Austin Popper
Emperor of Antarctica
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2017
- Messages
- 1,504
- Location
- Colorado, where the gold is still elusive
This happened in the spring of ’83, or maybe it was ’82. It is by far the most Fortean thing I’ve ever experienced. I’ve had many other odd experiences, but nothing like this.
It was a weekend, and I had gone into Topeka, Kansas for some shopping and goofing off. I lived in a small town about half an hour away, so trips to T-town were common. I was alone on this trip, which was nothing unusual. I’d gone to the White Lakes Mall in the south part of town. No doubt I spent most of my time there in the Town Crier, an excellent little book store where I had found many wonderful things over the years. Around noon I decided to cross the street and have lunch at the Village Inn.
It was a glorious spring day, sunny and warm but the hot weather was still a few weeks away. After lunch, I decided to do some looking around in an area I wasn’t too familiar with. I thought I’d take the long way home. I didn’t know what the area to the south and west was like, that is the part of town inside the beltway road of Interstate 470. I had relatives in the area, and had actually worked in Topeka a few years prior, but that had been close to downtown, several miles to the north. I set off down a side street into a nice looking residential area.
There were quite a few people out, kids playing and adults mowing lawns. Everything was green and lush with flowers blooming here and there. I headed west, then south, winding around in a pretty large subdivision full of well kept but modest newer homes. Soon I came to a short but fairly steep hill that led down to an intersection with a stop sign. I found myself at a fairly wide street running north and south. To my left there was an old business district, obviously the old downtown of a small place that had been swallowed up by the city of Topeka. Such things are quite common, but this one was entirely new to me. I would have expected, given the economic times and the nature of places like that, to find a funky old thrift store and maybe a pawn shop in there, but this was not like that at all. I decided to turn left and have a look.
By far the biggest business in this block-long downtown was a hardware store. It took up a fair bit of the block on the west side. The façade was golden brown brick or something, but pretty plain. There were large plate glass windows with red lettering spelling out the name of the store. This was painted on the glass by a talented sign painter. It read “Surname Hardware” with the surname forever lost to my memory. It could have been Simmons or Peters or Benson, I was never able to retrieve it. The place was clean and bright and busy. There was a tidy row of lawnmowers out front on the sidewalk, maybe a few bikes too. Other businesses also seemed to be doing well, and there were people walking around on the sidewalks. I drove right down the middle of all this thinking I’d have to check it out some time, especially since it was only a few minutes from the mall.
I continued on that road, which led south out of town. Soon I was in open country, passing pastures, crop fields and the occasional farmstead. Something like ten miles south of Topeka, I came to an intersection that looked like a well traveled crossroads, with a tidy white clapboard church on one corner. I saw a few houses in the vicinity, and probably a barn or two. There was a sign at the intersection that said “Somethingorother Corner”, again the first word was immediately forgotten. The sign was pretty substantial, and the whole area had an air of prosperity that was pretty much out of character for the area. I was a bit more familiar with that neck of the woods and I had worked with a few people from down there. They were good, hardworking people, but the land was not nearly as rich as the bottom land near the river, and one was much more likely to find tougher looking places out that way. This spot looked like what we’d call gentrification these days, except it really looked like it had never been run down or funky. There are of course lots of places like that in the Midwestern US, but it seemed a bit surprising to find such a community right there.
A few minutes later, I came to a road I knew of or maybe a sign pointing off in the direction of a town I had been to, so I turned off and headed home since I knew how to get there from that point. It took a day or two for it to sink in just how very odd my trip had been. At no point did anything seem to be other than perfectly ordinary, but as it turned out my route was quite impossible. I couldn’t remember what any of it was called, or even a street name. I couldn’t say to a co-worker, “Hey, I drove down through Clarkville [or whatever] the other day. Boy, that’s a nice area. Never knew anything about it. Just happened on to it.” Then it occurred to me that all I had to do was look in the phone book under Hardware, and check the addresses with a map. Duh! Should have thought of that sooner.
The phone book listed several hardware stores, of course, but I had been in all but one and I knew where it was. That was a few miles north of my starting point and in a very different environment. Definitely not the store in question. The more I thought about my weird little trip, the more problems became apparent. For starters, there was no such road heading south out of that vicinity that could possibly take one into the countryside. I know I was not on Burlingame Road, to the west of my route that day. I’d been on it and it was nothing like the road I was on. To the east is Topeka Boulevard, a major thoroughfare that was at that time actually US-75, a busy highway. My non-existent road would have taken me past the old Chief Dive-In Theater, which had only recently closed. There is a Super Sprawl Mart there now, but at the time the screen would have still been standing and I’d have to have seen that. Likewise, the big potato chip factory a bit farther south would be hard to miss. Strangest of all, I had no recollection of passing over or under I-470, a road I had driven many times.
Of course it did not take me long to try to retrace my route. I was probably back down there the next weekend, I don’t recall. There is no little hill with a stop sign at the bottom, no vestigial downtown with a hardware store and various other shops, no quiet two lane asphalt road heading down through the industrial parks and highway interchanges in the area. Over the years, I would sometimes take friends over into the residential area, and we’d try to figure out where I left normal reality that day. At the time of the event, there was no odd atmosphere, no discontinuity, no Oz Factor. I was in my twenties, it was midday, and I was alert. There was nothing strange about the cars in the old downtown, I didn’t notice any odd license plates, the people I saw around the shops all looked like people you’d see in Topeka in the early 80s. We never found a hint of any of it. You leave the Village Inn and zigzag around to the west and south, you very soon (within a minute or two) come to either Burlingame Road or 37th Street. Both of those were familiar to me at the time. Both were and still are quite busy streets.
I did make a trip or two south in search of Somethingorother Corner, and eventually found a fairly similar orientation of old church, intersection, and a house or two but the buildings looked disused, there were weeds about, and it wasn’t really in the right area anyway.
None of this bothered me. I thought it was kind of cool. The friends I shared it with knew me well enough to know I hadn’t made it up, and they thought it was interesting. The big reason it didn’t bother me was I had by then read quite a few of Jane Roberts’ books, mostly the Seth Books. I was very intrigued with what he called probable realities. The concepts he described came into our mainstream culture a couple of decades later as alternate dimensions, parallel universes, and so on. According to Seth (and some others) we weave in and out of various probable realities all the time, but it’s almost always so seamless we have no clue we are doing it. This is good and even very necessary, because life is chaotic enough these days without shopping districts and roads popping in and out of our domains. It’s interesting that I set out that afternoon, albeit pretty much on a whim, to explore a part of town I didn’t know much about. A trivial mystery turned into a much more interesting one.
I’m also kind of a map nut. On the theory that I had briefly visited a slightly different version of Topeka, I looked for signs of a long forgotten town in the location of the downtown area I drove through. In, say, the 1880s, it would have been about three miles from Topeka, which would make sense. To this day I don’t pass up an opportunity to take a close look at an old map of the area, but even with the large number of tiny settlements that appear on old maps, I’ve not found a candidate. My best reckoning puts the phantom townsite somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the old Chief Drive-In, or maybe “under” the mass of highways and ramps just to the south of that. I’ve looked at old atlases, old section maps, history books, all sorts of road maps and old railroad maps for clues, and I’ve found many interesting things, but nothing that seems to fit with my trip that day.
I lived in Topeka a couple of times in the years since my little adventure, and for a few years actually lived within a mile or so of the Chief. Never had another similar experience and never found any road, building or location that seemed at all related to that trip.
If I had seen some people with pointy ears, or heard them speaking some strange language, I would have paid more attention or even taken a couple of pictures. I usually had that old counterpart to the modern crappy phone camera, an Instamatic in the glove box. Too bad I didn’t stop and buy a pocket knife or better yet, a local map! I’d love to have a receipt from the interdimensional hardware store.
It was a weekend, and I had gone into Topeka, Kansas for some shopping and goofing off. I lived in a small town about half an hour away, so trips to T-town were common. I was alone on this trip, which was nothing unusual. I’d gone to the White Lakes Mall in the south part of town. No doubt I spent most of my time there in the Town Crier, an excellent little book store where I had found many wonderful things over the years. Around noon I decided to cross the street and have lunch at the Village Inn.
It was a glorious spring day, sunny and warm but the hot weather was still a few weeks away. After lunch, I decided to do some looking around in an area I wasn’t too familiar with. I thought I’d take the long way home. I didn’t know what the area to the south and west was like, that is the part of town inside the beltway road of Interstate 470. I had relatives in the area, and had actually worked in Topeka a few years prior, but that had been close to downtown, several miles to the north. I set off down a side street into a nice looking residential area.
There were quite a few people out, kids playing and adults mowing lawns. Everything was green and lush with flowers blooming here and there. I headed west, then south, winding around in a pretty large subdivision full of well kept but modest newer homes. Soon I came to a short but fairly steep hill that led down to an intersection with a stop sign. I found myself at a fairly wide street running north and south. To my left there was an old business district, obviously the old downtown of a small place that had been swallowed up by the city of Topeka. Such things are quite common, but this one was entirely new to me. I would have expected, given the economic times and the nature of places like that, to find a funky old thrift store and maybe a pawn shop in there, but this was not like that at all. I decided to turn left and have a look.
By far the biggest business in this block-long downtown was a hardware store. It took up a fair bit of the block on the west side. The façade was golden brown brick or something, but pretty plain. There were large plate glass windows with red lettering spelling out the name of the store. This was painted on the glass by a talented sign painter. It read “Surname Hardware” with the surname forever lost to my memory. It could have been Simmons or Peters or Benson, I was never able to retrieve it. The place was clean and bright and busy. There was a tidy row of lawnmowers out front on the sidewalk, maybe a few bikes too. Other businesses also seemed to be doing well, and there were people walking around on the sidewalks. I drove right down the middle of all this thinking I’d have to check it out some time, especially since it was only a few minutes from the mall.
I continued on that road, which led south out of town. Soon I was in open country, passing pastures, crop fields and the occasional farmstead. Something like ten miles south of Topeka, I came to an intersection that looked like a well traveled crossroads, with a tidy white clapboard church on one corner. I saw a few houses in the vicinity, and probably a barn or two. There was a sign at the intersection that said “Somethingorother Corner”, again the first word was immediately forgotten. The sign was pretty substantial, and the whole area had an air of prosperity that was pretty much out of character for the area. I was a bit more familiar with that neck of the woods and I had worked with a few people from down there. They were good, hardworking people, but the land was not nearly as rich as the bottom land near the river, and one was much more likely to find tougher looking places out that way. This spot looked like what we’d call gentrification these days, except it really looked like it had never been run down or funky. There are of course lots of places like that in the Midwestern US, but it seemed a bit surprising to find such a community right there.
A few minutes later, I came to a road I knew of or maybe a sign pointing off in the direction of a town I had been to, so I turned off and headed home since I knew how to get there from that point. It took a day or two for it to sink in just how very odd my trip had been. At no point did anything seem to be other than perfectly ordinary, but as it turned out my route was quite impossible. I couldn’t remember what any of it was called, or even a street name. I couldn’t say to a co-worker, “Hey, I drove down through Clarkville [or whatever] the other day. Boy, that’s a nice area. Never knew anything about it. Just happened on to it.” Then it occurred to me that all I had to do was look in the phone book under Hardware, and check the addresses with a map. Duh! Should have thought of that sooner.
The phone book listed several hardware stores, of course, but I had been in all but one and I knew where it was. That was a few miles north of my starting point and in a very different environment. Definitely not the store in question. The more I thought about my weird little trip, the more problems became apparent. For starters, there was no such road heading south out of that vicinity that could possibly take one into the countryside. I know I was not on Burlingame Road, to the west of my route that day. I’d been on it and it was nothing like the road I was on. To the east is Topeka Boulevard, a major thoroughfare that was at that time actually US-75, a busy highway. My non-existent road would have taken me past the old Chief Dive-In Theater, which had only recently closed. There is a Super Sprawl Mart there now, but at the time the screen would have still been standing and I’d have to have seen that. Likewise, the big potato chip factory a bit farther south would be hard to miss. Strangest of all, I had no recollection of passing over or under I-470, a road I had driven many times.
Of course it did not take me long to try to retrace my route. I was probably back down there the next weekend, I don’t recall. There is no little hill with a stop sign at the bottom, no vestigial downtown with a hardware store and various other shops, no quiet two lane asphalt road heading down through the industrial parks and highway interchanges in the area. Over the years, I would sometimes take friends over into the residential area, and we’d try to figure out where I left normal reality that day. At the time of the event, there was no odd atmosphere, no discontinuity, no Oz Factor. I was in my twenties, it was midday, and I was alert. There was nothing strange about the cars in the old downtown, I didn’t notice any odd license plates, the people I saw around the shops all looked like people you’d see in Topeka in the early 80s. We never found a hint of any of it. You leave the Village Inn and zigzag around to the west and south, you very soon (within a minute or two) come to either Burlingame Road or 37th Street. Both of those were familiar to me at the time. Both were and still are quite busy streets.
I did make a trip or two south in search of Somethingorother Corner, and eventually found a fairly similar orientation of old church, intersection, and a house or two but the buildings looked disused, there were weeds about, and it wasn’t really in the right area anyway.
None of this bothered me. I thought it was kind of cool. The friends I shared it with knew me well enough to know I hadn’t made it up, and they thought it was interesting. The big reason it didn’t bother me was I had by then read quite a few of Jane Roberts’ books, mostly the Seth Books. I was very intrigued with what he called probable realities. The concepts he described came into our mainstream culture a couple of decades later as alternate dimensions, parallel universes, and so on. According to Seth (and some others) we weave in and out of various probable realities all the time, but it’s almost always so seamless we have no clue we are doing it. This is good and even very necessary, because life is chaotic enough these days without shopping districts and roads popping in and out of our domains. It’s interesting that I set out that afternoon, albeit pretty much on a whim, to explore a part of town I didn’t know much about. A trivial mystery turned into a much more interesting one.
I’m also kind of a map nut. On the theory that I had briefly visited a slightly different version of Topeka, I looked for signs of a long forgotten town in the location of the downtown area I drove through. In, say, the 1880s, it would have been about three miles from Topeka, which would make sense. To this day I don’t pass up an opportunity to take a close look at an old map of the area, but even with the large number of tiny settlements that appear on old maps, I’ve not found a candidate. My best reckoning puts the phantom townsite somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the old Chief Drive-In, or maybe “under” the mass of highways and ramps just to the south of that. I’ve looked at old atlases, old section maps, history books, all sorts of road maps and old railroad maps for clues, and I’ve found many interesting things, but nothing that seems to fit with my trip that day.
I lived in Topeka a couple of times in the years since my little adventure, and for a few years actually lived within a mile or so of the Chief. Never had another similar experience and never found any road, building or location that seemed at all related to that trip.
If I had seen some people with pointy ears, or heard them speaking some strange language, I would have paid more attention or even taken a couple of pictures. I usually had that old counterpart to the modern crappy phone camera, an Instamatic in the glove box. Too bad I didn’t stop and buy a pocket knife or better yet, a local map! I’d love to have a receipt from the interdimensional hardware store.