The Hunt for the Screaming Well

On a Monday in Renton, I stood in the Black River Riparian Forest talking to a plant. 

I crouched in the soil with my guides, Jeremy Puma and Garrett Kelly. Kelly attached sensors to the plant’s leaves; A tangle of wires connected the sensors to what looked like a giant computer chip with toggles on it, and then to an amplifier. 

If everything went as it should, the plant—an osoberry, according to Puma—would tell me with its own words where I could find what I was seeking. You see, Puma, 49, and Kelly, 43 are the co-founders of Liminal Earth, a crowd-sourced map of the weird and unexplainable. And in Renton, there lurks something far more sinister than the Ikea parking lot on a Saturday. It is the rumored home to the Screaming Well, a haunted spot where the disembodied screams of its victims scream eternal. And, if you’re lucky—unlucky?—the screams follow you home. At least, that’s what a 1998-era blog post said. 

Kelly introduced himself to the plant and asked if the Screaming Well was “this way.”

Techno-babble spluttered from the amp.

“Did it just say ‘yes’?” I asked. Kelly and Puma heard the same thing. 

For my turn to interview the plant (as a journalist, it is imperative you interview any flora when given the opportunity), I couldn’t think of a question. 

“Um, what do you like about being a plant?” I asked. 

The wind rustled the trees above me. The plant, however, kept its stomata sealed. Silence.

Puma suggested a different line of questioning.

“Ask it something about the Black River,” Puma said. Yes, good idea. 

At that moment, we stood on the banks of the mostly-dead Black River. The river dried up in 1916 during the construction of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, leaving flopping salmon and the devastation of a Duwamish Village along the river in its wake. Puma and Kelly believed weird occurrences in this area—mysteriously appearing piles of oranges, a strange map with a riddle about the Black River, an encounter with a drone operator they now believe was a fairy, and the idea of the still-undiscovered Screaming Well—were caused by the river’s ghost. 

Yeah, we’re talking river ghost-type of weird. 

“Were you here when the Black River flowed?” I asked. 

Garbled chatter came from the plant. 

“I heard ‘Black River,’” Kelly said. I hadn’t, but I really wanted to. 

Kelly and Puma have never seen the Screaming Well, but they’ve gone hunting for it at least four times before we wandered into the woods together. For my latest exploration into Seattle’s subcultures, I tagged along on their latest Screaming Well excursion and had my world rocked—not by the paranormal nor the supernatural, but by the space Puma and Kelly have created for wonder and whimsy.

“For us, it’s more about getting out there and seeing what happens in the spirit of fun and not approaching everything fearfully,” Puma explained. He wore the same hat the character Dipper wears on “Gravity Falls,” a show about children exploring spooky mysteries. Puma considers himself a full-grown Dipper.  

Part of that involves using tools such as ultrasonic detectors, trickster spirit medicine tinctures, a bag of madrone berries for casting lots, a pocket watch-turned-ouija board, hagstone binoculars, dowsing rods, a memlin whistle (“What’s a memlin?” I asked. “We can’t tell you,” Puma said. Google didn’t help either), a box of wooden thumbs (“What are they for?” Puma said. “I don’t know, but having a locked box with two wooden thumbs in your bag is fun.”), a pendulum made out of an alligator claw, and, of course, a floraphone to ask plants questions and investigate potential hotspots of high strangeness. 

Kelly, who does tech at Sub Pop Records, had hooked the osoberry up to his homemade floraphone. His eyeball earrings swung back and forth as he attached electrodes to a leaf. Wires from the electrodes connected to a biodata sonification unit which translated electrical signals through a midi narrator with English phonemes. Or something like that. All of that flowed to a mini Fender amp sitting in the dirt by the plant’s roots. 

And so, there I was in the forest talking to a plant. 

After wishing I’d heard it say “Black River,” I tried again. 

“Are you ready for fall?” I asked. 

In quick rapid staccato, the plant said: “Fall off, fall off, fall off.” 

Chills pricked my skin. Maybe there was something to this. Puma and Kelly could have told me that from the beginning. 

Strange origins

Born and raised in St. Augustine, Florida, the U.S.’s oldest continuously occupied settlement, Puma was fated for an interest in the liminal. With so much history around him and the “albino swamp witch” who babysat him as a kid, how could he not grow up looking for thin places and portals?

“She would sneak books on ghosts and UFOs to me and tell me she just saw Bigfoot in the backyard,” he said. 

Kelly developed his taste for the strange on a diet of “The X-Files” and “Sightings.” Then, in college, Kelly read The Mothman Prophecies, accounts and theories of the supernatural from journalist-turned-ufologist John Keel, and “that really opened my mind,” he said.

Years later, in the early 2000s when the internet used to be fun, Puma, who had moved to Seattle, wrote a blog about politics, current events, and spooky stuff. He befriended Kelly, who ran his own similar site in the blogosphere. They had a community of internet friends with whom they swapped strange stories.

“Talking to Jeremy and this little community of bloggers that was talking about this stuff made it more fun, and… weirder,” Kelly said. 

“More magical,” Puma added.

After over a year of online friendship, a little bit of magic snuck up on them.  Kelly and Puma realized they both not only lived in Seattle, but they lived across from each other on the same Wallingford street. 

As their friendship both online and in person continued, they kept logs of their weird experiences and dreams. Puma and Kelly plugged those experiences onto a map of Seattle, which became Liminal Earth’s first iteration: Liminal Seattle. 

Mythless in Seattle

Seattle, to Puma and Kelly, had always been weird and they’d been weird along with it. 

“This area is so rich in spookiness and nature and fog and mist,” Puma said. The region was primed for a penchant for the paranormal. The television of the 90s cemented this mythology. Surrealist “Twin Peaks,” set in a fictional version of North Bend, invoked the the eeriness of the area: the woods, the owls, the churn of Snoqualime Falls. As did the “X-Files,” where early seasons of show often unearthed aliens and cryptids lurking inside the Northwest’s doom and gloom.

Then, the mid-aughts came and Seattle started acutely feeling the permanence of big tech’s presence. 

 “I moved here in 1998 before Lake Union turned into the corporate hellmouth,” Puma said.  (The corporate hellmouth used to be on the map in South Lake Union.) They feared how the influx of Silicon Valley could smooth over Seattle’s texture. 

“It was sad,” Puma said. “We thought, ‘What we can do about this?’” 

They started mapping the weird stuff: South Lake Union UFO sightings, I-5 spatial distortions, a squirrel eating a donut in Cal Anderson Park, the radioactive bubblegum ghost in the basement of the Veterans Administration building. 

Liminal Seattle became a tool to unearth the weird heartbeat underneath New Seattle’s proverbial floorboards. 

“This culture that we’re stuck in has become so disconnected from the world of myth,” Puma said, “And where has it gotten us?”

Remythologizing Their Landscape

Before we talked to any plants along the Black River, we walked through Renton’s Waterworks Gardens. Puma, Kelly, and I passed through a thicket of birch trees where the whorls on the bark looked like unblinking eyes. The two had logged this section of the path—what they called an “alley of eyes”—as strange phenomena.

“No matter where you go, as mundane as it might seem, there’s something strange there if you open yourself up to it,” Puma said. 

This is how Puma and Kelly approach the not-normal. They ask questions of their surroundings, lean into their curiosities. When they investigated the haunted Walker-Ames House in Port Gamble, Washington, instead of talking to the ghosts like everyone else, Puma and Kelly talked to the fern in the basement. 

“What does our imagination and our intuition have to do with whatever the paranormal is?” Kelly asked rhetorically. “Maybe if we’re playing a little bit something can interact with us.”

Emily Hoffman, 36, is an actor and a guide of a Pike Place Market ghost tour and has been on a few of these adventures with Kelly and Puma. She likens them to the feeling she gets before a performance.

“This may not make sense to anyone who is not an actor, but there’s always that moment right before you have to go on stage, where you’re like, ‘What’s gonna happen?’” Hoffman said. 

The possibilities of these adventures, like the possibilities of live theater, feel endless to her. 

As we meandered toward the river, two garter snakes crossed our path. We took that as a sign. Of what? Who knows. As we went, I started paying more attention, seeking out anything that felt novel. 

When a worm squirmed at our feet, we stopped and watched for a moment. I don’t know the last time I watched a wriggling worm, let alone wondered about it. Maybe this was a sign? I mused aloud about whether its tail was pointing us in the direction of the Well. Kelly said he was about to say the same thing. 

“There’s just something so genuine in a lot of the experiences you have with high strangeness,” Hoffman said. “In a lot of cases, it’s pretty endearing because you’re just connecting at a level you don’t really always get to with the rest of the world.”

Wednesday Night UFO Parties

According to Keel of Mothman acclaim, the best time to see UFOs is on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. During the pandemic, Puma and Kelly hosted virtual Wednesday UFO parties to put the theory to the test. They called it “WUFO.”

Around 30 to 40 people gathered weekly online. They sat outside and looked for UFOs. Since UFOs are hard to come by even at peak viewing times, people mostly reported the nightly goings-on outside their homes. 

“There was a stargazing side quest where we were learning about stars,” Kelly said. He described the whole thing as a “having a seance distributed over the internet.” 

For Hoffman, WUFO was a way to connect in a community that was online, underground, and disconnected. “Until you really get people talking about [high strangeness] they don’t actually know that it’s okay for them to talk about it,” Hoffman explained.

Hoffman’s interest in high strangeness started in her childhood. “As a child, I read one thing about spontaneous combustion and I was really convinced that I was going to spontaneously combust. I had to read literally everything that I could about spontaneous combustion so I could figure out how to not spontaneously combust,” she explained. 

The same thing happened with ghost hauntings. 

“My dad had to call every library that I could physically get to and tell them not to give me any more ghost books,” she said.

The anxieties faded and the interest remained. But, Hoffman only really started engaging with fellow strange thinkers after she discovered human skulls in the backyard of her Seattle rental house. Her video about the skulls gained three million views on TikTok. Though she later discovered the skulls were made of stones rather than bones, the experience was weird enough that she felt the urge to reach out to the creators of her favorite map of oddities, Liminal Earth.

“The skulls were just a good opening line, really, and that pushed me to be more social about all of it,” Hoffman said. 

As those in the know put it, there’s a limit to what people will believe, even in paranormal circles. The established lore invents a status quo even for stories from the fringes. 

For instance, according to Kelly, no one believed Joe Simonton’s 1961 alien encounter when he described how the aliens made him pancakes. “It’s not normally what you think of when you think of aliens,” Kelly said.

Often, because those stories are ridiculed, they aren’t heard as much.

“People are afraid to tell that weirder part of their story,” Puma said. Those weirder parts of paranormal tales is where the high strange—the truly bonkers—lives. 

When they’ve tabled at events such as UFO festivals and ghost conventions, they’ve explained the Liminal Earth map, Puma and Kelly will ask people whether they’ve had any unexplainable experiences themselves. 

“They’re like, ‘Oh no, no, no… except this one time,’” Puma said. “Everybody has an ‘except this one time.’ They just need a space where they can come and share it.”

The Screaming Well 

Despite the conversation with the plant, following the direction of dowsing rods, and casting madrone berry lots, we didn’t find the Screaming Well. But, as we hiked our way back to Puma’s orange Subaru, I noticed the swish of leaves, the roar of cars, and the ozone smell before the clouds unburdened themselves. My chest swelled more with each breath and I couldn’t help smiling. Even though we’d only walked around a Renton park for a few hours and not seen much, I felt as though I’d been on an adventure.

I’ve noticed I’m prone to a sense of malaise that rears its head when I haven’t done anything novel for a while. This almost claustrophobic feeling comes when I feel as if I know Seattle too well to discover anything new about it. Maybe, the devilish feeling of unfulfilled wanderlust tells me, I should uproot myself from the place I’ve lived for a decade and from the community I’ve cultivated. 

But looking fruitlessly for the Screaming Well and hunting for ghost rivers—whether or not I believed in them—got me to a part of the Puget Sound area I’d never explored. Listening to Puma and Kelly talk about their explorations up and down the region made me realize how little I really know about this place. And, doing all of this while keeping an eye out for fairies and ghosts made me see my world in a whole new perspective.

As I stared out Puma’s window and as he talked about the guy at his local weed store who’d asked him to come investigate the full-body apparitions haunting the shop, I looked toward the West Seattle hills and wondered what could be in those trees. The city felt alive to me. It felt new.