Candle Face's Codex: The Lost Souls' Secret Messages

June 1, 2024

Main Subjects: Candle Face

• Victim #31
• Victim #2

Just as Crystal told me last week, I need to pay closer attention to the testimonies. So I did what I’d do with any raw intelligence. I stripped the spirits’ testimonies down to letters and searched them for hidden words and phrases.

The idea is old in intelligence work. Lay enough material in front of you, search it from every angle, and patterns start to show. Sometimes they mean something. Sometimes they’re noise your own mind wants to read as a signal. The job is telling the two apart.

There’s a famous warning about this, and I’ll be straight with you. It cuts against what I’m about to do. During the “Bible Code” craze, when people claimed hidden messages ran through Genesis, a mathematician named Brendan McKay ran the same kind of letter searches on Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel. He turned up “predictions” of famous assassinations hidden in a book about a whale. That was his point. Lay out enough text and patterns will surface whether anyone put them there or not. Order shows up in randomness. By itself, it proves nothing.

So why do it? Because McKay started from nothing, and I didn’t. A spirit told me to look, and she was dragged back through the portal for saying it. Crystal said the clues are already in the testimonies. If she’s right, the patterns below aren’t the accidents of a long text. Someone left them on purpose, the dead for the living. That’s the claim I’m testing, and I’ll weigh every result against the boring explanation first, the way I was trained to.

I ran the search across the testimonies gathered earlier in this volume. I removed the spaces, the punctuation, and the formatting, then looked for words in every direction: up, down, backward, and diagonal. The search returned a long list. Some words showed up in every direction, which is why they caught my eye first. This entry examines the strongest of them, what they may mean, and what they may say about the Lost Souls’ testimonies.

Words Found in Every Direction

The strongest results were the words that appeared in every direction: “MAMA,” “FIRE,” “LOVE,” “SAFE,” “BURN,” “SCARE,” “NIGHT,” “TIGHT,” “GIRL,” and “SAD.” Each may point to something in the Lost Souls’ testimonies.

1. “MAMA” turned up 9 times in all directions. It may point to the maternal figures that run through the testimonies. In “Candle Face Victim #2: Mama’s Last Embrace,” the young girl’s testimony turns on her mother’s protection and the separation that followed. Most likely this word points to her, the girl who may be Tanisha Lorraine Watkins. Its repetition also raises whether Candle Face’s own past held a mother bond that was damaged or broken.
2. “FIRE” turned up 22 times. It ties straight to Candle Face’s story and the trauma around it. The fire on Ben Howell Drive in Austin, which claimed the life of a young boy and may have involved Candle Face herself, is a major event in my memoir The Empty Lot Next Door. “FIRE” appearing this often suggests that event sits close to the center of the spirits’ stories. If that’s true, understanding what really happened in that fire may be necessary before I can understand Candle Face or stop her.
3. “LOVE” turned up 12 times. It looks out of place at first in testimonies full of fear and suffering. But it may point to the bonds the spirits held onto in life. In “Mama’s Last Embrace,” the bond between the girl and her mother stands against everything Candle Face does. The count suggests attachment and loss carry more weight in these testimonies than I first assumed.
4. “SAFE” appeared 21 times. It lines up with one of the clearest needs in the testimonies: to be protected, sheltered, left in peace. Many of the spirits speak as if safety was gone long before death. This word may point to a condition that has to be restored before they can rest.
5. “BURN” turned up 28 times. It ties so directly to Candle Face that it’s hard to separate from her. It points to literal burning and the lasting damage she leaves on people. Its frequency may lead back to her central trauma and to whatever keeps that trauma active.
6. “SCARE” appeared 8 times. It points to the role fear plays in how Candle Face controls her victims. The testimonies are full of terror, and that fear is part of how she holds power over them.
7. “NIGHT” turned up 8 times. It may mark the time when Candle Face is most active and when the spirits come to me. The word may be as practical as it is symbolic. Most of what I’ve learned from the Lost Souls has happened at night.
8. “TIGHT” appeared 10 times. It may point to physical restraint, emotional pressure, or the way fear closes in. It may also point to the bonds between the spirits and the people they loved, bonds Candle Face seeks to destroy. The word carries pressure, confinement, and attachment at once.
9. “GIRL” turned up 12 times. It points back to Candle Face herself and to many of her victims, several of them young girls. It stands out because so much of this case turns on girls, mothers, and the loss of safety at a young age. That pattern may hold clues to her motives.
10. “SAD” turned up 33 times. It captures the tone that runs through nearly every testimony. Grief, loss, and longing sit at the center of these stories. The count suggests sorrow is built into the structure of the testimonies themselves.

Hidden Phrases in the Testimonies

A single word can point somewhere. A full phrase is harder to write off as chance, and more likely to show intent. These phrases turned up in the same search and may give clearer clues than the single words alone:

1. “ISAWMMAMA” (direction: down). This reads as a compressed “I SAW [MY] MAMA.” It likely points to a memory tied to the little girl in “Mama’s Last Embrace.” It could mark comfort, trauma, or recognition. In a darker reading, it could mean her mother is also in Candle Face’s Lair and the girl saw her there.
2. “HOMEMOBILEROUS” (direction: down). This points to a mobile home, which matches the little girl’s testimony in “Mama’s Last Embrace” and her account of living there with her mother and grandmother. It reinforces that setting and the instability tied to it.
3. “THEREMYGRANNY” (direction: up). Reading as “THERE MY GRANNY,” this points to the grandmother’s presence and importance in the spirit’s life. In “Mama’s Last Embrace,” Granny is a source of love and security.
4. “THEREMYGRANNYMA” (direction: down). Like the one above, this may read as “THERE MY GRANNY [AND MY] MA[MA],” placing the grandmother and mother together. It may point to the combined importance of those two in the spirit’s life. It could also mean the girl saw both of them in Candle Face’s Lair.
5. “EYESLOVEONEMORE” (direction: diagonal, upper right to bottom left). This may point to a last look, a final plea, or the wish for one more moment of love and recognition. The wording is compressed, but the direction is clear.
6. “SCAREREALTOUGHT” (direction: diagonal, upper left to bottom right, written backward). This likely points to real fear. The spelling is rough, but the meaning reads clearly enough. It reinforces the terror Candle Face instills in her victims. The fear feels immediate and physical.
7. “DONTPLEASEDONT” (direction: down). This captures a direct plea. Of everything found, this one is among the hardest to explain away. It sounds like a spirit begging for the pain to stop.
8. “TRELEE” (direction: up). This is either an incomplete phrase or a name. A search shows “TRELEE” is used as a first name. Without more context, I can’t say more. It may still point to a specific spirit, person, or place.
9. “TEXAS” (direction: down). This confirms the setting of all the testimonies. Every story so far points back to Texas, Austin most of all, and this word says the same.

What the Phrases Point To

The hidden phrases point most clearly in four directions:

• Familial connections: “ISAWMMAMA,” “THEREMYGRANNY,” and “THEREMYGRANNYMA” point back to mothers and grandmothers, especially in “Mama’s Last Embrace.” If that reading holds, the female family line in that testimony plays a larger role than I first realized.
• Settings and context: “HOMEMOBILEROUS” and “TEXAS” fill in where the spirits lived and died. The mobile home fits the testimony connected to Tanisha Lorraine Watkins and grounds that story in a specific place. “TEXAS” sets the broader pattern in a clear region.
• Emotional states: “EYESLOVEONEMORE,” “SCAREREALTOUGHT,” and “DONTPLEASEDONT” point to longing, fear, and desperation. These run through the testimonies and shape what the spirits carry.
• Desperation and fear: The repeated pleading and fear, in “SCAREREALTOUGHT” and “DONTPLEASEDONT” most of all, show the helplessness the Lost Souls hold. These point to sustained psychological torment.

Together, these phrases suggest the testimonies carry a second layer. They point to identity, relationships, memory, and emotional state. They may also point to how Candle Face holds the spirits, and to ways of weakening that hold.

Reading the Messages

The words found in every direction seem to point toward two connected things: who Candle Face is, and what might weaken her. Maternal ties (“MAMA”), fire (“FIRE”), and the repeated need for safety and love (“SAFE,” “LOVE”) keep pulling me back to her past, to her mother and to the fire. Fear (“SCARE”), sadness (“SAD”), and night (“NIGHT”) point to the conditions she works in and the state she creates.

If these patterns are real, the testimonies may point to more than memory. The unresolved grief, fear, and attachment in them may be tied to how Candle Face keeps these souls trapped in her Lair.

The search turned up a set of recurring words and phrases. Each one needs more testing. I have to run them again, compare them across testimonies, and watch whether the same patterns hold as new spirits come forward.

If any of you have ideas about what these hidden messages mean, please contact me. The words point toward Candle Face’s past and toward a way to help the Lost Souls.

Here’s a list of additional words found written backward along every direction of the search, in order of appearance:

ETAH — HATE
EFIL — LIFE
ELPOEP — PEOPLE
GNINNIGEB — BEGINNING
STNERAP — PARENTS
SDNEIRF — FRIENDS
TNAW — WANT
DLROW — WORLD
DEVIVRUS — SURVIVED
NEVAEH — HEAVEN
LLEH — HELL
DEPPANDIK — KIDNAPPED
DEPOH — HOPED
EKAW — WAKE
DEIRC — CRIED
HTAED — DEATH
YDOB — BODY
YARTEB — BETRAY
SLLIK — KILLS
DAED — DEAD
PLEH — HELP
ESAELP — PLEASE
EID — DIE

The investigation continues in the three most recent entries below. Each adds to the record on Candle Face (Isabel), the Lost Souls, and the Fugitives. You’ll find every entry to date in The Journal.