Message for Merv

(Written by Joshua Cutchin)

Click here for the original PDF.

”Somehow, I met a manic Minnesotan mystic who moved to Modesto.

It’s a long story.

And somehow, even though it was an enormous pain in the ass, I found myself agreeing to meet up with him on a weekly basis. Hell, I even started enjoying his company.

That’s also a long story.

And—despite my efforts to sometimes hold them at arm’s length—somehow, his speculative philosophy got under my skin. It’s another long story.

But in the end, Kevin Cann got me seeing ghosts again. And hearing Bigfoot.

… you guessed it: long story.

Allow me to apologize. I know that ‘long story’ refrain is something of a cop-out. The truth of the matter is that I’m galloping through all these details for a litany of reasons. Some I don’t recall. Some would force me into endless digressions. Still others? Well, they aren’t exactly fit for public consumption.

But I suppose you’re owed at least one indulgence. So let’s unpack one of those ‘long stories,’ shall we?

You can call me a lot of things, but I most enjoy being called a Fortean. Not a Ufologist, not a cryptozoologist, not a parapsychologist. Not even a paranormalist, or a supernatural author/researcher/investigator.

I’m a Fortean. If I do my job halfway well, hopefully you’ll see that in my books. They try to embody the approach of Charles Fort himself: interested in damned facts; wry, mildly agnostic, deploring labels; believing everything, and so believing nothing.

This is where most people in my position share something that set them on this path. Doors slamming in their childhood home. A gleaming disc zipping through the sky on a humid Independence Day. Something big and hairy, caught in the headlights while pulling out of a lover’s lane.

I’ve got none of that, at least not as a formative flashpoint. The only thing I can figure is that I was a ‘monster kid.’ I liked monsters. Monster movies, monster books, monster magazines, monster toys. Must be hereditary, because decades later I found out that my father subscribed to Bigfoot newsletters way back in the day.

But no miraculous moment kickstarted my career. I just love this stuff. And for a long time, it loved me back. I feel grateful to have indeed faced impossible things over the years: a door, exploding open in an abandoned hospital; a Civil War soldier’s spirit, no older than 15 by the looks of him, staring at me with hollow eyes; a few ‘Bigfoot-adjacent’ experiences, as I call them.

It was fun while it lasted. But, having said that, all of these happened about a dozen years ago, at the most recent. My experiential cup has not been filled in some time.

At the same time, I don’t wish to oversell this dry spell. I’ve had some minor highlights more recently. Some great EVPs captured while ghost hunting, a handful of anomalous light phenomena. I’m grateful for what I get.

Nothing too exciting, though. So, yes—it has been mostly a run of bad luck. By and large, I go looking and find little to nothing. For someone who believes that these phenomena—ghosts, UFOs, and cryptids— are not only all connected, but also in complete control of when, where, and to whom they appear… well, in recent years, I’ve grown to fear that I just may have become ‘paranormal kryptonite.’

(It feels like it’s not just me noticing this, either. I’m a member of a ghost hunting group back home, and some of them have noticed how odd it is that Josh just so happens to be on the dullest of cases. Alarm bells, folks. I can’t let them find me out. Your social status is pretty abysmal when not even the ghost hunters want to hang out with you.)

Still, my interest in these topics is primarily academic rather than experiential. I remain, first and foremost, a theorist. And that’s fine. We need astronauts and we need astronomers. But dammit, it’d be nice to have my cup refilled once every decade or so. Is that too much to ask?

Well, somewhere in the past year or so, I met Kevin. (Remember, long story.) And, though a combination of my nerdy paranormal speculation and some of his Platonic Surrealism—specifically the ‘plasma control circuit’ notion—I came up with an idea. A clear course of action that I hoped might improve my luck with having anomalous experiences.

No, I won’t go into it. It’s a long story, remember? And besides, some tricks are better kept secret. But, long story short… it worked. It was by far the most compelling ghost investigation in which I had participated in well over a year, maybe more.

Kevin was, of course, ecstatic to hear this news. We considered it a successful proof-of-concept. Nothing as big as we’d have hoped—no bleeding walls or rattling chains—but a clear improvement. Maybe there was something to this whole ‘Platonic Surrealism’ idea.

That was in the summer of 2025. Flashforward a few months to autumn. When setting up our next online meeting, I mentioned to Kevin that I’d be attending a camping trip with my friends to the mountains of North Georgia specifically to look for evidence of Bigfoot.

(No, it’s not just the west coast. Bigfoot’s everywhere. Because people are everywhere. But now’s not the place for that discussion.)

To be clear, this camping trip wasn’t any old off-the-cuff decision. These plans were so longstanding that they actually predated my weekly meetings with Kevin. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears (to say nothing of money and stress) had gone into planning this. Friends bought plane tickets. Vacation time was submitted. I learned how to camp (yes, embarrassing as it is, I’d never been camping).

But for all our planning, there was one thing we couldn’t control: would we run into anything interesting out there?

Well, the moment Kevin heard about my plans—and I can’t really explain how or why he did it—he intuits that there is indeed something waiting for us out there in the woods, near the Georgia-Tennessee border. A Bigfoot. A small one, but a Bigfoot nonetheless. And if I acknowledge its presence, it might put in an appearance for me.

Goes by the name of ‘Merv.’

Please let me be clear. I understand that this sounds absurd. But, after over a decade of immersing myself in these subjects, I’ve come to learn that absurdity is not only common in the paranormal space, it may well be the entire point. Something about the preposterous, humorous ‘dream logic’ of paranormal experiences—the surreality of it, to directly invoke Kevin’s philosophy—seems to short-circuit our cognition. Perhaps that same absurdity introduces us to dimensions of meaning we don’t usually access, much like the surrealist ethos itself.

On top of that, desperation tempers embarrassment. So if I need to go out into the woods and ask to see Merv, well… I ain’t too proud to do that.

Having said that, the first night of the outing (Halloween night, 2025) was an abject disaster. Yes, the autumnal north Georgia mountains were beautiful, but the rest of the day was rough. Enduring 27° temperatures at night with a surly tentmate. Practically no strange activity to speak of. Given my track record, it all seemed to predict a long weekend in the woods where I found nothing but instead lost friendships, time, and self-respect.

But, as I shivered in my sleeping bag that first night, I realized that all this may have been my own damn fault. Because there was something I hadn’t tried.

I hadn’t asked to see Merv.

To be fair, I wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. And I had no idea how those around me would react. Would it seem too silly? But the following day, with nothing to lose, I told myself that I would find an opportunity to put in a request.

Before I did that, though—and I kept putting it off, because I wasn’t sure when would be the right time—I did something else. Quite frankly, I approached the scenario with the mind of a child. For example, I’ve long had a rule that I don’t wear paranormal-related clothing while on investigations. (I mean, it’s a little too on-the-nose, right? No one sees a UFO while wearing an X-Files shirt. Get outta here with that ghost hunter hat. And you sure as hell don’t see Bigfoot while wearing a Bigfoot tee.)

But for whatever reason, I—having layered up against the cold—wore not one, but two Bigfoot shirts and a goddamn Bigfoot hat. All my pride was in the rearview mirror. Whatever works, right?

In the end, the time came for that evening’s outing into the woods. We geared up, slipping on headlamps, toting walking sticks and infrared cameras. And then, upon reaching the site, a friend happened to provide an opening for my message to Merv.

They had brought a cheap, slender cigar as an offering to… whatever was out there in the woods. The spirit of Bigfoot. Whatever. Just show up. I could be home right now.

This was clearly my opportunity. So, instead of keeping the recipient of the offering vague, I explicitly said it was for Merv. And I kindly asked him to put in an appearance.

Please? We’ve come all this way and I have friends that will resent me for this wild goose chase and good Lord I’m cold and I swear my back has been tweaked from sleeping on the ground and I missed my kids’ Halloween celebration for this and…

Something about all this must have at least sounded earnest. And it seems to have been mildly compelling. Or maybe everyone else was as desperate for some action as I was.

But whatever the reason—after clarifying where the hell I came up with this insane idea—at least one of my friends joined in, asking to see Merv, too. The minor ritual, such as it was, ended when we placed out little cigar on a large, flat rock, inviting Merv to take whatever he liked.

Look, I have to be honest. I don’t know if there’s really a Bigfoot out there named ‘Merv.’ I don’t know if what happened that night was supernatural. But I do know that I embraced the absurdity and—long story short, again—it worked.

It may not seem like much, but (after spending countless nights over the years in so-called ‘haunted houses’ and staring at the drywall in abject silence), the fact that anything happened was what I would consider a ‘win.’ For the rest of the night, we would periodically hear unidentifiable ‘whoop’ vocalizations from across the valley. If these things exist, I now believe that I have heard them.

Lest this be dismissed as wishful thinking or misidentification, our guide was otherwise adamant whenever he recognized wildlife vocalizations. Time and again the night before I had looked at him expectantly, only to be informed by the seasoned hunter that what I was hearing was an owl. A coyote. A dog in the distance.

But tonight? Tonight, he looked at us and just said, “Yup… that’s what you come out here for.” As a youngster who had listened to hours upon hours of alleged Bigfoot vocalizations, hearing them in the Blue Ridge Mountains with my own two ears bordered on the uncanny. Each call was shockingly close to what I’d heard all those years ago.

As remarkable as this may seem, however, it was far from only thing we experienced that evening. Another long story, but I’m going to keep this one long.

Earlier in the day, I had told my friends that I would consider the weekend a clear success if I had something thrown at me. (To clarify, Bigfoot is often blamed for lithoboly, the tossing of rocks by unseen forces. This is common across all paranormal scenarios—poltergeist infestations, especially—but rocks flying through North American forests are unusual, and understandably raise eyebrows for Bigfooters.)

So, imagine my surprise around the campfire late that evening when something—heard by myself and three others—landed right behind my chair. It took every one of us by surprise.

We all describe it a little bit differently. One thought it was my chair, moving. I thought it sounded like someone close by, tossing a thumb-sized stick in my direction, underhanded, landing on the dried leaves and pinestraw. Another friend thought they heard, in their words, a pop and a plop… almost like something materialized.

Materialized and, it should be said, de-materialized. Because none of us found the source of the sound when we looked. Nor did anything show up on the thermal camera, hiding in the tree line. We wondered whether or not a pine cone had fallen from the tree above, but there was simply no evidence of that. In fact, the possibility of something falling from the trees seemed to be ruled out entirely. The night before had not only been cold, it had been windy, and not a damn thing fell from any of the trees that night.

But now—between my back and my tent, a distance of maybe ten feet—something had been tossed at me. Something had been tossed at the one person who wanted more than anything to have something tossed at him. Something that almost seemed to have popped into-and-out-of existence, tossed at Joshua Cutchin, who has argued for years that Bigfoot behaves more like a forest poltergeist than a great ape.

All this happened to him after he opened his mind like a child, humbled himself, and followed Kevin Cann’s advice to speak to a Bigfoot. To ask for ‘Merv,’ as absurd as it is.

Maybe all those howls we heard and that toss we noticed that night … maybe they would’ve happened either way. But I chose to follow Kevin’s advice and—dammit—I had an interesting night.

Why? How? I don’t know. But I have my suspicions. And I suspect that belief itself is important to experiencing these things, and that same belief must be finely-calibrated. Maybe that’s what Kevin did. Maybe he re-calibrated me.

I say all this to advocate both for Platonic Surrealism and its founder, to invite you into that magical intersection of humility, impossibility, and absurdity. It’s a hard destination to reach, especially in the 21^st century. You might not find it comfortable, but you don’t have to. And it doesn’t have to make sense to you, either, especially at first.

But if you can embrace the absurdity—the absurdity of Platonic Surrealism, the absurdity of Kevin Cann, the absurdity of your own paradoxical misfortune and blessing to be incarnate at this moment in history—then you are one step closer to summoning just about anything you can imagine.

I won’t get into details, because that’s Kevin’s area of expertise.”

And besides… it’s a long story.”

-Joshua Cutchin
11/11/2025 “