Paranormal Bubble in Downtown LA
January 20, 2020 • Downtown Los Angeles
Several times in the last few years I’ve run into unusually eerie people on a specific block-and-a-half stretch of 5th Street in Downtown Los Angeles. The neighborhood is full of a wide variety of weirdos—lawyers, homeless people, accountants—but these extra-unusual people are radiating something else. It’s like they’ve got an aura of strangeness. If a cheroot-smoking broker in a $20,000 suit is a 5 on the weirdness scale, and a homeless drug addict with face tattoos and no pants is an 8, these individuals are pinging at a 14. I’m not psychic, but in each case, in four or five separate incidents, I was definitely picking up something. I’m not sure why they’re present in numbers along that stretch of 5th Street, and why I haven’t seen anything similar anywhere else. Maybe the veil between worlds is especially thin right there. The Biltmore and the Central Library have featured in several of the Mason books, but rationally, fiction doesn’t imbue a real place with anything mystical. Mason spends lots of time on Bunker Hill, and interestingly, this block is where Bunker Hill starts, and walking west from Olive Street is uphill onto Bunker Hill. It’s only on the sidewalk too; I’ve hung out in the Biltmore and at the library, and these entities aren’t inside. All these venues feature in the upcoming The Melted Pineapple. Some examples of the odd ones I’ve seen:
‣ a fictional character from one of my books. We recognized each other, although we didn’t speak. I wrote about that encounter here.
‣ a guy who looked exactly like Waldo in the Where’s Waldo books, except instead of red and blue, he was wearing mustard yellow: a mustard-yellow striped shirt, a mustard-yellow beanie, mustard-yellow glasses frames, mustard-yellow pants. His eyeglasses distorted his eyes to make them look huge, like Waldo’s. He looked me over the same way I was looking him over. Maybe he was startled that I had detected the weirdness around him.
A couple of links to this place on Google Maps: latitude-longitude 34.049501, -118.253075; latitude-longitude 34.050298, -118.254327.
Several places are known for paranormal weirdness, but they’re usually not heavily populated, like Sedona and the Uintah Basin in Utah, not in the shadow of the tallest office building in a metropolis of ten million people. So what’s going on? Aliens or time travelers materializing on that block, still sparkling with weird vibes, and they don’t quite know how to fit in? Tulpas created from my own mind? Don’t ask me, because I don’t know. If you find yourself walking on that block, keep your eye peeled, and let me know who you see.
