I can't remember his name but he was and is a legend in the B-movie community, and also respected by "legit" filmmakers. Apparently he was a mega-prankster but a heck of a nice guy, and loved by all. He was also into hawks.
It was a well-done doc, and what was interesting was that there were lots of unexplained things that happened during filming, and they managed to work a few things into the film, such as weird video and audio glitches and batteries being dead right out of a fresh pack that was perfectly good a week earlier. I've had that happen before, more than once, and it's a tad unsettling.
Of course they were speculating on whether or not their dearly-departed buddy could be causing the things to happen. For what it's worth, the guy had said that if he could he'd prank them from the afterlife, sort of like Houdini telling his wife that if he could, he'd contact her from beyond the grave, although she apparently never heard from him. Is it possible that B-movie guy had more success than the great Houdini?
The craziest thing that happened was when the guy went out of town for a few days. He was obsessive about keeping his office completely locked when he was away, to protect his ideas, artwork, memorabilia and other valuables. He had the only key and he even sealed the vents and doors. When he returned from his trip and went into his office, he found a hawk feather on his desk.
Since he's a filmmaker he started filming. He looked a little pale and appeared to be genuinely freaked-out. He showed the feather apparently as he found it. It was parallel to the sides of the desk and appeared to be perfectly placed. I don't think he faked it. For one thing plenty of crazy things had already happened, some caught on film, but mainly it'd make him look stupid, and like he didn't have his security-shit together if a hawk feather could just waft its way into his office.
The next morning I woke up thinking about the doc in general, and specifically the hawk feather. I went up to the former Kangaroo Mart to get a coffee, which took maybe ten minutes. Imagine my surprise when I returned home and found a hawk feather on the porch. It stopped me in my tracks.
It too appeared to be perfectly-placed. The day before I'd gone to the river and found an interesting rock. It looked like a scaled-down monolith, and almost like it was quarried. It had some algae on it so I'd soaked it in bleach and set it on the porch to dry. I naturally placed it in line with the bricks, and the feather was lying parallel to it. You couldn't have placed it any more perfectly.
It was Summer, and we were in the middle of one of those periods where it's like the Doldrums for ten days...hot, with almost no breeze. It was a perfect day for a hawk to catch a thermal, and I looked up but there were no hawks circling. For a feather to drift down from the sky and land perfectly two inches from a rock about the same size, the odds must be astronomical. It's possible, but I also considered the possibility, while slim, that someone was pranking me.
I also had to consider the fact that I'd just seen a thing where a guy found a perfectly-placed hawk feather on his desk, that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. I think that doc was the first time I heard the word "Apport," which describes it perfectly, if only in theory. An Apport is an object that appears and/or disappears from or into thin air, apparently without explanation.
I'm not saying that my hawk feather appeared out of nowhere, but if that guy's office was sealed, and he checked and said it was, then in his case it makes as much sense as anything. You know how it goes...sometimes the craziest possible explanation is correct.
I decided to leave the feather alone for the time being, and watch to see if anything else happened. I've seen plenty of hawk feathers in the woods, but I leave them alone because they're illegal to possess. I figured I'd eventually take it into the woods out back, but I left it alone for a while. I sat down and played my drums. I could see most of the yard, and I'd see anyone approaching the porch. I had a funny feeling something else might happen.
Usually I play drums with my eyes closed but this time I kept them open, and I never left the room. After about 45 minutes I went outside and the feather was gone. There hadn't been a puff of a breeze and I knew it couldn't have blown away, but I looked for it anyway. I got down on my hands and knees and searched the area and then searched it again, but it was gone.
How could it just disappear? Did the hawk who lost it in the first place swoop down and snag it? Was it a really clever animal playing a trick on me? Maybe it was an Imp, ot the Hawkfeather Fairy or something. I'd have seen anyone over two feet tall approaching the porch, and again there wasn't a breath of wind.
As odd as it was that it happened less than twelve hours after I saw a doc about basically the same thing happening, and even if it was just a random feather that fell from a hawk's tail hundreds of feet up in the sky and landed perfectly on the porch by chance, it still defied the odds, and how could it just disappear? That type of thing gets my attention. Was it an Apport? One certainly has to wonder. Cool word anyway.
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