Take me home, El Capitan!
The Trans-Dimensional Stick People... A Supernatural True Story

This write up won't be of much interest to some. It's not motorcycle related. I wrote this primarily for my myself, but it may be of interest to those who are into the supernatural, ghost stories, tales of the unknown..

I've experienced two supernatural, unexplainable events in my life. I documented the first one..The Entity: A Truly Scary Story, a few years ago for my grandsons. The following event happened years earlier. As of late, I've felt compelled to get it down on "paper" and I'm not sure why. Perhaps it'll be relevant to someone in the future whether that be a family member, paranormal detectives,  doctors at my competency hearing, or otherwise. If you read them both, you'll notice one commonality between the two events. The incongruity of time.  I have no explanation for this. I'll also add that the following would have made a great episode of "the Twilight Zone.."

A few years ago I was reading a book on the human brain.. Interesting read.. One revelation that stayed with me is that our strongest memories... good and/or bad... the ones that stay with us for the rest of our lives are determined by the amount of adrenalin that was running though our bodies at the time of the event. Our first sky dive.. our first sexual experience.. an accident... injury of a loved one.. being robbed... our wedding day.. walking up on a large bear and her cub while hiking ..  On the flip side of that coin are dreams... No matter how vivid they are, almost without exception they seem to vanish like the wind upon waking and certainly don't last for years... Very interesting how the brain works..

I mention this because through the years I have questioned the following event.. "Could I have just been dreaming?" and if so.. why do I still remember it as if it happened yesterday? It's been 53 years, for Chris' sake!  Having replayed that day in my head dozens and dozens of times and scrutinized every freakin' detail, I now have no doubt in my mind that the following did actually happen.

The Event:

I
can only guess at the date of what follows. I was around 8 or 9 years old which would put the date around 1963. My parents (and by default, my sister and I) were avid church goers. We attended the Riverwood Church of Christ (in Nashville) until I was in my mid-teens and that's where this takes place. The church is mid-size for reference seating 750 people on a good attendance day. More often than not we went whenever the doors were open. Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Weds nights not to mention vacation bible school in the summer. While the rest of my family seemed to love every minute they spent with the church crowd, I hated it with a passion from day one until my last. I simply didn't fit in nor like the "concept" of going to church although I certainly understand why some do. .. but I digress.

It was just like any another Sunday morning service. We were seated perhaps 8 rows from the front on the left hand side of the church. My father was seated to my left, my mother was to my right, and my sister on the other side of my mom. It must have been a beautiful day outside as sun was streaming through the stained-glass windows. I remember sitting there dreading the hour ahead.  It was just before the sermon as the church was being led in song. I even remember what they were singing.. "How Great Thou Art." My mother and father had a lovely voices and on this day I was getting it in full parental stereo.. I had my song book in my lap, but I never sang.

In the middle of the chorus... "...then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee..."... the congregation's words started to slow down so much so that I looked up. It was as if somebody turned the power off on a turntable and the needle slowed to a stop mid-song. Immediately I looked around the auditorium. Everyone was frozen.. Mouths open.. no sound.. No movement. I turned to my father.. He was looking ahead and to the stage with his mouth open.. I shook him.. He didn't move.. I turned to my mother.. I shook her..  What was happening?  My heart was racing. I was scared.

A few seconds later.. I heard it.. Children laughing.. giggling.. The voices were almost musical, but where were they coming from?  I turned around in my seat and peeked over the church pew. At first I saw nothing, then.. I could see movement towards the rear of the auditorium.. Then some movement on the right side of the church.. and even more just a few rows forward near the stage..  Blurs of motion. Now the laughing and giggling was coming from 4 or 5 different locations.  My fear turned to curiosity. I listened intently while hidden safely between my parents for at least 30 seconds and then I saw one of them.

About halfway back of the auditorium and towards the center, I saw a small creature standing in a church pew beside an inanimate church goer. It was maybe 3-3.5 ft tall with a stick-like body and normal-ish sized head. While it had no ears (that I could see) or hair.. it did have extraordinarily large eyes.  It's arms, torso, and legs were about as thick as a roll of quarters. It's fingers were spindly and much longer than ours. Thinking back, it's face reminded me of one of those Margaret Keane paintings of the children with big eyes.

The creature stopped.. giggled, then in a flash it moved a few rows further back then stopped.  It was incredibly fast. Now I can see glimpses of 4 or 5 of them.  All running.. stopping.. laughing.. then running again. After watching them for a few more seconds, I realized that they were playing a game.. Hide & seek. I watched mesmerized as they'd move in and out of the church goers with lightning speed. I remained hidden observing them for maybe 60 seconds and then one of them stopped, turned, and looked directly at me.

As soon as our eyes met it perked up and focused on me. Unlike everyone else in the church.. I was moving. It was obvious (to me) that it did not expect this. After a second or two, it turned to the other beings (without making a sound) and they all stopped and looked in my direction.  Now I was scared again. I turned back at the one I had first seen and after a second or two it smiled at me.. a big smile. I smiled back Then in a micro-second... it vanished in a blur...

It was at that same exact moment that somebody plugged in that aforementioned analogous record player as the sound of my parent's (and the entire church's) voices started slow then got up to normal speed and volume with the next line of that song..."How great Thou art, how great Thou art"... A couple of minutes had passed for me. A nanosecond for them. The rest of the church and my family had not missed a beat.. They never noticed what had just transpired and I never told a soul until now.

Conclusions and Observations Drawn:..

After much thought over these many years I have come to some inescapable conclusions.. Using the principle of Occam's razor ( ie..that all things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the right one,) the only logical deduction I can make is that these "stick people" were from another dimension or parallel universe and for a few minutes.. they overlapped with ours.  They could not have been time travelers from our own planet as they weren't like us. I would also assume they weren't aliens from another world for the simple reason that if a technologically advanced civilization traveled light years to get here, the odds that they'd be playing hide and seek rather than exploring or observing or anal probing or conquering us are slim.

While they had some human traits.. eyes.. legs.. arms.. fingers... they clearly were not humanoid. They didn't suffer from the same gravitational or spatial laws that we humans do. They moved faster than anything I'd ever seen except for perhaps a humming bird's wings.  With a spindly little, stick-like body with seemingly no musculature, their speed would seem impossible. My theory?.. Some sort of on-demand mental teleportation. They think where they wanted to go then a second or two later.. they were there.

That being said,  they breathed our air..They see like we see. They laughed and smiled like humans, except their laughter had a musical quality to it.. The sound was beautiful. During my short time among them I didn't hear any of them utter a single word... When the first being saw me and then turned to his (or her) friends,  it must have communicated telepathically what he or she had just seen (ie.. me) and EXACTLY where I was located in the auditorium as they all turned and looked directly at me simultaneously. This shows mental abilities far beyond our species.

What's baffling is how I, alone tapped into their time .. their dimension or perhaps their universe. Why me? Why ONLY me?  They were obviously surprised to see me. They seemed as baffled as I. Shocked, even. I'll add that I never for a second felt that they were malevolent. In fact.. the opposite.

Many astrophysicists think we are part of a "multiverse" which is a hypothetical set of various possible universes including our own. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists.. ie.. the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, the physical laws and the constants that describe them.The miscellaneous distinct universes within the multiverse are called the "parallel universes" or "alternative universes".  The thing is.. this theory is unproven. Did I alone actually tap into a parallel universe and it's inhabitants? Did I go where no man has gone before?  I have no idea, but I sure wish I had had a camera with me.

Postscript... The stick creature I saw looked identical to the one pictured above right.

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone."
... Rod Serling / 1959


 
And that's all I've got to say about that....
Jerry D. Finley
Captain / Pirates' Lair