Saturday's STRANGE?

We need more strange stories! Send yers now! Before it's too late!!!

oddtodd7@hotmail.com

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I love your site!  I feel fortunate to contribute something to help keep
other unemployed bums occupied for a few moments :)  This story starts off
slowly, but I don't know how else to tell it and get the full freakout
value, so here it goes...

When my husband and I had just graduated from college, we pursued our dream
of moving to "The Big City," which for us was, ahem, Portland, OR.  While
looking for housing to get us out of our friend's living rooms, we went to
see a place in the crunchy granola neighborhood of SE Portland.  The place
seemed perfect: low rent, perfect neighborhood, huge rooms and common areas,
even tasteful, Asian style decorations.  The owner, however, was a different
story.   He sounded normal on the phone, even looked like your typical
ponytail-and-Birkies Portlander, but this guy did not seem to be, shall we
say, upsettingly stable.   He greeted us, for example, by standing stock
still in the doorway and gaping at me like I was Bin Laden's vengeful
proctologist, after which he visibly collected himself  and finished the
entire house tour without ever looking at or speaking to me again.

We were shocked when he called later that day, acted like everything had
gone swimmingly, and said he thought we'd fit in well with him and the other
roomies! He then invited us to a "gathering" he was having.  Nigel and I
immediately thought he was some kind of fascinating urban cult member, so we
said yes out of curiosity--with no intention of ever moving in.  We made
some buttermilk (no special additives-that becomes important later) brownies
for the potluck and caught the bus out to his house again.

At first glance, the so-called gathering was bizzarre as we could have
hoped.  Everyone on the porch was discussing his or her experience following
the raw foods diet to achieve health and spiritual wholeness.  A group
wearing what looked like health spa robes was working on Tai Chi in the
living room.  Various individuals were walking solemnly around the whole
first floor with bunches of burning juniper, cleansing auras and sharing a
little photo book and what appeared to be a guest register with interested
parties.  There was even a guy offering to diagnose people's health problems
through irradology (sp?), or the study of the irises.  Definitely space
cadet land.

After a while we began to notice disturbing details.  Small groups of
people, for example, would disappear into the recesses of the house, then
reappear looking like they had been crying.  Some people drifted around not
even speaking to anyone, and, completely out of the blue, embraced and
patted others in the party as if they were giving emotional support.
Something was going on, but before we could figure it out, the raw-foods
people shocked us by coming inside to the kitchen, then attacking the
brownie with forks!  Standing around without plates, they ate and told each
other how many months or years it had been since they last tasted processed
food.  People said things about this being "the time" to do crazy things
like this, and before I could wonder about it I saw them passing around
enzyme pills they had brought to help them digest the food.  Had they come
in here expecting to go crazy?  What the hell?

Here's what made me decide I had seen enough:  Not only did this seem to be
some kind of suicide club or group therapy for depressive vegans, but people
were looking at me.  Not just glancing to see who had come in, but staring
hard.  Some even walked over talked to me without seeming to hear what I had
said, and then moved away to point me out to others.  Keep in mind that I'm
quite ordinary-looking, so this started setting off alarm bells of a
Rosemary's Baby nature.  I grabbed my husband, said I was getting out of
there before they tried to sacrifice me or something.  Before we could get
out the door, the owner, who had obviously been crying, stopped us and asked
why we were leaving.  Still heading for the door, I explained what had to
already have been obvious to him--this was not a potluck but some kind of
observance in which I apparently played a role I was not intent on pursuing.
Again he seemed not to hear what I had said, actually reached out and
touched my hair, then burst into tears, and walked off.

As Nigel and I turned to run the hell out of there, a reasonably
sane-looking woman came up to us and said that she was the owner's sister
from Idaho.  I'm glad we stayed to hear her explanation, though her answer
made things even more fricking weird than they began.  It turned out that I
was the spitting image of the owner's newly deceased girlfriend at my age.
This whole party was a kind of wake for her, and the books they were passing
around contained locks of her hair, which turned out to be identical to
mine.  There were also pictures of her and places to write messages for her
to receive in the afterlife after they were burned in the morning and
scattered in the wind.

Of course these people couldn't have chalked it up to an uncanny resemblance
and left me alone!  They believed that part of her soul lived on in me;
hence the invitations, staring, touching, etc.  I have to admit that, once I
worked up the courage to look at her picture, the woman looked somewhat like
me even given the age difference, and our hair color and texture (keep in
mind that I saw an actual cutting of said hair) was identical to mine.
Apparently this poor woman had decided to pursue natural healing to combat
her raging bone cancer and died disillusioned, causing many of these people
to doubt their entire belief systems.  To this day I can't believe this
happened to me, and I hope it never does again.

Am I crazy or is that an extremely weird situation?

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