Somewhere Near Witch Mountain

Lauren Nixon-Matney • March 1, 2026
Somewhere Near Witch Mountain
Retro pixel art image of a family of five standing together at dusk facing a glowing mountain, inspired by Escape to Witch Mountain and themes of childhood wonder, memory, return and grief. Part of the Searching for Stars Cinematic Embers series.

It didn’t feel like déjà vu exactly… but it didn’t feel like the first time either.


It felt like stepping into a dream I hadn’t realized I’d memorized. Like driving straight into a movie I’d rewound a hundred times—until the colors bled, the tape hissed, and the scenes flickered with that warped magic only VHS could hold. A dream so woven into me, I stopped knowing where the story ended and my memory began.


The fog in Carmel and Pebble Beach rolled in like recognition. Not from a place I’d lived, but from the glow of a screen. A silver sheen of half-remembered light. Escape to Witch Mountain. Child of Glass. Watcher in the Woods. These weren’t just films. They were frequency. They were part of my internal mythology.


This wasn’t just a road trip.

It was pilgrimage.

Part childhood myth, part family memorial, part secret dream come true.


⸻


We found our legends in the clearance bin.


Godwin’s was the kind of grocery store that smelled like old linoleum and Pine-Sol, with a dusty back corner where the video rentals went to die. It’s also where Jamie used to work—long before we ever met, which feels oddly poetic now, like something out of a time-travel subplot. Back then, when a movie stopped getting rented, they’d toss it onto a shelf marked down to a quarter, maybe fifty cents if the cover sleeve was still intact. 


That’s how we found Child of Glass. Just sitting there, humming with forgotten magic.


The moment we brought it home, it became sacred. My brother and I watched it so many times the tracking slipped, the picture twisted, and the sound fizzled into soft static. Didn’t matter. We knew it by heart. That movie didn’t just stick with us it attached itself to something under the skin.


It was eerie and aching and beautiful. The kind of story that lingers like a secret.


Years later, Bobby called me out of nowhere no hello, just urgency.

“Lauren, what was that movie we used to watch?”


I didn’t even let him finish.

Child of Glass, I whispered. Like I’d been keeping it safe for both of us.


Some stories don’t fade. They just wait in the dark until you call them by name.


⸻


Not all the movies that shaped me were filmed here but somehow they still showed up.

They traveled with me, tucked in memory, humming beneath the surface like a frequency only I could hear.


Child of Glass wasn’t made in California, and neither was Watcher in the Woods. But as we drove through that strange, sea-wrapped light fog curling around the trees, sky pressing low like a whisper… I swear I could feel them anyway. That quiet tension. That almost-electric stillness. That sense that the veil between worlds was thinner here, like something forgotten might step out of the mist at any moment.


Maybe it’s the way memory folds time. Or maybe it’s just that I carried these stories with me for so long, they’ve started to shape the way I see the world.


Escape to Witch Mountain, though that one was rooted here. Somewhere between Pebble Beach and the pine-lined curves of Monterey, it unfolded on real ground.


As we wound through those roads, I kept wondering if the trees remembered. If the cliffs or the moss or the curve of the coastline had once watched a camera roll past, carrying two children trying to get home.


I remembered everything.

And for the first time, I wasn’t watching it on a screen.

I was inside the scene with my husband, my kids, and this shimmering, impossible moment.


⸻


The truth is, this trip wasn’t planned around me. It was planned around her.


Jamie’s mom passed away a year ago on Mother’s Day. Her last wish was for her ashes to be scattered near the Monterey waters where she used to dive. It was where she felt most alive, most herself. So we came. We packed up the kids, snacks, two miniature dachshunds, and a car full of grief and grace—and we made the drive.


There’s a kind of weight that doesn’t show up in words. It settles in your bones, in the back of your throat, in the pauses between conversations. Jamie carried that weight quietly. I know it was heavy. But even in his own season of mourning, he made room for wonder. For me. For the girl who grew up watching ghost stories on warped VHS tapes and never fully stopped believing in the magic of a well-timed fog.


⸻



I don’t know how much my kids will remember—but I hope something sticks.


Gracie’s still a baby. She won’t remember the way the cliffs curved into the fog, or how the redwoods swayed like they were whispering old secrets. But she was there. She was curled against my chest as the sky turned silver. She was breathing the same ocean air. And maybe that’s enough.


Jaxon and Maggie? I think they’ll remember. Not everything. Not the names of every beach or how long the drive took—but the feeling.


The way I lit up when we passed the Lost Boys house. The way I talked about Escape to Witch Mountain like it was a real place you could find on a backroad map if you knew where to look. The way Jamie and I stood side by side at the edge of the sea, knowing it held both memory and goodbye.


I talk about these movies all the time. They probably roll their eyes in the backseat, even if they don’t say it out loud.

But I hope—one day, years from now—when they scroll past Child of Glass on some dusty digital service, or see “Witch Mountain” flicker across a screen, something tugs at them.


I hope they remember this.

I hope they remember me.


And maybe they’ll smile.

Maybe they’ll feel a flicker of something sacred.

A kind of home.



⸻


I never found those movies scary—not really.

They weren’t horror. They were signals.


They felt like invitations.

Portals. Warnings wrapped in wonder. Mirrors reflecting back the strange, soft power of childhood magic.


Escape to Witch Mountain wasn’t about running from danger—it was about running home. Two kids with powers they didn’t ask for, navigating a world that didn’t understand them, being chased by men who wanted to possess what they could never comprehend. But underneath it all, it was about belonging. Memory. Return.


The moment Tia and Tony find each other—and realize they aren’t alone anymore—that was the magic.

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t explosive.

It was cosmic.

It was comforting in a way I didn’t have language for as a child, but somehow already understood.


Child of Glass lived on a different frequency, but pulsed just as deeply. A boy. A ghost girl. A riddle. A house that breathed sorrow. It was eerie, yes—but also full of light.


Like it was trying to teach us how to help the dead find peace.

How to listen.

How to care.

How to believe in what we couldn’t always see.


And Watcher in the Woods? That was another level entirely.

A forest. A girl gone missing. A presence not quite alien, not quite spirit. It buzzed with the same strange electricity I’d later hear echoed in whispers about the Book of Enoch—the watchers, the veils, the rift between worlds.


Not everything invisible is malevolent.

And not everything visible is safe.


But they all had something in common.


They didn’t make me feel afraid.

They made me feel awake.


Awake to the idea that this world is only one layer of the story.

That maybe we were meant to remember something.


And maybe some of us already had.


⸻


I stood beside our children and thought of Tia and Tony. The way they reached for each other in the dark. The way they never stopped trying to get home. I thought of ghost girls who just wanted to be remembered, and watchers in the woods who were never truly gone. I thought of Bobby calling me in the middle of the night, carrying Child of Glass in his chest like a story too holy to forget.


And I thought about how we carry them all.


The stories.

The people.

The places that shaped us.


Maybe we don’t escape to Witch Mountain.

Maybe we return to it.


Maybe it’s not a place on a map,

but a moment in time

where the veil thins just enough

for us to remember who we are.



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