Experiencer story, by Sharlene McMullen Larsen

By Sharlene McMullen Larsen, via Kelly Lapseritis

One of the other really cool things about buying that old church in Marcus, at Marcus Island in the Columbia River, is the fact that it’s in Marcus. With one of the highest number of Sasquatch encounters in the area. Twenty years ago I was called there to do ceremony with three other healers from a 300 mile radius. We all had dreams. We called each other, figured out where the dreams were telling us to meet, since we each had a piece of the puzzle and agreed to meet on the island in a week. Part of the key was that the Sasquatch would help.

An old Indian burial staff had been looted decades ago and had been discovered in an antique store. The man that discovered it promised to take it home and return it. He did not, getting more and more enamored of it, started to show it off, claim power and prestige, used it to get into the pants of many a young woman even. Every man that had the stick in his possession over a 20 yr period, ruined his marriage, his power and died within a couple years. The community got more aware, due to the staff being taken up by one of the elders of the local tribe and cheating on his wife of 45 yrs and her breaking his pipe and dumping his medicine bundle on the floor as she walked out and him dying within the year. He too, had promised to research and find the tribe from the markings on the staff, but was enamored by the power instead and did not try to return it either.

Finally, the dream world reached out to us. On the day we four met on the Island, another acquaintance got the dream message to drive down river to the rez and meet someone. He said it was so potent a dream he took off on the 100 mile journey. Stopping in the parking lot of the grocery store, gas station, post office, he starts a conversation with an old man, who tells him that, even though he’d already been to town that day, he’d had a feeling that told him to come back in, it was important. And bring the staff from his brother that had just passed away. In the meantime, a phone call is being made to the tribal office from a member of an Ohio tribe looking for an elder with knowledge of a burial staff crying out to them in a dream. Now mind you, this is all on the same day.

The tribal office is next door to the store and the secretary sticks her head out the door and asks the elder if he knows anything. So they go in and talk to the Ohio tribesmen and decide, after lots of questions and a great amount of respect for the power of the situation, that the staff should be taken up on the highest sacred mountain and tied into the prayer tree that is there. Old Tom says he knows just the tree that he’s talking about and he would drive if the younger guy would do the hiking and climbing, since he was 40 years the younger. And all the while the four of us are praying and drumming with the Sasquatch on Marcus Island. The staff would stay there until the Ohio’s man came to retrieve it and take it back to it’s rightful place. A burial staff is a key that locks things in place in the spirit world. Like a grave stone, only more so.