Alexa BillsFollow

Date Collected

Winter 12-3-2018

Place item was collected

Logan Utah

Informant

Blaine Bills

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Blaine Bills, is my dad, he is currently 49 years old. He grew up in the Nephi, Spanish Fork area with his parents and two siblings, Duane and Cathy. Both of his parents and his brother have since passed away. He went to school at Dixie for the first two years of his schooling and then moved to Logan to go to USU for the rest. He got his degree in industrial hygiene, but has also gone through the police academy, and has been working for the state of Utah as an adult probation and parole officer for 23 years.

Context

My dad usually tells this story when we are sitting around a campfire. Most often, when his sister, Cathy, is there to confirm it. I hadn’t heard him tell it for a couple of years. I interviewed him, sitting on the couch in our TV room, with the recorder on my phone turned on. He was relaxed, reclining in his chair. His dog, a Chihuahua, was on his lap, and my dog, a small poodle mix was wandering around the room. You can hear both of them in the recording.

Text

This is [uh] I grew up in Nephi Utah in the 70’s. We lived in a house that was moved to Nephi from [uh] I think it was Topaz, or out in the west desert of Utah that was a Japanese internment camp during [uh] world war two. It was a two bedroom house, so my parents lived in one room, and my brother and sister and I lived in the other room. We had a bunk bed and a single bed on the floor, so there were three beds in the room. [uh] So we were probably, I would say I was probably, my brother he was a year older than me, so I think he was probably maybe eight I might have been seven, and my sister, she was, she’s three years younger than me, so she would have been maybe four. But we for like one week or so, from what I remember, like every time we would go to sleep, when we would wake up in the morning we would be in different beds. Usually I would sleep on the top bunk, and my brother would sleep on the bottom bunk and my sister would sleep on the single bed. We would go to sleep in one bed and then wake up, we’d be in completely different beds. We could never figure out, like, why. What was happening? It was kind of a weird thing, but it only happened for like a week. And then it quit happening. Like my brother and sister and I don’t remember why it was happening. So that’s the story.

Texture

Telling the story, my dad was very relaxed, probably even tired. He had worked a twelve hour overtime shift at the chapel of a prison, the night before, and had still done his usual eight hour work shift, the day after. He had told this story before, and I had told him that I would interview him about it. He had plenty of time to think about what he was going to say. He didn’t have any major pauses, other than a few “uhs” littered all throughout.

Course

English 2210

Instructor

Dr. Lynne McNeal

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G7: Unexplainable Phenomena

EAD Number

2.2.2.2.0.32

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Additional Files

Recording.m4a (380 kB)

InterviewR.docx (30 kB)

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