​
​What follows has been edited for content and relevance to the ongoing investigation
into events in Sugar Creek, Ohio on the night of September 26-27, 2015.
​

Let me start by saying my dad was not crazy. I don't agree with what his therapist said. I don't think he ever took the time to get to know him. Dad could get really sad, in a way that both Mom and me worried what he might do to himself if we left him alone for too long like that, but what Dad wrote is true: he would never hurt us. He wouldn't hurt anyone. Ever. He wasn't capable of that. Dr. V_______ is full of it. 

But some of the things in this journal...I didn't know the man who wrote them.

I see him clearly in the parts where he's joking. I had trouble stopping myself from laughing, even under the circumstances. He had this incredible self-deprecatory wit that I loved so much. Even in a deep funk, he could tell a joke that would have me and Mom rolling. I mean, he could be vicious with it, too, but only with people who deserved it, some asshole or bully who was begging to get cut down to size. And his takedowns were legendary. When he was done with someone there'd be nothing left but a pair of smoking shoes and a crater. That was the extent of how "violent" he could be. 

He could get angry. Like anybody. He gets frustrated when he feels misunderstood. Like the thing with the doll head and the media. I can see exactly how that happened. My dad always gets...got...carried away with things he's excited about, didn't really think before he acted. And then he thinks so fast his words can't keep up with his thoughts. It upset him when people didn't understand him, but he would turn that on himself. Called it an "opportunity for self-improvement." He wasn't vengeful. He didn't want to hurt anyone. 

But when he writes about nearly crushing a man's skull...those horrific blood-soaked nightmares...I didn't know that man. That man was a stranger.

He was suffering. I don't deny that. He'd been suffering in one way or another my whole life, so when I came home between semesters and felt that low-level tension, I was familiar with it.  Dad had lost his job - his career! - and was in a bad funk most of that summer. So that New Year's where he spent most of the night alone in his office, staring out the window? That was weird, but not unexpected.

He was listening to that CD boxed set I'd gotten him for Christmas. The Corries? I was generally aware of my dad's enjoyment of things Scottish, and I thought it would be a great joke.  When he said it was one of his favorite groups, it kind of blew my mind. I literally had no idea! I mean, I loved my parents, but I still spent my childhood aggressively ignoring their musical tastes out of embarrassment. Yeah, I was one of those kids. It was really kind of a thrill to know how lucky I got with his gift, and the music actually wasn't bad, either. 

If I had it to do it again, though, I never would have bought them. I might have burned them, just to be safe.

I asked Mom if anything was going on, if Dad was still depressed, and she muttered something about his "new hobby" taking up all of his time. By that time the first bunch of nightmares had calmed down, so she was less on-edge. I mean, she was always worried about him; it was part of their relationship. 

I thought it was nice that he had a hobby! And that it was so in line with what he used to teach...that's how he got me hooked, you know. "Hooked on History?" The way he talked about it, it was like all those dead famous people were still alive and making news. He made them so real. And he'd seemed so excited at first. I mean, how could it be bad if it pulled him out of a depression? 

The thing with the doll and the news was embarrassing, but like I said...it was Dad. He made a mistake. And the fight with our neighbor was...a problem, but Mom and I both knew that guy was a bully in need of taking down. It didn't have to be Dad's fault. At least until I learned about the other stuff. 

All the other stuff.

Why did he send this to me? Why did I have to learn about all of this like this? This was torturing him. Was he afraid it would torture Mom if he told her? Was he afraid she would take Dr. V______'s side? It would have messed with her, but she never would have done what Dr. V_______ asked.  Maybe he didn't want to take the chance. Maybe he thought she'd shared enough of his suffering. 

I think it was the interview that changed him. Really changed him. I helped him prepare. I didn't know what I was doing. He seemed so excited, so eager, I thought I was doing something for him. I didn't help him cyber-stalk that Weaver guy, by the way - I just showed him how to use Google Earth! I thought I was doing a good thing supporting his hobby! I just made things worse. Make him worse.  I wish I hadn't come home that weekend. I wish I'd known what was going on!

I wish I'd never given him those godd__ned CDs...

The interview. I think that stranger was inside him when he came back from that.  This was the man who almost killed our neighbor. The man who quit his job and started a bone collection. Who started harassing public officials. Who nearly got himself arrested so many times! 

The man who brought a gun into our house.  You don't understand: my dad hated guns. With a passion.  He said they were dangerous, a homicide waiting to happen just by being there.  And then he randomly buys one off the Internet one day? Do you see?  I had no idea who this man was.

But I think I'm staring to get one. 


​(At this point in the interview, Ms. Corrie reaches down and retrieves an envelope from her bag. She opens it and removes a sealed plastic container bag with a collection of crumpled white papers inside that have been smoothed flat again. Each sheet of paper is covered with cramped handwriting and drawings. There are six pages total, front and back.)


This came in the mail a few days after I got the journal. It fills in what you're missing. It fills in a lot. 

My dad learned something terrible in that interview, and it did change him. But it didn't make him crazy. It made him afraid. Afraid for my mom and me. Scared enough that he was willing to bring a weapon into our house. Terrified enough that he was willing to throw away everything that he had been to try to save us.  

All of us. 

July 12, 2014

Randi - Miranda. My sweet, amazing girl. You will never read this. You will never be touched by this shit, my shit. This will not infect your life as it has mine. I just need someone to tell this to, even if it is only in my mind that I am talking to you. I have to imagine how you would respond to this, what you would say. What you would tell me to do. I'm terrified, I'm bursting with this, and there's no one else I can say it to, not your mother, and definitely not that backstabbing traitor Dr. V_______. 

I warned the Doc about this. Warned. He promised me he would never betray my trust again. But I guess what happened between me and Bill Pryor made him change his mind. 

This isn't making any sense. Let me start over. 

I spent the weekend after the 4th practically living in the woods. I was absolutely determined to find something that I could definitively link to one of the disappearances. I mapped and plotted and dug in every inch of that creek right up to its source, a sluggish little spring deep inside the trees. The canopy was so thick and the trees hugged so close to the water there that it was like walking through an underground tunnel or the inside of an old Roman aqueduct. My alert system was at DEFCON-1 at first, making an already laborious task even more exhausting. I expected to be set upon  at any moment, with no idea by what, and I was starting at every splash, every rustle of the leaves.

After awhile I was able to relax a bit. Whatever this thing was, it didn't want me dead, or it would have taken me months ago. It was a danger, but clearly not an eminent one; maybe it was getting too much of a kick out of f___ing with me. 

That Sunday morning, I had nearly had my fill of frustration. I was pulling up all sorts of crap from all different eras: random animal bones, fragments of stone and metal, more buttons - you'd think this thing had swallowed a godd__n button factory or something!  The mud was like runny soft-serve, giving this stuff up easily, and all of it was untraceable junk.  

Then my shovel hit a hard spot. Not rock-hard, but noticeably more resistant than anywhere else around it. For some reason, I just started stabbing at it, hacking away at the spot. I was cutting into something tough and fibrous, like underground roots or something, that parted as grudgingly as a tightly-clenched fist. When that fist finally opened, I plunged my hand into the water and pulled out a small, partially-laminated rectangle that made my jaw drop when I realized what it was.
​

​This is how I remember it. I only got a brief look at it, and damn it, I can't remember the name for the life of me, but it was, without a doubt, an identification card. A student ID. With a picture! I could even make out a year: 1991-92. This tempered my excitement a little as I remembered the significance of the date. Nineteen Ninety-One. The anniversary of the Legend that brought the flood of metal detector-wielding yahoos into these woods. It looked like at least one of them never made it out. 

I wasn't able to find out who. I'd been so absorbed in my digging that I'd ignored the the lapping of water and snapping of twigs behind me, not realizing someone was there until I felt a cold circle of metal rest against the back of my head.  
​

​My piece-of-shit neighbor Bill had put the barrel of a shotgun against my head. I heard him pump a shell into the chamber, and the red water turned a little more yellow where I was kneeling. He snarled something about me "trespassing on his property," a claim that has and always will be utter excrement but not one I was prepared to debate with Yosemite Sam's less-congenial brother. But then he added a new wrinkle to it, actually accusing me of stealing his property and gesturing to the piles of detritus I had spent the weekend dredging up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him gesture with his gun. He told me to drop everything where it was and stand up. I palmed the card and let my trowel fall, and started to rise. 

All of a sudden something - I have no idea what - erupted from the water and lashed me across the hand, slicing my palm like barbed wire. I cried out and lurched forward, dropping the ID into the muck. Bill was startled, and I saw the barrel drift away from my head. Without thinking I grabbed it with both hands and shoved it back and away from myself as hard as I could. Bill fell back into the creek and I held onto the gun.

Bill flopped and floundered in the muddy water, screaming obscenities so loud and so fast they came out like gibberish, filthy baby talk. He was bellowing about his gun, his gun, his property, his woods...

His woods! his f____ing woods!  I saw red, red like in one of my nightmares, and then the gun was above my head, raised like a club to cave in Bill's thick skull. I was screaming, a raw, furious scream that shook my whole frame. I was going to do it, Randi. In that moment, I think I was going to do it. But then something pierced through all of that rage straight to the center of my nervous system and stopped me cold.

It was the feeling - no, the certainty - that I was being watched. And that the thing watching me very much wanted me to do this. 

Now Bill looked like the one who was going to piss himself. I can't say I blamed him. I was still pretty f___ing angry, though, and I took his gun and bashed it against a tree until it broke in half and threw the pieces at him. I yelled at him to f__ off or I'd make him eat them next. He took the hint and hightailed it into the trees. 

My hand was slick with blood and I was shaking pretty badly, but I ignored it all to search for the ID. I didn't find it. I searched all around the place where it fell, but it was gone. It drove me nuts: here I find my proof and lose it practically in the same breath. I couldn't figure what had cut me, either. I'd pulled away all the fibrous material, and there was nothing living in the water that could have created such a wound. I could've taken a guess as to what did, but I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. 

I gathered up my other finds and hiked back down the creek, emerging from the trees into a wash of blue and red. Chief Talbot was standing on the porch with your mother and that shitbag Pryor, who was pointing at me and yelling something I couldn't make out. Talbot was looking at me with the same look he'd had on his face when I showed him the doll's head. It's a shame they didn't name it Shit Creek, cause I was definitely up it.
​

That cowardly prick accused me of assaulting him without provocation, "like a crazy man," when he came upon me trespassing on his land. He'd gashed the back of his head when he fell, and he blamed that on me. I threw it back in his face, saying he'd attacked me and held a gun on me, and showed Talbot my hand. (He can lie, I can lie.) Talbot looked for a moment like he was going to just cuff us both and run us into town. But he's a fair man, Randi, and he knows what a shit-stirrer Bill is. He gave us both a warning about fighting, and told us to steer clear of each other in the future, or he would bring us both in for brawling. He told me I needed to compensate Bill for destroying his shotgun, which I wasn't happy about but figured was better than arrest for assault. Bill looked like he was about to shit a brick, but he capitulated. 

All's well that ends well, right? Well, no; there were two problems. Problem One: Bill wasn't done with me. He started talking to the neighbors, the postman, folks in town, anyone whose ear he could hang off of about what a crazy f___ing lunatic I am. He even tried to go to Rachel's work to get them to publish an open letter about me! They said no, of course, but that's how I ended up at the newspaper office the next day to be gobsmacked with Problem Two. 

A quick chat with Rachel's boss assured me that there was no way they would risk libel charges with Bill's screed. I thanked him and was about to go when he handed me an envelope that had just come in the mail and asked me to give to Rachel. This was weird, because no one ever sent mail to her at work. Then I saw  the return address. 

​It was from Dr. V_______.  He had reached out to your mom again, behind my back. In the car I ripped the letter open and read what that Judas had to say about me. 

I'd had a session with him a few days earlier, and I'd told him everything I just told you about Bill. Now he was laying it all out for Rachel, that and more, and in nothing resembling charitable terms. Do you know what he said, Randi? He called me a "deeply troubled" man, that I suffered from paranoia bordering on psychosis, from dissociative delusions that "were threatening to overtake me" completely, and that my latest appointment suggested I could even become violent and out-of-control. He said that a "psychological intervention" was advisable, even "against my will if necessary!" Can you guess how much of this shit he said to me?

So I've cut him out, Randi. I'm done with him, and he is done with us. He'll never hear another word from me, or get another word to Rachel, period. You're never going to see this, but I still feel like I need to say it: I am not crazy. I am suffering, but at the hands of something terribly, impossibly real that I can only hope to overcome.  And I would never, never do anything to hurt either one of you or put you in harm's way.

Not intentionally. 

What follows has been edited for content and relevance to the ongoing investigation
into events in Sugar Creek, Ohio on the night of September 26-27, 2015. ​​​

June 2, 2014

Okay, Dr. V______. Operation Restoring Trust has begun. Let's see how you roll with this. 

I have spent the past week scouring every source I can to find a scrap of information, public, private or otherwise, that backs up the accounts in J.L. Preston's book. I have found almost nothing. I have no idea where the author found any of these stories, and I suspect, from the briefness of most of these accounts, she didn't have a lot to work with either. 

​Ah! But you may have noticed that I called her she. That's because I can confirm that J.L. Preston is in fact Jennifer Louise Preston. I wish I could say this was some adept sleuthing on my part, but it was sadly inferable from context: the writer was clearly one of poor Angie Weaver's parents, and the article listed both of their names: Carl and Jennifer Weaver, née Preston.

Armed with this mote of knowledge, I set out in search for her. Here, public records were finally my friend. I learned that the Weavers divorced in 1988, and Carl Weaver left Sugar Creek and moved to Dayton. A little cyber-stalking (with the help of my dear daughter Randi, God bless and forgive her for aiding and abetting me in navigating the Interwebs) produced a current address in Huber Heights. 

But.

"But what?" C'mon, Doc. How long have you been reading this? Figure it out. What could I possibly be but-ing about? What haven't I mentioned yet? What realization lit a hot coal of pure dread in my gut?

I couldn't find her. Anywhere. There was no indication that Jennifer Weaver moved out, no forwarding address. The house sold in 1993, but she wasn't listed as the seller. I found no additional titles under her name. The publisher of "Lovely, Dark and Sweet" was a vanity house that went belly-up in 1989. I couldn't find used copies of the book on Amazon, eBay, Craigslist or any of a dozen other pissant book sites. Short of something available on the Dark Web (not sure how or why Randi knows so much about this), I think this copy may be the last or only one in existence. 

I am trying to remain calm about this. I am imagining her just packing up her car and leaving one day, like that guy in Into the Wild (just without poisoning herself at the end). Leaving no forwarding address, abandoning a life of pain and bad memories for a future off the grid, happy and free. 

I am trying so very hard not to imagine the alternative.

So this snipe hunt continues. I'm heading to Dayton tomorrow to talk to Carl Weaver. (Don't worry, I'm not stalking him - I'm meeting him for coffee, not camping out in his bushes!) You'll have to wait with baited breath until then.

June 25, 2014

I'm sorry, Doc. Really, I'm truly sorry. I'm sorry I missed our last three sessions. I'm sorry I had to destroy what I wrote over the last month. But I'm not ready to talk about all of that yet. I wasn't ready to read back the shit I learned, the shit I saw. Please be patient with me, and please, just listen. 

I can't tell you yet what I learned from my trip to Dayton, or what greeted me when I came back. I can tell you that it sent me charging back up the Creek, ready to hack that place to pieces with my shovel.  I felt possessed, enraged, by that place. If I could have physically hurt it, I would. Gasoline and a match popped into my mind more than once. It scared me how hard I had to fight back the impulse.

I wish I could tell you what I was looking for. I mean, I know what I was looking for, that was never a question in my mind. I just can't tell you right now.

It's the whole trust thing, y'know? This is a whole new level of craziness requiring a shit-ton of trust, and you and I just aren't there yet. I'm not entirely there yet with myself.

I don't know if I expected to find what I was looking for. I did expect to find something, though. And I wasn't disappointed. 
​

This is just a sample. In all, I found about fifteen animal bones of all sizes and types. And wouldn't you know they were all just jumbled in a pile together? I'll have you know something else: I've dug in this spot before. I found nothing then. 

So what's the big deal about a bunch of animal remains? That's just the circle of life, no? Nothing nefarious about that. But I'm guessing you can't tell exactly what these are from the scale of the drawing. These skulls are actually quite large. And they belong to creatures that haven't been around since Sugar Creek was covered by glaciers. 

I looked them up online. The one on the far left is a smilodon, a saber-toothed cat. The one on the right is a dire wolf.  i had to search a bit for the one in the middle, as I thought it was a cave bear. I found out they only lived in Europe. I'm almost certain now that it's a short-faced bear. Same time period as the others, at least eleven thousand years ago.

They're sitting on a shelf in my office. I haven't sent them anywhere for analysis, and I don't plan to. 'Cause I get the joke now. Whatever I find, whatever I send, there will be something to debunk it. Lack of solid provenance and plain-old rural skepticism were my foils before: something else would cast the same kind of doubt on these. 

I actually figured out what that something would be fairly quickly. Finds this old you'd expect to be fossils: brittle, yellowed bits of rock masquerading as the bones they used to be. But these were still bones, white and glistening as the day the flesh was first stripped from them. They are real, I know they are. But they look far too new.

​It's hard to mistake the feeling that you're being f___ed with, Doc, even if you don't know why or by what. The skull that emerged from the bottom of this pile drove this feeling home clearer than a middle finger shoved right in my face. 
​

I felt myself shudder with alarm and excitement for the briefest of moments, my body betraying me by suggesting I had found it, the thing I sought, even as my brain told me it was a lie. The skull was badly fractured across the cranium, but otherwise was as smooth as the others. It was also just as old: the tip of an ancient spear point was lodged in the left eye socket. I'm sure if I looked it up I'd find a match to Clovis culture weapons or something equally ancient, but it wouldn't be enough to prove anything to anyone else. However I presented it, no matter what theory I put forth about it to others, it wouldn't be believed. I'm not ashamed to admit it, Doc - I held that skull in my dirty, mud-reddened hands and and I wept.

I wish I could tell you the whole reason why. I wish I could tell someone. Anyone. 

​
June 26, 2014

I can't deny this anymore, Doc. There is something out in those woods, something up to nothing good, and it is trying to tell me something.

I went to bed last night utterly defeated, close to broken. But whatever was messing with me wasn't done with me yet. I found myself in pitch darkness, with the sensation of something hot, pulsing and red all around me. The air was thick and close, and I felt hugely claustrophobic, like I was deep underground. Buried alive. 

The sounds of animals were everywhere, above me, below, right in front of my face: grunting, snorting, little bleats and short squawks. Aggressive noises that seemed to circle me and each other, beasts squaring off for a fight.

Suddenly one sound briefly silenced the rest, a deafening bellow combining the rage of a giant predator with the shriek of a jet turbine. It reminded me of the T. Rex roar from Jurassic Park. This roar exploded into the darkness, and then all the rest rose to match its volume and intensity, a vast, hideous sound of pain and fury that threatened to shatter my skull. The void around me started to churn and boil, and I realized all the creatures these cries were bound to were fighting. No, not fighting - ripping each other to pieces. Abject carnage in pitch black. I could even hear what I am sure were human voices and sounds at this point, though nothing intelligible, nothing sane.  I had started to scream myself at this point.

The volume grew and the voices fused, until we were all screaming together, a ragged, tortured howl that had now become the sound of a single creature, of which we were all now a part. I looked upward and saw we had erupted from the dark place where we were contained, and a red sky ringed by skeletal trees spun madly overhead.

I started up to utter silence in my bedroom. Rachel was dead asleep beside me. I clearly had not screamed aloud, but my throat felt as if I had gargled with battery acid. I felt something salty filling my mouth, so I ran to the bathroom and spat a gout of blood into the sink. 

I'm sitting on the edge of the tub, door locked, desperate for the sun to rise. I just finished madly sketching the last image of this fading dream and I know what it is. It is the view through the canopy looking up from the creek bed.

​I have to know what this thing is, Doc. I have to know why it's tormenting me, what it is planning. I don't have a choice in the matter. It's self-preservation as much as anything else now, preservation of my sanity.  

What follows has been edited for content and relevance to the ongoing investigation
into events in Sugar Creek, Ohio on the night of September 26-27, 2015. ​

February 20, 2014

Dearest Dr. V______,

I have been made aware that you are somewhat cross with me. This is fruit borne from your backstabbing betrayal in January, when you interpreted my open and honest narrative of legitimate concerns surrounding events in Sugar Creek as a sign of "increasing paranoia, delusions of grandeur and spiraling depression." ( I peeked at your notebook while you were in the loo.) Since then, I have chosen to maintain a more polite distance from you and your ministrations.This is in spite of your borderline demand for me to schedule more sessions, increase my check-ins with this journal, and - the ultimate insult - to take medication. 

I was happy to let you go pound sand. However, you once again managed to get to my lovely wife, who has an unholy power over me that you can only dream of wielding. She gave me an ultimatum, the terms of which I will not share with you. I will only say "well-played, you diabolical turd."

So I would like to present a compromise. I will not submit to your mind-altering drugs. I will return to our previous schedule of visits, no more, no less. And I will check in more often with this journal, if only for the pleasure of telling you to go f___ yourself on a bi-weekly basis. 

Are we agreed? If so, feel free to respond after the "go f___ yourself."


March 5, 2014

Go f___ yourself.


March 19, 2014

Go f___ yourself.


April 1, 2014

Okay, Dr. V______, I'm aware of how childish this has been, and I'm ready to be civil and communicate.

April Fools. Go f___ yourself. 


April 15, 2014

Tax day. Remember to go f___ yourself before the IRS does it for you. 


April 29, 2014

For reference, see "yourself, go f___."


May 13, 2014

Get f____d.
​

May 18, 2014

May 27, 2014

Shit. 

Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back, Dr. V______. This was a mistake. I use this journal for multiple purposes, and I intended to rip this page out before sharing my usual flaming bag of dog poo with you. This is not a "cry for help" or a need to confide in you in any way. But now you've seen it, and god____it, so has Rachel, and she's begging me to actually talk to you, and I can't stand seeing her in pain over this. So I will "confide" for her sake. Don't you dare f___ me again. 

This is a map of the area around my house. It's not to scale; there's about five miles of road between me and 62. I don't know if the woods take up as much space here as I've made it look, but it feels like it: they seem vast. Note that Logan Road doesn't cut through but very carefully skirts the perimeter. There are no houses on the woodward side. 

I started drawing it a few weeks ago. The library was sending me multiple threatening letters (or as threatening as a librarian can muster) about the mounting fines for "Lovely, Dark and Deep." I figured that after four months I could reasonably slink into town without drawing pitchfork-and-torch-wielding crowds, so I grudgingly sifted through my office until I found it. Because I hadn't really done much beyond cursorily glancing through it before, I made the mistake of sitting down to read it again. Let 'em tack another ten cents onto the bill, right?

As I've said before, most of the titles were "The Lost This" or "The Vanished That," variations on a theme. Not so "The Butchered Plough-Horse." The viscerality of the title had caught my eye the first time, and drew me in again now.

It recounted a strange case from 1882, when a farmer named Andrew Kelley didn't come home one evening after spending the day out in the north forty with his plough-horses. (Need I mention what those forty acres dead-ended into?) This would have been just another missing persons case if not for what his neighbors discovered the next day. As they were driving up the Creek Road (now Logan Road), they discovered a gruesome sight. One of Kelley's horses lay dead on the banks of the creek, stomach ripped open. The rest of it was a bloody mess as well: wounds and claw marks covered the horse nearly head-to-tail. It looked as if the horse had been set upon by a pack of vicious animals and managed to escape, dying of its injuries not long after. 

That would have been enough to distinguish it from the others, but the story wasn't done. The Sugar Creek constabulary hauled the dead horse onto a wagon and brought it back to town, where it was laid out in a butcher shop to await autopsy the following day. (The police had no facilities to accommodate it, and it was thought unseemly to bring it to the town mortuary.) However, When they came for it the next morning, the shop was a scene of chaos. Someone had smashed their way into the building and made off with the corpse, and when I say smashed, I mean smashed. The front door lay in a heap of splinters and glass against the far wall. Where the horse had been on the floor in the back room there was nothing but a large red smear. Whatever had taken it had dragged it out the back, through another destroyed door. Deep scratches and grooves covered the floor along its path, along with a dark, ichorous red fluid that initially was thought to have come from the horse until it was noted it was in the front of the store as well. The trail extended fifty yards from the store to a large pool of the ichor, where it stopped. Like the horse was suddenly lifted up into the sky. 

Or dragged down into the ground. 

Unfortunately, there was no resolution to the case, no other assessment of the break-in in the story. I checked Rachel's news archives, and I wondered how J.L. Preston had been able to find this. There was nothing that I could find on Andrew Kelley but an obituary. He was quite a character: brash, loud, and aggressive, known for carrying both a monogrammed handkerchief and a silver Derringer like some kind of dandy wannabe cowboy. He reminded me a lot of my dickhead neighbor Bill, in that they shared the same confrontational approach to "trespassers": why waste words when high-velocity lead will do?

All of a sudden I felt a familiar tingling at the back of my brain, like I'd felt with the doll four months ago. Something about the story was tugging at my memory. Almost without thinking, I reached over to my desk drawer and opened it. It was the drawer, you recall, that was filled nearly to the top with weird, random crap I pulled out of the creek last fall. I dumped the drawer onto the desk, and immediately saw what I was looking for:

The letters on the fragment of linen were unmistakable. The fragment of the plow harness and the corroded single-shot pistol rested neatly to one side. It couldn't have been clearer if someone had laid it out for me.

I will go further into that idea momentarily. Gotta set it all up for you first.

I began going through the stories, and the items. Wanna see what I found?

These are just the highlights, Dr. V______. For every story in that book, I found at least one item that could link to it. Do you know how many stories there were? Almost two hundred. Two hundred people in 170 years, just...gone. The map marks the last place that many of them were seen. Suffice to say, it is unsurprisingly consistent.

I know what you'll say: that none of this is conclusive. There are no clear names on anything. At best, all I have is conjecture and my own confirmation bias connecting this stuff and these people, like with the head. 

And what am I trying to say, anyway? That there is an epidemic of murder in Sugar Creek? Stretching over two centuries? How could that be possible? It would be a vast conspiracy, involving dozens of killers over the decades. How could that be kept silent?

If you said that, you'd be right. It would be impossible to hide a conspiracy like that. So I'm not necessarily suggesting that. What I'm suggesting is howling-at-the-moon crazy. And I'm not sure I can explain it in a way that even I  understand, other than to say that it is an intuition that sets my hackles standing straight up.

I'm suggesting that there is one single killer in all of these cases. And that I am being shown his trophy case. 

I'm telling you this against my better judgment, Dr. V______. I'm asking you again: do not f___ me over this.
​

What follows has been edited for content and relevance to the ongoing investigation
into events in Sugar Creek, Ohio on the night of September 26-27, 2015. ​​​​
​

January 6, 2014

All right, godd___it, enough putting this off. 

In case you're wondering, Dr. V______, there have been no recent nightmares. My sleep's been blissfully undisturbed for weeks now. No, I've left night terrors behind for the moment and shifted over to obsessive thoughts, specifically on the book with the oddly-foreboding title and disturbingly-painted cover lying on my desk with a library return date of January 10.

So I've given in to the curiosity. Today is the Festival of the Epiphany, celebrating the revelation of Christ to the Three Wise Guys. Hopefully some of that revelation will rub off on me today. I have J.L. Preston's book open in front of me, and I plan to take notes as I read. This is all going to be "IRL," as the kids like to say. 

I've paged past the story of "The Lost Founder" and I'm reading some of the titles following it: "The Vanished Lovers." "The Absent Fisherman." "The Butchered Plough-Horse." Most of the stories are only a page or two long, and they've all got a vaguely penny dreadful quality to them: stories of people who one day up and disappeared from their lives. Salacious and unsavory theories of foul play are suggested, but no certainty is given. I'm just skimming them right now, but my head is spinning over this. I'm having a hard time reconciling these stories as fact, urban legend or otherwise. It's hard to imagine this many people having gone missing from Sugar Creek without some notice.

One chilling detail that keeps appearing: virtually all of them were last seen in the vicinity of the creek itself. 

The last section in the book is the longest, with the simple but unsettling title "The Children." Weirdly, there's very little story in this part, other than a blurb of a few lines here and there.  The rest is page after page crammed with names followed by a listing of age and a year, presumably the dates of disappearance. This along with the title is somehow worse than the rest of the book put together, the thought that all of these young lives cou
​

(The entry ends abruptly in mid-word. The next entry begins on the following page.)


January 29, 2014

I want to make it clear, Dr. V______, that I am only writing this because you are insisting I do so. I've already humiliated myself enough to you, to the police, the local news vultures. I was wrong, okay? I was mistaken. I made a huge god___n stir and I messed up and I want to forget about this. 

But never mind that. Let's keep you happy.

So...the book. Which I still have, which is currently racking up library late fees, which is still on the floor of my office where I dropped it, open to the dedication page. Let's start there. 

The very last entry in the very last section, "The Children," was longer than any other entry in the section or the rest of the book, and was dated 1985, one year before the book's publication. Instead of a name, this entry had its own title: "The Stolen Angel." It described a little girl in such intricate and personal detail that I realized, mid-way through, that it could only be the author's own daughter. She was a sweet, strawberry-blonde three-year-old who loved hot dogs and hated cauliflower, who was shy around strangers and scared of big dogs until she got to know them, who had a meltdown when she got too big for her baby swing in the back yard and cried when it rained because she thought the sky was sad. The writer had poured this child's life onto the page, so much so that I felt myself tearing up a bit when I arrived at her inevitable fate.

She was on her own front porch that August day, playing with the brand-new custom doll she had received for her birthday...until suddenly she wasn't. When her parents couldn't find her in the immediate area, or down by the nearby creek where she was expressly forbidden to play, a week-long manhunt was launched. County and state officers were called in to comb the entire area around her home, even the dense woods enclosing the head of the creek, to no avail. The trail, if there ever was one, was dead cold. 

At this point the hairs on the back of my neck were standing straight up, and I felt an almost sickening wave of deja vu wash over me. Everything in the entry was maddeningly familiar for a reason I couldn't pinpoint. I finished the last page with no clue as to the little girl's identity. I flipped back through the book to see if there was anything I'd missed.

I landed on the dedication page, where there was a picture.
​

Rachel says she heard me cry out, but all I remember is the book hitting the floor and me throwing open the door of the closet and seizing the nearly-forgotten paper bag from the top shelf. I ripped through the paper and plastic to get to the gruesome object inside and knew instantly it was the same doll. 
​

​That wasn't the only revelation I had. There were two more that came in rapid succession. The first was that I'd seen that photo before. I raced out of the office, nearly bowling Rachel over, and asked to see her laptop. (I know "asked" probably isn't the word she used with you. More like "bellowed frantically while shaking her," which I will own.) She opened it up and keyed her login for the newsletter website, which I also "bellowed" for her to do. As a contributor, she had access to the online archives, which fortunately included the time period I was looking for. I scrolled to the link to 8/8/1985 and opened it to confirm my fears.
​

I'm reluctant to tell you the second revelation, but I imagine you already suspect what it is. The photo in the article and dedication is the last photo taken of the missing girl, Angie Weaver. She was the Sugar Creek equivalent of Baby Jessica at the time, and the added tragedy was that this photo was taken on the front porch with her new, custom-made Cabbage Patch doll just minutes before she vanished. 

Remember before when I said we were able to get this place for cheap? This is why. She vanished from my porch. My home.

And I had just found the first real trace of her in twenty-eight years.

This is why I called 911. And the local news. I should have chosen my words more carefully. I shouldn't have panicked.
I should have thought before they came stampeding out to my home, and I stood on my porch and held the disembodied doll head up before the crowd and declared that Angie had finally been found. I wasn't prepared for the reaction I got, but then I never am, am I?  Twenty, thirty people standing in the snow outside my house, all wishing their glares could cut me dead. Chief Talbot asked me questions, where I had found this, how long I had had it, if there was anything else I had to show him. He had to work harder to stay calm with each answer I gave him. The whole time, the news vans were pulling away, until only the chief and one of his deputies were left. He clearly saw how dumbfounded I was, and (calmly, so very calmly) explained that "trash from the creek" did not constitute a break in a thirty-year-old cold case. I must have looked truly pathetic then, because he offered to take the head into evidence, almost as a favor. 

So I have graduated from has-been to laughingstock. I was featured on the local news, but as some sick practical joker who tried to become famous off the back of a missing child. My students, who barely respected me to begin with, haven't even bothered to show up for class recently. Everywhere I go, I collect side-eye like it's my job, even from my wife. I've spent the last three weeks desperately trying to will it out of my memory.

And you want me to dredge this all back up...why? You say it's going to help me, that it will be cathartic to vomit it all out and help me discover the root of this "episode" as you call it, but let's not kid ourselves, shall we? You're one of them, a f_____g rubbernecker, a gawker, leering at the freakshow. 

Now that I've done what you asked, will you and the rest of humanity  f_____g shut up about it???
​
​

December 31, 2013

I am in a state of what may be the closest I will ever come to pure bliss in my entire life. I am sitting in the comfy chair in my office, dressed in my New Year's best, including my brand-new slippers and smoking jacket my dear, darling wife gifted me with for Christmas. I am sipping twelve-year-old Glenfiddich, a present from one of my old colleagues who still speaks to me and even kind-of still likes me. I'm not smoking a damn thing in spite of the jacket, because I actually want to taste this fine elixir with all of its peaty goodness before I get too buzzed to taste anything. I hear the laughter and the jollity of my friends and family in the next room as we count down the minutes to 2014, but only faintly, as I am also listening to my gift from my dearest jewel of a daughter: Disc Two of The Corries boxed set playing a 1976 concert version of "Loch Lomond." Listening to Roy Williamson's sad, wistful rendition of this shamefully abused tune melts even my flinty Caledonian-American heart, although I'm sure the scotch helps. 

Two things you may have noticed: one, I am, as the kids like to say in their text-speak, "Scottish AF," at least on weekends and holidays. Two, this famous folk duo's name happens to dovetail with my own. Tell me about it: I first noticed this when I was ten, and I've been a fan ever since. It's some beautiful stuff, and dear, sweet Randi took pity on her technology-challenged old man and bought it all for me on compact disc. I'd say my cup runneth over, but I keep emptying it too fast. (Rimshot!) I wish so badly that this feeling could last longer.

But the clouds outside just parted. The waning moon is like a searchlight, illuminating the frozen lawn like daytime. Through the window, I can see all the way down it to the Creek, which, unlike the lawn, refuses to freeze. I'm imagining that sluggish current, oozing from the that black hole in the woods like pus from an infected wound. That black hole, into which my beautiful music and delicious tipsy joy disappears. That f_____g unknowable abyss, which this week became just a tiny bit more knowable. 

​I went looking for that man in my dream. I didn't want to. I wanted to take everything I found and chuck it all into that filthy water and go back to corroding away on my front porch. I wanted to. But I also wanted to f_____g sleep through the night again and for my wife not to move out of the house, so I went looking. I Googled, I Binged, I might have Ask-dot-commed in a moment of weakness. I talked Rachel into a Take-Your-Husband-To-Work Day and searched through newspaper archives, which only reliably went back to 1901 and unreliably back to 1869 and didn't help at all. I went to our tiny, pathetic library, whose sole librarian gave me the bright idea of going to the town archives, which I should have done in the first place. I went and I searched all the way back to the town charter itself, drafted in September 1815, with its register of founding families. One name, a solitary man among all those nuclear clusters, stood out against that ancient yellowed page as if written in blood. 

Owen Hollister, Sergeant, Regiment of Riflemen. Part of a unit attached to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Mustered out March, 1815. Joined a party of settlers heading north from Cincinnati into the wild hinterlands of Ohio, and signed his name more obnoxiously than John Hancock on the document that birthed this place into being.

And then...? No death was recorded for this man in the register. All there was next to his name was the following cryptic statement and date: 

Lost, October 1815.

I went back to the library and adjusted my search to anything resembling a history of the town. The librarian brought me a tiny little book that looked as if it hadn't seen the light of day since it was printed. The catalog record confirmed this, saying the book had not been checked out once since the library bought it in 1986. The book was a self-published light history of the town written, to my shock and amazement, by a local writer! The idea that Sugar Creek had produced anyone of literary merit was as insane an idea to me as mammaries on a male bovine. 

"Lovely, Dark and Sweet: Stories from Sugar Creek" was the title, and it shared selected trivia and folktales from the town's founding up to 1985. The very first story was about "The Lost Founder," a sullen, melancholy war veteran for whom the town's founding was nothing less than a chance for redemption after years of killing. If that's what Owen Hollister wanted, though, it was pretty clear he didn't get it, and he withdrew from his fellow townsfolk almost before the ink on the charter had dried. The last time Hollister was seen was early one fall morning, plodding slowly and sadly along the Creek Road, now Logan Road, toward the woods. 

The book didn't speculate on the man's fate, but the tone of the story implies suicide. It makes some sense of the cursory verdict in the register: they would have wanted this handled discreetly. But I think of my dream, and I wonder...could lost literally mean lost?  For all intents and purposes, he just vanished without a trace, his true demise unknown.

Until three and-a-half weeks ago, I suppose. When I got to watch him get ripped limb from limb through the eyes of his murderer.

Godd__nit! I feel like a f_____g idiot for even putting this to paper! Everything in me revolts against this woo-woo psychic bullshit idea forming in my head. Yeah, these dreams are spawning a lot of wild coincidence, but that's all it is. This is all coming from somewhere in my subconscious, something I saw out of the corner of my eye, or read and dismissed, or heard in passing. Or something other than f_____g ghosts screening their home movies in my godd__n sleep!

Three minutes to midnight. My buzz is long gone, the music seems dissonant in my ears. I'm cold and uneasy and I want to be in a well-lit place among people again. I checked the book out*, and it lies on the desk in front of me, daring me to read more.  Maybe next year.

November 29, 2013

"Black Friday" is an amazing, evocative term. There's an old-world simplicity to it that suggests something eldritch, something unknowable that fills the heart and mind with dread. "Things were never the same in the little Appalachian mining town...after Black Friday." "Mothers anxiously shooed their children indoors and worried the beads of their rosaries as they watched the sun dip below the horizon, for they all knew the dangers that ranged the night on Black Friday." It's a term that begs to be loaded with something more significant than a yearly stampede at the local Wal-Mart.
​
It also perfectly describes my day today, since I just learned that the lead I thought I had found four weeks ago is in fact garbage. Good old N_______ from OHC got back to me today about the button. Thought it would be big, because who interrupts their Thanksgiving holiday to tell someone that your archaeological find is a giant crap-cake, unless they are some kind of sadist? (I'm not ruling this out, N_______; you seem like a nice guy but your timing is more than a little suspect.) So the familiar digits show up in my caller ID, and I answer the phone thinking this is it, this is the one, and then I get the message that the button does not date from the period I thought it did. 

Oh, it IS a genuine US military artifact, just twenty-five years too late to be tied to the Legend. The button was from the coat of an rifleman who served in the War of 1812. I ground my teeth and held my tongue as N_______ gave me the equivalent of a pat-on-the-head over the phone and told me, not terribly convincingly, not to give up on my windmill-tilting. I grabbed a turkey sandwich out of the fridge and a fifth of Jack out of the liquor cabinet (no glass for me) and have resumed my summertime vigil on the porch. It's a balmy seventy degrees outside, so I don't even need a coat. (Thanks for that at least, global warming.) Randi (who is home for the weekend) and Rachel are both staring at me through the front window with that look, you know the one, the one that pretends at concern but is really equal parts embarrassment and exasperation. Swapping bites of turkey with pulls from the bottle, and no ambrosia has ever been more...disgusting. Feh. Another few swigs and I'll be too numb to taste anything anyway. 

What are the odds? What are the odds on actually finding a datable military artifact in this pile of mud and having it turn out to be from the wrong f____ing war? And in the middle of all that other tantalizing but otherwise inadmissible evidence? I have half-a-mind to drunk-dial that prick N_______ and rip him a new turkey-hole for Thanksgiving. 

Also worth mentioning: I haven't found a single thing of historical value since Halloween. I dug my brains out for awhile, but all that I've unearthed since is a small pile of junk:
​

I wonder if there was an illegal landfill at the head of the creek at some point in the past; certainly would account for all this stuff being jumbled up together. There are some rings and bits of jewelry mixed in that might be worth something, but I haven't taken the time to clean them to find out. It's all in a box in the office closet...with the head. Why haven't I thrown that out yet? 


December 7, 2013

Back on the porch again, early morning. It's cold today, no unseasonal heat. I'm shivering, but not from the cold. I just finished emptying my guts into the toilet, and the chill is a relief. My penmanship is likely garbage right now, but I have to get this down before I lose it. 

You've probably already guessed it, Dr. V________, but the dreams are back, and they're worse than before. I'm just not sure what they are trying to tell me this time.

Cannon and small arms fire has filled my unconscious mind these past few nights. I'd wake up every morning with my throat and eyes burning from black powder smoke, like I'd just dropped in from the Siege of Yorktown. Shouts battered my eardrums, all in English this time, and flashes of red and blue uniforms faded in and out of the battle haze. I was semi-lucid in these dreams, and I ranged around, straining for some hint of where I was. All I could figure was that it was nowhere near Ohio. I saw trenches and defensive earthworks, Spanish moss hanging from artillery-blasted trees. I smelled water, lots of it, close at hand, with a faint trace of salt. 

​I saw the button, too, of course. Saw a whole bunch of them, dangling from blue coats lined up in a row behind long guns along the trench line, rifle fire crackling in the air. Sure, fine, very exciting, great detail and all, but what the f___ did this have to do with the creek? Hard to say if the headaches or the frustration were more intense when I woke up. 

Last night, though...it couldn't have been more different. I was in a place of near-complete silence: no guns, no shouts, not even birdsong. All I could hear was the faint trickle of water flowing, and the faint rustle of grass as a solitary figure walked toward the source of the sound. I knew in a second this was the creek. My point-of-view was nearby, just inside the treeline, and I just gazed out at this figure for the longest time. He had knelt down by the water with his back to me, and he was partly in shadow, yet he was quite clearly at complete ease, peaceful, drinking in the quiet and the solitude.

I might have shared his outlook, but for two reasons: one, the silence did not seem peaceful at all to me, but incredibly tense, like everything was holding its breath to see what happened next. The second reason, and definitely the more significant one, was that everything in this dream was...well...red. (Like how I wrote that in a different color, Dr. V________?) It was like I was viewing everything through a thick, translucent smear of blood. I felt myself try to blink several times, to clear this gore from my eyes, but they seemed lidless, and would not respond. 

Suddenly, I felt myself launch forward toward the figure. I felt huge, massive, as I erupted from the brush and raced across the open space. My vision doubled, then quadrupled, and I realized I was seeing him from all sides, multiple points of view all converging on him in the center. It was a him, as I could see all the details now:  a man in a familiar coat, with familiar buttons that flashed in the sun as he jerked upward and careened back, his red-stained face and eyes frozen in fear, mouth open to scream - 

It's kinda something how florid my prose gets when I'm recounting these dreams, especially when you consider I just finished horking up last night's dinner five minutes ago. That and the self-mockery you've witnessed helps me to objectify the situation, to separate myself from the mortal terror that chased me awake, from the shriek that started in his throat and ended in mine and now is the reason why my penmanship sucks so bad because I can barely keep a grip on it with how badly my hand is shaking...

What should I make of this, Doc? Prior to two months ago, I'd say it was just a nightmare. But the last time this happened, it...connected to something real, for want of a better (crazier) term. What does this connect to, then? Is it just leftover flotsam from last time? Or something new? And if it is somehow...significant, what is it significant of?

​How do I dare answer that question, given what it could mean?

One other thing, and I'm not really sure how to explain this. I shot out of bed, sweaty, bellowing, and raced down the hall, barely making it to the john before my stomach turned inside out. But there was a moment, just a flicker between sleeping and waking, where an incredibly powerful sensation seized control of me, all the stranger due to my nausea just a split second later. 

In that brief moment, I was hungry. Ravenously, insatiably hungry. Like I could eat the world. 

​What follows has been edited for content and relevance to the ongoing investigation
into events in Sugar Creek, Ohio on the night of September 26-27, 2015. ​
​

October 30, 2013

I like to think I'm a pretty logical guy. I don't believe in ghosts, I don't throw salt over my shoulder when I spill it, and I don't put stock in things like "omens" or "fate." I am with Frank Herbert on the subject of fear: it is the little death, the mind-killer, and giving into it for irrational reasons is tantamount to surrendering your status as a higher organism. It's beneath my dignity to be scared of the unknown. 

That said, I am ashamed to say that dolls have always freaked me the f___ out. 

I can't put my finger on an inciting incident, a "traumatic moment" from my past leading to my lifelong hatred for the things - it's always been the case as far as I know. I just can't stand them. When Randi - Miranda - was a child I used to insist she keep the little buggers in her closet when she wasn't playing with them, way in the back. God bless her, she tried, but you know how kids can be, and I had more than my fair share of mini heart attacks coming into a room and seeing one (or worse, a pack of them) sitting in the middle of the floor, staring up at me. 

And I think that's the thing of it, not the dolls themselves but the faces. The eyes, those dead, unblinking globs of plastic that just seem to fix on you, no matter where you are in the room. I wonder if there's something in our biology, some evolutionary instinct that is triggered by the relentless, even predatory challenge in a doll's eyes, raising our hackles in spite of ourselves. We know intellectually that there's nothing there, that it only mirrors the animosity we project onto it. We know this, and yet we don't dare shift our eyes away from it, for fear that it won't be in the same place it was when we look back. 

But I'm woolgathering. Enjoy this brief little window into my soul, Dr. V_______. I have more important fish to fry. 

I crashed pretty hard following my epiphany by the dawn's early light a few weeks ago, but my sleep was the sleep of the just, blissful and dreamless. I rose a few hours later like the phoenix from my bed of ashes and marched out to seize my destiny, to the blue ash at the edge of the treeline.

​

I can't figure how I (or anyone else) could have missed this: the tree trunk was a road map of antique conflict. Along with the bullet holes, there were gouges and scars from edged weapons, most likely axeheads. The base of the tree was covered with long, deep scratches that went all around its circumference. I confirmed a suspicion I had when I placed the tips of my fingers against a group of them - they were from human fingernails. I imagined a fighter on the ground, clutching the trunk for dear life as a group of his enemies struggled to tear him away, inflicting all manner of grievous wounds on him as they did. There was a savage fight here, and I could barely contain my excitement. 

That excitement was tempered pretty quickly when I tried to dig in one of the bullet holes with my pocket knife. The wood was as hard as rock, and I gave up after I nearly broke the tip off in it. (Weird how the wood was hard enough to resist my knife, but had once been soft enough to be scratched up by fingernails? Not sure what to make of that.) Nonetheless, I wasn't deterred. The shot pattern on the tree all pointed in one direction: into the woods. I just needed to be more patient and methodical about how I searched.

I came back the next day ready to conduct nothing less than a CSI-level investigation. OK, I wasn't exactly that scientific about it: I picked a spot inside the trees in the direction the bullets had been flying and laid out a grid on the ground with string. I numbered all the sections and kept careful track of what I found in each one in order to paint a full picture of what had happened. Like most things in life, I expected this to be the same: a lot of work for precious little payoff. 

It wasn't.
​

Musket balls. Arrowheads. A bent piece of metal that I'm pretty sure is the butt-plate of a rifle. All manner of coat buttons. I was over the moon with everything I was finding, but then I found this:
​

This is a button from a from a US military jacket. Undeniable. PROOF! I nearly danced a damn jig right there in the middle of the creek bed. Images of grandeur paraded through my head: the acknowledgement of my find from the OHC, the press coverage, the accolades, the James Arthur Corrie annex of the Sugar Creek Museum of Pioneer History that doesn't exist yet. The promise of future greatness was intoxicating, and it momentarily distracted me from the large number of peculiarities accompanying my discovery.

For one thing, it was all just under the surface. I barely had to dig at all before finding the first musket ball. Second, apart from the corrosion of age, it was in pristine condition. None of the bullets I found had been fired - no fragments, no flattened remnants, just perfectly round pieces of lead. Then there was the scatter pattern: there wasn't one. Almost everything I found was in the center four squares of my grid, like they had been dumped there in a pile. 

And there was this f___ing thing right in the middle of all of it:

My soul momentarily separated from my body when I saw it staring up at me from the muck. Once my heart rate returned to normal, I really started to worry. What was this trash doing in the middle of a pile of 200-plus-year-old artifacts? Would this "corrupt" the find somehow? Maybe I can avoid mentioning this when I send the button off to my old buddy N_________ at OHC. Sure, it's a little unethical, but maybe it won't matter in the final analysis? Crossing my fingers on that one. 

The artifacts are safely labeled and locked away in my desk drawer. Not sure why, but I also kept the doll head. It's from an older-model Cabbage Patch Kid, with blue eyes and remnants of red yarn hair. Looks like it was an expensive one: there are hints that it may have been customized. 

I put the head in a freezer bag. Inside a paper bag. Inside my locked office closet. Facing the wall. 

​(I still feel like it's looking at me.)

Yeah. Look upon my works and despair, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Or Gordon Lightfoot. Whoever I was trying to ape with this drivel. Guess I won't be quitting my day job to become poet laureate of Sugar Creek after all.

Or a mystery-solving archaeologist, for that matter.

Today is our fair hamlet's 198th birthday, and about a month out from the 222nd anniversary of the events of our dubious legend. Seems a fitting day to announce that all my hopes for my great summer find have come to naught. I sent the remains of the pistol lock to a Mr. N_________* at the Ohio History Connection about ten days ago, along with my theories. He actually called me, which gave me some initial hope, and made some interested noises, but said even without testing they were unlikely to find anything conclusive from something so degraded. He said some things about interchangeable gun parts, musket balls, campaign buttons, and other things that might narrow the find down to a few decades, if I could locate them.  I really wasn't listening that hard after the first bit. But I got the hint that proving such a major discovery from a few rusty gun parts would be "next to impossible." That rang through loud and clear. I thanked him and hung up. Then I went out on the porch and sat, listening to the sound of no birds. 

I'm still sitting here, looking upon all my works culminating in this shitty poem, and...well, you know. Feeling profoundly stupid. What the hell was I thinking? Indiana Corrie was going to roll up with this piece of junk coiled in his bullwhip and be hailed as the greatest treasure hunter since Howard Carter? God. Did I really think that? I'm horrified to say that, yeah, I did. You'd think I'd be used to humiliation by now, but somehow it stung more this time. When you hang so much on something so trivial, it just shows how little else you have.

Pathetic.
Old.
Man.

* Note: while Mr. N__________ acknowledges receipt of this artifact from Mr. Corrie on September 19, 2013, it has since gone missing from OHC storage and has yet to be rediscovered.
​

October 13, 2012 ​

I'm on the porch. I'm sleep-deprived out of my skull. My hands are shaking as I write. I'm getting red clay all over everything. And I don't think I've been this excited in my whole life. 

You know the cliche "it came to me in a dream?" Sure, we all do. As a plot device, it's eye-rolling, lazy and laborious, a deus ex somni placeholder for something better to come along and propel the story forward. Nine times out of ten, that "something better" never shows up, leaving you with pure, pulp garbage. 

Well God help me, something in my subconscious doesn't realize what a hack it's being, 'cause it came to me in a godd____d dream. 

I slept badly the night my little fantasy fell apart. Rachel said I thrashed around so much in my sleep it drove her out to the living room. I woke up with a full-body tension headache and a vague memory of loud, disturbing dissonance in my dreams. Lurched through my classes the next day like a zombie, although I doubt the zombies I teach much noticed. Didn't think much about it - until it happened again the next night. And the next. And the next. More than two weeks of high-anxiety night-sweating that had me wondering if I'd acquired Mad Cow Disease and had my wife no doubt considering divorce and/or murder. Every night, the same blaring, unsettling noise saturated my dreams.

Then the noise started to shift. I'd say it was about five nights in that the wall of sound started to split and divide, becoming multiple, distinct sounds that became a little clearer each night. I realized that certain barking, staccato sounds were speech; that intermittent tapping was running feet; that gut-wrenching thuds were guns. It was as if I was listening to the soundtrack of a movie through a broken speaker system that was very slowly being repaired. 

By the time the images started to appear, the sounds were sharp enough that I could see the story: two groups of men, running. One clearly chasing the other. High-pitched, warlike cries and shouts of panic. Thunderous gunfire being exchanged, bullets hissing though the air and whining off of targets. The splash of something wet. One long, agonized scream of pain. The images by contrast were little more than disorienting flashes of light, and I'd wake up in an even worse mood than before, impatient for the two to sync up. (Rachel swears I yelled out "Focus!" in my sleep one night.)

Then last night...f___ing eureka.

The sound was nearly crystal clear. The images were blurry black-and-white hand-held. I made out trees, gray sky, snow on dead grass, shadowy legs running. Objects whizzing through the air too fast to see. Feet bursting into clear water. A hand, brandishing a long, dark object...

The pistol. It hung there in the frame briefly, then an arrow punched through the man's wrist and it sailed off into Sugar Creek -

​I was halfway across the front lawn before I woke up fully, running full-out for the creek. I was barefoot but wearing pants, thankfully, and had a trowel in my hand that I must've grabbed from one of Rachel's flower pots. I could hear Rachel on the porch, yelling something at me. I learned later that I'd scared her half out of her mind, leaping out of bed bellowing at the top of my lungs. I didn't slow down at all, but dove to my hands and knees by the spot where I found the gun and started digging like a gopher, throwing water and rusty sediment everywhere. 

And I found bupkis. My adrenaline rush petered out and I collapsed sideways, panting like an old dog and looking like a homicide victim from all the red on me. If I'd had any breath to spare I would have laughed, and then likely puked and then cried, all in that order. What will Dr. V______ think of this, I wondered: I am officially certifiable. I laid there as Rachel raced toward me and dawn extended its rosy fingers along the length of the creek toward the opening in the trees...

And in that light, I saw something I had never noticed before:

​This blue ash tree just to the right of the entrance to the woods was pockmarked with holes and scars. Just riddled with them. The sounds of whizzing bullets and whining impacts that filled the dream now seeped back into my mind, and then I did laugh, silently and completely without breath. I had found it, I thought. I was Archimedes in the godd____d bathtub.  I flopped over on my back and I looked up at Rachel leaning over me, staring at me like I had grown tentacles. I beamed at her, and reached out to embrace her in my muddy arms. She squawked and fell back on her ass, and I laughed out loud, choked a bit in the middle, but managed not to puke.

This is it. This is the start of something amazing.
​

September 13, 2013

Found this journal under a pile of old school papers in the office. Part of me vaguely recalls burying it there sometime in mid-July.  Wouldv'e driven a stake through its heart if it had been an option. I'm rereading some of the crap I wrote on my worst days this summer, and there were some bad ones where I nearly went mad staring at the walls: "Ate a sandwich. Sat on the porch for an hour. Went back inside. Couldn't take the silence. There don't seem to be any birds around. Think I'll go back to sleep." Jesus. Lucky thing I don't own a gun. 

BUT! My reversal of fortune has gone through its own reversal recently. I actually found a job (of sorts): adjunct teaching at the community college one town over. I swore to myself once upon a time that I would never re-enter that hell, but this summer taught me some provinces of Perdition are more pleasant than others. Gives me an idea for my first course: "Unemployment and Porch Sitting: Dante's Hidden Tenth Circle." 

Rachel's also done well for herself, securing a writing job for the town newsletter. (I still remember a time when the Sugar Creek News was almost a newspaper in its own right, although its hard to believe a town this small could ever support it.) She also does online test-scoring part-time for extra money, and between the two of us, we're doing all right. Randi just started her first semester at OSU, pursuing a double major in English and History. (I swear, I tried to warn her. I just hope that academia is kinder to her than it was to me.) She's also insisting that we start calling her "Miranda" now, and throws a fit whenever we slip up. It'll take some getting used to, I admit. 

Oh, and then there's this: 

 I found this toward the end of July, when desperation drove me off the porch and out for a walk along the creek. Not to overstate it, but this may have been the thing that brought me back. I saw the lock sticking up out of the rusty muck of the creek bed like a hitchhiker's thumb, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. A little digging and I found the rest. I'm sad to say it was intact when I pulled it out, but quickly disintegrated into its component parts.

For the uninitiated, I'll just say it: this is the lock and trigger mechanism for a flintlock pistol, easily two centuries old if not more. It woke my mind right the f___ up, and got the historian in me salivating. It also lodged a thought in my head that, weeks later, I still can't get rid of.

The Legend.

Could this be proof?

OK, I know I'm an idiot for even writing this. I've been ripping the townies for years for believing in this bastardized Washington Irving crap. Let's look at the facts: in two centuries, nothing has ever been found to corroborate it. Not one brass button, not one arrowhead, and not for lack of trying either. Back in the early '90s, around the bicentennial of the Legend, there was a small flurry of morons combing the creek with metal detectors. We were told it drove our nearest neighbor Bill Pryor apes__t, all these people swarming "his land." (He's claimed for years that his property extends deep into the woods, and gets pretty belligerent about it. He's a bit of a prick.) He made such a stink about it that he actually got the Town Council to ban metal detecting in Sugar Creek. The craze died out soon anyway, as all it produced was piles of rusty beer cans from the '70s. If anything was going to come to light, it would've been then.

But would it, though? Lots of big historical discoveries have happened by accident. The Lascaux cave paintings were found by a bunch of kids chasing their dog. Herculaneum was found by a farmer digging a well. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Terracotta Army in China, the Rosetta Stone, the god_____ed Venus de Milo, for Christ's sake. Why it is it so unlikely that I didn't just stumble across the thing that everyone else tried but failed to find? 

I've been sitting on this for a month and a half now. Why? There's no question that this is an artifact. Even if it's not proof of the Legend, it's still something. What could it hurt to check it out? What pride do I have left to bruise, anyway?

I realize in rereading this thing that I still owe a drawing of the creek from back in June:

In West Virginia years back, I saw a stream that had been corrupted by acid mine drainage. It looked a little bit like this, turned a bright vermilion by mineral pollution. There are no mines near Sugar Creek though, and never have been.  And the texture...the sheer viscosity of the water is just impossible to explain.  Every theory put forth to explain it - soil content, freak algae growth, bacterial infestation - none of it has held up. The Legend neatly fills the hole that science can't, and doesn't look like it will be dislodged anytime soon.