It’s that time of the year…the Veil between this world and the next is reaching its thinnest. Ghosts and apparitions of those who have passed through the Veil now find it easier to make their presence known to us, the living. Some find this to be disturbing. I imagine I would as well had it not been that I’ve experienced this type of phenomena since I was about 4 years old.
Even at the age of 72, I remember that first encounter. I don’t think there’s any way I could ever forget it. My bedroom was kind of catty-cornered across the hall from the kitchen. I could hear my parents talking as I fell asleep. I always slept with my teddy bear in the crook of my right arm. I suddenly woke up to find a disembodied hand over my face! I was too scared to scream or even yell for my parents. Somehow, my mind started to rationalize the whole thing. Maybe it was my teddy bear on my face…No. He was still in the crook of my arm. I was on my back so, out of the corner of my right eye, I checked to see if there was standing there…NO…only a hand over my face. I was really scared, but I thought to myself that if I just closed my eyes and went back to sleep, it would be gone when I woke up. Somehow I managed to go back to sleep and when I woke in the morning, it was gone. I don’t know why, but I never told my parents about it. Maybe I thought they’d never believe me or maybe, from past experience, I knew they wouldn’t believe me. I did, however, spend the next seven years sleeping with the covers over my head!
My experience with ghostly things didn’t end there though. We were still living in the same house and I really couldn’t have been much older (we only lived there until I was 6) when I awoke one night with the feeling someone was in the room. I uncovered my face and found the apparition of a lady in a long dress with a hood standing at the end of my bed. She never moved, never spoke. She just stood there and seemed to be watching me. I didn’t feel threatened so I just pulled the covers back over my head and went back to sleep. That wasn’t the last time I saw here though. She became “The Lady in Gray,” to me, and I would see her several more times throughout my life. The last time was when I was pregnant with my daughter. She came one night and, once again, stood at the end of my bed, saying nothing. As the years passed, I’ve wondered if she was the spirit/soul of my daughter keeping an eye on me until I grew up and became pregnant so she could be reborn as my daughter. I mean, I’ve never seen her since then…what would you think?
When I got to be in my middle twenties, I had all kinds of psychic experiences with ghosts/spirits. It began with my interest in automatic writing. (For those unaware of the term, it’s sitting down with paper and pen/pencil and opening yourself to spirits using your hand to communicate to the living.) It was like the spirit world saw my shining light and I soon because the go-to human for leaving messages for others I know from dead friends and relatives. Back then, that type of person was referred to as a “medium” and I didn’t even need a seance to have the “dead” speak to me. It got so bad, a one point, I couldn’t get any sleep. That’s when I had to put my foot down.
What to do? On one hand, I didn’t mind being a way for them to communicate, but, on the other hand, I needed to sleep! So, one day it came to me and I said, with great authority, that when I went to bed, if someone wanted to communicate with me, they would have to enter my dreams…NOT wake me up! The message was evidently received because I started to get some uninterrupted sleep with the occasional dream with someone asking if I could give someone a message.
That ability eventually blossomed into “ghost-busting.” I and a few others came to be house exorcists. Whether it was a ghost who didn’t realize they had died and just needed help moving on or some troubling spirit who was causing harm to those living in the house, we came and cleared your house for you. There were a couple very troubling experiences during that time. One involved a house where a ritual human sacrifice had been performed. The other was a ghost who kept reliving her own accidental death in a bath tub that was so visible many people had seen it happening over and over again.. This particular house that it happened in also had two other hauntings that we had to clear. Those were interesting times.
Now I live in a house that’s almost 150 years old. The last family, before us, had lived here since 1906. One of the daughters was the last to live here and she died in 1990. So, we inherited two family ghosts. One is the father and he haunts the downstairs. The other is the daughter and she haunts the upstairs. They have been experienced by guests to our home, but as the years have passed – we’ve been here 27 years come Halloween – they have become less active than they were at first. Occasionally, you might hear the dining room door open and close with no living person having done it (two cats I had even heard it and turned to see who it was) or in the wee hours of the morning, on occasion, you might hear a man’s footsteps walking down the hall to the stairs. I think, at first, they wanted to make sure we were going to take care of the house. Once that became clear, the activity seemed to die down.
For over 65 year of my life, I’ve come to realize that those who are “gone” from our reality really aren’t gone at all. They’ve just passed through a Veil or door to another reality. They are still with us and, every once in a while, feel the need to give us a message, even if it’s just to let us know they’re still around. The important lesson is that they aren’t really any different than they were in Life. If you had no reason to fear your mother, your grandfather, your aunt, or friendly old Mr. Jones who lived down the street,then there’s no reason to fear them in what we call “death.” Be open to the possibility of hearing from them again. It gives hope to what we can expect when we’re done living this life.
