Truth is stranger than fiction; or is it?

Perhaps, sometimes fiction may be truer than reality.

Sceptics may scoff at some of these tales; believers swear to them. Such is the harmony of opposites created by a blend fact, fiction, and legend. Each tale we wil tell has been carefully gleaned from island people who have lived, or who have heard of those who have live, through these events.

Can you imaging building a house beneath the sea? One man tried it in the San Juan Islands.

His house had an entryway and a room which was used as an observatory post for fish watching. The main part of the house was about 10 feet long by six feet wide. Round glass windows looked out upon the sea about ten feet beneath the surface of the water.

Built entirely from concrete, the house had an unusual entry which was a square chimney rising above the house through the water and out into the air above the high water line.

The builder was so delighted with his undersea house that her often invited friends there. One by one they would shimmy down the chimney into the living room, or apartment, as he was known to call it. The view from the windows of his apartment was spectacular and ever changing. Tales passed on say that he believed his apartment to be so comfortable that he sometimes spent entire days in it--even sleeping and eating in his quarters.

The story is told in the islands that this man spent more and more time in his undersea world. Day after day he left the life above the sea to become engrossed in the motions of the life beneath the sea. "Do you know what I saw today?" he would ask his family. As time went on, his stories of the life beneath the sea became stranger and stranger to those who still spent most of their waking hours above the water line.

"He's gone mad," as few would say. But when he did not emerge from his apartment for several days, his family grew worried about him. Finally, his wife descended into the entrance to the apartment that for some time now she and the others had been forbidden to enter. There, lying on the floor of the room was her husband-seemingly in a strange trance or coma.

She frantically tried to awaken him, but he only continued mumbling something that she could not understand. Then, suddenly, he rose to his feet and pointed to something outside the window.

"Don't you see her?" he asked his wife. "She's as beautiful as any woman I have ever seen!" His wife looked through the window. She said later that she could see nothing. Whatever was there had gone or had never been.

But what kept this man down there day after day? Why would he devote so much of his life to building an apartment beneath the sea? Did he plan for some creature of the sea to move in with him? Perhaps we'll never know.

But for whatever reason, he left the island and did not return for ten years. As far as we know, the ruins of his undersea house may still be found just off Flower Island in the San Juans.