Where, Oh Where Did Oliver Go?

Indiana history is haunted by the tale of young OLIVER LERCH.

One fine evening, long, long ago, young Oliver went out to the well after dinner. To getet himself a drink, one supposes.

The family—Ma, Pa, Baby and Brother and Sister—all waited for young Ollie to come back with oaken bucket in hand. He never did.

Ma, curious as to what could be keeping him, went out onto the porch, calling out, "Oliver? Oliver? Now, where on earth has that boy gone and run off to?"

Oliver went about, much as boys in that bygone day and age often did (at least, if they hailed from dirt-poor farming families), in his bare feet. His bare feet prints were clearly visible going the twenty paces up to the well. But, oddly enough, before they got all the way there, they stopped. As if Oliver, dear Oliver, was plucked up by some...invisible force.

Perplexed, Ma went to rouse the family from their after-dinner reverie. A search commenced, each family member calling out the name of the boy in increased worry and fear. Shining a light down the well revealed, also, that young Oliver had not fallen in it.

Just then:

"Mother! Oh, mother, help me! It's so dark where I am at!"

A voice, come blowing in on the nighttime breeze. The weird, eerie intonations of a boy lost in some place... some other place, wherein it is dark. And lonely.

No one ever saw Oliver again. Ma heard his voice that night, and perhaps Pa and the rest of the family heard his plaintive cries for help, too. But, as to where those cries originated, and how those who heard could possibly be expected to help the crier, no one could say.

Occasionally, people just vanish. Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart are both famous examples of those who simply disappeared. It's as if, at odd and sundry intervals, reality opens a tunnel into another dimension, and just swallows people whole. The Bermuda Triangle is said to be a vortex of such mysterious, other worldly energy. The unsolved disappearance of Flight 19 occurred over the Bermuda Triangle, and people are still debating about it.

The story of "Oliver Lerch" may or may bot be true. There is another version that circulates, one starring a young boy called "David Lang." And, still another credits the happening to an old farmer named "Orion Williamson"—with the latter having the added caveat of being investigated by none other than literary misanthrope Ambrose Bierce, who based his story "The Difficulty in Crossing a Field" on it.

"Orion Williamson"

It was a July day in 1854, and it must have been damned hot in Selma, Alabama. Farmer Orion Williamson stood suddenly, telling his family, all of them sitting on the front porch, perhaps drinking mint julips, that, "I'd better go tell Andrew about them horses!" (Andrew being them man who tended the horses.)

He went walking across his field, stopping only to pick up a switch, and waved to Mr. Armor Wren and his son who were passing by in a buggy opposite. It was just then that the unthinkable happened.

Orion Williamson seemed to stumble... then disappeared! Vanished. As if the earth swallowed him whole.

The family, slowly coming to the realization that something was wrong, hurried out to the yard, fearing that he may have fallen into a hole. Or, something. No such thing occurred, of course; Orion Williamson had vanished just as certainly as if he had been swallowed up by an invisible force.

And, maybe he had.

Much as in the former story of Oliver Lerch, it is said that the wife could hear Williamson's voice, faintly, coming in on the wind, calling from somewhere they could not see. Calling for help, as if lost...or trapped. But, as before, in time this grew more and more faint. Finally, it stopped altogether, and Mrs. Williamson could hear it no more.

According to the legend, Williamson was never seen or heard from again. Ambrose Bierce wrote his tale based on this; and another famous one, "The Damned Thing," about an invisible monster that cannot be seen with the naked eye, because it is comprised of matter that is not a part of the visible spectrum, a "color out of space," as H.P. Lovecraft might have called it. Bierce, most famously in his story, has his narrator exclaim "...the Damned Thing is of such a color!"

Are there pathways between this world, universe, "reality"...and places and spaces beyond? Do doorways occasionally yawn wide to offer egress into another realm, a place beyond the ken of mortal eyes to see, mortal hands to touch?

Theoretical physics tells us there may be a shifting prism of "realities," or alternate dimensions, wherein higher (and lower?) orders of life exist. Some posit that there are various "selves," or versions of our self, our life, our world, spread out across the spectrum of what we perceive as the universe. In other words, alternate dimensions.

Wormholes or rat holes into the Void. Or, perhaps, like Jonah in the belly of the whale, Bierce's "Damned Thing" really is out there, invisible. And always HUNGRY.

Bierce, a curmudgeon who once famously was heard, at the casket of his suicide son, telling the corpse, "You made the right decision," himself vanished in 1904 while chasing the movements of Pancho Villa in Mexico. He was never seen or heard from again.