menu Home chevron_right
Articles

DREAMING OF INDRID COLD

Ron Patton | January 2, 2011


Urban legends are always frustrating to me because no matter how many times you
hear them you want to stop the storyteller and tell them that the story is a legend and
that there is no fact to back it up. I realize now that there is no harm in these stories
and people can believe in Kentucky fried rat or in exploding cactuses loaded with
spiders or hookers that take your kidneys while you sleep if they so choose.
There are some Urban Legends that when told over and over again seem to take on a
life all their own. They can eventually show up in our reality and it is at that moment we
bear witness to a causal manifestation.
When a group of people find themselves in the same mind set and while in the hive
mind create a tangible entity, that entity is known as an egregore.

We see the egregore manifest in corporations, political parties and in religious
organizations. When a thought or a meme becomes a symbol or substance and takes a
life on its own we begin to understand how these images and symbols tend to rule us or
dwell in our unconscious mind.
Symbols like the original concept Santa Claus or Uncle Sam and the tooth fairy are
egregores in a sense because the collective mind accepts them as symbols and
associates them with a certain group or philosophy. Maybe it is an oversimplification
of the concept but the group mind is capable of creating great and wonderful things,
however when the group mind is negative, or paranoid they all feed off of an energy that
can produce monsters.
In the darkness we can borrow light from egregores such as “gods” that we cling to but
no matter how much faith you place in a god there comes turning point where all of the
violence, bloodletting and selfishness takes the collective unconscious on a joy ride to
the depths of the abyss.
When this happens, there seems to be an overwhelming increase in reports of demonic
possession, alien abduction, simultaneous visions, dreams and encounters with entities
that defy explanation.
In the Stephen King story, “The Stand” we were introduced to the concept of
the “psychic predator.” There were many characters in the story who dreamed of a “dark
man” who would come after a great plague. The same concept was offered in another
film “A Nightmare on Elms Street” where teenage children were being visited in their dreams by a child killer named Fred Kruger. In the movie “The Exorcist” the image of a dark grinning man with a white face was seen in flashed moments literally awakening a meme that has haunted many people in all walks of life.

Carl Jung had expressed that all humans have inherited a set of primordial images
that are buried deep in the collective unconscious. These are called Archetypes and
they tend to remain buried within the unconscious mind. Deep down we respond to
them and they are programmed into us through religion, art, literature and films. The
shadow archetype is the most dangerous one of all. Shadow archetypes have tendency
to invade thoughts and when those shadowy thoughts become “group think” there is the
possibility that through some quantum trick a manifestation can take place.
The shadow archetype becomes a real breathing entity fortified with the group think
that prolongs its life and its image can be a harbinger to some other event that will
eventually cause hardship.
Dr. Carol S. Pearson who has developed her own archetypical methods has stated
that shadow archetypes surface at times when we as a collective are worried about the
future.
It seems that shadow archetypes are here to carry out our destruction and if they
become autonomous egregores we must pay attention to them and try to eliminate or at
least protect ourselves from their influences.
According to Pearson each and every person has a death wish that can ultimately hurt
them and the much larger society. Pearson further adds, “Even the healthiest individual
will do or say things that hurt other people. Ultimately, the Destroyer turns us into
villains when we refuse to acknowledge and take responsibility for the harm we do and
we all do harm of some kind”
It seems a to be a bit of an eerie coincidence that the two words in the bible describing
this “destroyer” are Abaddon and Apollyon. These names are mentioned in Revelation
Chapter 9 and the 11th verse. The Numbers 9 and 11 now represent death and
destruction an attack that was manifested and inevitable because of group think and the
revelation of the method.
In this biblical text we read of Abaddon having a key to the bottomless it and rising
from the smoke and fire are creatures that look like flying locusts, dark creatures with
breastplates of iron and dark winged bodies.
Many have interpreted these images as something other than literal. The thought of
one place where a pit exists where large flying locusts appear seems farfetched, but the
archetype implanted into collective unconscious of and a volatile apocalyptic group think
can produce all sorts of unwelcome results.
I have become an avid fan of the TV show FRINGE. It has been put on hiatus and so I
was up late and decided to watch some first season reruns online. I thumbed through
the old episodes and found one that I found particularly interesting and wanted to
watch again. It was called “The Arrival.” The episode seemed to be inspired by John
Keel and maybe even a little Jim Keith was thrown in for good measure. Both of these
authors have passed away but their enigmatic prose influenced my thoughts when I was
younger. Thoughts about black helicopters and those Men in Black with dark glasses
and shifty grins invaded my thoughts when I was teenager.
Long before they were cartoons in a Spielberg comedy they were the dark
predatory “heavies” or shadow archetypes that brought with them all kinds of chaos.

This FRINGE episode begins in a diner near a construction site. A man in a black
suit with no hair and no eyebrows is in the diner and wants to order a raw roast beef
sandwich with 11 jalapeño peppers on the side. When he is served the sandwich he
then pours an entire bottle of Tabasco and empties an entire pepper shaker on the
sandwich and proceeds to eat it as if it was his last meal.
He observes the construction site nearby with some odd binoculars and takes notes in a
language that waitress does not recognize. She tries to make small talk but the strange
observer is more preoccupied with the construction site.

Suddenly there is a strong earth tremor and the crane that is above the construction
site starts to rock and eventually topples on to the screaming crowd below. There is an
unbelievable explosion and the bald man in black walks through the chaos unaffected.
He picks up his handheld phone, grins and says “It has arrived.”

The cylinder is eventually taken and hidden away so that it can be examined
What has arrived is a cylinder that sends out a strange frequency. One of the scientists
and main characters in the series named Walter says that the cylinder is part of a secret
government project called “Thor” where the military had learned how to fire a weapon
underground in order to hit its target.
Secretly Walter knows who the bald grinning man is and decides to have meeting with
one of them over a root beer float. Het tells the man in black that he has hidden the
cylinder.
The cylinder seems to be a hot property as some strange time traveler or alien is in
pursuit of the weapon. This traveler can use a machine to read minds and captures
Walter’s son Peter and tortures him until he can get into his deep unconscious to find
out where his father hid the weapon.
Peter apparently knew all of his father’s hiding places. Eventually Peter tries to find his
father to save him and has a run in with the bald and queer observer. He tries to speak
to him but the observer speaks the same words at the same time meaning that this
strange man in black can read minds,
The observer shoots Peter with a gun that stuns him so that he can get away. Later
we find out that Walter knew the strange grinning man because he appeared out of
nowhere after he and Peter were in a car accident when Peter was very young.
It seemed that they had somehow fallen into deep frigid waters.
Walter explained that when he and Peter were in what is assumed to be a car accident
they were trapped and started sinking into freezing the freezing depths. Walter told him
he was so cold he couldn’t move. Peter apparently was curled up into a ball and was
frightened. He told Peter that they would have died had it not been for the bald grinning
man with no eyebrows. He pulled them from the water to safety. He told Walter that he
was needed for a future event and that he could not die. Walter had expressed that
while he was losing consciousness because of the cold and that the bald grinning man
was “indifferent to the cold.”
When John Noble the actor who plays Walter in FRINGE uttered the line “indifferent
to the cold” my mind suddenly registered Indrid Cold. The name and the image of the
Man In Black hit me with a sudden fear in my stomach. Indrid Cold is character that is
indirectly linked to the Mothman, a dark winged figure that terrorized the small town of
Point Pleasant West Virginia in the late 1960’s.
According to “Woody” W Derenberger a salesman from Parkersburg Virginia, a grinning
man with olive skin, who drove a strange hovering car came to him and asked him to
roll his window down. The peculiar man called himself Indrid Cold. Indrid Cold was not
menacing at all but peculiar none the less and appeared to Derenberger to be “alien”
in a sense and that his vehicle did not look like it was from this earth. He was just one
character in a menagerie of many strange beings that appeared near Point Pleasant
West Virginia in 1966.
For thirteen months the town of Point Pleasant West Virginia was gripped by a
paranormal event that will go down in history as the Mothman visitations.

On the night of November 15, 1966, a man and his wife told the story of a
very strange encounter near an abandoned TNT plant in the quiet town of six
thousand. Point Pleasant is situated in the Ohio River valley in West Virginia. The
story is that the couple spotted two large, glowing eyes that were attached to
something that was “shaped like a man.”
However it appeared to have gray fur. It was seven feet tall, and had “big wings folded
against its back”. The couples feared for their lives and sped away. Ahead of them they
saw another creature. It spread its wings and shot up into the sky. It then swooped
down and followed with their car. The creature kept up with the vehicle that was
traveling at one hundred miles per hour.
The story appeared in the local papers, which also triggered other stories about strange
phenomena in the area. In 1961 a similar story was told by a West Virginia woman who
claimed that she and her father saw the same thing on Route 2 near the Indian hunting
Grounds.
They came upon what appeared to be a man. The headlights caught the eyes of the
man and they began to glow. Soon the figure had what appeared to be wings. It was
said that these wings practically extended across both sides of the road. The creature
also lifted into the air and the woman and her father sped away in the car.
Another story triggered by the hysteria was the story of young boy who claimed he saw
an angel in his back yard. The child described the angel as a man seven feet tall with
glowing eyes. There were also stories reported of giant birds and giant butterflies in the
area. It was as If the whole area was hallucinating.
The Mothman enigma developed so many twists and turns that it raises more questions
than answers.
Another story deals with the heroism of a dog-named Bandit. In November of 1966
Newell Partridge was watching the TV when it suddenly blinked out. A loud whining
noise was coming out of it and soon it was competing with the howling of Partridge’s
dog Bandit. Partridge grabbed his flashlight to see what was wrong.
He claimed he saw what looked like bicycle reflectors in his back yard. He then noticed
them blinking at him and just as he was getting the creeps, Bandit Jumped into the
brush and chased after the glowing orbs. Partridge heard his dog whine as if in pain. He
knew Bandit was dead.
More stories of the Moth creature were told and sightings were happening around the
munitions plant. Gray with manlike legs but no visible head its glowing eyes seemingly
placed oddly in the middle of its chest. The wings of the creature never flapped, but it
flew at incredible speeds and shrieked loudly at anyone who cornered it.
Mallard Halstead was the Sheriff who was called to investigate the sightings of the
creature. By the time he arrived there were no sign of the creature and when he
attempts to use his police radio he claimed that he heard strange sounds on the air.
From Halstead’s Police radio there suddenly came the sounds of what he claimed was
gibberish, as if someone was playing a record at high speed.
The Press had concluded that the haunt of the Mothman was around the Munitions
dump and so the legend began. Townspeople were fearful of the creature and some
looked at it as some practical joke. It apparently was for Raymond Wamsley up until his
family was traumatized by the creature. The Wamsley’s and another Family, the
Bennets were driving out to see friends The Thomas’s’. Their home was near the
infamous TNT building.
Raymond thought that he would walk up to the window of the Thomas home and
pretend to be the moth monster when suddenly a screech was heard from the shadows.
The real monster appeared near their car. It rose up slowly in front of Mrs. Bennett. Mrs.
Bennett gazed into the eyes of the creature and dropped her two-year-old on the
ground. Mr. Wamsley called to her to run but she couldn’t. It was as if the eyes of the
creature had held her in a trance. The panicked couple scooped up the child and got the
others to safety. As they were calling for help the glowing eyes peered into the window.
Mrs. Bennett was so traumatized by the event she needed medical attention and
psychological therapy. She had reoccurring dreams of the event. Sometimes she would
dream that the flying creature would wait by her window screaming to her.
The encounters with the moth creature kept adding up until over 100 sightings were
reported. All of the accounts were remarkably consistent. They all were describing a
large human form with legs, wings, and glowing red eyes.
A lot of accounts mirrored Mrs. Bennet’s account. The creature apparently had the
power to mesmerize and take over the minds of those who were unfortunate enough to
witness it.
Connie Carpenter then made the remarkable claim that she saw the creature in broad
daylight. She said the creature swooped down on her automobile and blinded her
temporarily with the glowing eyes. She was later diagnosed with Klieg Conjunctivitis a
condition that can be caused from staring directly into the sun. A lot of people who have
seen UFO’s sometimes suffer from this condition.
Soon a few residents were having dreams and seeing strange things in the skies.
UFOs were being sighted and Cattle were being mutilated in the area.
UFO expert John Keel was called in to investigate the claims of the Paranormal in Point
Pleasant. His Investigations found that a lot of the alleged UFO activity was being seen
around the TNT munitions area, the very same area where the Mothman was first seen.
After her eyesight had improved Connie Carpenter was walking down the street on
February 22nd 1967. She claims a black Buick approached her. The model of the car
looked at least 20 years old but was shiny and well taken care of, as if brand new. The
driver seemed lost. She approached the car in order to help the driver.
The driver abruptly seized her. After a struggle she managed to break free. She ran
home and locked herself in her house. The next morning she awoke to loud pounding
on her door. When she came to the door there was a note slipped under it. Printed in
block letters were the words “BE CAREFUL GIRL I CAN GET YOU YET!”
More witnesses came forward claiming to receive visits from Men in Black posing as
census takers, photographers and bible salesman. Once they were inside they would
ask questions about the Mothman, UFO’s and other strange phenomena.
The strange occurrences ranged from defective phones, television and radio
interference, floating balls of light, sulfur smells, beeps, rumbles, cries of phantom
children, backwards gibberish, and a number of other poltergeist manifestations.
The town drunk, Tad Jones claimed that he had a brief encounter with a small metal
sphere. Days later he received a threatening note. “WE KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE
SEEN AND WE KNOW YOU HAVE TALKED YOU’D BETTER KEEP YOUR MOUTH
SHUT! YOU WANT (sic) BE WARNED AGAIN!”
John Keel kept receiving opened and resealed mail and a number of his friends claimed
that he was making phone calls to them. Keel made no such calls.
Then Keel began receiving strange phone calls from a peculiar electronic voice. The
person on the line claimed to be Indrid Cold and that he was working with another man
named Apol. There have been many theories about the names of these beings. Indrid
apparently is a name that comes from the word Indra the Hindu god of Thunder and fire
from heaven. Indra was also considered a “watcher” or observer from heaven. Apol is
said to be short for Apollyon the destroyer spoken of in the book of Revelation.
Indrid Cold claimed that there would be a major disaster on the Ohio River. The weird
voice said the disaster would happen on December 15th 1967. Later many people were
having simultaneous dreams of pleading faces and Christmas packages floating on the
waters of the Ohio River.
Soon other witnesses to the Mothman’s appearance were having the same nightmares.
Then it happened. Thirteen months to the day of the first sighting of Mothman. The
disaster that was foretold occurred. It was evening rush hour and the Silver Bridge was
full of cars. A lot of them were Christmas shoppers. At 5:05 PM on December 15th the
suspension bridge that separated West Virginia from Ohio collapsed. There were 42
confirmed dead and six persons unaccounted for. Rescue workers were heartbroken to
see floating in the dark waters Christmas presents that would never end up under the
Christmas tree.
The Mothman mystery continues to remain a mystery to this day. After the Silver Bridge
disaster, the Mothman appearances dwindled to zero. It was later revealed that near the
munitions TNT area, there was igloo shaped concrete mounds that hid a deadly secret.
There was a lot of munitions waste that was contaminating the water aquifers. The
stories of the Men in Black indicated that perhaps the whole town was being monitored
and harassed for some government experiment. It can all be written off as some sort of
mass psychosis or even mass hysteria.
However, as I had indicated earlier, there is also the Jungian model of the collective
unconscious that may have produced the strange occurrences in Point Pleasant and
could explain an even deeper and more esoteric conclusion.
The simultaneous dreams and appearances of a dark winged creature, perhaps an
angel or even darker archetype could have been part of an astral construct. Indrid
Cold and Apol, the two “grinning men” are characters that are considered shadow
archetypes. They both represent death.
John Keel wrote about the foolish grinning man and how many people in the area of
Point Pleasant were saying that they were dreaming about such a man and that there
were others who would see him standing in the sidewalk in front of them. He was
always described as a man in a black suit coat and trousers, with a craggy pale face,
hollow eyes and a large toothy grin. These grinning men would speak very few words
and would sometimes ask to borrow things like a ball point pen, or ask for change and
then walk away laughing and being giddy about the whole affair.
In the case of Indrid Cold and Apol we can see as a shadow metaphor that can be
found hidden in the bible. The story of Lot, who lived in Sodom and Gomorrah, speaks
of two strangers that appear on the scene before a major disaster. It paints the picture
of the shadowy beings perfectly. While the two strangers who show up in Sodom and
Gomorrah are interpreted as angels, it can also be interpreted as something far more
contemporary.
In a strange simulacrum of the events portrayed in the bible, two strangers appear in a
small town like Point Pleasant. There is also the appearance of a dark flying creature
that some interpreted to be the angel of death, appearing in the area of an open
munitions pit. The Mothman was a creature that can be seen as a locust or some other
vile creature from hell. John Keel the reporter had found himself in the middle of all of
the chaos and received more phone calls from Indrid Cold and Apol.
The strange voices warned of Pope Paul VI would be stabbed, and that Robert
Kennedy would be assassinated.
The Pope eventually was attacked and stabbed in the Philippines in 1970, and Robert
Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968 after the Silver Bridge Collapse.
Keel had theorized that perhaps the entities that appeared in Point Pleasant were
egregores or what the Tibetans call Tulpas. Tulpas are believed to be beings that
are created either by intent or in moments of deep stress and anxiety. Many psychics
believe that with the proper focus, it is of course possible to “create” an entity or
manifest an entity either through the process of intended group think, or accidentally
through the process of preoccupation with negative thought forms that could lead to
destruction as pointed out by Jung.
As I had stated the thoughts of Indrid Cold were triggered in me by my favorite
television show FRINGE, reminding me of an archetype and a story that has haunted
me for as long as I have been investigating the paranormal.
As I was preparing for a show unrelated to Mothman I received a phone call from
a friend of mine. She told me that she was following a very peculiar story that she
thought would peak my interest. She stated that there was a very strange phenomenon
transpiring on the internet about a character known as “Slender man.”
She was telling me that the character was a complete fabrication on a blog called
something awful.com. Slender man was created for a fake paranormal pictures
Photoshop contest. He allegedly was created by Victor Surge. He even created a back
story about how Slender man would molest children.

Slender man while fictional is a shadow archetype that has captured the hearts and
minds of people that are beginning to see him and dream about him.
He’s often depicted as a tall and thin entity, wearing black pants, a black suit with a
white shirt, and a black necktie underneath. He has really no facial features and is
sometimes depicted as blank faced human with a foolish grin. He can stretch forth and
elongate or shorten his arms. He also has tentacles on his back.
The fictional slender man was created in 2009 but it wasn’t until recently that the
character, who was similar to the ‘grinning man” and Indrid Cold started appearing in
people’s dreams.
One such notable experience was posted in a blog by author Poppy Z. Brite. On
December 14th, 2010 she posted:
“Last night I dreamed that Slender Man left me two black kittens. I can’t remember
what the one’s name was supposed to be — Beaux? Boo? — but he had left explicit
instructions that the other one should be called Brad. This is the name of an ex-
boyfriend of mine — a good guy, but a very serious one, so it didn’t seem like a suitable
name for a kitten. Yet I was afraid Slender Man would be mad and come get me
(or, worse, take the kittens back) if I changed the name.”I know!” I said, having an
epiphany. “I’ll call him B-RAD!” (Pronounced Be-Rad) And everyone was happy.”
I couldn’t believe what I was reading and decided to look into the phenomenon further.
I actually remembered that there was website that was out of Italy that many people
dismissed as a guerilla marketing site called “Have you Dreamt This Man?” On the site
there was posted a police artist sketch of a very plain looking man with bushy eyebrows
and a very odd smile.

The site claimed that many people were dreaming about the smiling man and the
owners of the site wanted to start a dream registry to see if anyone had dreamed about
him. Of course there were many people who said yes and then I decided to do the
same thing on Facebook. However, I had placed a number of archetypical shots of
what I believed was the grinning man including a depiction of the Slender man, my own
creation of a grinning man I dreamed about when I was 14, the artist’s rendering from
the “Have you dreamt” site, and Reverend Kane, the ghostly man from The Poltergeist
movie.

I was surprised at the affirmative responses. There were many people who either
dreamed about him recently or had dreamed about him a long time back. I felt I needed
to discuss this with my audience and share with them the possibility that our emotions
and anxiety for the future could be manifesting in a shadowy entity known as “the
grinning man.”
I had the opportunity to discuss my intentions with some friends of mine, telling them
about how the TV shoe FRINGE re-kindled my interest in the Indrid Cold story and
the eventual links to Mothman. One of my friends had commented that it seems that
you can’t have the one entity without the other. He explained that it is obvious that the
Indrid Cold either had to have been Mothman or that both entities need each other.
He described the dark synergy between Batman and the Joker. Batman is a being
that is a man with bat wings. His dark image is similar to that of the Mothman. Then
suddenly out of nowhere comes this grinning visage of death, the Joker. . Everywhere
the Joker goes he creates chaos and tries to control future outcomes and disasters.
Each time the Batman shows up, the Joker will surely follow, or vice versa. He then he
asked me, “If there have been all of these dreams of the “grinning man” then where
is your winged counterpart?” He challenged me to look to see if there have been any
recent reports of the appearance of Mothman or even a giant bird.
The frightening part is that for the record, there was a report of the Mothman being seen
in Los Angeles. He was spotted just before the story broke of the missile that was fired
off the coast of California. There have also been reports that the Mothman has been
seen in several areas of California in November and December.
The sighting had been compared to a similar sighting in 1942 during the Battle of Los
Angeles, where a UFO was sighted over Los Angeles and was fired upon by Anti-
aircraft artillery. A report in the newspaper said that many people witnessed a huge
Butterfly in the sky. Some people at first thought it was a blimp.
Now it seems that Mothman and the simultaneous dreaming of the grinning man has
returned. The recent sighting in California was not reported in the mainstream news.
However there are a couple of websites reporting it. They are not calling it a Mothman
sighting because the witness says that it was a giant butterfly. It seems that the only
people who really cared about the sighting were a few New Age thinkers who see the
butterfly as a positive omen.
If anything it is a sign of some sort of huge transition. Knowing the history of such
sightings, the transition is likely to be traumatic.

Written by Ron Patton




Search Ground Zero

Newsletter


  • play_circle_filled

    Ground Zero Radio

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 376 – OUTSIDE THE BOX

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 375 – SOLVE ET COAGULA – THE DARK NEXUS OF POSSIBILITY

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 374 – GHOST WRITER W/ DAVE SCHRADER

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 373 – YE GHOSTS OF TERROR YET TO COME W/ NW GHOST RECON

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 372 – FLIGHT 401 – JUST PLANE DEAD

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 371 – RED SHED REDEMPTION W/ PAUL BEGLEY

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 370 – REVELATION ZERO A CASE FOR THE RETRO CAUSAL APOCALYPSE

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 369 – PARAH ADUMAH – THE ADVENT OF THE APOCALYPSE COW

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 367 – SPY GATE: OCTOPUS UNVEILED

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 366 – THE LOOMING OCTOPUS

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 365 – OPERATION GREEN CHEESE

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 364 – ECLIPSE – THE DIGITAL DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 363 – DESECRATION MOON

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 362 – COSMIC CONUNDRUM – ALIEN HYBRID WARFARE W/ RYAN WOOD

  • cover play_circle_filled

    Episode 361 – THE INCURSION DRILL W/ WHITLEY STRIEBER

play_arrow skip_previous skip_next volume_down
playlist_play