Why I Had To Have Heart Surgery, I Was Drugged

The Night Everyone Changed

It was supposed to be a night of memories. The kind where old friends squeeze into a crowded bar, raise a glass, and tell the same bartender stories they’ve been telling for years. The place was packed, wall to wall, for the memorial of a well-loved bartender and manager who had died far too young, barely into his thirties. But as the night wore on, the mood shifted from warm nostalgia to something stranger.

A handful of regulars noticed it first: the way people started moving differently, talking in odd rhythms, their eyes glassy and unfocused. One man, a familiar face who hadn’t been seen in years, staggered through the crowd speaking pure nonsense, swaying so violently that friends thought he might collapse. Those who knew him well would later say they’d never seen him like that, not before, and not in the years since.

It wasn’t just him. In corners of the bar, unlikely pairs were tangled up. Two women, both with boyfriends, ended up later at an old neighbor’s apartment, brought there by someone sober who thought they’d be safer away from the crowd. One of them, a strikingly attractive woman, sat perched on the lap of an older man who looked like he’d been weathered by decades behind a bar. She spoke to her boyfriend on the phone, swearing she wasn’t drunk. “I’ve only had one drink,” she insisted. She sounded like she believed it.

By morning, the whispers began. At least a dozen people around town quietly admitted they thought they’d been drugged. Several more who hadn’t touched a drop that night claimed they’d noticed the same eerie pattern, people acting unmoored from themselves, their judgment and inhibitions dissolving all at once. Nobody filed police reports. No one went to the hospital. But the story hasn’t stopped circulating.

Many months later, the night still comes up in conversation, not with laughter, but with that uneasy tone people use when they’re not sure if they saw something criminal or just… strange. And among a certain circle, there’s a quiet agreement on one thing: they think they know who did it. No one says the name out loud. Not in public. Not yet.

The Night My Heart Was Literally Damaged:

It was right before Covid. I moved from Falmouth needing a break. I took the opportunity to move to Claysville and help some dear friends remodel a cabin. I moved there, started the remodel, started doing natural pottery, was walking up to 15 miles a week, and got in the best shape I was ever in. For nearly a year I lived seeing only a handful of people every month. I did catch Covid and I did catch Covid pneumonia but recovered from both. Nearly the whole time I lived there, most days I kept in contact with my best friend at the time, Cory Mullins. I considered him a brother.

March came like a rush with some great weather. Cory and I had been talking, sharing songs we had written like we used to do on napkins, but now over Messenger. He sent me a picture of a spider meme, and we talked about some new people he had hung out with and thought I would like. That was the last time we talked. He was busy, I was busy… Well, one morning I woke up with a horrible feeling. Somehow I knew. I went on Facebook and there were rumors someone had died, though the post wasn’t sure who. I knew, and I messaged everyone I could think of. Sure enough, that feeling in the pit of my stomach was true.

It wasn’t but a week or so later that the wake happened. It was at a local bar we frequented. I left the isolation of the cabin and came into town. Earlier in the year I had gotten to hang out with him for a week. Thankfully, because here I was returning to town for his wake.

Of course I started drinking. I wasn’t really drinking more than I usually did, certainly not enough for what happened. I had a conversation, and an ironic one looking back. There was what I thought had been a mutual friend who stated he was happy Cory was dead. That didn’t sit well with me, but through my grief it didn’t register in the way maybe it should have. Like a big caution light smacking me in the face and saying: Chris, don’t drink anything that wasn’t sealed until it was handed to you. I should have listened, because around 6:45 PM is my last memory.

I woke up behind what I have come to find out was maybe the water plant, maybe the police station. I have a vague memory of trying to walk to the friend’s house I had arranged to stay at, the last place I had hung out with Cory. I never made it though, because at about 3:45 AM I woke up in some creek bed with a big light in my eyes. And I felt out of my mind with confusion. I felt weird. Heavy in a way that I never had, and like my head was checked out halfway and just waiting for permission to quit for a while.

I knew something wasn’t right as I walked around, realizing my phone, my book bag with my laptop/tablet, honey oil, and vape pen were and still are, somewhere away from me. I had no idea where.

Strangely, as I got out front to the bar, everyone had left. It was nearly 4:00 AM. I found my tobacco pipe. I walked a circle around the block and proceeded to find my tobacco, and then a few hundred feet away I found my lighter. It was like someone had left me a bread trail. Then it stopped. Of course most of my stuff was gone, just like the memories of an entire night. It was around that time I started saying to myself with a firm feeling: I had been Mickeyed, drugged by an unknown assailant. Once I gave up, I retraced my steps twice through that side of town trying to find my bag. By 5:30 AM I gave up and started walking to BBS for coffee to sit there until the bar opened for breakfast.

Two of Falmouth’s finest stopped the obviously messed-up dude walking with a vengeance to go get some coffee and try to clear his head. As soon as I saw the taller one, he asked the usual questions you would. As soon as I told him I felt like I was drugged and my whole story, he told me six other people had claimed to have been drugged there the month before.

He said he was investigating. He believed me and let me continue to BBS, saying he would contact me. Well, by the time two good friends drove me home to Claysville to drop me off at the boat dock, both of them revealed they had felt funny also. It took me sleeping nearly two days and being awake two more to feel right. I made a decision: I was moving back to Falmouth to find out what happened.

I literally uprooted my peaceful life to move back to Falmouth and play the investigation game. I even saw the officer not that long after moving back at Two Rivers, and he said, Yes, I will call soon. Well, shortly after talking to him the last time, I heard he hit someone with his cruiser and was no longer on the force. Just like that, my “case,” where someone else could serve justice, was ruined. I decided I would find out myself. And with the help of another great friend who had stories of his own, I found tons, and eventually found out who did it. I even told him I knew to his face, publicly and in private. He gallantly told me I had made him famous. Because when I feel something in my bones and I know the right of it, I have this thing about needing to share it with many people.

Good thing I did, because over the course of about six months I found 32 people who felt like they had been drugged in the same place. Over eight months I spent nearly $10,000 at that bar seeking who, what, when, where, how, and overall why.

Six months in, I was sitting in the bar talking to the new bartender and I started having horrible heart palpitations. A few months later I was having a heart ablation. It was the only thing that helped the heart murmur. It came with a five to six-month recovery too.

Some of you who wonder why I am so tenacious and want to know what is wrong and why, why I am Whisper One, well, look no further. This article should answer all the questions you have about that. It’s been nearly four and a half years since this happened. The last time someone else told me they also felt like they got drugged was in 2024. They had clear memories of that three month period here they also felt like they lost control the same way.

This article is more my history. I do not want to cause problems at this point for anyone. But I do want this point heard: no one else besides that one officer ever participated in that journey of understanding and investigation. No other official I tried to talk to seemed to care. The closure I deserved was support for what happened and a follow-through from those who did not believe me. In fact, the only ones that ever acknowledged this story were the ones who had been through it themselves. And the ones that were just as close to them as I was.

This, this is why the Whisper is important. Because there are so many people that need to be listened to. And without us, they are ignored, always.

Whisper One Out.