22    “Oh My Gosh, It’s a Ghost!”

Anytime you receive a sign from a spirit, it is extremely likely you will know the one responsible for it and the meaning behind it. But there are rare occasions when a spirit may choose you to make themselves known for no reason other than convenience. As in Evelyn’s story, that can be scary, exciting, and fascinating all at once.

Evelyn was a chaperone one day for her daughter’s class field trip to their community’s heritage park and museum. “The park and museum site is a jewel in our neighborhood that showcases our town’s history,” Evelyn said. “That day we walked to the museum, saw the exhibits, and walked back to school when we were finished. My daughter was about seven years old at the time.”

After the field trip, the students were given a homework assignment that was based on the history of their community.

“My daughter and I were in what used to be our garage; we converted it into a playroom and office,” Evelyn said. “She was working on the project and shouting questions to me while I was in the adjoining bathroom with my son, whom I was potty training. My multitasking was working quite well until some very loud music drowned out my daughter’s voice.”

Evelyn went into the playroom to find the stereo on at maximum volume.

“She looked at me all confused. I asked her what she did, and she said she didn’t do anything; the stereo just came on by itself and got loud on its own. You know, because that’s what stereos do, right? So, I shrugged it off, pushed the volume button down until the music was silent, and went back into the bathroom.”

No sooner had Evelyn gotten to the bathroom than . . .

“It was loud again — all the way up!” she said. “My daughter was starting to get freaked out, insisting she didn’t do anything. This time I turned the volume all the way down and pushed the power button to make sure it was off, then I headed back to the bathroom.”

You can guess what happened next.

“Now I was getting irritated. I got my son off the toilet, got him dressed, and carried him on my left hip back to the blaring stereo. My daughter was hysterical. I didn’t know what was going on. I pushed the volume down again and turned the power off again. I stayed there this time, staring down the stereo, just daring it to come back on with me watching.”

And it did. “Right in front of my eyes!” Evelyn said. “I helplessly watched the digital volume bar go up from zero to ten . . . all the way up to the max of fifty. My daughter was screaming and covering her ears. The walls were shaking. The furniture was rattling. I turned it down and off again. The stereo switched on and up again. My son was still attached to my left side and laughing hysterically, like this was all some game he was in on. I yelled to my daughter, ‘Where is the remote?’ thinking that she must have been accidentally stepping on it. She pointed up to the shelf. There it was, out of her reach and my son’s reach. Nobody was touching it, and nobody else was home.”

Evelyn turned the stereo down and off one more time. She waited in silence for a few seconds. Then it kicked on again.

“I didn’t know what else to do, so I instinctively screamed ‘Please stop!’ as loud as I could. And it did. Instantly. The volume went all the way down to zero. I had chills. How did I just do that?”

Her daughter freaked out. She screamed, “Oh my gosh, it’s a ghost!”

Evelyn laughed and told her there was no ghost, that there had to be another reason. “Because that’s what you tell a seven-year-old,” she said. “But, in my mind, I knew there was no logical explanation for what had just happened. I was even thinking of the history of our house, and there really wasn’t much. It was built around 2000 on top of what used to be lemon groves. Unless there were some angry dead lemons, we weren’t living in the Poltergeist house.”

Evelyn went to another room and called her husband.

“I was anxiously rambling nonstop, telling him everything that had happened. He tried to calm me down by telling me a neighbor was probably using a remote that triggered it. I just said, ‘Chris, are you serious?’ I know he was trying to find logic in what had happened, but there was none. I repeatedly turned the stereo down and off, and it repeatedly came back on the next instant. No way was a neighbor who couldn’t even see us somehow turning it back on and up with perfect timing.”

Chris always had been a skeptic.

“No way was he going to believe for a second that something supernatural had anything to do with this,” she said. “He continued to tell me to calm down. I continued to freak out. After we hung up, my daughter and son and I got out of that room and worked on her school project in the kitchen. The stereo stayed quiet from that point forward.”

About a week or two later, I was at someone’s home giving a small-group reading. Evelyn was not part of the group, but she was there because she had brought a friend who was part of it. When it was over, Evelyn approached me and told me what had happened with the stereo. What follows is our conversation. It actually turned into a mini reading.

“Where did you go that day?” I asked her. “You went somewhere. To a museum, maybe?”

“Yes, we went to our heritage museum,” she said.

“Tell me exactly where you went before and after.”

“We walked from my daughter’s school to the museum, saw the exhibits, walked back to her school, and then walked home to our house.”

“That’s it.”

“That’s what . . . ?”

“You brought back a spirit from the museum,” I said.

“What?” Evelyn exclaimed. “Are you out of your mind?”

I laughed. “Nope. I’ve seen this happen before. Did your daughter do something once you got home that related to the museum trip?”

“Yeah, she had a project to do on it.”

“It makes perfect sense from the perspective of the spirit world,” I said. “That project was something that the spirit was interested in, so he followed you home.”

Evelyn was stunned, to say the least. I was even able to give her what I thought was the first name of the spirit — which, it turned out, matched the name of one of the town’s founders.

“Bill said the spirit just wanted to get our attention to let us know he was there and interested in what we were doing. The project my daughter was working on was during his era. The stereo was a way he was able to communicate with us. Bill said he wasn’t there to hurt us or to even scare us. That’s why when I yelled at him to stop, he did. He wasn’t angry. In fact, he was thrilled that we were doing what we were doing. It was the most fascinating story I had ever heard.”

Evelyn’s husband has become a believer himself. And she now recognizes signs all the time, especially from her recently deceased grandmother.

“My entire family feels my grandma’s presence,” Evelyn said. “We actually talk about it every time we see each other, asking each other what signs we have received from her.”

This story is a bit unusual compared with the others in that Evelyn wasn’t asking for a sign and didn’t even know the person who was trying to give her one. For a spirit to “latch on” to someone and go home with them is rare, but when it does happen, there is always a logical explanation why the spirit did it.

This spirit in particular was very gracious, thankful for their visit to the museum and for their project, and he simply wanted to be part of it. And when they acknowledged his presence and asked him to stop, he did, a good example of the fact that spirits will listen to us when we make our voices heard by them. This project probably brought the spirit a lot of happiness, and it also gave Evelyn and her daughter a really good story to tell.