Eight witnesses, one casserole on the step, and a retired librarian who will not be told what is and isn’t good manners

The porch light at 14 Crestfall Road, Dunmore Township, Koochiching County, Minnesota has been on since Tuesday at approximately 9:47 PM, which is when Edna Varick, 71, retired head of special collections at the Dunmore Public Library, watched what she describes as three tall, pale figures in the northeast field walk calmly into a light source that had no visible origin and disappear. She went inside, put on a second casserole, and turned on the porch light. She has not turned it off.

Seven additional witnesses corroborate the sighting, including two men from the propane company who were on the road that night and have since submitted written statements that are, by their own description, the most uncomfortable documents they have ever signed. The figures are consistent with what this network’s field catalog identifies as the Nordics — tall, light-featured, associated with rural appearance events that tend to be calm, deliberate, and poorly explained. WTC has covered seventeen such events in eleven years. This is the first to involve a covered dish.

Community Notice

I was raised that if someone comes to your home, you offer them something. I don’t see why that changes just because they arrived the way they did.

— Edna Varick, retired librarian, Dunmore Township

The casserole is chicken and wild rice. It is covered in foil and weighted against the wind with a smooth stone from her garden border. She has checked it twice. She says she will replace it tomorrow if it hasn’t been touched, because it won’t keep, and she is not going to leave something out that isn’t any good. She said this in a tone that suggested the extraterrestrial component was the least unusual part of the sentence.

There is, at this hour, no indication the figures have returned. The light is still on. The radio on my desk — running, as it does, on a frequency that isn’t supposed to exist — shifted up about a quarter pitch when I pulled up the file on this one and has not come back down. I don’t know what that means yet. I’m writing it down. Mrs. Varick, for her part, says she’s not worried. She says she is simply being thorough. I have nothing to add to that.