The Sibold Effect: Beyond Science, History, Ghosts, and the Appalachian Supernatural

Chapter 1 The Setup

-Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier- Dorthea Brown

Is this my destiny? Is this my predetermined path for the rest of my life? Growing up exploring the Saltpeter Caves in Greenville, West Virginia, instilled in me an overwhelming passion, or more like a compulsion, to research and investigate this curious kinship we share with Mother Earth.

It was the fall of 2002 and the group of us were sitting on the deck of the ‘Golden Dawn’ anchored in the harbor off Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. We were waiting for dusk so that we could shimmy down the anchor line with our lights off hoping to get a glimpse of flashlight fish erupting out of the cargo hold of an old fishing trawler sitting on the bottom of the harbor one-hundred feet down. Flashlight Fish only come out on moonless nights about twenty minutes after dusk when it becomes pitch black. It was our last dive on this trip before we had to pack up and head home half a world away.

The discussion on the deck at the time was how the Motuan, the indigenous people of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, were treated by the British, much like the American Indian during the British colonializing of America. At 10 am on February 20, 1873, almost one-hundred years after the American Revolution, the English captain, John Moresby of the HMS Basilisk, claimed the land of Papua New Guinea for Britain and named it after his father, Admiral Sir Fairfax Moresby. He called the inner reach ‘Fairfax Harbor’ and the other ‘Port Moresby.’ The Motuan were considered savages and uncivilized heathens that had no right to the land of their ancestors.

These discussions always got lively and entertaining among my travel buddies who were a very diverse bunch. They were political opposites and geographically separated by oceans. From China to California, from the Appalachian Mountains to the English countryside, we had it all pretty much covered. I was the hillbilly of the group.

It had been a successful and rewarding dive trip to the Coral Sea, located between northern Australia and Papua New Guinea. It was a somewhat unusual dive trip in that we were diving sea mounts in the rain all week and never saw any land. These sea mounts were the tops of underwater mountains covered with coral heads and lava tubes.

The Flashlight Fish showed up right on cue and it was amazing. They came out all at once and like water from a fire hose, exploded out of the hold. When they came out on that moonless night they were lit up like it was Christmas. Flashlight fish are two or three inches long and have pockets under their eyes that are filled with bioluminescent bacteria which produces their bright glow. Not unlike squid, cuddle fish, and other creatures of light, they can sync and resonate with Earth’s hidden energy as if they were all connected wirelessly.

Is this what I am supposed to be doing, exploring faraway places, looking for the unknown, searching for the obscure, chasing encounters with wild animals? This compulsion to make that connection to the natural universe has been with me all my life. Even though it has not been exactly clear, there has always been the presence of a higher spirit, or maybe a guardian angel, that always seems to be close by. It seemed important to always listen to that inner voice, that sudden revelation of intuition, it has never let me down.

It was now nearing the end of the trip and the next hurdle was to figure out how to make a satellite phone call back to Virginia. The fifteen-second delay made the call very difficult so I had to wait till I arrived in Cairns, Australia, to make a clear call home. The gang of us on the boat for the last night were already discussing where our next adventure might be. In the running were the Andaman Islands off the coast of India, or maybe a livaboard trip traveling around the Island of Borneo and a visit with the orangutans. Little did I know that the world I knew was getting ready to flip on its axis and everything known was going to change forever.

It wasn’t until my arrival in Cairns that I was able to make a clear phone call back home. My girlfriend had just started Vet School at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, and we were looking for a house for her to live in while she was in school. We had a realtor looking around for quite a while and hadn’t seen much, until that day when he called out of the blue and said he had a realtor friend who was going to list a property tomorrow, and it just might be the place we are looking for. Well, being in Australia at the time and not seeing the place first, I told my girlfriend that if she likes it, go on and put a low offer on it and we would see what happens. The plan was to call back tomorrow from Sydney.

This was the age before the cell phone and there was only a small window of opportunity to find that bank of pay phones somewhere in the international terminal before my flight left for the sixteen hour flight back to LAX and then on to Richmond. Only having a couple of minutes to talk, it was conveyed to me that there were three other offers on the property already and the realtor had not yet put our offer in. The only thing my girlfriend mentioned was that it had a decent view; she was not very persuasive either way. But, something deep inside me said go ahead and make another offer and this time at one thousand dollars over the asking price. The phone call ended and I ran like OJ to my departure gate.

These long plane rides were not too bad anymore as some of my travel friends were emergency room doctors and have access to sleeping pills that will knock you out cold for eight to ten hours. And, if you sync the sleep time to California time, the jet lag heading east isn’t so bad. During the long layover at LAX and upon arrival, I looked for a pay phone to check in back home.

Well, my bid was the high bid, I now own an old house somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia and I knew absolutely nothing about it. I don’t really believe in coincidences, so I was wondering what I might find when I finally get to see it. This just might get interesting. The only thing known about the house was that it sat in a rural area near Blacksburg, Virginia, called Clover Hollow. Some of these places can really be run down and need a lot of work to get up and running so I braced myself and was prepared for anything.

The first time I saw the place, I could not believe my eyes. It was a beautiful country house with a wrap around covered porch and a tin roof. Walking up on the porch, the strong surge of chill bumps started to form along my spine as I gazed out over Sinking Creek flowing west, over a dam, and then heading northwestwardly through the Appalachian Mountains. If you close your eyes you could easily mistake the water falling over the dam and hitting the rocks below for ocean waves crashing on the beach. Nothing but a natural wonderland in all directions and a dream come true. I had died and gone to Heaven. The Earth’s natural energy emanating around me was palpable.

This did not seem real. Before me was a place more beautiful than I have ever seen in all my travels. It was the strongest of notions that I had been summoned here for a very specific reason and purpose, and it looked like it was going to take a lot of ciphering to unlock the secrets buried deep inside Clover Hollow. From that moment on, I kept my camera close by, just in case.

Just a week or so after closing, I received a letter in the mail from the insurance company stating they had an issue with insuring the place because their records show that the property was sitting in the one-hundred year flood plain. This sounded strange since the house and property sit up on the side of a mountain. I found a copy of the plat to see where the problem may lie. Turns out that the bottom of the driveway where the mailbox stands, sits down next to the creek which of course is in a flood plain. That wasn’t the jaw-dropper that made me go find a chair, it was the name written down at the bottom right corner of the plat; Frank W. Sibold.

Sibold is not a very common name, but it did happen to be my mother’s maiden name. I did know that some Sibold’s were from the Blacksburg area and I did know they had something to do with Virginia Tech. Oh yeah, I also spent every summer as a kid in Greenville, West Virginia, not thirty miles northwest of Clover Hollow as the crow flies. It is where both sets of my grandparents, the Millers and Sibold’s, lived across the street from each other. All the thoughts of purpose and why I am here came rushing back to me. What does all this mean? Believing there are no coincidences, everything happens for a reason, and everything is connected, I wanted to know the reason I was brought here, what am I supposed to find, and where am I supposed to look?

It didn’t take long to find out that of the first five women to graduate Virginia Tech in 1925, two of them, Lucy Lee Lancaster and Carrie Sibold, were cousins of mine. Lucy Lee became the librarian at Virginia Tech for the next fifty-two years. Her interest lay in travel and genealogy, and her papers are now archived at the Virginia Tech Library. She left forty boxes, or forty cubic feet of genealogical documents in her collection.

It took over ten years to piece together the history associated with this little piece of land and it’s mostly unbelievable. The house sits on the side of the hill and was built before 1890. It was built with two rooms on two rooms and built as the miller’s house, the house where the mill manager lived. Price’s Mill and dam sat about one-hundred yards down the hill on Sinking Creek. Only the dam and house remain today.

One of the first white settlers to the area, who chose this strategic piece of property for a mill site, was John Michael Price, my first-generation grandfather, one of three first-generation grandfathers that came to the New World together on the ship Winter Galley in 1738. They became founding fathers of the German New River Settlement in 1740 when they settled around the horseshoe bottoms on the New River. The other two first-generation grandfathers were John Phillip Harless and John Phillip Sibold. They too, have a connection to this little piece of Earth in Clover Hollow.

This place also has a direct connection to Paleo-Indians, Cherokee Indians, Draper’s Meadow Massacre, French and Indian War, American Revolution, Daniel Boone, George Washington, and William Preston, among many others. The historical imprint on this specific spot has been heavy.

One would think the story ends there but that would be a mistake. When the last renter moved out and I took my chance to move in, the strangest of all things began. It wasn’t but a few weeks before bizarre supernatural activity in the house commenced after the start of a remodeling project. It really would not have been mentioned, had it not been all caught on film. During the next year, there were visitors who manifested themselves in a variety of ways; like orbs, ectoplasm, mist, and shape shifting glowing sparkly’s. Was the house I now live in haunted by the ghosts of my ancestors, or was this place being visited by ancient Indian spirits who had once roamed these parts?

Explanations for these events suggested the real possibility of visitors who may represent; ghosts, Indian spirits, or some other supernatural phenomena. Ruled out were insects, snowflakes, and figments of my imagination, thanks to the photographic evidence. My sense at the time was that this phenomenon was mischievous and playful by nature and they were deliberately, almost purposely, letting me photograph them. It was like they were trying to show me something, or tell me something, and I knew that if I kept my eyes open, my camera close, and followed the clues, I would surely find out what’s going on.

During my investigations of the property, strange and mysterious electromagnetic field disruptions occurred in specific areas which could be measured using gauss-meters, dowsing rods, and they would make my compass needle rotate on it’s axis. This was clear evidence to me of an active geodesic zone, meaning an active geological energetic site.

Sinking Creek out front flows west and empties into the New River. Sinking Creek is a major tributary along with many other creeks and springs running off the mountains into the New. The name Sinking Creek comes from the fact that the creek travels at times underground through limestone bedrock on its journey to the New River.The New River is known to be one of the oldest rivers in the world in par with the Finke in Australia. It is thought to be over sixty-five million years old and probably preceded the mountain building process that created the Appalachian Mountains. This may be a factor in the prehistoric nature and ancient feel of Clover Hollow and Sinking Creek.

Over time, watching the property on a day to day basis, it was noticed that every time there was a weather event like rain or snow, there would be some sort of off-gassing of Sinking Creek and the creek would erupt like a bubbling witches cauldron. I began photographing and videotaping the creek during these events. Video screenshots in this book will show strange light forms and odd creatures traveling through and above the water. Again, it would not have been mentioned without the abundant documented evidence. It was clear Clover Hollow was being visited by strange and mysterious entities whose messages have not yet been deciphered.

Bob Dylan might say a ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ occurred that day in February 2013 when I gazed out over the dam after a light snow. Because of the contrast between the snow and the dead brown leaves, a recognizable outline of an old trail crossing over the side of the mountain and running right across my yard clearly came into view. This would turn out to be the same trail that twenty Shawnee warriors retreated across with Mary Ingles, four hostages, and Phillip Barger’s head in a burlap sack. They crossed my property on July 8, 1755, just one day before General Braddock’s Defeat and the unofficial start of the French and Indian War, when Colonel James Patton was assassinated at Draper’s Meadow, not seven miles down the Indian trail from my property in Clover Hollow.

It was known an old Indian trail was located nearby but believed to have been completely covered up when the Price mill in the 1840s was built and a road was cut in down beside the creek. A closer look revealed a small piece of the trail cuts right across my property and then comes to an abrupt stop on the side of the mountain overlooking the road and dam below. At the edge of the trail, where it looked like nobody had stood for over two-hundred years, was a very strange rock that looked like it might be some sort of pioneering or survey trail-marker. It had markings of some type carved all over the entire surface. It turns out that rock was no eighteenth century trail-marker, but just one of a whole complex of petroglyphs of unknown origin, more than likely thousands of years old. These newly discovered stone panels, megaliths, and portable artifacts, are abstract, creative, unique, artistic, clever, crumbling, and alien in nature.

Because of a trip to Peru and a hike to Machu Picchu, I started putting some of the pieces of the puzzle called Clover Hollow back in Virginia together. After finding a connection between the ruins of Saksayhuaman, Ollantaytambo, and Machu Picchu to Clover Hollow, I was able to formulate some possible explanations that might unlock some of the mysteries at the Price Mill site.

It became quite clear to me early on that there were no experts in the academic community that had the knowledge or interest in what is happening in Clover Hollow. As many archaeologist and university department heads that could be found were contacted, including the State Archaeologist at the Virginia Department of Historical Resources. All the American Indian experts that could be found were also contacted, but no one had the prehistoric expertise that I needed.

It looks like I am completely alone in my investigation and the clues that I have been given are all pointing to the unknown. The documented evidence collected falls into three categories; natural, supernatural, and the historical record. The answers to some of the mysteries at Clover Hollow might lie somewhere in the historical record and may provide some clues as to why I was brought here in the first place. The first place I visited was the library at Virginia Tech where the Lucy Lee Lancaster Collection was stored. After studying the forty boxes of genealogical documents, much pertaining to eight generations of three of my bloodlines, I got the overwhelming notion that the information put into those cardboard boxes were specifically put there for me to find.

The conclusions that have emerged I believe are true. They are both unconventional and controversial, yet they are the only theories that can be supported by the documented evidence consisting of high resolution photographs, videos, and the historical record. My research goes back to the beginning of time and has been sewn into a quite unbelievable storyline that is absolutely true according to my research. What appears to be thousands of random coincidences and pieces of a giant puzzle, actually fit tightly together, connected with purpose and a reason for their existence. The answers to this puzzle were eventually found buried deep into the roots of my religious and spiritual beliefs.