I’ve been thinking about Sean’s address in Denver since Saturday. Osage Street? Really? I just wrote about Lily Gladstone getting a globe, and the globe she won was for Killers Of The Flower Moon, and Killers Of The Flower Moon is a movie about, of course, Osage Indians. Here’s something from Wikipedia about the Osage Indian Murders:

During this period numerous white men married Osage women to become guardians of their estate. Some of the murders were committed in order for some whites to take over the headrights of Osage members when inheriting property after deaths.

The Osage found little assistance from local law enforcement to investigate the deaths, as it was dominated by powerful whites working in their own interests. Later investigation, including that of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI, the precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation) revealed extensive corruption among local officials involved in the Osage guardian program, including lawyers and judges. Most of the murders were never prosecuted.

When I got the Osage address texted to me I was already out of Denver, so today (MLK Day) I’m going to drive back to Denver and check out where Sean was living before he met the Indian woman who must have been the catalyst for Sean’s decision to leave a good subsidized housing unit for Montana.

Yesterday, after spending most of the morning holed up in my hotel room in Manitou, I decided to see if any bookstores were open to explore. $400 dollars later I examined my book booty and chose Haunted Manitous Springs to flip through while waiting for my pizza to be ready. Here’s how the chapter Séance At Onaledge begins:

When I met my husband, he was CFO to a biotechnology company in Southern California. He had worked himself to the top of the executive food chain through years of working weekends without pay. He believed in the little company because he thought it held great promise for curing cancer.

Did hubby’s job at a biotechnology company get my attention? Yes, it sure did, and it was the loss of his biotech job that led this couple and their two kids to purchase Oneledge, a haunted property in Manitou. When the paranormal activity got too hostile, culminating in a séance where the message FUCK YOU was clearly stated through an ouija board, the family sold the property and fled. 

Did anything else stand out to me about this story? Yes, the previous owners of the property, and the people who ended up purchasing the property, post-séance, were both from a particular state. Guess which one? That’s right, Texas.

The NON-investigation of dead Osage Indians mirrors the NON-investigation into the REAL circumstances that resulted in the death of Sean Stevenson, along with other cases that informed a post I wrote last April, titled Coming To Terms With The Power Of Things Not Happening. 

Clearly, I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon of authoritative non-action for awhile, and doing what I can to fill the intentional void left by authorities, which made what I saw on tv last night all the more fucked up. Are you ready for this?

One of the books I picked up yesterday is by Nic Pizzolatto, the creator of the tv show, True Detective. Does the book take place in Texas? Of course it does, which is obvious from the title: Galveston. Did I know, when I bought the book, that the fourth installment of True Detective was premiering later that night? Nope, I discovered that as I flipped through cable channels in my hotel room. This is where Ghost Travis enters the picture.

The show is subtitled Night Country and it takes place in Alaska. The core mystery unveiled in the first episode is the disappearance of several scientists from a research facility. Is biomedical research a part of this narrative? Of course it is. Is conflict with Indigenous people a part of this narrative? Of course it is. And does the audience know Travis is a ghost when he first appears in the cold snow to his partner? No, but it’s easy to suspect something weird is going on with Travis, because he just stands there, not talking, until the sun goes down. Finally his partner decides to follow him into the frozen tundra, where Travis stops and points.

It’s not until the end of the episode that we discover what Travis was pointing at: dead bodies frozen in the snow. When the cop asks the woman how she found the bodies, she says “Travis showed me”. The reply from the cop? ”Travis is dead”, to which the woman replies, “I know”.

Ok then. Time to get back on the road.