20 minute read
Good Reads
by Darcy Connor
Preschool/Toddler The Leaf Thief
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Written by Alice Hemming Illustrated by Nicola Slater
I am so happy to be heading into fall. I’m ready for sweaters and jeans, stews and lattes and all the joy autumn brings. That eagerness for the change of seasons immediately brought The Leaf Thief to mind as that cute little squirrel “with a belly full of hazelnuts” obsessively counts the leaves on the trees. But wait! How can it be? Just yesterday there were so many more leaves on the trees. There were red ones, and orange ones and yellow ones. Where did they go? Could they have been stolen!? Is there truly a leaf thief on the loose? This is a wonderful story about embracing change that is inevitably part of life.
Picture Book The First Strawberries Written by Joseph Bruchac Illustrated by Anna Vojtech
Joseph Bruchac is an awardwinning Native American writer with works like Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two, Two Roads and Skeleton Man. Many of his stories are based on Native American legends and folklore, including his book The First Strawberries, which is based on a Cherokee Indian story about how strawberries came to be. A celebration of the natural world, the illustrations by Anna Vojtech make this a beautiful book for your blossoming reader.
Upper Elementary School The Mystery of Black Hollow Lane Written byJulia Nobel
Sent to boarding school after the strange disappearance of her father, Emma carries with her a mysterious box of medallions that belonged to her father. When she arrives at school, she discovers that the same symbols on the medallions are etched into walls and books at school. Emma soon discovers that the symbols are connected to a secret society called The Order of Black Hollow Lane. Could these medallions and this secret society be clues to help find her missing father? Readers won’t truly find out until they read the sequel The Secret of White Stone Gate.
Middle School The Crown's Game By Evelyn Skye
Historical fantasy. Magic. Romance. Long-buried secrets. OK superfans of Shadow and Bone, here’s your next series. Two teenagers, Vika and Nikolai, must compete in an ancient duel of magical skill to see who becomes the Imperial Enchanter for the Tsar in order to help defend Russia from the Kazakhs and the Ottoman Empire. It’s anyone’s guess who will persevere.
Adult Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving By Mo Rocca & Jonathan Greenberg
Based on CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Mo Rocca’s podcast, Rocca does a deep dive into the lives of people long past who have fascinated him. Founding fathers, a sports team, artists and entertainers’ lives are reexamined by Rocca and co-author Jonathan Greenberg. As Rocca notes in his introduction, “As a lover of obituaries, these are the kind of questions that weigh on my mind: How did Founding Father Thomas Paine, the man who inspired the American Revolution with his pamphlet Common Sense, end up with just six people at his funeral and an obit summed up in the line ‘He had lived long, did some good and much harm’?”
While offered in book format, you may enjoy Mobituaries as an audiobook with Rocca’s unique voice and humor truly capturing his fascination with the lives of Ada Lovelace, the Black congressmen of Reconstruction, Fanny Brice, Billy Carter and more.
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SQUATCH WATCH
The Hunt Continues
Story by Zach Oden
Stillframe from the infamous Patterson-Gimlin video taken in 1967.
They lurk in the deepest woods, just out of the periphery of human existence. They rattle the forests with their lumbering, humongous frames. They watch us from the tree line, snapping limbs and howling into the night.
Bigfoot has been an omnipresence in the forests and swamps of North Carolina for decades, invading our popular consciousness and providing a stream of fireside stories around campfires across the state. For most of us, they catch us when we are young.
“My grandmother called them the Booger Man,” recounts John Bruner, a retired paramedic from Marion, North Carolina who leads the group BIGFOOT 911, a team of volunteer Bigfoot hunters whose goal is to document (but not harm or capture) the elusive creatures. Bruner has been hunting Bigfoot in North Carolina for more than 43 years now, ever since a chance encounter with something in the deep woods of McDowell County.
“Back when I was young, Marion was very rural, and you stayed in the woods a lot. And I got deep in the woods by the old family place when I heard strange knocking sounds, and it puzzled me. My grandmother lived close to us and I stopped by on my way home and told her about it. She freaked out, saying, ‘You don’t need to be down there. The Booger Man is down there.’ She seemed mad and scared. Years later, she finally told me about a creature that supposedly lived down there—a big creature, and not human.”
Bruner helps organize the Marion Bigfoot Festival, a cryptozoological celebration of all things Sasquatch where he hopes that families will come together and help celebrate what he considers one of the most important and maligned North Carolina residents. He seems to embody the mantra of the festival’s tagline, “Come a skeptic, leave a believer” as he emphasizes a reliance on the scientific method over science fiction.
While the festival leans heavily into the Sasquatch of popular culture, and allows you to partake in bigfoot funnel cakes and Hairy Hominid IPAs, it seems to represent the zeitgeist of mass popular culture and interest in a universally appealing creature. The popularity of the American Sasquatch has been building for some time, and Bruner considers this a byproduct of an ever-connected world via the internet and social media. Ironically, for someone who has been searching
SQUATCH WATCH
Above: Image of a possible bigfoot sighting by John Bruner in 2017 near Lake James.
Right: John Bruner, founder of BIGFOOT 911
most of his life for the creature, Bigfoot is suddenly everywhere.
The term Bigfoot itself is relatively new to the English language. It’s a moniker loggers in Humboldt County, California, used to describe the giant humanoid tracks found around their camp after several bizarre encounters with a creature that seemed to be continuously wrecking their campsites in the summer of 1958. The name was soon Americanized into “Sasquatch,” a slight bastardization of the Chehalis Native term “saesq’ec,” which derived from tribal tales of a wild man of the woods that bore more than a passing resemblance to the Bigfoot stories.
While wild fantasies of the hairy cryptid would propagate pulp novels and magazines in the early 1960s, it would be 1967 when Bigfoot would finally get his big moment in the form of a short film documentary being shot in Willow Creek, California by two entrepreneur cowboys: Roger Patterson and Blake Gimlin. The grainy, oneminute footage would forever become known as the Patterson-Gimlin footage. Its authenticity is hotly debated to this day.
As iconic and shaky as the Zapruder footage of JFK’s assassination, the scene opens with a tranquil sunny vista in the basin of a California creek bed. Suddenly the camera pans frantically to the left, and a large simian creature rises up and begins walking with long, lumbering strides. The cameraman (Patterson) gives chase, and a few shaky seconds of running jostle the viewer before he plants his tripod and captures the final few moments of the creature’s gate across the open plain. At one point, she (Bigfoot hunters have gendered her based on the mammary glands that seem to be prominently featured in the footage— Bigfoot boobs, if you will) indignantly and casually glances back over her shoulder as she walks, not breaking stride, seemingly annoyed at these interlopers who have invaded the tranquility of her morning squat next to a dead tree.
The footage has been debated, debunked, verified and vilified over the years, and Bigfoot hunters still refer to it as the Rosetta Stone of Bigfoot evidence. If nothing else, it inspired a national fever in the creature, and cheesy horror film after horror film featured the titular behemoth as its Jaws or Texas Chainsaw stand-in in the subsequent drive-in features.
Bruner recalls seeing the Patterson-Gimlin footage as a child, and it had a profound impact upon him. “They used to play all sorts of trailers and news footage at the movies when I was a kid. This was the early 1970s. And I am sitting in the movies and suddenly there’s this giant creature on the screen and they are calling it Bigfoot, and I remembered what my grandmother had said about the Booger Man and I said, ‘Man that is it! That’s what they were talking about—that’s the Booger
Man!’ And I was hooked from that moment on.”
Since then, Bruner has dedicated much of his time to searching for the elusive creature. Sightings are up: In North Carolina alone there were more than 80 Bigfoot sightings in 2020. Now, “Squatch Watching,” as its practitioners refer to it, has become a popular outdoor event nationwide, especially in the Tar Heel State, spawning several regional search groups aimed at finding definitive proof through encounters with the hairy mystery. Bruner has trained his group of more than a dozen Bigfoot hunters to follow methods of tracking and data collection that might be more at home in a forensic analysis or missing-persons search and rescue team.
On August 5, 2017, they had their biggest success—a close encounter with an actual Bigfoot in the woods around Lake James.
“Bigfoot is an animal,” he says. “I have seen it up close. About thirty yards. We were on a forest service road. I kept hearing something running parallel to me on the right side. It was none of my team members. It stopped every time I stopped. So, I waited. I saw something ahead of me and I flipped on my headlamp and it took off across the road and into the woods and I gave chase, maybe 50 yards. And then I didn’t hear anything. When I panned to the right, though, there it was. Standing there with its right arm up on the tree, looking at me. And you could tell it was not in the least bit intimidated by me.
“It was probably about seven and a half feet tall. It didn’t look like what I thought they would look like. Matted hair, not fur, no hair on its face, flat nose, leathery black face. I watched it for about eight or nine seconds, and could even see its chest rising and falling as it breathed. And then I watched it walk away, could see the muscles in its back and hip and I was satisfied. That was an animal. That was not anything but an animal.”
Bruner’s sighting made headlines, but for the most part he seems content with staying out of the limelight. If anything, too much focus on the hunter takes away from the real purpose of chasing the elusive being, and finding credible experiences in a sea of half-truths, hoaxes and hyperbolic hunters.
Bruner and his team offer training and are expanding their ranks by offering a thorough course at the local Community College, which includes over 80 hours of research and field training. And the interest and excitement only seem to be growing. Thanks to the internet, new generations of crypto enthusiasts are encountering the blurry Bigfoot footage for the first time, and with a widening mainstream appeal, more and more people seem to be sharing their stories of running into the creature.
“The internet has really brought us all together,” Bruner muses, referencing the popularity of various Bigfoot-themed events across the country. The Festival in Marion, for instance, drew over 56,000 visitors to the tiny town of 8,000 last year, to share in the collective lore of Bigfoot sightings.
Bruner’s team of researchers is one of dozens currently working (and posting their experiences online) across the country, sharing similar stories of wooded encounters with a large, mostly nocturnal, definitely nonhuman, and incredibly large-footed being. It is no surprise that the number of Bigfoot sightings in 2021 is on track to outpace the previous year. While it remains to be seen if there will be the “holy grail” of a live sighting or event to definitively prove its existence, Bruner sees the interest alone as a good sign, and not just for avid enthusiasts such as himself.
“Bigfoot research is great for families, because it gets you together. Take the family out for a hike. You are together as a family, doing something, and you are teaching your kids to get outside. And also, you’re looking for Bigfoot! Will you ever find him? I don’t know. But being outside with your kids, and teaching them to love it—you aren’t wasting any time doing that.”
In an age of ever-widening conspiracy theories, fake news and media distrust, Bruner and his colleagues seem to have found solace in perhaps the one collective mystery that does more good for humanity than harm. The hunt for Bigfoot provides us with a sense of wonder and community, binding us together in the woods, searching for something like us, but just out of reach, just beyond the trees, a little bit bigger than us all.
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SQUATCH WATCH
Our HigherSelf
By GregGirard
When LouAnne Jordan’s mother had a heart incident that put her in a coma, she was understandably distraught. Her mother also had a degenerative spine disease, which came with a lot pain, and so Jordan anxiously sat by her mother’s side for 13 days wondering what her mother was thinking. Was she fighting to come back? Was she accepting her fate? Was her time close to an end? That’s when she turned to clairvoyant Trish
Fleming.
“Trish just talked to and checked in with my mom during that time,” says Jordan. “She told me my mom hadn’t made the decision whether she was going to stay or leave. It was really comforting, and it was obvious she was talking with my mom from the things Trish was telling me. Trish said my mom felt so much better and didn’t really know if she wanted to come back to all that pain. And then later Trish said another medical thing was going on with my mom that hadn’t been detected, something personal, and she advised I talk to the doctor. We checked it out and the doctor was able to catch something that could have been devastating if Trish hadn’t warned me about it.”
“I think it’s a gift,” says Fleming. “I think it’s a gift from God. I truly do. When I was younger, I’d say I was about four, it’s going to sound crazy and bizarre, but I could be upstairs in my room and when I wasn’t supposed to go outside, I could teleport myself outside. I’m not a crazy woman. If you met me, you’d think I was very normal. You would. But I could teleport outside and I could go play in the yard. And then I could go see what my mom was doing in the kitchen. Then I could go back up to my room and go back into my body and continue forward.”
Clairvoyant, psychic, telepath, spiritualist, there are any number of words to describe persons who bridge the metaphysical world, who delve in the abstract, transcending beyond the physical laws of nature. Fleming, who just recently moved away from the area, describes herself as a clairvoyant, someone who can perceive events beyond normal sensory contact. She says she’s also clairaudient (the ability to hear something not present to the ear) and clairsentient (the ability to feel what is not present). And with a bachelor’s degree in metaphysical science from the University of Metaphysics, she has dedicated herself to helping her clients find peace, balance and joy in life.
“Through my readings I am able to connect with each individual’s high self, the angelic realm and other divine beings that have messages and/or blessings,” she writes on her website.
It is easy to conjure up visions of con artists organizing séances and peering into crystal balls to talk with the dead or see the future. Indeed, at the height of the séance and spiritualism craze in the 19th
century, the great escape artist Harry Houdini made it a mission to debunk so-called spiritualist tricks, like ringing a bell with their toes under the table, using levers to make tables move up and down or using double exposure photography to show spirits floating in the background.
One of the most infamous con artist teams of the 19th century were Maggie and Kate Fox, sisters from Hydesville, New York, who led wildly popular séances claiming to communicate with the dead through tapping sequences. Forty years after they first began, in 1888, Maggie Fox admitted the tapping heard from the dead was actually just the sisters cracking their knuckles and other joints.
Give the audience what they want and they will pay for it, after all, but Fleming and others who have abilities in the metaphysical world believe their spiritualism is no different from more traditional, dogmatic religious practices. When addressing religion, the University of Metaphysics website notes, “No one religion is right and all others wrong. Each exists to serve whatever level of spiritual evolution its leaders and followers have attained. The ultimate purpose of religion is to reunite a person with God’s presence within, and in the process to improve one’s life. This is the current, present and daily purpose of Religious Metaphysics.”
Fleming sees a natural synergy between her belief in God and Jesus and her ability to communicate with spirits and souls. She counsels that each of us has a higher self, an existence in the spiritual world that also includes spirit guides, angels and other beings who accompany us throughout our lives. And Fleming is able to communicate with her clients’ spirit guides through her own higher self and guides.
Fleming explains: “It’s communication from their high self to my high self. There are different beings. It’s not just beings from your family. They can be from different realms, but your family is going to always come and help if needed. And so I sit down and, all of a sudden, I just know stuff about people. I’ll usually ask my high self to go in order of importance and they’ll just start saying things. I can hear things, see things, feel things. And I just start ticking off this list of what they (a client’s spirit guides) want the person to know first.”
Clients come to her for a variety of reasons, with the standard questions you’d expect about romance, career, money, health and contacting loved ones who have died. Shannon Becker has been seeing Fleming for years and shares that her experiences with Fleming are of guidance and trust, but that people shouldn’t confuse the messages Trish relays for a lack of free will.
“It’s very rare for a psychic who is worth their salt to tell you something like, ‘Don’t get in the car. You’re going to have an accident,’” she says. “I had a woman I worked with when I was 19 tell me over lunch that I was going to die before I turned 40 and I wouldn’t live to see my children grow up. It’s not like that.
Our HigherSelf
If Trish senses something, she’ll say, ‘You’ve got a career change coming up’ but if you don’t do anything to manifest that and you decide instead to sit on your couch and watch Friends all day long, it is obviously not going to come true.”
Jordan sees it the same way. She’s received guidance from Fleming on dating but hasn’t always followed through on certain suggestions because her gut was telling her no. Regarding her career, however, Jordan says Fleming gave her some of the best advice of her life. She was at a career crossroads about 10 years ago. She was let go from her job as a gallery curator and was about to take another job. During a session, Fleming told her to be patient, that another opportunity was coming her way and even though it would be for less pay, Jordan would find more fulfillment in the position.
Psychic phenomena will always be debated, its very essence impossible to tangibly prove. Do some people have the power to transcend the physical world? Do we each have our own spiritual guides journeying through life with us? And can certain people speak to those spirits? For Fleming, she says it’s not her fight to convince skeptics of her abilities. She is well aware of the uniqueness of her existence and that some people will never be convinced. Her goal, she says, is to simply help those who ask for it.
“In the end, I don’t care if you believe me or not,” she says. “I’ve had clients from 10 years ago call me and say they want another reading because I was right about something. But I think most people can tell when someone is bullshitting them. For all my clients, I’m open, I’m honest. I’m very blunt with my readings, and people generally like that. I’m just giving you information and you can take it or leave it. If it feels good in your heart, go with it. If it doesn’t, just skip it.”
To learn more about Trish Fleming’s work, visit foreverinthelight.com.
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Java Bean Roasting Co.
410 SW Broad St., Southern Pines 910.695.BEAN (2326)
The Java Bean Roasting Co. has been perking up the Pines with their specialty coffees and freshly roasted beans since 1996. Family owned and operated, this little spot has seen lots of change in those 25 years. The “Bean” remains the perfect spot to meet up with friends and make some new ones.
Located on the edge of downtown Southern Pines, there is always easy parking no matter what time of day, and that convenient curbside service is still an option. The times have changed the shop a bit with walk up window service. If you prefer to stay awhile, this historic cottage offers plenty of outdoor seating and quiet space inside.
In addition to classic espresso and other specialty coffees, there are plenty of new menu items. From handmade flavored syrups to golden lattes and matcha creations. Herbal teas and drink mixes are blended in house and available for purchase to enjoy in your home. With new items introduced regularly, there really is something for everyone.
The crown jewel is found hidden around back. In “The Shed” you can get a first hand look at how small batch roasting creates the perfect cup. Coffee is roasted daily and offered in 8 ounce and 16 ounce, or 12 ounce gift bags. Give a call and even large orders can be roasted fresh for you to share, gift or just keep for yourself.
Check out the Pines best kept secret. Sip a latte or a cup of tea, get some work done or strike up a conversation. Most importantly, make yourself at home!
