Welcome to The Mystical Underground

When people leave messages on our answering machine, we often don’t notice the blinking light right away. Sometimes, days pass. This happened a couple of weeks ago and I was shocked to hear a message from a friend I hadn’t heard from in  nearly 40 years.  Bob Preston.

Preston and I hung around with the same group during college in the 60s in Utica, New York. We went to anti-war protests, concerts, and explored the kinds of phenomena that we talk about on this blog. He was as interested in the I Ching as I was (a rare breed in those days), and I remember we used to sit around tossing the coins on all sort of questions. Our biggest question, though, usually seemed to come back to: What is the nature of reality?

“Hi, Trish, this Bob Preston. Would love to reconnect. I was reading this book called Kill Time and got to the part about Utica, New York, and suddenly realized T.J. MacGregor was you. Call if you’re so inclined.” That was his message.

I poured myself some coffee, called him, and we spent nearly two hours on the phone, pretty much picking up our conversation where we’d left it somewhere back in the 70s. It turns out that Bob now lives in Wisconsin and quit teaching some years ago to do what he loves most – play music, sculpture, and write. That’s a photo of one of his wood sculptures at the top of the post.

Preston, as I have always called him,   is no stranger to synchronicity. Here’s a layered one that he sent us.

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In the fall of 1978 I was living in an old house across from an equally old cemetery in the city of Whitewater, Wisconsin. On Halloween night of  that year I decided to walk across the street and play banjo to the unasembled masses. The thought had come to me that music was something that happened rarely  in such  a setting , that the deceased were lonely, that it would be time well spent.  With this in mind I  walked to the cemetery, and began the impromptu concert.

My banjo style is somewhat old-timey, often in mountain minor keys, with an emphasis on multi-step strum styles. It seemed the perfect evening, light winds, a plethora of autumn  smells, sounds and aura.

As I walked and played, I attempted to become one with the instant, in essence, strumming in time to the moment. I continued this way for twenty minutes or so, walking in a haphazard  pattern between plots and rows. At one point, I stumbled into what felt like a partially sunken grave site. There was enough of a jolt to my senses that it felt like missing the last step on a stairway. It caused my head to jerk upward, and focus on the constellation Orion.

At exactly the same instant, I felt a weight,  not unlike a hand,  on my left shoulder. This caused me to feel a little disoriented, a bit confused with a tinge of eerie unease. I stepped out of the depression and immediately walked back to the house across the street. I entered the house through the back door, stepped into the kitchen, closed the door and stood there with my heart pounding and my breathing shallow.

Then the back door knob began to slowly turn. My dog, Sociology, began barking and the cats scurried in every direction. The door opened a bit, then  closed gently. My dog started whimpering, cats were frozen in place, and I felt that weight again  on my shoulder. Immediately, the phone rang, in essence breaking the silence. At this instant, the door once again opened, then slammed shut with  a resounding echo. All animals became calm.

I answered the phone, still feeling somewhat confused. It was my girlfriend, just checking in. I muttered something along the line of…’you’ve just saved me’.

The following morning I walked across the street to examine the area of the cemetery where I had been the night before. I couldn’t locate the grave that I had ‘stepped into’. After a while I returned to the house, filing the whole episode under the general category of ‘interesting’.

Within a month or so, I decided to move to Colorado, simply because the opportunity arose. I was gone for nearly a year. In this time the cemetery incident had evaporated into the past. I had never shared the  story with anyone.

I returned  to Wisconsin in May of 1979, got a job teaching, and happily went about the business of living. At some point, within a few weeks, I traveled to Madison. While picking up some things at a mall, I decided to stop and see a friend that I had not had any contact with in a long time. As I drove past her house, I noticed that she was outside, raking her front yard. I pulled into her front yard, got out of my car to give a hug and exchange pleasantries. After a few minutes she indicated that she had an appointment and asked if I would like to go along. We left right away, from the yard to my car and on to the appointment.

We arrived at my friend’s destination and as she was getting out, she asked if I wanted to come along to her meeting with a tea-leaf reader.  Having always been interested in such things, I gratefully accepted the invite and followed her to the front door of the reader’s home. As soon as we entered the home, the reader stared at me and asked my friend if it would be possible  for her to have a few minutes with me before starting the appointed meeting.

I followed her into the ‘reading’ area, where she  asked me to sit. She picked up my left hand,  all the while looking deeply into my eyes. She indicated that there was an existing issue that she needed to discuss with me. At this time she prepared a cup of tea for reading and after a few moments said, “Do you recall the evening in the cemetery?”

Believe me, that got my attention. There was absolutely no way she could have been aware of the incident, now over a year in the past. I had not discussed this with anyone, I had never met this person, no contact could have been made before we met and my friend was totally unaware of my story. She then began to relate the entire event to me and started by calling me Robert – even though we hadn’t been introduced.

She related the entire cemetery incident, down to detail, adding at the end that the reason I had not found the grave the following day was because it had not been a depression in the ground but, rather, a raised mound on an unmarked grave. I was told that a young girl was buried at that spot, that she had been the daughter of a founding father of Whitewater and had died in the 1850’s,  the victim of a train accident.

The tea-leaf reader went on to relate that I had drawn this young girl to me with music and happenstance. Evidently, she had lived in the same house that I had been staying in, so I had provided the opportunity for her to gain entry into the dwelling. She said the  girl had been frightened by the noise, level of reaction and the phone call.

At this point the tea leaf reader indicated that the cemetery story wasn’t the message she had for me.  She got very serious and talked about all of the incidents relating to the supernatural that I had been involved  in over the years. She brought up Utica, by name. She talked about the I Ching and  my fascination with witchcraft. She went on to caution me about the effects of the unknown with people who don’t possess the necessary skills to successfully delve into the  subject.

Her advice was simple: gather the appropriate knowledge or steer clear of the subject. There comes a time in the study of the occult that preparation cannot be over-emphasized. With that, our meeting was over. My friend met with her and  later, I took her back home. I did not discuss this with her.

The following day I visited the local historical society. Everything the reader had told me about the house and the young girl  was confirmed by the records! From that day until now  I have kept my own council.