Entry #2: What Was The Conjure Quake Event?

Okay, we've all heard the same bullshit "official story" about what happened on Conjure Mountain during The Conjure Quake Event, but everything I've seen about it... it doesn't add up.

Eyewitness accounts, timelines, even what people reported it smelled like at the base of the mountain... none of it matches. I've read newspaper articles. I've read journal entries from people who were there that day. I've interviewed residents and heard stories passed down by their grandparents and great-grandparents. And after years of digging through all of this shit, I think I finally have a theory. But first, let's talk about what supposedly happened.

On October 21, 1864, a seismic event struck Conjure Mountain and caused a collapse inside the Burdale Coal Mine. Twenty-three miners were trapped underground and eventually died from injuries and starvation. According to the official story, a fissure opened somewhere on the mountain, releasing natural gases and destabilizing the mine. Okay, maybe. I absolutely believe there was a collapse. I believe those miners died down there. What I DON'T believe is that a normal geological event explains everything else that happened that day.

One of the most important pieces of evidence I've found is an old journal entry written by Henry Abbott, one of the sheriff's deputies who climbed Conjure Mountain immediately after The Event. Abbott died two days later. His entry is dated October 21, 1864, sometime late that evening. According to Henry, when the group reached the upper mountain, they found the area to be completely obliterated. Scorched earth, with vegetation burned or practically vaporized. Not to mention a strange smell in the air that didn't resemble smoke or methane. And something at the center of it.

Henry never clearly explains what it was, but he describes something physical that none of them could identify or make sense of. He also mentions what he believed might have been some kind of body, although even HE doesn't seem sure that's what he was looking at. Human? Animal? Dead? Alive? No idea.

Whatever they found, the sheriff immediately ordered everyone there not to speak about it. That's where things start getting interesting. Because I've done EXTENSIVE research into seismic records and historical accounts from October 21, 1864, and Burdale wasn't the only place where something weird happened that day.

I've found two others. The Village of Swansong in the UK and The Town of Ängsstad in Sweden.

Three towns on three different parts of the planet experienced unusually localized seismic events on the same day. Maybe you're reading this thinking: "Okay Whispers, earthquakes happen all the time. You're connecting dots that aren't there."

Fair enough.

But what if I told you all three towns experienced ANOTHER seismic event exactly fifty years later? October 21, 1914. And this time, all three came with reports of an enormous beam of light protruding from the surrounding wilderness. Burdale had The Light Beam Incident. Swansong had one, Ängsstad had one, and they were all on the same date exactly fifty years later. That is one HELL of a coincidence, and it absolutely gets worse.

The more I've learned about Swansong and Ängsstad, the more I've realized that the similarities between these places don't stop in 1914. They have some of the same fucking things we do... I'll explain that in a sec.

So here's my theory.

I think there are places on Earth where whatever separates our reality from whatever exists beyond it is naturally weaker. Maybe it's geological, or maybe it's electromagnetic.

Maybe it's something involving gravity, or maybe there are dimensions stacked on top of ours and we normally just can't interact with them. I don't fucking know. People have been talking about ley lines, "thin places," sacred ground and locations where supposedly strange things happen for thousands of years. Most of that stuff gets dismissed as superstition. Maybe some of it is. But what if there's something real under that folklore? What if there are locations where the boundaries between different realities are simply thinner than they are everywhere else?

My theory is that Phantom Valley is one of those places. More specifically, I think Conjure Mountain sits directly on top of one of these weak points, and I believe Swansong and Ängsstad sit on or near two others.

On October 21, 1864, something happened that caused all three points to rupture simultaneously. For a brief period of time, I think different versions of our world overlapped. And when they separated again, everything didn't necessarily go back where it belonged. That would explain something I've started calling Interdimensional Artifacts. Ever wonder how the fuck there are ruins of what appears to be an ancient European-style castle sitting on Crown Rock? Seriously dude. Who built it? When? Where are the records? Why is something that looks like it belongs somewhere in medieval Europe sitting on the side of a mountain above a nineteenth-century American coal town? Maybe nobody built it here. Maybe for a few seconds, minutes, hours.. who knows.. Crown Rock existed in more than one place. And when everything separated again, parts stayed behind. Then there's the Crown Tree. According to a Swansong resident who goes by the alias Rufus, whom I've spoken to recently, an almost identical tree stands atop Pike Hill in Swansong. His great-grandfather always claimed that the massive tree literally appeared "overnight". Newsflash, trees don't appear overnight. So maybe the day before, that tree was simply somewhere else.

Then there are the things living in these places. Swansong and Ängsstad both have historical sightings of creatures that sound ridiculously similar to our guy, The Wildwood Man. There are also accounts from their forests describing people who appear to belong to cultures that shouldn't exist anywhere near those regions. I'm not even going to get into that shit here because this post is already long enough. That's getting its own entry.

Then you start looking at the PEOPLE. They have stories that sound suspiciously similar to The Witch Lady. They have something floating around resembling Mr. Trenchcoat. Different names, slightly different details, and different histories. But sometimes the descriptions are so fucking similar... how can you even dismiss it??

So then maybe we're not talking about copies - maybe sometimes they're literally the same people. Maybe a person walks into the woods in one place and comes out somewhere else. Like, if castle ruins can cross, maybe people can cross, maybe animals can cross, maybe objects cross. Maybe entire sections of landscape can cross.

I don't know how big these overlaps can get, but I think Burdale, Swansong, and Ängsstad are somehow touching each other from thousands of miles away. And I think October 21, 1864 was the first major recorded instance of that happening. Which brings us back to The Sickened Seven.

After the mine collapsed, the sheriff and his three deputies climbed toward the peak along with Arthur Myers (local school teacher), Birdie Baker, whose husband was among the miners trapped underground, and local barkeep Barty Aldrich. Seven people.

According to the official story, they discovered the fissure that caused the disaster, and in doing so they were exposed to gases leaking from the mountain. Except Henry Abbott wrote in his journal that night which describes something VERY different. He describes an area that looked like it had been violently altered leaving scorched vegetation and destroyed earth, and then something he couldn't identify. Something he said resembled a body. All this before recieveing an immediate order from the sheriff that nobody was to discuss what they'd seen. The journal entry continues, telling how the sheriff returned to the station to contact state authorities while Abbot and the other deputies closed the mountain trail.

Less than twenty-four hours later, government officials arrived in Burdale and took control of Conjure Mountain. And this wasn't just somebody from the state coming out to inspect a mining disaster. According to a FUCKING PHOTOGRAPH I'VE ACQUIRED, the group included representatives from BOTH SIDES of the Civil War, Union and Confederates together in October of 1864. I've uploaded the photo - our "experts" at The Burdale Historical Association say they can't verify its authenticity. Personally, I think that's bullshit because by the end of that same week, construction had begun on a facility on the adjacent mountain, Specter Ridge. The facility's entrance was marked with a unique eight-pointed star. So whatever those seven people found on Conjure Mountain was apparently important enough that people who were ACTIVELY FIGHTING A FUCKING WAR put their differences aside long enough to deal with it.

And then the seven witnesses started getting sick. Only Barty Aldrich, Birdie Baker, and deputy Glenn Bank survived while the others died. We know them as The Sickened Seven. Well, some of us do. Funny how that part gets glossed over whenever Burdale schools teach the Conjure Quake. We're told they died from prolonged exposure to natural gases. Okay bro. Which ones? Why did they become sick in the ways they did? Why did some of them survive? Why did government officials immediately seize the area? Why was a facility built on Specter Ridge within days? And what exactly did Henry Abbott see?

I have another possibility. Maybe they were exposed to something human beings were never supposed to interact with. Matter from somewhere else. Or radiation. Some form of energy created when two realities overlap. Hell, maybe the air itself was temporarily different up there. I don't know. But whatever happened to those seven people, "natural gas exposure" doesn't answer nearly as many questions as the official story likes to pretend it does. And then there's the part of this story that I genuinely cannot explain.

The cog. Within the hour after the quake, Emma Myers, wife of Arthur Myers, supposedly found a strange metallic object near the base of Conjure Mountain. It is described as circular... cog-like.. and before I go any further, I want to make something perfectly clear. I have never seen it. Though, I have seen it described as roughly eight inches in circumference, and I've spent more hours than I want to admit trying to figure out what the fuck this thing is/was. Based off it's description, it LOOKS manufactured. That's what bothers me. This isn't some rock Emma picked up after an earthquake, but it sounds like a mechanical component of something. But what? According to an 1882 letter written by Emma and Arthur's son, Philip Myers, to his cousin Anne, Emma concealed the object inside her coat and brought it home.

When Arthur eventually returned from Conjure Mountain that evening, Emma showed it to him. Whatever Arthur had seen up there, he apparently believed the object was connected to it. And that's about all we know. The letter states that Emma eventually told her son portions of what happened that night, but for whatever reason, she never told him exactly what Arthur said he had seen on the mountain.

Maybe Arthur made her promise not to. Maybe she was afraid because of all the government folks who showed up in Burdale the next morning. Or maybe after watching her husband get sick and die within days, she decided her son was better off not knowing. Your guess is as good as mine. But Philip knew two things:

• His mother found this object immediately after The Event.

• His father believed it had something to do with what they encountered on Conjure Mountain.

I've acquired a copy of Philip's letter (it wasn't easy) and I've uploaded it to the Wildwood Whispers photo gallery.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking.

"Whispers, you just spent half this post telling us objects can cross between realities. There's your answer." And my response is, maybe. Maybe the cog is another Interdimensional Artifact. Maybe it's a piece of technology from another version of Earth. It's possible that whatever Henry Abbott encountered brought it through. But I don't like forcing evidence to fit a theory just because it's convenient. Frankly, I don't know where the cog fits. If anything, it raises MORE questions. Who made it? What was it part of? Why did Arthur immediately connect it to whatever he'd seen? And if this thing really did appear because of the 1864 event, what does that tell us about what was on the other side?

I've looked for nineteenth-century machinery resembling it's description, but nothing.

Look, maybe I'm looking at this completely wrong. Maybe the object has nothing to do with my theory at all and I'm wrong about the whole fucking thing. But right now, the cog feels like having one puzzle piece that you KNOW which puzzle it belongs to, but the picture on the piece doesn't look like anything else on the box, and here's where THAT story gets even stranger. The object supposedly stayed with the Myers family for generations.

Eventually it came into the possession of Nelson Myers, owner of an old Burdale oddity shop called The Spiral Staircase. Then, in 1964, The Spiral Staircase burned to the ground and Nelson died. His infant son William was never found and was presumed dead in the fire. Personally, I believe Nelson Myers was murdered and that the fire was deliberate, but I haven't figured out the connection yet and I'm not going to pretend I have. But according to what I've been able to piece together, the cog survived the fire. And you'll never guess what building stands where The Spiral Staircase used to be?

The Burdale Historical Association.

And this is where I've hit a wall. I've been told the Historical Association has the cog.

Not on display but locked away in a storage vault inside the museum. I've asked Sarah, one of the founders who handles the day-to-day operations of the museum, about it. She says the whole story is bullshit, and maybe she's right and the cog doesn't exist. Maybe Emma Myers found some ordinary piece of nineteenth-century machinery, the story grew over the generations, and I'm wasting my fucking time. But if that's true, I've got a pretty simple question: Why is it locked in a vault? Let me see it. Put it on display int he museum. Let SOMEBODY examine it. If it's just an old gear, great. I'll write a follow-up admitting I spent all this time obsessing over a fucking gear. But until somebody opens that vault, I have to work with what I've got, and what I've got is an 1882 letter saying Emma Myers found a strange object at the base of Conjure Mountain immediately after The Event, that her husband believed it was connected to whatever he encountered up there, and that an object matching that history may still exist somewhere inside the Burdale Historical Association. So until I actually see the damn thing, I'm leaving a giant fucking question mark next to it. So where does all of this leave us? Here's what I think I can say:

Something happened on October 21, 1864. It happened in Burdale. It happened in Swansong. It happened in Ängsstad. And then something happened again exactly fifty years later. All three places have histories involving similar people, creatures, objects and events that shouldn't exist where they do. Seven people climbed Conjure Mountain immediately after the first event and encountered something they couldn't explain. Most of them died. Government officials seized the mountain. A facility was immediately constructed on Specter Ridge, and now more than 150 years later, nobody can give us a straight answer about what happened up there. I think Phantom Valley is a weak point. I think Swansong and Ängsstad are too and I think there are places on this planet where the boundary separating our reality from others is thinner than it's supposed to be. On October 21, 1864, I think that boundary broke. I don't know what caused it. I don't know what was on the other side. I don't know why it happened again exactly fifty years later. And I still don't know where the fucking cog fits into any of it.

But I think something came through Conjure Mountain that day. And whatever happened up there... I don't think the door ever completely closed.