Trapped Echo

The search for something real, even when it’s not.

The Center of the Universe is in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is a brick circle on cracked concrete near a run-down train depot on a downtown bridge.

Next to the Center of the Universe is a giant pole. The pole seems blank and black until you get close and see it is covered in motifs of falling airplanes. Behind the pole is the Bank of Oklahoma headquarters, a building designed by the architects who designed the World Trade Center. They made it a small-scale replica of Tower One.

The mini-WTC Bank of Oklahoma Tower was built in 1976. The falling plane sculpture, “Artificial Cloud,” was built by Apache artist Bob Haozous in 1991.

Hey, isn’t it a little weird that ten years later your mind starts asking, but the invisible hand of capitalism covers your mouth before your words get too truthy. Save it for another time: there are more concrete mysteries to explore.

No one knows when the Center of the Universe was activated — or how it works.

In the Center of the Universe, no one can hear you scream. Stand in the right place, and your voice turns into a distorted echo —but one only you can hear. Other people sound distant even when they are near, and you sound normal to them. They do not understand what is happening until they stand on the circle themselves and their own voices become otherworldly. They jump off and insist others try it, and they do, transforming from skeptics to believers in an instant.

That’s what happens when there’s proof. Or what’s supposed to happen, anyway.

Down the street from the Center of the Universe is Greenwood, once known as Black Wall Street. In the early 20^th century, Black entrepreneurs created thriving businesses, only for the neighborhood to be destroyed by white mobs who murdered dozens of Black residents and left over 10,000 people displaced.

On its centennial anniversary in 2021, the Black Wall Street Massacre was a crime Americans regarded with great concern, for it arrived before the backlash against accurate history did. Officials, including President Biden, descended on Tulsa and declared they would right historical wrongs that had long been ignored.

In 2024, the last Black Wall Street Massacre survivors, Viola Fletcher, 110, and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, lost their case for reparations. They begged Biden to fulfill his promise to help. The Biden administration refused.

Greenwood is another Center of the Universe: voices screaming in a self-contained echo that the surrounding world claimed not to hear. It wasn’t the first time. Before Greenwood, Tulsa was indigenous territory. Eastern Oklahoma is populated by Native Americans whose own ancestors’ massacres by whites were downplayed or denied.

The Center of the Universe looks like a manhole. It is so nondescript that people walk over it without knowing what they’ve found. Physicists have no decisive explanation for the echo that started in the 1980s and never stopped. The Center of the Universe is a manhole: a hole in man’s experience that offers no resolution.

I heard it was a portal to another dimension and decided to test it. I wanted to escape into an alternate 2024, one where reality and compassion were not in freefall. I stood on the circle and screamed, pleased this was socially acceptable. But my plan failed. I was trapped in an invisible silo, babbling to myself in a voice no one could hear.

“It’s not a portal,” I told my children sadly. “It’s an algorithm.”

* * *

Tulsa was the final stop on our annual road trip between St. Louis and Dallas, where we have Christmas at my sister’s house. This drive is impossible to make boring. We take different routes each time, breaking up the trip for a night or two in Arkansas or Oklahoma, and always find something weird.

Our first stop is the same: a night in the Crescent Hotel, which I wrote about in my book They Knew (excerpt in Vanity Fair) in the village of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which I discuss in detail here.

The most important thing about the Crescent Hotel is that it’s haunted. A former cancer treatment center run by a 1930s con artist who was not curing cancer but stealing money from the dying and hiding corpses on the grounds, the Crescent is the only place where I’ve had a legitimate paranormal experience. We’ve been going there since 2017, early pandemic years excepted.

I splurge on a Crescent stay because it delivers non-metaphorical ghosts that distract me from the ghosts of memory in my mind. Ghosts of reverence and regret, the word “bittersweet” tipping like a seesaw at each recollection.

My children are older, now. My parents, too.

At night my daughter and I wandered the halls, trying to coax ghosts into the open through apology. I’m so sorry they did this to you, I thought, with all the power I had. It felt right to apologize to the dead when there was no recourse for them in life.

Outside the Crescent is an old Hungarian church. I wandered inside, even though it was supposed to be closed, and sat alone. I wanted to light candles for ailing people I know — there are far too many — but I was a trespasser, and worried I’d somehow curse them instead.

I had lit a candle in a Santa Fe church in 2023 for someone with stage four cancer and they’re still alive, against the odds. Because of medical science, I know, but I still worry my candle did it. And that if I caused it, I could accidentally reverse it too.

This is what happens to your mind after eight years of no transparent public health, a deluge of state crimes, the normalization of mass death and mass murder, and an attack on human thought by artificial intelligence. The lines between spiritual and superstitious blur to the point of imperceptibility, because caring about other people has become a radical and unpopular act.

These are death cult days.

At dawn we packed our bags, and I watched the grounds awaken. Vultures gathered in the blue-eyed morning. They swarmed a tree until they buried its branches, shrieking for prey. I shuddered at their greed but forgave it. They can’t help how they’re wired.

What’s everyone else’s excuse?

* * *

Deep in the Arkansas woods, there is a path leading to a bootlegger hideout in an ancient cave. Remains of an old brick wall line the entrance, enclosed by a narrow bluff. The hideout is remote by American standards but not by Arkansas standards, which is to say anyone who wants to find it can, but officially it does not exist.

There is no marked trail and no cell service. It is how life was and should be.

Next to the cave is a waterfall. I seek out waterfalls since they resemble honest tears, and commiseration is hard to come by. The bootlegger hideout was the most peaceful place I’d seen since October, when I canoed eight miles through the Ozarks to the isolated ruins of a 1930s resort near a spring said to possess miraculous powers.

In 2024, you do what you can to ease your mind.

One reason the drive from Missouri to Texas is so interesting is because everything is rumored to have magical properties — sometimes benign, sometimes demonic. All water heals you and all caves haunt you and everything rots instead of being razed and the best geology is named for Satan.

One such place is Devil’s Den State Park, not far from the bootlegger hideout. At the visitor’s center, I read about the creation of the park during the New Deal.

“Education is absolutely essential to any measure of success these days,” a quote on the wall proclaimed, and under it, “From The Voice of Satan, camp newspaper, Nov. 6, 1936.”

What the hell? Literally, what the hell?

Excerpts of The Voice of Satan were all over the walls. Nothing explained why. “The men of this company will lay outside their GI’s tonight and dance to the music of Bertie Owen’s band in the Recreation Hall beginning at 9 o’clock,” The Voice of Satan announced on August 15, 1936.

“Do you know why the newspaper is called The Voice of Satan?” I asked a park employee.

She smiled and looked at me like I was a bit dim. “Because you’re in the Devil’s Den.”

“Why is it called the Devil’s Den?”

“Well, it has the Devil’s Lake, and the Devil’s Icebox…”

She trailed off. Where was Bertie Owen when you needed him?

I tried to look up the Voice of Satan. While I’ve found records of the documents, there is no explanation of the name — at least, not on the enshittfied internet. I wonder what would have happened had I looked it up five or ten years ago. Back when search engines prided themselves on working and folks prided themselves on knowing.

Now every search is an unmarked trail to a signpost made by a thieving robot moron. My imagination is growing as my knowledge shrinks. Which is just as well, considering where we went next.

* * *

Around 600-800 AD, the Vikings arrived in Oklahoma. Taken by the regional beauty, they carved runes into a 12-foot sandstone slab to mark their territory. The runes are written in a script called Elder Futhark and translate to “Valley owned by Glome.”

That is the premise of Heavener Runestone Park, a 55-acre rural expanse of caves and waterfalls based on the belief that the Vikings lived in eastern Oklahoma centuries before other Europeans set foot in what would become the United States.

The park was conceived by Gloria Stewart Farley, an Oklahoman who dedicated her life to proving that Vikings landed in her hometown. Dismissing an alternative theory that Scandinavian settlers carved runes into stones in the 19^th century, Farley insisted that Vikings had sailed to the Gulf of Mexico, paddled the Mississippi River to the Arkansas River, turned onto the Poteau River, and wound up in Heavener, Oklahoma.

Farley eventually found an archeologist to back up her claims and also attested that members of the Choctaw tribe saw the ancient runes first.

I have been to many strange places. But nowhere pairs beauty and bizarreness like Heavener Runestone. The lush park has a long wooden trail following the overhangs of caves — one of which is, of course, said to be an ancient Viking dwelling — leading to the giant runestone, which is preserved in a shelter with two complimentary, smaller runestones.

The setting feels dreamlike whether or not you believe the Viking lore. But you’d better believe the Viking lore, unless you seek the gentle wrath of mystic Oklahomans. I entered a curious skeptic and left with a runestone promising me the power of “Poetic Justice.” It cost a dollar and twenty-five cents, which seems a good rate for runes.

I could have stayed there all day. But we had to get to Dallas, so it was time for a straight shot drive, until we saw a Bigfoot Museum and immediately pulled over.

Folks in the Ozarks are serious about Bigfoot. He is everywhere and nowhere, like Jesus, and has spurred a line of swag, also like Jesus. When covid appeared in 2020, one of my most active Facebook groups was the Missouri Bigfoot Research Club, which had a lively debate about whether Bigfoot should be vaccinated or whether his mastery of social distancing would suffice.

The Bigfoot Museum of Talihina, Oklahoma is no exception. Despite a giant stuffed Bigfoot in a Christmas outfit greeting you at the entrance, the museum has somber and elaborate exhibits about sightings in Oklahoma and beyond.

The proprietor told us she saw Bigfoot and described the experience as traumatic. She stressed that, should we encounter him, we must respect his space. She showed me a convincing photo that I am not allowed to post on social media. She noted that the Choctaw were the first to attest to Bigfoot’s presence — the same claim made by the proprietor of the Viking Runes. I’ve been to several Choctaw history museums and am tempted to ask about these claims next time, but I should probably refrain.

The Bigfoot Museum does not charge admission: truth transcends money. We wandered freely, reading about renowned Oklahoman Bigfoot spotters like Jim “Biggjimm” Whitehead and examining casts of Bigfootprints.

I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe in Bigfoot, the Viking Runestones, God, Satan, ghosts, and whatever else we encountered. I wanted to believe because someone had done the hard work of creating a learning experience, with records and evidence.

That the evidence was questionable did not matter. It was not AI. It was not bot-vomit spit up by an inanimate digital plagiarist. It was documentation curated with human emotion. Love, fear, excitement, faith.

I wanted to believe — in Americans. In imagination, curiosity, adventure. And I could, on this backwoods backroads route. Where the oligarchs have yet not invaded, where my cell phone fails to connect, where natural beauty abounds, where people welcome strangers with strange interests. Where whether a claim was true matters less than whether it was sincere.

And it was.

* * *

Since I started writing this article, a series of terrifying events occurred. A massacre in New Orleans, an exploding Tesla with a dead man inside, a mass shooting in Queens.

It has been impossible to get reliable information about these tragedies, not for the usual reason that they are developing stories, but because the American media is mostly dead. It is paywalled, or propaganda, or published by robots.

The digital void devours everything. Silly stories are as elusive as serious ones. When I researched the places I describe in this piece, I found, over and over, incoherent compendiums scraped by AI into something resembling an “article.” I relied instead on paper brochures I had picked up on the way. I felt grateful that I’d kept them.

I used to go on road trips to get away from the news. I still seek escape but no longer know what I’m fleeing. 2025 is likely to be the year that terrible plots that I’ve been warning about for over a decade converge. I fear not only the culmination, but that it will be impossible to ascertain even basic facts.

If Marvin Gaye sang “What’s Going On?” today, it would not be a protest anthem, but an honest question. No one knows what’s going on and oligarchs are eliminating the means of finding out.

Maybe you came here to read about something more than ghosts and cryptids and dubious archeology. But I write what I know, and right now what I know is what I can see with my own eyes. Folklore that may or may not be bullshit — but the people preserving it are real.

My fellow Americans and their runes and ruins. My fellow Americans and their buried histories I dig up. The real Center of the Universe is anywhere you hear a human voice instead of the trapped echo of your own. You don’t need a portal to get there.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. I appreciate your support!

The Arkansas bootlegger cave.

The view from inside.

The Center of the Universe in downtown Tulsa.

The sculpture with falling planes in front of the miniature World Trade Center tower.

The road to runes, Heavener, Oklahoma.

Believe!

St Elizabeth’s Church with the Crescent Hotel in the background, Eureka Springs, Arkansas.