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From the High Desert book cover

From the High Desert

A Cultural History of Art Bell

Thumbnail for January 26, 2002: Open Lines - Monsters

January 26, 2002: Open Lines - Monsters

Jan 26, 2002
2h 53m
0:00 / 0:00
Art Bell opens the phones for a monster-themed edition of Open Lines, inspired by a harrowing call from the previous night. He brings back Ken and his girlfriend Sherry from Portland, Oregon, who describe two years of escalating paranormal terror in a house built in 1910. Sherry recounts being pinned face-down in bed by an invisible force with the weight of a body pressing on her, receiving a bite mark on her back that took six weeks to heal, and spending nearly two years confined to the kitchen because every other room felt threatening.

Ken describes the final confrontation. A search-and-rescue dog brought to the basement storage room reacted with extreme panic, giving what handlers call a death alert. The next morning, a massive black figure approximately six feet tall with an enormous head ascended the staircase, rotating in the air without visible legs. Both Ken and Sherry witnessed the entity simultaneously before it vanished at the bedroom doorway. They fled the house shortly after.

Callers contribute their own encounters, including a man in Chicago who woke to find five hooded monk-like figures examining his apartment, and a caller from Fairbanks, Alaska, who describes shipping ancient frozen walrus meat from a remote Bering Sea island to a researcher in Massachusetts studying regenerative spore cells.

Key Moments

  1. 'Time to kill' on the unplugged radio: Ken's girlfriend Sherry is woken by a child's clock-radio blaring 'time to kill, time to kill' over and over; she rips the cord from the wall and finds Greg ashen at the top of the stairs, pinned moments earlier on the couch.

  2. Bite mark, and a family that fled the same house: Ken describes finding bite marks on his girlfriend's back and later learning a previous family had abandoned the house in the night, leaving food, clothes, toys, and furniture behind.

  3. Ancient meatballs and 'spore cells' in Alaska: A Fairbanks fossil dealer recounts being asked by an English film crew for 100-1,000-year-old frozen flesh; he digs up Yupik 'meatballs' and FedExes them on dry ice to a Massachusetts lab researching regenerative spore cells.

  4. Art's bat the morning his father died: Triggered by a caller's bat story, Art reveals that on the morning his father died of a heart attack, a bat appeared on his desert porch, stayed all day in the causeway, and was simply gone after dark.

  5. Lifted straight up: the angels of Hyde Park Boulevard: An Inglewood caller describes a car aiming at a young couple leaning on a fender; in one motion, with no flexed knees, they rose vertically and landed on the hood, then looked at each other and laughed.