Orange Water, Red Eyes

6-1-4The creeks in southeastern Ohio run orange. Not metaphor. Acid mine drainage bleeds out of abandoned coal works and stains the water the color of rust and old blood, and the people who live near it have been seeing things for as long as anyone bothered to write it down. Red eyes in the treeline. Lights in the Moonville Tunnel. Something that howls and matches nothing in the field guide.

Orange Water, Red Eyes is twenty-five years of fieldwork in the Sunday Creek corridor, where the poisoned ground and the high strangeness sit on top of each other and refuse to come apart. Colt Handa walks the actual sites. The Truetown drainage plates, King's Tunnel, the rail bed the howling came from. He pulls the contamination records, the sighting databases, and the family stories, and lays them side by side without flinching at where they line up.

This is the opening argument for the Eidola hypothesis. Land this wounded, this chemically and economically and historically broken, starts to generate. Something comes off the damage, and it does not need you to believe in it.

The history is documented. The folklore is sourced. The sightings carry their database provenance. What you do with the pattern is your problem.