change.

“A bright white glow suddenly filled the northern horizon,” he said. “This looked nothing like the northern lights, nor did it behave like them either.”

The white light moved “almost like a light on a photo scanner.” The single bar of brightness moved from west to east over Jake’s head and disappeared.

“I thought that I should maybe go inside at this time, and found myself unable to move,” he said. “I felt the control of my arms slowly fade out of my body.”

As numbness grew in his arms and legs the world began to grow black and he crashed to the ground. Jake awoke disoriented.

“The next thing I remember I am standing on the front steps of my house, some 500 yards away,” he said. “I felt woozy and almost sedated, and I couldn’t think clearly. Time seemed muddled in my head.”

He walked into the house to find he’d been outside an hour – and he’d been injured.

“While I was unconscious the left side of my face was covered in small, precise cuts; my left ear, it was almost severed,” he said.

But Jake felt something else was wrong, something he couldn’t understand.

“It took most of the night for me to tell my parents what happened, and most of the time I kept telling them that I thought the calendar was wrong, it should at least be after 2008,” he said. “To this day, my mother remembers bits of this, mainly because I looked at her and asked point blank, ‘Is the black man president?’”

What happened to Jake? Seizure? Psychological phenomena? Or did Jake accidentally take a brief, four-year step into 2008?

Time slips, like Jake believes occurred to him, have been recorded numerous times in history. English women vacationing in France in 1901 reported stepping into the French Revolution, and two English couples traveling in Spain in the 1970s claim to have stayed at an oddly archaic hotel that was simply gone on their return journey.

Physicists like Albert Einstein, Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking have all said time travel is theoretically possible; our science just can’t achieve it – yet. But what if nature can?

Patricia Griffin Ress, author of the book “Dangerous Information: The Further Time-Travel Experiments/Studies of Steven L. Gibbs,” is sure of it.

Ress met Gibbs in 1989 and when Gibbs turned on his “time machine” – clouds forming on the ceiling and sparks dancing on the chandelier – Ress became a believer.

Although no one time traveled, something life altering happened to Ress that night. She later caught her favorite movie on TV, “Shane.” However, it wasn’t the same movie she’d seen dozens of times. Dialogue she’d memorized was altered or spoken by different characters. It was the same movie, but it wasn’t.

“It scared me to death,” she said. “If you ask me to see the movie ‘Shane,’ I’d say no thanks.”

She thinks that night Gibbs’ machine somehow altered the past … and the present.

Because of people like Jake and Ress, “time machine” inventors like Gibbs, and my lifelong fascination with time travel, I’ve set up the website “Time Travel Reporting Center.”

If you believe you’ve traveled in time, or have encountered someone seemingly out of time and place, please post your encounters at: timetravelerreportingcenter.blogspot.com. This will hopefully become a database of time travel events and a forum to discuss the validity/reality of time travel.

You also may discover you’re not alone.

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.