We receive reports in
various ways. Some come by e-mail. Or tips are provided by relatives and friends of a
participant. Articles in newspapers and magazines sometimes alert us to what has happened
locally. Occasionally long detailed letters arrive in the mail from some witness clearly
ready to explode, if he or she doesn’t tell somebody. Preferably a listener who will
listen and won’t laugh. But the more frequent source of our pipeline into
"what’s new around and about", is of course Pa Bell’s invention, the
phone.
One such call announced itself at 8 a.m.,
on the 27th July 1994. I had just arrived at work. The lady on the other end of the line
was clearly distraught about what her three-year-old son was reporting had occurred during
the night and she wanted me to come and talk to her three-year-old son. RIGHT NOW!
After listening to her account, I felt
sufficiently intrigued that I began to mentally re-shuffle my day’s activities.
Fortunately the nature of my job permitted me some freedom of movement in my daily
routine. Consequently I succeeded in arriving at this Surrey residence around 10 a.m. and
where was it located? You’ll never guess,…right in the middle of the Surrey
Corridor! Surprise! Surprise!
The very first thing that I couldn’t
help but notice was that the house was right alongside a BC Hydro right of way that
carried high powered transmission lines. Long years of experience had taught me that
frequently we could expect reports of sightings and personal "visitor"
interaction to be generated by the proximity of these nation-wide eyesores, essential
though they may be to the comfort of our daily lives.
Mother, "Maureen Gladstone", met
me at the door and launched into what 3 year old "Edward" kept on insisting had
happened during the previous night. It went like this:
Somewhere around 4 a.m. that morning Edward
had come into the bedroom announcing "there's a thing with blue lights under the
wires and little people on the poles". Not making any sense out of all this, Mum told
him to climb into bed with her and go to sleep, which it seems he promptly did. Trouble
was, the story was repeated at breakfast that morning and clearly Edward with his limited
vocabulary wasn't concocting an imaginary event. Mother wanted to get to the bottom of all
this as her son wouldn’t let the matter drop.
First of all we visited Edward’s
bedroom, it faced east across a major highway. Right alongside the house was waste ground
where an object could have come to rest under the wires. Most certainly it would have been
visible to passing traffic from the nearby highway. One large problem here was that
"the little people on the poles", (assuming he was referring to the pylon close
to the house) was not visible from his bedroom window. Compounding this problem was the
fact his height dictated that his eyes only came up to the bottom of the windowsill in his
bedroom. Horizontal, plastic blinds screened the bedroom window, so it was pretty well
impossible for him to have seen outside. Which raised the larger question, what or whom
alerted Edward to the night-time visitors?
After a visit to Maureen's bedroom, which
looked west, (where you could observe the pylon, except the windows were screened in an
identical manner), we moved out of the kitchen area onto the veranda, where we discussed
the night's events in the warm summer sunshine.
At this point Edward launched into a brief
description of the "high, high, man, who bobbed up and down"! All the while
lifting his hand as high as he could above his head to indicate how tall this guy was. One
thing for sure, he was taller than Dad!
"Where was this man?" I asked.
Asking his mother to pick him up, he leant over the veranda rail and pointed most
assuredly to the grass below. "Where were the little people?" I asked. He
pointed to the nearby pylon. "Where was "the thing with blue lights"
?" He indicated the grassy area directly in front of us. From our elevated position
we could not discern any area of compressed grass in the immediate vicinity.
"Where were you?" I asked
Edward. With the "high man", he replied. "Where was Mum?" was my next
question. He pointed downwards to the grass below! ["X" on picture] Clearly this
was something that came as a complete surprise to Maureen and quite definitely she
didn’t want to hear this!
From what this young man was telling us she
and her son had been out of the house during the night with seemingly a very strange
visitor, "who bobbed up and down".
But how could that be? Her small family
occupied the top portion of the house, whilst her mother and sister resided in the lower
half. Not only was the house securely locked but they also owned a large dog, whom it
would seem had also slept through the past night’s events.
Finally, I asked her son "Where did
the "thing" go?" He promptly raised his hand to the sky, pointing in a
westerly direction. Further questioning revealed that prior to moving into their home they
had lived in an apartment about two miles to the north. It seems that Edward complained
frequently to his mother that "an old man would peer through the window at him during
the night". This statement was also hard to come to terms with, as not only were the
bedroom windows covered with heavy drapes, but also the apartment was on the second floor!
Whatever the explanations might be, clearly her son was experiencing some unusual events.
Prior to my departure Maureen seemed to be
struggling with a hard decision. As I left she announced, "we are leaving here, the
sooner the better". A month later they had gone.
Unfortunately I forgot to ask her how many
times she had previously moved. I have a strong feeling it had been quite frequently.
Furthermore, whatever is trailing them will soon catch up to their new location. But I
didn’t tell her that. Why spoil a lovely summer’s day?
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