The White Stag of Chillicothe
The White Stag
of Chillicothe
On magnetic solar bursts, a 200-year-old haunting, and the Celtic Otherworld
6 MINUTE READ
Seven streams of searing hot plasma pummeled the earth, caused it to moan and creak as it fought to hold its protective shield in place.
The soles of my feet were burning. My heart fluttered inside my chest as suddenly, I was standing on the side of a hill. The moon was just a sliver, perched atop a tulip tree, and before me, a herd of brown eyes blinked.
The deer were large and small, mostly antler-free. They seemed to look right at me before walking in my direction and parting around my body — some to my right, some to my left. I turned to see where they were going when out in the distance, I saw three white stags. Their antlers glowed in the moonlight — powerful, majestic. My jaw dropped to take a breath, and then, I was back.
Under the fuzzy blanket, in my bedroom in Ohio. My blackout blinds were half drawn shut. The morning sun shining like normal.
If I had trusted just my eyes, I never would have guessed that the sun was erupting, sending its fiery self towards the earth more forcefully than it had in decades, but while my eyes struggled to see, the rest of my body knew.
My feet were still vibrating, my insides shaking like a maraca.
I think the sun is exploding, I cried to my husband while folding myself in half, trying to soothe the energy speeding through my body.
Sure enough, it was.
Sunspot AR3664 was sixteen times as wide as the earth and spewing high-energy blasts of light, straight towards our planet.
It took hours to reach the magnetosphere and trigger an active warning for a geomagnetic storm, but I felt it sixteen hours before when out of nowhere, my cells started acting like magnets. It felt like they were being pulled by some great force, but rather than escaping my body and flying to meet the sun, they were blocked by the shield of my skin.
I felt them knocking against me. Like inside my body, there lives some great magnetic being, separate from my physical form. It was begging for release as I closed my eyes and dreamt of the earthly deer, walking to meet the majestic stags.
The dream felt like a message, a secret code sent by whatever was vibrating inside me.
And as I wondered what it could mean, I saw the white stag’s face, its antlers glowing bright, and I heard the words: THE LAKE.
I immediately thought of the lake in Virginia where two centuries ago, my ancestors lived. They were the first white settlers on the western side of a mountain that did not belong to them. Eight years after moving there, members of the Shawnee tribe came to their farm, scalped two of their children, and kidnapped a third. The latter of whom was taken to Ohio and burned at the stake.
The settlers retaliated violently, killing a number of the Shawnee in return.
Over a century later, an amusement park was opened on the land where the massacre occurred, but in 1966, after six people died bizarre deaths while visiting the park, the site was abandoned completely. To this day, the land remains abandoned. It’s listed by Travel Channel as one of the “Most Terrifying Places in America” and was ranked by ABC as one of the “10 most haunted places in the world.”
I, myself, have never been, and I knew nothing of this particular family history until one day, I was living in New York and missing my home state of Virginia. I decided to watch a movie filmed in the Virginia mountains, and by the end, I was sobbing uncontrollably. I later learned that the movie was filmed on the very land where my ancestors moved after the massacre.
Ever since, I’ve observed strange incident after strange incident all connected to this particular piece of family history and that tract of land stretching from one side of the mountain to the next.
And now, it seemed to be coming up again. But why a stag? What does that have to do with any of this?
A little research revealed that white stags have held various symbolic meanings over the millennia. I was scrolling through Google results on the subject when a link towards the bottom of the page spontaneously opened. I hadn’t even seen it. My fingers were nowhere near the link to click. Nevertheless, it loaded before my eyes, and I gasped when I saw the headline:
“You wait for years to see a white stag...then three come along at once!”
Three white stags…just like in my dream.
I kept reading.
I learned that white stags are often considered messengers from the beyond and that they’ve appeared in numerous novels, including Harry Potter, The Hobbit, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The last book caught my attention because for the last eight months, C.S. Lewis has been circling me.
It all started in September 2023 when I had a dream about…The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. A movie I loved as a child but a book I’ve never read. All of this is to say, my curiosity was piqued. I wanted to know what the white stag meant in that book specifically, and so I learned that in C.S. Lewis’ famous novel, the white stag appears at the very end.
At that point in the story (spoiler alert), four English children have been living in a magical land called Narnia for nearly fifteen years. They first stumbled upon the land through a wardrobe, and now, in Narnia, they have become royalty — kings and queens. But when they encounter a white stag, it sends them back through the wardrobe. They arrive home just as the children they were before their time in Narnia except now, they have the knowledge of another world and a whole new understanding of “home.”
As I read this summary, a tear welled in my eye. For in the dream, I wasn’t standing on just any hill. I was standing on the hill at the top of the road that leads to my house. The road is named Chillicothe, and if I were to take it south, I would eventually find myself in a town called Chillicothe, Ohio, and it was there — in that very town, 241 years ago — where a young Ezekiel Clay was tied to the stake and burned.
I felt the connection between his story and mine, the blood that moved through both our bodies, and I remembered that in July 2021, just three weeks before my husband and I serendipitously found our house, I kept seeing a stag in my mind.
It wasn’t out in the world in physical objects and signs, but it was there, in my mind’s eye, staring at me: the stag.
And I flipped back to the article about the three white stags…like the three children killed in 1783…and I noticed the date of publication: March 18, 2021.
I opened my journal from three years ago and flipped to that date, and lo and behold! At the bottom of my entry for that very day, I wrote: “We decided to move to Ohio today!!”
And despite my many daydreams about moving back east and feeling the cool ocean breeze wrap itself around my shoulders — a shingled cottage in the distance, full of all the books I’ve written and read — I felt clearly in that moment that I am exactly where I’m meant to be. Home.
