Hi. So it turns out that when I said I'd be back after the first of the year, I meant april, but all that matters is that we're here now. Ready to hear some scary stories from my neighbors, but we need to cover some weird bases before we dive into our next batch of neighbor interviews. I think we can all agree that my town is unique over the years we've heard stories of haunted houses, demon nest filled basements, lizard monsters, ill intentioned fairies, poltergeist even mimics.
It's always been weird here in that don't look over your shoulder as you run up the basement stairs kind of way, that certainty that something is watching you from the treeline sort of vibe compared to what's happening now. The past spooks seem downright harmless. Maybe that's not the right word. May be old fashioned is a better description of our past interviews. Whereas I was hearing from people with one ghost, one demon, one monster.
Now we've entered a place of multiple and varied spooks, a place of trolls and prophetic visions. Time slips, truly ancient forces that make demons seem almost tolerable. This new level of weird began to ring some bells. If you haven't yet watched hillier seasons one and 2. I watched it on amazon prime, please do So it's a fun documentary style series about aliens, but not really. I bring it up because it introduced me to the concept of liminal spaces and high strangeness.
I feel like I've mentioned this here before. Maybe I don't want to repeat myself. But the movies also introduced me to a stack of fantastic books, one of which is the trickster and the paranormal by George P. Hansen. It's a dense wordy tome which I'm not quite intelligent enough to completely understand but I still got a lot out of dim dumbing my way through it.
It helped me to better understand the concept of liminal spaces and their connection to or maybe influence on the weird, I'm going to do some quoting here, brace yourself in the book. Hansen states the paranormal and the supernatural are fundamentally linked to d structuring change, transition disorder, marginality, the ephemeral fluidity, ambiguity and the blurring of boundaries.
In contrast the phenomena are repressed or excluded with order, structure, routine, stasis, regularity, precision, rigidity and clear demarcation. That was on page 22 way later in the book, he talks about how in times of transition, a number of people are likely to have visionary experiences. That one was on page 406.
So like in times of change in the in between or as Hansen calls it in liminal spaces or my favorite way that he puts it in the betwixt and between, that's where spooky stuff tends to slip through into our reality or perhaps we're slipping through into there's I don't know,
but isn't that exactly where we find ourselves now be twixt in between our past and future in that liminal state that exists between pandemic and aftermath between religion and true awakening between invasion and world war three.
I know I'm not the only one white knuckling, waiting for what comes next feeling like I'm stuck between the startled intake of breath and that relieved exhale all of this rambling is to somehow say that, yes, my town is really weird, but I'm willing to bet you a venti soy latte with one shot of pumpkin spice syrup that your town is getting weird too. Things are slipping through everywhere. And this is what ties together our next tiny batch of weird stories.
Wellesley may have a baseline of weird, but that line is trending upwards. We're in the midst of change and that's where we'll meet next Friday, April one.