Encounters with the paranormal — the Other, as some say — can change people, Some have a “UFO” encounter and are never the same, often psychologically damaged. Some encounter Bigfoot or other cryptids and are sort of afraid of the dark ever after.
On the other hand, one Bigfoot experiencer whom I interviewed had created a sort of shrine to his encounter in his home: photos, drawings, newspaper clippings, etc. It struck me as a kind of “material religion” thing.
This experience of mine is much less awesome. It involves bedding — wool blankets. Just fabric, no critters. But it was still weird.
I got this Hudson’s Bay “point blanket” from my mother in the 1990s. The “points,” the thin black lines, identified the blanket’s size when folded on a shelf in the trading post or the Hudson’s Bay Co.’s later department stores.
It not only spoke of tradition, but it was damn fine blanket that went on the bed every October — until October 2024.
That year I went to the bathroom cupboard where sheets and blankets are stored. There sat a zippered plastic blanket-storage bag. I could see the off-white wool of the folded blanket within.
I pulled it down, unzipped it, and took out a off-white heavy wool blanket. It was not my Hudson’s Bay blanket though, but another one — creamy-white with two thin blue stripes up the middle. I had never seen it before, that I could recollect.
The Hudson’s Bay blanket was gone. I have never found it. The replacement blanket is on the bed now, although the time to take it off is rapidly approaching.
This is the second winter with the “replacement” blanket, which is a fine blanket, but not the right one. The house wights, or whoever, have not chosen to switch them back.
But do I blame the house wights? They go mainly for shiny objects, although there was that one episode involving a book. This feels different. It feels like life was a train running down one track, and someone switched it onto another parallel track. I look around, and it all seems the same: Same wife, same house, same dog, same Jeep, and so on and on.
(Maybe in the Hudson’s Bay blanket timeline, the house burned in a forest fire or some other bad thing happened. But how would I know?)
So a little bit like the UFO experiencers, I am shaken at some level. It’s like something told me, “You’re not really in control as much as you think you are.” And what do you do with that?
VERY interesting. Your experience reminds me of two very different accounts, one personal and one learned about, that are superficially very different but point to something maybe all have in common.
The first happened many years ago- for one week I had almost nightly astral projection experiences- none previously and virtually none afterwards, certainly none for at least 26-30 years. Each time I ‘left’ I never left my apartment, usually never left my bedroom. BUT each time the lay out was different- a window where none was, stuff like that. I ended up thinking perhaps this reality was one page in a book of indefinite thickness. The next page was nearly the same but 100 pages out things were very different.
The other was on ly a few years ago. I had gotten intrigued with attempts to verify past lives. Many accounts were on Youtube. One stood out- a Scottish 4 year old (or around there) kept saying he had previously existed on an island off the coast, and gave many details of his life there. He said he was killed in an auto accident. He kept at it so long and in such detail that his parents took him there.
Detail after detail matched up, except they could not dind the house he said he had lived it. They checked the records and there had been a house, no gone, on the site where he said he had lived. Records of the family enabled them to contact them. They said they had never had a relative killed in a car wreck!
An extraordinary amount of overlap existed between the little guy’s memory and what could be verified- but not his existence! I thought maybe these were pages close together in that book.
Chas, my feeling is that “Nothing is ever really lost, if you look for it hard enough.” After all, the dinosaurs have been rediscovered, 66 million years after the curtain dropped! And I once recovered a missing diopter correction eyepiece that had fallen off my Olympus 35mm camera while I was exploring the canyons outside Farmington. I knew approximately where I’d lost it, so I went back two months later and found the damn thing, just a little bigger than a quarter!
So are you sure that the point blanket got put in the plastic bag in the first place? And have you checked everywhere else in your domicile? Knowing you, I suspect it’s probably been thrown over a couch or something, hidden in plain sight, and you might be sitting on it at this instant! You just never know.