Outcast Earth Enewsletter: Outcast Earth's Invisible Member

Trespass searches for sister's grave In December 2007, at the tail end of the Outcast Earth team’s retreat in the Big Basin Redwood Forest in California, Cipher made a stunning announcement... He claimed that Trespass’s dead sister, Meryl, had been watching over and assisting the team since its very first days.

Since the beginning of their retreat, the team had a variety of unusual experiences including prophetic dreams, seeing mysterious people lurking among the trees near their campsite, and having unusual images appear in several digital photos. [See Into The Wilderness for details on all these phenomena.] Most of these occurrences appeared to be localized around a hollowed-out tree that Trespass had inadvertently stumbled upon early in their visit. The tree itself appeared to be a natural lens that focussed and enhanced the team’s psychic abilities. But their experiences at the tree also raised multiple questions... What did their dreams mean? Who were the people seeing lurking through the woods? What did all this mean to the members who were experiencing it.

The team debated among itself, but Cipher withheld his opinions up until the last few days. Cipher appeared to be particularly interested in the “ghost photos” taken in the area. The first photo showed a crouching male figure wearing a green cap and a brown shirt. The second appeared to show a female figure standing in the tree-line and watching Trespass. And the third was seemingly a double-exposure of Coyote, with two similar images of the sixteen-year old standing side-by-side. It was Cipher’s theory about the identity of the female entity that was most stunning.

“Finally there’s the woman entity,” he wrote in this online journal of December 2, 2007. “This was the most puzzling one for me, because for the longest time I simply couldn’t figure out who this woman could possibly be. Then looking back through [the team’s] notes and journals, it became so obvious. The woman entity is Trespass’s step-sister, Meryl. The one photo we have of her is of her standing behind Trespass and watching him. At first I thought this was coincidence, but now I think it was significant.”

Could it be true? Has Trespass’s dead step-sister been haunting him since her death in 2003? If so, was Trespass aware of this but not revealing it to his colleagues? For the first time, we’ve been able to get Trespass to open up and speak honestly about this personal tragedy and Cipher’s intriguing theory. The following is distilled from the team’s interview with Trespass.

WHO WAS MERYL?
Meryl Meryl was the only child of Trespass’s stepfather, Patrick. Born in 1970 in New Orleans, she was abandoned by her mother at age seven and was raised primarily by her paternal grandparents in the rural Louisiana “town” of Dry Tree [See Trespass’s Return to the Bayou for additional information]. From all accounts, Meryl’s father was charismatic, dishonest and violent. Patrick had a string of failed relationships with women until he finally married Trespass’s mother, Corey, and moved her and Trespass to Dry Tree. Despite their difference in age, Meryl and Trespass became fast friends, united partly by their dislike for Patrick. Patrick’s violent tendencies were exacerbated by his alcoholism, but Meryl was frequently able to intervene to save Trespass from harm.

“One of the first things she taught me was how to climb out the windows,” Trespass told the team members. “Whenever Patrick would get shit-faced, we’d run to one of the bedrooms, lock the door and jump out the window. We had a meeting area in the swamp where we’d hide out until the following morning. By that time, Patrick would be passed out and harmless. We could never get my mom to go with us, though. She’d always take the worst of it.”

Meryl’s protective nature seemed to extend beyond Trespass. She was a compassionate woman who loved animals and tended to a colony of feral cats that lived in and around their homestead. But years living in an abusive and alcoholic environment had impaired Meryl’s ability to help herself. Saddled with little education and no resources, she had resigned herself to living out her days in quiet desperation in Dry Tree. Both she and Trespass turned to alcohol as a means of escaping their daily reality.

MERYL’S DEATH
On the evening of August 6, 2003, Meryl and Trespass stole some beer from Patrick and rowed deep into the bayou in a small boat.

“We spent the next few hours drinking and talking,” Trespass said. “I told her I was making plans to leave. I was going to get a job and hide the money. Once I had enough, I was going to buy us both bus tickets to Baton Rouge and we were going to leave before Patrick even knew what happened. I knew my mom wouldn’t come. Patrick beat her daily, but she was totally devoted to him. If he went after me, it was Meryl who tried to rescue me. My mom stood by and did nothing.”

Tragically, however, Trespass’s escape plan for Meryl never came to fruition. Both he and Meryl fell asleep in the bottom of the boat; and when he awoke the following morning, Meryl was nowhere to be found. Her body was discovered the next day by neighbors about five miles downstream. The police surmised that she had awoken from her drunken stupor sometime during the night and fell overboard. Trespass slept through the whole thing.

After Meryl’s death, Trespass’s relationship with Patrick and his mother became worse.

“Patrick blamed me,” Trespass remembered. “And my mother supported him through her silence. Several days after we buried [Meryl], Patrick attacked me outside our trailer. He beat me so badly that I passed out. He wouldn’t let my mom take me to the hospital, but she was allowed to care for me in the trailer. I lay there swollen and in constant pain for nearly two weeks. The entire time, I was rethinking my escape plan...”

MERYL’S GHOST
It was during Trespass’s long convalescence that he first encountered Meryl’s spirit. He recalled lying in bed, so badly injured that he could not move, when he heard footsteps.

“At first, I thought it was my mom,” he said. “But then I opened my eyes and there was Meryl. I was so happy! My first reaction was that everything had been some kind of weird dream. For an instant, I was sure she was alive... but then she just faded away before my eyes.”

Meryl returned to Trespass multiple times during his recovery. Eventually, she began to speak to him, whispering into his ear. At first, her words were of simple encouragement, but as Trespass gained strength, the ghost appeared to feed him important information.

Curiously, Rune recalled hearing footsteps and whispered voices in Trespass’s old trailer during their visit to Louisiana in April 2006.

“I totally felt there was a presence inside that abandoned trailer,” Rune recalled. “It wasn’t scary, but it was definitely there. Even at the time I wondered if it was Meryl, but I never pushed the question because I didn’t want to upset Trespass.”

“One of the things [Meryl] told me was where Patrick hid his drinking money,” Trespass said. “Patrick controlled all the money in the house. And there were no banks in Dry Tree so he had this large roll of cash that he kept in a heater vent in the bathroom. Meryl told me where it was. She told me where he was going, what he was doing... she was my fly on the wall. Even in death she was still looking out for me.”

With this amazing supernatural help, Trespass was able to plan his escape and finance it by stealing Patrick’s hidden money. He escaped to New Orleans and never looked back.

MERYL AND THE OUTCAST EARTH PROJECT:
Meryl’s assistance to Trespass did not end with his escape from his abusive stepfather, however. Meryl’s spirit followed him... and directed him to the Outcast Earth project.

In his online biography, Trespass is described by Rune as being the “first and most important mystery [OCE] should investigate.” [Click here to see Trespass’s biography.] Indeed, from the very beginning Trespass perplexed the rest of the team.

“Those of us who started Outcast Earth all knew each other,” Polaris said. “But Trespass was a complete outsider. Literally, I received a phone call from him one day. He introduces himself and says he’s interested in joining our group. At the time, I was so stunned I didn’t even think to ask him how he knew about Outcast Earth. There was no website at that time and it wasn’t like we were advertising for members in the newspaper or something. I remember I put him off and hung up on him. But he kept calling back.”

Eventually, Trespass showed up on doorstep of the movie theater owned by Polaris’s family in Kaua’i, Hawai’i. Meryl had led him there.

“I can never really anticipate when she’s going to show up,” Trespass said. “Suddenly, I will just see her or hear her. When I left Dry Tree, I had no idea where to go or what to do. Meryl kept telling him I needed to go to Hawai’i... I needed to find Polaris and convince him to include me in his big plans. I trusted her, so that’s what I did.”

Trespass on steps of the trailer So over the intervening years, just how much has Meryl’s spirit assisted the unknowing members of OCE?

“A lot of what we assumed to be Trespass’s psychic ability may have been information he was getting from Meryl,” Rune said. “The most obvious example was when Trespass claimed to see a burning warship off the coast of Wake Island [in August 2005]. None of us saw it, but he insisted it was there and then he seemed to recant and deny everything.”

It was later revealed that the “burning warship” may have been a vision of the World War II-era Japanese destroyer Hayate. The Hayate was destroyed by American shore batteries in the approximate area indicated by Trespass. [For more information, see Wake Island: Lost But Not Forgotten.]

“We could never figure out how he was able to get such accurate information or why he was deny it once he had it,” Meridian said. “I guess he was afraid to tell us the real source.”

“The other team members are really open-minded people,” Trespass said. “When you do what we do, I guess you have to be? But telling anyone that you’re being haunted by your dead sister and she’s feeding you information from the other side... well, that would be a little hard for anyone to swallow.”

So Cipher was right?

“Yeah,” Trespass said, “Cipher pretty much hit the nail on the head. I don’t know why Meryl showed up in the photo taken in the redwood forest but never has in any other photo. Maybe it was just the place or the time? Maybe she just thought I needed to come clean with my friends?”

Whatever the reason, Trespass, we’re glad you did. As for Meryl, if you are still with us... welcome.

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