Let Me Share One of the Strangest Discoveries of My Life. Google Made It Possible. It Happened This Week.
Jan. 5, 2008
A few days ago, I did a Google search for "Caleb North." My son died a little under a year ago, and I was just seeing if there was anything new on the web about him. His obituary has been posted for 11 months.
I came to a link.
Caleb North
Caleb had so many curious girls to pick from.
That caught my attention. I clicked the link. There, at the top of the page, I read this:
Caleb had so many curious girls to pick from. Picking the right show heifer prospect takes a little get to know me time.
There was a photo of a young man standing next to a young heifer. Instantly, I thought: "It's my son." The skinny legs. The big feet in tennis shoes. His back was to the camera.
But the two photos beneath this one did not look quite so much like him. His shoulders are a little too broad. It is hard to see his face.
Two photos beneath these two again looked amazingly like him: his profile, his haircut. But one photo showed him with his mother. It was not my wife.
I can date the photos: April 2, 2006, the last photo on the page. It was taken at an east Texas cattle ranch.
We used to live in east Texas.
There are almost no people in modern times named Caleb North. Google lists what appears to be fewer than half a dozen who lived in the 20th century.
There is a page that describes Caleb North, a varisity football player at Chisum High School in 2006. Chisum High is located in Paris, Texas, a few miles from Sulphur Springs, where the cattle ranch is. He weighed 140 lbs. in the fall of 2006. My son was about 140 lbs. when he died in January, 2007.
Another entry for Caleb North is for a member of the Chisum Future Farmers of America, who raised farm animals in 2001. It's clear that these entries refer to the same person who was in the photos.
I used the digital White Pages to identify where he lives. He lives 119.36 miles from where my son grew up.
We hear the folk tales of doppelgangers: look-alikes on opposite sides of the world, a good twin and an evil twin. But they are not supposed to have the same name and the same geography. I don't believe in these tales.
Camera angles explain some of the mystery. But it is all very strange.