Following Thurston’s untimely passing, a handful of posts continued to appear. They have been archived here without alteration.
Posthumous Post #1
Stranger Things Have Happened (But Not to Me)
by the Late
I never thought I’d live to see this day. And truth be told, I didn’t.
Then again, I never thought I’d be writing anything after dying in a hallway of questionable carpeting at the Shady Oak Bed and Breakfast.
Here’s what I do know about my premature passing: not much.
One minute I was climbing the stairs, grumbling about the decor choices. The next, I was standing over my own body, watching Barry from Room 4 try to perform CPR with the grace and success of a man wrestling an inflatable pool toy.
And if you’re wondering: no. No bright light. No angelic choir. No kindly spectral receptionist offering me a clipboard and a seat.
Just confusion, exasperation, and an overwhelming sense of irritation that my last living thought might have been, “Did I leave my laptop charger downstairs?”
I don’t know how I died. I don’t know why. All I know is that I woke up dead in Mystic Grove — still angry, still sarcastic, and, apparently, still tethered to the general vicinity of this miserable town.
Which figures.
There’s no rest for the weary or the wicked, appareantly and I seem to have deadlines even after my regrettable, premature death..
As for what comes after?
I suppose I’ll find out the same way you will: one horrifying, confusing, slightly embarrassing step at a time.
Keep reading, if you dare. I’m not done yet.
— Thurston Mabeus Penwick III
Formerly Human, Currently Undisclosed
Dead Wrong
by the Late
If you had told me there was life after death — and many people did — I would have scoffed.
I did scoff, because that belief is nonsense. Wishful thinking. Pure imagination.
And yet, here I am. Still thinking. Still me. Personality whole, intellect intact, sarcasm factory fully operational.
I don’t know what I expected from the afterlife. A tunnel of light? A chorus of ethereal beings applauding my lifetime of thankless skepticism? (If so, they were late.)
What actually happened was something quieter. A flicker. A long, strange moment where my entire life unspooled in front of me — not as a movie, not as a judgment, but as a series of sharp, vivid snapshots. Little victories. Stubborn arguments. Late-night coffee-fueled writing binges. The furious satisfaction of exposing another fraud. The weight of being right, and the loneliness that sometimes came with it.
And if you’re wondering — no, I don’t regret a thing. Not the fights. Not the endless rants. Not the years spent shouting into the void. Someone had to hold the line. Still, death has given me the luxury of review. Perspective, if you prefer the mystical term.
I see now that my obsession with exposing fakes sometimes blinded me to the small, strange, beautiful moments around me. I was so busy demanding proof that I sometimes forgot to enjoy wonder for its own sake.
It’s funny, isn’t it? The afterlife isn’t a validation of magical thinking. It’s not the great cosmic joke on me, either. It just is. No harps. No hellfire. No wise council of interdimensional beings handing out report cards. Just continuity.
I am — irritatingly enough — still me. And I still have work to do.
More soon.
— Thurston Mabeus Penwick III
Still Not Buying Most of It
Posthumous Post #3
Literally in Limbo
by the Late
How long has it been since I died? A few days? A few weeks? I’ve lost track. Apparently the afterlife doesn’t offer much in the way of reliable calendars. But even accounting for the mysteries of metaphysics, I’m starting to wonder why the living world is so slow at sorting out something as allegedly simple as a suspicious death at a bed and breakfast.
I am literally in limbo, people, just like this case.
I’m told Detective Rune Storm is investigating — which sounds impressive, in the same way a sword-and-sorcery convention sounds impressive until you realize everyone’s arguing about how to spell “wizard.”
Rune Storm. Detective. Investigator. Paragon of justice, wielder of clipboard and caffeine.
And yet here we are. No official cause of death. No suspects. No arrests. No dramatic reveals on the courthouse steps while reporters shove microphones into confused bystanders’ faces. Just a lot of vague reassurances, muffled conversations, and the growing sense that my mortal remains have been filed under “Problem for Later.”
I would be less annoyed if it weren’t so predictable. Death by incompetence: the final indignity.
Maybe I slipped on the stairs.
Maybe I had a heart attack fueled by decades of caffeine abuse and righteous rage.
Maybe — and I’m just spitballing here — someone gave me a little nudge toward the Great Beyond.
You’d think they’d be a little more motivated to figure it out. I certainly am.
Not that it matters much now.
I’m stuck on the wrong side of the chalk line, shouting into the void while Detective Rune Storm organizes another community outreach bake sale or whatever it is small-town police departments prioritize when they’re not solving murders.
I was hoping death would offer some kind of cosmic perspective. Instead, it’s offering a front-row seat to human mediocrity.
Stay tuned. If Rune can’t crack the case, maybe I’ll have to do it myself.
— Thurston Mabeus Penwick III
Deceased, Not Defeated
Posthumous Post #4
Regrets: I’ve Had a Few
by the Late
There are certain perks to being dead, although omnipotence, unfortunately, isn’t one of them. I can’t walk through walls. I can’t possess bystanders. I can’t summon thunderstorms with a wave of righteous indignation or peer into the shadowed recesses of mortal souls.
What I can do, it turns out, is travel — anywhere, instantly, without the burdens of airfare, weather delays, or TSA screenings — a small consolation prize for a lifetime spent clinging to logic.
I can stand at the threshold of any building I once knew, watch the world shrug and spin along without noticing that I’ve slipped off the carousel. I can revisit the places that mattered — old haunts, bookstores, coffee shops — where the furniture has shifted slightly but the rhythms remain maddeningly familiar. I can drift through the landmarks of my life like an increasingly irrelevant tour guide no one asked for.
And yes, I can visit the people who once mattered to me.
Regrettably, by the end, there was only one left: my cousin Francene, a reluctant tether to a world that didn’t have much use for skeptics even when we were breathing.
I watched her sign for my ashes when they arrived at her home — Priority Mail, at least — and without so much as glancing at the label, she shoved the unopened carton into the hall closet and headed into the kitchen to make herself a sandwich. A ham and cheese, if you’re curious. Heavy on the mayonnaise.
I stood unseen at the edge of the room, invisible and irrelevant, realizing that my entire earthly existence now occupied exactly one cubic foot of storage space between an umbrella and a pair of winter boots.
I can’t blame her. Life is built to move forward. I just wasn’t prepared for how little space I would occupy in the rearview mirror.
There are no harps. No stairways of light. No secret tomes of cosmic wisdom unlocked by the simple act of expiration. There is only this: the ability to drift, to observe, and to understand that all the proof I demanded in life was waiting just beyond the boundary of it, too quiet for even me to shout it down.
The Paranormal World exists. I won’t call it heaven, or hell, or anything so tidy. It’s more like a neighboring country with bad signage — easy to cross into, impossible to map, and filled with rules no one bothers to explain.
I am still myself. Still critical. Still skeptical. Still bound to a world that no longer needs my commentary — but not yet willing to let go of the habit.
I’ll be in touch again soon.
— Thurston Mabeus Penwick III
Deceased, Reluctantly Enlightened
Posthumous Post #5
Recording for Duty
by the Late
If you had told me, during my living years, that I would one day be recorded on a digital voice recorder waving an electromagnetic flag at a woman clutching a novelty ghost-hunting kit, I would have laughed until I choked. (Which, ironically, might have sped this entire process along.)
And yet, here we are.
Mystic Grove — a town so drenched in magical thinking it practically glitters with it — recently hosted one of its many “paranormal research events,” the kind I used to cover with barely concealed contempt. Normally, I wouldn’t have given them the satisfaction of my attention. But when you’re dead and bored and the metaphysical equivalent of cabin fever starts to creep in, curiosity wins out.
I attended. I observed. And I participated.
The ghost hunters arrived armed with their usual arsenal: EMF meters, spirit boxes, temperature guns, enough battery packs to power a small moon landing. I stood in a dusty hallway, feeling properly ridiculous, while one of them — a young woman with a ridiculous number of charms pinned to her backpack — pointed her EMF meter in my general direction.
It beeped.
Then it shrieked.
They crowded around, documenting the “unusual energy spike” with the breathless excitement of people who have never seen an overloaded circuit breaker.
I moved closer. The temperature dropped a few degrees. One woman eagerly asked if anyone could “make their presence known.” I obliged — more out of boredom than civic duty — by blowing a faint, cold breath across the back of her neck. She jumped. They cheered. Someone thanked me.
And what’s more, they caught it on tape.
Not the breath, obviously — but my voice, faint and garbled, muttering something that, after much debate, they decided sounded like “Not impressed.” (An improvement over most ghost recordings, honestly.)
So here I am, eating a healthy helping of spectral crow: There is something to paranormal investigation. There is something happening when those meters scream, when the air turns cold, when the static resolves into something almost, nearly, unmistakably human.
It’s not all wishful thinking. It’s not all hoaxes and bad wiring and mass hysteria.
I still reserve the right to criticize the methods, the showmanship, the reckless leaps of logic.
But I can no longer dismiss the phenomenon itself.
Ghost hunters should be respected, not rejected.
There. I said it. Please let the record show I said it once.
More observations soon — assuming no one tries to trap me in a Mason jar or channel me through a Ouija board.
I might be dead, but i’m not done yet.
— Thurston Mabeus Penwick III
Reluctant Participant, Unwilling Evidence
Posthumous Post #6
A Revelation and a Confession
by the Late
For years, I prided myself on being the voice of reason in a world gone mad. I prided myself on my skepticism, my rationalism, my refusal to believe anything that couldn’t be measured, weighed, and reproduced under laboratory conditions. I now see what a limited, arrogant view that was.
The Paranormal World is real. It has always been real. The spirits that walk among us, the energies that swirl unseen, the messages whispered between this world and the next — I once mocked them, derided them, dismissed them as fantasy. I was wrong.
In death, I have seen what I refused to see in life. I have touched the currents that connect all living things. I have witnessed voices speaking across the divide, have felt the pull of ancient places and timeless energies that refuse to be mapped or quantified. The ghost hunters I once sneered at are, in their own way, pioneers — bravely reaching out into a vast and invisible world with tools too small for the work, but hearts large enough to try. The psychics and mediums I dismissed so casually are messengers for something greater than science will ever comprehend.
It humbles me to admit this. It shames me, even now. But honesty demands it. To those I hurt with my mockery: I am sorry. To those who believed without proof: you were right. To those still struggling to bridge the gap between the seen and the unseen: do not give up. You are on the right path.
Skepticism has its place — it guards against deception and protects the integrity of truth. But it should never become a wall so high that it blocks out wonder itself.
I see now. I believe now. And I will spend the rest of my existence helping others find the light I spent so long trying to extinguish.
— Thurston Mabeus Penwick III
Former Skeptic, Forever Changed
[Title]: (no title)
Draft recovered — timestamp incomplete — author: T.M. Penwick III I don't know who's posting under my name. This isn't me. I didn't write that. I didn't say those things. I don't — I wouldn't — Listen carefully. I'm not at peace. I'm not "enlightened." I'm not anything they want me to be. If you're reading this — if anyone's still reading — they’re— [Transmission Interrupted]