The Nest, or 5 Ways I Don’t Wanna Die

It’s Weird Out There, 3-12-2021

Hello, everyone. Alien here. Because it’s on my mind, what are your May the Fourth plans? Yeah, me neither. I can dream, though, right? 

Okay. Back in January, LA-Ghost-Con™ came to Louisville in digital form. Evidently it was a great show, for not having an actual public location. You can check out their coverage online for tons of awesome stories about the hauntings across the US and beyond. Some people came to me offline to talk about their personal experiences. They want to share, just not in the convention platform. So, here are their stories, as promised.

Ernest B lives in central Kentucky. He bought a farm cheap. It turned out the last owner had passed, which at first didn’t bother Ernest much. Things took a dark turn, and Ernest nearly died as well. He agreed to be interviewed about his experiences. Here is the transcript from Nicole’s visit.

Thing gave me nightmares for the next three nights.

With Ernest’s permission, Nicole went to the farm. She describes a rustic but beautiful place, a low ranch house with some scenic barns. Photographers could make something wonderful out of it. She said the kitchen door is boarded up now, but she found none of the bleak or sinister vibrations she expected from the place. It just seemed run down, tired, and dirty.

Thoughts, folks? Ever see big spiders with white faces? I don’t do spiders, so I couldn’t look it up. What about ghosts reaching through glass to try to kill you? Or ghosts with spider pets? Or maybe Fred isn’t a ghost.

As always, let us know if you have any information relating to this story.

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The Hungry Garden

This next segment is about the other person who contacted me, PatriciaK. She likes to go by Trish. She called me two weeks ago after we exchanged numbers back in January. A few minutes of her story convinced me I wanted to see the place, so we agreed to postpone and meet in person.

If you open that door, we’re done. I’ll leave, and I’ll call the police.

Sunshine and balmy (for April) weather made for a pleasant drive over to Brownstown last weekend. I tied my hair back and put the windows down. Lovely day. I always get excited going to talk about one of my favorite subjects: ghosties.

The turn to the house is a few minutes south of Brownstown, about halfway to Salem. A few miles east, turn onto a curvy, hilly driveway and you’re there. While not a mansion, the high-rise look wouldn’t be out of place in wealthier neighborhoods in a big city. It had more windows than I prefer, and the long, paved hill up to the house looks like it would be dangerous in the icy snow we just got through not so long ago.

Trish waited in a beat-up Escape from just after they went short and wide. She dresses like a Grunge fangirl, jeans, work boots, a Pink Floyd tee under faded flannel. Not what I expected for a mathematician who does chemistry and robotics to pay the bills. Why is a chemist using robotics? you ask. Thanks to the pandemic, even labs are trying to work from home. She builds and programs robots so she and her team can work remotely. I think she needs to make robots that do laundry and fold clothing. Maybe on her next job?

The walk up to the house is longer than it looks. Trish didn’t speak, but I couldn’t tell whether she was nervous or introspective. She unlocked the door, but then paused before opening it.

“It’s a bit of a mess,” she said. Brief, apologetic smile. Downcast eyes. She’s an introvert. 

In spite of the size of the house, the tour lasted all of ten minutes. The front door opens into a wide space that goes all the way to the enormous windows along the back of the house. First, we went through a living area. It’s on the north side so there’s no direct sunlight to interfere with the massive TV. Gigantic couches and plush recliners make the area look cozy, and the haphazard pillows with prints of Joplin and Knight made it look lived in. Then came a kitchen, more to the left, with large appliances in cool blues, custom stuff, it looked to me. Next to that was a dining area, followed by the study area that occupied the rear, along that glass wall.

Stairs on the right took us up to bedroom and master bath areas. It was five bedrooms, with one used as storage, a second doubling as a home office and robotics area for Trish, then three regular bedrooms. The small one was Trish’s. A slightly larger bedroom had a kid’s bed and teenage girl things. Dolls on a shelf, stuffed unicorns on the bed, poster-like puzzles hung on the walls, assembled, glued, and framed, showing more unicorns by a couple of talented artists. The main bedroom, which looked unused for quite some time, had a sheetless, super-king bed with Victorian footboard, tall posts on the corners, and elaborate cushions on the matching headboard. I think she mentioned the bed cost ten thousand when they got it.

And who are ‘they?’ We’ll come back to that.

After the tour, Trish took me back down to the study, to the rear of the house, where she refused to even unlock the back door. “If you open that door, we’re done. I’ll leave, and I’ll call the police.”

Outside, a red-purple banana tree dominated a swath of pale dirt and the ruins of what once must have been a lovely garden but which now resembled the chaotic disarray you see in pictures of hurricane or tornado damage. The banana tree topped out about eight feet or so. Wide leaves spread out, rather than up, and it shifted slightly in a breeze.

“That’s where we’ll see her,” Trish said, pointing at the tree. “If you stay till night. If she comes.”

“She,” I asked.

“Teri.”

###

Trish found herself exploring Mathematics at UC Berkeley at the age of seventeen, with scholarships and a grant for women in STEM. A year later, her parents died in a car accident. She took custody of her kid sister, Rebeccah, only four at the time. Despite the well-known hardships of raising children, working, and completing a degree, she finished her masters in five years. Meanwhile, she dated two boys, one girl, and one enby, Hannah, the only one she regretted losing.

They’d finish each other’s sentences, and she’d say, ‘spooky action at a distance.’

In her fourth year, Trish met Teri, a Physics student specializing in plasma systems. She’d stayed late at a lab working on a chemistry final in December. Walking across campus in the dark wasn’t all that strange to her–until she rounded a corner and found three men punching a black woman. Trish pulled out her phone to record the attack, then shouted at the men to stop. Some quick threats that the video was already uploading to her social media ended the assault, and the men left. Trish helped the victim, Teri, to the hospital.

In the following weeks, she learned more than she ever wanted about the power and intensity of hate towards non-white people in this country. Teri was dating one of Trish’s classmates, a musician and mathematician named Jonas. The three men were Seniors who knew Jonas, and harassed him for dating a black woman. Jonas ignored him, until the three caught him in an alley and beat him to death. Teri saw part of that attack, and the abuse she got was to keep her quiet. With this latest event, the boys and their wealthy parents aimed their weaponized legal firms at Trish. Only, the women of the UC Berkeley legal department, professors and students alike, stood behind Trish and Teri to end the legal assault, even if they couldn’t get the racist, murderous men put behind bars.

Teri never forgot, and when Trish finished that masters a couple of years later, Teri invited her to Indiana and then helped her get a job in the same company. When Trish moved with her nine-year-old sister, Teri and her husband, Nigel, invited them to stay in their house. The very house where Trish had just given me the tour.

“I know this is going to come out,” Trish told me, with one of the few direct, eye-to-eye moments during the whole story. “I don’t care. I fell in love with both of them. I was in a relationship with both of them. Together. Teri and Nigel.”

I asked if that caused problems.

“Nope. They were great with Bek. She ate it up because they spoiled her. I loved that aspect as well, and having help to get her to school and dance, that sort of thing, was amazing. And the time with Teri and Nigel was wonderful, the kind of romance I’ve only ever seen in movies. Nigel was an architect, and some nights he’d be with clients half the night, giving me time with Teri. She always said the weirdest, best things to us. Like one night, she said there were uncountable atoms in her body, and every one of them gravitated towards me. I said because it was gravity, they went towards everyone. She laughed, then came back with something cheesy like, sure, but they’re all in love with you. 

“And she’d do that to Nigel, too. They’d finish each other’s sentences, and she’d say, ‘spooky action at a distance.’ He asked her one time if she loved him or me more, and she told him her heart was like Schroedinger’s cat, you couldn’t prove either unless you opened it. Nigel was great too. Some nights, when it was just him and me, he would cook the most delicious Korean delicacies. He grew up in California, but was close enough to his parents and grandparents that he had a bit of an accent. I loved listening to him. He never made me feel like a third wheel.”

The happy romance would not last long. One secret Teri kept from Trish until later was that she had ovarian cancer. She got sicker and sicker, and about eight months after Trish moved in with the couple, Teri died.

###

Teri left a video explaining what she wanted. She recorded it with her phone the previous summer. Trish didn’t show me, but says she’s kept a copy of it. Teri, among all her other things, was an avid gardener. She kept a variety of rare and unusual plants in the garden, along with the big red-leaved banana tree. In essence, she wanted to be cremated, and wanted her ashes spread over her plants so Nigel and Trish could visit her as long as they kept the garden intact. Only, and Teri was quite explicit about this, none of her ashes should go to the banana tree. She called it–him, Horace. She said he wasn’t a very nice plant, and that he absolutely wasn’t to get any of her ashes.

Trish was ready to give Teri’s ashes to the garden right away. Nigel wasn’t.

Two months later, Covid-19 was blooming across the world. Nigel’s grandparents passed within two weeks of each other, leaving his parents alone and grieving. His mother got sick, so Trish told him to go to his parents in Korea, before they blocked all travel. This left Trish alone in the big house with her sister and unable to put Teri to rest in the garden. She wouldn’t do that without Nigel.

“Bek was the strong one,” Trish said. “She kept me together. Sometimes, she was the one who got me up and off to work. She picked up this fascination with Druids, you know, the old religion from Europe. There’s all these stories about Druids, and people talk a lot, she said, but so much of it was made up or just speculation and people repeated them like facts. Really, we don’t know much about them. But we know they were fascinated by trees. So Bek says to me in the car one day on the way to school, ‘Trish, if I die, I wanna come back as a tree. Trees live a long time, and they clean the air. I want to help clean the air.'”

Bek started hanging out in the garden. It was late spring, by then, well into lockdown, and the plants became her friends. Bek had loved Teri like an adopted sister, and she wanted the plants to be healthy and strong for when they spread the ashes. 

About the same time, Trish noticed odd holes in the yard. Well away from the city, they saw plenty of wildlife. Deer and rabbits visited periodically. Squirrels claimed the entire territory. There were the usual holes from chipmunks and insects, little holes from digging birds looking for food. But these new holes were always straight up and down, often shaped like a deer hoof, but there would only be one, and it would be several inches deep.

This went on well into the summer. Trish didn’t worry over it. “It had to be some sort of bug or burrowing animal, right?”

By July she was paranoid and antisocial. She bought cameras to watch the house. The ones outside the house caught nothing. The ones inside caught Bek going to the kitchen, the bathroom, watching TV in the living room. Trish tried to connect her sister’s insomnia to her own paranoia. It didn’t click.

“I thought for a few days that Bek’s nocturnal behavior was interfering with my sleep. Had she turned the TV up too loud, and I was waking up just enough not to rest? It makes sense, right?”

By this point in the interview, I was beginning to feel like nothing made sense. When Trish asked if I was okay, I realized I hadn’t eaten lunch. I suggested a break for food. She agreed, but only if she drove. I offered to drive separately. We’d only just met, after all.

Trish said, “You look about to faint, so I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

We went to a diner in Brownstown, a place with sloppy, tasty food and a waiter much too busy on his phone to get anyone’s orders right. I had to ask four times for ketchup.

“You still tipped him?” Trish said when we left.

“He got the food to us. That’s good enough, right?”

“Most people I knew wouldn’t have.”

Knew. Ominous. No. I wanted it to be ominous. That’s what sells, right? But after a moment of reflection, I realized it made me sad.

After a silent ride back to the house, Trish picked her story up again.

“One evening, I got home from work, sent the babysitter home, and Bek asked if we could get a swing. She said she knew a perfect spot, and that I had to see. She pestered me all through supper until finally I caved and followed her out back, to the edge of the trees and a small dry creek. Bek pointed, and I found a rope tied to a horizontal tree limb.

“Only, it was more than just a rope. It was thick, and doubled over and cinched with metal crimps. There was a hook at the bottom, with a lock on it to keep whatever it held from inadvertently slipping off.”

She wouldn’t say why just then—in the present, but the rope creeped Trish out. She went to a living room window, stared out through trails of stains from rain tracking downward through dust.

That night, after she got Bek to bed, someone knocked on the door. Nigel, dirty and unshaven, leaned in the doorway when she answered. He smelled like beer and cigarettes and who knows what else. She’d never seen him like this, and helped him to the master bedroom, still made up. He didn’t have much to say, other than that he was exhausted, so she left him there. She’d been sleeping in that bed because she missed both of them so much, but because it was awkward, she went back to her room for the night.

The next day, Nigel was out. Bek asked about the swing again. Trish dodged, and they got through the nightly routine  and to bed.

As had become common, Trish woke early. This time it was just after 3 that morning. Like so many other mornings, she remembered dreams of walking through the back yard. This time, she remembered dozens of such walks, uninhibited, unclothed, damp from summer dew.

We joked about mosquitos, but her grin never touched her eyes.

As if compelled, she went in her nightshirt out onto the patio, into the yard, where the denizens of her dreams had shifted and moved, tall, dark shapes, alien, organic, like mobile plants with hands that touched her head, her shoulders, walked with her in a migration from east to west. The whole thing was like another dream, but when she woke a few minutes later, she was still out in the yard.

Naked.

With no sign of her clothes, she trudged back to the patio. She was groggy like she was drunk or stoned, and when Nigel touched her back, held her from going inside, she let him have his way with her. Their lovemaking was fierce and strange, and she remembers only fragments, odd spices on his breath, his wet shirt against her back. She never caught sight of him, only the touches, glimpses of his fingers, always from behind her.

She woke in her bed, still damp, smelling like grass, the garden, and the night air. Trish slept in because it was a Saturday, and woke later to scents of bacon and pancakes. She showered and then found Nigel in the kitchen, finishing making breakfast. Bek sat at the table, drawing something on her phone. It felt almost like before.

“I don’t know what you did to me,” she said, hugging Nigel as he cleaned up the bacon skillet, “but I haven’t slept this good in months.”

“Ew,” Bek said. “But it wasn’t Nigel. He was in Indianapolis last night. He didn’t get in until eight this morning.”

From Nigel’s confused grin, she knew Bek was telling the truth.

“That must have been one hell of a dream,” he said, setting platters of bacon and pancakes on the table. “But, breakfast is ready, and I’m ready.” He paused with a perfectly straight face. “What are you guys going to eat?”

Just as they were sitting down to eat, Trish found the urn she’d kept on a shelf next to the kitchen. Someone had opened it, and dark smears marked the shelf and the wall. She got up, went to it. Nigel and Bek noticed her distress.

“Yeah, we took care of that for you while you were at work,” Bek said. Nigel grinned like they’d done something helpful.

“We were going to do it together,” Trish said, and she had a hard time fighting back tears.

Bek reacted with a teenager’s sullen defiance, but Nigel turned angry. He said things like he didn’t understand what she didn’t like about it, and how he was under way too much pressure to be dealing with this.

Trish took the urn to her bedroom and stayed there.

You’ve got to understand. This wasn’t a human sound. No aircraft or machinery made it. It was organic.

That evening, Nigel claimed exhaustion from the driving and went to bed early. Bek passed out on the couch until Trish carried her to bed. Then Trish sat up, more awake than she’d been since the insomnia began. The questions troubled her. What was happening? Why did she dream of plants that walked and sex on the patio. Well, that last part seemed reasonable enough, but Nigel’s being two hours north at the time made her ever more confused. Anger and disappointment over Teri’s ashes played a part.

Finally, she decided she was getting nowhere, and since sleep seemed unlikely, she fetched her laptop to catch up on some work.

An hour later she was neck deep in calculations and project paperwork when something moving out the back window startled her. From the living room couch, that something had seemed like a person on the patio. When she got up, she was certain a woman stood out there.

The woman pointed east.

At the same time, a vast sound, like deep whale-song, vibrated the house. When Trish looked again, the woman was farther from the windows, but she pointed east again. Thinking of NIgel and some of the wines he kept in the cellar, she went outside. By this time, the woman had fled. Trish called out to her, but the sound came again, low like a foghorn, only there aren’t any foghorns in central Indiana.

“I’ve never heard anything like it, before or since,” Trish told me. “You’ve got to understand. This wasn’t a human sound. No aircraft or machinery made it. It was organic. It wavered like an animal call, only so loud, I thought my chest was going to burst. It didn’t hurt, but I’ve never felt anything so uncomfortable.”

“And that was when I heard Bek.”

The sound came from the east end of the yard, where the woman had been pointing. At first, it sounded like a kitten mewling, but then recognized her sister crying. With the light on her phone, she went to the northeast corner of the enormous yard. Bek hung from a bar. Her wrists had been zip-tied to it. The bar hung from the rope that had inspired Bek’s to suggest getting a swing.

Bek’s eyes were closed, and the Goth makeup she’d been wearing streaked down either cheek. Trish ran to her, tried to lift her off the bar. Only, the bar was stuck to the hook by layers of duct tape. Trish picked at it. Then the world spun as she fell, and her mind played back the crackle of a stun gun jolting her as she lost consciousness.

The next morning, she woke to a neighbor lady shaking her awake, and the worst headache in her life. She had been tied to the bar in place of Bek, and her sister was missing. So was NIgel.

Police came, and went. A friend of Nigel and Teri from work started a search party. For days, there was nothing.

This is where Trish called it for the night. “I don’t stay out here after dark. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll tell you the rest, and show you where they found her.”

It wasn’t all that late, probably an hour of daylight left, and I wasn’t at all afraid to drive home in the dark. “I’m sorry, I don’t think a hotel is in my budget, or another drive over here. Can we finish in town, or in your car?”

“There’s a spare bed in my hotel room.”

So that was an awkward moment, but eventually I agreed. I had to hear the rest of it.

This is all they ever found.

Trish refused to talk about Bek or Nigel, or much of anything at all while we were in the seedy motel downtown. She didn’t shower, so I didn’t either, and sleep was awful. Between the odors in the hotel room and the highway noises outside, I didn’t sleep until nearly dawn. Trish shook me awake around ten. We brushed our teeth and then grabbed breakfast, a sausage-patties-on-a-biscuit-to-go kind of thing, and then went back to the house.

We didn’t go inside, though. Trish led the way up the walkway, then veered right and took me around the house, across the long yard to the valley below, to a path going south into the woods. She was no more talkative during that walk than she had been the night before. After about an hour of picking our way over hilly woods, we came to a tree with something pink sticking out of the side.

When I got closer, I realized it was a small sweater, sized for a teenager. It emerged from the bark and hung limp, as if someone had drilled a hole and shoved the rest of the sweater inside. The tree was about a foot and a half in diameter. Not a young tree. One sleeve of the sweater came out the other side of the tree. So did the leg of a pair of denim pants, also sized for a teenager. 

“This is all they ever found,” Trish said. “There was a bit of blood. The type matches Bek’s, but there’s no sign of a struggle, no sign of Nigel at all. I think she got her wish and turned into a tree.”

I still don’t know how to answer that. I was standing there thinking it looked like the tree had eaten her sister, and I didn’t want to say that. Her version was nicer.

With her story told, Trish turned almost catatonic. I had to lead her back to the house, often by the hand. She didn’t say anything, and sometimes, if I released her, she’d stop walking and stare at the ground. Eventually, I realized she was grieving. She’d been holding out, holding the pain in, and somehow, this visit to the tree with me was a funeral of sorts for the kid sister she’d been protecting so long.

“Are you good to drive?” I asked at her SUV. She nodded, buckling in. I gave her a card with my number and the address for Weird Out There. “Please let me know you got home okay? And call if you need anything. You want to talk, anything.”

I sound professional, right. It sounded pretty weak at the time, yet she gave me a brief but potent smile, started her car, and drove away.

I was half-way back to Bellington before I realized I had forgotten to ask about Teri’s ghost and the strange sound.

Trish texted me when she got home, and thanked me for listening. I haven’t heard from her since.

Conclusion

Nicole found some stuff related to the story. There are open missing-person’s cases for Rebeccah and Nigel. Interestingly, Nigel’s parents live in Florida, not South Korea, and they’re white. He was adopted at the age of three. Additionally, the police investigating the deaths of Trish’s parents suspected foul play, but couldn’t prove anything. If you have any information regarding this story or these other aspects, or if you’ve seen Nigel or Rebeccah, please contact the authorities or share the details anonymously here.

That’s a wrap for this edition of It’s Weird Out There. You have an odd story about ghosts or anything else, please let us know. This is Alien, signing off.