Ah! Here's the thread I've been waiting for! Twenty-five years ago I started a fantasy trilogy with several fortean themes . . . but the more I wrote the fewer fortean references I had (I love to mention "real" fortean events in stories). And when I finished -- it just sort of sat there. Never seemed to have the time or patience to revise it.
Then, circa 1996, I stumbled onto something called the "Dulce Base," a supposed secret installation beneath Dulce, NM. A supposed map of the place showed tunnels and sub-bases all across the USA, including Southeastern Oklahoma and my hometown Tulsa. "Huh," I said, "that looks amazingly like the secret base from my story" (hey, you write what you know, and I knew eastern OK). Then the Dogman/Dog-Headed Men phenomenon revved up (there are werewolf-type critters in my story, but in 1994 all I found in "real life" were the Bray Road Beast of Wisconsin and a couple other obscurities). That also matched my trilogy perfectly.
And it kept happening. Other things that fit my book uncannily have been the Skinwalker Ranch, Jenny Randles' "Time Storms," almost everything about the Missing 411 series by David Paulides, "hooded"/monk-like/ Grim Reaper-ish entities, the Search and Rescue/Stairs in the woods stories from Reddit (admitted to be fiction now), and various minor things. Made me think it was time to dig out the endless trilogy and review it again.
What does this have to do with creepy buses? Well, I've revised my way up to the last hundred or so pages, and this happens:
As the phone in Tahlequah rang, a schoolbus edged off the highway onto the gravel lot in front of the brownstone hulk. The bus had been painted green, with huge yellow and white flower designs on the sides.
Looks like something hippies drove in the ‘sixties, I thought. A hippy Happy Bus.
The protagonists call them Hippy Buses, rolling out to collect unsuspecting children, not Creepy Buses, but that's close enough for me. It's -- a Sign! Come on, Buses! Don't disappoint me! It's time to bring this puppy to a close!
(Waits to hear new weird bus stories . . .)
oet: