SAN DIEGO: Snapshot Strangeness Story #3

Things Are Not What They Seem, Or So It Seems, Or At Least So I Keep Saying

Arial photograph of downtown San Diego, courtesy of Naval Base Coronado, and hold that thought!

“Sometimes I wonder where our lives go / And question who we used to be / Abandoned houses with the lights on / Late at night I call your name / I can't sleep ‘cause what if I dream / Of going back to San Diego / Can’t go back to San Diego…” — Blink 182

“Well it was out in California / By the San Diego sea / That was when I was taken in / And it left its mark on me…” Tom Petty, “Louisiana Rain”

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Hello everybody, new and old, fresh and veteran, allies and lurkers and plagiarist spies. I’ve been wavering about whether to publish this or not, second-guessing myself as my subscriber/follower count has quadrupled since I started writing about all the strange and seemingly sinister stuff going on with the so-called “royal” family.

For the first time ever, I wondered whether it would appeal to “my audience,” whether it might alienate or bore some of my new subscribers/followers — I hate the word “follower,” I don’t want to be a leader of men nor a religious figure, I want you to think and act for yourself: “To thine own self be true” — who dig my de-occulting, but only up to a certain point, one rooted in our material world.

Except I don’t think everybody should be rooted in the material world. I think everybody should keep one foot in this one and one in the…next. The spiritual world, the world of beings invisible to our eyes but not our souls. “The Mystery,” the duality of human experience, as depicted by Mark Booth in his tour-de-force book The Sacred History. It explains how through most of humanity the understanding of our existence was that “We live at the intersection of two planes, a mental plane and a physical plane,” the mind and the body. The two were equally important, until very recently.

I highly recommend both of these paradigm-shifting books by Mark Booth (known in the E.U. under his pen name Jonathan Black). FWIW, I have a first edition of The Secret History of the World, which carries the subtitle As Laid Down By The Secret Societies; that got excised from later editions and the paperback. The first edition hardcover also features the 16th Century painting Portrait of Luca Pacioli, which is prominently displayed in Occult Auteur David Mamet’s excellent caper film Heist for some reason.

That intersectional body/soul understanding faded as the industrial revolution drove an increasingly materialistic worldview, which has only gathered pace as the technocracy (technocrazy?) revolution now moves to supplant physical industry. The Metaverse and Vision Pro and the W.E.F. all beckon us like a siren to live in an unreal virtual reality, where our covered eyes will create a fugazi life in a palatial mansion loaded with ornate furniture and artwork, while our physical surroundings are squalor and our planet is pillaged. “You will own nothing and be happy.” Plug in, turn on, drop out, surrender your consciousness, die. No thank you.

Mark Booth/Jonathan Black, and me too, want to return to the earlier age’s wisdom. The kind that knows there are living beings of some sort all around us, outside the limited spectrum of what our eyes can see. Booth puts out a call for “Writers who ask if there is a mystical dimension to our lives, if the world is shot through with meanings we did not put there, if we are engaged in interaction with unembodied intelligence, [and whether] great spiritual beings still intervene in the decisive way that they intervened in the lives of Moses and Joan of Arc.”

I say yes, yes they do. It can be a wonderful and glorious and awesome and intimidating and terrifying and sacred thing.

But what’s become precarious in our modern materialistic age is how the enemies of humanity seemingly know this better than the degeneratively transformed masses, the muggles, the sheep, “The Dead.” These enemies actively engage with the shadow side of this mystic force. They know a key facet if they are to wheedle their way to dark victory is to convince everyone else that there is no spiritual realm, there are no ethereal beings, God either doesn’t exist or doesn’t care about us if He does; and the sole path to self-actualization is through the pursuit of materialist acquisitions, ego gratification and the sensual pleasures of food, drink, sex, and, for some, torture and murder.

My concern — and this is only my opinion, I’ve never heard or even read anybody else posit this, so I could be totally wrong — is that these unfathomable and inscrutable spiritual beings want our attention. They want a relationship with us, and gravitate towards those who provide it through prayer, ritual, communion. The dark occultists will gather more and more power as they pay tribute to these shadow forces, while driving the majority of humanity into a spiritually untethered materialistic atheism or profoundly misguided watered-down self-centered lower-case satanism as useful idiots for the Upper Case ones.

Thus, I am sometimes moved to write stuff like what follows. I’ve bumped into things from this other world, or perhaps they’re bumping into me. Whispering so low it’s below a murmur, a voice I only hear in my soul, yet I hear it loud and clear-ish. I’m not sure how to best phrase what it’s telling me, perhaps it’s beyond language, but what follows should pretty much speak for itself. Thank you all, even the ones who stop reading here.

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I enjoyed most of my almost exactly 10 years in San Diego, from October 10, 2010 (10/10/10!) to January 19, 2021 (1/19/21). Really, I did. 

Until the last year that is, when the city went nuts like how most of the country went nuts and especially how all the hungrily authoritarian Blue States, like gaping Gavin Newsom’s California, went über-nuts during the Covid virus/vaccine psyop. But even before America’s Used-To-Be-Finest City lost its mojo and its mind and its way, I had my fair share of strangeness, most notably but not only via a few of my neighbors. 

Before I get to (some of) them, however, I’d like to mention how I’m pretty sure there is something very strange happening on the tied island of Coronado (Corona-do?), the mostly seemingly cozy resort town south of San Diego city proper, also known as the “The Crown City.” 

Coronado in Spanish means “crowned,” the masculine noun, so a crown fit for a King. Same way, incidentally, the Corona virus was called “Corona” because it means “Crown” in Latin: When placed under an electron microscope, the Coronavirus’s viral envelope looks crown-like because of the tiny bulbar projections caused by the virus’s spikes, which look like the points of a crown. 

Coronavirus under a microscope, top left. Artists’ depictions below left. Then there’s the “gravity drive” that folds space-time from Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1997 cult sci-fi horror film Event Horizon, which sends its doomed space travelers literally into Hell itself and also looks a lot like you-know-what. There’s a great deal more to say about that deeply unsettling and prescient film, but I already said it here.

I used to go to Coronado a lot, the beach there is arguably the best in San Diego County, but it’s a pain in the ass to drive around Coronado because of the one-way streets and bizarre layout of its residential section, which is grid-designed around a pyramid missing it’s capstone, or, perhaps, capped by a square, or a block, or a cube. Or maybe the entire island is considered the seemingly unfinished crown. Beats me.

What I do know for sure is that despite being known as a deluxe vacation spot, what Coronado, “The Crown City,” actually is, more than anything else, is home to Naval Base Coronado, the largest aerospace-industrial complex in the U.S. Navy, which takes up more than twice as much area on the tied island as residential/resort Coronado.

Perhaps you recall Naval Base Coronado being in the news some years back when Google maps revealed a building designed like a swastika on the property. A mistake and coincidence, the Navy assured the public, just like the darkly funny coincidence of how the architect who designed the building was named John Mock, as in “Mock the public.” Later, however, an Israeli investigative journalist named Avrahaum Segol discovered documentation revealing the building’s shape was acknowledged internally at the Navy as far back as the 1960s, but nobody particularly gave a damn until it was discovered. The backstory can be found here. 

A 1923 map of Coronado, with a 2019 residential map inset, below left. The capstone-less pyramid of the city’s design is almost as clearly defined as the swastika found on the nearby Naval base.

There were also a couple puzzling and outré murders/suicides on Coronado while I lived in San Diego. The weirdest and most unsettling was the July 2011 death of 32-year old Rebecca Zahau — girlfriend of a pharmaceutical industry billionaire Jonah Shacknai —who was found hanging naked and gagged, with her ankles tied and her hands bound behind her back, from a balcony inside the beautiful and historic beachfront Spreckles Mansion. An enigmatic message — “She saved him. Can you save her?” — was found scrawled in black on Ms. Zahau’s bedroom door. She died two days after her big pharma boyfriend’s 6-year-old son, who was in her care, took a fatal fall from the same second story staircase we were told she somehow hurled herself.

Despite being found naked, bound and gagged, the San Diego Sheriff’s Department declared Ms. Zahau’s death a suicide. The public did not agree, and her family later won a $5 million wrongful death suit against Jonah Shacknai's brother Adam, who was the only other person in the house at the time of her death. That civil suit judgement was appealed and later negotiated down to $600,000. To this day, Rebecca Zahau’s death remains to many an unsolved mystery; the subreddit devoted to her case was updated as recently as last month. 

Less than six months after Ms. Zahau’s death, before sunrise on New Year's Day, 2012, there was a sickening multiple murder-suicide on Coronado, when 25-year-old Navy pilot John Robert Reeves killed himself after murdering a fellow Navy pilot, the pilot’s sister and another man. The two dead Naval officers had been part of the elite fighter jet program popularized in Hollywood’s pair of Top Gun films. An investigation by the San Diego County Sheriff's Department did not find "a clear motive" for the shooting, according to a departmental press release. Witnesses of the quartet’s celebratory New Year’s night out stated John Robert Reeves showed no signs that he was upset before he murdered three people and offed himself.

Coronado, or the (King’s) "Crown City” also has a historic connection to the British royal family. The tied island’s legendary Hotel del Coronado is where Britain’s King Edward VIII (then the Prince of Wales) first met the woman he would abdicate the throne for, Wallis Simpson, in 1920. That’s right: The guy who would later give up the British Crown met the lady he would surrender it for on the isle of “Crown City.”

FWIW, then-Prince Edward was traveling at the time with Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was later discovered to have been a voracious pedophile, “a person of extremely low morals…a homosexual with a perversion for young boys,” according to FBI documents. I can’t help but add that Lord Mountbatten later became the mentor of both the U.K.’s current King Charles III and his brother Prince Andrew, the notorious client of dead pedophile pimp Jeffrey Epstein. Lord Mountbatten got blown up by the Irish Revolutionary Army in 1979 while boating with two teen boys, who also perished. 

Coronado has been the site of numerous alleged “alien abductions,” (PRO TIP: They’re inter-dimensional beings, not extraterrestrial ones), and multiple Navy pilot UFO encounters off the Southern California coast. All UFO incidents chronicled from the Naval base have been made by unnamed F/A-18 Hornet pilots, the same aircraft flown by the dead murder/suicide pilots from New Year’s Day 2012. No connection between the two events has been suggested, I’m just tossing it out there; you’re welcome to toss it back. 

But my instincts tell me there’s something weird going on at Coronado, if not all of San Diego for that matter. Which brings me to my neighborhood. 

I lived in North Park, which was voted the #7 Hipster Neighborhood in America when I moved there from downtown San Diego in 2013. I rented a 1933 Craftsman home with a quintet of cute little gazebos across the hedge on one side and an ugly white apartment building on the fenced opposite. Before leaving for Texas in January 2021 — I was determined to get outta Cali by Xiden’s inauguration day, and did — I had multiple curious run-ins with the locals and maybe some not-so-locals. 

Living in North Park, San Diego, was great until suddenly it wasn’t.

It all started when I figured out — after some but before most — our conquered nation was run by blackmail rings, seemingly rooted in pedophilia and other sex crimes. Back before Trump got elected, places like Reddit and VOAT (R.I.P.) were loaded with deep dives into things everybody knows now but nobody talked about then: Jeffrey Epstein and Orgy Island and Ghislaine Maxwell and her Mossad dad Robert and Prince Andrew and Rachel Chandler and Dan Schneider and poor Amanda Byrnes and “Pizzagate” and John & Tony Podesta and Anthony Weiner’s laptop, even before Hunter Biden’s laptop, and on and on and on, down the rabbit hole, down, down, Rock Lobster. Raaaaaaawk.

I had a lot of free time after getting canned from the San Diego digital marketing agency Digitaria (R.I.P.) at the behest of its storied parent advertising agency J. Walter Thompson (R.I.P.). I was rather down on humanity at that moment, hadn’t really gone much to church for several years, and the whole “America is run by a cabal of psychopathic pedophile satanic cannibals” Narrative conclusion I was drawing at first felt grimly satisfying — “Everybody sucks but me!” — but then absolutely horrific. I started going back to church, twice a week, and praying. A lot. 

That’s when things began getting seriously weird. About a month after I started going back to church, two vans rolled in, one parked in front of my house, one up the street a bit. Both had Minnesota license plates. It was a weekday, so parking on the street in daytime was easy. One guy was a lot younger and in shape; he got out a stepladder from one of the vans and started putting up small silver/metal boxes that seemed to be pointed at my house in the trees on the other side of the hedge by the gazebos; the other guy was older and significantly heavier, with a flamboyant handlebar mustache. The bigger, older guy wore an undersized Minnesota Vikings jersey that showed off an impressive beer gut, and kept pacing, strutting, prancing really, almost a sashay, up and down my block, with a small dachshund on a leash. Over and over.

Finally, I went out to talk to him about the silver boxes. I don’t remember what was said, but it didn’t go well. I tried to be friendly, but he was abrasive, almost threatening. I was caught off guard and instead of going New Jersey on him, I backed off and fled inside. The boxes stayed in those trees until I moved out. They may still be there. Maybe they had nothing to do with me.

One night, not long after that, I caught a guy prowling around our property. Twice. Both times, same night. I had a “vibe” to go outside, and both times he was there, once at the gate to our back yard, which was locked.

The man was small, wiry and skeevy. The second time I went out and saw him, I went back inside and returned with the fireplace poker. He gave me some lame excuse about thinking it was somebody else’s house, which was the exact same thing he told me the first time. I said to him that if I found him on my property again I was going to beat him to death with the fireplace poker. Then I followed him down the street for a block before turning back. I never saw him again.

One morning, the day after I wrote something somewhere about how much I disliked James Gunn, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy and Scooby-Doo movies, because he made a “funny” video about anally raping his infant daughter, I discovered a plush toy of the Mystery Machine from the Scooby Doo franchise on my front porch. The day after I wrote a Facebook post about how degenerate and psychologically broken Miley Cyrus had become, I was sitting on my front porch relaxing and reading a book when a car drove by with three young women in it who screamed in unison “Fuck you! Miley rules, you fucking white asshole!” which kinda freaked me out.

My place in North Park, Christmas season 2018.

Somewhere along the line, the house 2x catty-corner across from the gazebos on the right got new tenants. I saw them move in, but didn’t pay much attention, though over the next couple months I noticed the most prominent resident, the one I saw by far the most, was a beautiful middle-aged man. 

“Beautiful” isn’t a word I often use for a man, in fact I don’t think I ever have until now, but for him it fit. Tall, slim, tight clothes, tight skin, pointed facial features, he nearly looked like a sleek male version of the actress Kate Mara, but for the long, long silver hair that hung 2/3rds of the way down his back, almost the exact same color as his two matching, also beautiful, silver wolf-like dogs. 

I first noticed him because he would run past my house with the dogs tied to a thick belt around his waist. The belt had bells that jangled when he ran. I often noticed him around, but never got close enough to acknowledge him. Even from a distance he seemed supernatural somehow, long white locks like Orlando Bloom in Lord of the Rings, skin taut and perfect, face serious and severe. I was wary.

As time passed and life got curiouser, I began to see him around more. At the nearest grocery store, mostly, where whenever he was around me he would get this rather knowing look on his face, just short of smug, humorlessly amused, definitely an “I know something you don’t,” expression. It was offputting, so I stayed put off. Never introduced myself, never said hello.

One day, 2019, I think, because it was before the COVID hoax, I was walking back from the grocery store and he was puttering around on his front yard. He did do a lot of gardening, and the property looked nice, loaded with flowers. 

He was right there and I was right there and he was looking at me with the usual “I know something you don’t knowwwwww” look. We’d been neighbors for more than a year, seen each other multiple times but never said anything to each other. Even then everything was starting to feel off-kilter to me, like I was a character in a movie, so I just went for it. The guy and I had never spoken at all up to this point.

“Hey, look, I see you around a lot with the dogs, and I just gotta ask: Are you a magician? An occultist? What’s your story, really?” I said to him, boom, point blank.

He looked at me, unfazed, with his familiar smiling smugness. “I don’t know, am I?” he asked, voice sweet as sugar.

“Beats me, man, that’s why I’m asking," I pressed, my Jersey push now engaged. "You’re the one with the two mystic wolves, you’re the one who runs with bells, you’re the one who always looks like he knows something I don’t. There’s obviously some kind of magick going on here. What’s your story?”

He looked like I smacked him with a fish. Smug smile vanished, he muttered out something I could not hear, then started walking off his lawn and up the sidewalk, away from me and into the house.

“Oooooo-kay,” I said. “I guess that clears that up.”

Next day, I shit you not, there was a “For Rent” sign in the front yard. The guy and the two (?) other people in the house were gone in a month. I never saw any of them after the brief conversation. The replacement(s) (who I never met) hung a huge “SPARTAN” flag out front after they moved in. 

Somewhere along the line, too, I was out walking one morning — I used to take a lot of walks, it’s a good way to clear the head — and I saw one of the strangest combinations of people in my life. There was an older man who looked like he’d lived a hard life — gaunt and grizzled, in need of a shave, monochrome dirty mustard shirt and pants, a rainbow pin on his shirt, glaring all around him in a state of barely contained fury. With him was a beatific and very young blond girl, maybe eight years old. She was carrying a stuffed rainbow unicorn and kept flipping in the air and catching it, flipping it in the air and catching it, giggling happily as we passed each other. The old man scowled at me with blatant contempt as our paths crossed, the very young girl didn’t even cast me a glance. I never saw either of them again.

For a couple weeks during the early days of the lockdown, every day when I would go out, I would run into a woman in a Navy shirt or sweatshirt walking a dog. It wasn’t always the same woman, nor the same dog, but it was always women, always in a U.S. Navy top, always walking a dog. The last day it happened, a heavy-set black woman in a dark blue Navy sweatshirt had a German Shepherd-ish looking canine with her. After our paths crossed, I couldn’t take it any longer — this was happening every day, WTF — so I turned back and said “What’s with the dogs?”

She turned back to me. “What?” she asked.

“What’s with the dogs. All you Navy people have dogs. Every day I see you. You gotta know I see you,” I said, more of a declaration, really.

At that point, the dog suddenly lunged at me and started barking. Loud. Incessantly. The heavy set woman with the Navy sweatshirt pulled on the dog’s collar and started backing away from me.

“Does she like me or not like me?” I shouted/asked the Navy woman. “Does she think I’m a good guy or not a good guy?”

“She doesn’t know,” the woman said, and turned her back to me, pulling the dog further away. I didn’t see any Navy women with dogs after that. 

I did see other things, other uncanny and scarcely credible things, but I’m nearing 4,000 words when my intent was for this Substack to be a quarter that long. Once you start peeling the onion, it’s easy to forget you’ll never get to the center, and I’ve no shortage of strange stories, hardly exclusive to San Diego. 

Maybe it’s me. But I think it could be you, too, wherever you are. “Reach out and touch faith.” We need all the help we can get.

Another strange San Diego spot is Old Town, the oldest settled area in San Diego and site of the first European settlement in California, 1769. Old Town’s El Campo Santo cemetery contains at least 477 bodies and likely more. In 1889, the cemetery was bisected by a street car line, and parts of the cemetery were later paved over in 1942, becoming San Diego Avenue. In the 1990s, small circular bronze plaques labeled "Grave Site" were placed in the pavement and cement of the road and sidewalk, marking the dead. People drive, park and stroll over the bodies of the dead many times daily in Old Town San Diego, which is claimed to be one of the most haunted towns in America. Amazingly, the Old Town graveyard is not the only cemetery in San Diego to be disrespected by city planners. Pioneer Park in Mission Hills, formerly known as Calvary Cemetery, served as a Catholic cemetery for almost a century; it still has 4,000+ bodies buried there, with only a row of tombs at the very end as a reminder. Children play on playgrounds above the buried dead. Meadowlark Pioneer Memorial Cemetery, much smaller, now has an intersection built over it.