Stories.

[Tyler]

Justin,
A while ago you related to me a story of a guy walking along a path he'd tread many many times and suddenly noticing a tree that was there that hadn't been there the day before. The tree was hundreds of years old but he knew it hadn't been there the day before.
Where'd that come from?

[Tyler]

Jeff,
A while ago you related to me a story about Big Dave Murray selling his sould to the Devil for the ability to play guitar. Was that the case? Please elaborate.

[jtmx1]

David was joking…I’m almost completely sure. I remember being over at his house and asking him how it was that he was such a phenomenal musician. His talent seemed--still seems--light-years beyond the average mortal. He told me quite matter-of-factly that he had sold his soul to the Devil. I think it was just one of those straight-faced jokes. He muttered something about it not working out the way he had planned, and that was it.

In retrospect I feel a little like Shelley Duvall asking the Woodman if he has raccoons.

Jeff

[Betterout]

Tyler,

It was a little less dramatic than that, but it is actually an amalgam of three things you're remembering. One that happened to me when I was a kid, one that happened to a bunch of us (you may have been included, but I'm not sure) when we were a little older, and a story that I had planned on writing (and attempted but never completed) based on the first two experiences.

First one. I was on vacation with my family when I was a little guy. One night on vacation, I was hanging out, as was my custom, with my cousins Trey and Ryan--yeah, Ryan from the board. We were telling ghost stories and making up scary stuff and that sort of thing. The three of us were sitting in a triangular shape, all facing inward, with our backs to the rest of camp. From where I sat, I was staring out at the back of the campsite, onto the back of some other campsite, and onward across a road a good distance from me. I had the road to our campsite right behind me. I had been staring out in that direction for a long time as we spoke. Suddenly, a car drove by, illuminating the area in my line of sight. It occured to me in the passing light that there was a young tree there that I had simply not seen at all in the hours we'd been talking. On further thought, I couldn't remember a tree being there at all during the daytime, either--not for the whole time we'd been at camp, which was going on the better part of a week. I got really freaked out, and I walked up and touched the tree to make sure it was real. Yep. It freaked me out, and I went back inside shortly thereafter.

Second one. This occurred, if I remember correctly, between 11th and 12th grade during the summer. I remember it co-occuring with a strange proclamation from the Osages that non-shareholders were no longer considered to be part of the tribe, which evidently got reversed a few weeks later on appeal or something. I remember this event, 'cos Dave came over to the house that night and said that he was now just French. That was the running joke that night. But I don't remember if that happened before the incident in question or immediately aftwerward. Anyway, for some reason a group of us that I know included at least Chris Todd and me followed a bunch of guys out on the road leading out to the bullpens just off the lake road. I don't remember who all went, and I don't remember why. But we went to an old house that had burned down years before, and had evidently killed someone when it burned. This was literally out in the middle of absolutely nowhere. I've never been there since and I hadn't been there before. All I can really remember about the location was that there wasn't much around. There was just enough moon out to give us the indication that we were far from anywhere, and smack in the middle of a clearing. So, we were walking amid the rubble, and one of the people we were with (a member of the French tribe) was talking to us about stuff. Suddenly, he started, like he was scared out of his wits. "You see that?!?!? It's someone from the spirit world. Just right there!" We all followed his outstretched pointer finger with our eyes. And there, standing right in front of us, was a tree. I sure felt it, but someone else said it first: "I don't remember seeing that before." None of us could. The French guy walked over to the tree and told it that it didn't belong there, that it needed to go back where it came from. While he was yelling at the ghost tree, we were already loading back up in Chris's Festiva. We were back in town in just a few minutes, still very much shaken.

Number three. Based on the two experiences I'd had, and also on the notion of "Backdrops," which we had discussed at length and claimed to have witnessed on the morning of January 1, 1992, I was planning on writing a story about a slow invasion (uh, like, geologically slow) of our world by spirit world beings taking the form of trees. The trees, old and knotted, had appeared throughout time in places where they had not been just a day before. The trees had fully developed root systems, other sorts of onboard plant, animal, and fungal life, and otherwise posed no threat to us. However, if you leaned in closely, pressing your ear right up against the bark, you could hear a slowly beating heart. If hacked down quickly with an axe, the inner regions of the trees' flesh became darker and wetter, eventually yielding a thick rusty blood. At the very core of the tree was a cylindrical heart of wooden muscle. The heart had to be removed to kill the tree. But that's was the scary point of it all. These spirit world beings had become not only physical but also alive. I tried to write the story several times, once as a full scale spirit invasion, and once as a single person's discovery of, fearful obsession with, and attempts to destroy a single ghost tree.

[Tyler]

Awesome.
Now we just need some before / after sattelite photos of an "appearing tree".