Thoughtful in The Dark
My interest in writing dates back to my middle school years. I recall filling entire notebooks with information. Among the material I wrote are stories, points of view, anecdotes, and personal experiences that have shaped my life and continue to do so. Later, and during my college years, I decided to publish the material as a blog. As a result of accumulating a large following as well as positive feedback and petitions, I ventured into the world of podcasting. I transformed my written content into an audio experience for each episode. It is here that you have found me, and I will remain there so long as you find my work interesting. It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to my creative realm and into the depths of my unpredictable thoughts. Hope you enjoy! — Ralph
Thoughtful in The Dark
Paranormal: Finding Meghan
Every once in a while, I get this crazy ideas based on things that I read and sometimes watch either on TV or read in a magazine. This episode is one of them. This is a paranormal story that I created based on a slim desire to write about something different and to venture into a world I love to be in, the one where imagination leads me on! I hope you all like it.
Paranormal: Finding Meghan
The day looked fantastic! Tim was ready to do it all over again. Today he was hiking again. You see, it was his hobby. He loved nature and to interacted with it. This was not the first-time Tim hiked on Taylor Creek Park. He usually came here on his days off to admire the high trees, the beautiful tall grass and the vegetation that grew all around. This park was a famous park because of this. There is plenty enjoy there. A lot of people came in here just to enjoy nature and to liberate some stress from the everyday struggles. Tim Biltmore did as well. He was a journalist on a local newspaper recently graduated from this field, and ready to face any challenges that came his way, but in the right state of mind. So, hiking to him was not only about a set physical goal, but it also had to do more with the state of mind. This was the way he rebooted his thoughts and abilities to write.
And as the trail progressed and Tim continued to move forward, he was distracted by a small blue butterfly that began to fly over his left shoulder. At first, he didn't seem too surprised about it, because these type of beautiful forest creatures were all around, and so he continued his walk forward. He can clearly admire the small trail that he was walking on. Beautiful and tall pine trees everywhere. As high as almost touching the sky! He continued to admire the landscape and enjoyed the blue sky, the white clouds stamped all over it, and the variety of smells that the flowers produced. And while coming to the realization of such enjoyment, the blue butterfly once again made her presence known by flapping her wings louder over his left shoulder once again as he looked in admiration. He couldn't help it. He couldn't really hold back. He began to talk to her,
“How are you beautiful? Why are you following me?”
He found it amusing. But he also found it rather strange that he had such an unusual company during this hike. But it wasn't until the mid-top section of the route, about an hour and twenty minutes into the hike, where the trail splits. There was a Y on the road and with it, a decision-making process. Tim could choose to go to the left or stick to his right. The rightful and conscious decision would have been to continue to the right because this was the arranged trail path. To the left, however, there was an abandoned road—closed and blocked by a chain-link fence and a big sign that read off limits. The fence was rusty. It seems like it had been closed for many, many years. For some reason, Tim never actually saw this on his previous walks. Earlier on his trails, he was focused on speed and performance, not like today, when he was spending most of the time admiring the landscape. The blue butterfly continued to hover over this fence, in circular flight plan, as if asking Tim to follow suit. Tim suddenly found himself in a predicament. Whether to continue the trail to accomplish the day’s goal or suddenly follow the lead of his new blue friend, through this mysterious forbidden road.
“Do you want me to go that way? Do you want me to jump over the fence and continue to walk with you? Is there something you wanna’ show me?”
And as soon as these questions were formulated, the butterfly’s wings began to flap with even more intensity and flew a bit higher down towards that abandoned Rd. Team follow suit. He jumped over the chain link fence and continued to follow his blue friend’s fight plan. But something extraordinary happened as soon as Tim jumped over the fence. A sudden change of energy and the way it felt around him changed as soon as his feet landed over. It was almost as if he had stepped into a whole separate dimension, a different alternate reality. It became quiet. The sounds of nature were no longer audible and the little he could hear was extremely unpleasant. Tim began to feel uneasy by the whole scenario, but the unmistakable blue of her newfound friend kept flying forward leading the way.
The road became narrow now. The space around Tim continued to be less to his right. The density of the forest grew from an aggressive hill jump to his right and a significant dropped once again to his left, where water can be heard running below. Team was now focused on the butterfly. She continued to flap her wings until she veered to the left on a new section of the road. Not too far ahead, Tim noticed that the road ahead ended. At the end of this secluded dirt path was now an old hanging wooden bridge. Tim was scared. He did not know what to do from this point on. He didn't know whether to take the risk of crossing this old structure or turn around. But once again, he was convinced by his blue friend’s flight to continue forward. She flew right ahead and waited for him over the other side. Team made his move. Although hesitant, he continued to walk forward. He did not understand why he would take such a risk and led by that train of thought, he's mental question, became a spoken inquiry,
“Why? Why would I risk going through this old wooden bridge? It's too risky, too scary. I think this is as far as I will go. Do you see this drop? I'm sorry, I can’t.”
As soon as this statement concluded from the other side of the old bridge, he could clearly hear a female voice that gently disturbed the airwaves by saying,
“Help me!”
Tim’s heart jumped to his throat! He was trembling in fear after hearing that clear voice of despair. He now understood that whatever this butterfly was trying to accomplish, had to do with the fact that she wanted him to help someone. There was a girl crying for help somewhere on the other side and suddenly, the wooden bridge did not seem too scary anymore. Tim began to walk slowly over the wooden planks laid on it. Breathing deeper in his fear as he went along. Step by step he continued to conquer his fears and to dominate the thoughts that described him falling to the seemingly endless depths towards the bottom creek. He maintained his eyes forward. And one after the other one, he finally crossed over.
His blue flying friend seem to celebrate this accomplishment with another display of flying technique in circles around him. It looked as though she danced for him, but as soon as she concluded this brief celebration, her attention was now on a small grass-opening that led to the bottom of what it looked like an endless cliff of a mountain! She was directing Tim to go down.
“Do you want me to go down there, to follow this this tiny path?”
The butterfly gave three quick spins as if agreeing with the interpretation. Something however, changed this time. Tim’s new blue flying friend did not follow. She kept her position, steadily hovering over the spot in a symbolic temporary-separation ritual. She had come as far as she was permitted to. From this point on, it was Tim’s turn to take charge.
“You are not coming, huh? Are you saying I must continue alone?”
As soon as these questions flew over the blue butterfly’s senses, she slowly began to disappear until Tim could see her no more. Tim turned around and looked at the trail he was about to take, second-guessing his decision to continue but as quickly as these thoughts invaded his rationale, that mysterious girl’s voice echoed once again inside his beating heart,
“Thank you!”
Tim took a deep breath and began to climb down. At approximately his third or fourth step of his descend, the winds gathered an extraordinary amount of strength, and his eyes began to see that from the bottom of hill, moving upwards in a fast aggressive charge, was a spinning vortex. Like an almost invisible tornado of energy that moved rapidly in his direction. As soon as this energy phenomena touched his body, a powerful surge of energy blew from its internal core, and with it, a vision appeared in Tim’s consciousness!
In this vision, he saw a group of teenage girls with backpacks and hiking equipment on the trail he had just left behind. Suddenly, he can see them jumping over the fence of the blocked forbidden road. They were all laughing and acting as if they were having a good time. It was right after they had jumped the fence, when the same dark energy that engulfed Tim a few hours earlier, came over them as well. But in the vision, after that dark energy stroke, all the girls disappeared except one. She had a purple backpack with a large letter M embroidered on it. There was a lucky rabbit’s foot attached to the hole of the main bag’s zipper handle. It looked like a school backpack, but with much dirt on it. Tim could hear the wind picking up strength ion this vision, and he also saw the girl’s confused face as she realized what was happening. She seemed disoriented, confused. Along with the gusty winds, Tim was able to also distinguish a very strange yet disturbing sound.
From what seemed to have been the tall pine trees shadows, ghostly and disturbing creatures began to form. These ghouls of demons where materializing from both the winds and the dirt that rose from the strong winds. The girl began to scream at their presence! She could see them appearing all around her, and her shock held her still only to the point she could no longer resist, and then started running for her life. Tim could see this but could not interact with it! It was as if a giant projector had been laid in front of him to see. He felt a mixture of feelings that mainly came from fear, confusion, and despair. This poor girl was being attacked by entities he could not readily identify and there was nothing he could do about it. She dropped her bag on her desperate attempt to free herself from the creatures, and when Tim got close enough for him to see a name on the bag written with a black marker. It read Meghan.
During his senior year in college, just about ready to begin his internship with a local newspaper, the headlines were all about the mysterious disappearance of a girl in a northern suburban town in state of Oregon. The news about this case were just about on every televised newscast and even documentaries where theories and speculative scenarios were presented. It had been years now since this poor girl’s disappearance that she was now considered dead by many, to include her own family. Tim wondered if the girl with the bag in this vision, was the same girl in the news. But how could that be? Many years had already passed. Time travel certainly is still unattainable, and no common sense could have been strong enough to make sense of it. The fact is that bellow the name written in the bag was also a year. Tim read Meghan 1989.
And that was it! That was enough for Tim to understand that something strange and unworldly was taken place. He has been transported, perhaps, with the aid of the vortex, to a different time and dimension. He was there in that dark forest, witnessing demons rising from the dirt, with that girl but at the same, he wasn’t! Nothing about his made sense, and Tim suddenly thought of his blue butterfly friend, hoping to see her flying with new instructions, but it wasn’t meant to be this time. Tim had no option but to follow this girl and try to figure out what to do next. He took off running after her until the darkness of this strange forest swallowed them all from view.
Although the subject of multi dimension portals is one that strikes for a great evening conversation, details and facts about its existence are but scarce. It has all been left to conceptional information and ideas of whether they truly exist or not. In the case of Taylor Creek and Tim, it seems that those rare predicaments of both imagination and facts converged into a real portal that took him not only to see otherworldly things, but it also had sufficient energy to take him somewhere else. Exactly three days after he went out hiking, Tim’s solar-powered cellphone rang, once again, somewhere in time…
“Hey Tim, this is Andrew. I am not sure what has happened to you or where you have been these past few days, but it has become official my man! Please, return this call as soon as you can. There is a Police Report out already. Call me back as soon as you can! You have officially been reported as a Missing Person!”
— R. Cortes / TITD The Podcast 2022