Dopplegangers, a trip to the underworld, and a big black bird
Frater Pera guests on the Euphomet podcast
When I was a little kid, I checked out a book about ghosts from the school library. School libraries used to have that sort of thing in their non-fiction sections. At least, the cool ones did. My mother saw it and remarked that she and my dad lived in a haunted house in Marblehead, Massachusetts in the days just before I was born. It was classic stuff: the sound of phantom footsteps, blinking lights, the family dog barking at and following an unseen presence as it moved around the room. This ignited a fascination in me that would come to define a lot about me in the days to come. Where other boys my age chased basketballs and footballs, I chased down everything I could find about the paranormal at the local library. And all my life I’d gnash teeth and rend garments, frustrated that for all my fascination and desire, nothing weird ever happened to me. I never saw a UFO. The houses my parents moved us into weren’t infested with malevolent, noisy spirits. Well, eventually one of them was, but not until I was an adult. As a kid I wanted so badly to be the subject of a paranormal adventure and it bummed me out that I didn’t the sort of luck that kids my age did in Hollywood adolescent adventure movies.
But here’s the thing: It was happening all around me. All the time. It just didn’t match my expectations.
Euphomet is one of my favorite podcasts. Its host, Jim Perry, is Ira Glass for the modern weirdo set. He’s thoughtful and soft spoken and is an excellent interviewer. He talks to people in a way that gives his editor a broad range of material to piece together into a compelling narrative. Euphomet is an oral history of high strangeness, told by the people who lived through it and on the latest episode I get to tell my story: A bizarre descent into the underworld when I was ten years old that seems to have charged my life with a heavy current of weirdness. By some speculation, I crossed over into an alternate dimension. By others, I took a brief trip to Arcadia. Whatever happened to me down there in the bomb shelter, it changed me in profound ways and left me with a magnetism for the bizarre energies of the cosmos.
I hope you enjoy it.