The Lost Archive

of uncertainty. Welcome to the Last Archive, a place I've been coming to for a while now to think about knowledge and the history of evidence. I'm Jill Lapoor. I'm fascinated by origins, When did something start and why? So for this final episode, I wanted to go on a quest for my own origins, a trip to the place where I first started asking questions about how we know what we know. I wanted to try to understand why, why exactly. I've gotten so worried about losing those things,

losing the ability even to know anything at all. Step over the threshold to the town where I grew up. Long before I was born. The town where I grew up was taken apart brick by brick, stone by stone, plank by plank, tree by tree. How long does it

take to build a town? I don't know. Decades, generations, clearing fields, cutting roads, building houses, planting crops, setting up a grist mill for grinding flower, a butchers, a bakers, a candlestick makers, establishing a church, a town hall, town common How long does it take for all that to be dismantled? I know that answer precisely nine years. In the eighteen nineties, the city of Boston was running out of drinking water. The Board of Health studied the problem,

looked all over the state of Massachusetts for solutions. Where could they get water? They decided the best solution was to dam a river, the Nashua River. They'd create a reservoir with the water from the dammed river and build aqueducts to bring that water from the reservoir to the city. Problem was the place where they wanted to build this reservoir, A beautiful valley, a bound to full four thousand acre floodplain. It was a town, the town of West Boylston, population

three thousand. Still, it was the best option, and the state decided to go ahead. In the name of progress. The state brought in the best engineers, drep plans detailed every inch of it, the dam, the reservoir, the pipes. The dismantling began in the year eighteen ninety five. Half the population of the town was displaced. The state brought in immigrant laborers battalions like my grandfather Giovanni Lapoor, to do the work. At night, they slept in shanties made

of old boards and rusty nails. By day, every day they took things apart three hundred and sixty houses, eight schools, six mills, four churches, nineteen miles of roads, and six miles of train tracks. The dam was finished in nineteen oh five, and then the valley was very slowly flooded with water, its vast expanse swirling round the stone foundations of dismantled houses rising higher higher, higher, like filling a bowl with sue to the very rim. It was as

if the town underneath had never been there. When we started this podcast three years ago, people kept getting the title wrong, the Lost Archive. It sounded so Indiana Jones. I had to keep correcting people. No, No, not the lost Archive, the last Archive. But I've come to see over these three seasons that a lot of the show really has been about loss. So instead of trying to avoid that title, I decided to jump right into it by going back to whist Boilston, the part of that

town that survived the building of the reservoir. By nineteen o eight, half the town had been flooded. The valley, or what had once been the main part of town that was long gone. But after the reservoir was filled the hills that part of town survived. What had once been the outskirts became the center. I grew up there in the nineteen sixty in nineteen seventies, I can't even tree. This giant spruce tree was here when I was a kid. Was the weeping so far the only thing the willow

tree in our backyard. I felt right bringing my producer Ben here. We first met, oh more than a decade ago, when he was a student of mine. He was one of those college students where you say, plainly, I'm the one learning here. We'd really gotten to know one another when he was working on his senior thesis about orson Welles.

Ben and I share, among other things, a love of old radio and dogs and eb White essays for the Last Dart I've We've taken a lot of road trips, but for me, the weirdest quest we'd ever undertaken was that trip to the house where I grew up, a tiny white brick fronted colonial across the street from a restaurant called The Manor. Ben got there before I did. I was standing out front of the house, and then I was like, you know, maybe I shouldn't just be

can here with those strange Yeah. I hadn't been back, probably since the nineteen eighties. You might think a historian would like to look back, to go back, but I don't like looking back at my own life. I'm also the opposite of a hoarder. I threw everything away, photographs, diaries, letters, pretty much junked all of it. I love reading other people's old male pawing through their archives, but not my own. I also never go back. Everything's different in my old

neighborhood now. The street used to be a sleepy little road and something closer to a raceway. Now. Our house was kind of raggedy, a little shabby, a vacant lot next door for kickball, wild BlackBerry patch in the back. None of that's there anymore. What hasn't been mowed down

has been tarted up. When I was twelve, the night before we moved out of that little brick fronted colonial, I walked through every room in the house in my pajamas in the dark, carrying a flashlight, casting its glow from corner at a corner, from floor to ceiling, trying to frame within the light and then commit to memory

every single object within my sight. The yellow laundry shoot, the cream and leather world book encyclopedias, the pink flowered wallpaper, the shelf of canned soups, the ashtrays in every room for my father's wooden pipes, the smell of his brigs tobacco everywhere. I wanted to memorize the contents of the entire house as if I were shooting a film, to keep and etch and preserve it in my mind, an

archive of my childhood. Nights afterward, I would close my eyes in bed and run the film again to watch it, so I wouldn't forget it visiting there looking at old photographs that would have been crazy to me. Instead, I kept it in my head. I can still unspool that film and watch it when I shut my eyes. I know where the soup should be shelved, the spot on the bumpy froumpy couch and the basement where my cat had kittens. The proper shade of pink for the bedroom

above the garage. I didn't like to store things, but I like to keep memories. I was always worried about forgetting, mainly, I think because I was so distressed by what distresses every kid. Grown ups seem to have forgotten what it's like to be small and powerless and scared. How could they for me. The place to go for answers to that question, for answers to every question was the library in West Boylston. That place was the Beaman Memorial Public Library.

He could walk there from our house, and I walked there all the time because it was one of my chores to bring all the library books back. How did you return all these books? I had this little red canvas rucksack that with these canvas straps that I really loved, and I don't know where I got it or if I picked it out, but like I remember thinking, this is exactly what a little girls should carry your books to the library. And I don't know why I like it.

I think I God, look at the library. I walked from my house to the library went partly through the woods, at least the way I took it. You walked across our backyard, leapt over a little brook, and traveled along a path through a shadowy pine forest. You got through the sort of BlackBerry field through you merged out of the BlackBerry patch, and all of a sudden you were

at the town common. There was the Catholic church, our church, the cemetery, a skating rink in the winter, a gazebo, and then you cut through this park like thing, which wasn't as landscaped as now. This is the center of town. Door to door. It took all of fifteen minutes. It's occurred to me more than once when working on the last archive, that this building, this little town library, lies

at its heart. When I say this thing at the top of the show about the place where the known Things go, I must be thinking about the Beaman Memori Royal Public Library, because that's the place where I anyway used to go to know things. Out front of the library there's a little monument to the town's revolutionary era founder,

Ezra Beamon. It's like how in The Simpsons there's a statue in Springfield to that town's revolutionary era founder, guy who goes by the name Jebediah Obadiah Zachariah Jedediah Springfield. So this is the famous Beeman watering trough, because I think his name is Jedediah Zachariah Obediahs. You can't get water for your horse here anymore, of course, the trough's empty.

It's just decorative. But back when I was a kid, I found it magical, a portal to another world, a kind of time machine, to a world where people had horses who needed water. And I was always curious about this mysterious founder, Guy are Ezra Beamon. In The Simpsons, Lisa sets her mind on unmasking Jebba Springfield. This quest takes her to Springfield's Historical Society, where she digs through

the archives and she finds the secret confessions of Jeopardiah Springfield. Know, ye who read this, there is more to my life than history record. That was exactly my girlhood fantasy. As I trudged every day into the Beaman Memorial Library wearing my red canvas rucksack stuffed with books, standing in front of the historical plaque. I can still feel a little bit of that thrill. This watering trough was erected in eighteen o eight at the old Beamon Tavern by Major

as Rabeam, and the founder of was Bolston. This is an ingering question. What does it mean to found a town? Is it like he showed up here and he was like, I like the cut of this valley and you should come out, or as Rabamon founded was Bolston in the way that most New England towns were founded by seceding from another town. The Beamon's settled in New England in sixteen thirty five. Ezra was born in seventeen thirty six. In seventeen sixty four he built the Beeman Tavern, where

colonists would laid a rail against British tyranny. Then he fought in the Revolutionary War. Starting in seventeen ninety three, he lobbied the state, hoping to establish the valley where he lived as its own town, separate from the town of Boylston. He won that battle in eighteen o eight, founded West Boylston and died three years later. How the

library got started, that's another story. West Boylston opened its first library in eighteen seventy eight, mainly with a collection of books donated by the writer, abolitionist and suffragist Lydia Moriah Child. That library was demolished for the reservoir, and so was Ezra Beeman's family farm, and so was the Beeman Tavern. Anyway, in nineteen eleven, when the New Town Center was just being built, after the reservoir was filled, Ezra Beeman's great grandson funded the building of a new

Town library. It opened the next year as the Beaman Memorial. It opened at the height of the progressive era, when public libraries represented the vanguard of democracy, These free, beautiful places open for everyone, especially for the waves of new immigrants, Hungarians, Jews, Italians like my grandfather. You know, probably the stateliest building in town. I mean, we're looking at it. It's a

you know, it's it's not gorgeous. It's a it's a sort of very kind of prim brick with white trim, two story building with the kind of pitched slate roof. It's not imposing, it's not monumental, but it communicates its public charter in the way it faces this little common and in the way it occupies the tip of this long triangle where the two main roads of the town are coming together. It just says, welcome to our town, and here is our world of knowledge. Ben and I

headed inside. We walked into a reading room with tall windows, long wooden tables equilt on the wall, each square stitched to depict an episode in the town's history. And it was very very quiet. You know how, It's like every library has the sign that says, like, maintain a library like atmosphere. Yeah, which is this kind of like very circular reasoning. I feel that this is a really clear illustration of a library type atmosphere. Upon coming in, you

feel it. The library was a lot smaller than I remembered. Also, it was a lot nicer. I could still close my eyes and picture where my favorite books used to be shelved, the corner where I liked best to read. Now when I go to a library reading room, it's a big library, Harvard's widen Air Library or the New York Public Library or the Library of Congress. The beam in reading room is the size of a living room, and all the more magical for at a tiny mystical palace. You see

all these quotes about libraries. They're penned up on the glass the very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man ts Eliott with u Isabella end a quote that's very last archivey. The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night. We're at the beginning of the episode. When I was a little kid, I spent most of my time in the children's room in the basement, where the librarian was named Missus Noise,

Missus Noise, who told everyone to be quiet. The children's room has since then moved up to the second floor. Ben and I headed upstairs. Rugged carpet, hip high shelves, pint sized chairs, stuffed animals. This is so cute. I love a children's every puppet theater start. Yeah, they have a painted puppet theater like a Jella. You graduate from the children's room and get set loose in the nonfiction and fiction stacks, the reference room, the card catalog, the

computer terminal. Everything in a library is there just for you and also just for everyone else. It's a public space for common knowledge and for community. But you could also take a piece of it back home in your backpack. Every step of the walk home passed the town Common, through the BlackBerry patch, winding a path through the pine woods, leaping over the brook sneaker squelching in the mud, rucksack on my back, walking through the beam in public library.

I began to think it had been just this all along, that I felt I'd lost the giddiness of carrying that weight, bringing home a stack full of books, believing they held all the answers, spirits seeping out of their pages. Every little town library that I've ever been to has its own version of a last archive, some tiny locked room. Sometimes it's in an attic, more often it's down in the basement where they keep old stuff, antiques, a lot

of it. It's junk stuff people donate to the library thinking it's amazing and collectible, but really it's pretty much trash, and then the library and has got to keep it, or feels obligated to keep it. I've seen very old and obscure books in these places, paintings, prints, unwanted bronze plaques, chipped marble statues, jewelry, boxes of beads, campaign buttons, moth eaten poncho's, ivory, chess pieces, stamp collections, faded photo albums.

Sometimes it's a treasure, though I found uncataloged invaluable portraits in these rooms. I once went to a town library where they had a mammoth tusk and preserved in plaster dinosaur footprints. I wouldn't be surprised to find a dead body in one of these places. Honestly, they're strapped, padlocked trunk full of bones. The last archive at the Beamon Memorial Library in West Boylstone is a windowless room in the basement with metal shelves and a dehumidifier humming. Anna,

the library director, let us in. There was a wooden reading table and a cardboard box filled with tiny white cotton gloves. Ben and I stretched them on and began pawing our way across the shelves. I always want somehow to touch everything, lay a finger across the spine of every book. Ben's got the same bug, I thought, watching his white gloved fingers tracing in boss titles as he read them out loud to himself, whispering, neither of us are hardly happier than when in a room like this.

Dust boars dancing in the light so much in so small a space musty. It smells like knowledge. And none of it exists online anywhere. Ezra Beamon's family Bible is here. Heaviest Stone, the guy who started the Farmer's Almanacs from West Boylston. So they've got a complete set of old Farmer's Almanacs down here. They've got the whole of Lydia Maria Child's Library, the hundred and seventy volumes that started

off this collection. There are also plenty of records of my own family, Photographs of my father, who was a public school teacher, in the town's high school yearbooks, smiling surrounded by the men's basketball team, or sitting behind a desk wearing a bow tie, smoking his pipe and looking shy.

Then there were also lots and lots of old maps and blueprints of the town, the two thousand acres of farms and houses and churches and mills that in the early eighteen nineties the water board was planning to flood. Plan of West Boylston after the survey of the Metropolitan water Board eighteen ninety eight, the state had to inventory every square inch of land and everything on it to pay property owners and to plan the engineering marble that was the reservoir in the dam. Each slope and incline,

the pitch and size of it all. Looking at the engineering plans blue with white lines like water and fishing line, I pictured what they hid. The farm or somesow once had a record number of piglets. Could almost hear them squealing the hayloft where lovers met on autumn evenings, whispering over the thrumb of crickets. Their whole world had been reduced to these blue sheets of paper. And then, after the project had been completed, what did the State Waterboard

do with all those plans? They gave them to the town library. On the wall above the bank of drawers that held the blueprints, they hung a manuscript, framed and under glass, a letter dated nineteen twelve from the town Clerk's office, in much faded handwriting. We are deeply gratified that we are the recipients of a kindness, the final expression of a long cherished purpose, so appropriate and so timely. It was a resolution of thanks to Ezra Beemon's great grandson,

thanking him for the gift of the library. This gift will enable us, our children, and our children's children down through the generations to reap the rich footage of recorded human thought rich? Where is it? It's got to be footage. No, it's not footage vintage. I just could not figure out this weird old word. Could not see the letters tell one from another, could not sound it out. I found myself in a library unable to read the word. Is footage?

Is not the rich footage of recorded human thought? Okay, so we had not. I found the equivalent of Jebediah Obadiah Zachariah Jedediah Springfield Secret Diary. But honestly it was better this tribute to Ezra Beemon's great grandson. This gift will enable us, our children and our children's children down through the generations to reap the rich. It's a good thing. Ben was with me. He's much better at keeping his head at a word like footage. I mean, you can

read fruit, to read the rich fruited. It comes to this, the end. This is like, this is the original, This is the Incanla, the last dur Guy. We have found it here, and yet we cannot have it to read the footage of recorded human thought. This is where the known things go. This letter, pressed under glass, framed in wood, hanging on a wall, fading had been in this little basement room my whole life, a fifteen minute walk from

my house, and I'd never seen it before. It would have meant nothing to me when I was ten years old anyway, but it's been waiting here for the moment I needed it. Reading it, trying to read it gave me that same magical feeling I always get when reading something written long ago that says something to me, as if it had been written and sealed in an envelope and mailed to me, mailed to everyone, but we each get to open it up when the time is right.

It's very beautiful. The archives of old podcasts don't have stacks, no spines of books, not even any file drawers. Just MP three's floating in the ether, episodes about Rachel Carson and bird Song, about Pedro Gonzalez and Spanish language radio, about the polio vaccine and access Sally, and Soviet propaganda, everything from the Scopes trial to January sixth. The idea of a fictional archive had been Ben's, but the fictional

conceit always intersects with something real. That's what we found anyway. This love letter to Ezra Beemon's great grandson from the town clerk it was like that. I wanted to nab it, stick it in my rucksack, head off through the BlackBerry brambles, and carry it back into the last archive. But not everything lost finds its way to an archive. Not most things. Actually most things they just vanish. Ben and I had one more stop to the place where the lost things go.

So see how we're just driving down into You could imagine this just as a valley. It we're just really gone lower, much lower than we were. But this is the Wachuset Reservoir, and it's really very beautiful. When I grew up in West Wellston, the same as if everything involved around the reservoir, it was just so big. It's fast, really, which means that you're forever driving across it or around it. It's just a reservoir. Though you take it for granted.

You don't really think about it, except that I did. Maybe when I was six years old, my mother told me that under the reservoir used to be the town. I remember we were driving over this same causeway, and then I got obsessed with it, the drowned town under the water, the town haunted, flooded, vanished. I biked across here all the time, as a kid, this causeway, and I'm going to take a left here and go buy this hotdog stand, which is a famous landmark. Well used

to be Bobs, but I guess it's Roun's now. The last stop of this last last archive road trip to the watch Us Reservoir. Like when you're a kid, like there's your family, and there's your house, and then there's your street, and then there's your neighborhood, and then there's some sense of your town. It always felt like my town was just missing. My town had gone to its watery grave below all this water too, where the nipmuck dead w U sit. That's a nipmuck ward Nashua, the

river that was damned to make this reservoir. That's an Abanaki word. Maybe there's also something I don't know if this is like part of being a historian or I don't know if you think this is part of being a historian, but if you have to have some kind of affect of love of the past, like there has to be just an impulse there to feel the sense of belonging with it. It was a little scary to me, but some sense that it was some kind of purgatory

where the lost. We're trapped. And it's not as though I wanted to go visit them, not least because I can't swim. I have more than once come very close to drowning. I'm terrified of water, crazy scared of it. But I pictured it all the time. I wondered what might be down there at the bottom of the reservoir. The thing about the past for me is it doesn't ever really go away, like stuff that happened generations ago is.

It's still kind of there, like you can go find it, you can look it up, and the evidence that had happened is very likely still there. Below this water are the foundations of houses that haven't been there since nineteen o two, but the foundations are still there. You could still put on your scoopa gear and dive under this water and you would find you would find the remains. It was as if there had been these three places

growing up that it really mattered to me. My house which I loved and knew we were leaving and tried desperately to remember the library where they actually kept things, stored knowledge so that it wouldn't vanish, and this reservoir, which was where all knowledge was lost. Just sunk, disappeared. How do you find your way to that stuff without drowning?

After the break? Ben and I dive in. I remember in high school reading Adrian Rich for the first time poems she wrote in the early nineteen seventies, especially this one, Diving into the Wreck. Here's her reading it. I came to explore the wreck. The words of purposes, the words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroked the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed. These lines of riches just

spoke to me, then cut into my bones. It was exactly how I had always pictured diving into the reservoir, just going under the thing. I came for the wreck, and not the story of the wreck, the thing itself, and not the myth. The drowned face, always staring towards the sun, the evidence of damage, worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty, the ribs of the disaster, curving their assertion among the tentative horns, The evidence of damage, the ribs of the disaster, the wreck, the ruin. Ben

and I always joke about ruins and remains. How we both want to see those places. How that's a big part of how we imagined most episodes of this podcast, diving into Rex. We had all these trips and where we would go to some place where something used to be, Like here's where Ralph Allison's barn was. Yeah, you know, this is where West Boylston was. This is where this dead body was found. The parking lot where this crime was committed. This is where doctor do a little once

loved at the reservoir. We parked the car near the hot dog stand and near the reservoirs. One historic landmark, another kind of wreck. Now we're walking down this kind of gravel carriage road to the what's called an old Stone Church, which was a Baptist church built just a couple of years before the state decided to flood the town. The town's Baptist church right at this spot at the edge of the valley, had burned to the ground in eighteen ninety so the Baptists had built a new one

out of massive stones, unburnable to last forever. It was brand new in eighteen ninety two, and then the next year the state water Board made its decision to flood the valley. The Baptist congregation mostly left, fled to other towns like everyone else, but someone decided to leave the brand new stone church standing as a kind of monument. I guess it was just too new, too beautiful, too hopeful to dismantle what had just been mantled. Do you want to go inside the church? Yeah, let's going. It's

gotten so much Nacer. They really did this incredible job renovating it. When I was a kid, it was it had been just left since, you know, eighteen ninety five, and the roof had fallen in. I had been struck by lightning a few times, and it was really dangerous, and they had just put it like a chain link fence around it, and it was kind of terrifying. It's also very wholesome graffiti Eric and Tony true love stuff, Marry Me. There's no pews in it, there's no altar,

there's no stained glass windows. There's no windows at all. There's just holes it. It's a great looking little church, it really is. You can see why you wouldn't want to tear it down immediately after completing it. Yeah, it's beautiful. Is this the thing we'd come for? In the basement of the library. We'd found that letter on the rich footage of recorded human thought, common knowledge. In other words,

the theme of this whole season. I'd wanted to show Ben the reservoir because as it's beautiful, but also because I thought it m'd hold within its depths some answers about the theme of the whole podcast, the slipping away of certainty, the rise of doubt. And then we'd come to the church, a memorial to another kind of search for truth. One thing Ben and I share. We're both Catholic, and these holy places make us light headed with the

sense of the eternal mysteries. It's one thing we've both been drawn to puzzle over in this podcast, how the mystery, the unknown, what was known only to God, had been replaced by this secular idea of the fact, and then, more recently, the fact had been replaced by data, a wholly new kind of mystery, with its own priesthood, but without the love. Water flooding a valley, leaving it a ruin, a wreck. We sat inside for a long time, watching birds fly in and out, tending to nests in the rafters.

We heard picnickers outside, popping the lids on soda cans. I felt right that we'd come together, the two of us with a microphone and a recorder. We are I am, You are, by cowardice or courage, the one who find our way back to the scene, carrying a knife, a camera, a book of myths in which our names do not appear. When we were first struggling with what to call this podcast the Last Archive, the Lost Archive. For a long time, we'd wanted to call it the Evidence Room. Somehow, I

think that name was already taken. There'd been some talk of getting around that by calling the show Jillipour's Evidence Room. But I'm glad my name never appeared. It's not my room. It never was my room. This podcast started out as a kind of murder mystery. Who killed Truth? There's no royal answer, or really, if I'm being honest, there are only two answers. First, everyone killed truth, the dead, living, the old, the young, the left, the right. The evidence

is everywhere a collapse of trust. And Second, truth isn't dead, even though very often it's buried. A lot of it is floating around in archives and libraries and laboratories and classrooms and city halls and town commons and old churches. It's a question of finding it, saving it, deciphering it.

Who killed truth? I wish I could offer up a tidy ending, a big reveal, gather all the suspects into the conservatory, tell the story of my investigation, explain my methods, list every clue, and then in a flourish unmasked the murderer. But I can't, Ben and I left West Boylston and the Old Stone Church and the Beaman Memorial Library and trudged back into the Last Archive. We've met so many people, teenagers, scholars,

dog scientists, archivists, artists, farmers, hypnotists, naturalists, poets. We'd been so many places, We dived into so many wrecks and come up mainly only with more questions. Cleaning up the Last Archive, we got to talking about where we'd been and what we'd found out, trying to put the place in some kind of order. Yeah, theater tickets. Was there ever an organizing scheme or like, these are things that

fit in this drawer? Yeah, Well, it's an archive without an archivist, so that's always been sort of a problem. Oh wow, Look, it's all the episodes, every single episode of the Last Archive. How did those get here? That's weird for the birds? His first bird walk, I guess, And I'd like to have had a movie. Lstran LaVita Hobby was a lady in complete commerce. Repeat after me. I'm going to turn back through time and space? Did you turn the light on over there? I didn't touch it.

I don't think that doesn't even that doesn't look like artificial light. Ben, is that glowing? What's that sound? It's almost like did you hear that? The Last Archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, Ben Natt of Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our executive producer is Mi Lobell. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking by me Games. Original music by Matthias Bosse and

John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our full proof player is Robert Ricotta. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jennette Foundation. Special thanks to Anna Shaw and Steve Carlson at the West Boylston Beamon Memorial Library. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries.

If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist, a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jill Lapour. I've had my share of magic Archives, but this place isn't done with us yet. I left my keys with Ben. He went back to check out that freaky light. Nobody's seen him in weeks. I think that's a good sign.