When I first visited Port Townsend in 1987, I had no idea that I would one day be a resident some 31 years later. There was a metaphysical store called Phoenix Rising in the downtown area that drew visitors from all over. All things must pass, and in March 2025, the store closed for good when Jill, the owner, moved to Sri Lanka in pursuit of her dream.
Having a metaphysical store in a Victorian seaport tourist town always seemed a perfect fit, and many people arrived in town with the store as a necessary destination. The closure also brought an end to one of Joanne’s favorite venues for her fortune-telling. For most of the year the upstairs was occupied by a rotating number of psychic readers including my wife, Joanne.
The void created when Phoenix Rising closed was filled by 3 new stores in town. One of the three is called the Sacred Portal located at 211 Taylor Street in what is called the Undertown in the Mount Baker Block circa 1889. Close to the corner of Taylor and Water Streets there is a stairwell in the middle of the sidewalk leading down below street level to four shops along an underground hallway. The last shop in the row is the Sacred Portal.
On July 6, 2025, Joanne and I went to the Sacred Portal because I had a strong feeling that we needed to go there today. I had a compulsion to go there with no known basis, since we had not thought about that place for weeks. We had visited there several times and on the last visit, the owner bought copies of our books to add to his growing paranormal books. When we went there Jeff, the owner, greeted us and he introduced his mother, Susan Hunter, who calls herself an Intuitive Spiritual Medium. She also has an intense interest in Aliens and UFOs. After we talked about UFOs for a while, Joanne asked her to give me a reading.
She began focusing. She lowered her head, and I could sense how tense she had become. She stated that the room was crowded with other beings. She said she sensed beings from other stars who visited the earth to help us.
It felt like her excess energy would levitate her right up from her chair. Joanne was in the room, and the two of them started talking about “who” was coming through from the other side. Joanne was sitting off to one side of the table and she offered to leave. The psychic medium said she should stay, so that she could help.
Joanne said a person was coming to her named Hazel. I thought of my grandmother, Hazel Clarkson who passed away in 1987 in Kentucky at 85 years old. Admittedly, I had not thought of her for a long time. There was one memory that went to the forefront of my mind as Joanne spoke her name. Liberty, Kentucky was where my father grew up. My grandmother raised her family there and she became a well-known schoolteacher. She was deeply committed to her local church, which is one reason I was so surprised when she went a news clipping from her town newspaper about three local women who reported they were abducted by aliens while they were returning home from a restaurant.
The story gained national attention because the three women had very odd burn-like injuries to the extent that a doctor treated them right after their strange report. A detective lieutenant from a metro police force polygraphed the women and determined they had been truthful. He had undertaken the assignment from a very skeptical perspective. My grandmother knew the doctor as a well-respected physician. She knew the three women who had been abducted.
All three of the women were later hypnotically regressed by a famous UFO investigator, Dr. Leo Sprinkle. He determined that the women related consistent accounts of their bizarre ordeal. This remains one of the most well documented and investigated alien abduction reports ever, rating up there with the Betty and Barney Hill story in 1961, the famous Pascagoula Incident in 1973 or the Travis Walton Abduction in 1975.
One of the strongest comments in support of the truthfulness of the three women from Liberty, KY came from my grandmother, Hazel. Before she mailed the newspaper clipping to me, she took the time to write in the margin, “This has to be true. I know these women and they’re not smart enough to make up a story like this.”
When the reading was over, we went back out front and I told the owner, Jeff Knittle, what had happened. He said, “Do you want to know something really weird?” Then he lifted the corner of a floor rug. (The shop is in an underground hallway with stores on each side. It has a concrete floor, and the whole place is at least 75 years old or older. His shop has a slab floor, so he had it covered with rugs.)
When the slab was poured, someone wrote the name “Hazel” in the concrete. The full inscription reads
Hazel Roy and a date below it, February 2, 1945.
If the medium had been the person who brought up the name Hazel, then a skeptic might say that she already knew what had been written in the concrete slab when it was poured eighty years ago. But Joanne brought up the name and stated that Hazel was present in the room.
The world seems even more wonderful and mysterious as I have opened myself to a much broader range of possibilities.
James Clarkson
July 29,2025
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