To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were… We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time.
Clara Ortega
The Laughing Boy and the Girl in the Glass: Stories from My Brothers and Sisters
On Christmas Eve a few years ago, my parents and most of my siblings and our kids were sitting around the dining room table. We were eating a roast beef dinner, with spinach lasagna for the young vegetarians among us, and speculating with my youngest nieces and nephews what time Santa would arrive and what presents he might bring. When the doorbell rang, we all yelled out, “Hi George!” or “Merry Christmas, George!” because nearly every Christmas since he died, my mom’s dog George stops by and rings the doorbell. My mom can see spirits—not all the time, but more than any of the rest of us can. She has seen George’s spirit several times since he died, playing with the kids in the sunken living room, trotting into the sunroom, sometimes even jumping into her lap. George was in pretty bad shape when he died, but whenever my mom sees him, he is healthy and fit. The doorbell usually rings once before my mom sees George’s spirit, and we consider the doorbell to be George’s signature greeting. So on Christmas Eve when the doorbell rang a second time, we were all surprised. Someone got up and looked out the window and said, “Oh, the UPS man is here.” It hadn’t occurred to any of us that it might be a human being in a physical body at the door. We all laughed as my brother’s girlfriend Lila said, “You guys know you’re weird, right?”
Me and my siblings, circa 1967. Left to right, back row: me, Maggie, Iris, and Betsy; front row: Thomas, Dan, and Randall.
So, in the spirit of weirdness and in honor of Lila, here are some of the ghostly or supernatural experiences my siblings have had that weren’t covered in other chapters.
Iris
My older sister, Iris, is fierce and smart. When we were growing up, she wrote plays for us younger kids to perform and (I was so envious of this) could play the accordion. She had two accordions, a big one and a small one, and the rest of us weren’t allowed to touch them.
Iris had the really cool experience of seemingly being transported backwards in time when we lived in Ottawa. Iris is four years older than I am, so she was eleven or younger when this happened. It was a sunny summer day and she was walking out to the clothesline with a basket of laundry to hang on the line. Iris said that, as she walked, she got distracted by the pattern of dappled shadows moving on the ground caused by sunlight shining through swaying tree branches. She saw a fire pit, and as she knelt down for a closer look, she suddenly realized that instead of her own bare feet and legs, she was wearing moccasins and suede leggings. The fire pit, with the cold remains of the previous night’s fire, was in a dried creek bed. Lying in the cold ashes was a bone that looked like an animal’s leg joint, with meat still on it. When Iris picked up the bone to take it with her, she saw that the meat was partially raw. She got disgusted and threw the bone back into the fire pit. Iris’s strong emotional reaction to the raw meat seemed to break the vision, and suddenly, everything was back to normal.
Iris said that when she was seeing the fire pit scene, it felt normal. She felt like she was a Native American man who was preparing to leave the spot where he had camped the night before. She didn’t feel like she was herself trapped in an alternate reality or anything. Iris thought the experience might be a past-life memory. Another possibility is that the moving pattern of light triggered a change in consciousness, and Iris tuned in to a scene from the past associated with the land itself. Our house was built on land that had been Dakota/Sioux territory a little more than a hundred years earlier.
Thomas
My dark-eyed older brother Thomas, who inherited our Montana cowboy relatives’ love of horses and the West, is sort of a mad genius who coined words and phrases such as “snorkafueny, fueny, fueny,” which he mumbled when he was pretending to be asleep to keep pesky younger siblings away. Thomas doesn’t eat candy, which gave him a terrible power over the rest of us. He kept his share of whatever candy we got in his underwear drawer so no one would steal it, and he used his candy stash to bribe us or as rewards in his twisted magnum opus, Quiet Game. The goal of Quiet Game was to progress through a series of designated stations in the living room by being the quietest person in the room, as determined by Thomas. Meanwhile, he would stand in the center of the living room and watch us, occasionally telling jokes to try to make us laugh. Sometimes after telling a joke, he would say, “You may laugh.” But just as often as not, he’d follow this magnanimous gesture with a quick “Stop!” Anyone who couldn’t stop giggling had to move back one station. As far as paranormal experiences, Thomas says he has had none. Ghosts probably couldn’t top anything Thomas could come up with anyway.
Betsy
When she was a kid, my younger sister Betsy was nicknamed Betsy Brown Eyes because of her big brown eyes. As a child, Betsy was really shy and really smart. She has had more paranormal experiences than most of my other siblings, especially out-of-body experiences, or OBEs.
One of Betsy’s first successful astral projection experiences came after she took a class on astral projection through the local chapter of Open U. Betsy had often experienced incomplete OBEs in the past, in which she felt her astral body lifting out of her physical body feet first, but not making it all the way out, usually getting stuck at her head before she was jolted awake. (Lifting out feet first is the way I most often experience OBEs, too.) After the Open U class, Betsy lifted all the way out of her body. She wanted to connect with our grandma Dorrie, but the first spirit she saw was a young girl crying in the corner of her bedroom. The girl had long dark braids and was wearing a white nightgown and seemed both unhappy and out of sorts. (More on this odd similarity with my mom’s ghost girl in a minute.) Betsy recalls having a brief conversation with the girl to try to find out why she was unhappy but does not remember getting any real answer, and moved on. Our grandma Dorrie was present in this astral experience, sitting at Betsy’s kitchen table with our Montana grandma, Grandma Morgan. But it was our Montana teddy-bear grandpa, Grandpa Morgan, who was the most animated and interactive spirit in this experience. In her OBE, Betsy saw our grandpa Morgan at the end of the long hall, by the doorway to her kitchen. She flew down the hallway and into his arms. She said she felt Grandpa Morgan’s love and reassurance.
Betsy said she was able to ask Grandpa Morgan a few questions, which he answered. She can’t remember that part of the conversation anymore, a situation she finds completely annoying. She does remember that when she asked our grandpa if dead people could watch what’s happening on earth, she had a sense she had gone too far. All of our grandparents disappeared, and Betsy flew back down to her bedroom and somersaulted into her body.
I just learned the detail of the little crying girl’s dark braids and white nightgown as I was fact-checking Betsy’s experience while writing this chapter. (She had this OBE before my mom had discovered the identity of the ghost girl who followed her around.) Betsy is certain this little girl was not part of her own spirit. Did Betsy, like Randall, tune in to my mom’s ghost girl? I’m inclined to say no, just because neither my mom nor my brother Randall perceived the ghost girl as unhappy. That leads me to wonder why four of us in our family have seen a ghost girl in a long white nightgown. I do feel confident that my mom perceived part of her own spirit. And since Randall saw the same ghost girl hanging around my mom, I believe he also saw my mom’s ghost girl. The true identity of the ghost girl I saw while brushing my teeth at my grandparents’ house is less certain, but because I saw her in my mom’s childhood home, I think there’s a good likelihood that she was associated with my mom. But Betsy saw her ghost girl in her own home and displaying different behavior than the girl that Randall and I saw. Maybe a ghost girl is sometimes just an archetype, like the ubiquitous hitchhiker ghost or crying baby spirit.
One of my worst nightmares, which I had as an adult, was of being trapped in Grandma and Grandpa Haraldson’s house. The dream had an “off” vibe from the very beginning and quickly became very disturbing. In the dream, I knew my grandparents had both already died and there was no reason for me to be there. Their house was eerily empty, but as soon as I realized how odd that was, random pieces of furniture started to materialize around me. This completely freaked me out, since it seemed like something sentient was both aware of my thoughts and trying deliberately to mislead me. At the beginning of the dream, Molly and I had gone to my grandparent’s house to clean, but at some point, Molly disappeared. I started calling for her, knowing the house was bewitched and we had to get out. I knew somehow that Molly had gone upstairs, and I went to get her. I had to run past a possessed man sitting in a chair in the front hallway. He was in the throes of violent seizures but turned to look at me as I ran past, and his eyes were twirling patterns. It was then I realized that something evil had taken over his body. When I got to the top of the staircase, I hollered for Molly. Instead of Molly, Betsy came out of one of the upstairs rooms. She was about six years old, was wearing a white nightgown, and had no feet. The dream ended there because I woke up.
The other weird coincidence about all this is that in one of Betsy’s OBEs (which she experienced before hearing anything about my nightmare), she felt like she was floating in darkness in some sort of clear membrane bubble. She could see young girls in white nightgowns floating in other bubbles, and none of the girls had feet.
Betsy’s psychic experiences continued after her daughter Christine was born. Christine was a very light sleeper, and like all new parents, Betsy was pretty sleep-deprived. One day, Betsy was drinking a glass of water and wondering if she had the energy necessary to take care of a baby. When Betsy lifted up the glass of water to take another sip, she saw Christine’s smiling face looking up at her from the bottom of the glass! Betsy thought she must be seeing things because she was so tired, but when she looked again, Christine’s face was still there, smiling up at her. Betsy took this as a message that everything was going to be fine.
I love the smiling baby Christine story. I think being sleep-deprived put Betsy in a state of consciousness in which she did some spontaneous scrying. Scrying is the age-old art of seeing the future or gaining insight into current situations by gazing into a reflective surface such as a pool of water or a mirror and interpreting the images you see. I think the way scrying works can be explained by something I read once: You are a spirit, you have a body. I believe we exist in the physical world and spirit world simultaneously, and that we have access to an unlimited pool of information if we can find a technique for bypassing the limitations of our conscious mind. Done properly, scrying does just that.
Christine had a dramatic psychic experience as a toddler. Betsy had an extremely long and difficult labor with Christine. After forty-nine hours of labor and some complications during the delivery process, the doctors delivered Christine by cesarean section. When Betsy got home from the hospital, she put the bathrobe she had worn during labor—a distinctive, brightly flowered silk robe—in the back of her closet.
One morning when Christine was just over two years old, Betsy wore the robe while preparing breakfast. It was the first time she had worn it since being in the hospital. Christine stared very long and hard at the robe when she first saw it but said nothing. As Betsy fed Christine her breakfast, Christine said, “Mama, the baby wants to get out. The baby wants to get out now. The baby wants to get out now!”
When I heard this story, my guess was that Christine was spontaneously practicing psychometry, or in other words, reading the highly charged energy imbued in the bathrobe. Betsy’s first thought was that Christine might have had an out-of-body experience during delivery because of all the physical and emotional stress of the labor, and was watching “the baby” trying to be born from an observer’s point of view. On a few occasions, Christine has demonstrated the ability to tune in to Betsy’s thoughts, commenting specifically on dilemmas that Betsy was pondering, usually involving how to handle stressful social situations. Christine is now seven years old, smart and shy like her mom and a writer of spooky stories like her aunt Annie.
Randall
My younger brother Randall has always been tall, athletic, and exceptionally easygoing. In fact, he was so mellow that in many of the pictures we have of him as a child, he’s sound asleep—either that or he’s tromping around in his cowboy boots with his equally mellow and oversized cat Big Black under his arm. He and his wife Karen live in California. For a while after they were married, they lived together in Karen’s house, and they both have had ghost experiences there. Karen’s parents own the house, and they believe there are three ghosts that visit occasionally, and that the ghosts are the spirits of the people who first owned the property.
Karen said the ghost activity usually involved hearing loud cracking and popping noises, especially in one particular corner, that neither she nor Randall could explain, tapping sounds as though something was tapping on a piece of wood, doors opening on their own, and doorknobs and windows jiggling. The spirits liked to play with a metal dragon that Karen had hanging on the wall, moving it from side to side and making small noises with it. Occasionally the spirits would help her out. If Karen set her alarm and didn’t get up, they would make a racket until she got out of bed. One night, a friend who didn’t believe in ghosts spent the night at their house. He woke up because he heard someone calling his name. It was a woman, so he assumed it was Karen. But Karen had been asleep and in her room with Randall all night, so they concluded it must have been a ghost.
Karen said the only time she was really scared was when she was home alone and heard heavy footsteps walking up the hallway toward her. Randall suggested she tell the spirits to stop making noises because it scared her. She did, and the noises stopped. However, when Randall came into their room one night, he saw a woman in a white diaphanous gown standing beside their bed, watching Karen sleep. They moved out of the house a few years ago. (Karen reports that the dragon decoration is hanging on the wall at their new place, and has neither moved nor made a sound.) She and Randall do not know if the people who are now living in their former house have met the original owners or not.
Maggie
My younger sister Maggie is the adventurous one of our family. She has always had an outgoing personality, and as a kid, her warm nature and winning smile made her pretty much completely adorable. As an adult, Maggie has traveled extensively and has lived in both Spain and India. Maggie had a time-anomaly experience similar to Iris’s while she was living in Seville, Spain. She had gone to explore some Roman ruins with her friends. At the time, Maggie was standing by herself in what remained of a city. All that was left were the foundations of houses, low stone walls, and some tiles. The layouts of the rooms and location of where some of the chimneys had been were still visible in some of the homes. Maggie was wondering what the place had been like when it was a city when suddenly, the scene changed, and it was a city. There were people everywhere, apparently just going about their daily business. No one took any notice of Maggie at all. She watched the hustle and bustle of the people, and like Iris, she didn’t feel scared or lost in time. It felt very normal. She felt like she belonged in the scene until she looked down and saw her modern-day sundress. Maggie’s first impression was that she wasn’t dressed right. Then the true scope of the experience hit her, and the scene disappeared. Maggie said it was so powerful and moving that she had tears running down her face afterward. For many years, she assumed this was a past-life flashback, but now she thinks it could also have been a “wrinkle in time” kind of bleed-through.
Maggie also had two out-of-body experiences while in high school, both precipitated by doing aerobic workouts to her Joanie Greggains record (a collection of ’80s pop songs). Our sister Betsy learned in a class on OBEs that the ideal state for experiencing astral travel was when your body was relaxed and your mind alert, which accurately describes Maggie’s post-aerobics state. Unfortunately, Maggie had never heard of astral projection when the OBEs happened and thought she was going crazy. Maggie’s first OBE happened when she was zoning out on the couch right after exercising. She said her eyes were open, but she wasn’t focused on anything. A song from the Joanie Greggains record was going through her mind when suddenly, the song she was thinking of speeded up, as if someone were playing a 33 rpm record at 45 rpm. What happened next was that Maggie found herself (or at least found her awareness and visual perspective) in three separate places in our parents’ house in quick progression. Our mom was in the kitchen frying bacon, and first, Maggie had the perspective of being inside the frying pan. Next, she found herself in the midst of our younger brothers Dan and Sam’s informal wrestling match in the sunken living room. Her last impression was of being directly in front of the television screen in the sunroom. That’s when Maggie got scared and wondered what was happening. As soon as she felt fear, she found herself back on the couch, perceiving the people and events around her in the usual way.
Maggie’s second OBE was in the shower, again shortly after she had finished working out. One minute she was in the shower, and the next thing she knew, she was watching a woman wash her arm. She was viewing it from above and slightly to the left, and at first she didn’t realize she was looking at herself. Maggie said, “As soon as I realized it was me I was seeing, I was back inside my body.” She said she was startled to discover that, while viewing herself washing her arm, she couldn’t feel any sensation at all. In other words, she perceived herself visually but not in a tactile way.
I think Maggie’s experience of not being able to perceive the physical sensation of washing her arm while having an OBE adds credence to my belief that OBEs are either a form of dissociation or operate on the same principle. (Dissociation is a medically recognized state of consciousness in which people perceive themselves as being outside their own physical body, usually as a coping mechanism in response to extreme trauma, like torture or abuse.) Maggie did say that the OBEs happened during one of the most stressful times in her life. I think dissociation is related to the phenomenon of soul loss, as well.
Maggie’s husband Rob is a musician who has occasional intuitive flashes, like the time recently when he had a foreboding sense of death in their neighborhood. He found out later there had been a murder on their block the previous night. When Rob and Maggie were living in Bangalore, India, they had a weird haunting experience. The company Maggie worked for had leased a huge mansion for its employees to share and staffed it with a cook and an assistant cook; additional staff included a gardener, a housekeeper, a driver, and a security guard. Large residences in India are often named, and their house was called Sampradaya. Three single women, Maggie’s coworkers, lived at Sampradaya as well. Each person or couple had a private bedroom and bathroom, and shared a common dining room and kitchen. The company let employees live in the house rent-free as part of their compensation.
Maggie and Rob and the other women lived in the house for nearly a year without incident. Then the haunting commenced. While in India, Maggie and Rob sent out an email newsletter, the “Bangalore Chronicles,” about their experiences to all of their family and friends. Here is Rob’s account of the haunting.
Bangalore Chronicles, June 23, 2001
Which brings me to the recent episode of “household mass hysteria” that gripped the residents of our guesthouse for several weeks last month. Valerie, Jo, Ivy and Maggie (who sleep in separate rooms) all reported a number of incidents where they were awakened around 4 am by rappings on the door, door handles being jiggled, whisperings, and such. Through subsequent investigations, we ruled out the possibility of house staff being responsible, and then of outside intruders who may have broken in at night. That’s when a “supernatural” explanation started to uneasily gain some steam. And the noises, the rappings, continued—always at the bewitching hour of 4 am. I even set my alarm one night at 3:55 and laid in wait for whatever might come, but (as is often the fate of the skeptic) I saw nothing. What finally pushed the experience over the edge of normalcy and into the freak-out zone was something that Sampad[1] let slip out of the bag. That these visits were not unusual and that they were from “witches”—ghost spirits of young Indian women who had killed themselves for one reason or another, and now were making regular nocturnal visits to the young single women in the house. Not to harm them, but just to bug them.
Dilbag[2] revealed that he had twice seen them floating in the trees late at night behind the house. One of the guards related a story to Sampad that was especially creepy. He said that one night he dozed off—and when awakened, he discovered that he was being carried. He shook himself to his senses, and found himself standing in the middle of the yard being stared at by four young women—who then just sort of dissipated into the ether. You can imagine how comforting all these stories were to the single women of the house. (Although I’m still not sure why Maggie heard something one night—perhaps I should double-check the validity of our marriage license.)
Anyway, to wrap things up, the noises have stopped. Things are once again back to normal at Sampradaya. But! As an extremely interesting footnote: one night Jo and Ivy returned to the house from a wedding. They had gone all-out with the Indian dress thing: full saris, strings of jasmine in their hair, and bindis (the forehead dot). So they took a picture of themselves. Ivy held the camera and shot the two of them standing framed in an ornate downstairs mirror. The developed picture caused quite a stir. There are three faces in the photo! Jo’s, Ivy’s, and then a distinctly ghoulish, scary countenance peering over Jo’s shoulder. Folks, it’s positively freakazoidal. We would have sent the photo along with this edition of the Bang Chrons, but Jo’s holding off on major distribution until she sees if there’s any chance to market this baby to the National Enquirer.
Whatever it all means (and I’m sure the truth is out there), it does point out how closely the Hindu mind links the spirit and material worlds. None of this appears to be too out of the ordinary to Sampad and Dilbag.
The staff suggested that Maggie, Rob, and the single women put up pictures of a common Indian protection gargoyle (surprisingly, not a god or goddess) on their bedroom doors to keep the witches away. They all did this, and the rattling of the doorknobs ceased. (See the photo gallery for photos of both the ghost face and the protection gargoyle.)
Back in the United States, Maggie and Rob both noticed an increase in astral experiences after their twin sons, Oscar and Carter, were born. Actually, when Maggie discovered she was pregnant, I asked her if she had any inkling as to whether she was having a boy or a girl. Maggie said she didn’t have any feeling as to the baby’s gender, but whenever she thought about her baby, she thought of “them” rather than him or her. She found out when she was further along that she was expecting twins.
Rob says he considers himself a skeptic about paranormal experiences who is willing to be proven wrong. He says the following experience was one of the first in his life that seemed unexplainable, although three and a half years later, he’s not sure anymore if it was paranormal or just messed-up perception due to sleep deprivation. One night, when the boys were babies, Rob woke up. He saw a silhouette of Maggie standing in the hallway comforting one of the babies in her arms. Then he rolled over and saw Maggie asleep in bed next to him. Upon seeing Maggie, he quickly looked back to the hall and found it empty. He was completely freaked out. At that point, he dashed into Oscar and Carter’s bedroom, fully expecting to find an intruder, but found only the boys asleep. Then he quickly called Maggie and woke her up. He continued to frantically search the house for someone until it became clear there was no one there.
Another night, Maggie woke up in the middle of the night because she heard one of the boys laughing. Rob woke up when Maggie did. He hadn’t heard anything, but he saw one of the boys standing in the nursery, having climbed out of his crib. I think it’s interesting that both Maggie and Rob perceived one of their children but in completely different ways—Rob visually and Maggie in an auditory way. Rob quickly got up to put whichever twin it was (they couldn’t tell for sure) back in his crib, but in the six seconds it took Rob to reach the nursery, he found both boys asleep in their cribs. This happened at a time when the twins could scarcely climb out of their cribs, let alone climb back in by themselves. No laughing little boy was anywhere to be found.
Sleep deprivation has been used as a vision-inducing technique in initiation and healing rituals for ages. I think, in the latter case, Maggie and Rob’s new parent sleep-deprivation acted as a doorway to perceiving Oscar or Carter’s astral form, out of his crib and exploring the nursery at night. As for the first experience, Rob doesn’t know who the woman was.
Other than possibly making the unexpected appearance in the hallway, Carter has not had any paranormal experiences that we are aware of. He loves solving mysteries and telling stories, and is always on the lookout for interesting and weird events. Oscar’s natural skills include a highly developed sense of empathy and insight. He had a very interesting dream about a mean elf who lives in a violin that we are going to use as the main character in a story.
Dan
My brother Dan, whose girlfriend Lila is the one this chapter is dedicated to, has had two paranormal experiences that he can’t explain. Dan was a remarkably cute kid who from a young age demonstrated a fierce independent streak that you might not expect to see in someone with six older siblings. Unfortunately, neither of Dan’s ghostly experiences was very positive. In the first, he had been working outside in the heat (he works as a homebuilder) and had come home to take a shower and get cleaned up before going out. He lay down on his bed for a few minutes and fell asleep. He woke up because he heard a strange crackling noise. He looked around and saw a bright ball of golden light floating near the ceiling. Dan was trying to figure out what the light could be when it suddenly zapped him! He said it felt like he was getting a shock. The shock lasted for a long time—nearly thirty seconds, by Dan’s estimation. Then the light disappeared. Dan rented this house out for a while to a man from Ireland, who apparently had a different kind of weird experience there. The Irish man asked Dan if the house had brownies. (Brownies are helpful—but capricious—house fairies.) Dan thought the renter was joking, but he wasn’t. He told Dan that someone was straightening out the shoes and boots piled by the door each night, which is exactly the kind of tidying-up behavior brownies are known to exhibit.
Believe it or not, Dan’s other paranormal experience was even worse—I refer to it as the time he got beat up by a ghost, although he likes to remind me that technically, he only got pinned down, and therefore the scuffle ended in a draw, with no clear winner.
Between doing construction work, running, biking, and kayaking, Dan is in exceptionally good shape. But when he had surgery on an old rotator cuff injury, the doctors told him he had to have someone around to help him out for the first few days after surgery. Since Lila works full time, Dan went to stay at our parents’ house. My parents have plenty of ghost activity at their house, but their ghost has never hurt anyone—until Dan spent the night. He was sleeping in the recliner because it was more comfortable than trying to lie down on his sore shoulder. Dan said he woke up because he felt something pin him down. One of the main spirits at my mom and dad’s house is a male ghost who sometimes smells like cigarette smoke, but all the ghost usually does is walk up the staircase or make his way down the hallway toward the bedrooms. He also bangs around in whatever rooms my mom and dad aren’t in.
After realizing he was being held down, Dan tried to hit whoever had him pinned. He was at a disadvantage since he couldn’t see anyone, was in a lot of pain, and his good arm was in a sling. Eventually, the ghost just disappeared. I have no idea why a spirit would try to beat up my brother, although I do enjoy razzing him about it from time to time. Dan always reminds me he was on painkillers when it happened. And I always remind him that most people on painkillers don’t get accosted by ghosts.
Sam
My youngest brother, Sam, is ten years younger than I am, so when he was little, my girlfriends and I liked to play with him and pretend he was our baby. Sam had big blue eyes, dark blond hair, and a serious nature. He now works as a soil-testing engineer, so it seems fitting that his only unusual experience—which may or may not have been an OBE —is his story of getting smacked down into the ground by “the big hand of God.”
Sam characterizes the experience as an unusually vivid dream in which he felt himself flying out of his body. Sam said it felt really cool, like he was flying at high speed straight up into the sky. He was completely unafraid, even as he left the earth’s atmosphere and entered outer space. All of a sudden, a huge hand appeared out of nowhere. He heard a male voice boom no! as the hand smacked him down. Sam said he hurtled backwards to Earth and hit the ground so hard he was actually embedded in the dirt. He does remember thinking, “Is this a dream?” Sam does not usually have lucid dreams, so even that aspect of the dream was unusual.
Sam’s wife, Jenny, is vivacious and petite, and used to be a defense free safety for the Minnesota Vixen, a team in the Independent Women’s Football League. She lived in a haunted house in California from the time she was a baby until she was almost three, when her parents moved back to Minnesota. As a toddler, she was terrified of something in her room. One night, Jenny asked her mom for water. When her mom came back with it, Jenny came running out of her room screaming and crying. For the next few days, Jenny would peer around the door before entering her room and was very tentative about going inside, but whatever had been in there seemed to be gone. Jenny’s mom came to believe the house was haunted too. She would hear footsteps on the carpet behind her, but no one was there when she turned around. But at least one of the spirits in the California house was helpful. A ghost woke up Jenny’s mom one night when Jenny had thrown her blanket on the space heater, so she was able to remove it before it caused a fire. Another time, when her mom was really sick, Jenny’s dad woke up and saw an old woman kneeling beside the bed, praying for her. Jenny’s mom had never talked to her husband about the ghost because she didn’t think he’d believe her. He became a believer anyway when he woke up one night, being pulled off the bed by something he couldn’t see. He yelled for Jenny’s mom to help him, saying, “Hold on to me, hold on to me! Something is pulling me out of the bed!” Jenny’s mom grabbed onto him, and whatever it was went away.
Sam and Jenny have two daughters, Mahala, age four, and Ava, age one. Ava is a fearless go-getter with a ready smile—or growl—depending on what the situation calls for. We will have to wait until Ava is a little older to hear her stories.
Mahala is smart and serious and sweet. One night when Jenny was reading bedtime stories to her, Mahala kept looking up at the ceiling in the corner of her room. Jenny finally asked her what she was looking at. She wasn’t expecting Mahala to answer, “The old lady in a chair in the air.” Mahala asked Jenny to make the old lady go away. Jenny told Mahala that she couldn’t see the old lady, but she still told the old lady to go away. Jenny also told Mahala to let her know if she saw the old lady again because no one should be in her room that made her uncomfortable. With the youngest members of our families we try to strike a balance, both listening to what they’re saying and making sure they feel safe and secure. Jenny did a blessing and protection ritual for the room to keep the energy clear.
More recently, Mahala was at my parents’ house and casually remarked, “I had a different mom once.”
My mom, caught completely off-guard, replied, “You did?”
“Yeah,” said Mahala. “But she went away or something. I don’t remember …” Mahala also told my mom that, when she grows up, she’s going to change her name to Emily, “because that’s my real name.” After this bit of commentary, Mahala just started playing again. Mahala’s comment is especially interesting because as far as we know, she has not been exposed to the concept of reincarnation. There has been some really compelling research done on children remembering past lives. Dr. Ian Stevenson conducted extensive studies, primarily in India. Reincarnation is a central tenet of Hinduism, the dominant religion in India, and therefore parents there pay attention to their children’s past-life memories. Dr. Stevenson found that children were most likely to remember past lives before age seven. One of the fascinating things that Dr. Stevenson discovered is that if someone died tragically, some evidence of how they died will often appear on their physical body in their next incarnation in the form of a scar or birthmark.
Sophia
My sister Iris’s daughter Sophia is an artist and photographer who has a particular affinity for nature spirits. When she was fifteen, she saw green, glowing lights in her bedroom at night. On various occasions throughout that entire summer, Sophia woke up at night and noticed different objects or parts of objects glowing green when her room was dark. The first was the lower parts of some spines of books on her bookshelf, then it was part of a shelf on the wall or a spot on the wall. Another time it was just the leg of a wooden chair near her bed. When Sophia turned the light on, everything looked normal; when she turned it off, the objects would glow again. She didn’t sense anything bad from the green glow, but she was spooked enough to leave the light on when she slept, most of the time. Sophia said it was a pretty intense time in her life and that it may have been related to excess emotional energy. She did an experiment to see if the green light had left residual energy in her room, putting one of her plants on the shelf where she’d seen the glowing light, but a move to the glowing light spot didn’t seem to affect the plant in any noticeable way.
Gwendolyn
Iris’s younger daughter, Gwendolyn, is whip-smart, focused, and very giving of her time and talent. Gwendolyn was the youngest grandchild for quite a few years and has spent lots of time at my house. The last time she spent the night, a few years ago, Gwendolyn heard footsteps upstairs, then she heard someone clear his throat right in front of her. (She was standing by the clock in the kitchen at the time.) Weirdly, when Gwendolyn told my mom about it the next day, my mom said she had heard someone clearing his throat at their house the night before! My mom had never heard that particular ghost noise at her house before. It’s possible that my mom was actually tuned in to Gwendolyn’s experience, rather than hearing a spirit at her own house. I find these random shared family paranormal experiences to be comforting. It’s like we’re all so in tune with each other, we have a collective family energy field to rely on if we need a hand.
That same night Gwendolyn heard someone clearing his throat, she had a nightmare that scared her enough that she came and slept in my room. Gwendolyn’s dream involved a diabolical female ghost with a shaved head—the same dream character Molly had dreamt about a decade earlier that scared Molly so much she came and slept in my bed. Gwendolyn was sleeping in the guest room. She dreamt that I came into her room and said I wanted to show her something. I looked toward the wall and it started to move and shift. It morphed into a blank wall. The closet door disappeared. Gwendolyn and I could see right through the wall, and there was a ghost in the otherwise empty closet. It was the shaved-head ghost from Molly’s nightmare. Gwendolyn said the ghost had an angry expression on her face and seemed evil. She was sitting in a bluish-gray recliner. Gwendolyn was terrified. She said it didn’t feel like I was in the room anymore, but it seemed as if Leon, our protective house spirit, was there. Then the shaved-head ghost’s expression changed, and she seemed less threatening, almost sorrowful. That’s when Gwendolyn woke up. Gwendolyn had heard the story of Molly’s nightmare, so it is entirely possible Molly’s dream was on her mind when she went to bed. But what I found compelling was the chair in which the ghost was sitting. Gwendolyn had no way of knowing that the bluish-gray recliner has been in both an OBE that I had and part of a creative visualization exercise that I had done several times. In my OBE, I was actually sitting in the chair. I remember thinking how ridiculous it was to be sitting in a recliner while astral projecting, and that ended the experience. It was the only time I’ve felt self-conscious during an OBE. In the creative visualization exercise, I imagined myself going to a quiet room and sitting in a comfortable chair. I pictured a big screen in the room, and basically projected a movie of my intended goal coming true on the screen. I always imagined a bluish-gray recliner as the comfortable chair. I stopped doing this exercise after a while because it seemed to me like it was just as effective to do what I’ve always done to reach my goals: decide what I want to accomplish and then go for it. I am usually picturing what I want in my mind, just because that’s how I’m wired, rather than using it as a deliberate technique. I have read in various magical books that people should take the time to dispose of things they’ve created on the astral realm (usually referred to as “thought forms”). Otherwise, it’s like being an astral litterbug. There is a theory that thought forms that are magical in origin (created through willpower) can even take on a life of their own. A sentient thought form is known as a tulpa.
Levi
A person doesn’t have to believe in ghosts to fit into our family, but I was happy to learn that my beau Levi had a supernatural experience in his childhood. He was a farm kid in Illinois and was staying at a friend’s house overnight. He and his friend were helping with farm chores. When they were walking back across the farmyard after chores, they heard a loud clanging noise from over beside one of the outbuildings, and when they went to investigate, they saw that the sound had come from a bunch of metal milk cans stored there. They didn’t see anything that could have made such a loud and sustained clanging—no cat could have done it, and there were no dogs around, but they shrugged it off and went inside for supper. Later that evening, after dark, they were out in the barn, sitting around on the hay bales, when they both got a strange feeling and decided to go back to the house. They latched the barn door behind them and had started across the barnyard when they heard a banging noise from the door. When they turned to look, they saw the barn door moving and banging like someone or something was inside trying very hard to get out. Levi says the distance from the barn to the house has probably never been covered as fast before or since. When they got to Levi’s friend’s bedroom on the second floor, they peeked out the window over to the barnyard and saw the barn door open, swinging back and forth. As they were looking at the door and talking about what could have possibly opened it from the inside or been strong enough to break it, they saw a moving shadow in front of the white wooden fence between the house and barn. The shadow was larger than a man, upright, and moving in a strange, furtive, almost animal-like way. Levi said he and his friend never did discover what came out of the barn that night.
This past year, our family had a very simple Christmas celebration, reflecting both the world’s economic situation and my mom’s recovery from surgery earlier in the month. We focused on spending the day together, sharing a meal, and giving gifts to the children. We had a Christmas tree but no other decorations up. We noted that even George scaled back—he didn’t ring the doorbell on Christmas Eve. After the presents were opened, Oscar, age five, and Mahala, age four, came running out of the sunroom, wide-eyed and out of breath. “The light turned off and on! It turned off by itself! It blinked off and then came on!” They were so excited, they were talking over each other. With great precision, they used their hands to demonstrate how long the light was off before it came back on. We discussed the various possibilities and decided that maybe George had stopped by to wish us a Merry Christmas after all, with a new greeting to reflect this year’s simpler holiday celebration.