The Best Thing Online This Week Is A Crowdsourced Map Of Paranormal
Seattle, on its surface, is not a very strange city. To the south you've got Portland, straining to keep itself weird. To the north you've got Vancouver, BC, which is weird because, well, Canada — must they all be obsessed with Tim Hortons? To the west out on the Olympic Peninsula you've got small towns including Forks, picked as the setting for "Twilight," and to the east you've got North Bend, the eerie place where "Twin Peaks" was filmed. Seattle is ringed by weirdness, but the oddest thing you're likely to see inside the city are Amazon's new super-luxe offices.
If, say, you do see something spooky — like a an IRL zombie you initially mistook for an Amazon employee — you should tell the people of Liminal Seattle all about it.
Founded by Seattleites Garrett Kelly (@boontdustie) and Jeremy Puma, the Liminal Seattle map is the region's new go-to tool for tracking "fairies, ghosts, bigfoot, time travelers, extraterrestrials, ultraterrestrials, crow conferences, sentient lawn computers, lanyard'd ogres, broccoli wizards, etc." It extends beyond the Seattle city limits a bit — my hometown of Kirkland, WA has a "Strange Animals" pin on it about some recent bear sightings (I don't remember ever hearing about bears roaming around our town, so I think that counts).
The project seems fairly tongue-in-cheek, but I don't doubt that several of the stories marked on the map are real and genuinely inexplicable to the people who submitted them. Take, for instance, the story of the Ghost Cat near Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, submitted by a user named Dakota:
This is a cross between ghost and animal…a ghost animal actually. My brother and I saw this ghost cat on multiple occasions, together and separately when we lived in that neighborhood in the late 80's/early 90's. It was the shape of a cat and moved as a live cat, but made of oil slick. Like, swirly rainbow-y car oil in a puddle, but in the shape of a cat. It came into our basement once but usually we saw it out in the street on 8th Ave NE. We called it, Ghost Cat, as you do.
Too much effort to be made up for the sake of trolling this map, right? Compare that to my favorite Time Traveler sighting a few blocks away on the map:
Encounter with humanoid with what appeared to be snot running down his face/beard. When questioned, said it was actually "time travel residue"
Real story or fake (and, for that matter, real time traveler or fake), without Liminial Seattle I wouldn't have this great little gag to cherish. With some more attention and support, Liminal Seattle could rank amongst "Night Vale" and the SCP Foundation as one of the best spooky corners of the internet. Here's hoping that Seattleites continue to chart their eerie experiences for everyone's benefit — and that the HELL MOUTH in South Lake Union doesn't consume the entire Puget Sound.
