Those of you who follow my Instagram account (and if you don't already, please do) may have seen my post yesterday about me arriving in Connecticut for a visit. If you're new here, one thing to know about me is that I was born & raised in CT and spent the majority of my life in and around the New England states.
I think my love for Halloween has a lot to do with growing up here. I moved to the Tacoma, WA area about 6 years ago, and while that part of the country has its own charm, it feels so different than New England.
The Pacific Northwest and New England both have their own flavors of spooky/creepiness. The PNW feels like an animalistic, untamed place, like it will catch you & eat you alive. But New England is seriously ancient,* spanning eons of dusty memories & full of ghosts that will haunt you forever.
*(literally true, in the geological sense, there are some pretty fucking old rocks in eastern North America)
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| Cornfield, East Windsor CT, ca 1999, photo by me |
No matter what time of year I'm here in New England, it always feels like Halloween is just around the corner: about to occur or just passed. Right now, we're nearly halfway through August already and the late-summer/early-fall funk is hanging in the humid, uncomfortably warm air. I can feel time and timelessness so much more intensely with every one of my senses. I generally despise hot weather, but there's something about being outdoors on a sticky August night that feels eternal, free, and wild.
Which leads me to my story from earlier this evening. My friend and I had been out doing errands just after sunset, and decided to stop for takeout on the way back to her place. We had about 10 or 15 minutes to wait when we arrived at the restaurant, so we had music on in the car and were chatting with the windows and sunroof open, the strip mall parking lot mostly dark and quiet, near about 10PM.
Then -- as we were talking -- every few minutes, we heard some sort of cry/song/vocalization of an animal, which sounded fairly close by to where we were parked, but not on the ground -- higher up, as if it were up on the roof of the strip mall. The first time we heard it, we didn't think anything of it, it was just background noise partly drowned out by the music. The second time, we wondered if maybe it was just part of the song that was currently playing? But no. We stopped the music to see if we could hear it again. Every few minutes or so, we heard a similar sound coming from the same spot. Sometimes, we heard another similar call from further away, and then the closer creature (???) would call out again, seemingly in response. Was that its mate? Who knows.
Both my friend and I immediately thought that it must be a bird of some kind - but nothing similar to anything we had ever heard before in the wild, and definitely not at night. Was it an owl? Didn't sound like any owl either of us knew of. Was it a parrot, I wondered; maybe somebody's pet who escaped? Part of the sound/call was almost a "laughing" sort of sound that a money or kookaburra might make, but like... what the hell lives in CT that would make that noise? So strange. And whatever it was, there were at least 2 of them. We wondered for a few moments if was it a recording of some kind designed to scare off other birds or creatures from the rooftops -- but the sounds we heard were slightly different every time. Baffling.
We kept our eyes peeled but we never saw anything. Finally, it occurred to me that I should pull out my phone and see if I could capture any audio. The video below was all I got:
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