A man in the Beard Building hallway. A red-haired young man with wire-rim glasses. A German frontiersman in tweed and tiny round spectacles. An elderly Comanche woman in a yellow floral bandana. They did not arrive as research subjects.
Clairvoyance and mediumship are the terms I use for experiences I understood as perception or communication beyond ordinary explanation. The words identify the kind of experience I am describing. They do not, by themselves, establish who or what was encountered.
In several cases, information came afterward. A building history. A family conversation. A deed. A map. An archival record. Sometimes what I later found gave unexpected context to details of an earlier experience. Sometimes it complicated them. And sometimes nothing could be verified at all.
I learned not to make those categories the same. A record could establish that a person lived, that a building existed, or that an event had been reported. It could not, on its own, prove the source of an earlier impression. The experience and the research belonged beside each other, but each needed its own account.
That changed the work. I learned to preserve an experience before later research could alter my memory of it. Names, images, circumstances, and uncertainty all mattered. So did the order in which information arrived. A later association was not something I should quietly move backward into the original encounter.
Beard, Steve, Brinn, and the Comanche Elder Woman enter the Diaries through different relationships and different kinds of evidence. Their profiles do not resolve those differences into a single explanation. They show how an encounter can lead into history, grief, recognition, or a question that does not close.
This practice did not give me permission to stop investigating. It gave me reasons to begin. The task was to follow what could be followed, record what could be recorded, and let uncertainty remain visible.
Not every encounter resolved. I learned to let unresolved material remain unresolved.