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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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Welcome to the Otherworld, Patreon. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. Last year, I remember, we got an email from a girl named Soleil that was so wild that our producer Nikki, walked over into the little studio where I do my editing and told me to come read it, which was kind of unusual. When I read it, I understood why. It really was a wild and magical story. It was also a story that Soleil expressed hesitation in sharing because she said, it's long and difficult to explain without feeling like she sounds crazy. However, it left a major impact on her and the friends she experienced it with, and it genuinely altered the course of her life. I ended up doing four long interviews with Soleil. I also spoke to her friends. Part of what I do on the show and what takes up most of my time is listening to actually understand what happened to a person and then helping them explain it in a way that the audience can then understand it. And then, of course, editing all of that into what you finally hear on Otherworld. This one ended up being nine hours of interviews, which, as you can imagine, is a lot of editing. And after working at a puzzle of a story for so long, it's kind of easy to get lost in it and feel unsure if it's actually done or if I've done my job of making it make sense. You kind of start to question yourself after a certain point. And sometimes I kind of start feeling a bit like Soleil described feeling in terms of her hesitation to share this story. But recently I've decided that with episodes like this where I might never feel like I've actually finished it, it's best to just put it out on Patreon and let people actually listen to it. If you think I'm exaggerating or playing up the weirdness of certain stories or getting lost in it or whatever, I have a bizarre little anecdote that I could share with you that occurred during the very first interview that I did with Soleil. I actually forgot about this completely until today. Like I said, this was the first conversation I had with her. We had barely said hello. She didn't begin telling me the story or anything. We were just kind of getting set up and I suddenly hear screeching tires and a huge crash right outside of my window. Somebody had crashed into a parked car outside of our studio. For some reason, I instinctively grabbed my phone and started taking pictures of the license plate of the car that caused the accident. I don't know why I did, but I'm glad I did it, because the car Immediately started backing up and then sped off. I told Soleil, hang on, I think there was just a hit and run outside of my studio. I need to go see if these people are okay. And then I ran out and left her sitting there. Thankfully, she was very patient and understanding. And I actually have this part recorded. It's a little hard to hear, but I do have it recorded. You could listen for yourself.
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Oh, my God. Is everybody okay? Oh, my God. Okay, yeah, no, go do what she. Go do the good thing.
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Stay here. I'll just be one second. Okay?
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Okay.
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So I run outside, and almost on cue, I see a younger guy walking up to the smashed parked car. His hands are on his head in disbelief and his mouth is open and he screams, oh, my God, Are you kidding me? This is the worst day of my life. He starts freaking out and he tells me, you don't understand. My girlfriend literally just broke up with me. I parked here to visit my friend to talk about it, and now this happens. I can't believe it. So I'm just sitting here trying to talk to this guy and calm him down. And I told him, hey, man, that sucks. But luckily, I took a picture of the car that hit you, and I got the license plate number. I'm happy to send it to you. I think he was still kind of shocked, but seemed relieved about this. And that's when another guy walks up and he says that he saw the accident as well. Not only that, he knows exactly who hit the car, which sounded like great news. So we asked him to explain. And that's when the situation gets even more surreal. I'll let you listen to that for yourself because I actually have a part of this recorded as well. What'd you guys see?
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Okay, I'm going to be honest with you. I've been hit three times already last year. Three fucking times.
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Okay?
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C
The car that hits you, whatever that car is, it's not a normal car. What I'm trying to tell you is that you're probably being targeted. Are you guys. You're being targeted, brother? Because this. This right here, the way he hit you, it's kind of like he knew that. It's. It's an ultima. People that does that type of. Is because you're being targeted.
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What would he like? What kind of targeting?
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That's what I'm saying.
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Okay.
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What does that mean? Okay, so pretty much people in the United States, let's say. Let's say you could be targeted for whatever reason. Do you get along with your mom? Do you get along well, I don't
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got any enemies, as far as I know.
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No enemies.
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No enemies, okay? So at that point, I stopped recording. But this guy starts explaining, basically gang stalking, that the government has cars for following people, targeting them as a form of psychological warfare. They might hit your car over and over again. They might drive past your house over and over again. They might disguise themselves as a FedEx truck. You know, you can imagine where this went. And all of a sudden, me, this poor guy, and his friend are giving each other looks like, how do we get rid of this dude? What are we going to do? Meanwhile, they're still on the phone with the police, trying to get somebody to come and file a report. At that point, I realize, oh, my God, Soleil is still up there in the studio waiting for me. So I tell them, look, I have to go. This is my phone number. Text me and I'll send you all the photos I took and everything, and I'll do my best to help you out. A couple hours later, the guy hits me up. We laugh about the whole thing. I send him the photos, and then at the very end of the conversation, he goes, hey, dude, by the way, I could be wrong about this, but I think I might have sat next to you at a Chinese restaurant last year at a very big birthday dinner with a lot of people. We ate Sichuan food. Do you remember this? And I didn't at first, but there's actually a photo of this, and he was absolutely correct. I did sit next to this guy at a Chinese restaurant a year in the past, and we had both not recognized each other. I thought this was so weird. The fact that I instinctively took these photos was able to help him. And then it turns out it wasn't a stranger. It was somebody I did briefly met while eating spicy food a year in the past. It was all so strange and happened in just a few minutes. All while Soleil was sitting there by herself in the studio, patiently waiting for me to return so that she could then tell me her own wild story, which she did. And after hearing the whole story, I had pretty much forgotten about the bizarre car accident and the ensuing situation completely. And I bring all of that up to say that most of the time, life is very mundane, but sometimes strange things do happen out of nowhere. And what I've noticed is that oftentimes when one strange thing occurs, it attracts even more strange things that then happen. Even with me, when I'm just listening to a strange story, sometimes bizarre stuff happens to me. And when all of those things stack up on top of each other all at once. It makes you ask yourself, is all this really happening? Or am I just losing my mind? Or am I in a dream and haven't quite realized it yet? This is a story with lots of unusual things happening all at the same time. And I think Soleil would have definitely doubted herself if she didn't have friends there with her who experienced it at the same time. You're about to hear this from Soleil and her two friends, Scott and Callie, and I hope you enjoy. This episode is called Folly Beach Part 1, and you're listening to the Otherworld Patreon.
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I'm Soleil, and I'm a surgery scheduler currently. But I think I'm gonna go back to school next year for nursing because I just. I love being in the medical community. I love working in the clinic. I was born in New Orleans. I didn't live there for very long. The great Mississippi flood ruined our home, and my mom had kind of had enough of it, so she moved us out to Washington State. Lived there for a few years, and then we moved down to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Lived there for a few years. My mom remarried somebody in the military, and we ended up moving to Charleston from there. I've since lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I'm now living in Columbia, South Carolina. My mom, she. So my mom was a deadhead. She was following them around whenever she met my biological father, you know, so we kind of grew up with this, like, sort of hippie mom, but she was super hardworking to get us, you know, keep. Keep us safe, keep us in a house. And I didn't really see a lot of her when I was younger because she was sometimes working two or three jobs at a time. I was kind of a weird kid. I was really into. I was really into reading. I was, like, reading really scary stuff. And then I would give myself nightmares. And I think at one point the school librarian called her and was like, you realize your daughter who's in, like, third grade is, like, checking out, like, Stephen King and stuff. And my mom was like, you're not allowed to do that. Growing up, moving around so much either. I would find myself in places where I just didn't really have any peers or people who shared my interests, like, especially, like, Cheyenne, Wyoming. It's a really small community. I was like that weird girl at school who, you know, was. I mean, it's not that weird today, but back then, it was. It was weird. Weird to, you know, sit by yourself and read, you know, that was kind of hard, just kind of. It was. It was a lonely childhood. It wasn't until I moved to South Carolina that I started to make some friends. One of my first friends, her name was Vicky, she introduced me to a couple of the other. I guess we'll call them, like alternative girls in the school. And we all loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And we would like. We all kind of lived in the same apartment complex or like close enough to each other. And so whenever we weren't at school, you could find us just sort of running around in the woods. We would pretend that we were slayers or witches. One of my friends, Molly, her grandmother, was a witch. She would lend us like some of her books and stuff. So we just kind of went nuts with that. Like, we just had a really good time, like doing little spells that we would find in this book. At one point, my mom found a note that I had written to one of my friends. And I was talking about the witchcraft and stuff that we were doing. And she was like, what is this? And my stepdad, he'd never really been confronted with anything like that before. And he didn't understand that it was like kids kind of messing around. And he took it really seriously. That same year, I was at a school dance and there was a girl who had brought a gun to the school dance. It was a whole thing. Like all the parents got called and my mom had to come pick us up. And like, everybody was, you know, like, we all got escorted out of the gymnasium. My mom was like, this is it. You're going to Christian school. And so I ended up going to Christian school for Coastal Source Christian School for a year. And that was a really traumatizing experience because I kind of got ripped away from all of my friends and put in this school where I was just sort of automatically the odd one out. I remember one of my teachers at one point, it was dress down day and I came in wearing like a Linkin Park T shirt. I was, you know, seventh grade, and he told me that I was an agent of Satan and. And made me face my desk against the wall and I wasn't allowed to sit with everybody else.
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All because of Linkin Park?
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Yeah, basically.
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What did they do?
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That's a really good question. Like just, you know, it was that type of school. My experience there was pretty short lived. My mom was just constantly getting called down to the principal's office because, like, I would do this or I had this CD or they. One time my teacher, like, took my journal out of my book bag and Was, like, upset because he read some Evanescence lyrics that I wrote down. And my mom was like, you can't do this. So at the end. At the end of the year, my mom was like, do you want to go back to public school? And I was like, please, God, yes. Please put me back in public school. I would rather deal with, like, the name calling and the taunting I got at public school than like, what. Whatever is going on here. So she was like, okay. So I got to go back to public school. That was great. I found my people. I got to go to a public high school in Somerville, South Carolina. While I'm in high school, I'm super into this artist named Elliot Smith. I was also really into art at the time. So I was, like, doing a bunch of paintings of Elliot Smith, and I posted it online, and my ex found me through that. He messaged me and was like, oh, my gosh, this is so cool. Like, I've never met a girl like, this is. He found my MySpace, basically. He was like, I've never met a girl who, like, has all, like, the same, like, music and movie taste. And, like, you love Elliot Smith, and, like, you're an incredible artist. And. And so we started talking, and we talked for a long time. At this point, I was living in Somerville, South Carolina, and he was living in Columbia, and he knew some people that I knew. We talked for years, and I didn't actually meet him in person until I think I was 19. We were just really young, and we were both going in very different directions. I had also just broken up with somebody, and so we started dating, like, a year later. And, you know, there were signs that things were not gonna work out. Well, it's easy to see now in hindsight, but at the time, like, I was just. I was a young girl. I was in love with somebody. And, I mean, to be perfectly honest, I just didn't really have a good handle on what a healthy relationship looked like. I didn't really have a handle on what love really looked like. I kind of thought love was attention, and he gave me a lot of attention, so I got wrapped up in that. And so then, like, when things were bad, like, when we would have these terrible fights and he would get really upset about things or get really jealous, like, out of nowhere, you know, I just thought that was. I just thought that was, like, part of being in a relationship. And that's, like, something, too, that I've learned from other people who are in, like, emotionally or physically abusive relationships is that, like, you get this Delusion, kind of that it's. Love isn't, like, real unless you have been through something together. But that's not love. That's a trauma bond. But I didn't know that at the time. We just got deeper and deeper into our relationship. Then we got engaged in 2014. After we got married, things went downhill pretty quickly. The only reason that, you know, this is the only person that you're not going to hear from is because this is a person who endangered my life and is a danger to people around me. You know, after I left him, I literally spent, like, a few months hiding because I thought he might come kill me. And so I'm just. I'm not really trying to involve that person in my life or anything I do anymore. He lives across the country, and I hope it stays that way. So August of 2023, me and a bunch of friends had watched the Perseid meteor shower together. And that was on, like, August 12th or 11th. And my birthday is on August 18th. At the time, I was living back in Charleston with my brother. I just moved back from Charlotte, and I really missed this ritual that I had with some of my college friends where we would go to the washout at Folly Beach. We would all go out there and we would get ourselves, like, stuck on the little washout island because the tide would come in. So then, like, nobody can get to you, but you also can't leave. And it was really dark out there, and I would just lay on the beach in the darkness and stare at the stars. And when you hear the ocean while you're looking at the sky like that, and it's completely clear and there's no light pollution, it just kind of feels like you're floating in space. It's just one of my favorite things I've ever done, one of my favorite things I've ever experienced. And so nobody was really able to make it for my birthday that year. So Callie and Scott came over the weekend following my birthday, and they were like, well, we want to do something special for you. Like, what do you want to do? And I was like, I really want to go to Folly Beach. I haven't been out there in a really long time. I'd love to go, like, spend the night on the beach. And everybody was really sweet, and we're like, well, yeah, it's like, it's your birthday wish. Let's go do it. You know, we got blankets, we got snacks, we got drinks. We went out there. It's gorgeous. The Perseid meteor shower isn't like it's mostly over, but there are still some meteors. And that's kind of what I was hoping to see was just like a few shooting stars here and there. And we're having a really nice time for the most part. Mark is being really quiet and I don't really remember him saying a whole lot. Scott and Callie went for a walk and I was like, well, I'm going to lay down. This is like what I came out here to do. I'm going to lay down. So I stretched out on my blanket and I had my little speaker next to me and I had been playing music all night. And I will never forget. Like, I can't hear this song without replaying the experience in some ways. But this cocktoo twin song started playing. I think it's Frou Frou Foxes and Midsummer Fires. And I was just really enjoying the song and looking at the stars and I see this like glimmer in the periphery and it's I think like on the right side. Yeah, like on the, like I see it like in my right periphery. And so I look over at it and there's a blue pulsing light and it's kind of tracing a triangle. Like it's like a. It's not like the whole thing was a blue light. It's like there's a light that's tracing the edges of this triangle and I'm not like quite sure what I'm looking at yet. I'm like, is this like a drone or. I just wasn't sure what I was seeing. Then it starts pulsing this rainbow light. And when that happens, I can see that it's actually not a triangle. It's like a diamond. And this thing is spinning, it's rotating and it's close enough that I can see the shape of it.
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Okay, I hate to cut it off, but this was just a preview. The full two episode story is out now on Patreon and actually I'm planning on doing a third episode chatting with Soleil about some things that didn't make it into the series. If you want to hear all of that, you can go to patreon.com otherworld to sign up.