The more enlightened our houses are,
the more their walls ooze ghosts.

Italo Calvino

The Haunted Trailer and Other Weirdness in Wisconsin

Roberts

When I got married to John, Molly and Jack’s dad, we lived in an apartment in St. Paul for six months, then bought a trailer in the small town of Roberts, Wisconsin. The trailer court was on the edge of town and, even though I knew it wasn’t exactly fabulous to live in a trailer, I liked our sunny and cheerful little home, which was all done up in ’70s décor. All the appliances plus the toilets, sinks, and our fancy garden tub (which had two steps leading to it) were harvest gold. The walls were brown paneling, and the color of basically everything else—carpets, linoleum, curtains, wallpaper—was burnt orange. Jack and Molly were both babies when we lived there, and orange is still their favorite color, which must be some sort of testament to the positive vibe of our trailer house (see photo gallery). Although I never experienced any paranormal activity in our place, it was rumored that there was a haunted trailer in our park—on our street but down one block. I heard about it at one of my neighbor Dani’s Tupperware parties. Dani was a colorful person, a Tupperware lady with long, dark hair and gypsy looks. She had loud fights with her husband and swore in regular conversation. Dani had a beautiful, junglelike flower garden on her lot that was the envy of the trailer park. Her Tupperware parties were well-attended and sort of wild, with alcoholic beverages and lots of laughter and occasional loud arguments. At the time, I wasn’t old enough to drink, and we didn’t have extra money for Tupperware products, but I was so intimidated by Dani that I didn’t know how to refuse her invitations. I did enjoy listening to Dani’s stories, which is how I learned about the haunted trailer.

Molly and neighborhood friends having pillowcase races in the back yard, Hudson, Wisconsin, circa 1984.

Dani had actually been inside the haunted trailer (none of the rest of us had). She said that the bedroom was haunted, and the wife realized it first because her jewelry box, which was the kind that played music, started acting up. The first thing the jewelry box did was to start playing by itself. Eventually, it escalated to “jumping around” on top of the dresser. The husband, who didn’t believe in ghosts, finally saw it, too. I did hear that the couple was having problems and eventually split up, but I heard nothing more after that.

I used to think about the haunted trailer when I went to pick up my mail. The mailboxes for the entire park were on a central street, only three or four lots away from the haunted trailer. I was glad I didn’t live right next door to the haunted trailer, and in my mind, I sort of “blurred out” our trailer so if the ghost tuned in to me because I was thinking about it, it wouldn’t follow me home. I think it was instinctive to do this rudimentary shielding technique.

John and the kids and I only lived in our trailer for a year before we purchased a house in Hudson, Wisconsin, through a first-time homebuyers program. When our marriage ended after nine years, there were times when I wondered if I had misperceived our relationship the entire time. I started to question my judgment. During one of these periods of doubt, I had a strange dream in which I found myself back in our trailer in Roberts. I was standing in the kitchen, but everything was dark. I opened the curtains and saw that someone had put a piece of cardboard over the window. I took the cardboard off and was able to see clearly. As I turned around, I noticed food and plates on the table, as though someone had gotten up in the midst of a meal. All of a sudden, I thought, “What am I doing here? I don’t live here anymore.” Then I heard the front door opening. I stepped back into the hallway so I wouldn’t be seen, and as I did, I realized there was a woman with her back to me, standing at the sink doing dishes. Then I saw my former husband John come in through the front door and pick up baby Molly. When I realized I was seeing an everyday scene of my family from the past, I glanced over to the woman at the sink. She turned around, and I saw that she was me. The dream version of me went up to John, and they hugged. The best part of this dream was that I could actually feel the love John and I felt for each other and remember the emotional bond that we had shared. It made me realize that the decisions I had made regarding matters of love and trust were good ones, even though our marriage didn’t last. The dream ended with the dream me catching sight of the observant me. I didn’t say anything to the dream me, because I didn’t know what would happen—I didn’t want to scare myself. But the dream me just smiled and said, “May I help you?” I remembered how trusting and accommodating I had been, and it made me a little sad. When I woke up, I searched my mind for anything that had happened when we lived in the trailer that might have been the flip side of my dream—in other words, me perceiving a visit from my future self, or even a presence in the trailer watching me—but I never have come up with anything. Still, because it was so emotionally powerful, I feel this healing experience was a more than an ordinary dream.

My Parents’ House

My mom and dad live in the country, on the outskirts of a small town on the western border of Wisconsin. They have had so many haunting experiences at their house, it’s hard to know where to begin. They bought their house in 1977. It was kind of a sad situation for the seller. She was a woman whose husband had died. He had been a newly remarried widower when he built the big country house for himself, his two teenage sons, and his new wife. Unfortunately, the man died before the house was completely finished. I don’t know if his widow didn’t want to be out there alone after the last two kids moved out or if there were estate matters to settle, but the man’s dream of a country house for his family ended with his death. That’s when my parents bought the house. I believe that the man who built it is the male spirit that my parents encounter most often.

When we moved into the house, seven of us kids were still at home, and the big rambler with five bedrooms and three bathrooms felt like a fabulous luxury. It was a seventies-era house through and through, with a sunken living room, psychedelic flower wallpaper in the downstairs hallway, a red, white, and blue bedroom, and orange and black carpeting in the open living room and dining area. My parents have been redoing the interior over the years, and one of the first things to go was the Halloween-colored carpeting. My folks’ house seems to be getting more haunted as time goes by, but maybe it’s just that the ghost couldn’t make itself heard over the noise of five teenagers plus two boys aged eleven and six.

My mom has had more paranormal experiences in the house than my dad, but my dad has had a few weird experiences as well. More than once, he has had to take a look around to make sure the loud crashing noises he and my mom heard were caused by a ghost and not an intruder. Probably the most common haunting behavior at my mom and dad’s house is hearing heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, then walking down the hallway to their room. My mom has actually felt someone sit down on the bed, which seems intrusive, but it’s relatively common spirit behavior. (Twice, I’ve awakened at my house to find a spirit sitting at the foot of my bed. One time, it was my great-grandma Maggie, who I was surprised but happy to see. The other time, it was an incredibly sad woman from the 1940s who, despite her sorrow, seemed more like an image or imprint than anything else. Both experiences are covered at length in my first book.) My mom’s impression is that the spirit that has sat on their bed is male.

My mom and I send emails back and forth when weird stuff happens. It’s a quick way to share our stories; plus, for me, it’s helpful to have a written record of events. Here’s a typical email that I got from my mom in December 2008:

Also have been a lot of hallway, stairs, and other walking noises, and drawers opening and closing. Last night, I was reading in the sunken living room and I heard steps coming up the stairs, going back to the bedroom, and just assumed that it was O. T.[1] getting ready to shower because of noises of drawers opening and closing, ditto closet doors. I thought nothing of it until about 5 min. later when he came upstairs from the garage. No message from whomever was banging the drawers!

Love, Mom

Elsewhere in this book, I tell about my mom seeing the spirit of her dog George and hearing a man clearing his throat on the same night my niece Gwendolyn heard the same sound at my house. Some of the other unusual ghost activity my mom has experienced includes seeing the bathroom shower curtain, which was pulled closed, ripple all the way across its length, as though a breeze had blown behind it. This happened in the middle of the night, and the bathroom window was closed at the time. My mom did not open the curtain to see what was behind it.

On at least two occasions at my parents’ house, a picture has flown off the wall, not in front of my parents but when they’re in the next room. When they have come out to investigate the crashing noise, they’ve found a picture lying on the floor in the middle of the room. My mom believes in paying attention to possible messages, so she always calls whoever is in the picture, just to check in.

One of the more unusual things that happened at my mom and dad’s house was the night the guitar strummed itself. My mom was home alone at the time. There was an acoustic guitar at my folks’ house, left there by either Molly or my brother Randall. My mom woke up and felt like someone was in the room with her. She went into the hyperalert state that you go into when you feel threatened and looked around. (My mom leaves a lamp on at night if she’s home alone.) She didn’t see anyone, but she heard one strum of the guitar, as if someone had brushed a hand across the strings. Her dog George was at the foot of the bed, so she knew it wasn’t him, and he doesn’t usually play the guitar anyway. Nothing more happened that night, but my mom had a hard time getting back to sleep.

One of my favorite ghost stories from my parents’ house was the night my mom grabbed a ghost. She woke up and saw a man’s hand reaching out for her. At first she thought it was my dad’s hand, which still would have been weird, but then she saw that the hand had no arm attached to it—it was just floating in the air. And—here’s one of the things I love about my mom—she grabbed the hand as hard as she could. She said it felt like a regular human hand, with skin and muscles and bones. It wasn’t freezing cold or anything ghostly, but it did disappear in her hand. When my mom told me about this, I laughed because it was like the opposite of a ghost story—the living person freaked out the ghost, instead of the other way around.

On a similar note, I recently had a vivid dream in which I woke up because I heard voices coming from my bedroom closet. It sounded like two men having a conversation. When I knocked on the closet door and asked who was in there, they stopped talking.

“What’s that?” one of the voices said to the other.

“A ghost!” the other voice said, then laughed.

“Leon?” I said. “Is that you?”

One of the voices answered, “How about Ted Steinmeyer?” Ted and his wife, Gertrude, were the owners of my house in the 1950s, before Leon Kuchenmeister and his wife bought it in 1963. I opened the door, and Ted and another man came out into my room. They both seemed like decent fellows, if a little perplexed by the situation. Ted asked me if I was a ghost.

“Sort of,” I replied. “I bought your house in 1994. And I’ve been living here for fourteen years.”

Was I a ghost? My house is energetically unusual. If spirits from the past can come through time for visits, maybe my astral body can go backwards in time to visit past homeowners as well. The possibility had never occurred to me before I had this dream.

Hudson

The first real house that John and I owned, which we bought after living in our trailer, was a small 1950s bungalow in Hudson, Wisconsin. Its most charming feature was a double fireplace. One side of the fireplace faced the dining nook, and the other side, the living room. I was happy to have a house, but we had a lot of work to do. The people who’d lived there before us kept thirteen dogs in the house (ten puppies and three adult dogs), and the basement and garage were filled from floor to ceiling with the family’s stuff. They had even used the yard as a storage area, keeping three old Jeeps behind the garage, along with a professional- grade freezer. After we moved in, we cleaned, painted, replaced all of the flooring and window treatments, cut down a dead tree in the yard and planted a new one, and slowly made the house cheerful and inviting. The best change we made, besides planting several trees in the yard, was adding a wildflower garden that encompassed the entire south side of the house. It was shaped like a half circle, with a smaller circle of flowers in the center, all outlined with sandstone that I got from the sand plant where my dad and John worked. It was designed to have blooming flowers all summer long, and it was spectacular.

Molly was not quite two and Jack was three months old when we moved into the house. Molly was already starting to display some of her intuitive abilities. The very first demonstration was in our car in the parking lot of the grocery store. I had both kids with me, and Jack, who was a baby, had gotten fussy in the store. I shopped as quickly as I could, but I was pretty stressed out by the time we got through the checkout line. As I was putting Jack in his car seat, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the rearview mirror, and my eyes looked wild. It caught me off-guard because I thought I had been doing a good job managing a stressful situation. Since I’m a writer, I started thinking of the moment as though I was writing about it: “She caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror, and her eyes revealed her true feelings,” and so on, reworking the sentence in my mind a few times. Molly, who was already in her car seat sucking her thumb, pulled her thumb out of her mouth and said, “Mom, I want to see your eyes” in a very conversational way, as though she had read my mind.

I said, “What?”

Molly said again, “I want to see your eyes!” It was a little nerve-wracking to think of having a child who could read my mind. But my sister Betsy has had the same experience, with her daughter Christine responding verbally to her thoughts.

The second thing Molly did that demonstrated her psychic abilities was when she tried to make a record not skip with her mind—and succeeded. She was three or four, and the kids had a record that they loved. We played it over and over, and eventually, it got scratched. There was one place on one of the songs where the needle got stuck, and I’d have to come and move it or the music would just keep repeating. One day, I was in my room putting on makeup and came out to the living room because the record was getting to the skip point. Molly was standing facing the stereo with her eyes shut tight. I asked her what she was doing.

She said, “I’m trying to make the record so it doesn’t skip.” I was completely taken aback, because I couldn’t imagine what had even given her the idea. I asked her how, and she said, “With my mind.” I asked her where she learned that, and she said she didn’t know. It was then that I realized the record had gone beyond the skip point—and had not skipped. If I had a young child now, I would work with her or him in a low-key and supportive way to develop this kind of skill. But at the time, I didn’t know how to respond to what had just happened. I didn’t discourage Molly, but I didn’t follow up on this demonstration of psychic ability in any structured way, either.

One day, Molly told me that someone named Wendy had come into her room the night before. I assumed Wendy was an imaginary friend until Molly told me that Wendy had hurt her.

“What?” I asked, a bad feeling coming over me.

“Wendy hurt me,” Molly repeated.

I asked Molly how Wendy had hurt her.

“She stuck sharp things in my head, “ Molly said. “She told me it would be okay.” When I asked Molly to show me where, she pointed to her temples. I checked them and was relieved to see no sign of trauma. Molly said first Wendy rubbed her temples, then she stuck something sharp in them. I asked Molly what Wendy looked like.

“I don’t know,” Molly said. “I’ve couldn’t see her face.”

Again, I had a sinking feeling. ”Why not?”

“She wore a cloak,” Molly answered. “It covered her face.”

I told Molly that friends don’t hurt their friends, and they don’t keep their faces hidden. I also told Molly that if Wendy ever came back, she was to let me know immediately, and together, we would make sure that Wendy never hurt her again. Maybe Wendy got the message, because Molly never saw or sensed her again.

So, who or what was Wendy? We never have figured it out for sure. One possibility that has occurred to me is that Wendy was drawing energy from Molly. That is one of the primary threats that astral beings pose to those of us in physical bodies. One night last summer, I had a very frightening experience at my house. I woke up really scared without knowing why. Then I saw a small hooded being beside my bed and got the distinct impression it was trying to pull my astral body out of my physical body. In my sleep, I had curled up tight in an instinctive effort to protect myself. I started praying and asking for protection. Suddenly, the hooded being was “removed” from the room. This is the only word that I can think of to describe what happened. It looked like the hooded entity was lifted away by some force that I couldn’t see or feel, like someone picked it up and took it out through the ceiling. As I watched it flying backwards and upwards out of my room, I saw that there were three or four other hooded beings behind it. They disappeared in the same way.

Nearly every psychic who has come to my house in Sibley tells me there are at least two or three portals here (portals are openings between the physical and spirit worlds). When psychic Linda Drake visited my house, Leon, the main house spirit and my ally in the spirit world, told her, “This house is filled with doorways. It’s like Grand Central Station for ghosts.” I realized after the encounter with the small hooded creatures that I needed to do some prayer and protection work around my house and property. (At the end of this book are techniques for blessing and protecting one’s home.)

Another weird instance at our house in Hudson was when Molly’s cousin Jill spent the night. The girls were around eight and nine years old when this happened. The night seemed pretty normal from my busy-mom perspective. After supper, the girls spent a lot of time in Molly’s room, with lots of giggling and chatting going on. Once, they ran out of the room screaming and laughing, but I didn’t pay any attention to it because it seemed like sleepover fun and games. What I didn’t know was that the girls had been in Molly’s bedroom, just talking, when they saw a playful procession of little people, about six to eight inches tall, come out of the closet, hop down off the dresser, and march in a line around the room. The little people were in “old-fashioned clothes” and they were all barefoot. Molly and Jill both saw them (and Jill, as far as we knew, was not psychic and didn’t even believe in that kind of stuff). The little people seemed unaware of Molly and Jill. One of the girls threw a piece of popcorn at the little people, which had no discernable effect on them but caused Molly and Jill to run screaming out of the room in anticipation of what the little people might do. The girls didn’t tell me about what they saw because they didn’t want me to make them go away. When the girls went back in Molly’s room, the little barefoot beings were gone. Molly and Jill tried to get them to come back, and even looked for them in the closet, to no avail. Eventually, the girls went to bed. They did not experience anything else strange that night.

So why would two young girls see tiny barefoot people marching around a room? I have to admit, at that point in my life I might have thought the girls were pulling my leg with their story. I did not think that our house in Hudson was haunted—and yet, we sometimes heard small knocks and noises coming from the closet where Molly and Jill had seen the little people emerge. The closet had a nearly impossible-to-utilize design. Built in a space above the basement steps, it could only be accessed from a door in Molly’s room that was about three and a half feet off the ground. The closet was deep but had almost no floor space because on one side, there were three built-in shelves, and on the other, the steep slant of the basement steps. Basically, you either had to stand on a chair and shove stuff in the deep closet as best you could or climb into the closet, standing at an angle or perched on the narrow framework. I generally chose the former option, so the closet was sort of a jumbled hodge-podge of holiday decorations and things we didn’t need very often. I always attributed the noise to piles of stuff shifting and falling. But it’s interesting that the noisy closet was the point of origin for the little barefoot people. Their appearance didn’t coincide with any significant anniversaries (that we know of) or presage any dramatic events. Molly says now that if she had to guess, she’d say the little people represented some sort of fairy energy. That makes sense to me. I believe everything that exists in the physical and spirit world is essentially some form of energy. Just as a spirit may appear in many different forms (in human form or as a ball of light, to name just a few possibilities), I think house spirits, or brownie energy, may appear as little people. (More on this possibility a little later in this chapter, when I talk about Theosophist beliefs.)

Not long after Molly and Jill saw the little people, we had another weird experience that started in Molly’s room involving an old-fashioned paper Christmas angel. The Christmas angel had been in the funky closet with the other seasonal stuff, but one year we decided to hang it on Molly’s wall instead of putting it away with the other holiday decorations. It wasn’t until the morning after the angel incident that we put the whole story together. I had gone to bed quite late (I was taking weekend college classes and working at the time, so I usually did my homework after the kids went to bed). I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of something flying around my room. I ducked under the covers and listened, trying to figure out what I could be hearing. I finally concluded that either a bat or a bird had gotten into the house. My bedroom door was shut, and I figured whatever it was would probably stay in my room. I decided I would deal with the situation in the light of day and resigned myself to sleeping completely under my covers, so whatever was swooping through my room couldn’t actually touch me.

The next morning, when I woke up, it took me a minute to remember the night’s events. I took a quick look around my room, then ran out, shutting the door behind me. On my way out, I noticed the paper angel from Molly’s room lying on my floor. The kids were watching TV. I told them not to open the door to my room because I thought either a bat or a bird was trapped inside. I told Molly that her angel decoration was on the floor of my room and I would get it after I dealt with whatever was in my room.

Molly said, “I don’t want the angel decoration in my room anymore. I slid it under your door last night.” When I asked her why, Molly told me the angel had moved by itself the previous night, swaying from left to right while still hanging on the wall. Molly did the logical kid thing, asking the angel, “Are you really moving?” The angel nodded her head yes. Molly asked the paper angel one more question (she no longer remembers what it was), and the angel shook her head no. That’s when Molly, who has always been very brave, ripped the angel off the wall and slid it under my door. At some point in the night, knowing nothing of what Molly had experienced, I woke up and heard the sound of something flying around my room. I didn’t turn on my light because I didn’t want something flying into my hair when I made my way across the room to the light switch.

Did Molly and I tune in to some astral being or energy that was communicating through the paper angel? The angel’s actions—swaying back and forth, answering questions, and flying around—don’t really make any sense, unless something just wanted to get our attention. I had always loved that paper angel because of the Christmas memories she held and her quaint, old-fashioned charm. But after searching my room and finding neither a bat nor a bird, I was freaked out enough that I threw the paper angel away.

Not everything that we initially thought was weird or scary turned out to be. Molly and Jack’s dad, John, is colorful character, a funny guy, and a great storyteller with a wild streak to boot. One night, I was talking to our friend and neighbor Sonya, an elementary school teacher with a garage sale-ing soul, when I heard someone pick up the other phone. I asked Sonja if she heard it, and she said, “Yes. Does someone want to use the phone at your house?” I told her the kids were in bed and I could see John from where I was standing, so I knew he hadn’t picked up the other phone. I asked Sonya if she had another line at her house, and she said she did in the basement. She said, “Hang on, I’m going to put the barricade in place.” (The barricade was a two-by-four with a piece of carpeting stapled to either end that Sonya’s dad had made. When Sonya put it between her basement and kitchen doors, no one could get in.) Sonja had no more than said these words when her line went dead.

“Quick, run to Sonja’s and make sure she’s okay!” I yelled at John, filling him in on the details as he ran for his shotgun. He had been on his way to bed, so he was in his long johns, but he threw on his winter boots and raced out the door. He jumped in his truck and drove to Sonja’s (four houses down) in his underwear to confront whoever was in her basement. Sonja was waiting for him at the side door. She had gotten freaked out when her line went dead, but she did get the barricade in place. She took it down so John could come in. He told Sonya to be ready to call the police as he headed into the basement. Sonja was just starting to remind him that her phone was dead so she couldn’t call the police when John slipped (because his boots had snow on them) and slid down the basement steps on his butt, his gun on his shoulder. Luckily, no one was hurt. Sonja found out later that her line went dead because the phone cord was old and needed to be replaced. That’s why we heard the strange noise, too.

Two of the weird paranormal experiences I had while living in Hudson were related to the escalating troubles between John and me. The first was a bad dream that I had that seemed to bleed into Jack’s consciousness. Jack was about five years old at the time. My dream started with John and I having an argument. As the argument escalated, he and I were transformed into pure energy, floating blobs of light that were mostly red but pulsed or throbbed with other colors too. The angrier we became, the darker and more intense the red color got. Finally, John, in his pure energy form, left the house. I floated around, still angry. Then I saw Molly and Jack on the couch watching TV, and I floated over to them and settled on the couch next to Jack. Even in my dream, I felt like it was dangerous to expose my kids to that kind of negativity. My dream ended when Jack woke up in real life, yelling, “It’s coming to get me, it’s coming to get me!” Once awake, I felt really bad. Jack could not describe what had been coming to get him in his dream, but because of the timing and the fact that Jack had never before woken up with a nightmare, I felt he had been affected by my bad dream. I had not heard of auras at that point in my life, but I believe my dream illustrated what was going on energetically between John and me, and the effect it was having on Molly and Jack.

I also think it was the stress in our house that caused Molly’s picture to act out. We had a close-up photograph of Molly’s face with her warrior princess expression that we’d had blown-up to a 11 x 14 size. We put it in a Plexiglas freestanding picture frame, along with a big photograph of Jack in the same type and size frame. Molly’s picture was constantly falling down from the mantel. Sometimes I’d find it lying facedown right below the mantel on the hearth, and sometimes it would be out in the middle of the floor face-up. After this happened a few times, I started to wonder if something was going on. I swapped out Molly and Jack’s pictures to see if the mantel was just off-kilter on one side. But it wasn’t—or, at least, Jack’s picture stayed put, while Molly’s started falling off the other side of the mantel. After John and I separated, our house felt much more peaceful. And Molly’s picture stayed put.

One of the most dramatic experiences I had while living in Hudson had many elements for which I had no explanation at the time. It happened one night when John and I were in bed. He was asleep, and I had just set my book down and was dozing off. Suddenly, my body went on high alert, like I sensed imminent danger. I strained to listen or see something, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Suddenly, the walls of our bedroom seemed to melt away, and I could see our back yard. In real life, it was summer, but the outdoor scene I was seeing was winter. As I struggled to figure out what was going on, I saw a man standing in our yard in the shadows and knew immediately that he posed a threat. He was wearing old-fashioned clothing and carrying a long gun. I knew that the man was John, but I also knew John was beside me in bed. I was going to wake John up when the man outside lifted his gun and shot me in the back. This is where the weirdest part of this very bizarre experience comes in. I was experiencing the scene from more than one perspective simultaneously. I could see the man in the yard, I could see John and myself lying in bed (from above), and I could see inside my body, where the bullet had nicked my spine and lodged in muscle. I also knew logically that I couldn’t have been shot in the back when I was lying down because of the laws of physics. But I felt as if I had actually been shot. My first reaction was sorrow at leaving my kids and my family and my life—I thought I was dying and assumed that’s why everything seemed so weird and unreal. Then I realized I was still in bed, and I felt a surge of hope that maybe I hadn’t died after all. I could still see inside my body and view the bone fragments from my spine, and my next concern was that I was paralyzed. I tried wiggling my toes, and when I was able to, I was so relieved I started to cry. That was the end of the experience. The walls of our bedroom reappeared from the ground up, and my perception returned to normal. I got out of bed because I was so rattled. I went and looked out the kitchen window into our back yard. Everything looked exactly like it was supposed to look. I wondered if the experience was some sort of premonition or a past-life memory or if stress was just driving me toward a nervous breakdown.

Many years later, I learned from the Peter Tompkins book The Secret Life of Nature that there is a form of astral vision that describes the strange simultaneous, multiple-perspective vision I had that night. In his book, Tompkins tells about a form of astral vision that the Theosophists referred to by the quaint if clunky term “withinth.” Tompkins describes this particular type of astral vision as “a sort of four-dimensional sense of seeing an object from all sides at once and from inside as well.” Tompkins reveals that with astral sight, a person can see “equally well behind and beneath” an object without turning their head. I also learned from this book that the initial experience of seeing my bedroom walls melt away was a similar form of perception that the Theosophists referred to as etheric vision. According to Tompkins, “Etheric vision is described [by Theosophists] as ‘throughth,’ meaning the ability to see through opaque objects.” Another fascinating thing the Theosophists believed is that by using etheric sight, people could see the “denser etheric bodies of the lower orders of nature spirits” such as fairies, gnomes, and brownies. Using more refined astral sight, people can perceive practically anything, from subatomic particles (electrons and atoms) to radiant water nymphs. Perhaps Molly and her cousin Jill were tuned in to the etheric realm when they saw the tiny barefoot people in Molly’s room.

A few years before we moved out of Wisconsin, I started to read a lot of books on metaphysical topics and talked to my kids about what I was discovering. My parents had some books on Edgar Cayce, the sleeping clairvoyant from the 1930s. Cayce, who was brought up in a relatively conservative Southern Christian home, had started out doing self-hypnosis for healing. He moved on to doing healing readings for other people and eventually started to explore topics such as reincarnation and life on other planets while in a trance state. I also read the works of Ruth Montgomery, a respected Washington, D. C., political columnist who had written a book about Jeane Dixon before writing a series of channeled books using automatic writing. Edgar Cayce and Ruth Montgomery’s traditional backgrounds and mainstream lives added credibility to the metaphysical concepts they explored that, at the time, were unfamiliar and vaguely threatening to me.

When Jack was a teenager, he decided to have an out-of-body experience. He felt himself lifting out of his body feet-first, which he said felt really cool. Then he opened his eyes a crack to see if he was really leaving his body. He felt a jolt of raw fear when he saw a dark, human-shaped silhouette lifting him out of his body. Jack was staying with some friends of ours when this happened, sleeping in a makeshift basement bedroom. He got so freaked out that he had to go get the husband to come and sleep on the other spare bed in the basement so he wouldn’t be downstairs alone.

One of the metaphysical books I read while living in Hudson told how to hypnotize people so that they could meet their spirit guide. My sister Maggie was in between traveling adventures and was staying with us for a while. She and Molly agreed to be hypnotized. They lay down on the living room floor, which was carpeted but still not that comfortable. I droned on (in what I thought was a hypnotic voice) through a lengthy script that went on for several pages. Neither Molly nor Maggie was laughing, so I thought they might actually be having a cool astral journey. Eventually, we got to the part where I brought them out of their hypnotic state. I got nervous when I couldn’t get either one of them to become unhypnotized, so I shook them a little bit to try and wake them up. It turned out they had both fallen sound asleep, and neither Maggie nor Molly was very happy about being woken up. When I asked them if they had met their spirit guides, Maggie said she couldn’t remember anything at all. Molly said she met her spirit guide and he looked like Jon Bon Jovi.

When the kids were in junior high school, there was a period of time in Hudson that we had a Ouija board in the house again. I can’t remember where it came from, although I would guess either the kids asked for one and I relented or they just got one from someplace and brought it in. Anyway, they were told only to use it when I was home and to do a small protection prayer before beginning each session. The kids did not have any dramatic Ouija board experiences that I ever heard about except for one, which had them both in tears before it was over.

When Jack was in grade school, my sister Iris had three kittens to give away. We already had David Grey Hair, who had basically adopted Molly as his companion human, so Jack got to choose a kitten. He chose a sweet and energetic little white kitten with black spots and named him Frisky. Frisky had some developmental challenges, but that just made him even more endearing. He was really good-natured and completely guileless, unlike David Grey Hair, who was smart and sneaky and complicated. Our cats were indoor and outdoor cats in those days, and when Frisky was four or five years old, I started to notice him behaving strangely. For example, I’d see him sitting off by himself in unusual places—on the front steps (where he had never hung out before) or on the compost heap beside the garage. One day, I found our friendly and active Frisky sitting all alone in the corner of the basement. I picked him up to pet him, and my heart sank. Frisky was so light, he felt empty. The weight loss had happened within the space of just a few weeks. I made an appointment with the vet the next day. I did not have a good feeling about Frisky’s health. Now that we were really focused on him, Frisky seemed uncharacteristically vacant. It was like he wasn’t even in his body anymore. In the morning, I wrapped Frisky in a big blanket to take him to the vet. I felt like I was carrying a shell of our kitty. Jack was so crushed, he didn’t want to come out of his room. I said, “Jack, you have to come and say goodbye to Frisky. You might not see him again.”

Jack came out of his room, completely broken up. And—I wouldn’t have believed this if I hadn’t been holding Frisky in my arms and seen it up close—Frisky’s spirit came back into his body to say goodbye to Jack. A moment earlier, Frisky had looked and felt like an empty shell. His eyes were open but looked completely blank. But when Jack approached him, Frisky became present and real. He looked at Jack with love as Jack told him goodbye. Then Frisky was gone again. By this time, we were all crying. The vet tested Frisky and discovered he had feline leukemia, which was something we had never heard of at the time. We had to put Frisky to sleep; there was no choice. We had a small memorial service in which we scattered Frisky’s ashes in his favorite spot in the yard and played the Ray Charles song “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”

Some time after Frisky’s death, the kids were consulting the Ouija board and had asked for a friendly spirit to come through. The planchette started to move, and when they asked who the spirit was, it spelled out frisky. They got very quiet. Then one of the kids asked, “Where are you, Frisky?” and the board spelled out hevn, which seems like exactly how Frisky would spell heaven. That’s when the kids both got completely choked up.

In 1994, we moved out of our occasionally quirky little house in Hudson, Wisconsin, trading up from a weirdness standpoint to a house full of ghosts in Sibley, Minnesota.

[1] My dad. His nickname is Old Timer, or O. T. for short.