The Secret School at Avalon
By Janet Kira Lessin
Contributing Author: Dr. Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D.
© 2026 Aquarian Media
Illustration Plan
Image 1 — The House on the Corner
A mysterious four-story Victorian river captain’s house at the corner of a small 1950s borough near the Ohio River, with a glowing crow’s nest room on the upper level, seen through the eyes of an astral child flying at night above rooftops.
Image 2 — The Land of Apples
A poetic view of Avalon as the Isle of Apples: orchards along the Ohio River, an old borough sign, apple trees, mist, and a sense of mythic healing woven into a real American town.
Image 3 — Eight Hundred Orchard Avenue
An old 1848 farmhouse on Orchard Avenue, with a child’s front bedroom glowing above, stairs descending into shadow, and a hidden cavern opening beneath the house.
Image 4 — The Boat Captain
A spectral riverboat captain’s head appearing near a stairway portal inside an old haunted house, eerie but not grotesque, with a child turning from fear into courage.
Image 5 — The Teachers Who Came
A small group of gentle gray beings teaching experiencer children in a secret upper-floor school, contrasted with a cloaked reptilian teacher arriving through a portal near a backyard boundary.
Image 6 — Whitley Strieber and the Nine Lessons
A visionary classroom beyond time: children receiving immersive teachings through strange helmets, Mars, Atlantis, catastrophe, timelines, and cosmic memory floating around them.
Image 7 — The Screen and the Cavern
A split-scene image showing a child watching Casper on an old television while the same child’s astral self moves through caverns, portals, and underground cities beneath the house.
Image 8 — The Framework and the Source in the Flesh
A 1990s metaphysical conference green room, books by Zecharia Sitchin, Anunnaki symbols, Janet and Sasha entering the circle of researchers, speakers, and ancient astronaut teachers.
Image 9 — The Foursome
Four close friends in a warm conference green room after hours, surrounded by sacred-site posters, speaker badges, books, and a feeling of deep friendship, loss, and reunion beyond death.
Image 10 — What Waits Below
A luminous sealed glass room deep beneath an old farmhouse, surrounded by caverns, stone stairs, vats, portals, and a soft message in the air: “You will know when it is time.”
The House on the Corner
For years I flew. Most nights my soul rose out of the front bedroom at 800 Orchard Avenue and lifted over the rooftops of Avalon, the small borough along the Ohio River Boulevard where I spent my childhood. I moved with ease through doors, windows, walls, and ceilings.
One destination pulled at me above all the rest, a four-story building at the corner of the boulevard and Prospect, the house that stands today at 735 Ohio River Boulevard and carries the name Captain’s Quarters. A riverboat captain built it, and the record dates it to around 1865. Its third level holds a crow’s nest room that overlooks the Ohio River, the lookout where a captain on land could still watch the water.
I zoomed up to that height again and again. The top floors held me out. Whatever lived in that crow’s nest kept its threshold sealed against a child who slipped through every other barrier in her world.
At four or five years old, I told my best friend Cherilyn what I wanted. Cherilyn was a year older than me and lived a few doors down the street. I wanted inside that building. I wanted to see the rooms my soul circled night after night.
Cherilyn took my hand, walked me to the rear of the house, and knocked on the kitchen door. An old man and an old woman opened it and welcomed us in for cookies and milk. My whole body buzzed with excitement and nerves at once. My manners kept my questions quiet. I hoped for a tour and held my tongue.
I understand now why Cherilyn could lead me there with such confidence. She already attended. She walked me toward a school she knew from the inside, because the two of us belonged to the same program, a private school for hybrid and experiencer children housed on that sealed upper floor, a place where small teachers showed us how to wake the dormant strands of our own DNA.
The same certainty followed her into our daylight lives. When I begged my mother to enroll me in the church kindergarten, the rule said I came too young. Cherilyn went there too. I pressed my mother to ask the church board anyway. The board set aside its own rules and let me in, because the visitors had called on the minister, and a man of God found their request beyond his power to refuse.
Two schools, then, ran side by side through my early childhood. One met in daylight with hymns and crayons. The other met above the corner of the boulevard, where the grays taught the children they had chosen.
The Land of Apples
The ground itself carries the meaning, and the founders knew it.
Avalon began as West Bellevue. On December 9, 1874, twenty-nine property owners met and resolved to separate from Kilbuck Township, which had split from Pine Township five years before, and they petitioned the court for incorporation. The court approved the petition on April 7, 1875.
In time the borough took a new name, Avalon, the legendary Isle of Apples, the land of apples, chosen on account of the orchards that covered the riverbank.
Read that against my own address. The founders looked at the apple orchards along the Ohio and reached for the name of the otherworld where the wounded king is carried to heal and to wait. They named the whole borough for the mythic Isle of Apples. My childhood home sat on Orchard Avenue, the street that holds the same root as the borough’s chosen name.
I grew up in a place named twice for the same vanished orchard, on the avenue and on the welcome sign, in a town that wears the name of the healing otherworld. The convergence I felt as a child lived in the documented record the entire time.
The captains belong to that founding era, and so does my house. The Captain’s Quarters dates to around 1865, and the original farmhouse at 800 Orchard Avenue rose earlier still, built in 1848. Both predate the borough’s charter by a decade or more, structures from the farmland years before West Bellevue ever met to incorporate.
I believe the two riverboat captains who built among the first homes here knew each other, friends and likely neighbors among the founding families who shaped this stretch of riverbank. The names wait in the deeds and the plat maps, and I mean to set them here once I hold them.
[Captain of 735 Ohio River Boulevard — name to confirm from Allegheny County records.]
[Builder of 800 Orchard Avenue, 1848 — name to confirm from Allegheny County records.]
Eight Hundred Orchard Avenue
The house itself ran on a vertical axis, and I learned its full height the way a child learns a body, from the inside, in the dark.
The original 1848 farmhouse stood as one of the oldest structures on the ground, more than a century of lives layered into its walls before I arrived to fly out of its front bedroom. My parents gave me that room, the largest in the house, a choice that made little sense for a baby until you counted the ghosts. The room teemed. They gave the haunted room to the child who traveled, and the room and the child belonged together.
Cherilyn lived close enough to share the same air. Our backyards faced each other across a narrow alley, her ancient house and my ancient farmhouse set almost back to back, the alley a thin seam between two children who attended the same hidden school.
From that front bedroom my soul went up and my soul went down, and the two directions taught me opposite lessons.
Up stayed sealed. The school’s crow’s nest refused me, and the upper floor of my own home carried a barrier I read as alien technology, the single boundary in the house my astral body met and respected.
Down opened wide. I traveled down the stairs, through the crawlspace across from the furnace, into a cavern, and onto a great stone staircase carved into the living rock on the right-hand wall. The descent welcomed me. The heights kept their doors shut, and the depths kept theirs open, and the world-axis ran straight through one house on Orchard Avenue.
At the foot of that staircase waited a chamber of giant vats. The liquid inside might have been beer, wine, ale, or blood. My astral fingers came away sticky, and the four names stayed folded into one substance, the fermented and the vital at once, the offering and the lifeblood waiting in the dark beneath my bedroom.
Past the vats stood the strangest room of all. A crawlspace of loose, sandy soil ringed it on every side, and the room itself sat behind glass, lit throughout, empty, with no door and no latch. I circled it and circled it, certain I had missed a hidden catch, the kind of lever that swings a castle bookcase aside.
The wall gave me nothing. I gave up the search and moved on, and I carry now the sense that the room opened only by teleport, that a person arrived inside it the way a person arrives anywhere the visitors decide, lifted in and set down rather than admitted through a door.
Beyond the glass room the way opened into enormous caverns full of underworld life. I passed through ruins until I reached vast cities. The crossing came with a rule I felt in my own mind as it happened.
Going down, past certain barriers, my full knowing switched on, and I understood everything around me. Returning, the same barriers switched the knowing off, and I woke in my own bed holding the journey down and the journey back, with the long middle wiped clean.
I asked why. The answer came back whole and patient: You will know when it is time.
The glass room and the message spoke the same language. A person reaches the sealed place by arriving, not by prying, and the searching itself, the circling and feeling the walls, opens nothing. The appointment keeps its own clock.
The Boat Captain
The captain stayed on, and my sister Louise saw him first.
She knew none of the history, none of the riverboat story, yet she named the ghost in our house “the boat captain” the moment she described him. He could manifest only his head, and she read his trade off him cold, with nothing to prime her. Her naming and the deed records met in the middle from two directions, an unrehearsed child’s account landing on the same truth the property history holds.
That kind of convergence carries more weight than any single memory, because it arrives clean.
He came to me too, and he frightened me. He would rise up behind me even in broad daylight, that head floating at my shoulder, and the fear of it ran cold through my whole body.
In time the fear turned to anger, and anger made me bold. I stopped fleeing and started chasing. I drove him up the stairs, and he vanished into the portal in the second stairway, the passage that ran from the kitchen up to the back room, the same portal that fed my descents.
That chase taught me the lesson the river-side teacher would press harder later. Fear hands you over. Something stronger than fear, in my case a child’s clean anger, breaks the spell and puts you back in command. A small girl turning to pursue the thing that hunted her was running the whole curriculum in a single image, years before I held any words for it.
And the captain ties my two buildings into one circuit. The school on the corner was his own house, the Captain’s Quarters with its crow’s nest over the river. The portal in our second stairway carried him between that house and ours.
The man who owned the sealed school haunted the open house, and he moved between the two through the very passage I used to travel down. He was the thread between the zenith on the corner and the nadir under Orchard Avenue, the figure whose two houses bookended my world-axis, walking the same hidden road I walked.
The Teachers Who Came
My teachers wore two faces, and the order of their arrival taught me as much as their lessons.
The grays came first and came warm. Small, gentle, the size of children themselves, they felt safe because they matched us. I found them cute. A being who stands at a child’s own height carries little threat, and the school above the corner ran on that mercy, teachers built to reassure the students they had gathered.
The reptilian came through a portal on the river side of Cherilyn’s yard, along the line where her family’s ground met the neighbor’s, the seam between our two homes. I was four. He arrived flanked by two figures, a thin man and an undertaker dressed in the black of the 1840s frontier, death’s escorts walking a soul across.
The reptile came cloaked, and he reached for me through telepathy so fierce it felt as though he meant to draw my soul straight out through the link. We spoke from my fourth year to my twelfth, and then that part of the schooling closed.
The grays taught me contact. The reptilian taught me contact under pressure, the harder curriculum, the one that asks whether a person can hold the connection open while fear floods the room. Fear severs the line. The whole of that lesson lived in learning to stay, to keep the channel clear, to meet the frightening form and keep breathing.
Whitley Strieber and the Nine Lessons
In 1997 a friend handed me a copy of The Secret School at a Whitley Strieber seminar, and I read it on the plane to Australia. I got it. I grokked it. The structure already lived inside me, and his pages gave it a shape I could see.
Strieber built his book around nine lessons, arranged in three groups of three, with a tenth that came later, in 1995. His teacher wore a different face from mine, a nunlike figure he called the Sister of Mercy, and she handed the children a kind of helmet through which the visions arrived. His method matched my own. The teaching came as immersion, as lived experience, rather than as words on a board.
His first lesson opened on Mars, with a glimpse of the Face decades before the Viking Orbiter photographed Cydonia in 1976. That single image rang through me like a struck bell, because I hold a memory of that same ground from the inside.
In my Ninmah incarnation I stopped on Mars to bury Alalu and to raise the monument the world later named the Face. Strieber saw the ruin. I remember the funeral. He glimpsed the structure from above, and I recall the hands that built it.
His other lessons gathered around deep time and catastrophe, the collision that formed the Moon, the cataclysm that closed the Permian, the scientist-priests of Atlantis awaiting their doom, a future disaster seen as if through a visionary screen.
The throughline he named for all nine matched the work of my own descent: how a soul frees itself from the constraints of time and space, joins the cosmos and the source, and comes home to joy.
Where his account holds time open and ambiguous, mine names the players, because I carry the Anunnaki framework his nine lessons only gesture toward. He received time as a teaching. I received it as a choice. Aboard ship I once stood before twenty-four timelines and chose the one I would walk. That is the sharper, more sovereign version of his vision, the difference between watching a future and electing one.
The Screen and the Cavern
My childhood ran two reels at once, the contact in the cavern and the cartoons on the television, and the two told the same story in different registers.
Casper the Friendly Ghost came to me at full strength. The first Casper short reached theaters in 1945, and the friendly ghost saturated television through my early years, on ABC by 1959 and headlining his own Saturday-morning show by 1963, the year I turned nine, my own Secret School age.
Casper carried the grays’ lesson in plain sight. A translucent child who wanted only to make friends, screamed at by every frightened adult, embraced at last by the children who held no fear. Fear breaks the contact, and only the unafraid keep it open. A cartoon ran that exact lesson for a generation of children, and I was one of them, taught the same truth downstairs in the dark and upstairs on the screen.
The later screens worked the other way. They trailed my experience instead of shaping it.
Land of the Lost arrived in 1974, when I had reached twenty and moved in the Star Trek world, and its rubber Sleestak struck me as corn. I caught glimpses and looked away. Yet the show’s bones rhymed with what I already knew, an underground city entered through glowing portals, a fallen reptilian race with a rudimentary telepathy, a deep chamber whose smoke loosened the tongue and bent the mind. The writers reached, without knowing it, toward an architecture I had walked through as a girl.
Stargate came in 1994, when I sat forty years old beside Jason in a Waikiki theater, and I found it silly and loved it anyway. James Spader, then thirty-four, played an Egyptologist named Daniel Jackson, a scholar his colleagues mocked for claiming the pyramids ran far older than the textbooks allowed, a man rescued from disgrace to translate a ring that opens onto a world ruled by an Anunnaki overlord.
The film handed me my own intellectual world dressed as a popcorn matinee. I recognized every bone of it, because I had read the source long before.
This is the heart of the matter. The experience came first, and the representation arrived late. I walked through a portal in my own yard around 1958. Hollywood put a ring of light on the screen in 1994. The skeptic says I borrowed the image from the movie. The order of the calendar says the reverse.
I carried the picture for thirty-six years before the film existed, and the corniness I felt watching these shows came from holding the real thing against the copy and feeling the gap. I had stood on the far side of that gate. The fiction only ever painted the door.
The Framework and the Source in the Flesh
I read Zecharia Sitchin on my own in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, in my twenties, as the books appeared. The Anunnaki framework entered me there, long before any classroom or any screen handed it back to me.
By the years I facilitated the UFO Discussion Group at Penn State, from 1990 to 1993, I knew the material well enough to teach it. I brought Sitchin to the group, and I invited my brother up to lecture. He had mastered the whole corpus, and he spoke for hours without a single note, the finest interpreter of that work then available to me.
A year later I sat in the Waikiki theater watching Daniel Jackson lecture his own disbelieving room, and I recognized the scene from both sides.
In 1997 I met Sasha, and Sasha opened the door to the source himself. He knew Cody and Robin Johnson, founders of Great Mystery and its Prophet’s Conferences, who sponsored Zecharia Sitchin, and they welcomed the two of us in, free.
I had hit the jackpot. From that year until his death in 2010, I breathed the same air as the man whose books I had read alone in my twenties. Thirteen years in the same rooms. Most readers who found those books in 1978 came no closer than the page. Sasha gave me the author in the flesh, and the Johnsons gave me the room.
The Foursome
Cody and Robin gave me far more than a conference seat. The four of us became best friends. We ran the green room together, the inner sanctum behind the stage where the speakers set down their public faces and turn human again.
They put us up in the hotels. We took private vacations once the conferences closed. We sat in each other’s homes, first here on Maui and later on the mainland after they moved. The same air I breathed with Sitchin was the air of that green room and those friendships, and my nearness to the source flowed from belonging to the circle that produced him.
Gary “Cody” Johnson, the way he wanted his name carried, has passed. He died in Spain, and Robin laid him to rest on a mountaintop cemetery among her friends in that place, an elevated burial for a man who spent his life staging gatherings at ancient and sacred sites.
Robin walks her own path now, a holistic and shamanic practitioner working with energy and the old healing arts.
After thirty-three years beside Cody, Robin lost the whole world the two of them had built, and the four of us stood inside that world. To sit with us again may show her only the shape of everything missing. We set her free, with love. Love asks for no daily proof to stay true.
The thirteen years happened. They are woven into who all four of us became, and the distance takes nothing from what was real. I carry her still, and I trust that when each of us crosses over, the foursome will gather again on the far side and tell the whole story together.
What Waits Below
I came to this work wanting to write up one childhood mystery, the sealed school above the corner of the boulevard. The thread led down through the whole architecture of a life.
An 1848 farmhouse built on a world-axis, a captain’s house above and a cavern below, the warm teachers and the fierce one, the captain who haunted both my homes, Cherilyn at every door, the books read young and the author met late, the friends who opened the way and the loves I have lost along it.
Every one of them a teacher. Every one of them a door.
The curriculum from that crow’s nest waits still, sealed below the threshold that strips the knowing on the way up, filed at a depth my waking mind has yet to reach. I have stopped feeling the walls for a hidden latch. The answer came long ago, in the patient voice from the underworld, and it holds for the school and the glass room and the whole of what remains hidden.
You will know when it is time.
Janet Kira Lessin | Contributing Author: Dr. Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. | Contributor/Researcher: Claudia Lenore | © 2026 Aquarian Media
