By Robert Cavaliere
I’ve been living under a rock these past months. Worried excessively about the delay of my work—the writing and the podcast, I withdrew to familiar rhythms. Long walks paired with listening to Alexander Soltzynitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago typified my summer days. I continued to compile research on many paranormal topics I’d plan to develop into podcast episodes. It wasn’t until the change of seasons that the urge to write and produce kicked into high gear again.
It’s the day before Halloween and it seems just right to remember Brent Thomas in the fall around this season. A few days I opened up my podcast app and thumbed through recent episodes of the Paranormal Portal Podcast. The affable host’s voice as he carries us through some equal parts harrowing and mystifying paranormal anecdotes was just the thing to get the engine going—that and a light evening breeze.
I noticed right away the last episode was released in the first week of May. I was vexed. I knew this podcaster was prolific—relentlessly producing at least three episodes a month. I don’t listen to a lot of paranormal podcasts. In fact, Brent’s style seemed almost wholly different than how I approach a subject. I like that. His is chiefly an interview show and at other times a narrative or rundown of supernatural occurrences. His last episode was about dead calls—in other words, ghostly voices from the other side calling the living.
I listened to this episode, liked it well enough and then made a mental note to look up what could have happened to the show. Was it possible that Brent Thomas, too, was wading through the waters of some sort of creative block? Could he simply gone into some much needed sabbatical of quietude? Could he have taken ill?
Incredibly, I imagined myself writing a thank you letter to Brent Thomas. He got me through some of the hard days of the lockdown of 2020. He should know, I also imagined myself writing, that I now know how much strength, how much persistence, how much this is a long-game of endurance––podcasting on the paranormal, that is. I, too, produce a show and struggle now and again with the hardships of life, with grief now older than most high-schoolers I see about. Anyway, I thought I’d sign off, I thank you. I know how hard you work.
I went about my business, still wrestling with this summer. With my own need to put my works and my show in hiatus—if only to recover my strength, to then redeploy my curiosity, to podcast again. Some couple of days later and I recalled my mental note and took action. I looked up the show’s website, typed in carefully the key words, and was in immediate disbelief when the search turned up results like “Remembering Brent Thomas.”
I finally found my way to his wife’s eulogy. She signed off as “Brent’s Loving Wife.” That stuck. The poor man. The fortunate man—to be so loved in life and now so missed in death. News of his death lingered in my mind. I didn’t know Brent. Or rather, I knew him the way so many knew of him: through his podcast, that Minnesota-nice way about him, so calm, so welcoming. It also hit close, after I thought about it, because he was engaged in the same work I am. We seek to understand baffling, ineffable mysteries. We do it our way, sometimes groping in the dark, at others shining a light in the darkness.
Some days later I found his son’s heartfelt farewell on YouTube—in all that remains of the show. Sheldon spoke straight from a broken heart. Even in his grief he sought to reassure us, to answer our questions about the future of the show. He said his father’s wish was that he take it over and Sheldon promised us that when he felt up to it, he would.
But that was months ago. And now there is no RSS, no website, no word on the future of this beloved portal to the paranormal. And no blame, of course. These thing are hard. I imagined myself, for a moment, writing to Sheldon, thanking him for his words, offering my condolences, offering any support he might need. I imagine, too, that he counts with the support of other paranormal podcasters. I think that typifies this niche. I feel strongly the people who gather both to listen or to produce these shows share a sense of wonder and generous spirit and just like Sheldon said of his father, willing to help anyone in need.
How strange–or how fitting?––that Brent’s last show would be about calls reaching our world of the living from the other side. And now, I had found myself drawn back to a show I’d lost touch with over one summer––one last summer, as it turned out. Pulled back into the nexus of the Paranormal Portal maybe through the action of nostalgia, or the desire to restore old, familiar habits, or the host’s soothing voice.
I hope that voice, wherever it’s heard now, lingers on. I hear it in his son’s voice, that same good-heartedness and wish Brent a quiet joyful passing toward the sunset in the horizon, that solemn place behind the veil.
