Mist and fog sweep over a seemingly endless number of trees under the overcast sky.
This is the view from my hotel room in Issaquah, Washington a suburb of Seattle that has ties to the cult classic Twin Peaks, a show about how the bizarre and strange can exist in a seemingly mundane town.
This realization strikes me as a fitting synchronicity considering I am here to spend a day with Liminal Earth.
Simply put, Liminal Earth is a curated map that is crowdsourced by those who have had an anomalous experience. Whether that is seeing a ghost, thunderbird, grey alien, or even a pigeon using a crosswalk (an actual account reported to Liminal Earth)!
All one must do is submit their experience to the Liminal Earth website and a documented account will be added to the map! Liminality, after all, is the space in between.
Now, we have a resource to find the “in between” spots on a map where others have had experiences with the “in between” of consensus reality. As founding member Jeremy Puma states “it’s a way to remythologize your landscape”.
The crowdsourced map on Liminal Earth’s website is amazing! One can spend hours traveling the world from the comfort of their screen finding reports of strange occurrences.
Whether you are interested in high strangeness from the other side of the globe or a haunted house located in your hometown.
Liminal Earth will give you the inside track on the weird in the world. But, its not just the map that makes Liminal Earth fantastic, it’s the unique team behind the map that really makes everything blossom.
Liminal Earth is comprised of Jeremy Puma, Garrett Kelly, and Bex Atwood.
Each member brings a unique and refreshing take on the paranormal and is certainly changing the game on how to investigate the world of the unexplained.
Jeremy Puma, an urban forager
I start my day by meeting up with Jeremy Puma, an urban forager, and one-third of Liminal Earth. He’s taking me to a hidden in plain sight fae village at a park in West Seattle.
The park is a slice of the wilds of the Pacific Northwest sandwiched between a fully functioning neighborhood with residential and business districts.
It is the living embodiment of a liminal space.
As we begin our descent into the fairy realm Jeremy points out numerous edible pants on the hiking path and brings up the relevance of his two passions working in unison.
“The way we try to cultivate looking into the paranormal and remythologizing your landscape is similar to the way that somebody who knows plants, looks at plants when they walk outside.
There’s a fern with roots that taste like licorice and a tree that has edible berries, but only if you can distinguish the female ones from the male ones.
That’s kind of how it is with the paranormal a lot of the time, people walk into these haunted houses and there might be stuff happening all around them, but they don’t see it because they don’t know what to look for in that situation”.
Jeremy grew up in Saint Augustine, Florida which features a famous haunted lighthouse. However, as Jeremy points out the town is much stranger than its infamous paranormal attraction.
Saint Augustine featured a college with secret chambers (one of which had a strange zodiac diagram carved into the floor), spooky structures built and haunted by the Spanish, and creepy backwoods. Also, a woman who Jeremy describes as a “new age psychic swamp witch”. With such a unique setting for a young mind intrigued by anomalous phenomenon, Jeremy developed a passion for high strangeness.
We reach our Fae village
Back on the trail, we reach our Fae village destination. The smell of Sulphur permeates the air as Jeremy points out skunk cabbage. As Jeremy states, “the smell is often associated with the fae”.
The atmosphere has a calmness about it, and a lot of the bustling noise from the urban landscape surrounding us fades away.
The land certainly has an enchantment brimming all around when suddenly Jeremy hands me a hag stone, a rock with a natural hole in it which is believed to be able to see into the realm of the fae.
However, this hag stone has some serious paranormal DIY mojo going on with it as a pair of binoculars are taped to the opening of the stone.
Jeremy states that he has seen some bizarre things looking through the hag stone.
Ironically, Jeremy does have tales of being “fairy led” and encountering an “old hag” like character with two black dogs in this very park.
The “hag stone binoculars” are one of the various unique tools Liminal Earth uses to investigate the paranormal.
Before we exit the fairy realm Jeremy gives me a scoop on a new divination system that Liminal Earth is working on based on the idea of the Liminal spirit.
“Every place has a spirit, and that spirit can be a go between for the entities that live around you.
If I want to define meaning to the landscape, the spirit of the place can commune with say plant life and provide answers from them, after all, they are a form of ancient intelligence.
In a way, it’s like tapping into probability patterns. Our divination technique will allow us to walk into any landscape and commune with the spirit of a place using natural objects” states Jeremy.
As my time with Jeremy comes to a conclusion, he wishes me luck on my next adventure with the other two-thirds of Liminal Earth as we are set for a night of high strangeness south of Seattle in the town of Bremerton.
Garrett Kelly and Bex Atwood on a cold clear night at the Kitsap Peninsula.
Bremerton is a seaside town southwest of Seattle.
It is no stranger to weirdness as it is the home of “Shrimpy” a giant shrimp cryptid that manifested in a laundry room to an unsuspecting woman in 1948.
In an ironic twist, Bremerton is also home to my first ever paranormal investigation back in the summer of 2013 when I was able to “ghost hunt” on the USS Turner Joy.
The drive into Bremerton brings back memories of a night filled with anticipation for an encounter with the anomalous.
Tonight is no different. I meet up with Garrett Kelly and Bex Atwood on a cold but clear night in the Kitsap Peninsula.
The clarity in the sky is an important factor because tonight is Wednesday Night UFO Watch Club or WUFO for short.
Famed scribe of high strangeness, John Keel believed the best time to see a UFO was on a Wednesday night around 10 PM.
Liminal Earth and Maighdlin Kelly (Weird Astrology) formed WUFO to carry on the Keel legacy and to create a collaborative experience with “skywatchers” from all over.
You can participate in your backyard, local woods, or even on rooftops if you live in a concrete jungle. Every WUFO event is live streamed (Pacific Standard Time) with Liminal Earth. Tonight I was able to attend in person!
But, as an appetizer Bex and Garrett served up a side adventure before the nights’ main course!
High strangeness at the restaurant
As we make our drive over to the first stop on WUFO Wednesday, Garrett begins to tell me a whimsical story of high strangeness at the restaurant we will be checking out.
Garrett Kelly is the co-founder of Liminal Earth and admits that as a child he was terrified of spooky subject matter.
“My parents had freaking Communion on the coffee table and those Time Life books. They ended up putting blinds on my windows because I was always imagining waking up and a gray alien would be looking at me”.
But as Garrett grew up the world of the strange began beckoning to him again. He befriended Jeremy and started Liminal Earth. Got into the radio business and met Jim Perry of the Euphomet Podcast.
Garrett now fully embraces the strange and is excited by what it brings to his life.
“Creating new rituals, creating new tools, asking new questions, I love things that are spontaneous or like random divination, like introducing randomness to piece things together is just so much fun for me.
So, that is where I want to focus in the paranormal”. With Garrett’s conclusion on his drive for investigating the unknown, we arrive at our first destination.
A playlist with the greatest hits of 1993 echoes throughout a restaurant called the Golden Mum.
Bex, Garrett, and I wander through the establishment as multiple pool tables and gentlemen resembling the NWO of WCW fame make awkward eye contact with us.
Someone shouts “IT’S GONNA BE ONE OF THOSE NIGHTS, HUH” as we pass the pool tables. Little do most patrons know, the establishment offers a bit of unique history in the realm of the UFO experiencer.
Back in the early 2000s, a woman claimed to have a telepathic conversation with two “elf looking” beings at the Golden Mum restaurant.
This encounter was even reported in the “Flying Saucer Review”. The beings seemingly vanished when the woman decided to confront her telepathic conversationalists.
“Estes Session”
After a bit of time scoping out the scene of the Golden Mum (which included dowsing rods and creating a magic sentence), Bex, Garrett, and I decide to go outside the restaurant and attempt an “Estes Session” with an SB-7 spirit box.
For anyone unfamiliar with the “Estes Method” it was developed by Connor J Randall, Michelle Tate, and Karl Pfeiffer at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.
In a nutshell, the “Estes Method” is a divination technique that puts an individual in an almost “trance-like” sensory deprivation state where they are blindfolded and can only hear through headphones plugged into a spirit box.
The “receiver states out loud what they hear, and other investigators can then act accordingly.
Bex and Garrett were conducting a session for a couple of minutes when someone asked, “Is she alright?”
The concerned voice ended up being the owner of the Golden Mum who then sat down with us and told us she fully believed the restaurant to be haunted.
She was unsure of any elves or alien activity but, was still open to the idea and claimed her establishment welcomed “everyone”.
Back to our WUFO watch spot
We eventually made our way back to our WUFO watch spot. Bex expertly set up a fire pit and was ready to go for another “Estes Session” all in about ten minutes!
She had her game face on and was ready to go! Bex Atwood is a witch, mycologist, denizen of the strange for her local community, and is the newest member of the Liminal Earth team.
Bex started her paranormal journey with a weekly column in her local newspaper showcasing her investigating the unknown. Eventually, Bex made her way up to the Key Peninsula and started having strange experiences at home. However, Bex was prepared for how to deal with paranormal experiences.
However, she was curious if her neighbors were having odd encounters of their own.
Bex jumped right into investigating the strange and unknown in her local community.
“It went from we’re experiencing things, too I’m going to ask my neighbors about it, to I’m going to post flyers that are cryptic and weird around my peninsula.
I got a ton of feedback and I’m investigating this now” states Bex.
After submitting some encounters to Jim Perry of the Euphomet Podcast (friend of Liminal Earth) and a recommendation from Amanda Paulson (PrettyFnSpooky) about the Liminal Earth map, Bex met and befriended Jeremy and Garrett. And the rest as they say is history.
The mighty Liminal Earth trinity was formed!
Bex continues “We have this unified idea of how we want Liminal Earth to be and how to progress in this paranormal world. We have a lot of goals and a lot of dreams now”.
The next thing I know, Bex is under again in an “Estes Session” that is being live streamed over the internet.
She and Garrett go back and forth in an effort to communicate with aliens, ghosts, or whatever may come through.
I even chime in with a few questions and observations about what Bex is hearing through the spirit box. The details of the “Estes Session” that night are quite shocking.
I will let Liminal Earth reveal what they uncovered when and if they feel it is appropriate to do so. However, what I can say is that we definitely were in communication with some kind of intelligence that night.
After the live “Estes Session” we walked down to the bay where we had a clear viewing of the night sky.
Garrett had a handmade antenna for his HAM radio which he was using to potentially communicate with intelligences in the night sky.
We watched for a full hour and did come across a curious object in the night sky that was difficult to debunk even with a stargazing app.
But, alas nothing that was definitively anomalous. With just one simple day in the life of Liminal Earth, I encountered a bevy of high strangeness in the Pacific Northwest.
But, most importantly I made three new amazing friends. Liminal Earth is changing the game of paranormal investigations.
I wholeheartedly believe in their approach to uncovering the unknown. Check out their map, TikTok live streams, and follow them on all social media platforms. They may just end up helping you remythologize your landscape!
