The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  It felt a bit morose to mention such a thing at Thanksgiving, but I couldn’t not think about it. Bob immediately knew what I was talking about. He said the rumor was that the woman’s body had lain in the woods for days, within sight of passing cars, before anyone noticed.

  Could she be someone I’d met? I’d spoken with so many electrosensitives over the two years that I’d been visiting, and all their tales of suffering had clouded together. I’d grown deeply skeptical of their ailment, to the point that I’d stopped being concerned for them. Now someone had died.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You’ve Got to Experience It”

  “OH MY GOD!” SUE HOWARD SAID. “So much has happened since I last spoke to you.”

  I was at a Christmas Day gathering of the electrosensitives. Sue’s husband, John, was in the kitchen chopping potatoes for our potluck dinner. He’d arrived that morning, having driven through the night from Westchester—and this time he didn’t plan to go back to New York. They would now both be full-time residents of Green Bank. That fall they’d purchased a 255-acre property, which included 122 acres of cow pasture and rolling hills that could protect them from neighborhood WiFi. It was a quiet zone within the Quiet Zone. In a sign they’d made the right decision, their U-Haul had by chance featured a giant image of the Green Bank Telescope—part of the moving equipment company’s efforts to promote travel across America. To the Howards, it was providence. They still had to build a house on their new land, so for the time being they continued to rent Diane Schou’s mobile home.

  “We’ll have to take you to our property and walk you all around it,” Sue said. “It’s a big, beautiful forest.”

  About two dozen electrosensitives and their spouses crowded inside an old farmhouse attached to an inn called Mountain Quest. Steaming platters of food crowded onto the tables. We all gathered in a circle. Allan Clark, who’d told me a year earlier that he could make lightbulbs glow with his bare hands, said a prayer. We each grabbed a plate and dispersed into two dining rooms. I sat beside a woman named Clover, with whom I’d once locked arms at a square dance. Across the table was a family of four—the only family of color in the group. I introduced myself, and the mother said her name was Sittul Monna. She was from Bangladesh and her husband was from Haiti. She looked at me more closely and exclaimed, “I’ve seen you jogging in Prospect Park!”

  I had to ask her to repeat herself. She’d seen me in Brooklyn?

  “I go to the farmers’ market every Saturday and I know that I’ve seen you!” she said.

  We were practically neighbors in New York City. And we’d both ended up in the Quietest Town in America for Christmas. It was the family’s fourth visit to Green Bank since 2016, after initially coming on behalf of their eleven-year-old son, who they believed had developed electrosensitivity from a vaccine. The boy was recovering thanks to the family’s visits to Green Bank, Monna said. They wouldn’t be allowing their daughter to be vaccinated, she added.

  The family was looking into purchasing property in Green Bank because of their concerns about all the wireless technology in the city. “That kind of environment can kill you,” Monna said. In their Brooklyn apartment, she had replaced all her lights with special red bulbs. She never looked at a computer screen without wearing blue-light-blocking glasses. She always wrapped her head in a protective scarf when she rode the subway.

  “I can’t handle big cities,” Clover chimed in. “I fall apart. I can’t think straight. Even going into Lewisburg, I start cross-wiring, I start doing the opposite of what I want to do. It’s very frustrating.” She added that “places with a lot of industry, WiFi,” had high rates of cancer and other illnesses—“it’s very straightforward.”

  The others nodded along. Having grown up in an evangelical church and witnessed how worshippers fed off one another’s religious zeal, I could recognize the group fervor that happened whenever the sensitives gathered. They helped each other believe in the reality of their illness and encouraged one another to recognize “evidence” of the harm from radio waves. In Green Bank, they had found not just quiet but companionship and validation.

  AFTER DINNER, I introduced myself to the inn’s owner, Susan Alexander Bennet, who went by Alex. A gray-haired woman with intense green eyes, wearing a frilly green blouse and Santa Claus earrings, Bennet seemed to get on well with the sensitives. She’d turned off the WiFi for the gathering, and as a general policy she encouraged all guests to stay off their devices because “we’re really trying to help people break away.”

  Bennet and her husband, David, had purchased the 450-acre property in 2001, expanding the original farmhouse into a conference center with a two-story, twenty-six-thousand-volume library. They’d moved here from Washington, D.C., where Bennet had worked for the U.S. Department of the Navy as chief knowledge officer and deputy chief information officer for enterprise integration. She held a doctorate in “human systems engineering,” which I gathered to be a mix of business management, psychology, and information technology. She was also a Reiki master, meaning she believed she could heal people through energy vibrations. She told me the Quiet Zone was an asset to her work, calling Pocahontas “one of the purest areas” because of the abundance of nature and the lack of cell service. I asked if she could tell me more about how life here was unique. She told me to follow her across the hallway.

  In another room, the walls were covered with dozens of framed photos of ghostly black-and-white images. At a table in the corner, Bennet picked up a photograph and showed it to me: it was her dog, Sash, who had died years earlier. Bennet held up another photo: it showed swirling fog. Bennet put the photos alongside each other. The fog had an uncanny resemblance to Sash. She believed the spiritual presence of Sash was captured in the photograph.

  “These are not ghosts,” she said. “These are messages. These are energies.”

  Bennet gestured around the room. She had nearly fifty thousand such photos of “energy spirits” or “mysts,” as she called them. They appeared on clear, fogless nights when she walked outside, sang into the darkness, and asked for these paranormal energies to manifest themselves. After several flashes of the camera, the orbs would appear. “Dimensional holes open up and thousands of these orbs come streaming out,” she said. She’d self-published a short book about the phenomena called The Journey into the Myst. It was available on Amazon, she added.

  Another hundred people had been able to get their own photographs of the mysts, Bennet said. On the wall was a framed photo of a foggy swirl that resembled Mother Teresa, meaning that Bennet believed the saint’s actual spirit had visited Pocahontas County. Why here? Because it was the Quiet Zone, where airwaves were free from interference and people free from distractions, and therefore able to tune in to their surroundings, Bennet said. She showed me another myst that, with some imagination, looked like a person playing the violin. She believed it was the presence of her first husband, a violinist, who had died years earlier.

  “Can I play devil’s advocate?” I asked. “You know how when you look at the clouds and see different objects?”

  Bennet smiled. “Isn’t that wonderful?” she said. “Our reality, everything that you do, you create from your own head and from your set of experiences . . . What you see is going to always be unique to you based on your experiences, your beliefs, your values, your mental models, et cetera.”

  “So how do you know if it’s actually your late husband in the myst or if you just wanted to see that?”

  “I wouldn’t have ever wanted to see him—I divorced him!” Bennet shot back. Then she laughed. “Actually, it was very comforting to see that picture. I thought, ‘That’s great that he’s still nearby and hopefully not holding any negative energies.’ But anyway, you can see the face. You can see the violin. It’s pretty easy.”

  While Bennet thought she had discovered an interdimensional portal in her yard, each time I visited Green Bank was like crossing into another dimension, or at least an alternate reality.


  When I later asked Bert Schou what he thought of the mysts, he sounded surprisingly skeptical.

  “I can’t discount it, but I can’t totally believe it,” he said.

  “There’s a parallel between you doubting the mysts and other people doubting electrosensitivity, no?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Bert said. “You’ve got to experience it.”

  Before leaving Mountain Quest, I was tasked with vacuuming the dining rooms. Sue Howard said she and the other sensitives were pained by the touch of the machine, so I agreed to expose myself to the supposedly harmful electromagnetic radiation. I also had to roll my eyes. If it wasn’t good for them, why was it okay for me? We had all sat under the inn’s lights all afternoon, near a lit-up Christmas tree, and I’d even spotted several smartphones at the tables. Yet they couldn’t touch a vacuum?

  I found Bennet cleaning up the kitchen, and she offered me a glass of water that had been run through a special purifier made of crystals.

  “This is with crystals,” she said, handing me the glass. I sipped. “This is without crystals,” she said, handing me another glass.

  I said I couldn’t taste the difference.

  “Take another swallow,” Bennet said, as if she were willing me to taste the power of the crystals.

  We were all putting on our jackets when I finally broached the subject of the electrosensitive who had died. There were nods and murmurs. Everybody had heard about the suicide, but nobody knew the woman’s name or any concrete details about her death. Kathryn Stauffer, the sensitive from Illinois, said she’d heard the woman was from Virginia and had stayed overnight at the Boyer Motel. Stauffer herself once tried to stay there but was so bothered by its air conditioners that she’d instead slept in her car.

  “She probably came here desperate,” Stauffer surmised. “She probably got here and thought, ‘It’s no good here, either,’ and didn’t take the time to find one of us.”

  A COUPLE DAYS AFTER CHRISTMAS, I visited the county clerk’s office in Marlinton. As I flipped through a huge book with hundreds of pages of death certificates, a name caught my attention: Marianne Roberts, age sixty-five, of Crozet, Virginia. Date pronounced dead: September 14, 2018. Cause of death: “Perforating gunshot wound of the head.” How injury occurred: “Shot herself.” Place of injury: “Wooded area,” five miles from the Green Bank Observatory.

  I left the clerk’s office, walked down the carpeted hallway, and turned the corner toward the county prosecutor’s office. Eugene Simmons waved me inside. He had handled the case—yet another mysterious death over the decades he’d been in the office. He confirmed that Roberts was the sensitive who had killed herself. She was last seen alive on September 11 at the Boyer Motel. She’d checked out, driven a mile up the road to Boyer Hill Mennonite Church, walked down an embankment into the woods, and shot herself in the head. Three days later, her body was discovered by a road crew. Simmons had inspected the scene, finding it apparent that Roberts died by suicide. Police discovered a pistol by her side and several suicide notes in her car. To get more details about the woman, Simmons suggested I speak with the Boyer Motel’s owners, Frank and Jane Murphy, the last people known to have seen Roberts alive.

  Later that week, I found Frank at his motel, and he told me he remembered Roberts. She’d taken an interest in his cats. “Come up to the auto shop, my wife can tell you more,” he said. His wife, Jane, worked at Murphy’s Auto, run by their son. Frank added that his son had actually spotted Roberts’s body in the woods but hadn’t called the police because he’d thought it was a mannequin discarded over the embankment—which sounded odd, at the very least. I didn’t know of a single store in the area with mannequins, meaning there wasn’t exactly a mannequin glut in Pocahontas. And in any case, why would someone go through the trouble of dragging a mannequin into the woods?

  I followed Frank a mile up the road to the auto shop. Jane sat at one of three metal desks, eyeing me warily. Her son, Mike, a stern-looking man with a dark mustache, glared at me from his desk. His wife, Karen, called Frank into a back room. Nobody seemed excited to talk to me.

  “I have no idea what happened,” Jane said, lips pursed. “I only talked to her a couple times. She came to play with my cats and talk about her cats.” Roberts had arrived without a reservation. She used the Murphys’ home phone to call her employer in Virginia, letting them know she’d be back in a few days. She left nothing behind when she checked out the evening of September 11.

  Karen called Jane into the back room. Then Karen reemerged alone. “You need to leave now,” she said to me.

  I asked what the problem was.

  “I think you’re an investigator,” she said.

  I repeated that I was a journalist.

  “We’re working here, buddy,” Mike growled in a way that made clear I was not his buddy. “We’re trying to finish a Friday and I’ve got a pile of shit going on. Just get the hell on out of here.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “The Only Way Out”

  ANY SUICIDE IS UNSETTLING. Details around this incident left me feeling especially uneasy, from the fact that Marianne Roberts had driven into the Quiet Zone with the seeming intent to kill herself, to how her body had lain unnoticed for three days—save for the guy who mistook her for a mannequin. Had she killed herself out of desperation? Was she trying to send a message? If so, what was that message?

  The death hadn’t appeared in the Pocahontas Times, but I did find Roberts’s obituary online, and it listed the name of a sister in Texas. I looked her up, found a phone number, and called. Leslie Stanga picked up. She seemed eager to talk, as she was still trying to make sense of her sister’s death.

  “She barely told me she was feeling so bad,” Stanga said, “so I was totally blindsided when we found out that she had committed suicide.”

  The sisters hadn’t seen each other in years, but they’d kept in touch by phone, and Roberts had said she felt pain from WiFi and cellphones. Stanga was unaware that Roberts believed WiFi was literally killing her.

  Stanga helped put me in touch with a handful of Roberts’s family and friends, and in speaking with them a picture emerged of an intelligent and ambitious woman, obsessive and intense, idealistic and empathetic, who became reclusive in her final years. Born and raised in Louisiana, Roberts had attended Vassar College in the 1970s and then gone to Harvard University for her MBA, earning her master’s degree from the world’s most prestigious business school not long after it started admitting women. She worked as an investment banker for the Wall Street firm Dillon, Read. She briefly married and divorced, never having children. In 1986, she abruptly switched careers and became a caretaker at Innisfree Village, a rural community for adults with disabilities near Shenandoah National Park. She got involved with animal rights advocacy in nearby Charlottesville through a group called Voices for Animals, which rescued feral cats and provided free spaying and neutering. Charlee Pawlina, who co-led Voices for Animals with Roberts, described her as “a brilliant woman filled with compassion for everybody” and “one of the most nonviolent people I know.” What changed to make her commit such a violent act?

  Around 2015, Roberts’s health became an issue after she was exposed to a large amount of mold while helping a friend named Donna Middleton move out of an old barn house. “The mold issue led to a downward spiral of things she was allergic to,” Middleton said. The same year, Roberts discovered she had benign brain tumors called meningiomas. One side effect is tinnitus, or ringing in the ears, which Roberts later claimed to suffer from. In 2016, Pawlina’s husband developed a brain tumor near where he’d always worn a Bluetooth earpiece, which led Roberts to research how the devices emit electromagnetic frequencies. Then she personally started to feel sensitive, becoming disoriented, dizzy, and nauseated when near electronics, with the sensation of her body vibrating, buzzing, and burning.

  Doctors could offer Roberts no explanation for her symptoms, so she began researching alternative healing methods. Alre
ady a vegan, she cut more foods from her diet, losing about seventy pounds between 2015 and 2018. To water bottles, she applied special stick-on labels that imbued the liquid with “healing frequencies.” She consumed a cocktail of herbal supplements, including molecular hydrogen and magnesium.

  Roberts spent around $10,000 on protective EMF-blocking gear: hat, gloves, face mask, and specially designed wire-mesh clothing that looked like chain mail armor. Family would later discover hundreds of dollars in unpaid bills for the gear, and Stanga would angrily call one of the companies to accuse it of preying on her sister’s paranoia.

  Roberts became wary of going outside for fear of being exposed to cell signals. She curtailed her computer usage and began turning off her power breaker. She developed neck pain for which surgery was recommended, worsening whatever suffering she already felt. Monika Kohler, a coworker, recalled Roberts saying she felt enough pain to jump off a cliff. Kohler asked if she had suicidal thoughts. Roberts said no.

  She tried going out west to detox. She spent time in Arizona and visited a clinic where she paid thousands of dollars to undergo a weeklong body detoxification. Nothing seemed to help. Then Roberts visited the National Radio Quiet Zone. When she returned, she told friends she was considering moving to Green Bank.

  In September 2018, several months after Pawlina’s husband died from his years-long battle with brain cancer, Roberts made plans for a trip to the Quiet Zone. She left behind meticulous instructions on how to care for her cats. “It somewhat seemed she was leaving to not come back,” said Kohler. Friends and family later learned that Roberts had tried to euthanize her sixteen-year-old cat. When the vet refused, Roberts had responded, “I could die at any moment and I want to make sure this cat is not going to be stuck in a shelter.” The vet agreed to adopt the cat.

  On Tuesday, September 11, Roberts called Kohler from the Boyer Motel near Green Bank and said she’d be back at Innisfree by the end of the week. When Roberts didn’t return by Friday, Kohler became concerned. She called the motel and spoke to Jane Murphy, who said that Roberts had checked out days earlier. A few hours later, Kohler received a call from Murphy saying police had found Roberts’s body.