It's a Fact

“It’s the strangest phone message I’ve ever received. And I’ve I had a number of very weird ones. You see I am a retired university scientist, and to keep my mind active, I host a local weekly cable television show called “It’s a fact”. What I do is debunk some of the dumb ideas out there held by a lot of people in town: conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination fears, UFOs, and the like. It is a lot of fun. There is a call-in at the end, where people get to ask questions, or assert their determined ignorance of all things scientific.”

This phone call was different. The message consisted of just the one sentence, “I want you to reassure me that what I’m thinking is wrong…or not.” Then the man left his phone number.

Usually I get challenged to try to prove that the one leaving the message is wrong, the caller thinking that I can’t. This was different, so I called him back. He was fast picking up the phone. 

He expressed gratitude that I phoned him, then he asked me, “Could you come over to my house? I want you to see something. I hope it is not just me hallucinating.  Please come around three o’clock in the afternoon, no later”

How could I refuse? I had to go there to see or not see what was troubling him. 

The House

His house was about five miles out of town. There weren’t any neighbours nearby, just farmer’s fields on either side and across the road. Behind it was a forest that had grown up from what appears to have been a woodlot a few generations past. 

The house would have been elegant in its time, too much so to be simply a farmhouse, but too small to be rightfully considered a mansion. The first owners must have had money, and the means to get much more. Now it looked a lot like Miss Havisham’s fancy wedding dress worn everyday years after she had been stood up at the altar in Charles Dickens’ classic Great Expectations. I’ve had that image engrained in my mind ever since my first year university English Literature class, my only non-science course that year, when I read the book cover to cover two times.   Got a good mark.

I drove up the unpaved driveway, and walked up to the door. Before I could knock on the door (a sign read ‘bell not working’), my host opened the door for me and greeted me with a big smile on his face.. This person, his name was George, was clearly hoping for a happy ending to the story I would eventually tell him.  The first thing he said to me was “Let’s go behind the house. I need to show you something.” We walked around the side of the house. I felt like, without touching, he was taking me by the hand like he would a child.

Then I saw it. There was a space bearing nothing living, a real contrast to the ground around it, which was full of vibrant trees, bushes, grasses, and ferns. It was black like charcoal, like there had been a bonfire gone ballistic. 

“This is where it struck – a mighty bolt of lightning, maybe two – crashing and destroying like they were thrown by Thor himself in a fit of rage.

“Let’s go inside. I have to show you some newspaper clippings I photocopied from the library”

We went in through the back door, and I saw the sheets of copy paper on a small desk. I sat down on the chair in front of it, and looked at what was the front page from some 15 years before. The headline read, “Family disappears after bolt of lightning strikes”. George let me read through both pages of the article (continued on page three), before he would speak again. I read that the family was made up of a mother and a father with two kids and a dachshund, and that nothing could be found of their remains. Some witnesses claimed that the lightning struck twice in roughly the same place. That was all on the first page. I did not want to read further after that – too depressing.

George continued, “After that tragic event, it was years before the brother of the wife could sell that place. People believed that the house was cursed. I was the one to buy it. I was new in town, so I did not know about the stories told.”

I was relatively new in town as well, so I hadn’t heard of this tragedy before. I was beginning to wonder how this linked with what he wanted me to disprove.  

George asked me whether I wanted tea and scones, to which, of course, I said ‘yes’. 

“We’ll just wait until about five before four, and then we will go outside and watch. Then you and I will both know whether I am hallucinating. I hope that I am. And there cannot be mass hallucination with only two people.”

He put the kettle on for tea, and put the scones into the microwave to warm them up. When they were done, he asked me what I wanted in my tea and with my scones, and I answered “Nothing” and “Some kind of berry jam”. I accepted the raspberry jam, having seen raspberry bushes in the woods. 

We ate in silence except for a little slurping and a few yummy sounds. There were no words spoken until the big round clock with the massive black hands indicated that it was five minutes to four o’clock. We both stood up and headed out the back door.

There were two lawn chairs, both aimed at the back wall of the house. We sat down and waited. There was one question I just had to ask, “Why four o’clock?”

His answer was swift in coming. “You would know if you had read page three. The lightning struck precisely at four o’clock in the afternoon. Although this house is away from town, the lightning could be seen, and the time noted all over town.”

I still wondered what that had to do with what I was going or not going to see in a few minutes.

Then there they were – shadows, five of them- two big, two small, and one very small and low to the ground -the victims of the bolt of lightning. And they weren’t just stationary shadows against a wall. They moved. I swear they moved, first slamming into the wall and then falling. You could even see it with the little dog. And then they stood up, and turned into what I felt was a position facing us. They held that stance for a few moments, and then faded slowly until all I could see was bare wall.  I turned to look at George, who asked me. “Can you see that, or is it just my mind creating them? “ My answer was simple. “It’s a fact.”