We get to talking at work sometimes and this was a story I heard yesterday that I found really interesting. If I had heard the same story from a different person, I might be really skeptical, but Charlie is a very level-headed down to earth type of person, so that makes it an even better story.

Charlie and his brother were living in a century old farmhouse in 1975 about 25 miles south of Athens, Georgia on a large acreage of land. The facilities of the house were not good at all: they had sort of an outhouse in the back yard. One night as they were studying, Charlie's brother went outside towards the outhouse, and came running in saying "Come out here! You've got to see this!" Charlie went outside and what they saw on the path to the outhouse remains clear in his memory even today.

They saw a large sphere, glowing red suspended about three or four feet in the air. Although it was lit from within, it did not illuminate anything around it. From it came a strange whining sound, almost like a child crying. The sphere changed from the the glowing red to a turquoise and a purple as they stood there and watched it, transfixed. They talked to each other throughout the incident to make sure they were both seeing the same thing. Finally, Charlie's brother said "I am going to get my gun" and ran upstairs. He yelled out from the second floor "get up here quick!" and Charlie ran up the stairs. From the bedroom window upstairs, they could see the strage sphere still changing colors. Every so often the light would change to white, and when it did, Charlie said that both he and his brother had the feeling that whatever it was sensed their presence. He said it ws like when the headlights of a turning car play across your body and you know that you are seen, but the light did not radiate. They were both terrified and ran downstairs and jumped in the car to drive to a friends house and relate their story. When they came back to the house a short time later with their friend, the thing was gone.

Charlie says of the situation "I have always wanted an opprtunity like that, and when it happened I was so scared that I ran away." About two weeks after the incident he and his brother were at a party and were recounting their story. A girl came up to them who lived about five miles away and said that her twelve year old sister had been out walking the dog on the same night and had seen the same thing, but in her case it whooshed right down in front of her and she went off running into the house.

Have you or someone you know had any close encounters?

It all started in the summer of 93. I was to be entering my second year of college at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, where I also happened to grow up. I was still friends with some of my high school friends, Lisa, a year ahead of me in school, and Hilary, a year behind me in school. The three of us found a house to rent for the year, actually Lisa found it, and what a house. The house was located very near to Doak Campbell Stadium (FSU's football stadium) and was on Prince Street, a street of older homes that were commonly rented to college students. It was owned by a rather eccentric woman, named Karin (pronounced Car-in) Ostlund, and she had painted the whole house inside and out in the craziest way- see the photos below. We as young college students thought it was cool and would make a neat party house. Karin was weird, but she assured us that she was moving to Albuquerque in a couple of weeks and we would just put the rent in the mailbox. It sounded like an okay deal, and we gave her a deposit and first months rent and soon moved in. Karin told us she would be staying in the garage until her move. She told us it was an efficiency apartment in there. Stupidly, we took her word for it.

Well, shortly after we moved in, we started noticing some odd things. Karin was always hanging around, creeping out our friends and doing strange things. She would be up in the middle of the night, sneaking around painting the outside of the house even more strangely than before, so that we would wake up to a real surprise. The entire outside of the house changed colors and patterns several times. She painted some strange symbols on the garage door and told us they were messages from Neptune.

Karin stayed in the garage week after week. It seemed that she wasn't going to move to Albuquerque. She would skulk around the house and listen to our conversations. She would crawl under the house and spy on us there, too. We could smell the smoke of her hand rolled cigarettes coming up through the floorboards. When she saw us, she would say little things to us to let us know that she had been listening in. She would bring up things from our private conversations to creep us out. We had discussed one night that we needed a way to lock the windows, since all of the window locks were broken. We decided we should drill a hole in the wooden window frames where they overlapped, and then we could put a pin or a large nail in there to effectively lock the windows shut. The next morning, Karin handed us a box of large nails and said "these are for you to lock the windows with" and walked away. She would also water the backyard incessantly. It was raining every afternoon that summer, so it certainly didn't need watering. We kept turning the hose off, and she would turn it back on. We went through 27,000 gallons of water in one month.

Things get fuzzy in my memory after that. I remember that something scary happened with Karin while Lisa and I were home, but I don't remember what exactly it was. Lisa called the police and they came out and found a mud covered Karin creeping around under the house. Their advice to us was "get out of here." After that we found out that Karin was mentally ill, duh, and her parents had bought the house for her to live in. They never intended for her to rent it out. She was just a nut. We ended up losing our deposit and moving out, not wanting to deal with the insanity. But I am sure none of us will ever forget Karin Ostlund and the house on Prince Street. I wonder if she is still there, doing the same thing to other unsuspecting college students.

Today at work, one of my crazy co-workers, Pat, was telling us about how his daughter used to drive him nuts by leaving the milk out. This was when she was about thirteen. She would have a bowl of cereal late at night, and was forever leaving the milk out on the table all night and it would spoil. One Saturday morning Pat woke up and found an almost full gallon of milk on the kitchen table, warm. He stormed to his daughter's room, yanked the covers back and yelled "You left the milk out, now go get it!" He forced her to carry than darn jug of warm milk around all day- she had to keep her hand on it at all times for her punishment. He even rounded up the family to take them out for lunch and to the mall, and the milk went too. I can't even imagine the humiliation! He said that afternoon she went outside and was sitting on the front curb, hand on milk jug, just to get away from him, she was so mad. She never left the milk out again, though.

I think I have briefly made mention of it in previous posts, but I will go into greater detail today since not much is happening on the home front. In 1994 I was in college at Florida State University in Tallahassee studying fine art. I wasn't all that sure what I wanted to do with my life at that point, and was searching for a way out of school. That summer, my grandma took me, my mom, my aunt, my sister and two cousins on a cruise. We stopped for one day in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the wheels in my head began to spin. A few weeks after we got back from the cruise, I decided I was going to move to St. Thomas. I didn't know anyone there, I was nineteen and had almost no money. It was the only time in my life that I could do something like that, and I seized the opportunity. I bought a one-way ticket and had $300 to get started on the island. I am pretty sure everyone thought I was crazy. When I look back now, I see how insane it was, and am kind of sorry that I put my parents through it, because they must have worried a lot. Still, they let me do what I had to do. I looked at it like this; I would go and see if I could survive on my own, and if I couldn't I could always come back and call the whole experiment a "vacation." Well, I ended up staying for over a year, about a year and a quarter. I look back at it now as an excellent exercise in finding myself and confidence building and I wouldn't be the person I am without the experience. I really have no regrets about it aside from making my parents worry. I got to do incredible things like motor yacht and sail on an Olympic racing catamaran, helicopter around and island hop in small planes. I lived in a really cool simple little house tucked away on the side of a mountain with the most gorgeous beach at the base of it. I hitchhiked all over the island and worked in stores selling jewelry and in bars serving cocktails. But mostly, I played. And it was fun.

When I worked in the jewelry stores, we would get lots of customers from the many cruise ships that would come in every day. People would come in and say to me "you don't have the accent (like the locals), where are you from?" and I would tell them my story and they would always say "I wish I did something like that when I was your age." So now I will never have to be one of those people who "wishes" they had an adventure like mine. I did it! By the way, I wasn't the only one- there were a couple hundred of regular American kids in their late teens or twenties that had done exactly the same thing I had. These were the people that became my friends on the island.

I ended up leaving in November of 2005, after Hurricane Marilyn devastated the island. It just wasn't much fun after that with no power or anything, and it was to be months or years before it was restored. It was time for me to get back to the real world.

This is the view from the little house in the Virgin Islands. Pretty incredible, isn't it? The two islands in the distance are Inner and Outer Brass Islands.

Here's me in my little house in St. Thomas. It was all wood, and one room except the bathroom and there was a screened porch on the front of it. There was no A/C, just a ceiling fan, but it was plenty cool enough. The shower was actually outside, on a big rock outside the bathroom, with wooden slats all around it. There was a tree growing there that you could hang your shampoo and conditioner on. You can see the wood slats of the shower right behind me out the window in the picture.