Idaho Woman Recounts Experience of Living in High Strangeness 'Window Area'

*(Emily Wayland / Singular Fortean Society)*

The Singular Fortean Society was contacted recently by a witness who wished to share a number of anomalous experiences that occurred in northern Idaho.

The experiences happened during a period in which she lived in a cabin near the foot of Mica Mountain, which, after review, may represent a high strangeness window area.

"I lived up there for eight years, in a cabin with no running water," she said. "I had a very modern job, but my life was very simple away from work. I loved it out there."

"When I moved out there I had a lot of issues; I had a lot of experiences that I would not have thought would happen before," she continued. "But whenever they’d happen to me there, I always tried to make them normal. Instead of wild flights of fancy, you see crazy things and you try to say ‘Oh, this is something that I know about.’"

The first such incident recounted involved a phantom bonfire seen from her property in the fall of 2007.

"I had a bit of a commute, and by the time I got home it was starting to get dark," she explained. "I had a loop that I liked to ride through the woods that had some nice jumps, and then I’d come up over a hill and I could look at my home, and also down at this cabin. So, I was up at the top of the hill, and I saw a fire burning down there—it was a big fire—not an out of control fire, but a bonfire. I heard chanting."

Although she had been to the cabin before in the daylight, she did not know the people who owned it well; they lived in town and rarely used the cabin.

Despite that, she thought the owners might have been responsible for the incident—at least until she visited the cabin to see for herself.

"It wasn’t people sitting around the fire talking, it really did sound like Native American chanting. But still, I told myself, you know, it’s the people who live there. I sat there for a while, and I listened, and then I headed home. I was like a quarter mile from home at that point. It was maybe a day or two later when I had a chance—I rode over there in daylight. And there was no fire pit, there was no burned ground, there was nothing," she said.

The witness never got the chance to ask them about it.

"I didn’t know them very well," she said. "I couldn’t really ask them."

The next incident she related was a sighting of strange lights over nearby Mica Mountain in the winter of 2009. She was approximately an eighth of a mile away from her previous sighting.

"We lived in a kind of a snowy area—we'd get four feet of snow. In fact, sometimes I’d have to shovel my windows we had so much snow...A snowy night can just be incredibly beautiful when the stars are out, and I was about ready to go to bed but I didn’t quite want to go to bed yet; so I went out and I had just fed the horses, and I leaned my arms over the horses back, you know, they’re warm and fuzzy and just a nice thing to stand next to in the cold, and I looked up at the mountain," she said. "I looked at the top of the mountain and saw these lights."

At first she thought they might be the headlights of several vehicles driving on top of the mountain, but she quickly realized that wasn't the case—the lights were above the mountain, and there was no cloud cover off of which any lights from the ground could reflect.

"I tried to tell myself ‘Well, maybe somebody’s driving around up there.’ Except these lights, they were above the mountain. They were not touching the mountain," she said.

There were, I don’t know, seven or eight of them. Quite a few. And they were just balls of white light. That’s what it looked like from where I was. I watched them and I thought ‘How would I describe what I’m seeing?’ They looked like they were playing. They would leapfrog over the top of each other. They would shoot off at just incredible speeds. And then they would just stop. Just like in an instant.
As if that wasn’t enough, I thought ‘I’ve got to figure out what these are. I just have to know.’ I jumped in my truck in my pajamas and a coat, and headed for the mountain. The mountain was snowed in at that point, but I got as close to it on county roads as I could get. But the weird thing was, as soon as I went out my driveway, I couldn’t see them anymore, even though I still had a clear view of the mountain. And I headed east, and then north towards the mountain, and took the county road and headed back west and just made a loop and came back. And as soon as I drove back down my driveway I could see them again. I thought, ‘This is too weird.’ I watched them for a little while, and then it kind of weirded me out that they disappeared when I got off of my property, and I went to bed.

The lights, she said, were "many times bigger than a star. Relative to the mountain, and this may not be very accurate, but my best guess is that they were like the size of a tree on the mountain; so, 20 feet? They were big."

The sighting was impactful enough that she was certain it must have made the news, but the next day nobody else seemed to have seen it.

"I really, sincerely thought it would be on the news. And there was nothing. Probably, I was the only one who saw it or could see it," she said.

The final sighting from the property that she shared was of an unknown hairy hominid. This sighting took place in the summer of 2010.

"I was out on my property in the daylight during summertime, and I saw something crossing the pasture just to the east of us. I thought, ‘That’s a calf moose, that’s a young moose.’ Because it was so awkward looking, and it was about the size of a yearling moose," she said.

But she quickly realized that what she was looking at was no moose.

"It was walking on two legs and [was] definitely not a moose," she said. "It was much larger [in both height and weight] than a human, and moved in a slightly hunched over way. Other than that, it had a dark coat; I can't say much about the length of the coat [because I was too far away]. There was both an awkwardness and a power about it."

She was struck both by how quickly the creature noticed her and how it seemed to so suddenly disappear.

"And as soon as I saw it, it looked right at me," she said. “It was like a quarter of a mile away, and I wasn’t making any noise. It was too fast, it just noticed me too fast. It felt psychic. Once again, I became kind of obsessed, and I chased after it. I’m not a fast runner, but I ran as hard as I could...it went through a small bunch of cows in a small pasture that’s not used much, and it just wasn’t there. I thought ‘It must have moved very quickly and very silently, so it didn’t disturb the cows. How did it get away so quick?’ Before that moment I would have said, Bigfoot is probably not true. But then I read about it and the thing that most resonated with me was Bigfoot as an interdimensional being. Because of the way it was so quickly aware of that I had seen it. And how, almost magically, it had seemed to disappear."

Investigator Tobias Wayland asked the witness if she was familiar with the idea of sighting ‘window areas’, and if she thought that her cabin might have been in one.

"That’s a new angle. I hadn’t thought of that before," she said. "That mountain, it’s just full of mica. In some of my reading about ghost lights, they do mention ley lines and mica. And so, I always thought that maybe it’s the mountain."

Whatever the case may be, living in the area seemed to have an effect on the witness. She mentioned that a year after her sighting of the lights over Mica Mountain, she had seen something similar in the springtime while visiting her brother.

"I was at my brother’s house, 400 miles from there, and I was out in his horse pasture talking to his horses, and this thing flew overhead," she said. "It’s near an air force base—Mountain Home Air Force Base—and I thought ‘Oh, this must be a bunch of jets in formation.’ But relative to one another, they weren’t moving at all. So, I thought this must be solid. If it’s solid, it’s not that far off the ground, maybe three telephone poles—100 to 200 feet up at the most—completely soundless, and it was in a V formation."

"I have no clue what I saw," she added. "I can only speculate."

“The question that brings up to me, I was living on that property at the time I visited my brother and saw the unidentified object. Was that the land influencing me?" she asked. "Prior to living there, I had never heard of or seen or believed in any of this stuff. Since I’ve left, I’ve never seen anything unexplained again.”

While the things experienced by her while living at the cabin may have left her with more questions than answers, the witness felt that the experiences were overall positive.

"I loved it out there, and weird things happened, and I never felt unsafe," she said. "But they certainly changed my worldview."

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