Haunted Cosmos - The Devil's Den, Part III

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

Please enjoy this third inter-season episode of our Patreon exclusive show, The Dusty Tome. In this episode, we continue the story of the Devil's Den!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Want to keep nefarious fairy Bigfoots away and also avoid icky seed oils, preservatives, artificial colorants, and other nasties in your daily shower routine? Then check out the vast array of homemade soaps from our friends at Indigo Sundries Soap Co.! Go to indigosundriessoap.com to learn more—and as our gift to you, use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!This episode is sponsored by New Dominion Design Co. Visit their website here and learn more!This episode is sponsored by Backwards Planning Financial. Visit Joe's website here or give him a call (615-767-2555).This episode is sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee! Visit their website here to get your first bag free!  Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully.Finally, this episode is sponsored by Gray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order.Support the show

Everyone and welcome to this third episode of our interseason dusty tomes special releases on Honod Cosmos. I hope that you've been enjoying these, and there's not much else to say, apart from we're going to continue the story of the incident at Devil's Den. This episode is sponsored by Indigo Sundry Soap, Backwards Planning Financial, New Dominion Design Co, Greytoed Tallow, and Squirrely Joe's Coffee. We are stoked to be sponsored by such great companies, and we really do recommend that you check them all out. And of course, this episode is not possible without our patrons. So thank you to all of our patrons.

And if you like what you hear on The Dusty Tome, consider going and becoming a patron yourself. With that, on with the show. On a late September night in 1961, a young couple drove through the cold and foggy Appalachian passes that rolled between them and their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They had just concluded a lovely vacation tour of Niagara Falls in the bustling metropolitan Montreal,

all as a well-deserved break from their busy lives back home. While the two talked about their favorite moments from the past few days, any sense of trepidation at the mounting fog and cold melted away. Inside the car was safe and warm. With one another all sense of security only grew for the both of them, for both Barney Hill and his wife, Betty. Eventually, with the passing of time on their nighttime road trip, a quiet contentment filled the air between them. No more words were spoken, and it was precisely this fact that confirmed

for the both of them the peaceful intimacy of the moment. Silence can be an awkward enemy to be vanquished, or a welcome friend to be looked for. It all just depends on where you're sitting. In the midmost of this quiet episode, Betty stared at the bright moon through the windshield. Luna shone down in her hardened and chilled radiance that night, painting the lightless black with sheer hues of off-white and silver blue. Near to the moon, Betty marked the triumphant march of Jupiter across the cosmos, a king surveying his realm with beneficent light

always emanating from him. But while she was struck by the majesty of these heavenly bodies, she noticed a flicker of light suddenly appear between them. This new light was not quite like the others. Where Luna and Jove are steady and dependable, this new thing seemed unkempt and unreliable. It waned here and waxed there with non-mechanical cycles. What's more, Betty could swear that its movement was clearly perceived.

She looked away and stretched her face as she opened her eyes wide into the dark forest that sped by her outside. You know what it's like to set the reset button on your vision. After rubbing her eyes and blinking some more, she looked back at the same spot and was shocked. It was a shooting star. Its flashes remained irregular and violent, and it couldn't. be denied that it was indeed moving very fast across the sky. It was strange. Betty had never seen a shooting star move so slow in a direction that defied the natural assumptions of the human brain. The thing flew, for lack of a better word, up instead of down. It flew like a ball, kicked through

the goalpost of moon and planet, like it was aiming right for it, but wasn't entirely confident in itself to pull it off. Barney, meanwhile, kept his face. hard glued to the winding path of U.S. Route 3 in front of him. Deer were always a threat this late and on these less traveled roads. The last thing he wanted was to ruin what had been a fine trip with his bride by slamming into a deer at 40 miles an hour and sleeping in the cold car for a night. Because of this, he didn't notice Betty's face that was so amazed and captivated by the night sky.

She glanced over and understood his clear lack of awareness of the light show. Honey, look, there's a falling star by the moon. Yes, right there. The meteor had by now grown far bigger and brighter and faster than it had seemed to Betty before. Betty urged Barney to pull over so they could get out and both get a good look at Heaven's Dance. After all, it was past time that they let their dog Delsey out for a pee break. Thus it was that Barney Hill parked his car at a small picnic area off the road, stepped out into the northern air and changed he and his wife's lives forever thereafter.

Betty ran around to the back of the car and quickly yanked out her pair of binoculars they had used at Niagara Falls. Peering through the aperture only increased her sense of awe at what she was seeing. For, she told Barney, an odd-shaped thing was flying across the face of the moon while it flashed multicolored lights all around it. It wasn't a meteor. it was some kind of craft, but so bright, so fast, so sudden in its onset,

who had ever seen such a thing before? Barney pulled the by-nose to himself and had a look. After a few seconds, he dismissed it as a commercial airliner coming in for landing patterns, probably somewhere in Vermont. However, at Betty's prodding, he kept looking and suddenly changed his opinion

in a frantic moment, for as he peered through the lenses, the craft turned, in a single instant and began descending rapidly straight towards him. No fighter jet could make such a maneuver, much less a massive jumbo jet. With a tinge of trepidation and cracking in his voice, he admitted to Betty that she may be right about this thing being something strange. Having watched Delsey relieve herself, they all climbed back into the car and kept making

progress toward home. Barney drove much slower now, so that he and Betty might keep observing this anomalous object while I got closer and closer to them. Finally, after continuing to inch through time and space towards one another, the craft could clearly be seen as a smooth saucer, bouncing erratically through the sky, like a pinball through a tight passage of the board, ever pressing onward in some discrete path.

Suddenly the craft raced rapidly down towards them until its bulk filled the entire field of vision afforded by the 1957 Chevy Bel Air's windshield. Barney slammed on the brakes, sending Delsey into a floorboard plunge and a single-shocked yelp. Barney exited the car, transfixed by the beauty of what hovered before him. He took some steps closer to it. Raising the binoculars to his eyes, he saw a handful of humanoid creatures, staring back at him from inside this flat, an oblong obelisk of darkness.

As he stared, all but one of the figures retreated. away from his vision in a single movement. But the one that remained continued to stare right back at Barney as if they were inches away from each other, like the being could actually see Barney's eyes through the darkness and through the glass lenses. He began to hear a voice in his head, as clear as his own, but not at all his own, speaking thoughts that he had never had before, that seemed to be confined to the walls of his skull but were utterly foreign to him in every way.

Stay where you are and keep looking. The Barneys arrived home at dawn. They had no recollection of any events that transpired after Barney's apparent telepathic communication. They began to exhibit odd OCD-like behavior. For example, Betty insisted that their luggage be kept near the back door of their house rather than the front. Neither of the couple's watches ever worked again.

Barney's dress shoes were severely scraped, though they were brand new. The leather strap of his binoculars was torn. Betty's dress was ripped slightly at the hem, the zipper, and the lining. After letting it sit for a couple days at the back of her closet, she observed a lining of pink dust all over the dress. It had no scent nor taste. The car's trunk had concentric circles marked on it that neither of the hills recognized. According to them, when they moved a compass over the formation, the needle would begin to spin rapidly without rhyme or reason.

Betty began to have vivid dreams for nearly a week after the ordeal. In them, she and Barney would be stopped at a roadblock before being removed from their car. She would lose consciousness in the dream before struggling hard to regain it. Once she did, she would find herself walking between two small grayish men through the woods. Barney, she could tell, walked behind her, though he seemed to be in a trance state, like a sleepwalker reluctant to snap out of it. They would be led to the car and let back in.

They would be told to wait until the odd men departed before they could leave. Barney was not keen on discussing these dreams, and so the matter was dropped and eventually the dreams went away and never returned. The next month, on October 21st, The hills sat down with an astronomer from Boston named Walter Webb. After a six-hour interview, Webb left feeling troubled. He later noted how sincere the couple seemed and how he believed their story. Though he also noted that it seemed they clearly knew more than they said,

keeping it from him out of some subconscious desire not to remember it themselves or in an attempt to save face for what they felt was too incredulous. At any rate, this interview bore the fruit of a strange detail that neither Barney nor Betty had thought of yet. You see, Barney recalled looking down at his watch when he stopped the car to get out and approach the lingering UFO overhead. It read 10.30 p.m., give or take. He remembered that with certain clarity. The problem is, they had already driven much of the 178-mile trip from Colbrook, New Hampshire, to their home in Portsmouth, that time, it didn't expect to arrive home much later than midnight. Instead, they arrived as the

first light of dawn reached across the drowsy shores of the east coast the next morning. What should have been a four-hour trip had taken the hills close to seven hours to complete. Three hours of missing time. What could have happened in three hours? It has been documented that in cases of apparent abduction by what the lay people of our day call aliens. Abductees will arrive back in a similar state to the one in which they were taken, with a brain full of fog and opaque memory. In these cases, the only indication that anything has gone awry, assuming the victim even recognizes something is actually off, is an apparently extreme jump forward in time. People will suddenly come too on a familiar walk in the park, only to look down at their watch

and realize an hour has passed, even though they only seem to have covered a couple hundred yards. In some cases, the recognition of missing time is accompanied by a realization that something else isn't quite right either. For example, an abductee may notice that, for some reason or other, he isn't quite in the right place. The Hills did supposedly remember much of their experience that night. I say supposedly because the memories only returned under the influence of hypnosis. Perhaps that is a story for another time. For now, the Hill's memories do not come into these tales.

But the hypnotically induced memories of our friend Terry Lovelace very well might. Brian, I got bad news. The other day, I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself, and I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket. And then also, I started Googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts. Ben, what are you doing?

Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone disrupting chemicals? They're probably turning you into a girl. Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ben, you ignorant normie. All you've needed to do is go to indigo sundry soap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps. that are completely free of hormone-disrupting chemicals and other nasties.

Okay, I am literally going to indigo sundry soap.com right now. Tell me what to buy. Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six-pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle. Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men-six-pack, because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't.

So true, King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry's soap company, is offering 10% off your order. If you just use all caps, discount code Haunted Cosmos, no spaces. Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that.

Is that information in the show description? Ben, you ignorant normie, it's always in the show description. Okay, so I'm going to go to Indigo sundrysoap.com. I'm going to pick the men's six-pack bundle, and I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout, all caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show.

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Some years had passed since Terry Lovelace's unfortunate and harrowing experience. at Devil's Den. In the intervening time, which we will discuss more of, don't worry, things had steadily gotten a little bit better for Terry. He had weaseled his way out of any trouble with OSI, again, more on that later, and had successfully exited the Air Force. He and his wife had remained very much committed to one another and had even had a couple of kids. Terry had graduated law school and was now a high-performing lawyer at his firm, where he made a very respectable living for his family. As I said, things were going well. But the dark memories of that night back in 1977 were always hiding just behind the horizon of his thought, like a stalker in the

dark. One day, they came back to haunt him again in a most peculiar way. You see, Terry was a simple man. He had simple likes, and he only grew tired of a routine after a very long time. For that reason, he habitually went for a leisurely motorcycle ride most Saturday mornings, leaving before his family awoke and getting back in time for a late breakfast of pancakes made by his lovely bride. One particular Saturday morning in early October was no different from the rest. Apart from it being Terry's favorite time of the year for such morning rides, he loved the fall. At 7.30 a.m., he quietly got out of bed, stealthily pulled his riding gear on

and carefully pushed his motorcycle down the driveway to the street so that he would avoid waking anyone else up by starting the engine. It was time for him to pick between the three favorite routes he had. He knew them well and so knew that they would afford the greatest scenery in his little piece of neighborhood while remaining predictable enough to make sure he would be back home at 10.30 a.m., 11 a.m. at the very latest.

He chose the one that stayed exclusively on a lightly trafficked two-lane blacktop road, and off he went. Terry gingerly wound around the curves and corners of his familiar place, enjoying the fruits of his labors in every vibrant red, orange, and yellow leaf he rode beside, under, and over. The autumn wind kissed his face with a refreshing coolness that only grew more pleasant as the sun continued to rise in his victorious course across the morning. It was just as it was every Saturday, just as Terry had always wished his life to be, peaceful.

After a time, and well-in to the second half of the familiar route, something a bit irregular happened. Terry suddenly awoke, as if from a brief, even momentary trance, and found himself riding over a gravel road that was quickly growing rougher with each passing yard. Have you ever been driving somewhere, somewhere familiar? Maybe it's to a friend's house or to the local market, at a time when traffic is light and lights are yielding to green the hallway for you.

And then at some point in the drive, you suddenly come to grips with the fact that you haven't been paying attention at all. Not only is it a lack of focus, though, it's also an inability to remember the drive you just took. If someone were to ask you the most basic question about the route, something like what color was the only other car you saw in the oncoming lane, you would not be able to answer it, not even if you'd been given a million years. I believe we can all relate to this to a degree.

We think our lack of attentiveness is funny, especially since nothing bad came of it, and we just continue to go about our day. Something akin to this is what happened to Terry. All at once, and in a way that was most of the way that was most of it. most jarring to him. Terry rechecked his control over his situation and brought his motorcycle to a slow and careful stop. This thing was precious to him. It represented a lot of work and freedom that he had yearned for for many years. Driving it over gravel was sure to scratch its paint or chip its wheels or at least wear down its tires in a most undesirable way. He was far too invested in this

machine to let that happen. As he dismounted to check for any scratches that he would have to have, to buff out later, he tried to remember making the turn that led him down this side road. He knew exactly where it would have happened. After all, he passed this gravel road at least once a month on these lonesome rides. He knew he would have had to check carefully for oncoming traffic due to a grassy bluff creating a blind drive. He knew he would have had to navigate through the rough ground around the washed out entrance to the road. But he didn't actually remember any of this. He thought it's strange, but not much else more than that. He could see the blacktop just a few football fields away,

and so he pushed back his kickstand, started his bike, and very cautiously drove back to where he'd just been. At the threshold of the gravel, he checked both directions with added care and then accelerated onto the blacktop of his normal route. The whole ride had been flawless up to that point. No train crossings had forced him to wait. No cops had lined the shoulders, Not even a single stoplight had caught him.

Oh well, Terry thought. A mindless quick detour like that isn't the worst thing that can happen. When he pulled into his driveway back home, his wife came running out of the house to greet him. Her face was soaked with tears while her eyes hid deep within puffed and red skin. She'd been crying for a while now. Terry hurriedly pulled his helmet off and ran to give his wife a hug, urgently asking her what was the matter?

Terry, are you serious? What do you mean? he asked. Where have you been? I've been worried sick. You see, Terry Lovelace was, despite his colorful career in the Air Force, a military man indeed. He was punctual. Through their decades of marriage, his wife had learned that she could depend on Terry's being punctual, in much the same way that she could depend on the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. She knew that Terry would not arrive home from his Saturday rides past a little.

11 a.m. And that was the very latest. It only happened when he got stopped by a train crossing or by getting stuck in odd traffic. 10.30 was much more usual. But on this morning, he had gotten home at 12.50 p.m. He had arrived home a full two and a half hours late. What's more, he had no possible reason to explain it. Naturally, his wife was afraid. She really had been worried sick. She had called the police multiple times to inquire about any accident reports that involved the motorcycle. When they told her, again, multiple times, that none had in fact occurred, she started to get ready to go looking for Terry herself. It just wasn't like him to do this.

But as he proved to her that he was okay, her fear and anxiety turned to anger. Why was he gone so long? Was he with someone else? Eventually, things cooled off. enough for Terry to assure his wife that nothing untoward had happened, that the only thing abnormal about his ride was that weird case of zoning out he had suffered on the gravel road. This, it turned out, caught his wife's attention. She asked if he thought it could have been a case of missing time. He said he didn't know, that he hadn't really thought of it, but she gave him

a magazine with a certain article dog-eared in the middle. Terry opened it and immediately glued his eyes to the story of Betty and Barney Hill. He was astonished. It really seemed like he underwent something similar. Inexplicable missing time. A feeling of being zoned out. Coming to in a familiar place that was also slightly off, it just didn't feel right and it all added up with Terry's experience. Terry sank into his chair and took a deep breath of exhaustion. It had been so long. Why was Doom grabbing at his heels again? Why now? Why him? His wife, whose name is Sheila, by the way, stared at her husband with an expression of growing unease. He looked ahead of him deep and thought. She looked right at him, deep in some kind of macabre realization. Fear enveloped her.

Terry? She began in a shaking voice. I also experienced something a little bit odd the other night. I didn't tell you. I don't know why. What was it? Well, it's going to sound crazy, she said. Sweetheart, do you really think, after all you've seen from me, that I would call you crazy? Sheila thus began to tell her tale. It was Saturday night, the very midmost of Saturday night, in fact, and the whole house was dark and quiet. From this serene rest, Sheila's eyes pierced open with an unusual quickness. Though she didn't move and wasn't panicked, she was utterly,

wide awake. It was no urge for the bathroom, nor was it any bad dream. Rather, it was a deep instinct of the soul that screamed in sleep of something being wrong. Does a mother not have a way with these things? She slowly turned over to be on her back, being driven to it by that same primordial urge. And there, right in the middle of the room, painted over with a filter of the darkest blue, Sheila laid her eyes upon a small woman, no taller than three or three or three and a half feet, standing at the end of their bed's opposite corner, between its foot and the room's picture window. She appeared to be staring intently at the side of the bed closest to her, Terry's side. But though her eyes were clearly very large, most of them were covered by a dark

hood draped over her head and face. The hood connected to a robe that ran down to the floor in a short train and was secured by a cord around the lady's waist. In a moment of a little, a little growing concern. It was the oddest thing. Sheila felt nothing close to panic, just concern. She slowly reached over to Terry in order to wake him. But her hand found only air and then comfort her. Terry was gone. Even still, there was no fear in the moment. That came later. She felt nothing in the moment of its happening, in fact. After a few seconds past, Sheila, who had not taken her gaze off the strange intruder at all, finally realized that the woman at some point

had been staring right back at her from under her hood. After a few seconds more of mutually aware staring, Sheila began to hear a voice in her head. It was a voice that was not her own, speaking thoughts unfamiliar to her. Though the woman's lips never moved, Sheila somehow understood viscerally that it was this woman who was speaking inside of her.

her head. Everything is okay. Go back to sleep. That was it. And that was what Sheila did, almost against her will. She knew she should be screaming, but she rolled back into her dreamless sleep and did not stir again until the next morning. Once she awoke, she remembered it all so vividly and figured it for a dream. But something in her heart of hearts pleaded with her not to run from the truth. It was not a dream. It had certainly happened as she remembered. Though she couldn't prove it, she knew with all her life that it was real. Terry, I believe this all really happened.

And the last thing was that when I was doing the laundry that morning, I noticed a small drop of blood on your pillow. Terry put his motorcycle up for sale that next week. His sense of unease and inexplicable apprehension increased every time he thought about this two and half hours. He figured losing his hobby would be well worth avoiding whatever that was again. What had happened to him? Much time was still to pass before he would ever find out.

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Link in the description below. I'm a poet. Didn't even know it. Years before this motorcycle episode, while the young Lovelace served his demotion after his little camping trip, Terry exited the back of a police car, uncuffed, and followed an OSI officer into a brutalist building that seemed as though it was designed to squash all human spirit with a single glance. He shared no words with the agent while they made their respective ways through the elevators

and labyrinthing hallways together. After a while, Terry found himself alone in a small square room painted all beige. A single metal desk stood boldly in the room's center, while four chairs peppered the room's corner and spot immediately behind the desk. A two-foot square mirror hung on the wall. hours later, while Terry squirmed uncomfortably on one of the fiberglass chairs that had been in the room, a major stared at him with a smiling face and an oddly calm and friendly voice. It was forced and Terry knew it.

The uncanny voice suddenly spoke as its owner rolled up Terry's shirt sleeve. In a few seconds, I'm going to give you a little injection in your arm here. I promise it won't hurt. It's very much like the medication they gave you while you were in the hospital. Now, do you trust me, Terry? Yes. Just sit back now and listen to my voice. It's important that you don't resist the feeling. Let the medicine do its job.

Obey the commands I give you and will be done before you know it. Will you do that for me, Terry? Yes. Terry felt a small prick in his arm. Close your eyes now, Terry. Relax and keep your eyes shut and listen to my voice. That's better. You have good veins.

Thank you, Terry. Toby stood before Terry disheveled and baffled. He and his family were in a frantic state as they packed the final things before moving away from Terry and Missouri forever on that fateful day. Toby smelled strongly of alcohol, and his eyes were stark red and filled with old and weakened blood.

Do you remember? Did it all really happen, Terry? All of it? Toby asked, in evident desperation, behind a muted and hushed voice, And right after this question, Toby's wife brushed past her husband, passing directly between he and Terry as if in a desperate attempt to get them to just stop talking and say goodbye forever. Terry could not stand to look at his friend's sick eyes anymore and turned his face down to the man's shoes.

His question had sent a tremor down Terry's spine, and Terry's heart pounded like a boxer in his chest. Though he wanted nothing to do with the question, he felt he owed his friend an answer. Yeah, it really happened, Tob, all of it. They hurt us. I don't know why, but it's all real. With that, Terry turned and stumbled back to his car, forcing his legs to obey his mind's commands despite seeming like jello beneath him. He never looked back, and he never spoke to Toby ever again.

Years later, as Terry labored his way through the pains of law school, he had no clue where Toby even was. He had not thought of him for a long time. Little did Terry know that Toby was a mere 45-minute drive away from his own law school, dying alone on the side of the street in the middle of Flint, Michigan. Want more haunted Cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content as well as exclusive content in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. So go to patreon.com slash haunted cosmos and sign up now.