Subjects of Interest:

  • Candle Face Chronicles

  • The Fugitives

  • Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona

  • The Scrolls of Souls


February 12, 2025


I left Austin in a hurry. I couldn’t wait to get home to read more scrolls. I first stopped by Michael's house to pick up the lost souls stored in the glass bottles and drove straight to Houston, except for a stop at Buc-ee's for some coffee and fuel. Once home, I put all thirteen boxes in my garage, placing them exactly as they had been in the attic. It felt right, like I was recreating something. Like I needed to preserve them as they were.


There they sat, waiting to be read. I stacked them neatly, their weight still heavier than it should have been. Thirteen boxes, each filled with names, each containing voices waiting to be heard. I told myself I would just open a few, maybe skim through them before getting some rest. But the moment I started thumbing through the scrolls, I was too far gone to stop. I had to know what Mr. Smoe had been hiding.


I unrolled one scroll, then another. The parchment still felt too thick, too smooth, too unnatural beneath my fingers. The ink seemed fresh, and the parchment felt new, as if they had just been made. As I read, the same sensation as before hit me—the voice of a stranger, clear and human, reading the words aloud inside my mind.


I rolled the scroll back up, picking up another, then another. More names, more voices, more afterlives sealed in ink. The stories varied, but the end result was always the same. Forgotten. Unheard. Lost.


I don’t know how long I was at it before I noticed one scroll that looked different. The parchment was older, darker, almost brittle in places, but something about it felt more... intact, as if time had touched it differently. The ink was thicker, the strokes heavier. I hesitated before unrolling it. I don’t know why. Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe it was the feeling that I was about to read something I wasn’t meant to. But I did it anyway.


The handwritten text inside was different from the others. It wasn’t a record of a person’s life. It wasn’t a plea for remembrance. It was instructions.


The more I read, the more I understood.


What I found, I won’t share. Some knowledge should remain hidden. Some things should never be passed on to hands that might use them for the wrong reasons. But what I will say is that it confirmed what I had already begun to suspect: spirits could be preserved in scrolls. Their presence could be bound to ink and parchment: their voices, names, and stories.


This was no accident. Someone had written this as a deliberate practice, a way to hold spirits in place without letting them fade. It was methodical, intentional. And whoever had written it knew exactly what they were doing. But it wasn’t Mr. Smoe.


I had assumed at first that he had written the instructions, that this had been his discovery. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he must have found these instructions somewhere and followed them. He didn’t create this practice—he used it. He must have spent years on this project, gathering spirits, sealing them in the scrolls, ensuring their voices didn’t disappear. The scrolls weren’t handwritten; the text was printed in computer ink. That meant he had transcribed each story, each name, carefully formatting them before printing them onto parchment.


Mr. Smoe must have spent a great deal of time doing this. But why?


At first, I thought these scrolls might have been a collection of Candle Face’s victims, but that didn’t seem right. These weren’t the souls of those taken by her. They were something else entirely. If he hadn’t been collecting Candle Face’s victims, then whose voices were sealed inside these scrolls?


Then, it hit me.


Maybe Mr. Smoe had been visited by spirits too.


Not victims of Candle Face, but unrelated spirits: wanderers, forgotten voices looking for someone to listen. Maybe, just like the lost souls that came to me, spirits had come to him, and instead of leading them to peace, he preserved them in scrolls. But these spirits wanted to be heard, why would Mr. Smoe just keep them in his attic where no one is listening? If he had been capturing spirits in scrolls, why didn’t he send them out into the world? Why store them away, hidden from everyone, including himself?


Was this just an obsession, or was he keeping them for a purpose?


I closed the scroll and exhaled, realizing that my hands were shaking.


I got it. This is how I would protect The Fugitives.


The bottles had been a temporary solution. They were fragile and weak. The wax could fail. The energy could leak. But this was permanent until I could figure out how to free the spirits to the other side once and for all.


I thought about what I had been doing all along. Listening. Writing. Recording voices that would have otherwise been lost.


This method, this ancient practice of capturing spirits in written text, fits me perfectly.


I'm a former missing persons investigator. I'm a writer. I uncover stories and give voices to those who can no longer speak for themselves. This wasn’t just a method. This was my calling. Hundreds of scrolls waiting to be acknowledged. An ancient method waiting to be used.


Whatever Mr. Smoe was doing with them, it doesn’t matter right now. Right now, I must transfer the 31 spirits from the fragile bottles into scrolls.


The fugitives will no longer hide in bottles. They’ll live in scrolls, and their stories will be read and re-read, their voices radiating in the minds of all those who read them. These fugitives will be free.


And so will the spirits already in Mr. Smoe’s scrolls. They’ll no longer be stored in a dark attic away from human interaction. I'll send these scrolls all across the country, maybe even the world, so they can be read over and over again. No one will ever forget them.


If Mr. Smoe was a register of the dead, a keeper of forgotten souls, then I’m their archivist.

I don’t just record their names. I give them voices.


But first, I have to transfer the fugitives from their bottles into their new and improved homes. The parchment will become their bodies, and the ink will become their voice.

Arthur Mills

Arthur Mills' career is defined by his relentless pursuit of truth, from a distinguished twenty-one-year career as an Intelligence Warrant Officer to private investigation focused on missing persons and human trafficking. However, his most significant case emerged from his own past when, as a child, he unwittingly summoned an entity he named Candle Face due to her charred features, believing he had banished her back to hell. Returning to Texas decades later, Arthur discovered Candle Face’s evil had never ceased. Now, combining his intelligence and investigative expertise with his experiences confronting Candle Face, Arthur documents his findings in the Candle Face Chronicles, determined to expose her story and protect others from her evil.

Is Candle Face real?

This is a complex and deeply personal question. On the one hand, there's the possibility that Candle Face is a manifestation of my childhood trauma, a figure created by my mind to cope with fear and emotional turmoil. On the other hand, the consistent details, physical evidence, and shared experiences with others suggest that Candle Face may be a genuine supernatural entity. Whether Candle Face is real or a creation of my psyche, her impact on my life has been undeniably profound. Ultimately, the answer to this question is up to you.

How are you able to communicate with the dead? Are you a psychic or medium?

I don’t consider myself a psychic or medium, although many in the paranormal community believe I have some kind of gift, perhaps one that I haven’t fully tapped into yet. Unlike those who claim to communicate with any spirit, my ability seems limited to connecting with Candle Face’s victims and Candle Face herself. While I’m not sure how this works, the connection is strong and focused on these particular Lost Souls, allowing me to share their stories and seek justice for them.

Do you use AI to create your content?

From October 2023 to around March 2024, I personally wrote the short descriptions you see on Google and social media platforms when my web pages or journal entries are shared or found in search results. These descriptions are those brief, 160-character summaries that pop up beside the URL. It was challenging to condense complex ideas into such a small space.


By March 2024, I began letting Wix, my website host, handle this task for me. Their AI generates these summaries much faster and often with more precision than I could manage within that tight character limit. It was a practical decision to let the system take over this small aspect of my work, allowing me to focus more on my writing and investigations.


The web pages and journal entries themselves are entirely my own. My writing encompasses a wide range of topics, including the testimonies of the Lost Souls, my investigations into Candle Face/Isabel, my books like Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona and The Haunted Handbook, as well as other works and research. Everything I write is rooted in my decades of experience in writing (over ten books in 15 years) and my 30+ years of expertise in intelligence analysis, missing persons cases, and human trafficking investigations. The core content you read always comes from me.


By early March 2025, I decided to create a Shopify account to sell copies of Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona, The Haunted Handbook, and to look for caretakers for The Scrolls of Souls. It was a tremendous amount of work to manually transfer all 130 journal entries from Wix to Shopify and recreate the Google SEO titles and descriptions for each entry. Shopify’s blogging platform also required a summary for each journal entry. Summarizing my work was taking around 30 minutes per entry, which became overwhelming and unsustainable.


To streamline the process, I allowed AI to create the summaries for me by uploading each journal entry and letting the AI generate the SEO descriptions, summaries, and ALT text for images. Here's a clear breakdown of what is AI-generated:


  • Some journal entry titles.
  • Nearly all SEO journal descriptions (up to 160 characters).
  • Nearly all summaries (which are only available in the backend and not visible to the public).

Everything else you read comes from me, whether it’s documenting testimonies from the Lost Souls, researching Candle Face/Isabel, or writing my books. The AI simply handles the tedious, mechanical parts of the process, leaving the writing, storytelling, and investigations entirely in my hands.


I review all AI-generated summaries and descriptions to ensure they accurately represent the essence of my writing. My decision to use AI for these backend tasks is about maintaining efficiency and allowing me to focus on what truly matters: writing, storytelling, investigations, and giving voice to the Lost Souls, protecting the Fugitives, investigating Candle Face/Isabel, and exploring new projects. Your experience as a reader is shaped by my work, not by AI.

Why did you end the podcast?

I decided to cancel the Candle Face Chronicles Podcast for two key reasons. First, while the Get Haunted Network is a fantastic community for paranormal entertainment, it wasn't the right fit for the serious and important nature of my work with Candle Face Chronicles. The network's lighthearted tone didn’t align with my mission.


Second, the friends and family of one of Candle Face's victims reached out and asked me to stop discussing their loved one on the podcast because it was causing them too much pain. Their request made me realize that my work, while well-intentioned, was unintentionally hurting those who are still living and grieving.


These reasons led me to end the podcast, but I remain committed to continuing my mission to uncover Candle Face’s origins and methods with a renewed focus on compassion and respect for the living.

Why did you stop using www.candleface.com and start using www.branchingplotbooks.com?

I have had the branchingplotbooks.com domain since 2012, but I transferred the domain to Shopify to use it as my storefront. I needed to do this because Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona can't be published or sold via Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing because of its spiral binding requirement. The same goes for The Haunted Handbook.


I decided to sell them, along with most of my other books, on Shopify because it allows me to provide a more streamlined and reliable experience for my readers. It also enables me to have full control over my work and how it reaches my audience. Additionally, all my books are still available on Amazon (paperback and Kindle), except for Isabel: The Forgotten Daughter of La Llorona and The Haunted Handbook due to their unique binding requirements.


I also chose to use Shopify’s blogging platform, keeping all books, my journal, and the shopping experience located in one place.


I plan on keeping www.candleface.com up for the interim, but it will likely go down as well, or at least be redirected to www.branchingplotbooks.com. In the end, I want my work to be more streamlined and easier for the paranormal community and my readers to find my work, read and help the lost souls, protect the fugitives, and care for the Scrolls of Souls.

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