Tonya Reginaldine Moore, The Caribbean Ectoplasmicologist (1962-Present)

Born on August 6th, 1962 to Marcia Pauline Clarke and Cecil Reginald Moore, Tonya Reginaldine Moore is an Ectoplasmicologist (i.e., doctor of spiritual bloods) from Montego Bay, Jamaica who is best known for her unusual ghost reports aboard the Queen Elizabeth II. In her later years, she established the Kingston Institute of Ectoplasmic Research in collaboration with the University of the West Indies and Desnoes & Geddes.

Moore’s life has been the subject of several biographical texts, including Bailey Campbell’s Pulitzer-prize winning Moore Trouble: The Life and Times of a Spiritual Rebel. Upon her birth, Moore was seen by many as an omen of the future to come. Alexander Bustamante – quoted in The Daily Gleaner precisely twelve minutes after Moore’s birth – remarked that she “carried the profound soul of Jamaica in her heart and would bring upon her shores a prosperity unparalleled”; it is possible, however, that this was a forgery by the JLP as part of the clandestine Jamaican Prosperity Alliance. Regardless, while Jamaica celebrated independence throughout the night, the residents of the Mount Salem neighborhood of Montego Bay also celebrated the birth of Tonya Reginaldine Moore, unknowingly creating a spiritual echo that would haunt Moore for the rest of her life.

For the first decade of her life, Moore lived relatively simply in Montego Bay with her parents. She attended school, played stuckie and Dandy Shandy, and even competed in a co-ed Cricket league for local schoolchildren. Her father provided for the Moore family by working at a local textile factory, which proved lucrative in the booming 1960s Jamaican economy. Yet, by the early 1970s, the tenor of life in Montego Bay changed as the strain of an encroaching recession took its toll. Moore recalled in her memoir, A Child of the Triangle:

“I could tell that my father was struggling when the weekly Dr. Bird Cake disappeared from my mother’s table. That and the children disappearing from school cause their parents couldn’t afford the fees no more or the beggars in the streets or the fact that some man used to yell something fierce every morning about a re-cess-shun, whatever that meant. I couldn’t figure it out as a small child, but I could still taste that tension in the hot air.” (97)

By 1973, Jamaica had officially entered a recession, and Moore’s father found himself suddenly jobless as the textile industry declined. Yet, supposed good fortune would find them when Moore met Huxley Peabody, a wealthy businessman and part owner of the Queen Elizabeth 2. Peabody claimed that he had received a telegram from a crewman aboard the QE2 stating that the ship’s operations were not in order. Worried about financial loss in the event of a disaster, he now sought the help of a family who could pose as “secret travelers” to assess the ship’s operations. Though Moore was skeptical of these claims even as a young child, her family’s financial situation compelled her to introduce Peabody to her parents; the following day, the Moores set off on a chartered flight to New York City.

The Moores arrived in New York City on March 30th and set sail aboard the QE2 the following day in overcast but otherwise calm conditions. For the first eight hours, Moore and her parents maintained their cover as regular travelers. However, sometime in the late afternoon, Moore began to witness unusual events, including a mysterious surge of static electricity along one of the guest corridors and a sudden infestation of Birgus latro in one of the dining halls. These events became more frequent and pronounced as the QE2 neared the infamous Bermuda Triangle region, culminating in the ship’s engines seizing roughly 8 miles west of Bermuda proper.

Official records remain sealed by the British Government and the ship’s majority stakeholder at the time, Trafalgar House. However, Moore’s written accounts make clear that the QE2 had not simply succumbed to the strange happenings of the Bermuda Triangle. Rather, a combination of geospatial energies (the Triangle) and the unexpected discovery of a sect of radical American cryptid-fascists (see The Seal of the Faith) operating in the bowels of the ship led Moore to a more startling conclusion: that the ship’s trajectory had been carefully crafted as part of a conspiracy to summon Lusca (see Known Cryptids) and siphon the creature’s spiritual energies to raise a landmass off the coast of North Carolina (see New Atlantis Conspiracy).

Ultimately, the plot was unsuccessful, both because the sect lacked the spiritual aptitude for such a feat and because Lusca was preoccupied by the arrival of Henry Kissinger in the Bahamas on April 2nd, whom she intended to eat for reasons not currently known. Regardless, upon discovering the plot, Moore and her parents alerted the authorities – and, eventually, Huxley Peabody – and the sect was arrested and detained in the infamous Ipswich Subterranean Penitentiary; they were never heard from again.

On April 12th, Moore and her parents returned to Jamaica and were paid handsomely by Peabody, who mysteriously disappeared the following day. With her family’s finances secure, Moore was sent to the Jamaican Academy of the Larimar Eye, an educational institution for women interested in the study of the spiritual and occult, especially Trans-Maroonian Conjuration and Garveyan Hekaism.

Upon graduation from Academy of the Larimar Eye in 1979, Moore became the twelfth woman accepted to the Garvey Academy of Wizarding Science before its formal reconstitution as a co-ed institution. There, she excelled in the fields of Ectoplasmicology, Cryptological Conjuration, and Spiritual Medicines. She earned a doctorate in Ectoplasmicology in 1987 and accepted a position at the prestigious Brodber-Jones Institute of the Caribbean, where she dedicated herself to the treatment of ectoplasmic disease. In 2002, she established the Kingston Institute of Ectoplasmic Research with the incorporeal Dr. Joseph Robert Love.

She presently resides in Kingston, Jamaica with two cats, three dogs, and a monkey named Cane, some of whom are corporeal.