Welcome to Day 3 of Cle Elum Memories. This is the day that may convince you I’m delusional. And if I hadn’t experienced these things with my own eyes and ears, I might be inclined to agree with you you, but since I did indeed experience them, I can no longer consider anyone else delusional who confesses that they’ve had similar experiences in their lives. Living through these close encounters makes one a firm believer in ghosts and UFO’s (including Jimmy Carter and DeForest Kelley, both of whom are/were military men with plenty of exposure to the aircraft of their times)!

 

First, the stuff that’s easy to believe

 

One day I was riding my Yamaha 125 on the Krafts’ property. I was headed back toward the powerlines on my motorcycle when I discerned some unusual movement up ahead.

 

Luckily, I stopped.

 

Because when I did, I spotted a sow bear just ahead of me on the bike/horse trail with two (maybe three, I don’t remember now) cubs with her.  She was on one side of the trail and they were on the other,  about 100 feet ahead of me.  If I hadn’t seen her when I did, I would have invaded their space and become the object of her wrath.

 

Instead, she heard the bike slow and stop and the motor idling and stood up on her hind legs to see if she could get a good look or a whiff of me. She snapped her jaws a few times. I knew what that meant, so I turned around and skedaddled out of there, leaving the sow and her cubs to claim the trail as their own.

 

Manmade Lakes

 

In addition to Horseshoe Lake, which Dad blasted out of the ground in the middle of a field using fertilizer and some other compound (THAT was quite the experience, watching that go off!), he also built (I believe using a tractor and blade) a shallower pond in our new back yard in Cle Elum (the one across the street from the old stagecoach stop we lived in at first for several years where I saw the ghost — that story is coming up).  After allowing  his new pond to fill with water, he bought several thousand rainbow fry to stock it with so we’d have a fishing hole when they grew large enough to eat.

 

The problem (according to him) was that the native wildlife — especially the herons in the region — found Dad’s pond full of fish not only irresistible but easy pickings because it was so shallow.  So, several times a day for months we would hear Dad swearing a blue streak about the G-D M-F herons. He’d grab his gun and head out the back door, only to have them flap their wings and fly away before he could draw a bead on them. (I was glad about that!)

 

And when he tried to shoot them by opening the sliding glass door a little and poking his rifle out, I called foul and said, “For heaven’s sake, Dad! You put a gazillion fish in there. If they eat a few, so what?!”

 

“They’re MY fish!” he proclaimed.

 

“We’re living in their habitat, Dad. Cut ’em some slack!  You let me catch fish for my hawks!”

 

And speaking of hawks

 

While I was raising the baby hawks that Dad brought to me after accidentally running over their nest in a hay field (mentioned in an earlier blog post recently), I used to go fishing in the pond and in nearby streams for fish to feed the birds.  One time I was looking into a shallow stream when I saw a garter snake go into the water and catch a small fish.  I was thrilled to my toes to witness the spectacle.

 

Another time, after reading that Native Americans used to catch fish bare-handed (hawks and eagles, too), I was mesmerized and thought I would try my hand at catching a fish bare-handed.

 

I spotted several rainbow trout in a shallow ditch just hanging out in a shady spot, so I got down on my belly and slowly lowered my hand into the water and left it there.  After several minutes, I slowly inched it closer to the fish, hoping it would regard it as a passing overhead shadow or something. Apparently that’s what happened, because in the next instant, I grabbed that fish and pulled it right out of the ditch, proving myself capable of Native American (pardon the expression) “Injun-uity.”

 

I also had a de-scented skunk named Fancy. I don’t recall how I got her, but I have a vague notion that a veterinarian gave her to me.  I raised her in the fireplace in our front room.

 

The fireplace faces (plural) opened into two different rooms in our new home across the street from where the old stagecoach stop had been. My long-suffering mother allowed me to have a variety of critters because I was so critter crazy, even though she was critter averse, having been chased by geese, dive-bombed by bats, and chewed on by both dogs and cats in her forty odd years of life. But she couldn’t deny that I was born with a way with animals, and she let me have most of the ones I pined for.  She said no only to monkeys, which is probably why I want to live in Costa Rica someday. I will have a monkey (a wild one) to enjoy before I die, I swear it!

 

And now … for the weird, out of this world stuff…

 

Ghostly Fisherman Visits Me in the Old Stagecoach Stop

 

Man at the Wheel (Dressed like the ghost I saw)

Image by William Hayes, Pixabay

 

Until I actually met a ghost, I was firmly ghost agnostic.  I didn’t fear ghosts because I found the idea very hard to believe in.

 

My old bedroom in the stagecoach stop was upstairs. Its windows faced west and south, and whenever cars came down Nelson Siding Road, their headlights and taillights took the same routes across the walls in my bedroom. These lights were old hat to me, and I ignored them. They were always clear/yellow or red-tinged (headlights back then were clear or yellowish-tinged and taillights were red-tinged) and they followed usual paths across my walls without fail every single time.

 

But one night, with no cars coming or going, a large bluish-colored “background” of sorts appeared on one of my walls.  It was something I had never seen before, so it intrigued me. But when a man materialized in the middle of it, I freaked out, big time. Unable to speak or shout, my mouth dropped open and I held my breath.

 

The ghost was dressed just like the iconic New England Gorton fisherman (who first appeared in TV commercials 1975, which was ten years after my ghost appeared to me) except his outer garments appeared to me to be grey, not yellow.  Before I could identify much more, he came across the room toward me completely soundlessly (my bedroom floor creaked loudly whenever people walked on them, because the building was close to 100 years old!) and then stood beside my bed, looking down at me.  Then he reached down as if to touch me.

 

I dove under my covers and thought, “I swear to God, if he touches me, I will drop dead from a heart attack.”

 

I didn’t feel anything, so I waited for what seemed like five minutes, afraid to peek out to see if he was still there.

 

When I finally did, he was gone.

 

I didn’t tell anyone for a week.

 

For a full week, I kept the secret to myself, hoping the ghost would stay away. But when I finally told my sister Laurel about the incident she said, “You should feel honored that a ghost would appear to you.”

 

Honored?!  Seriously?!

 

Then I began to revisit the visitation and I realized that the man’s countenance had been kindly and concerned, not malevolent or scary.  I had gotten scared simply because I was completely unaccustomed to getting up close and personal with a see-through disembodied spirit!  So, I began to school myself, telling myself, “If he comes again, I will do my best not to be scared.”

 

He never came again but I have wondered, time and again, since that night if perhaps he had a sick child in that stagecoach stop who had died there (or perhaps he had died there before he knew her/his fate) and if his spirit was intent on making sure he or she was okay… I wish I knew. I do know that I will try to remain unafraid if I ever encounter another ghostly spirit. I was unkind to this one by being so freaked out by his arrival and presence.

 

UFO ENCOUNTER

 

One dark night during what I guess was probably midsummer, the Kraft kids and Jackie and I were in the Krafts’ barn loft when we heard a whirring sound overhead that was NOT a helicopter or an airplane.

 

One of the Kraft boys asked, “What’s that sound?” and I said, “I don’t know…” but I was scared and didn’t feel much like investigating.

 

That didn’t last long because everyone else jumped up and ran out of the barn to try to identify this weird anomaly in the sky.  So I jumped up, too, mostly because I didn’t feel safe in the barn all by myself.  (I was not usually a scaredy cat, but this noise was definitely other-worldly and I became anxious.)

 

When I got outside, all of us looked up and saw a spinning, bright metallic object that seemed to be about 500 feet above us (although in the dark, it was hard to tell, but the noise from the craft seemed to be about that far away).   The Krafts’ parents heard the object and came out onto the porch and witnessed the same thing.

 

The object went across the valley, stopped in place, then backtracked directly in the path from whence it had come, and then — in an instant — took off at what appeared to be phenomenal, unearthly type speed.  In a single instant, it was gone, just like that.  We watched it for what I guess was about five minutes, all told, before it warped out of there.

 

When we asked the Krafts what it was, they had no idea.  Someone said, “It looked like a flying saucer. We should report it.”

 

The adult Krafts said, “Absolutely not.  People will think we’re crackpots. Don’t you tell a soul!”

 

Well, not long after that, the GOP representative in our region reported seeing the same thing!  (That was back in the day, when Republicans could be trusted…)