A Winter's Tale

In Memory of John Keel

"And Im laying out my winter clothes, wishing I was gone, goin home
Where the New York City winters arent bleedin me, leadin me to go home..."
-The Boxer, Paul Simon


This is the story of John Keel who found himself potentially homeless being unable to pay his back rent on a apartment in New York City,as well as myself in relation to a series of events which led to my leaving my own childhood home in search of an elusive truth that still escapes my grasp, but was guided by possibilities brought forth by a someone I had never met.

Like Mr Keel, having diabetes and a heart related condition, as well as long since being considered a senior to many, I ruminated on Loren Coleman's account of Mr Keel's last days and posed myself a question, how would I fare if faced with the same financial maladies that trailed his every step against the undertow of infirmities that arrive by advancing age? The simple answer is a doubtful one.
Winter is the final human season, with the enveloping stillness that accompanies a journey fraught with a destination yet to be envisioned, while one pushes upwind against a prevailing storm.


Beyond the chronicles of every paranormal event, there is a flesh and blood human being, and that this person whom I never met, never conversed with, was familiar to me in ways that remain perhaps the chronicle of uncertainty, and that, despite the odds being in favor of the house, one's survival whilst swimming upstream opposed to the odds of ever reaching a confirmation that such a destination will be received by a welcoming greeting, is the courage all of humanity holds.

In this we all share a familial bond, as we seeming pack our lives with lessons for a future that may or may not arrive as we anticipated it.

One evening, at the age of 18,many decades ago,I was in my room, intently reading a very dense book on necromancy that I was forcing myself to digest inasmuch I felt it this was critical, in order to comprehend the context of it's compendium of seals and signets as there was... oddly, no text. I had found it in a used book store in Chicago, it had a tattered orange cover, and yellowed, brittle pages but oddly, no title or attributions, which intrigued me as this sort of a publication as such, was a rarity to my own experience. After much cross checking, I had determined to my own satisfaction that each of these seals were referencing obscure angels within a medieval context. All of this would lead to a later experiment that ran seriously amok, but that is another account best left for some later post. That night, a blizzard was making conditions outside a virtual "white out" of any visibility one could gain by peering out the window.

At the time I was still struggling through that most dense and even more abstracted, quasi-historical tome which some of you may know as "The Oasphe." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oahspe:_A_New_Bible which has taken a great deal of prolonged searching to locate. Neither of these books were to be undertaken lightly. One had to reconnoiter a certain athletic will to read them, let alone comprehend them. At the same time some music I had been playing, some guitar noodling like Peter Green's "The End Of The Game". In the midst of this somewhat intensive focus on my part I was interrupted by a persistent urge to go outside the warm confines of my room into this blizzard which increasingly irritated me by it's perverse purpose of interrupting my studies. I could not in good conscious, call this a voice that called me forth as it wasn't, but none the less, this manifested call was so out of context to my present activities, I thought such a compulsion was evidence of some sort of instability on my part as there was no logical reason to follow this urge.

There had been a precursor to this evening, as two anomalous accounts related to this writer by two friends, Craig S and Gil.I had been in Michigan visiting a young lady, when upon my return, I was confronted by their offense at a snub to them I had delivered while I was out of state. Both irritated and puzzled had asked me why I had walked past them on the street not acknowledging them or returning their greeting. When I informed them I was in another state, all three of us became equally perplexed.

And so with this sense of the unanticipated being a possibility, I donned my winter gear, feeling all along that this had to be one of the more bizarre behaviors on my part, but then again, I thought to myself that after a couple of minutes, my inner restiveness would be chilled to the bone.

I was no more than a block from my home, feeling ridiculous, when a enormous flash lit up the entire neighborhood and as far as I could see, in a glare that would be impossible to describe that did not seem to originate from any specific location.Everything looked as if it were an over exposure of a black and white photograph, frozen in time. I turned in a circle trying to determine the source to no avail. To the south, a light that appeared to be a floating multi-hued Christmas tree light slowly and horizontally passed behind a power pole, some distance away


Two days later, I received a card in the mail, the sort that one sends to someone who has suffered a recent passing of a loved one, in a funereal "sorry for your loss" type of floral design via an unmarked envelope. Inside was a hand written death threat.

My mother, over the morning breakfast later in the week, mentioned in passing, the black limousine parked alongside the curb, opposite our house that had idled in place all night long and passed off the recurring presence later the following day, saying it was probably "a debt collector," which of course, then and now, made no sense to me.


At this time a friend of mine, Pat, suggested we visit Kathy whose close friend had found in his bedroom, dead, hung by his neck, on his birth date. To say Kathy was upset was an understatement as she had spoken to him the day before and he was his usual self, not particularly concerned or upset about anything. The next event in this odd week, was another friend found hung by the neck from the rafters of a home under construction. Again, there was a connection to yours truly, and it was then, I began to reconsider the card I had received earlier in the week. All of us scanned the local papers for more information on this second event, but we found no mention or report of it.


It was then shortly afterward, I came upon John Keel and his strange accounts of MIB activity, odd events, the paranormal twists and turns he had encountered as well as the darker aspects of this sort of thing. It was if this book had been gifted to me personally, and upon reading it, while I had no great insight into the events of the previous week nor others, I sensed that he was upon a path that I recognized in my own life and that afterward, I felt that my own deep feelings of isolation and suspicions by having experienced these events,that somehow there was a thread in all this, and by this, they suddenly did not quite seem so bizarre. When I left home with fifty dollars in hand that following summer, and a back pack that contained his books as well as a few others, I had the temerity to discount my own fears, bolstered by the exceptions to what others considered rules, by the example of others, Mr Keel was certainly among them.

Later, I would find the others had experienced these bizarre flashes as well the idling black vehicles, and so forth but it was John Keel who opened the proverbial door just enough to allow my passage in order to search for an elusive context for these events. He was and is irreplaceable, and if the world seems lessened by his passing, it is due to the fact that it is.

When I heard of his diabetes, and heart condition, as well as his bitterness and anger toward his own helplessness in regard to his financial condition,I was struck by the rewards of this life in the tangible service he had provided to others, by being the iconoclast and individualist he was, and that there will be no way to repay him in this regard other than to acknowledge his work for future generations.


Another was his refusal to give into despair in the place of his stance as a feisty individualist who refused to accept an easy way out, a graceful exit or a simple rationalization.. There will never be another John Keel and throughout his career and in the last moments of his life, one senses there was no unconditional surrender to either his or our own circumstances, as an advocate for those who have no voices, that we could ascertain, beyond the courage of his pen. Hail and Farewell, Mr Keel, I am in your debt. Despite your return, homeward bound, the fighter still remains, in every page and word you had arranged.