Goodbye, New Mexico had many urban legends. Too many, if me and other paranormal researchers had anything to say. Something about the Route 66 ghost town drew people and the supernatural to it in the same way it did for Area 51, Stonehenge, and the Bermuda Triangle.
Ever since that strange Halloween Night, when my Society coworkers and I had actually endured a real-life encounter of the mythical wild hunt, we’d been hard at work on a side project. Whenever we weren’t doing regular paranormal investigations for clientele, everybody started pulling together what we could find on Goodbye’s history. Even more than what Dean had initially compiled before we walked in the town’s Desert Star Motel (why did I call it the Desert Flower in our video? Ugh! Comments still won’t shut up about it!), unaware of what we would encounter after sunset. God, I could sometimes still hear the ghostly voices ringing in my ears…
Speaking of which, Dean hadn’t given up yet on the recorded audio. Whatever corrupted it didn’t deter the Mexican wolf from trying in his spare time to fully restore it.
Granted, we were far from the first group of paranormal detectives to investigate Goodbye, New Mexico, but the other agencies I had been in contact with never admitted to deciding to make a whole dossier. Plenty had written blog entries, online articles, listicles, a book or two, as well as dozens of interviews from former residents, but not a full dossier. So, we at the Paranormal Hunters Society decided to create one. As much as I wanted to call it either ‘The X-File’ or ‘The Para-Archive’, neither Laurie nor Samantha or Dean were as receptive. In the end, somebody at the P.H.S. crew’s small office offhandedly called it our ‘Goodbye Files’, and the name stuck.
Anyway, it had been a few months since October, somewhere in January or February. No clients had been coming in for a couple weeks, so the group had been spending our part-time hours doing deeper research into Goodbye. We separated each recorded paranormal event into related categories—the infamous Lost Weekend having its own special section—like ‘UFO’, ‘Disappearances’, or ‘Ghosts’, with Chance Whittier’s family home being included in ‘Haunted Location’. Dean suggested Miscellaneous though, no matter how much I insisted on witnessing something in the dark basement.
One morning, we had to include a new category: Unnatural Weather.
It all started when Samantha discovered a seemingly innocuous newspaper headline from a couple of online archives. Whoever had been owner to Goodbye’s local paper was smart enough to have all their printed copies scanned for preservation to the nearest library branch. In the headline dating from January of 1991, besides explaining how Operation Desert Storm was already underway, the front page was dedicated to mentioning freak storms. The kind that didn’t make sense happening beyond the monsoon season.
Nothing too out of the ordinary, except for one thing that caught Samantha’s eye: the article mentioned a whole week consisting of severe rain showers, thunderstorms and unusually strong gusts of wind that swept through eastern Arizona and western New Mexico when previous climate models predicted absolutely clear weather. None of them had struck well-populated centers, but most of these storms concentrated around the county Goodbye called home.
The article described destruction occurring to the dwindling residents of the ghost town; multiple lightning strikes, fluctuations of humidity, and fallen trees on a couple of abandoned homes, as well as one instance of a freak death involving one mountain lion named Joseph Dale
Simpson being found in his backyard, dead of frostbite after having passed out from heavy drinking on his rocking chair.
As a reminder, Goodbye was a Route 66 town in the American Southwest, an arid region surrounded by desert, and the newspaper’s obituary specifically mentioned Simpson dying of frostbite. Almost like he’d fallen asleep in his pajamas while in the middle of a blizzard.
Anyway, the article led us down a rabbit hole surrounding the events of January 18th all the way through January 26th. Roughly over the course of eight days, Goodbye, New Mexico endured strange weather phenomena that couldn’t be scientifically explained. Due to the world’s attention being hyper-fixated on the latter stage of the Gulf War, broadcasters in Nueva Fe and the surrounding cities hadn’t bothered to investigate it further. Everybody chalked it up to unknown glitches in weather predictions before refocusing on the events in Kuwait.
Among the weather incidents we could find, Dean discovered a few more obituaries related to deaths caused by the storms. The causes ranged from car crashes to lightning strikes (and suddenly freezing to death during their sleep). Neighbors reported one family passing away from illness related to hyperthermia and at least one instance of starvation. The whole unit was apparently trapped in their home due to the storm but didn’t have enough food to last a week.
One anonymous resident gave an interview to a paranormal blog years back. It wasn’t about the weather though, but black government vans, which they’d spotted driving repeatedly around Goodbye during the middle of the night before the events of January. According to the resident, the vehicles didn’t have markings or license plates of any kind. On top of that, during the quieter parts of the week when the winds or rain weren’t as strong, they would witness seeing attack helicopters.
This thread of evidence led to me redesignating the category as ‘Government Conspiracy’. Unfortunately, we didn’t have anything else to explore with. The leads were seemingly dried up at the moment, much to everyone’s annoyance.
One morning though, an unexpected advocate called the office—Chance Whittier himself, who returned my calls after I explained wanting to create the Goodbye Files and asking if he remembered January of 1991.
“Of course, I’ll be happy to be interviewed, Bram,” the middle-aged river otter said. “And that article? The anonymous one? I should be honest with you…that was me. But…there’s more to the story…”
To make a long story short, I went out for coffee with Chance at a nearby café. We got ourselves a quiet corner booth, and my jackrabbit ears remained attentive throughout the rest of his story. The entire time, he talked as if the barista herself worked for the C.I.A.
Everything in the interview itself was true, but he left out one additional detail out: what his own father went through during what we’d designate as ‘Goodbye’s Freak Week’ (the crew didn’t like the name either, but I somehow managed to make it stick, hehe).
You see, Mr. Whittier had been honest with me about his abusive father, and how everyone in the family of river otters each eventually moved far away once they turned eighteen. Before Chance eventually did, he spent his late teens spending as much time outside their childhood home as possible. Mostly, the otter broke town curfew with friends and slept on their guest beds during the weekends. Sometimes, during school nights too.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, for the rebelliously independent river otter, Chance chose to stay at his best friend’s trailer home the night of January 18th. The same night it began to downpour, “…like the Great Flood they used to teach us in Sunday school.”
With no way to get back to his family home, and not wanting to, Chance Whittier found himself staying an entire week with his friend’s family. The fog and rainfall was too thick for anybody to drive through, unless they happened to be daredevils. Still, everybody managed to keep themselves occupied with TV, video games, family dinners, all the luxuries the river otter wouldn’t take for granted after marrying and having pups years later.
The sightings of black government vans remained the same. However, Chance went further into what happened. They repeatedly stopped in the driveways of some houses, including his friends’ place, but nobody ever stepped out. The van just sat there, waiting for something as a storm raged on. They all only stopped for one to two minutes. The tinted windows didn’t show anybody inside the vehicles, and when a couple of residents tried walking outside to confront whoever owned them, the vans would immediately drive off.
Cut to six days later, and Chance felt it was time to return home. He walked between downpours, marveling at fallen trees or fallen signs on the way to the house when suddenly, a gunshot could be heard through the wind. Then, the river otter spotted one of those same black vans speeding away from the direction of his house. The same direction the gunshot also originated from. He ran just as another downpour resumed, bursting through the front door. In the living room, Chance found his father sitting in his recliner, dazed and confused.
The river otter told me he would’ve chalked it up to a weird coincidence if it weren’t for the fact his father’s clothes were dripping wet, his fur was soaked, and there was a trail of rainwater leading directly from the front door. To make it even more concerning, he could see smoke coming from a shotgun the elder otter kept hidden by his chair. According to Chance, his father had no recollection of ever firing at anything, let alone seeing a black, unmarked van.
By the time we walked out of the café two hours later, Chance thanked me for listening to his story, and wished to read the extent of the Goodbye Files once it grew wider.
“You just might one day,” I remembered jesting, only to feel a chill run down my spine.
Just how far is this rabbit hole though? I wondered. And where is it gonna take us?
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