"The True Shepherd of Anu," or The Nine Are Always with Us

ROCKPORT — Orion Krause appeared to have a bright future. 

He lived a comfortable childhood, first on Monhegan Island, a tight-knit fishing enclave and artist colony 12 miles off the mainland, and then in the midcoast town of Rockport in a beautiful shingle-sided home with views of the Camden Hills and Penobscot Bay.

His father was a...ferry boat captain. His mother came from a wealthy family and was involved in various community and charitable endeavors. 

Krause, who has a twin brother, Cooper, was gifted musically and always practiced...He was an all-state jazz drummer as a high school senior and attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio...  (source)

On Sept. 8, in the quiet northern Massachusetts town of Groton, Krause allegedly beat to death with a baseball bat four people: his mother, Elizabeth “Buffy” Krause, 60; her parents, Frank Danby Lackey III, 89, and Elizabeth Lackey, 85; and their home health worker, Bertha Mae Parker, 68.

Krause then walked to a neighbor’s home, naked and covered in mud and blood, and confessed to the killings. Police arrested him a short time later. He made a brief appearance in court in Massachusetts last week and now is awaiting a psychiatric evaluation at Bridgewater State Hospital. 

Documents associated with the case have been impounded.

Two college classmates have described Krause as a "gentle," and largely quiet jazz musician and drummer. 

"He was one of the most gentle people I've ever gotten to know," said an Oberlin classmate, Louie Krauss, of Baltimore, who is not related to the Krause family. "He wasn't the most talkative guy ever, but he would listen really intently to what you had to say."  (source)

The Babylonian star catalogues of the Late Bronze Age name Orion MULSIPA.ZI.AN.NA, "The Heavenly Shepherd" or "True Shepherd of Anu" - Anu being the chief god of the heavenly realms. -Wikipedia

 

In ancient Egypt, the stars of Orion were regarded as a god, called Sah. Because Orion rises before Sirius, the star whose heliacal rising was the basis for the Solar Egyptian calendar, Sah was closely linked with Sopdet, the goddess who personified Sirius. The god Sopdu was said to be the son of Sah and Sopdet. Sah was syncretized with Osiris, while Sopdet was syncretized with Osiris' mythological wife, Isis.  -Wikipedia

As the astronomy of Babylonia became more developed, as the heavens were mapped out into groups of constellations, each of which received a definite name, while the leading single stars were similarly distinguished and named, the stars and constellations followed the lead of the planets. As Mars became Nergal, so Orion became Tammuz. - (source)

Krause Family History. German and Jewish (Ashkenazic): variant of Kraus. German: from Middle High German kruse 'pitcher', 'jug'; a metonymic occupational name for a maker or seller of jugs or a nickname for a heavy drinker.

When a shadowy Rockport estate became the world epicenter of psychics and psychedelics. By Andy O’Brien

Few people alive today remember the enigmatic Round Table Foundation, which operated in Rockport from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. Even then, it was mysterious to outsiders, although it was well known within the tight circles of parapsychological researchers. The facility it funded hosted some of the 20th century’s most prominent and controversial psychics and mediums and even attracted the attention of the U.S. military, which saw potential in using the power of the mind to advantage the U.S. in its Cold War with the Soviets. 

(Andrija) Puharich, who died in 1995, has been hailed as the “father of the New Age movement.” In life, his work was celebrated by enthusiasts of the paranormal and condemned by skeptics. Today, the Round Table Foundation is routinely name-checked by both serious historians of Cold War–era covert research and tinfoil-hat types concerned with everything from extraterrestrials to the Illuminati to the Kennedy assassination. 

 

Puharich knew that some exceptional individuals could hear beyond most people’s typical audible range, and he wondered whether there might be a telepathic equivalent. 

Puharich’s more arcane research, meanwhile, involved gathering “sensitives” from around the world to stay at Glen Cove while volunteering for experiments on the nature of their abilities. 

His staff built a set of a copper-lined booths, known as Faraday cages, to block out radio waves and other electromagnetic interference, the better to isolate a potential psychic inside.

 

After the Navy Yard shooting ...the media reported that Alexis had filed a police report in Rhode Island on August 2, 2013, in which he claimed to be the victim of harassment and that he was hearing voices in his head. 

According to an FBI official after the shooting, Alexis was under the "belief that he was being controlled or influenced by extremely low frequency electromagnetic waves". 

Technology built around the Radio Frequency Hearing effect does exist, for example, Air Force patent # 6470214 patented in December 1996, allows sounds and voices to be heard ″When the expansion and contraction take place in the head of an animal, the acoustic signal is passed by conduction to the inner ear where it is further processed as if it were an acoustic signal from the outer ear.″ 

 

Electrical Device Used to Treat ‘Nerve Deafness’

By STACY V. JONES FEB. 20, 1971 

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19— A physician and a dentist were granted a patent this week for a method of treat ing “nerve deafness” by electrical stimulation through the skin. 

Dr. Henry K. Puharich and Dr. Joseph L. Lawrence as signed Patent 3,563,246 to the Intelectron Corporation, a New York company they found ed. 

The patient wears a head set with a pair of electrodes placed in front of and behind each ear. Then the therapist switches on amplitude‐modulated, low‐frequency radio waves. 

A typical treatment lasts an hour and is repeated daily for a month.

Eldon Byrd of the US Naval Surface Weapons Centre who controlled the US Non Lethal Weapons programme in the early 80s, confirms that ELF and electromagnetic devices are feasible – but it appears that yet again, all details are contained within the secure 'black' world of hidden research projects. 

 

In October, 1973, Byrd did experiments with Uri Geller. Geller allegedly permanently bent a piece of nitinol metal, a feat impossible without applying great heat.  

 

Byrd sued skeptic debunker James Randi for $30 million for defamation. Randi had called Byrd a convicted child molester [in the June 1988 issue of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Mystery Magazine], when in fact he had been arrested for possession with intention to distribute obscene materials involving children, and plead guilty to a lower charge of possession with intention to distribute obscene materials. 

 

So Now You Know (Part Two) UPDATED

UPDATE: I had cut a section that further explores some of the possible connections to MKULTRA/MKOFTEN/et al for space from this piece but have posted an expanded version here on The Solar Satellite. 

Give it a read, it may help clarify those issues for you.



So what the hell was Twin Peaks: The Return all about?

Well, the answer to that question depends on who you ask. If you ask me it was all about childhood trauma and mind control. 

Two of my least-favorite subjects to research or write about, but here we are.

WARNING: SPOILERS GALORE

I mean, Twin Peaks was about a lot of other things besides trauma and mind control, but at the core that's what it was really all about. 

Now, I know it seems like this blog has been all over the place lately but we're really looking at just a few basic themes from a number of different angles. And like I've said, it all started with this back-to-back conjunction of Chris Cornell's death and Twin Peaks: The Return's premiere and ended with the back-to-back conjunction of the end of Twin Peaks and the premiere of Stephen King's It (King and Lynch share a lot of commonalities). 

And in between were the hurricanes. All of this is deeply intertwined.

So here's where I am at: The fact that four out of five of the great grunge gods of the 90s- Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, Scott Weiland and Chris Cornell- are now dead (the fifth one recently appeared on Twin Peaks) got me to wondering why. And if you do even the most superficial bit of digging, you see the deep scars of trauma somewhere in their bios. 

My feeling is that this trauma was actually a lot deeper than they were ever willing to admit, which got me to thinking about the zest our national Frankensteins have always had for experimenting on children. 

I don't know if this is true with some of the people in question but it certainly can't be ruled out. All we really know for sure about government mind control programs comes from an cache that accounts-payable either forgot to shred or declined to do so for reasons unknown.

And quite without me asking for it, this whole Elizabeth Fraser business popped back up again. Which makes sense because she's baked into the essential DNA of Twin Peaks. I'm certainly not the only person to sense this but I may be one of the few who actually understands how deep this symbiotic communion really goes. From The AV Club website:

If you want to understand what’s going on in Twin Peaks, just listen to it 

The Mitochondrial Eve of this whole aesthetic vision isn’t something by Lynch, but rather This Mortal Coil’s cover of “Song To The Siren,” which transforms Tim Buckley’s longing folk song into an existential lament at once dirgelike and intensely sensual—la petite mort in song form.

They won't say it, but I will: consciously or otherwise, Laura Palmer is Elizabeth Fraser. 

There are simply no two ways about it. 

Yes, yes,  yes: I know that sounds crazy. But the parallels are more concrete than most people know. 

Like Laura Palmer, Fraser was repeatedly sexually abused and became a rebellious teenager. And like Laura Palmer, Fraser seemed to tap into another reality.

And something in Fraser's voice clearly got deep under David Lynch's skin.  Fraser's primal howling on those records Lynch would have bought when he first discovered her couldn't help but capture his interest, especially when it was set in a confection of late-Victorian childhood fantasy.  

In many ways, the Cocteau Twins were the original inspiration for the Bang Bang Bar performances in the new Twin Peaks:

By 1985, Elizabeth Fraser was David Lynch’s favourite living singer. Lynch wanted her version of ‘Song To The Siren’, the Tim Buckley track, recorded with the studio collective This Mortal Coil, for Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. He wanted Fraser and her partner Robin Guthrie to mime on stage in the prom scene. 

And it's generally agreed upon that Fraser (and the Twins) ultimately had a transformative effect on Lynch's artistic vision.  The music at the Pink Room sounds like Death Valley covering something off The Pink Opaque while zoned out on PCP. 

And Fraser's shunning of lyrical narrative- or of the English language itself- prefigured Lynch's wiilder experiments with narrative structure. Don't look at the videos (studio rats to the core, the Cocteau Twins hated making videos and playing live), listen to the music. 

Part of what Lynch was responding to was the intensely-dreamlike state* that the classic-era Cocteau Twins music induced, a state that prominent stars like Robert Plant and Prince were enraptured by. This was a very common reaction- fans often claimed they dreamed these songs before they ever heard them.

The Cocteaux are generally considered the originators of both Shoegaze and Dream Pop, and I think there's a case to be made they inspired Trip-Hop as well. And Twin Peaks: The Return featured a number of dream-pop acts such as Chromatics.

Laura Palmer and Howlin' Liz: 
Fan video from 2012

"I'M A VERY VIOLENT PERSON"

All of which makes sense because what Lynch and so many other well-known directors, rock stars and other artists were responding to in "Song of the Siren" (and Fraser's 80s work in general) were the very, very deep scars of trauma.

How deep? Well, Fraser has been hospitalized at least three times for psychiatric reasons, two events of which bookended her band's longest and costliest tour. Her mental and emotional state was so precarious that it deeply disturbed music journalists. And for good reason:

Grangemouth, as she recalls it, was a dark and stifling industrial town which left its mark on her and her music. Fraser was thrown out of her home at 16 for being a punk...  

Music provided a respite from her home life, where she was sexually abused by a brother-in-law and possibly her father, as well. The youngest of six, she felt abandoned by her older siblings and silenced by her family. 

Despite the image of the fragile Victorian waif that was very carefully crafted for her by designers and stylists, Fraser was no shrinking violet. She seems to have been a bit of a bully in school and knew how to take care of herself. 

From a 1983 Guardian interview:

Robin: "... But if somebody was to sort of ... er ... I wouldn't just sit down and take it, y'know? She certainly wouldn't."  

Liz: "I'm a very violent person, actually. It really annoys me."  

Robin: "We went to see (hardcore band) GBH in Amsterdam. We went to get some drugs, but that's another story, we'll talk about that later ... So anyway, we were walking up the stairs an' this Dutch girl goes 'Ha! ha! ha!' like that, so Elizabeth grabbed her hair and kicked her in the face." 

Compulsive violence is a common after-effect of severe trauma.

So where did Fraser go when she was thrown out of her home? Well, like so much of her biography we simply don't know. But looking at the evidence I can't help but wonder if she wound up at Lennox Castle, a place where horrible things were done to children.

Patients hidden away for years at Lennox Castle mental hospital turn to art to heal wounds 

Lennox Castle, in Lennoxtown, Dunbartonshire, was less of a mental institution than a warehouse, where those deemed society’s misfits were deposited. 

Truants, unmarried mothers, wayward teenagers and children with learning difficulties, Down’s syndrome or mental illness all ended up there. They were starved, drugged, physically and emotionally abused and robbed of their humanity.

Fraser was certainly a "wayward teenager." And she happened to have the misfortune to live in a patch of the world where MKULTRA was still alive and kicking, right up to the 1980s and perhaps beyond.

Back to Twin Peaks...

Yeah. Mind control.

In the groundbreaking Episode Eight, David Lynch and Mark Frost established Twin Peak's origin mythos. It all begins with the Trinity atomic bomb tests at White Sands, New Mexico. The fabric of time and space themselves are ripped open, allowing a supernatural entity (variously described as the Experiment, Mother and Judy) to invade our realm and sent out seeds of evil onto the earth. 

The whole thing plays out like Lynch and Frost's love-letter to Leslie Stevens and The Outer Limits, right down to the radio station and the atomic demons. (The first episode paid tribute to the uncannily-prescient Outer Limits episode 'OBIT').

One of the manifestations these seeds take are the soot-coated Woodsmen, one of whom walks out of the desert and makes a beeline to a radio station, from which he broadcasts an occult mind-control spell on unsuspecting listeners.

Out of all this we see a young girl- generally accepted as the young Sarah Palmer- possessed by a demonic chimera (of a water and an air creature). This is disturbingly sexual and certainly intentionally so, since the motifs of sexual abuse and demonic mind control form the underpinning of this entire series. 

We later see Sarah Palmer as a deeply-traumatized and broken woman, stuck in a tapeloop of the past, and unconsciously playing host to a vicious demon. The unspoken implication here is that like many abuse victims, Sarah replayed her trauma in her attraction to Leland Palmer, an evil and insane man who was himself possessed by a demon, and passed the cycle of abuse down to the next generation.

In the harrowing Fire Walk with Me, we see that these mind-controlling demons use human beings in order to create pain and sorrow in the world, which they in turn feed on. This ties into any number of theories on the sadistic and/or psychopathic mindset in which abusers feed on the pain of others. Children- whose essential emotions are naturally heightened anyway- are special targets for the psychopathic personality.

In Twin Peaks: The Return, the powers of the Black Lodge have created two Dale Coopers, one of whom is possessed (or mind-controlled) by Bob and the other of whom is a blank slate, a classic literary innocent. However, an interpretation can be drawn that this split was in fact part of a false reality instilled in the real Dale Cooper.

The highly-controversial (yet stunningly-brilliant) series finale takes us entirely out of the dream we had previously experienced and into a separate reality, one much more like our own. 

In this version Dale Cooper is neither the silent-movie bumbler or the demon-controlled doppelganger, but a much more authentic rendering of a middle-aged FBI agent: severe, laconic, brutally-efficient at physical violence and yet still on a quest to right a wrong done when he was young. Kyle MacLachlan is utterly amazing here, juggling a complex and difficult series of subtle emotional shadings.

As one might expect of a real-life Laura Palmer, the woman he meets is a broken shell of a person. She's apparently just murdered a man (which doesn't trouble Cooper much) and seems to have only a fleeting acquaintance with reality. This is the grim result of trauma and self-destruction.

After a blood-curdling shriek, we are back in the Black Lodge. We see Laura Palmer whisper in the ear of a visibly-troubled Cooper, which many interpret as her telling him never left. That the Lodge was controlling his entire experience, which was either a dream or an alternate series of reality-shifts.

THE ROOM ABOVE THE CONVENIENCE STORE

I believe that Twin Peaks is instilled with Masonic imagery and symbolism and one of the countless sub-themes at work here is a civil war between secret society factions, which seems self-apparent when you see a "White Lodge" and a "Black Lodge" vying for control. A Freemason friend of mine has said the Waiting Room is very clearly a Scottish Rite Lodge, which he said anyone in the order would recognize.  

The Room Above the Convenience Store may well be a reference to the lodge run by the Dolan Gang  (pictured) during the intra-Masonic pissing match better known as the Lincoln County War. 

That lodge was above Dolan's dry goods store, essentially the convenience store of the time. This civil war took place in and around White Sands and Roswell, and featured such legendary Western figures as Pat Garrett and Billy "The Kid" Bonney, both of whom were Freemasons. 

It also ultimately involved one Jesse Wayne Brazel, uncle of the better-known Mac Brazel, the ranch-hand who discovered a bunch of strange debris one fine day in July of 1947.  Seriously.

And so goes the daisy-chain. 

To bring this all full-circle:

 At least four of the MKULTRA programs were specifically conducted on children. This is the vast sub-structure of MKULTRA experimentation that has for the greater part been successfully concealed by the Agency. 

Curiously, another MKULTRA faction consisted of representatives of the Scottish Rite of Masonry, which had sponsored research into eugenics, psychiatry, and mind control since at least the 1930s. 

MKULTRA doctor Robert Hanna Felix was director of psychiatric research for the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and the director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Felix was the immediate senior of Dr. Harris Isbell, already noted in relation to MKULTRA.-- Jim Keith, Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness 

Is this in part what Lynch and Frost are alluding to? Do these factions represent the Black Lodge in our own reality? And tying back to Elizabeth Fraser, what if her extraordinary gifts of music and prophecy were either the byproduct- or in fact the product-- of manipulation behind the scenes?

Because as some of you know, I don't think for a minute that our mad scientists had any intention as stopping with mere mind control. I think they had (and have) infinitely more grand ambitions than that.

And "shamanic initiation" is just a polite way of saying "torturing children," historically-speaking.

WHATEVER YOU'RE LOOKING FOR

Now stop and think about the stories we tell ourselves- and tell our children-  for a minute. Think about how many of them are about intense trauma acting as a portal to another dimension. Where the fuck does that motif come from?

• Alice in Wonderland is about a child falling down a hole and being poisoned with disfiguring drugs before finding herself in another reality.

• Peter Pan was inspired by the death of JM Barrie's brother, who was reborn as an eternally youthful magical child. It also winds up in another reality (Neverland),

• The Wizard of Oz is about a girl trapped in a horrible storm and ending up in another dimension. 

• The Chronicles of Narnia is about children fleeing the London Blitz and ending up in another dimension.

• A Wrinkle in Time is about a girl who goes searching for her missing father and ends up in another reality. Incidentally, another reality ruled over by an entity called Central Central Intelligence.

• Star Wars is about a young farmhand who enters into another reality after the gruesome death of his guardians.

• Harry Potter is about an abused young orphan who enters into another reality. And one in Scotland to boot.

• Fringe is about an abused young girl who is given strange drugs by Harvard doctors and becomes able to cross dimensions as an adult.

• Stranger Things is about a girl stolen from her mother and subjected to hideous experiments. She ultimately creates a portal to another dimension.

• The OA is about a blind orphan who enters another dimension when clinically dead.

Are you sensing a thruline here? Given the pedigree of some of the people involved here, you think these stories  might be a reflection of some kind of secret ambition on the part of certain factions? You think it's mere coincidence that most of these stories involve vulnerable young girls? And drugs? And intelligence agencies?

Think about it for a while.

IT NEVER STOPPED

The post-Heaven or Las Vegas period is no one's favorite era for the Cocteau Twins. I don't think they made any bad records,  it's just that the magic was gone. Part of this was Robin Guthrie's debilitating drug addiction and part of it was Fraser's incredibly-fragile mental state.

Parenthood has clearly reordered Fraser's thinking, as has the self-examination she's undertaken since she had a nervous breakdown in 1993 while working on Four-Calendar Cafe. 

"Everything ground to a halt," she explains. "I didn't know what was wrong with me." Entering a treatment facility in the U.S., she was admitted to a trauma unit and confronted both herself and those around her with some hard truths. 

"I got told I was big-time co-dependent. I found out I was bulimic. I found out what I went through is called incest," she says. Deeply buried childhood memories became clearer. "You know, memories of being abused by people with no face. All you do is just cover up for those people, even while you're trying to remember."

OK, now I don't know exactly what Fraser dealt with at home but part of me wonders what else might have happened. What else she may not have remembered. This gets into the realm of wild conjecture but not entirely without evidence. 

Hear me out.

You see, I have this nagging thing about the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Now, let me be clear- I have an inherent distrust of memory myself, but perhaps for the opposite reason. I believe memory is malleable because it is constantly erasing itself. But that's a topic for another day.

What bothers me about the FMSF were all the MKULTRA luminaries on its board, like Martin Orne and Louis Jolyon West. What the hell were they doing there? It's anyone's guess but my guess is that there was concern that some of the old test subjects may go offline and start figuring things out. 

And so we had this rash of recovered memory subjects, most of whom were claiming abuse by older relatives. The whole thing became a major source of controversy. The topic of recovered memory became a lightning rod after some egregious claims on tabloid TV shows and it all kind of collapsed under its own weight.

But what if that was the point?

What if there were hidden persuaders, feeding bogus cases into the slipstream and making a Geraldo-sized spectacle out of the whole thing? What if the entire point was to shame and intimidate legitimate victims back into silence? 

Victims of things like this: 

Scots-born psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron became notorious for his role in the top-secret MK Ultra programme, running experiments in orphanages and psychiatric hospitals in Canada in the 1950s. 

He used LSD, electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), insulin-induced comas and repetition to try and erase memories – a technique the CIA hoped to develop into a weapon in the Cold War. 

When details of the MK Ultra project emerged in the 1970s, it caused a huge public outcry and led to both the US and Canadian governments paying out compensation to hundreds of victims. 

Now campaigners in Scotland are to come forward with sensational claims that similar experiments were also being carried out on this side of the Atlantic. 

Last night, one abuse survivor said: “The similarities are unbelievable, the drugs programme, the experimentation – we were also doing these things in the 1950s here in Scotland, allowing this deplorable behaviour by the medical elite.” 

One medic likely to be named by the campaigners is Dr Angus MacNiven, who trained alongside Cameron at Gartnavel Royal Hospital in Glasgow and went on to become one of the most eminent figures in Scottish medicine. 

However, this newspaper has seen evidence that at least one patient died while being experimented on under his care. 

Cameron, who was born in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire, emigrated to America in the 1920s, but remained in contact with his former colleagues in Scotland throughout his career.

Oh, Stirlingshire, you say? 

Guess who else is from Stirlingshire. 

Elizabeth Fraser.

Now here's the thing: MKULTRA and its tributaries may or may not have been canceled in the 1970s in America but apparently our cousins across the pond kept right on truckin'. There's also this:

Scots orphans used in ‘military experiments’ 

HOLYROOD’S child abuse inquiry will hear claims that British military scientists conducted drug tests on orphans in Scottish mental hospitals. 

The allegations centre on at least four institutions where thousands of children are said to have been experimented upon in conditions described as “like something out of Auschwitz”.

It is alleged that Porton Down, the top secret military facility in Wiltshire, was involved in trialling drugs for use in the Cold War on youngsters who were regarded as “feeble-minded.”  

One survivor told this newspaper he has obtained written and video evidence that he will pass to the public inquiry into historical abuse of children in care when it begins next year. 

The man, now in his 50s, has been advised by lawyers to conceal his identity for his own safety until his full submission can be lodged at the inquiry announced by Scottish Education Secretary Angela Constance. 

However, he was willing to divulge some of his intended testimony about the treatment he and others suffered. 

He said: “Six and seven year olds were tied to racks and given electric shocks.
The witness believes there may have been as many as 3,500 children who were involved in the Porton Down testing programme over the years. 

"The drug programme ran from 1948 to 1982. They were exposed to nerve agents, such as sarin gas, and hallucinogens, such as LSD."

So why haven't we heard more about this?

"I know that the legal people involved do have the relevant files, although the files do have a tendency to disappear. 

"One of the problems we want the inquiry to consider is the destruction of records.” 

For example, many medical files from Lennox Castle Hospital in Lennoxtown, Stirlingshire, where some of the experiments are said to have taken place, were destroyed in a fire.

Oh. That's why.

TO BE CONTINUED

Just sayin'...

Note: This is the exact same process we saw with The Dark Knight, which was a conceptual descendant of the music of Killing Joke, the band of high-initiate occultists who probably had a major influence on Alan Moore's evolution as a magician. 

This ultimately gave us the Batman: The Killing Joke graphic novel, which in turn played a major role in Heath Ledger's conception of the Joker character in that blockbuster. This is how popular culture usually works- things slowly bubble up from the underground and eventually go mainstream.

And almost inevitably, Heath Ledger was drawn into the vortex as well.

* For those who have watched the TP finale, the segue from echoing scream, extended silence and then ethereal washes of sound is remarkably similar in structure to the segue from "Persephone" to "Pandora" on Treasure.

Let Me Tell You a Story: You'll Float Too

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."- Faulkner

Well, as soon as everyone in the geek culture cognoscenti recovered from the stunning finale of Twin Peaks: The Return, the new adaption of Stephen King's It hit the theaters, setting off a new wave of retro-horror hysteria that will probably lead right into the premiere of Stranger Things 2 at the end of October.

For my part I can't help but notice how soggy the trailer for It is: there's water in nearly every major shot. It's been a while since I watched the original miniseries, but I'm not sure it gave quite the same impression. I read the book a million years ago-- and by that I mean I got through a little over a half of it (or It) and lost patience. I haven't seen the new movie yet and probably won't until this weekend so please don't spoil it. 

Or It.

But the conjunction of all that water and the theme of ancient (if not primeval) other-dimensional forces most certainly plays into the themes we've been, um, poring over the past few months. More and more data keeps, uh, pouring out as I try to stitch all of this information together. 

I know some of you still don't understand the significance of this Siren archetype I've been tracing but maybe it's because we're still in the middle of its debutante ball. Take my word for it that this goes way, way back. 

And I mean all the way back.

A reader had brought up the Pennywise/It! motif in my last "Let Me Tell a Story" post and sure enough, he may well have been onto something. I started poking around and looking to suss out the origin of It! and found this, on Stephen King's official site:

In 1978 my family was living in Boulder, Colorado. One day on our way back from lunch at a pizza emporium, our brand-new AMC Matador dropped its transmission-literally. The damn thing fell out on Pearl Street. True embarrassment is standing in the middle of a busy downtown street, grinning idiotically while people examine your marooned car and the large greasy black thing lying under it. 

Well, how the hell about that? Pearl Street. Huh.

As it transpires King confessed to starting the actual writing of It! (originally a bridge-troll caper) in the Summer of 1981. And it looks more than likely that he may have been inspired by a wave of pervert-clown sightings in my old neck of woods. From the late,  great, painfully-lamented Rigorous Intuition blog:

The first week of May, 1981, Daniel O'Connell, the Investigative Counselor of the Boston Public School Board, alerted the district's principals that "it has been brought to the attention of the police department and the district office that adults dressed as clowns have been bothering children to and from school. Please advise all students that they must stay away from strangers, especially ones dressed as clowns." 

Several days later, in Brookline, Massachusetts on May 5, two clowns using candy as lures tried to entice children into their black van parked near Lawrence Elementary School. According to Loren Coleman in Mysterious America, police had a good description of the vehicle: it was an old model with ladders on the side, a broken front headlight and was missing its hubcaps. The following day the Boston police, "responding to persistent complaints, warned that men in clown suits were harassing elementary children." One, driving a black van, was seen to be dressed as a clown only from the waist up; from the waist down he was naked. 

"By May 8th," writes Coleman, "reports of clown men in vans harassing children had come in from East Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Canton, Randolph, and other cities near Boston..."

Huh. Interesting. 

These names might not mean anything to anyone not from the area, but they sure set off the bells and whistles and clown-horns for me. Let me show you exactly why...

Now, call me crazy if you like, but tracing the path of these clown sightings it occurred to me that these characters could maybe- just maybe- have been from Braintree, considering that the sightings form a crescent around it.  

Just throwing that out there.

Also bear in mind this is the pre-computer age, so it's not as if all these various police departments even had any idea what the hell was going on in someone else's city. These clowns could well have been working the area from a base in Braintree and no one would be the wiser. After all, it seems a bit strange to work Randolph and Stoughton without paying a visit to the 'Tree. 

And it's not as if Chief Polio's Keystone Kops would have done anything to stop them.

Remember now that Braintree was home base for Bob Galowicz, Paul Shanley and the Pilgrim Youth Center, as well as the horrific murder of Dianne DeVanna (which is starting to look to me like a much, much bigger story). So it's not exactly like there's no precedent here.

Today, the 1981 Phantom Clown sightings are dismissed as another moral panic, to be lumped in with the Satanic Panic or the Day-Care panic or the recovered-memory epidemic a few years later. There are a number of pieces online about it, one of which claimed that:

(B)efore the 1980s there wasn’t that much concern about kids being kidnapped. It happened before the 1980s, but for whatever reason it wasn’t something parents were all that concerned about.   

I'm not sure exactly which bubble the writer here was living in but that's not what it was like when I was a kid. But the writer goes on to cite the Phantom Clown sightings as the turning point that led to parents becoming more vigilant and protective towards their children: 

This all changed. At the tail end of April, things started happening that parents, principals, and teachers couldn’t ignore. Daniel O’Connell, a counselor for the Boston Public School District, sent out a memo about men dressed as clowns bothering children to all schools. Teachers were told to actually watch kids between taking drags on their cigarettes. Parents were warned to be aware of where their children were going after school. 

Police start pulling over any car or van with a clown in it, which there were apparently a lot of them in the Boston area in 1981, but all they found were birthday party clowns. By May 9th, police were questioning the veracity of these reports. As they went over the multitudes of accounts, officers realized that no adult ever saw these clowns, only children ages five to seven.  

Well, duh. Kids ages five to seven were clearly the ostensible target. Correct me if I'm wrong but aspiring child abductors tend to avoid the gaze of adults when trying to kidnap children. Seems like a modus operandi to me. Continuing:

The evil clown scare was also a precursor to the daycare sex-abuse hysteria that swept the nation a few years later. In Massachusetts, the staff at Malden's Fells Acre Daycare Center were accused of sexually abusing the children in their care. The children testified in court that an evil clown and a robot were involved in the abuse. 

As the public later learned during the Catholic clergy sex scandal, sexual abuse of minors really had been happening in Massachusetts for decades. No clowns, robots or rabbits were involved, just trusted members of the community. The community had been so busy projecting its fears outward that it neglected to look hard at itself.

The Catholic clergy scandal was kicked off by the Boston Archdiocese coverup and scandal now immortalized in the Oscar-winning feature film Spotlight.

And almost inevitably, the Boston Archdiocese is now headquartered in Braintree.

One of the priests at the center of the Archdiocese scandal was adjutant Reverend Brian Flatley, who is the brother of the late Braintree-based real estate billionaire Thomas Flatley, who donated the office building the Archdiocese now calls home.  Thomas Flatley was also a longtime close advisor to the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law.

Synchro-Watchers are familiar with the Joker motif, which is more or less a subset of the Killer Clown meme. Longtime Secret Sun readers remember the Dark Knight-Killing Joke synchroburst back in 2008. Well, as it happens there's an early example of the type, also from the southerly end of Boston, from the early 1970s.

Before James Holmes was even born, Kenneth Harrison made the news when he committed a string of murders under the name "The Giggler." Given his interest in the Fort Point Channel Bridge, I'm guessing he was from South Boston, home of MKULTRA valedictorian James "Whitey" Bulger. 

As sheer happenstance would have it, Whitey was climbing the rungs of power at the same time "The Giggler" was murdering people. From Dangerous Minds:

(The Giggler's) first victim was a six-year-old girl who had accepted a ride from Harrison while he was working as a Boston cab driver. Harrison somehow convinced the child to exit the cab with a promise of a “piggyback ride” on a bridge on the Fort Point Channel that separated South Boston from downtown. Harrison (threw the girl off) the bridge into the water. Her body was found almost two months later on a popular patch of beach and her death was ruled “accidental.” 

On June 15th, 1969 (at a Combat Zone)  dive, the Novelty Bar, Harrison joined ex-Marine and city employee Joe Breen on the shuffleboard court and the two drank and carried on together for the rest of the evening. (Harrison took) Breen out to the back...and smashed his skull in—leaving the 31-year-old face down in a puddle of dirty water.  

Later, Harrison dropped a dime on himself by calling the Boston Police Department switchboard in the early morning hours of June 16th.  

Harrison: My dear, at the corner of Washington and Kneeland Streets in a construction site there’ll be a man down in the water, dead. The Giggler…Ah ha ha ha ha

Phone call recording here.

Harrison seemed fairly desperate to get himself caught from the jump. But as cruel Destiny would have it, the Boston boys-in-blue just couldn't get their act together to nab this sad-sack:

Harrison (also murdered) a nine-year-old boy he strangled with a piece of twine before disposing of his body in a train tunnel in South Station, and a 75-year-old woman who he also he tossed from the Fort Channel Bridge.  

Following the murder of the boy, Harrison once again tipped off the Boston PO on January 6th telling them where to find the child’s body. Unfortunately the cops weren’t able to put the two calls together. 

I can't seem to fathom exactly how, but eventually Harrison got his wish and was finally arrested.  But try as he might, the Giggler couldn't get himself booked on his most prodigious murderous act.

 ...Harrison would confess to all four murders and in November of 1970 he was convicted for the first degree murder of Breen, for which he received a life sentence. He would also received three additional life-terms, one for each of his other victims.  (Harrison also took)  responsibility for the arson of the transient-friendly Paramount Hotel that claimed the lives of eleven, and injured more than 50.  Harrison (claimed) that he set the fire for “shits and giggles"(but) was never indicted for the blaze.

"Never indicted" for a mass murder at a flop house smack dab in the one of the swankiest neighborhoods in Boston. A fire that surely made a lot of real estate speculators extremely  grateful but was subsequently blamed on a gas leak. 

It happens. 

Harrison was transferred to the notorious Bridgewater State Hospital--which inspired American Horror Story: Asylum (which also namedrops Braintree)--and OD'd on anti-depressants just before his planned transfer to prison. How exactly a high-profile prisoner was able to get his hands on enough happy pills to overdose is a mystery to me.

Just another of those kooky mystery things.

Incidentally, the new season of American Horror Story has to do with killer clowns. Gotta love those coincidences.

POSTSCRIPT: I want to dive back into Twin Peaks in some depth, but it'll have to get in line. But I did want to bring this sync from the finale back up, since it kind of blew my mind.

Not only did we see the Brain-Tree again in the final episode but before that we saw Cooper bid farewell to the particular reality the series took place in with this benediction:

Not only did this sync with the Harvey motif we looked at before, it also synched quite eerily with the this series in more ways than one. Reviewers picked up on the "curtain call" motif in their headlines, like this one in The New York Times:

Again, here is what looked at previously:

This place has all kinds of history in my life but also in the life of the mysteries we're trying to unpack here. You see, the Curtain Call Theatre lies cheek-by-jowl with the apartment building (see image below) where the unfortunate Robert LaMonica met his end on the orders of none other than Whitey Bulger. 

The guy fingered for the hit- ID'd by a teenage girl who claimed she saw him while boozing it up at the adjacent Faxon Park, was recently cleared of the charges and released from prison after 35 years.

And again, there was a real-life Dale Cooper from Braintree, who went missing (and was eventually discovered dead) in the wilderness above Burbank, California. Burbank is a major hub for the television industry, as you probably know already.