Field notes, Friday morning
My Blind Owl Moment
If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know what I’m referring to when I say The Blind Owl, it’s a novel by the Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat, first published in 1937. It has a reputation. It was banned or restricted in Iran for a long time, and for decades there’s been a story going around that it pushed readers to take their own lives. I honestly don’t know how much of that is true and how much is legend, but it didn’t help that Hedayat himself died by suicide in Paris in 1951. The book is narrated by a lonely man who paints the same scene over and over on pen cases: an old man sitting under a cypress tree and a girl handing him a flower. Then that girl actually shows up at his door, dies in his room, and things only get darker from there. He gets rid of her body with the help of a creepy old hearse driver who won’t stop laughing, there’s opium, a house full of rot, and by the end you’re not even sure which parts were real.
A friend of mine passed away roughly five or six years ago, and the last time I visited her grave was back then. Another friend of mine didn’t make it to her funeral and never visited her grave, and he’d been nagging me for a while, saying we should go and see her. So we finally decided to do it and visit the cemetery to find her grave.
All of this happened on October 28, and our first couple of attempts were hectic. We went to the church and couldn’t even find the cemetery. We were about to give up when we stopped a stranger and asked him how to get there. He pointed us back the way we came, down a kind of shady alley. When we got there, we found a middle-aged lady sitting a short distance from the cemetery. We asked her where it was, and she said, “Through that door.”
We went through the door and started looking around. There was a man there who I think was the caretaker. As we stood there, a huge whiff of stench hit us. It looked like one of the graves had been partially dug out, I’m assuming by crows because I don’t think there are other animals around there, but you never know. It smelled like rotten meat and it reeked so badly that we couldn’t stand there, so we went down the steps.
The caretaker turned around, passed by us, and asked, “What are you guys looking for?” We told him we were looking for the grave of a friend who passed away about five years ago. He asked for her name, and when we told him, he said it would be deep down there, and that there was so much moss and grass grown over everything that he didn’t think we’d find it. Then he said, “I’m going to lock the door. There’s another way down there, so if you guys want to leave, use that road.” I turned around and saw a path going out, so I thought okay, we can use that.
But I was feeling icky about the whole thing. I don’t like graveyards. So I asked my friend if we should just bounce. He said no, he was going to look for it, and I said okay, if you’re going to look for it, go ahead. The caretaker locked the door on us and left.
So I’m there waiting. I’m wearing shorts, so I can’t really do anything. My friend goes deep into the graves, stepping on a lot of headstones, searching and looking. One thing after another, he couldn’t find her. He couldn’t go any deeper either, because we didn’t know what was beyond that point, it was covered in grass, and it was very steep downhill. So he came back, and I asked him, “You satisfied?” He said, “Yeah, I’m satisfied.”
We took the road we saw earlier and started walking and talking, and then we reached a dead end. I thought, okay, this is funny, why is this a dead end? There should be a road here. So we figured we’d just go back to the main door we came in through. We went back and looked at it, and it was locked. I mean, we definitely heard him say he was going to lock it, but I thought he was just going to close it, not actually lock it and leave us.
We thought maybe there was another way, so we went looking and found multiple doors. Most of them were locked. One of them made no sense to me at all: the door was locked, but beyond it was just a wall. There was nowhere to go. I still don’t know why they put it there.
Then we looked down the steep slope and saw houses at the bottom, and we thought maybe we’d just have to hop across the tombstones to reach them. We started going downhill, jumping down, and at some point we hit another dead end. If we kept going down and there was no way out, there’d be no way to get back up because it was so steep. So we climbed back up.
That’s when we noticed a tree by the door. We figured we could climb it and jump over the wall. Somewhere through all of this, I kept seeing this ghost-like thing running around, which turned out to be a cat. Thank God I wasn’t hallucinating, because I really thought I was tweaking.
I was wearing very uncomfortable slippers, and he’s taller than me, so we decided I’d go first. Once I reached the top of the tree, I saw there was barbed wire on top of the wall, which made it almost impossible to jump. And even if we did jump, we’d land on flat ground with nothing to slow our momentum, so we’d be breaking an ankle or a leg. So I’m sitting there with half my leg over the wall and half of it on our side, thinking that if I jump, my clothes are getting torn and my legs are getting hurt. I told him, “One last time before we jump and risk it all, we’ve got to look for another way out.” He said, “Bro, that’s so steep.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s exactly how steep it is, bro.”
So we climbed down. I turned around, and there was this kid behind us, just staring off at the graves. I had a lot of questions, but mainly, how the hell did this kid get in? Is there another way? Did he float? Did he spawn? I was getting this eerie feeling, but none of that really mattered, because my adrenaline was hitting. We’d tried every way out and we were about to be stuck there. If I’d stayed a little longer, I was going to start panicking.
The whole time, my friend was in this completely non-reactive state, and I didn’t even notice it until a while later. That’s when I started thinking, am I the only one seeing this kid? What is happening?
I asked the kid, “How did you get in? Show us the way out.” He just turned around and smiled. Then he asked, “How did you guys get in?” We told him we came in through the door and now it was locked. He smiled again, and I said, “Okay, just show us the other way out.” He said, “Okay, I’m going to do this one time for you guys, because I have the key.” One time? Trust me, we were not doing this a second time. He opened the door with the key, we got out, he closed it behind us, and then he started running away. That was so messed up and eerie.
And then there was the lady from the beginning. While we were up the tree trying to jump, she’d seen us and called out that there was a road down there we could take. We couldn’t find any road, so we just kept contemplating. On our way out, we saw her again, and she was laughing. She said, “I bet you guys were scared, locked in there,” and again, “There’s a road there.” And I’m like, yeah, okay, sure there is. We didn’t know that. I just wanted to get out of there.
That was a creepy experience, and it’s one I never want to have again. It still feels weird.
I only vaguely remember this one, but I’ve had another weird experience like this. I was in grade 7 or 8, I don’t remember exactly, and a friend and I went over to another friend’s house. It was kind of rainy and we had winter classes, and they said there’s a river down there, so why don’t we go swim and explore a bit. We said okay, let’s do it.
So we head out. We’re in the mountains, we’re in the forest, it’s foggy, and we reach a point where it gets so steep that I was scared to go down. Both of my friends were like, “Why are you scared? Just come down.” And I said no, what if I fall? They said I wasn’t going to fall, and I told them I’d just wait for them there. That’s when they told me the spot I was standing in was cursed by some old lady, and if I stayed there too long, something bad would happen to me. I said that wasn’t going to scare me, and they went down.
I didn’t want to believe what they said, but I kept hearing noises. It’s a forest, so of course you’re going to hear noises, there are animals and all kinds of things, but I still got so scared that I started doing push-ups in the middle of the forest. Mind you, I’m still wearing my school uniform. I was just trying to distract myself, because your mind is a powerful imagination device and it can make you see and hear all kinds of weird stuff.
Then a group of guys showed up. I’d guess they were a mix of ages, somewhere between 20 and 30-something, and most of them were jacked. They had a bunch of alcohol, a bunch of drugs, some women with them, and two dogs. They came up the hill and stopped a bit below the spot where I was.
I could hear their noise and their laughter, but I was scared to come out and face them, because they were huge. So I told myself, okay, this is a cursed place and now you’ve got these weirdos too, which is every variable you need for everything to go wrong. I decided I just had to go down and not worry about anything else.
I got up and started walking down, and they went silent. One of the guys noticed me and said, “Hey, what are you doing? Where are you going?” I said, “Home.” He asked what I was doing up there and whether I was doing drugs. I said, “Drugs? What kind of drugs? No, I just came from school.” They looked at each other and said, “When did they start building schools by the river?” and started laughing. I was shaking.
Since it was downhill, I had to pass right by them. One of the guys said, “Come over, we’re chill, talk to us,” and then asked, “Where are you from, though?” I said, “From down there.” He asked, “Down where?” And I don’t even know why I said this, but I told him, “Down where your mama’s at.” He just said, “Go get it,” and those two dogs started chasing the hell out of me.
I ran down zigzagging through the trees, jumping across whatever was in my way. There were a lot of pickup trucks parked there, because a lot of people go up there to drink, smoke, and have fun, and I was swerving between them with the dogs right behind me. I just kept running and running, and at some point I was muddy all the way up to my knees. I was running for my life, and I finally made it back to my friend’s house.
Long story short, when I got there, my friend’s dad asked what happened. I was panicking and told him there were some guys in the forest. He went out, found them, caught them, and brought them back. Later my friend asked me, “You saw that group of guys? They had guns and stuff.” And I was like, bro, I just got saved.
That was wild too. I have a lot of wild experiences like these, but I guess these two are enough for now.