An 18th-century precedent for Whitley Strieber's three sets of three knocks

On the night of August 27, 1986, Whitley Strieber had an experience in which he heard nine very loud knocks in three groups of three. He recounts the story in his 1988 book Transformation:

I returned to the house, took a shower, and then went downstairs to do some reading. Dr. [John] Gliedman had given me his essay "Quantum Entanglements: On Atomic Physics and the Nature of Reality," and I had been reading it. I sat in a chair by a window and picked up the manuscript. A glow came around the house, but it was so brief that I ignored it.

It became very quiet. I was awake and alert, perfectly normal in every way. Anne and Andrew were asleep. My cats were sitting on the couch nearby.

The cats both got restless. . . . The Burmese was crouched, staring up at the back wall of the room. The Siamese was walking slowly along with his entire tail stiff and puffed up like the tail of a raccoon. . . . perhaps a deer. I returned to Dr. Gliedman's essay.

I read the following sentence: "The mind is not the playwright of reality."

At that moment, there came a knocking on the side of the house. This was a substantial noise, very regular and sharp. The knocks were so exactly spaced that they sounded like they were being produced by a machine. Both cats were riveted with terror. They stared at the wall. The knocks went on, nine of them in three groups of three, followed by a tenth lighter double-knock that communicated an impression of finality (pp. 129-130).

Mr. Strieber goes on for several pages, ruling out all possible conventional explanations for the knocks and describing his failed attempts to duplicate the sounds. He concludes that "the knocks were an absolutely clear indication that something entirely and physically real was present and that it was taking an interest in me" (p. 132).

In Mr. Strieber's 1995 book Breakthrough, he revisits the nine knocks, first noting, "I reported this experience in Transformation, which was given to the publisher in late 1987 and published in March 1988." During the window between those two dates -- after the book was finalized but before anyone in the general public had read it -- this happened:

On February 27, 1988, eighteen months to the day after the incident of the nine knocks at my cabin, but before they could have been publicly known, a large number of people in Glenrock, Wyoming, were awakened at 2:45 a.m. by a series of nine knocks in three groups of three on their cars, on the sides or roofs of their houses, or on their doors. The Glenrock Independent reported on Thursday, March 3, that "strange, unexplained noises interrupted the slumber of many Glenrock residents early Sunday morning. The three part series of three dull thuds at 2:45 a.m. was reported by many residents who believed it was made by direct physical contact on the outside of their dwellings."

In other words, despite the near-simultaneity of the sounds, numerous people thought that their individual homes were being affected. That they all heard the sounds at virtually the same time is supported by the sudden surge in police calls. All this only adds to the strength of my proof, because it requires that any hoax be extremely elaborate and that it involve many people, all knocking on houses at the same time. Residents hearing the knocks, "discounted the possibility of a hoax being performed on a seemingly random number of houses. The residents quickly either looked outside or physically inspected their property." A UFO was also observed in the area.

In the end, the Independent said, "The UFO, like the knocking, remains a mystery."

Although this happened in early 1988, it was not until nearly a year later that I became aware of the incident through a clipping service. . . . It could not have been an accident, not something so distinctive and precisely timed (pp. 23-24).

Today, following up a passing reference in The Hidden Springs by Renée Haynes, I found a strikingly similar story in the Memoirs of the Wesley Family (1824), edited by Adam Clarke. The following passage, from p. 137, is taken from the personal journal of Anglican clergyman Samuel Wesley (1662-1735), the father of the two brothers who founded the Methodist movement..

An Account of Noises and Disturbances in my House at Epworth, Lincolnshire, in December and January, 1716.

From the first of December, my children and servants heard many strange noises, groans, knockings, &c. in every story, and most of the rooms of my house. But I hearing nothing of it myself, they would not tell me for some time, because, according to the vulgar opinion, if it boded me any ill, I could not hear it. When it increased, and my family could not easily conceal it, they told me of it. When it increased, and the family could not easily conceal it, they told me of it.

My daughters Susannah and Ann were below stairs in the dining room; and heard first at the doors, then over their heads, and the night after a knocking under their feet, though nobody was in the chambers or below them. The like they and my servants heard in both the kitchens, at the door against the partition, and over them. The maid servant heard groans as of a dying man. My daughter Emilia coming down stairs to draw up the clock, and lock the doors at ten at night, as usual, heard under the staircase a sound among some bottles there, as if they had been all dashed to pieces; but when she looked all was safe.

Something, like the steps of a man, was heard going up and down stairs, at all hours of the night, and vast rumblings below stairs, and in the garrets. My man, who lay in the garret, heard some one come slaring through the garret to his chamber, rattling by his side as if against his shoes, though he had none there; at other times walking up and down stairs, when all the house were in bed, and gobling like a turkey-cock. Noises were hears in the nursery, and all the other chambers; knocking first at the feet of the bed, and behind it; and a sound like that of dancing in a matted chamber, next the nursery, when the door was locked, and nobody in it.

My wife would have persuaded them it was rats within doors, and some unlucky people knocking without; till at last we heard several loud knocks in our own chamber, on my side of the bed; but till, I think, the 21st at night, I heard nothing of it. That night I was waked a little before one by nine distinct very loud knocks, which seemed to be in the next room to our's, with a sort of pause at every third stroke. I thought it might be somebody without the house; and having got a stout mastiff, hoped he would soon rid me of it.

Getting a mastiff proved not be an effective way of getting rid of the knocking. When more knocks came, "our mastiff came whining to us, as he always did after the first night of its coming; for then he barked violently at it, but was silent afterwards, and seemed more afraid than any of the children" (p. 138). The disturbances continued to the end of January, and the family took to referring to the poltergeist as "Jeffrey," a name given it by Miss Emily Wesley. Particularly loud knocking often accompanied their prayers for King George I, from which they gathered that "Jeffrey" must be a Jacobite.

In 1720, Samuel's son John Wesley, having heard of the knocking incident, went to the house in Epworth and "carefully inquired into the particulars. I spoke to each of the persons who were then in the house, and took down what each could testify of his or her own knowledge" (p. 141). The results of his inquiry were published in the Arminian Magazine and are reproduced in the Memoirs, from which I quote.

A few nights after, my father and mother were just gone to bed, and the candle was not taken away, when they heard three blows, and a second, and a third three, as it were with a large oaken staff, struck upon a chest which stood by the bed-side. My father immediately arose, put on his night-gown, and hearing great noises below, took the candle and went down: my mother walked by his side. As they went down the broad stairs, they heard as if a vessel of silver was poured upon my mother's breast, and ran jingling down to her feet. Quickly after there was a sound, as if a large iron ball was thrown among many bottles under the stairs; but nothing was hurt. Soon after, our large mastiff dog came an ran to shelter himself between them. While the disturbances continued, he used to bark and leap, and snap on one side and the other; and that frequently before any person in the room heard any noise at all. But after two or three days, he used to tremble, and creep away before the noise began. And by this the family knew it was at hand; nor did the observation ever fail (pp. 144-145).

Notice that the Wesleys' mastiff, like Mr. Strieber's cats, exhibited unusual fear just before the knocking began.

The nine knocks are referred to again in a letter from Samuel Wesley's wife Susanna to their son Samuel Jr., dated "January 12, 1716-7":

At first [your father] would not believe but somebody did it to alarm us; but the night after, as soon as he was in bed, it knocked loudly nine times, just by his bed-side. He rose, and went to see if he could find out what it was, but could see nothing. Afterwards he heard it as the rest (p. 146).

She does not mention that the nine knocks were in three groups of three, but later in the letter she says repeated groups of three knocks were typical.

Sometimes it would make a noise like the winding up of a jack, at other times, as that night Mr. Hoole was with us, like a carpenter planing deals; but most commonly it knocked thrice and stopped, and then thrice again, and so many hours together (op. loc.).

Emily Wesley, in an undated letter to her brother Samuel Jr., does not mention the nine knocks but does say that the knocks typically came in threes:

I heard frequently between ten and eleven something like the quick winding up of a jack, at the corner of the room by my bed's head, just like the running of the wheels and the creaking of the iron work. This was the common signal of its coming. Then it would knock on the floor three times, then at my sister's bed's head in the same room, almost always three together, and then stay. The sound was hollow, and loud, so as none of us could ever imitate (p. 153).

This is from Mrs. Wesley's account, dated August 27, 1726:

Upon my looking under the bed, something ran out pretty much like a badger, and seemed to run directly under Emily's petticoats, who sat opposite to me on the other side. I went out; and one or two nights after, when we were just got to bed, I heard nine strokes, three by three, on the other side of the bed, as if one had struck violently on a chest with a large stick. Mr. Wesley leapt up, called Hetty, who was up in the house, and searched every room in the house, but to no purpose (p. 156).

Several of the other accounts also mention the appearance of something like a badger -- sometimes a headless one! -- and also a white rabbit. I have not quoted all of these, since my main concern is the knocks.

The Rev. Mr. Hoole, a houseguest, also briefly mentions the pattern of three knocks:

Quickly it was in the nursery, at the bed's head, knocking as it had done at first, three by three (p. 160).

John Wesley notes:

The first time my mother ever heard any unusual noise at Epworth was long before the disturbance of old Jeffrey. My brother, lately come from London, had one evening a sharp quarrel with my sister Sukey, at which time, my mother happening to be above in her own chamber, the doore and windows rung and jarred very loud, and presently several distinct strokes, three by three, struck. -- From that night it never failed to give notice in much the same manner against any signal misfortune, or illness of any belonging to the family (p. 162).

Just as this phenomenon apparently began long before the main "Jeffrey" disturbances of December 1716 and January 1717, it seems to have continued long after. In a letter dated February 16, 1750 -- 34 years after the main disturbances -- the former Miss Emily Wesley (now Mrs. Harper) wrote to her brother John:

Another thing is, that wonderful thing, called by us, Jeffrey! You won't laugh at me for being superstitious, if I tell you how certainly that something calls on me against any extraordinary new affliction: but so little is known of the invisible world that I at least am not able to judge whether it be a friendly or an evil spirit (p. 164, italics in original).

I am quite certain that Mr. Strieber had no knowledge of the Wesley family's experience 270 years before his own. In all his books, he is always eager to point out parallels between modern encounter experiences and similar event occurring before what we think of as the "UFO era." If he had known of the nine knocks in Epworth, there is no way he would have failed to mention them in his books. Still less can we suppose that the Glenrock incident -- affecting a whole town of people, most of whom we may presume lacked any particular interest in paranormal footnotes in the history of Protestantism -- was in any way influenced or suggested by the Wesley story.

I have no idea what to make of these parallels at present. I merely document them for future reference.

Synchronicity: A butterfly Mason?

Sometimes I write something I think is just too bizarre to publish -- and then I usually publish it anyway, and as often as not I soon get an email from some stranger saying, "You too? What an amazing coincidence!"

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Early this afternoon, I was sitting in my living room. We have a large window in the front, but it was a very sunny day and the curtains were drawn. Suddenly, my tomcat Geronimo (a highly accomplished jumper) got between the window and the curtain and started jumping up on the glass again and again like a maniac. My wife said there must be a bird or something outside, so I popped out to take a look.

It wasn't a bird; it was a white cabbage butterfly, steadily beating its wings and flying directly into the windowpane. The glass was of course an impassable barrier, but it wouldn't alter its course in the slightest, and the result was that it just sort of hovered there. Now everyone knows that a normal butterfly's flight path resembles that of a drunken skywriter. Straight lines are simply not in their repertoire; nor is this sort of persistence when confronted with an impassable obstacle. Nevertheless, it persisted.

As I looked at the butterfly, a question suddenly popped into my head out of nowhere: Are you a traveling man? -- quickly followed by the rest of this stock Masonic dialogue: Yes I am. Traveling where? From west to east. (I'm not a Freemason, but one picks up these things.) The feeling that I was somehow having this dialogue with the butterfly -- ridiculous on its face! -- was unmistakable. The whole time, the butterfly kept flying persistently straight into the windowpane, and on the other side of the glass, a highly neurotic tomcat kept bouncing up and down like a superball.

Finally I snapped out of whatever passing trance the butterfly had put me in and gently shooed it away from the window. It immediately resumed normal butterfly behavior, and the cat settled down.

Checking a compass later, I found that it had indeed been flying at a perfect 90-degree azimuth, from west to east.

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The weird feeling that I had been "communicating" (if reciting a stock dialogue can be called that!) with the butterfly made me remember that last year I had experienced a synchronicity in connection with the idea that the spirits of the dead can appear as moths -- I had read about this in Whitley Strieber's Afterlife Revolution and then heard the same thing shortly thereafter from a Taiwanese associate. Well, I thought, this was a cabbage butterfly, not a moth, but it's close anyway.

When I looked up my old post about the moth synchronicity, though, I found something that I had forgotten. The post showed the cover of The Afterlife Revolution -- illustrated with a picture of a white cabbage butterfly!

I ended the post thus:

I wonder how common this association is? I know Aristotle used the same Greek word to refer both to the soul and to the cabbage butterfly. (By coincidence, this same species of non-moth appears to have been chosen by Strieber's entomologically confused cover illustrator.)

I had forgotten that about Aristotle, too, but he does in fact use the word psyche ("soul"), in History of Animals 5.19, as a name for those insects that arise "out of those caterpillars which arise on leaves of green, especially on those of the cabbage-plant."

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Coming back to the ridiculous idea of a butterfly being a Mason, I remembered that Freemasonry's central symbol is the building of the Temple of Solomon, and that in the Rudyard Kipling story "The Butterfly That Stamped," a butterfly stamps its foot and makes King Solomon's palace (close enough!) disappear and then reappear. (It is actually Djinns that do this, but Solomon has arranged for them to make it look as if the butterfly is making it happen.)

Suleiman-bin-Daoud laughed so much that it was several minutes before he found breath enough to whisper to the Butterfly, "Stamp again, little brother. Give me back my Palace, most great magician." . . . So he stamped once more, and that instant the Djinns let down the Palace and the gardens, without even a bump.

Then I thought about the song "Build Me Up Buttercup" by the Foundations.

Building up foundations sounds like a mason's work, does it not? Buttercup is a bit like butterfly, but not quite close enough to be satisfying. Ah, but what's the very first thing Wikipedia has to say about the Foundations? "The Foundations were a British soul band." Soul = psyche = cabbage butterfly.

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Since Whitley Strieber had entered into this synch-stream, I thought of his "nine knocks" incident, documented in Chapter 11 of his book Transformation (a synonym for butterfly-style metamorphosis). Strieber recounts how he was at home, reading an essay by John Gliedman about quantum entanglement, when he noticed that his two cats were beginning to behave strangely, as if they are terrified.

The cats' fear didn't make sense to me at all. I decided there must be some animal outside, perhaps a deer. I returned to Dr. Gleidman's essay.

I read the following sentence: "The mind is not the playwright of reality."

At that moment there came a knocking on the side of the house. This was substantial noise, very regular and sharp. The knocks were so exactly spaced that they sounded like they were being produced by a machine. Both cats were riveted with terror. They stared at the wall. The knocks went on, nine of them in three groups of three, followed by a tenth lighter double-knock that communicated an impression of finality.

In his book A New World, Strieber refers back to this incident and connects it with Freemasonry.

I cannot know if this was intended, but the knocks reflected a tradition in Masonry where when someone is elevated to the 33rd Degree, they knock in this way on the door of the hall before being admitted.

He repeats this assertion in The Super Natural.

Also, when entering the thirty-third degree, a Mason must knock on the door of the lodge nine times in three groups of three.

I know basically nothing about the higher degrees of Masonry, but certainly "three distinct knocks" is a thing, and it wouldn't be surprising if they sometimes did three groups of three. Anyway, the point here is that Strieber, just like me today, (1) saw his cats behaving strangely, (2) assumed it was because of an animal outside, and then instead (3) observed something which he connected with Masonic ritual.

A familiar face

Yesterday before work, I picked up Communion and started reading it yet again. I became interested in the cover art and did some searching online for other work by the artist, Ted Seth Jacobs. In particular, I was trying to find his original (unpublished) cover art for Majestic, which had shown a soldier standing over the body of a Gray. The published version was edited in ways that Jacobs found outrageous, including messing with the lighting (Jacobs' particular area of expertise) and airbrushing out the soldier. I remembered the original painting had been published in an online interview back in the nineties, but it seems to have vanished from the Web since then. In the process of searching, I happened upon his original cover art for Transformation (later briefly used on the cover of one edition of Ed Conroy's Report on Communion), and decided to put it in this blog's sidebar.

So, after spending some time thinking about the art of Ted Seth Jacobs, and his cover art for Whitley Strieber books in particular, I went to work. Mondays are pretty easy for me, as I only have a few classes to teach. When the last one was finished, I came down to the lobby of the school.

In the lobby, there's a small section of wall that has been transformed into a whiteboard by sticking something on it. This stick-on whiteboard surface is now old and cracked, but the kids still like to draw on it. It had been clean when I arrived, but at the end of the day I found that at some point someone had doodled a face on it -- a face that reminded me of something.

If this had been the result of a remote-viewing experiment, I would have considered it a pretty strong "hit." So what happened? Subconscious telepathy, with the kid "reading" an image from my mind, or just one of those weird coincidences? Or it could be subconscious precognition on my part, I suppose, with my sudden interest in Jacobs' art triggered by the "premembered" whiteboard image. (I am very sure that none of my students have seen my Strieber books or know of my interest in that author.)

This is far from being the first time one of my students has drawn or written something that seemed to have been taken (with some slight distortion) directly from my mind. In one of the most striking cases (recorded here), I had dreamed about writing a book called Pineapples and Apple Pies -- thinking in the dream that the two terms used the same two morphemes in differing sequence, and realizing only after waking that pie was not the same as pine. The day after the dream, my student wrote, for no apparent reason, the word applepine -- explaining when asked that it was "like pineapple but the other way." (Note: This was many years before "Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen.")

Whitley Strieber and the thing that turned into a bird of paradise

Yet another morphing anecdote in the works of Whitley Strieber.

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Transformation (1988)

Later that day [December 29, 1986] we were driving through a nearby town when a voice told me to stop at the house of a friend, glass artist Gilda Strutz. Another car, driven by a tall and imposing bearded man of about thirty, pulled up at the same time. We all went in to see Gilda together. The man turned out to be another friend of hers, Barry Maddock. Communion hadn't been published and neither of them knew anything at all about it.

We chatted for a while and I soon found myself talking about the owls we had been seeing.

Barry was surprised to hear this because he had had a very unusual dream the night before about an owl. He proceeded to describe what sounded to me like a screen memory for a visitor experience. He had been asleep in a house where he was house-sitting until the new owners moved in. Suddenly he was awakened by what sounded like somebody kicking a baseboard heater. He got up because the house was new and he'd helped build it. He knew that the heating system shouldn't be doing that.

He walked into the living room. The first thing he saw was a pair of huge, dark eyes. When he later saw the cover of Communion he was amazed by the similarity. At the time, he had the bizarre impression that an enormous gray owl with big, black eyes was in the room. The owl took him into a large, vaulted chamber that reminded him of the Sydney Opera House. There it turned into a bird of paradise.

I bet that Maddock said the place was the Sydney Opera House, and "reminded him" is Strieber's own interpretation. 

He remembered sitting beside a small man who seemed to him like a gnome or a gremlin. His impression was that this man was good-natured. He didn't remember anything about the man's appearance, except that he was "dark."

The next morning Barry had what he said was an extremely strange feeling. He seemed "loose" in his body. He was also suffering from "missing time" in that he could remember getting up and going into the living room, then having the vivid dream. The trouble was, he could not recall going back to bed before he had the dream. The sort of confusion that Barry described fitted very well with my own initial conscious reactions to the visitors. He also noticed a small raised mark on his neck. He didn't think to mention it at the time, and I didn't see it, but his description, given later, suggested that it was similar to the one I had found on my own neck on the morning of December 24.

The dream had frightened him badly.

I resolved to get to know him better to find out if anything more would emerge from his mind. On the morning of December 30 we went hiking together deep into the woods and we talked. He turned out to be one of the most fearless people I had ever met. [. . .] The more he spoke about his dream, however, the more he revealed deep fear. It seemed to me that he was aching to say he thought the dream was real, but dared not do so because of its content.

I found that the house at which he was sitting was quite near my own place.

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The Super Natural (2016)

While I was writing Communion, I began questioning people in the immediate area regarding odd things they may have seen. As yet, I was not aware of all the strange sightings across the Hudson in Duchess County, which would become famous as the Hudson Valley UFO sightings. There were many stories, but one told by a carpenter in the process of finishing a house on our private road is particularly relevant to this part of my narrative.

In the Transformation version, the house had already been finished.

This was the first of two incidents that, to me, added up to a sort of communication. I have learned, over the years, to see the actions of our visitors as a sort of illustrative language, communication built out of images and events. For example, a consistent image that witnesses connect with them is that of the owl. It has played an enormous role in my own experience of them, in fact. If you study the habits and capabilities of the owl carefully, you find yourself studying the capabilities of the visitors. They are creatures of the night, they are stealthy, silent, and use surprise. Like owls, which can use their extraordinary ears to hear prey scrambling under snow, they have extraordinary means of detection. Like owls, they are predators. [. . .]

I include the above paragraph in this excerpt because it deals with the theme of owls. In Transformation, the reason Maddock tells Strieber his story is that Strieber had been talking about owls and his own dream had involved an owl -- but in the Super Natural version of the story, there is no owl!

The incident involving the carpenter occurred during the fall of 1986. He had been hurrying to complete construction before winter arrived, and had ended up in a situation where he had no way to take his tools out at nightfall. He didn’t want to leave them in the unlocked house, so he decided to sleep there, on the floor.

Transformation gives the date of this incident as December 28, 1986, well after winter had arrived. The carpenter, Barry Maddock, slept in the house because he was house-sitting for the owners, not because he was unable to take his tools out.

Later, he found himself awake and looking straight at a short man who was standing a few feet away. It was too dark to determine any color, but he was short and squat. The carpenter experienced a wave of intense fear, whereupon the man changed before his eyes into a bird of paradise and then disappeared.

In the Transformation version, he did not see anything immediately after waking up. Rather, he heard a noise, walked into the living room, and there saw an enormous owl, and it was this owl that turned into a bird or paradise. There is no mention of the bird's disappearing. In Transformation, he apparently saw the small man after, or at the same time as, the bird of paradise, and the man was sitting next to him rather than standing a few feet away.

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This is not something Strieber experienced himself, but something that was reported to him by Maddock in 1986. Since Maddock agreed to have his name used in Transformation, we can assume that the account in that book matches what he remembered of his experience at that time. The changes evident in the Super Natural version can only be distortions.

Naturally, it is hardly to be expected that Strieber would remember in clear and accurate detail someone else's dream as it had been reported to him 30 years before. He had written about it before, though, and could easily have looked it up in Transformation or in the notes he used to write that book. That he did not bother to do so can only mean that he was (wrongly) confident that he still remembered the incident clearly. This phenomenon -- inordinate confidence in memories which are in fact seriously distorted -- has obvious implications for Strieber's autobiographical work as a whole, particularly for The Secret School, which was written more than 40 years after the events it recounts.

Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl

Doesn't that sound like the title of a Surrealist painting? Or perhaps something from a really weird version of Clue? (Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick? No, it was Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl!) Actually, it's just another in my series of footnotes to the works of this very unusual writer.

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Cat Magic

In Whitley Strieber's 1986 fantasy/horror novel Cat Magic, this very strange memory of one of the characters is mentioned in passing; it just comes out of nowhere, has no effect on the plot, and is never mentioned again.

[The smell of paint] reminded him of the six weeks of the summer of 1968 he had spent in Florence. There had been college students from all over the world there, art students, working on the restoration of the Uffizi masterpieces which had been damaged in the flood of the year before.

He had met Irish magical Roisin, with whom he had cohabited for weeks, before he had found, jammed into her suitcase, the terrible rubble of a dead owl.

He had run terrified from her. Roisin, lost in the dangerous clutter of time.

George Walker, the character whose reminiscences these are, is unsympathetic and obviously deeply disturbed; one of his other memories involves setting fire to a live cat as a joke. While one can see the relevance of the cat-burning incident -- Walker's intense and strangely sexualized hatred of cats is an important plot point -- "Irish magical Roisin" with her suitcase full of owl rubble (rubble?) seems to have nothing to do with anything. The only possible purpose of the passage is to further establish that George Walker is a pretty seriously messed-up guy, and apparently delusional to boot.

Would any reader have guessed that this bit was actually pretty much 100% autobiographical?

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Communion

Communion, Strieber's famous non-fiction book about his close-encounter experiences, was published in 1987, just a year after Cat Magic. Here we find the first hints that the incident of George Walker and the owl-rubble may be based on some real experience of Strieber's.

In 1968 I ended up with four to six weeks of "missing time" after a desperate and inexplicable chase across Europe.

So both Walker and Strieber spent six weeks in Europe in 1968. Walker spent the latter part of his trip "running terrified" from Roisin, while Strieber characterizes his trip as "a desperate and inexplicable chase."

Later, in a discussion of various times owls have unexpectedly turned up in his life, Strieber mentions this:

I saw an owl once before, too, during the events of 1968.

So not only were Walker and Strieber both in Europe at the same time, for the same period of time, but they also each saw an owl there. There is no indication (yet) that the one Strieber saw was a dead owl, in a suitcase, but that's still quite the coincidence.

Later Strieber adds more details about his trip in Europe.

I took the train to Italy, second class. On the train I met a young woman and we began to travel together. At this point my memories become extremely odd. If I do not think about them they seem fine, but when I try to put them together they don't make sense. I recall that we went to Rome, but that we spent a few days in Florence on the way. For eighteen years I told the story that I stayed in Florence for six weeks. But when I went there in the summer of 1984 [. . .] I realized that I had almost no memories of the place. Even so, I placidly accepted this anomaly. For some reason, I left the young woman in Rome and dashed off on the train with no ticket, traveling almost at random. I ended up in Strasbourg.

 

Now we know that he stayed -- or used to think that he had stayed -- in Florence for six weeks, just like George Walker, that he met a woman there, just like George Walker, and that his "desperate and inexplicable chase" apparently involved running away from her -- just like, as you may have noticed, George Walker.

At the time he wrote Communion, Strieber seemed to have no memory of why he had left the girl; it was just "for some reason."

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Transformation

Transformation, Strieber's second non-fiction book about his close encounters, was published in 1988 -- a year after Communion and two years after Cat Magic. He once again revisits his travels in Italy in the summer of 1968.

In 1968 I was living in London. During the summer I spent between two and six weeks on the Continent, and have been unable to account for most of that time. As I reported in Communion, I crossed to the continent on a ferry and took a train south to Italy. On the trip I met a young woman. I remember her name and her nationality but have not been able to trace her. We went first to Florence and then to Rome. In Rome something happened that terrified me. My screen memory is that I got lost in the catacombs under the Vatican.

Whatever happened, I literally rushed back to my pensione and threw my things into my suitcase. Something I saw in the room horrified me. I have tried to recall what it was, but all I have been able to find out for certain is that I told a friend at the time that I had seen "a dried owl" somewhere in the room. If that is indeed what I saw, I am not surprised that I ran!

I made an unsuccessful attempt to extract more of this memory via hypnosis, but my feeling is that the material that emerged is not correct.

Strieber mentions that he remembers (but does not disclose) the woman's name and nationality. Given how much of this experience was apparently imported wholesale into Cat Magic -- leaving even such details as the date, the city, and the duration of the trip unchanged -- my money says she was an Irishwoman called Róisín, and I will go ahead and refer to her by that name. (It's just a guess of course, but it will be more convenient than constantly referring to "the young woman," "Strieber's traveling companion," etc.)

The owl puts in another appearance, and this time we are told that it was "dried" (and therefore presumably dead, as in Cat Magic). In the past I had always assumed that Strieber was referring to only one horrifying experience in this passage -- something that he (mis)remembered as getting lost in the catacombs under the Vatican and seeing a dried owl in one of the rooms there. Rereading it now in the light of Cat Magic and The Super Natural, I can see that the room where he saw the owl was probably the pensione he was sharing with Róisín, not in the catacombs. He saw something in Rome that spooked him, decided to leave, and then saw something else that spooked him in the pensione as he was packing.

Strieber still seems to have no memory of what exactly he saw; he "tried to recall what it was" but failed. The "dried owl" is something a friend remembers him saying at the time, not something that Strieber himself recalls at the time of writing Transformation.

What material, I wonder, emerged from the hypnosis session he mentions, and why did it seem incorrect? Did it involve seeing a dried owl (or the "terrible rubble" thereof) in Róisín's suitcase? And did he reject it as incorrect because he recognized it as coming from his fiction rather than from his life? We can only speculate.

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The Super Natural

Cat Magic, Communion, and Transformation were published in three consecutive years, from 1986 to 1988. We now jump forward almost three decades (and nearly 50 years after the events of 1968) to The Super Natural (2016), a non-fiction book co-written with Jeffrey Kripal. The symbol of the owl comes up, and Strieber once again tells his story.

Later, in 1968, I had a profoundly unsettling experience involving an owl. That year, I was living in London and attending the London School of Film Technique, now called the London Film School. During the summer break, I decided to travel on the Continent. On an overnight train to Florence, I fell in which a girl. We began traveling together. For a couple of weeks in Florence, we had a lovely time, living together in chaste intimacy. But then we went on to Rome, and when we toured St. Peter's, she became crazy, stalking through the church in raging silence. She scared me. I was living with her in a small pensione near the railroad station. I decided, "No more," and headed off to the pensione to collect my suitcase and get out of there.

I went into our tiny room, threw my toothbrush into my suitcase, and started to leave. Then I stopped. Her suitcase was lying on the foot of the bed. I have always been a bit too curious, and I opened it. What I saw shocked me to my core. In it was a nun's habit and, lying beside it, a dry, flattened owl carcass. I didn't get off the train again until I was in Strasbourg.

And we've come full circle, back to the Cat Magic version of the story, in which the dead owl is in the girl's suitcase. It's a "flattened" carcass, too, so perhaps this damage is what is intended by Cat Magic's strange description of it as "rubble."

As in Transformation, there are two scary events that precipitate Strieber's flight from Rome and Róisín. The first, though is not getting lost in the catacombs (which even in Transformation is admitted to be a "screen," or false, memory) but rather seeing Róisín "stalking" through St. Peter's Basilica "in raging silence." The second, of course, is the dead owl -- described as being in her suitcase, for the first time since Cat Magic 30 years before.

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What really happened?

If we take the anecdote in The Super Natural at face value, it means the one in Cat Magic is 100% true -- a real event from Strieber's life, inserted without any modification at all into one of his novels. (In fact it may even be truer than the non-fiction versions. Does anyone really believe that a 23-year-old American film student backpacking through Europe in 1968 would be "living together in chaste intimacy" with a young woman rather than "cohabiting"?) This raises the question of how many other bits of unmodified autobiography lie hiding in plain sight in Strieber's pre-Communion fiction. (I can think of a passage in The Wolfen that is a strong candidate.)

If we take the anecdote at face value -- but that would be just a tad naïve, wouldn't it? Strieber himself would be the first to admit that he is what is called an "unreliable narrator." Here are some possible ways of interpreting the texts.

1. The owl incident is fiction and was invented by Strieber for Cat Magic. As time went by, he began to get bits of this fictional incident mixed up in his mind with real memories from 1968 -- first "remembering" that an owl had somehow been involved and then finally, by 2016, adopting the Cat Magic incident in its entirety as a "memory." It's easy to imagine Strieber trying hard to remember as much as possible about that long-ago incident, coming up with a clear and distinct image of finding a dead owl in his girlfriend's suitcase, and assuming it to be a real memory, having long since forgotten that the image came from a novel he had written 30 years before. The question this interpretation raises is why Strieber would invent the owl-in-the-suitcase image in the first place -- given how bizarre it is, and how little it has to do with the plot of Cat Magic. Perhaps it was originally a dream or something.

2. The owl incident took place more-or-less as described in The Super Natural but was buried in traumatic amnesia, so that when Strieber wrote Communion and Transformation he no longer had conscious access to those memories. The memories returned decades later, after Strieber had to some degree managed to overcome his fear of the "visitors," which is why he was finally able to tell the story accurately in 2016. The question then is how some of the "forgotten" details recorded for the first time in The Super Natural managed to find their way into the fictionalized version in Cat Magic. Well, perhaps traumatic memories are only traumatic if they are thought of as memories. Perhaps when one is fantasizing or engaging in creative writing, otherwise censored memories may be able to slip into consciousness disguised as fantasies.

3. Strieber consciously remembered the owl incident all along, but for some reason didn't trust some of these memories during the time he was writing Communion and Transformation and was unwilling to commit them to writing. Given how many extremely bizarre memories he recounts in those two books, this hesitance seems a bit odd. Perhaps the similarity to Cat Magic made it seem as if the memories had been contaminated, but apparently he had overcome these misgivings by the time he wrote The Super Natural.

The million-year-old university

In my recent post The twilight of the brain, I make passing reference to the image of "a university a million years old," which occurs in Whitley Strieber's book Transformation (1988). On June 23, I happened to be reading one of the few Strieber books I'd never read before, The Super Natural (2016, co-authored with Jeffrey J. Kripal of Rice University) and found that it includes a retelling of the ancient university story, with many differences from the Transformation version. I took out my copy of Transformation to try to find the passage in question -- and found that I had opened it up directly to that very page! The synchronicity fairies have spoken, and a detailed comparison must be made.

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The two accounts

Here is the story as it is told in Transformation (pp. 108-111 in my copy, though I understand pagination varies among editions).

In 1972 a number of vivid thoughts surfaced that I now [around 1987] realize were connected to that summer [of 1968, when Strieber was traveling in Europe]. They involved a journey to a great desert. This desert had a tan sky that was so bright it was difficult to look at. It never really got dark there.

The little men took me into an oasislike setting that was bordered by tall, very thin trees and crossed by a narrow lane. Over this lane there stood an enormously high arch. One of the men with me -- who seemed very jolly and gay -- said that the arch was to commemorate "the achievements of the scholars." Ahead I saw a completely tumbledown building. It was on a cliff at the edge of the oasis and was so old that it seemed almost to have blended with the stones themselves. Beyond and below it I could see the tremendous desert.

I was told that the building was a university "a million years old." I was really very excited to go inside. We approached the building and I said, "Is it in ruins?" The reply was, "No, but the scholars aren't much good at maintenance." There was an imposing entrance, but I was taken around to a side door that was reached by clambering over sharp volcanic rocks. These stones were fearsome, and for years afterward I had a recurring dream of climbing through them and trying very hard not to cut myself.

As we approached the door we encountered two taller, thin men with gigantic, black, almond-shaped eyes. They were not nearly as friendly as the small men in blue. In fact, when they stared at me I felt naked. It was hard to be in their presence. One of them said, "He isn't ready yet." This deflated me. Things had been going so well; I'd felt very much approved. Now there was a sense of desperation. Why wasn't I ready? I wanted to go in.

The two tall beings left. One of my guides announced, "They said you weren't ready, but now they're gone." So in we went. I found an absolutely featureless corridor made of what seemed to be dark-green stone. The floors were dusty and felt like packed earth. There were doorways, and light shone across the floor from each. I was taken into the first room. Its floor was etched with a circle, and there was a large window looking out over the desert.

When I went into the circle I wanted at once to dance. There was no music, but when I danced I felt a sensation that I cannot describe. The best way to characterize it would be to call it a movement that led at once to great loneliness and great excitement. When I danced I found myself for moments inside other people and other lives. I was walking up a narrow, curved road. A portly redheaded man was running toward me. He was wearing a white toga, and my impression was that I was seeing something happening in ancient Rome.

The dance took on a great passion and intensity. Round and round I went, sailing through armies of lives, places familiar and unfamiliar. It was as if my soul had hungered for this. I sailed round and round and round, going faster and faster. I don't know how long I danced, but it was glorious.

Reluctantly, I left the university and was taken to another building. This building was a three-story adobe structure down the lane from the university. In it there was a room for me to live in. It was unfurnished. I slept on the floor. Once I woke up to hear somebody talking loudly in English. Two men appeared, both of them normal-looking. They were wearing khaki clothes that looked military. I had the impression that they were Americans. One of them had a Bell & Howell movie camera, which he pointed at me. They were standing outside the door to the room behind a white tape. The one without the camera said, "Why are they keeping you outside of the enclosure?" I replied that I didn't know, and he looked absolutely furious.

Next I was with a woman who was so pale that even her lips were without color. She handed me a piece of fruit that looked like a giant fig. She told me to eat it. I said that I didn't care to eat it. She replied that I had to.

Feeling very dubious, I bit into it. At once there was a terrible bitterness, and it seemed like my head was going to split open.

 

I was aware of a group of people, some with tears in their eyes, watching me from behind the line of white tape as I went off on my own. I found that the grass was very soft and fine, and I sat in it for a time. Then I started to return to the university, but one of the tall beings who's said I wasn't ready was there. He waved me away and I thought it better not to go. I went instead to an area of shacks made of what looked like adobe and dried tree branches. They were very rough and simple. In them I would find things like a single wooden bowl, or a discarded blue uniform. Some of the small men were there, and I was so surprised at the simplicity of their dwellings that they laughed aloud at me.

 

There isn't any more than that. 

Here's the version given in The Super Natural (Chapter 4; I'm reading an electronic edition that doesn't have page numbers).

[B]ack in our apartment on Fifty-fifth Street in New York, I had a more arresting experience with the kobolds.

It came in the form of another powerful dream. It probably happened in 1973 or 1974, but I still recall it vividly.

I was on a plateau in the middle of an enormous desert. The horizons were much too far away, as if the planet was two or three times its normal size -- or, I suppose, as if it was not this planet at all. Before me on the plateau was a narrow road, snaking elegantly through an expanse of close-cropped grass. There were tall trees, like cedars of Lebanon, in a grove off to my right. Ahead, the road passed beneath a tall triumphal arch. To my left was a squat oval building perhaps three stories tall, set in the side of a cliff. Beyond it was the immense desert view that I was seeing. The building was dark blue, and its windows had louvered awnings. The sun was bright and powerful, flooding everything with chalk-white light.

Having no idea what I should do, I decided to walk toward the building. As I went under the arch, I was joined by two small men wearing clothes that were busy with flaps, the overalls of workers. The clothes and the men themselves were a dark, iridescent blue, the same color as the building.

They drew me along to a little ravine. In it were some lean-tos made of sticks. They indicated that this was where they lived. I said, "These aren't even huts." One of them replied in a low, breathy voice, "They're all we need." At that moment, I got the impression of vast stretches of time, and how hard it was to maintain environmental balance, how you must waste nothing if you expect to survive long enough to matter. From that brief instant would later arise my own deep concern with the environment [. . .].

I asked them about the building. One of them replied that it was a university. Now that we were close to it, I could see that it was a wreck. I said, "It looks like it's in ruins." The reply, through bubbling humor, was, "It's a million years old and the scholars aren't very good at maintenance." Then they asked me if I would like to attend it.

I can remember the shocked delight and eagerness that flashed through me. I could see an arched doorway in the base. But as I drew closer, I found myself struggling through a field of sharp boulders. At that point, two very strange beings appeared, as tall as I was, very thin, with great, slanted black eyes that disturbed me very much as they bored into me.

One of them said, "He's not ready." This seemed to disappoint the blue fellows. It certainly disappointed me, and I tried to get around them, but they blocked my way. I sensed that the whole history and meaning of humanity must be known in that place, and that if I could matriculate there, I could learn the truth of us and the secrets of our lives [. . .]. I wanted to go in, and badly, but I understood that I had to obey them. The little blue men reacted with regret. They still thought I was ready. Finally, I turned away. The next moment, I woke up.

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The core story

Here is the core narrative, consisting of the overlap between the two accounts. This overlap is so substantial that these can only be read as two different versions of the same experience.

Strieber was in a large desert where the sunlight was very bright. There were tall trees, grass, and a narrow road or lane, which passed under a very large arch. At least from the time he reached the arch, and perhaps before that, he was accompanied by little men in blue.

He saw a building, built into the side of a cliff. He thought it must be in ruins, but the little men explained that it was a million-year-old university, and that the scholars weren't very good at maintenance. He had to climb through a field of sharp rocks to reach the entrance. At the entrance, he was met by two taller, thin beings with large slanted black eyes that stared into him in a way that he found disturbing. These two beings said he wasn't ready to enter the university. This disappointed both Strieber and the little men, who thought he was ready.

At some point, either before or after this attempt to enter the university, he saw some extremely simple dwellings made of sticks and understood that the little men lived in them.

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Differences

At first glance, the most obvious difference is that Super Natural presents this as a dream Strieber had in New York in 1973 or 1974, whereas Transformation presents it as something he actually experienced during his summer in continental Europe in 1968. Looking more carefully at the Transformation account, though, I see that he is careful to avoid actually calling it a memory. Rather, it was one of "a number of vivid thoughts" that "surfaced" in 1972, which he later decided "were connected to that summer" of 1968. In other words, nothing in Transformation is strictly inconsistent with the whole thing's being a dream or fantasy that he had in New York in the early 1970s.

The other glaring difference is that the Super Natural version ends when Strieber is prevented from entering the university, turns away, and wakes up -- whereas the Transformation version continues for seven more paragraphs, with Strieber entering the university after all, dancing there and seeing a vision of ancient Rome (a theme which he would revisit in The Secret School, this time placing it in his childhood), and even living in the vicinity of the university for a period of time. This seems awfully hard to square with Super Natural's "The next moment, I woke up" -- unless the narrative in Transformation is spliced together from several originally separate dreams or fantasies; he does introduce it with a reference to "a number of vivid thoughts." Apparently, by the time he wrote Super Natural, Strieber was no longer so sure that these scenes belonged together, or that they had any reference to 1968.

Besides these two biggies, there are a number of minor differences. Transformation refers only to "little men in blue," but Super Natural adds that the men themselves were "a dark, iridescent blue," too, as was the university building. In Transformation, we are told that the university "seemed almost to have blended with the stones themselves," which seems inconsistent with its being blue.

In Transformation, Strieber is led by the little men from the beginning; in Super Natural, he is on his own at first and is joined by the little men when he reaches the arch.

In Transformation, Strieber sees the little men's very simple dwellings after visiting the university, and their reaction to his surprise is to laugh out loud. In Super Natural, he sees the dwellings before the university, and the little men's reaction is to solemnly intone, "They're all we need," triggering a moment of insight which Strieber considers as marking the beginning of his concern with environmental issues. The supposedly transformative impact of this episode is missing in Transformation.

Wordsworth's daffodils as a symbol of death in Strieber's Transformation

Past the streams of Oceanus they went, past the rock Leucas, past the gates of the sun and the land of dreams, and quickly came to the mead of asphodel, where the spirits dwell, phantoms of men who have done with toils.

-- Odyssey XXIV, A. T. Murray trans.

In Communion, Whitley Strieber's famous 1987 memoir of his interactions with apparently non-human "visitors," there is a scene in which one of the visitors strikes him between the eyes with a wand-like instrument and causes him to see terrible visions: the planet earth exploding, his father choking to death as his mother looks on impassively, and -- I would have sworn if you had asked me yesterday -- his son, Andrew, in a field of yellow flowers that represents death. And I would have said that, while the exact species of yellow flower is unspecified, some of Strieber's fiction (Majestic, if memory serves) suggests the evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) as the likeliest candidate.

But in my recent rereading of Communion, I noticed for the first time that this memorable image never actually occurs. He sees his son simply in "a park," and green is the only color mentioned; the yellow flowers are from another book, and they aren't primroses.

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The park of death in Communion

The park is first mentioned on p. 57, during a hypnosis session with Dr. Donald Klein to retrieve memories of the events of December 26, 1985 -- with a spontaneous regression to October 4, which is when Strieber saw the various wand-induced images.

"Oh . . . green. Shows me a park. I see my son. What's this got to do with him? Is this the devil? What the hell is this?"

After the hypnosis session, Budd Hopkins asks Strieber some follow-up questions (p. 57).

"What about the green?"

"It's a beautiful, green expanse. Was immediately relaxing when I saw that. And my boy. My boy is in the park. My boy is there. And he's happy. That's what I saw. But--"

"Why are you so upset?"

"Because I think the park represents death, and he's there because he's dead. That's what I think."

"Why should the park represent death?"

"I don't know. That's just my impression."

A later hypnosis session returns to this same material (p. 62).

"Now I see . . . a park. . . . My little boy is sitting there on the grass . . . he's all wobbly, and he's like he can't move his arms right. He's all wobbly and his eyes look funny." (They appeared entirely black, without any whites at all.) "I have to go over and pick him up and help him. If I don't help him, he's gonna die. [Long pause.]"

There seems to be a little confusion here. Is the boy happy, or all wobbly? Is he going to die, or is he already dead? At any rate, there is no hint whatsoever of yellow flowers. The only descriptive details refer to "grass" and "a beautiful, green expanse."

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The field of yellow flowers in Transformation

In Transformation (1988), Strieber's second "visitor" book, he relates another visitor-induced vision (pp. 134-135). This one has the field of yellow flowers, but Strieber's son is not there, nor is it explicitly called a symbol of death.

The next thing that happened was that my deck and pool dissolved into a magnificent vision. In this vision I was standing before a field of yellow flowers that rose up a low hill. The sky was black and full of stars so large and bright that it seemed as if I could reach up and touch them.

Even though the sky was dark the flowers were bathed in bright sunlight. As I watched I felt a wind blowing around me from behind. Suddenly children of all ages and sizes were running past me and out into the field, running and laughing through the sunlit flowers and up the low hill. They ran in a dense column, laughing and waving, and I felt an anguish to join them.

They ran up the hill and right into the sky, a glowing column of children, and when they reached the top of the sky they exploded into new stars.

A voice said to me, "This is the field where the sins of the world are buried." I wanted to go out to it but I could not, and that was painful, but I was filled with joy just to know that it was there. [. . .]

Later I told my brother about this experience, and he said "The odd thing is that I've had a private fantasy of a field of yellow flowers all of my life. When I'm relaxing I often imagine that field."

The following spring we were to make a lovely discovery at the house. After an absence of three or four weeks we returned to find that there actually was a field of yellow flowers where I had seen one the previous August.

It turned out that the landscape architect had planted the area with bulbs in October-without, of course, knowing of my vision. I had not even known that she had done the planting, let alone what kind of bulbs she had used.

By coincidence she had chosen yellow daffodils.

Is this another version of the same park? I guess a field is a bit like a park, and there are children, but that's about where the similarities end. The children are running and laughing, not sitting there "all wobbly" like Andrew in the park. There are no direct references to death, but the hints are there: The sins of the world are described as "buried"; and the image of children running up into the sky and becoming stars recalls the posthumous fate of many a mythical figure. Daffodils are, etymologically, asphodel, the flower of the underworld. Even the little detail of the wind blowing calls to mind Homer's description of the Elysian fields in Odyssey IV.

Still, the links to the park of Communion are by no means obvious. Why had my memory conflated the two visions?

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The Wordsworth connection

Later in Transformation (pp. 180-181), Strieber is on a flight which, due to an ambiguous prophecy from the visitors, he believes may well end in his death. As the plane flies into a storm and begins to shake, Strieber wonders what fate awaits those who die unmoored from any traditional beliefs regarding the afterlife.

What would be my way of death? What if in another moment there was a great roar and I found myself disembodied but still alive, hanging in the air of another sky? Where would my judges be, where my guardian angels? I would wander as helplessly as a cloud. I would drift, waiting for something to happen. But what if it was intended that we create our own realities after death? A man who dies with no expectations would be in danger of oblivion.

The sentence "I would wander as helplessly as a cloud" immediately jumps out at me. Wordsworth is not a poet I am at all familiar with, but I do know two of his poems. One, a poem close to many a Mormon heart, is "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" -- which, as it happens, Strieber had previously quoted from in an epigraph to Part Three of Transformation (p. 161). The other, short and much anthologized, is known by its first line -- "I wandered lonely as a cloud" -- and is, as everyone knows, about a field of daffodils.

Coming as it does in a book that quotes Wordsworth and prominently features a field of daffodils, this "wander . . . as a cloud" line is surely not a coincidence. But is it a deliberate allusion -- is the reader intended to recognize it and think, "ah, Wordsworth, daffodils!" -- or is it a case of subconscious influence, a result of the author's having had Wordsworth and daffodils on the mind?

Anyway, the story continues. While on the plane, Strieber confronts his fear of death head-on, overcomes it, and disembarks a changed man, for whom the world is once again enchanted and death no longer (for the moment, anyway!) holds any terrors. And this -- after a few paragraphs of Traherne-esque rhapsodizing on the wonder evoked by every ordinary thing in the world -- is how the author chooses to describe his new attitude toward death: "When I would turn my thoughts to death I was like a child amazed by a field of daffodils" (p. 184).

For me, this clinches it. The reappearance of the field of daffodils, in a rather unlikely simile, just a few pages after the cloud-like wandering, shows that the Wordsworth allusion is in fact conscious and deliberate. It also links the field of daffodils with death, and thus with the park in Communion.

⁂

Here is the complete text of the Wordsworth poem, interspersed with my notes.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

In addition to daffodils and the wandering like a cloud, there is a reference to "the breeze"; cf. Strieber's "I felt a wind blowing around me from behind" -- and, as already mentioned, the wind that blows through Homer's Elysian fields.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Cf. Strieber: "The sky was black and full of stars . . . [The children] ran in a dense column . . . . They ran up the hill and right into the sky, a glowing column of children, and when they reached the top of the sky they exploded into new stars."

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

The children were laughing, and Strieber "was filled with joy just to know that it was there." 

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Strieber's brother said, "I've had a private fantasy of a field of yellow flowers all of my life. When I'm relaxing I often imagine that field."

⁂

Update: I found a passage in Transformation (p. 155) that mentions the park of death. It is presented as a transcript of a letter from one Yensoon Tfai, "a very traditional Chinese," relating how Jo Sharp, a family friend, had been visited shortly before her death by "seven little Chinese men" who lifted her up to the ceiling. The letter itself was transcribed from Yensoon's diary.

She protested and ordered them to put her back to bed, but to no avail. In a trice, she found herself in a verdant park. The sun was setting. Although the surroundings were a joy to her eyes, no living things were visible, only the wind was soughing amidst the trees. It struck a note of desolation to her. She felt a sense of despair. The little blue man presented her with a blue silk flowing robe, which she happily put on because it was her favorite color. [. . .] After this episode, Mrs. Sharp's condition declined rapidly.

Strieber adds (p. 156),

Yensoon also pointed out that the deceased wears a blue silk robe in a Chinese funeral. [. . .] They effortlessly translated her from the physical world into another reality, one that seemed to be a sort of archetypal place of death.

Upon reading this account, I remembered my hypnosis session covering the events that occurred on the night of October 4, 1985. During that session I had seen my son in a beautiful but strangely desolate park. I had thought him dead and had experienced emotional devastation.

Could there be an actual place somewhere, in some parallel reality, where the dead linger in sighing gardens?

At first I had some doubts regarding the authenticity of this letter. Tfai is not a possible name in any Chinese language, and the vocabulary she uses seems to be Strieber's own. Soughing, for example, is quite an unusual word, unlikely to be in the active vocabulary of many non-native speakers of English, but it occurs in several of Strieber's own works (qv). On the other hand, the diary transcript (only a small part of which I have reproduced in this post) does contain subtle and characteristically Chinese grammatical errors regarding the order of adjectives ("the yellow little man," "a blue silk flowing robe") and the incorrect use of and to link attributive adjectives ("a stern and icy cold look," "a slimy and soft body"). I also thought that the name Tfai, while obviously wrong, was the sort of error that served to confirm rather than debunk. It's certainly not the sort of thing any American would come up with if he tried to invent a Chinese-sounding name; more likely, the letter had been written in somewhat old-fashioned longhand, and Strieber had misread Tsai (a common Chinese surname, but not one particularly well-known in the West) as Tfai.

Fortunately, part of the diary passage in question also appears in Lowell Tarling's 2017 book Sharper 1980-2013: A Biography of Martin Sharp. (Jo Sharp was Martin Sharp's mother.) In Sharper, Yensoon's surname is given as Tsai, and she is described as Martin's girlfriend (euphemized by Strieber as "a close family friend"). The diary passage as quoted by Tarling is identical to Strieber's version with two exceptions: It once uses Mrs Sharp where Strieber has she, and it has sighing instead of soughing. I found it very satisfying to have my speculations vindicated in this way; Tfai was indeed a misreading of Tsai, and soughing was indeed Strieber's word rather than Tsai's own.

So the diary entry is authentic and is not Strieber's work. The chance of its being influenced by Communion seems remote. Strieber did not know Tsai -- didn't even know her name! -- and hadn't had any contact with her boyfriend Martin Sharp since they were in London in the sixties (coinciding, according to this post, with Sharp's only period of interest in UFOs). Strieber found out about Jo Sharp's strange experience because Martin had contacted Philippe Mora (who would later direct the film version of Communion) about it and Mora had called Strieber. Communion was a bestseller, of course, and Jo Sharp may have been exposed to it, but it seems unlikely that she would have borrowed the little detail of the park of death while still describing her visitors as "little Chinese men" in "coolie hats" rather than as greys.

Notice also the wind in Sharp's park -- a detail not mentioned in Communion but tying it to the field of yellow flowers in Transformation (and, of course, to the Homeric afterlife).