Briefly on the Mystery and Horrors of the Western Barn Owl

I looked an owl in the eyes two times in my life. They are a strange animal, more like a flashing ghoul rather than living, breathing creatures. In either experience, I could feel the essence of a great wisdom in nature bringing with it the stuff of death.

There’s an old ghost story my grandfather used to tell that involves an owl clawing a mute child to death. The child’s father goes to kill the owl but cannot find it. Finally, just before he dies of exhaustion and starvation, he hears the owl and the noise makes him scream loud enough to awaken the dead.

I have an ancestor on my mother’s side who died in battle during the Civil War the day after he saw a barn owl in the night on a tree branch staring at him with golden lamp-fire eyes, finally beckoning from its throat a wicked call, giving some death omen. He said he knew what it meant, that he was going to die the next day. And he did.

The way a barn owl hoots is demonic, an electric screech, as though it is a sorcerer of your soul. Like some sacrament or offering, delivering it to the Underworld.

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There’s an old Cherokee Chief called First to Dance that saw in a dream a sea of owls plaguing the skies and clawing it to shreds until opening up another world of dead bodies still breathing and bleeding and moaning. The week after this vision, the Cherokee were removed from their homeland in the Southeast in what is known as the Trail of Tears.

In 1768, a French painter named Jacques Monroe Sirref painted a now obscure piece titled Blood of the Trees. It’s a fever dream of Hell depicting a scene from an epic poem called El Búho y El Bosque. In the painting, stars are cast on fire and falling off the face of the earth, constellations are blazing to ash and all that remains of the trees in the forest is burnt cypress and oak and they appear as ancient skeletons from a long-ago world full of giants. All of the animals, the dogs, deer, wolves, birds, snakes, bears, horses, sheep, coyotes and little fishes scramble or howl frantically while burning alive—only two owls remain unmoved by the apocalyptic scene, bearing witness while they themselves also burn to death.

At the height of the poem, the protagonist, Miguelito, follows an owl to a body of water that rises with flame while he drowns. At the end of the book certain imagery suggests that he has been dragged to safety and resurrected by the owl, but scholars debate this.

The American poet and horror writer of the mid-to-late 19th Century Edmund Alrose used the barn owl often in his works and said that the barn owl carries with it the breath of the dead, that when one dies an owl is contracted by the devil to carry the bounty of their soul and give it to somebody new.

Alrose had a childhood memory that involved an owl which would affect him the rest of his life. He believed he’d been summoned by Satan himself to wander estranged from righteousness.

He wrote a poem just before he disappeared from the face of earth, saying that roaring out of the ash in death’s howl, Christ rose carrying on his shoulders a western barn owl.

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Owls up close don’t look real, like they’re a mysterious idea manifested into a creature with wings. Like they could be sketched on a canvas and then come flying out of it.

The first time I saw one I was about twelve years old and kayaking the Ocoee River in Tennessee with some friends and we stopped at dark to camp in the woods.

I saw an ugly face full of white hair in the dark I knew to be an owl. The owl screeched once I blinked and came at me in a beautiful, terrible blur. I awoke from my sleep screaming and in the morning, my face had expanded four times it’s size. I had to be rushed to the hospital and nearly died.

I cannot separate in this memory, reality from the dream.

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There’s an old comic book written in the 1950’s called Owl Man, with the titular character being an anti-hero, a seemingly amoral killer with a philosophy in his deeds that expands beyond religion and morality itself, citing psalms and proverbs from the Bible, Shakespeare, Confuscious and reimagined phrases of old-west outlaws just before committing murder. Owl Man is based heavily on the Budha and John Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost. The comic book has long been out of print and be found mostly now in prison libraries.

I first came across the series while serving my first stint in jail for possession of marijuana with intent to sell.

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The second time I saw an owl was last year. I stepped outside on the front porch during a party to smoke a cigarette.

What was the time span of half a cigarette felt eternal and eternally haunted.

When the owl hooted I thought I saw the devil. My heart beat slow, I could feel my blood within, rolling like a river on fire. It flew silently towards me like it was going to claw and chew the soul out of my flesh and I vomited as it whisked through the night silent and phantom as a ghost.