The North American Buddy System For Victims of High Strangeness – Ella Gray

April 8, 2025

Even in the dusty haze of too-early-evening on a cold day when no one cared to turn the porch light on, as the sun snuck off past the fields and factories at the edge of town, the white wooden house out on Schlotman Road was still lovely. A real estate agent wouldn’t tell you that, but Danielle knew the truth. The kitchen was certainly dated, with its muted wallpaper depicting Colonial American vignettes, but everything was tidy and the appliances were well kept for their age. Pathetic little knick knacks from the peddler’s mall in the old shoe factory in town littered every surface within, their dopey longing eyes cast in all directions like a biblically accurate porcelain angel. The only renovation the place had seen in the past two decades now was a walk-in bath retrofitted over the tub with hand rails secured to the walls and firm plastic grips dotting the shower floor. It was a buyer’s market these days and fit, young starter house buyers don’t look for walk-in baths.

It didn’t surprise Danielle that her grandmother, Lydia, had left the house in her name. She had moved into the upstairs bedroom when Lydia could no longer reach the second floor, acting as live-in care as her health deteriorated over the last 8 months of her life. Lydia’s kids didn’t seem to mind, neither did her other grandchildren. The only family member even remotely interested in the property was Danielle’s Aunt Julie. She was a realtor and Dani’s only family still in Ohio after Lydia’s passing. Julie thought that Danielle could flip the place easily enough, make enough for a nice condo down payment.

But Danielle wasn’t interested in selling. She was in no rush to get back to the city, as her aunt might have assumed. Her job was still fully remote. Her engagement was still fully paused. She didn’t even really consider her move to the farmhouse to be that much of an act of selfless granddaughterly service, although she had no problem letting her extended family define it in so few words. At the time, back in the spring when she hastily packed all the belongings she could carry onto an overnight bus from Boston, it had felt like her only option.

She probably didn’t even have it in her to sell. The mere idea of sorting through the decades of sentimental junk piled in the attic and cellar exhausted Danielle, let alone the specter of staging the home for buyers. She couldn’t do that. She hadn’t even turned the page of the kitchen calendar from September and it was now October the 8th. Danielle told herself this was due to grief, she was not ready to pass by the fridge without seeing her grandma’s tidy cursive script. But, in truth, she just hadn’t gotten around to the task. The plants were dying too.

Danielle knew that she should close the laptop on the kitchen table after a cheery “Thanks all!” wrapped up her Friday’s last Zoom. She knew that she should probably call Ben and take a walk before it got too dark and buy more toilet paper before Kroger’s closed, but instead she and the computer moved like a single object from the kitchen to the living room. With Jeopardy! and a half empty pint of Private Selection ice cream as her only companions, she absently scrolled through her usual rotation of social sites. She’d noticed recently that Ben had been getting more and more into rock climbing with some of his coworkers. She half wished he’d just cheat on her and give them a reason to call it quits once and for all. As if her indefinite sabbatical to her dad’s hometown wasn’t a good enough reason to call off the engagement. She wonders if anyone has ever done this before: completely ghost their fiancé but still watch his Close Friends stories. There has to be some precedent.

Just as she is least expecting it, which is often the case, Danielle encountered a pop-up ad that frightened her so deeply and so instantly that her spine chilled and goose pimples raised all over her body. This is how Joan of Arc felt. This is the feeling a little gay kid gets when he sees a gangly young Judy Garland traipse around the land of Oz for the first time. The complete certainty that this is for you. The awful comfort of knowledge from on high.

The advertisement said this:

“NORTH AMERICAN BUDDY SYSTEM FOR VICTIMS OF HIGH STRANGENESS
IF YOU HAVE SEEN SOMETHING YOU CANNOT EXPLAIN OR UNDERSTAND
WE ARE HERE TO TELL YOU THAT YOUR EXPERIENCE WAS REAL AND VALID
AND THAT YOU ARE NOW IN HEIGHTENED DANGER OF EVENT RECURRENCE
VISIT WWW.NABSVHS.COM FOR BUDDY ASSIGNMENT IMMEDIATELY”

There weren’t even any pictures. No logo, no rounded digital edges, no sleek hyperlink button. The website was much the same. Nearly unreadable green text on a black background, broken up sporadically with embedded images oriented to the left or right seemingly at random. The first image on the page was a group photo in what looked like a church basement. Eight men and women, paired off into little clusters and posed before a semicircle of metal fold out chairs like an AA meeting or grief support group. The caption read: “NABS VHS Group 118, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 2004.”

Another photo was of just four adults in what was clearly an Elks Lodge. The three men wore trucker hats signaling their time in the Air Force and the one woman had a terrified look in her eyes. Another image walked the thin line between data visualization and abstract digital art. An aesthetic as equally informed by Hollywood horror and sci-fi flicks as it is dictated by the limitations of an older person’s proficiency on Microsoft Office Suite. Danielle could not parse what message the graph was trying to impart to her.

Under a subheading reading “You Are In Danger, A Buddy Can Help”, Danielle found one of three mission statements:

“Officials from the Top Brass of the US Armed Forces have witnessed and confirmed multiple occurrences of High Strangeness. Newly unclassified information sheds light on the reality of unexplainable phenomena every day. Records kept by independent researchers suggest that individuals who have experienced High Strangeness encounters are at heightened risk of repeat incidence. NABS VHS was founded on the corroborated fact that the vast majority of occurrences of High Strangeness are experienced by individuals. Our strong hypothesis is that protection from recurrent experiences can be sought through a Buddy System of support. We find strength in numbers and lean on our Buddies as a firm tether to the laws of reality. If you or a loved one have seen or been impacted by an event that you cannot logically explain, know that you may be in danger and seek Buddy Allocation immediately.”

Directly below that paragraph, in a hefty list organized alphabetically by town name and not categorized by state. Which was a dumb system. Danielle struggled to identify what would be considered her local chapter. At last, she landed on Pickerington, which was barely a half hour’s drive. And what would you know- they met on Saturday mornings.

Danielle would have to decide before she fell asleep whether she would attend the meeting in the morning. Getting to Pickerington by 11:00 am would involve leaving the house before 10:30 am which would involve showering and eating basically as soon as she woke up which was an impossible thing to do unless she actively resolved to do so at least by the night before. To take on the day with such gusto had been harder recently, especially on mornings when she woke up downstairs, on the battered plaid couch in front with the TV murmuring low across the carpet. It was lonely in her bedroom all the way upstairs. Too quiet and far to reach after dark.

Danielle had moved some of Lydia’s toiletries downstairs to the powder room off the kitchen when her grandmother struggled to reach the upstairs full bath often enough to brush her teeth and comb her fragile halo puff of white hair. More recently, Danielle had moved her own tooth brush and face soap to the half-bath on the first floor. That small water closet off the kitchen is where she prepared for bed now too, after she found herself timidly avoiding going upstairs in the dark so many nights in a row that she thought she could feel a cavity forming on her back molar.

She only showered during daylight nowadays anyway. And she never faced the mirror when she washed her face. The idea of opening her eyes while facing a mirror terrified her for reasons she could not fully articulate. She felt the same terror at the thought of waking on the couch with her reflection in the dark screen of the television staring back at her. The idea of her sleeping form existing as a dark mirror image, imperceptible to her lidded eyes, unsettled her. So she kept the TV on as she slept with the volume low to drown out the commonplace noises of a rattly old house that would have otherwise frightened her awake. She felt like a hunted animal sometimes, edgy and paranoid in her solitude. She slept with her back firmly pressed against the backrest of the sofa, clutching a seat cushion to shield her yellow belly.

Danielle woke on Saturday morning to the sound of gunfire, a local news segment played on the television about Civil War reenactments down at Fort Randolph. Her heart was still in her throat as she brewed her morning coffee. It took a lot of convincing to get into the car and set off on her way to Pickerington. When she sat on her still made bed and briefly considered going back to sleep since she had nothing good to wear, most of her laundry was in dirty piles on the floor and her pre-move jeans were getting uncomfortably tight. She scolded herself in her head for feeling so reluctant to go out in the world. Yet the moment she felt most set on going, turning key in the ignition, her internal voice wavered. These were going to be crazy people.

Stopping at the Flying Jay almost did in her resolve to go when quickly pulling over for gas turned into parking around the side of the sprawling convenience store to pick up gas station coffee. By the time Dani was pulling out of the parking lot, she was seriously considering turning around. She could stop at Kroger’s for that toilet paper on her way home and use the Saturday morning to rake up the leaves turning to mush on her front walkway. But, as luck would have it, Pickerington lay to her right and the way home involved turning left out of the gas station lot. She hated unprotected left turns and that was enough to persuade her onwards.

Maybe it was her certainty that all other attendees would be unbalanced and nonsensical that allowed Danielle to attend her first NABS VHS support group meeting. She eased herself down into the church basement with the notion that this was just a lark, like the time she volunteered at the bodybuilding convention just to gawk. The metal folding chairs were arranged in a circle, like AA meetings on TV, but the chairs vaguely grouped into pairs leaving just enough space to pass into the circle between every other seat. Danielle had arrived early and that setup made choosing a seat maddeningly difficult. She had no idea where the meeting leader would place themselves and consequently no idea where she could perch furthest from scrutiny. She also felt certain that whoever sat in her paired seat would strike up a conversation that could, in the worst imaginable case, last the entire meeting. So sitting first and leaving that pairing to chance was a non-option.

To procrastinate choosing a place to sit, Danielle lingered at the meager breakfast spread laid out on the card table by the staircase. She kept her glance trained at the chipping linoleum tile floor where it met the white painted cinderblock of the wall and the cold metal of the door frame as she nursed her second styrofoam cup of burnt coffee that morning. She briefly resented the Catholic penchant for gaudilly beautifying their places of worship. If this was a cathedral, she’d feel less silly. You can talk about silly things in terrified, hushed tones to a priest in a cathedral and their somber countenance and stupid costume and the hazy scent of incense would assure you that your fears were both real and conquerable. The Exorcist wouldn’t have worked if they were Lutheran.

Attendees filtered in at a leisurely pace, some taking their seats quickly while others lingered by the donuts and coffee cake. An older man in one of the plastic and metal folding chairs scrolled through a stream of videos on his phone. He held the phone in his lap with both hands, which muffled the sound spitting out of the speakers into the soft flesh of his lap. His thumb languidly swiped at the phone screen’s bubbling and peeling protective film like an ore slowly propelling a canoe across a placid lake.

A younger woman with dip dyed hair embraced a man in a Gulf War veteran’s cap. She had an incandescently pretty face with giant sparking eyes and a button nose, like a photorealistic tattoo in memory of a dead baby. The gemstones bedazzling the butt of her bootcut jeans were sparkling cuts of glass and porcelain made to resemble turquoise, but the rough cut crystal hanging from a leather cord around her neck appeared more authentic. Maybe amethyst.

By the time Dani tossed the last dregs of her styrofoam cup into the trash can, there were three seats left unoccupied, two empty chairs paired together and one beside an older woman in a loose chambray shirt. She tepidly sat in one of the paired empties and turned her attention to the man holding a clipboard. He had a billy goat goatee that accentuated his long face and wiry frame. His haircut was uniquely bad in the Amish kind of way: it revealed a utilitarian lack of care more so than any studied anti conformist sentiment.

The woman seated in the seat paired with his own at the man’s left side was fiddling with another clipboard, attaching a pen to the clip part with a length of string. She wore an unseasonably stuffy eggplant cowl neck sweater. A charitable assumption would be that she lived far enough away from Pickerington that she had to leave the house early enough to experience the chilly mid-September morning fog and dressed accordingly. But she also looked like a bitch. Her thin blondish hair was cut into a stacked little bob with pin straight bangs swiped across her forehead at a precise 45 degree angle.

“Susan is gonna start sending the sign in sheet around so I think we can just about get started. I see some new faces, welcome. We’ll get to introductions in a minute. The first order of business is deciding who will be our chapter’s liaison to the annual MUFON regional conference. Joe went last year and Cassie has been communicating with their Experiencer Resource Team co-chair a lot in the past few months, so I nominate her.”

Murmurs of agreement rounded about the encircled group. A few members posed questions regarding whether there would be a livestream of the panel discussion and who might be interested in carpooling to the event to attend on un-official business and a few other logistical queries that either confused or bored Dani too much for her to follow. Despite all the back and forth, no one proposed an alternate nominee for the liaison post. Cassie, who appeared to be the younger woman with the crystals, seemed pleased if not touched by the honor bestowed upon her.

The clipboard man spoke exclusively in shouts that barely rose above an average speaking volume. Though not exceedingly loud, it was hoarse enough to constitute yelling on a technicality. The strained monotony of his voice wore on Dani’s nerves as the meeting progressed through general housekeeping and some personal updates about the wellbeing of two members who could not make it in person that day, a husband and wife who were away visiting her sister in Indiana. Susan scribbled meeting minutes into a yellow legal pad, occasionally glancing up to chart the progress of the sign in sheet as it circled the group.

“Well that about does it for the bulletin updates,” the clipboard man slapped his knees as he sat down, signaling the commencement of his one-man oration, “I think we can get into some introductions if everyone’s ready to move on? Wendy, how ‘bout you start us off and we’ll just go around from there?”

The woman seated to his right nodded with a friendly clasp of her hands.

“Thanks for getting us all started here Gene! Hi everyone, I’m Wendy and I’m a second grade teacher. I live with my husband and our two boys over in Revere’s Run by the middle school. This is my buddy Terry.”

Terry’s face was oblong and pinched by his sports sunglasses like a gourd. His teeth crowded in a narrow mouth that funneled his words out jumbled.

As Terry introduced himself as a contractor from Groveport, Dani grew confused by the proceedings. She wasn’t sure why, but she had expected the attendees to disclose their so-called experiences of high strangeness in their introductions. Like “My name is Wendy and I saw Bigfoot!” and then the group would all reply “Hi Wendy!” in the slightly too slow unison that large uncoordinated groups of people sing the Happy Birthday song.

It wasn’t as if Dani had been prepared to disclose the details of her experience when her turn came, but she was at least mentally readying herself to dodge the question. Suddenly, answering the most basic biographical tidbits about her life seemed a more daunting challenge. Should she mention her Grandmother, could she succinctly explain her living situation without getting into the details of Lydia’s health decline and death? These people didn’t understand that she even needed an excuse to explain why she was still living in that old house, in this old town. Would she mention that she was engaged? She suspected that bringing that up without a ring on her finger would raise more questions than it answered.

“Hi all, I’m Danielle. I live in Lancaster and I work in medical tech, it’s mostly B2B sales for hospital record keeping software,” she overcompensated with boring job details, “Oh, and I don’t have a buddy.”

“Danielle, welcome!” Gene screeched, “I think we can go ahead and pair you up right now. Rarely works out so well, but we just so happen to have two new members this week.”

“I’m a member?” Dani asked, trying not to sound too perturbed.

“You signed the sheet,” supplied Susan, who by then had the clipboard back in her possession.

“Let’s skip on over to you,” Gene segued and pivoted his body to face the older woman sitting alone. She had wire rim glasses and her graying hair was pulled loosely into a claw clipped bun at the back of her head.

“Hi everyone, I’m Nadine. I’m from Logan and I’ve worked for the Hocking County Library for coming up on 35 years now. And I suppose my buddy is gonna be Danielle here.” Her cadence was smooth and low. She seemed more at home in a church basement full of strangers than Dani felt, easily making eye contact with just about every seated attendee. 

Introductions of returning members resumed with the man seated to Dani’s right, a Gulf War veteran named Ray with three dogs, but she barely registered the monotonous procession of names and hometowns and professions and loved ones. She was trying not to stare at Nadine, imagining what bizarre circumstances could have possibly befallen a kindly looking librarian nearing retirement age.

James, mid 40s, worked in insurance. His thinning hair was spiked vertically. It was unclear to Dani if it was gelled or just wet. He wore an unintentionally loose fitting suit that almost shone in the incandescent basement light. His tie bore the image of trout leaping from a river. The overly long arms and pant legs of his suit nearly obscured his hiking boots and tactical all-terrain watch. Dani spotted a flip cell phone on his belt and wondered what else he could be carrying beyond the curtain of his blazer: a Swiss army knife or a beeper maybe?

Cassie came next and then her buddy was Todd, a young guy with a beard and a gut whose stained tee shirt warned that his sarcasm was loading.

Gene stood again as introductions wrapped up with Susan, who introduced herself as a 68 year old grandmother of three originally from West Virginia. “Thank you all again for coming out on a Saturday morning. We do not know why we were chosen as witnesses to unexplainable phenomena and we do not fully understand what responsibility these experiences have delineated to us, but we do understand the responsibility we have to our buddies.”

Gene spoke with the clumsy verbosity of a preacher, but he got his point across. In his paranormal cosmology, everything from ghosts to UFOs to seemingly the federal government was connected through some vague definition of strangeness. High Strangeness, the rank delineation between hauntings and manifestations of apparitions or weird lights and alien abductions, is experienced by individuals far more than groups of people. That is where the buddy system comes in. Buddies help by simply being there. They take the cosmic pressure off.

“Well,” he concluded what was certainly a weekly speech, “who wants to share? Rose and thorns from this past week.”