Whisper Trails and Coastal Coordinates
We met up early this morning in the café adjoining the Ashland motel. Everyone was still a bit groggy—most of us didn’t sleep well after last night’s vigil near the abandoned well. No one brought it up directly until Josh mentioned that he’d dreamed of someone whispering from behind the dresser in his room. I turned pale. I’d heard something similar in the hallway around 3 a.m. but had chalked it up to pipes.
Matthew was the one who kept things moving by setting a map down and redirecting the group. “It’s not just a haunting. It’s an echo with coordinates,” he said, circling the triangle formed by the three properties we’d documented. Santa-Pops nodded. “Seismic echoes don’t form triangles. Something’s concentrating sound. Possibly residual energy. Possibly something else.”
Donna mentioned that the abandoned well could be geologically significant—groundwater resonance, maybe—but Vernon shut that idea down with data from his soil samples. “Dry as a bone down there. No organic decay or methane pockets.”
We’ll catalog the findings and revisit the Ashland case later. But for now, we’re heading north.
Jennifer brought out a clipped article from The Oregonian—dated late January. A fisherman near Newport swore that the stars above his boat “smeared like a wet oil painting” and that when he came to, he was docked and missing twenty-two minutes. No recollection of travel. No motor noise. Nothing. That would’ve been a good campfire tale if it hadn’t been followed by three more similar accounts between Newport and Yaquina Head Lighthouse. All different people. All missing time. All consistent descriptions of coastal lights bending unnaturally before blinking out.
Grandpa seemed particularly interested. “We’ve heard this sort of thing before. Coastal electromagnetics. Low resonance interference. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch it mid-pattern.”
We’ve divided into the same cars as before. No major reshuffling this time. Caleb tried to get me to swap so he could ride with Donna again—something about continuing their discussion on psychological stress responses during anomalous sound exposure—but she claimed shotgun rights and refused. Donna just rolled her eyes and reminded him that we’d be sleeping in tents again, not a university debate hall.
We plan to set up camp roughly six miles north of Newport, inland but with a line of sight toward the ocean. Josh has the high-powered lenses ready, and Robin’s hoping for some stable coastal rock formations to test vibration response. We’ll start setting up equipment tomorrow night after dark, assuming the weather holds.
At lunch, Grandpa brought up a story from the mid-1960s about a similar light phenomenon seen in this area. It was dismissed back then as “trawler lights reflected on the fog.” But apparently, one of the Coast Guard officers filed an unofficial report noting their radio went dead for thirteen minutes, only to return with timestamps that didn’t match the ship’s log.
We’ll be looking for more than just reflections.
Miles Traveled: 173
