Student Collector

Sierra MackelprangFollow

Date Collected

Fall 11-29-2018

Place item was collected

Boise, Idaho via facebook chat

Informant

Tiffany Eller

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Tiffany is a young mother living in Boise, Idaho. She’s been living in Idaho most of her life, and has lived in a series of houses all over ADA County. She is graphic designer and lives with her husband Danny and her daughter Henley. She is the second oldest out of three kids from her originally family and third oldest if you include all her step siblings.

Context

I had told Tiffany about my project weeks before I started working on it and she was extremely excited to help and quickly agreed to a Facebook chat interview. I have known Tiffany for about ten years, and have spent a lot of nights looking up creepy pasta’s videos of ghosts and aliens and other supernatural occurrences. Tiffany herself is a firm believer of the supernatural, and has told me numerous stories of her own accounts and people whom she has talked to. She is a very old friend and is cherished by all who have the privilege of meeting her.

Text

Me: “Give me some context first tell me like, like how old were you? Give some context about Dylan, [her brother] and what his personality type is, umm what the house was like when it was made, that kind of stuff.”

Tiffany: “Ok, so when I was probably, eh- I wanna say like twelve years old… my brother would have been around te-, eh- it’s gotta be earlier than that, it might be like, I might have been ten and Dylan was maybe eight, but when we were that age we moved into this house in Boise, so I think most of the houses in Boise are- were built around like the sixties and seventies, so that’s my best guess when the house was built. But when we first moved into this house it was really creepy to even just move in there because like the walls were all painted really weird colors, and there was holes punched in the walls and it was just like a, like a really eerie place, and then like we had a spiral staircase that was like, like all metal and it was really…off putting. Like spiral staircases are something you don’t really see in Boise homes very often and it just gave this air to the house that was kind of like….[scrunches nose and makes a sour face.] Eeeeehhhhlllllluuu..[laughs]

Umm so I also feel like I should say, while we were living in this house we had a dog, a little Dachshund who was really mild manner like he never really got hyper, he never really barked at anybody, but there would be nights where like my dad and step mom would be sitting in the living room and suddenly he’d perk up his ears and start growling and his head would just follow like along the edge of the ceiling and the wall just like watching something that wasn’t there. And one night he jumped out off their laps and like ran down the hall and they were like ‘what is he doing?’ and so they followed him and he had gone all the way back to this back room that we never used for anything but storage because when we moved in it was like painted like dark blue, and we just had like the old piano back there and a bunch of boxes and when they went back to find him he was in that room and he had his paws up on the-the bench and he was just wagging his tail like he was getting his head pet, it was really weird.

So that was, yeah that was just like a couple of the things that happened while we were living in that house but umm at the top of the spiral staircase, was a little landing that was probably no more than four by five feet maybe a little bigger but it felt very small when you got up there, and at the top of the landing there was two bedrooms and a bathroom, and my brother’s rooms were both up there and they would always have sleepovers in each other’s rooms where they would just stay up all night and play with toys and then just finally fall asleep after a while but there was this one night, that both Dylan and Kyle- so Kyle is a year older than me so he was probably twelve, eleven or twelve and Dylan was probably eight or nine, umm, so they…they were having a sleepover, OH! I forgot to tell what Dylan’s…what Dylan’s demeanor is ok…so…sorry this is kind of all over the place…”

Me: “Don’t worry about it like, no this is like perfect! Don’t worry about it.”

Tiffany: “Ok so Kyle is the kind of guy that like…Heee kind of you couldn’t believe anything he said and is really gullible and he would tell stories when we were kids that you were like, [makes skeptic face.] ‘THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN’ so like Kyle’s not a super trust worthy source but on the other hand Dylan the younger one he did not believe in anything like out of the ordinary that you couldn’t explain with science…umm all these ghost stories all these- all this stuff was just like bull to him and he wasn’t afraid to tell you that even that young.

And so anyway back to the sleepovers,...so one night they have a sleep over in Kyle’s room which was the closest to the stairwell and they had finally kind of like settled down and started to get quiet and not talk to each other and as soon as they did- like Dylan- Dylan’s story was that he uhh…was he was just staring out the room out the door way across the landing and suddenly there was this like green mist that just floated into view and it hovered in front of the door and was like- I-I picture it as glowing I’m not sure if he described it as glowing but like this green mist…and he goes ‘Kyle…?’ and Kyle was like ‘I see it too.’ And they just sat there and watched it and it hovered for a minute, and then it just kind of like went towards the stairs and down the stairs…and they both like bolted out of bed and like ran down the stairs and got the parents and like it was just so weird to here Nolan tell the story...”

Me: “The parents! [Laughs at the odd choice of words.]”

Tiffany: “what?”

Me: “THE PARENTS!? I just like it…”

Tiffany: “The parents! [Both laugh about the odd phrase.] Well ok so Kyles…my step brother so it wasn’t like mom and dad it was like Kelly and Dad or Randy and mom so we just called them ‘the parents’ but when they- when they told me that story I was like ‘WHY WOULD YOU GO THE SAME DIRECTION THE THING WENT!? WHY WOULD YOU FOLLOW RIGHT AFTER IT!?’ [Laughs in disbelief.] And they’re like ‘WHERE ELSE WERE WE SUPPOSE TO GO!?’ [Laughs about the absurdity of the question and answer. Both laugh.]

Me: “Yeah! Haha.”

Tiffany: “So yeah…”

Me: “Like do you remember them describing, like when they saw it- were they afraid instantly like did they feel like it was trying to hurt them? Or was it more just like a like this feeling of like awe and bewilderment.”

Tiffany: I would probably say like bewilderment I think that there was a lot of fear with it but I don’t think that they had a feeling that it was malicious like the way I’ve interpreted the story was umm…I don’t know if this is just me projecting I feel like whatever it was, was more being an observer, it was observing them, but I-…you know it’s hard to say when it wasn’t like a human form and I didn’t see it-but that’s always what I’ve gotten..”

Me: “And it was like a blob…ok”

Tiffany: “Yeah and also the other thing that happened in that room was that on a day that me and Dylan weren’t there,…Kyle had like lined up- he had all these toys called like Bionicles and they were kind of like more complex Legos and they were like robots… and there was like this whole series of them, and so he had the whole series, and he had placed them strategically in like their power poses on this book shelf along the wall and while he was doing something on his bed he said like that they had like… magically flew off the shelf like if somebody had like swiped them off. So that also happened in that room.”

Texture

This interview was done over Facebook messenger and there was a lot of feedback and technical difficulties, which only added to the eerie feelings that accompanied her story. She always does such a good job describing how things looked, or felt, and what her overall views are regarding events in her life, and was very eager to share with me everything about her past. When listening to the story, I felt like this was a story that was cherished by her, and possibly her alone since she mentioned her brother not believing in what he saw. It gave me the feeling that she still cherishes and feeds her child like imagination by keeping these stories alive and passing them on to other’s.

Course

ENGL/HIST/ANTHRO 2210

Instructor

Lynne S. McNeill

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G7: Revenants

EAD Number

2.1.6.4.8

Additional Files

The Green Mist.m4a (3932 kB)

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