by Mark Frost
2 I’ve determined that this Dr. Hayward was the father of Dr. Will Hayward, who at this time was attending his first year of medical school at Washington University in St. Louis.
In 1952, after completing his postgraduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle, Will Hayward took over the family medicine practice his father had founded in Twin Peaks in 1925. He later figures prominently in Agent Cooper’s notes of the Laura Palmer case—TP
3 Medical records indicate Traherne suffered from PTSD and there is evidence he attended a “survivors group” of abductees in the early ’80s—TP
4 I can confirm there is someone named C. Rodd (photo above) listed in the credits for stunts on a 1973 film called Emperor of the North, starring Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine, but it was shot in Oregon, not northern Canada. The same name also appears, in the same capacity, two years later on a film called Rancho Deluxe, which was shot in Montana. Rodd was nothing if not itinerant—TP
5 Carl Rodd’s new home was the Fat Trout Trailer Park, outside Twin Peaks on the way to Wind River, a town that was later listed as a place of interest in an ongoing FBI investigation of some kind during the late ’80s and early ’90s. It is a classified file of the highest order and I need time to obtain sufficient clearance to examine it.
I also find mentions of Carl Rodd in the Twin Peaks Post [formerly the Gazette] dating from the late 1980s. They would occasionally print a small slug at the bottom of columns in the letters section called “Carl Said It,” apparently quotes he would share with younger friends over coffee, a few examples included below—TP
CARL SAID IT:
It’s all connected.
CARL SAID IT:
What is, is. What was, was.
CARL SAID IT:
All there is is now.
*3* OWL CAVE
The facts of Project Sign’s Incident #18 present many hallmarks of classic “abduction” cases, which at this time had not yet been widely experienced or reported. The reference made to an owl by the girl, which unfortunately the doctor did not more aggressively pursue at the time, may indicate the presence of what are now commonly referred to as “masking memories,” that is, a memory constructed by the mind--or, according to some, implanted by an external source--to supplant a real and much more disturbing encounter with something that also possesses oversized eyes. Douglas Milford, as we know, had had his own experience with something in these woods 20 years earlier.1
The nearby presence of “Owl Cave,” and the numerous depictions of owls in its pictographs, suggest that Native Americans in the area may have had similar experiences with this phenomenon during prior millennia.
2
1 A number of indicators lead me to conclude that there is a 96 percent probability that the dossier’s Archivist is, him or herself, a resident of Twin Peaks—TP
2 Okay, I have found literally dozens of volumes containing theories and speculations about owls as metaphors and symbols—including one for the aforementioned Illuminati—“screen memories” for aliens in abduction cases, guardians of the underworld, messengers of the subconscious and even more outlandish hooey. There’s one whacked conjecture that they show up as harbingers of some weird phenomenon I can’t even figure out called “reverse speech,” which is supposed to offer some sort of window into the deepest parts of the unconscious.
Personal bias: I don’t like owls. They’re merciless predators that have always creeped me out; ever watched a YouTube video of one gobbling down an intact live rat? That’s guaranteed to destroy your appetite for a while—but the notion that three kids stuck out in the woods for a night might run into an owl doesn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary. Even Douglas Milford’s saying he once saw a walking owl that was as big as a man doesn’t seem that strange to me. Some breeds of owls stand well over three feet tall and they all plump themselves up when confronted to appear more threatening. It’s dark out there, the primitive brain stem senses danger everywhere, your nervous system is cranked up like an overstrung mandolin, your eyes can play tricks.
Sometimes an owl is just an owl.
Also, the Archivist doesn’t elaborate here, but it’s likely that the “Maggie Coulson” referenced in this case grows up to become Margaret Lanterman, a noted Twin Peaks eccentric often cited in Agent Cooper’s files, whom the locals referred to as “the Log Lady.”
If she is one and the same, it would not surprise me to learn that she once got lost in the woods overnight as an impressionable kid and later developed an entire menu of debilitating mental or emotional symptoms related to logs—TP
*4* PROJECT GRUDGE
A few months after that meeting at Wright-Patterson AFB, in late 1947 the Air Force unit known as Project Sign produced a finding for their superiors. Titled, blandly, “An Estimate of the Situation,” the paper concluded with a matter-of-fact working hypothesis that UFOs were most likely of extraterrestrial origin.
This document worked its way up the entire Air Force command ladder intact unopposed, until the man at the top--General Hoyt Vandenberg--rejected their conclusion outright. Not only that, he ordered all copies of the report destroyed.
He also ordered that Project Sign be shut down immediately. It was followed by the formation of its successor, Project Grudge--using essentially the same personnel and engaged in essentially the same work, but with an entirely different mission.1
The express purpose of Project Grudge was not only to investigate and report, but to actively debunk any and all UFO sightings as mundane phenomena or outright hoaxes. A public program of disinformation was now conducted using the U.S. media, disseminating the general idea that the whole notion of extraterrestrial life zooming around our skies in impossibly advanced crafts was crackpot stuff. Grudge was a purposeful institutionalized attempt to squelch public curiosity about these strange and rapidly proliferating incidents and sightings.2
Although Project Sign--through the work of Doug Milford and others--had occasionally been in the business of discouraging witnesses, the debunking machinery deployed by Project Grudge represented a different order of magnitude. For experts in the field in years to come, Grudge would be looked back on as the Dark Ages of UFO inquiry.
While Project Grudge proceeded publicly, General Nathan Twining--at the direction of President Truman--allegedly helped organize and served as part of an insider group of 12 scientists, government officials and high-ranking officers known by various names but most often as Majestic 12 (MJ-12). This group received the highest level of security clearance in American military history. The order to radically change the direction of the Air Force position on UFOs allegedly came from them, but since any and all public acknowledgment of MJ-12 has been disavowed ever since as a matter of policy, its very existence remains in question.3
We will return to Douglas Milford and Project Grudge shortly. For reasons that will soon become clear, a deeper look into the underlying dynamics of power and influence in his hometown are in order.
1 Verified. I can also confirm that, although it is often talked about, no copies of this document, “An Estimate of the Situation,” are known to exist. Vandenberg never spoke about his reasons for taking this action—TP
2 Verified—TP
3 I am unable to confirm whether a star chamber panel like MJ-12 ever actually existed, its multiple depictions in modern pop culture notwithstanding. It is a wildly controversial subject and may be as mythical as a unicorn.
But it is worth considering that the Archivist may be speaking here from firsthand knowledge—TP
*** NOTABLE LOCAL FAMILiES: Packards, Hornes, Jenningses, Hurleys and Martells
*1* THE BEGINNING
Twin Peaks possesses all the traditional sources of information available to any small town--library, hall of records, newspaper--but beyond that also exists a unique and even more insightful resource called the Bookhouse, which will be explained in the body of the next excerpted document.
Entitled “Oh, What a Tangled Web …,” t
his slender volume was commissioned by the Twin Peaks town council in 1984 and written by reporter Robert Jacoby of the Twin Peaks Gazette--which in 1970 changed its name to the more up-to-date Twin Peaks Post.1
ONE
OUR TALE BEGINS when three families originally tied their fortunes to the fair, abundant forests which mantled the virgin hills and byways that lay between White Tail and Blue Pine mountains.
James Packard arrived first, eldest son of a Boston shipping family, alerted by his Harvard roommate—one of the Weyerhaeuser boys—about the wealth of natural resources that lay west of the Rockies and north of the Columbia River. Inspired by a vision, Packard traveled west and, moved by its natural beauty and untouched trees, laid claim to ten thousand acres around White Tail Falls in 1890. Once the railroad built a spur line from Spokane to connect Packard’s mill to the Northern Pacific, the Packard Timber Company became the economic engine for the town that sprang up around his burgeoning business: the town of Twin Peaks.
When Friedrich Weyerhaeuser purchased a million acres in the state of Washington from the railway interests in 1900, he organized the “Weyerhaeuser Syndicate,” a confederation of lumber companies that took dominion over his new kingdom. James Packard became one of those partners and the Packard Timber Company grew along with the Syndicate, a beacon of industry attracting waves of northwestward pioneers to seek their own fortunes in the Northwest.
One family already in the area wasn’t too thrilled with the Packards’ staking their claim. The Martells, descended from French trappers who’d worked the area’s beaver population fifty years earlier, had founded their own modest lumber operation along the river three years before James Packard set foot here. Underfunded and outmaneuvered, the Martells couldn’t compete with the Packard operation, particularly after Packard bought the land surrounding every side of their 150-acre claim. Bad blood arose between the families as a result, escalating from threats to legal action to an infamous attempted murder in October of 1914.
During the annual Lumber Days Festival, Ersel Martell –second son of patriarch Zebulon Martell—and a shady confederate from across the northern border, Jean Jacques Renault, accosted James Packard’s oldest son, Thomas, outside the Grange Hall’s annual square dance. Some say it was about a girl, others say it started with a slight from Thomas about Renault’s “rough manners.” It ended in a knife fight behind the barn, with Thomas clinging to life. The assailant Renault fled back to Canada, eluding capture, where his fugitive status led him down a wayward path to a life of crime as head of the infamous Renault Gang, which would soon amass a fortune running Canadian whisky across the border during Prohibition. (Some old-timers claim that bootlegger traffic was so thick on Black Lake, you could buy a drink from the next canoe.)
Although he hadn’t personally wielded the knife, Ersel Martell took the fall as an accessory to Renault’s assault and stood trial. Despite maintaining his innocence, Ersel spent the next three years atoning in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla. Thomas Packard, in the meantime, fully recovered and soon afterwards married Minnie Drixel, the gal who—so it’s said—had been the focus of their barn dance dispute. Ersel returned to town after his release from prison, sullen and embittered, with the Packard–Martell feud now turned up to a permanent simmer.
Their feud seemed at an end when the Depression hit bottom in 1933, after the Martell family harvested the last of the old-growth timber on their land. Their fortunes steeply declined and the next spring, on his deathbed, old Zebulon Martell sold the family’s acreage and timber rights to Thomas Packard. “Old Zeb” promptly passed on, with pen still in his hand and a scowl frozen on his face.
Thomas Packard, magnanimous in victory and eager to forge a permanent peace, hired all of Martell’s old workers, and in 1939 he closed and eventually tore down the Martells’ antiquated sawmill.
The third family that prospered mightily in Twin Peaks during the early twentieth century was the Horne clan. Patriarch Danville Horne had founded a mercantile company in San Francisco that banked its first million during the California gold rush. The promise of the timber industry attracted one of Danville’s sons to the area in search of their next fortune; Orville Horne arrived in 1905 and opened a well-financed general store and dry goods business that soon eclipsed the motley local competition—one of which, legend has it, suspiciously burned down. By the 1920s, as the bounty of the logging boom blossomed, that general store grew into a three-story anchor of the business district known as Horne’s Department Store. Soon, valley residents were treated to a selection of products as fine as the splendid offerings available in Seattle, San Francisco or even New York!
Representing the pinnacle of luxury values, the Packards and Hornes provided a vital sense of social aspiration to the fledgling community. Together they became principal investors in building the Bijou Opera House, a 250-seat jewel box on the main square that upon opening in 1918 became the centerpiece of local entertainment and civic pride. It served not only as a venue for high culture—visiting opera legends like Enrico Caruso and musicians of the first rank like Paderewski often adorned the marquee—it also served as a vaudeville house on the Orpheum circuit: The Marx Brothers and a young juggler named William Claude Dukenfield (aka W. C. Fields) were only two of the great acts who early in their careers graced its splendid stage. During the 1920s the Bijou did triple duty as the town’s first movie theater, and was the first in the region to be outfitted for sound when the “talkies” came along. The debut of The Jazz Singer in 1929 made unfortunate headlines, however, when one elderly patron—the town’s last living Civil War veteran—heard Jolson’s singing voice issue from the speakers and succumbed to a fatal rictus.2
The Hornes, on the wings of these rising fortunes, a short time later created the town’s first grand hotel, the Great Northern, built on the bluffs above White Tail Falls, a short hop down a spur line from the railway station. In awe of the Great Northern’s grandeur, most of the local hotels and rooming houses that had once attracted the tourist dollar immediately folded their tents.3
But hard times lay ahead. The people of our town survived the Depression through sheer grit, stout character, and the country’s unquenchable appetite for wood. Then, along with the rest of America, Twin Peaks and Washington State put their shoulders to the wheel to aid the war effort when World War II shattered global peace. The constant threat of attack from the Japanese to the west and infiltrating Hun saboteurs from the north heightened tensions. The local premiere at the Bijou of the 1941 film 49th Parallel—which features an attack by a rogue Nazi raiding party in western Canada—sent local enlistment soaring and led to the formation of a volunteer watch that tenaciously defended the border until war was declared after Pearl Harbor.
Spearheaded by popular law enforcement leader Sheriff Frederick Truman, the group that rallied to defend our territory was officially known as the Citizens Brigade, and counted among its ranks our fittest and finest young men. For their service during the war years they soon passed into local lore as the Bookhouse Boys, named for the old one-room schoolhouse out on Highway 21 that Sheriff Truman selected as their meeting place. (Since being displaced by the town’s first official school system in 1918, it had served as a lending library.) When America officially entered the war, many of that first generation of Bookhouse Boys went on to serve with honor and distinction in every branch of our military, more than a few of whom made the ultimate sacrifice. The names of the fallen adorn the World War II Memorial in Town Square across from the Giant Log.
But the surrender of the Axis powers didn’t mean the end for the Bookhouse Boys, who have maintained their admirable tradition of community service and the twin ideals of justice and literacy ever since. Proud members of the group’s next generation included the sons of Sheriff Truman, Franklin and Harry—named for Presidents Roosevelt and (no relation) Truman, respectively. Twin Peaks is indeed fortunate that both boys grew up to follow their father in service as our local sheriff. After F
rank served with the Green Berets in Vietnam he returned to take the job after their father retired, and later a job with law enforcement in western Washington, where his wife’s family hails from. His younger brother Harry, already a deputy, assumed the office from Frank in 1981, ensuring that a fifty-plus-year tradition of a “true-man” wearing the Twin Peaks sheriff’s star continues to this day.
Some believe the Bookhouse Boys’ most remarkable achievement came in 1968, when its members made up the entire starting lineup on the Twin Peaks High School seven-man football squad. That hard-nosed crew went undefeated for Coach Bobo Hobson during the regular season, a first for our small community—the misprint on the old town sign notwithstanding—and then thrilled their die-hard fans when they rumbled through the local, sectional and regional playoffs to reach the Washington State championship game. That epic contest ended in a heartbreaking loss to the Kettle Falls Cougars, 9–6. Thus ended, to this day, the best and only chance Twin Peaks High has ever had at hanging a statewide championship banner from the rafters of Hobson Hall.4
And finally, regarding that feud between the Packards and Martells? Well, I’m delighted to report that it found a happy ending. Although both houses may not have been exactly alike in dignity—to paraphrase the Bard—they did eventually fashion a storybook ending straight out of Romeo and Juliet.
In 1958, the eldest son of Ersel Martell, affectionately known as Pete—winner of six straight Lumberjack of the Year awards at the Packard Mill—tied the knot with the youngest daughter of Thomas Packard, the deceptively lovely Catherine. After she returned home at the end of her senior year at Sarah Lawrence, Catherine and Pete got reacquainted at the annual square dance during Lumberjack Days, where, according to tradition, the newly crowned Lumberjack of the Year can ask any woman present to dance a waltz; he chose the comely Catherine, whom he’d apparently had his eye on for some time. (This was the same event, mind you, where the attack by Pete’s father Ersel on her father Thomas had taken place over forty years before.) As they tripped the light fantastic, folks said you could see sparks flying from as far away as White Tail Falls. Before the week was out, Catherine had set aside her plans to study in Europe for a year and the happy couple announced their engagement.