Things Seen And Unseen: My Visible And Invisible Life Story

By Lorie Barnes

As I set forth in my Preface, for years many have wanted me to write about my extremely peculiar life experiences. I hesitated, since I never attained celebrity in my performing career, and wondered who would be interested in publishing such a tome from an unknown writer. I was no longer able to perform in my seventies, so after an entire lifetime of writing poetry, I finally managed to have a few poems published. About then, I began to write THINGS SEEN AND UNSEEN, and since, have revised it seven times.

In 1987 I had the great good fortune to meet a kindred soul who has shared, and still shares, many of my strange experiences that many consider to be "outside the norm". I read his New York Times best-selling book, COMMUNION, and wrote him a letter about a personal alien encounter. His name is Whitley Strieber. Very soon, I received a phone call from his wife Anne, and the three of us met for lunch. He tells of this in his glowing introduction to my book, and about things that transpired afterwards. I am most grateful for this.

My book includes experiences that begin as a mere toddler, continuing into the present time. Each chapter relates another strange experience during my life, either with afterlife beings or those of an alien ilk. During my hectic life, I became a Broadway and cabaret dancer, singer and actress and mom of five. I later became grandmother to nine, sadly now eight, and am now great-grandmother to two. Starting with marriage to my dancing partner at seventeen, I write about five more marriages, and mention three affairs with male celebrities. One husband and one lover were suicides, thankfully after I was out of their lives. My last marriage in 1987 was the best, and the only one ending in my spouse's demise.

The conclusion of my book presents to the reader feelings about my experiences, and concerns humanity's spiritual past, present, and earth's possible future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lorie Barnes
• Release date: Sep 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301399567

Lorie Barnes

My parents sent me to private pre-school, where I learned to read at three. By five, I was allowed into first grade, though the law specified children had to be six to enter that grade. This was because I was reading on a third grade level, and the Principal of P.S. 87 obtained permission for me from his friends in high positions. In fifth grade I came in second in a state-wide grade school level essay contest. I wrote poetry from the moment I could write. In fact, my parents told me I spoke poems even before I could write. I was also having the strange experiences that are dealt with in my book, from as long as I can recall. While spending a sixth grade semester in Louisville, Kentucky with my grandmother while my theatrical parents toured, I won a Kentucky state-wide grade school spelling bee. I was invited to attend the National Spelling Bee that year, but my parents could not arrange this. I graduated Grade, or what is now Middle, school at eleven, and entered High School at twelve. I did not fare well in Julia Richman High in New York City, a public school. A good friend of my parent's, Milton Berle, arranged for me to enter Professional Children's High School, as I was modeling professionally by my Sophomore year. I was also attending dance, voice and acting classes daily. I had to do some catching up at PCHS, as its standards were higher, but I was happier there. In Junior year I was top of my class in English, and was informed I had earned a forthcoming scholarship for Literature or Journalism, my choice, to Barnard College. When I joyfully broke this news to my parents, they succinctly told me I was not to enter college. Why in the world did I think they'd spent all their money and effort in training me for the stage, to be a "star"? Most parents dreaded having their kids yearn to be on the stage. Mine would hear of nothing else, though all I wanted to do was write! As a result, I never went to college. Instead of that, I entered the world of solo cabaret performing at the age of fifteen, in California, while mailing my hand-written lessons back to my school in New York. In 1961, I took a correspondence writing course, which helped to pick up the dropped threads of the fabric of my literal talents. In the early 1970s, I enrolled at the New School for one semester with Anatole Broyard, the brilliant newspaper columnist and writer. Due to personal upsets described in my book, I was unable to complete it. In 1987 I had the good fortune to become Secretary to author Whitley Strieber, and finally had a few poems published from the 1990s on. With renewed hope, I began writing THINGS SEEN AND UNSEEN in the 1990s. -Lorie Barnes

Book preview

THINGS SEEN AND UNSEEN

My Visible and Invisible Life Story

Lorie Barnes

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Lorie Barnes

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth, and of all things seen and unseen.

—— Roman Catholic Profession of Faith

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This book is dedicated

To Betty Joe McMillan

Who danced with me in a Broadway show in 1953,

then showed me how to finally publish this in 2012.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Whitley Strieber

PREFACE

PART ONE

1. The Baby Behind The Veil

2. Death At Six And Other Enigmas

3. My Haunted Childhood

4. Saved By My Dead Aunt

5. Atlantis And The Butterfly Man

6. Lori And Jon And Eerie Carnival Visitations

7. A Butterfly Soul Returns

8. Vegas And A Ghostly Gambler

9. A UFO Captain Makes Predictions

10. The 2:45 A.M. Soothsaying Spirit

11. Little Men And Being Allowed Recollections

PART TWO

12. The Desert Spirit Returns To Help

13. A Beautiful Blue Lady

14. My Weeping Portrait

15. An Awful Suicide And Hudson Ghosts

16. Past And Present Oracles

17. A Talk With A Dead Wife

18. True Legends

19. A Healing, Angels, And Ashes

20. Last Performances And An Amazing UFO

21. Haunted Peekskill And The Lone Star

22. The Mysterious Pump Room Archangel

23. The English Hauntings

24. Musings About My Multi-Faceted Life

Introduction

by Whitley Strieber

Certain people, often people who are little known, live lives so unusual that they suggest that there is a great deal about our world that most of us do not or cannot see. Lorie Barnes is such a person.

On the surface, her life has been a journey through a career in music and the theater, but under that surface it has been something very different and much stranger. Very much stranger.

My wife Anne and I met Lorie about six months after I published my book Communion, in which I described a close encounter of the third kind.

After the book came out, we received tens of thousands of letters from people who'd had similar experiences. One of these letters came from Lorie. After Anne read it, she handed it to me and said, 'You should take a look at this.'

I found myself reading a remarkably articulate account that was generally familiar to me, but in some crucial respects unlike my own. By this time, though, I was used to fact that there was rich variety in this widely shared human experience.

One aspect of her narrative was particularly interesting to us at that time, because we were just beginning to sense the true depth and complexity of what

people were actually experiencing, which was very different from the reports then being published by most researchers.

Specifically, Lorie described not only experiences that seemed to involve aliens of some sort, but also a lifetime of involvement with what appears to be human beings who have died.

At the time, Anne had a chart on the wall of her office, on which she was listing details being provided in the letters we were receiving. As they were coming in at the rate of three or four thousand a day, she was considerably behind, but one thing was already quite clear: what was happening may or may not have something to do with aliens, but it certainly had something to do with people perceiving their dead friends and relatives living in some sort of afterlife.

Lorie's letter was precisely like this, but with the difference that her descriptions were much more articulately expressed than most. Clearly, she could write.

We also noticed that she was living nearby, so Anne decided to call her. All three of us were rather astonished to discover just what nearby met. Out of our back windows, we could actually see her apartment on Bleecker Street.

We made arrangements to have lunch together, and found ourselves spending hours with this vividly alive, hilarious and razor-sharp woman…who was also having some very interesting experiences.

Additionally, it turned out that she was a competent secretary—in fact, more than competent, she was excellent. Anne hired her on the spot, and she agreed to start the next day. On our way home, we speculated about what would happen when she saw the mountains of unopened mail in our apartment, and discovered that just opening letters was going to be a full time task.

At that time, Anne had probably read something on the order of ten thousand letters, and passed about a thousand on to me. We were really very eager to find out what else was in the treasure-trove that had fallen into our laps, and which was continuing to fall in the form of three or four big gray bags of mail every day.

The next morning at nine, Lorie arrived. She came in, stared for a moment at perhaps twenty mail sacks that were stacked up along one wall of our living room, and burst out laughing. She commented that we definitely needed some secretarial help.

That day, she and Anne made an assembly line out of mail opening, and by the end of the day they had something along the lines of three thousand letters ready to read.

Over the next few years, Lorie would type out and categorize the most complete of the letters, and that file, although entirely ignored by science, still exists to this day, waiting to be made use of. But, sadly, that has never happened.

In those days, we were having groups of people up to our cabin in upstate New York to meet what we were calling 'the visitors.' These gatherings were working quite well, as close encounters were routinely taking place when friends were there. In fact, they were also happening to our son's young friends, and we were quite concerned about this.

We first noticed that the visitors were not exactly shy about showing up at the cabin one morning when one of our son's friends—they were age seven at the time—suddenly shouted out, 'a little flying saucer just went through the front yard.'

This, I had not expected. I'd thought of the experience as something private, and of what was happening to me as a sort of secret. Why, given all these letters, I looked on it that way I don't know, but I did. And certainly, I didn't expect the children to be involved.

Night was falling, and I really did not see how I could keep this child with us under these circumstances. Our own son had already reported a few strange encounters, so we were very concerned.

I telephoned the parents of the little girl and told them what had happened. They were mystified. Where had she even heard of flying saucers? She had never mentioned them before. But they were surprisingly unconcerned. They thought it was all quite fascinating, and wanted the child to stay.

I compromised by staying awake all night, sitting in a chair close to the bedroom where they children were sleeping, alert for any activity. The next day was Sunday, and we left the cabin early. I was very glad to put it behind me.

*

On the way home, though, Anne had the thought that the visitors might be responsive if we brought other people who were interested in them to the cabin. What if we could have group experiences? What if we could, wonder of wonders, get pictures?

I was being pilloried in the media, and I had been trying every means I knew to get some kind of documentation of their reality, but so far had not been successful. Maybe a house full of people with cameras and with a familiarity with the experience would change things.

This is where Lorie comes in. At that cabin, she participated in what is very simply one of the premiere encounter experiences of my life, and certainly the most fully developed one we ever had there.

It really started with Lorie. On this weekend, there were about fifteen people there. A number of them were a film crew who were making a documentary about me in support of the feature Communion, which had just been completed. Among the cameras they had brought was what was then a state-of-the-art low light device.

We set this up in the downstairs hallway, pointing down the hall where there were two bedrooms. In one of them was another woman Anne had selected as being an exceptionally articulate witness, Raven Dana. Lorie and another woman were in the next room.

In the living room, the filmmaker and his wife were sleeping on a convertible couch. Events had started that afternoon when Lorie had returned from a walk along the private road that led to the cabin, eyes wide with amazement. She had to sit down. She was really quite shaken.

She reported that she had been walking along the road when she had encountered her brother. She was astonished, because he had disappeared many years before. The FBI had given up looking for him. But here he was, in the flesh, standing right in front of her.

She was overjoyed to see him and at first didn't realize that he could not actually be there. The FBI had declared him dead twenty years previous.

He said to her, 'I want you to know that I'm all right,' then drifted back into the woods and was gone.

A very pale Lorie Barnes returned to the cabin. We gave her a cup of coffee to help her settle down, and I thought to myself, 'What might happen tonight?'

At this point, I'd been going out into the woods late at night to meet the visitors. Specifically, I'd been going about a mile back, then climbing down a cliff and going into a cave above a rushing stream. It wasn't a deep cave, but I had been finding that they would come close to me in there, and I was beginning to communicate with them a little.

I took Lorie and seven other people into that cave, helping them slide along the cliff face. It was raining, so a false step would have been fatal to anybody. But

we all got into the cave and chanted. I used the same sort of overtone chanting that I had gotten a reaction to before.

Absolutely nothing happened, and I ended up leading a tired, deflated and soaked group back to the cabin.

A few hours later, though, things changed. First, Raven Dana awoke to find what she thought was a raccoon climbing in the window of her ground-floor bedroom. A moment later, she realized that this could not be happening because the screens were screwed closed. In the next second, she was sure that this was no coon, but rather a small, large-eyed creature with spindly arms and legs.

She reached out to it and in that instant one of the rarest of rare events in this world took place: in full and ordinary consciousness, Raven Dana came into contact with a visitor. It asked her what it could do for us.

Immediately, she replied, You could go down that hall. A good choice: the low light camera was on and recording.

Then came Lorie's turn, and she, also, had a premiere moment of close encounter. But that is part of her story, and I will leave that to her to tell.

The next thing that happened was that the filmmaker and his wife were awakened in way familiar to me: something poking at his arm.

He opened his eyes and saw standing beside the bed a small man with a very large head, looking down at him out of deep black eyes. He tells me that he thought, 'my God, they're real.' Fear washed through him, and, as if in reaction to it, or in defense of itself, the creature suddenly changed into something with the head of a hawk—and disappeared.

A couple of hours later, my son and I were walking up from the woods where we'd been sleeping (the house being so crowded) and we saw a small, hooded, gray figure come out of the living room, race before our eyes across the deck, and go darting off into the woods.

Thus it ended. Over the years, Lorie, who is an excellent interview, has described her experience on radio and television, giving me great support, and serving real integrity the truth of this scorned and derided experience that the two of us share with so many others.

In the pages of this book, you will read not only the story of a life—engaging enough as that is—but also the tale of a miraculous inner world that she shares with me and Anne and so many others.

What the true nature of this hidden reality may be I do not know. But I do know this: it is woven into all of our lives, often so deeply that we either see it not at all, or just very occasionally.

Lorie sees it clearly. This is a remarkable and valuable gift, and it has been a great gift to have her in our lives. She sees, does Lorie. Clearly.

This unique narrative is quite a treasure, and I feel privileged to have been asked to offer this introduction to it.

—Whitley Strieber

PREFACE

Friends and family were after me for years to put my highly strange life on paper, and I began to do so in 1994. My electric typewriter soon became obsolete, and the sheets ended up on my first computer. The first draft was finished in 1995. It was edited by a dear friend, Anne Strieber, the wife of an amazing author whom I consider like family. I have done seven re-writes, and in 2012, finally declared it finished. All of my attempts at finding an agent or publisher failed, though a major publisher held it for months, before the man handling it left the company and all was lost. I was a stage performer for most of my life. Had I reached celebrity, publishing would have been guaranteed. Since I was a senior with only a few poems published, I was pre-judged a long shot.

I was not about to give up. Showbiz, and my life, taught me that. If at first an audition doesn’t succeed, sing, act and twirl, twirl again! Finally, I succumbed to the twenty-first millennium. My grandchildren, friends and one special lady friend, who danced in a Broadway musical with me in 1953, convinced me to put this book out there via e-publishing. Because I believe at least some of my experiences should be shared before I enter another dimension, I will ride this e-current. Hopefully the reader will find illumination shining from the electronic pages of my efforts. I strive to be a child of the light, though I have certainly flirted with, and ultimately dismissed, the dark. In closing I have one special soul among many to thank. That is the soul sent from our Creator known as Jesus.

CHAPTER ONE

The Baby Behind The Veil

I think I remember nursing at my mother’s breast. It has been said that the great surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, recalled having been in his mother’s womb. I don’t remember that.

I do recall the warmth and curve of Mom’s torso, and the way her hair used to fall on me and tickle my face. She would hold me in a chair, and that was when her hair annoyed me. I preferred those moments when we were stretched out on the bed; that was my favorite, special time.

Mom would be on one side of me and someone else would be on the other side, someone just as loving as Mom. It was not my dad, but it was someone who cared about me, and looked quite different from my parents. Whoever it was spoke to me, and sang lovely songs to me in my head. Later, my parents told me they had been truly blessed with me in my infancy. I almost never cried, except when I was hungry. My parents were both in show business, and kept late hours. I would lie in my damp crib and let them rest until late in the morning. During those hours, I cooed a kind of baby talk to something, or someone, nearby. I knew they understood me.

I also remember clearly that I liked to stay up late at night to communicate with little friends who visited me in my crib. They made me laugh, except for when they poked me or pulled my toes too firmly. I became fascinated with my hands. My little friends did not have such pretty, pink hands. Theirs were wide and strong and stumpy, and had four sharp, pointed fingers.

My parents, Marjorie Fielding and Charles Barnes, shared my gypsy soul. Mom was a ballerina turned choreographer, and Dad was a lyric baritone, actor and writer. Mom also played magnificent piano and was a formidable composer, although until she was in her thirties she could not actually read music.

I chose my birthplace, perhaps, because certainly my parents did not. I was supposed to have been born in New York City, but at the last minute Mom was caught with her water down in Louisville, Kentucky, Dad’s hometown. I entered this life on June 10th, 1930. Mom always said that, in contrast to her other four painful births, I was born with one big push and almost no pain. I have always striven to be a gentle sort of earth visitor, and have never wanted to cause pain.

The doctors also told dad, when they brought me out to him in my pink blanket, that I had been born with a veil, a membranous caul around my head, which had to be removed. When Dad first saw me, I had my hands folded across my breast like Anna Pavlova dancing Swan Lake or an Egyptian princess, and was smiling. I looked to him more like an older baby, tinged with pink but not red at all from birth. My eyes were wide open, and looking right at him. I think I wanted to make sure I had chosen the right father. I had indeed.

While my parents were alive, they sometimes inquired about my childhood memories. This fascinated them, as my recollections seemed unbelievably far-reaching. In 1980, when Dad was in a nursing home in New Jersey run by the wonderful Actor’s Fund of America, my brother and I went to visit him one Sunday. It was the year before my father left this earth. I said, Dad, I had a dream about being little last night. Where did we live where I used to climb up some stairs on my hands and knees in a yellow snowsuit, with you behind me? It was cold out, because my feet were freezing. But I could smell great food smells coming from our apartment. Ha-Ha was cooking butterscotch pie. Dad’s jaw fell open and he replied, But you can’t possibly remember that! I told him the scene was as clear to me as the present was, maybe even clearer. He said, Honey, that was on West 70th Street, and you were less than a year old and just starting to walk!

Ha-Ha was my toddler nickname for Hal Cole, a very dear friend of my parents, who had once been a chef at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. On occasion, he favored us with some of his homemade delectable delights. That particular apartment burned down soon afterwards, but not from Ha-Ha’s culinary efforts. During our escape from the fire, which I also remember, there was a lot of screaming from Mom. I was scooped up into blankets by Dad and rushed out into the icy cold. It had been getting very hot around my crib, and something was making me cough and gag, but I was not afraid. Some people died in the apartments above us. We lived on the second floor, but I seemed to somehow understand we would be fine, perhaps because my little friends had reassured me of this beforehand.

By the time I was two, I had another kind of little friend visiting my bedside. The type I knew as a newborn was about the size of a toddler and was stocky and long-armed, sporting those stumpy hands. They were also very rapid in their movements, sometimes even so quick that they became a blur. They liked to smile broadly, and laughed a low sort of deep chuckle. Their coal-like eyes flashed, and seemed to see into my thoughts with ease. Sometimes I heard them speaking amongst themselves, but in a language that sounded like metallic whisperings. I could not grasp this, but understood exactly what they meant when they turned around and addressed me personally. They had blue-gray skin whose texture looked like the baby elephant’s skin in the Central Park Zoo, and widely loose lips whose smiles reached ear-to-ear. I asked their names, but they told me names were unimportant to them, not significant like they were to humans. I asked how to contact them, if not by name. They said, Just think about us, and soon we will be with you. They smelled peculiar. I always knew they were approaching when I got t whiff of a sort of damp cardboard, or wet socks aroma. It was, I thought, yucky.

The new, second type of being had a different smell, like a musky, sweet, sort of sickening, incense. This type of being was really frightening to me. They were off-white, smoky blobs with black eyes. They were a bit taller than the other ones, and willowy. They made me terribly nervous, because they were so sneaky. They would pop up out of nowhere. There they would be, poking hard at me in my bed, with long fingers and strange wands. They shook my bed, and glared into my eyes. Just as I would doze off late at night, there they’d be, using my tummy for a trampoline and my covers for tents. I didn’t like them at all! They were rude, meddlesome and annoying, with their Jack-in-the-Box behavior. By the time I was about five, I had almost accepted them as another, passable breed of little friend.

My parents heard occasional outbursts from my room, but when the beings did allow me to cry out, they always managed to disappear before my parents came running. Most of the time during their visits, I seemed to be in a semi-paralytic state. My parents always said I’d had a nightmare, comforted me, and turned on my lamp until I fell asleep again.