Paranormal Incidents Through the Years
After about ten months, most of the paranormal incidents ceased—at least on a daily basis. Brittany returned to school, albeit a different one (she didn’t want to go back to the same school where she would be around the aforementioned ex-boyfriend). I continued writing for the newspaper and directing and acting in plays in the Nashville area. My mother continued to stay with us during the weeks Brittany was at my house, commuting back and forth to her apartment downtown on the weeks Britt stayed with her mother.
Paranormally, things were much more peaceful. I believe that her experience with the other side had been so traumatic that Brittany consciously put up a mental barrier to block all things paranormal. For a few years, life was relatively ordinary. She graduated from high school and then enrolled at Tennessee Technological College in Nashville to study to be an aesthetician. She actually wanted to become a makeup artist, but aesthetician was about as close a match as she could find and not have to travel to New York or L.A. It was a two-year course, and she was in her final quarter when she started dating a young man named Kevin who worked for the U.S. Post Office. They fell in love and decided to get married, then Britt quit school before graduation. Britt and Kevin bought a house near her mother, and life went on. Sometimes she worked, and sometimes she didn’t. Luckily, Kevin made enough money that it wasn’t absolutely essential for Brittany to work.
Once they were married, I didn’t see nearly as much of Brittany. Paranormal occurrences continued during the next five years for her and separately for me at my house. But they were sporadic and for the most part harmless. A few events seemed noteworthy enough to write down at the time, so I’ll try to summarize a few of the incidents I did jot down in a separate file on my computer.
Getting Reception Without a Paranormal “Antenna”
Laurel had said that Brittany was the psychic magnet making paranormal things happen at my house. The first time Laurel went through my condo, she said, “The house is not haunted. Brittany is pulling these entities in.” So I took that ball and ran with it for many years. I just assumed Britt was the antenna that was attracting paranormal events, which had proved oh so less than entertaining.
However, that didn’t explain the sporadic paranormal events that occurred here after Britt married and left home. Granted, the magnitude and intensity of the events were infinitely greater when she was here—but sometimes, inexplicable things happened anyway. I couldn’t help but wonder why, so I did a little research. I knew that the condos were built in 1985, but I wondered if maybe there had been some creepy old Victorian house full of spirits here before. But it turned out the condos were built on land that had been a horse farm—another dead-end street.
But since my paranormal events were usually not bothersome (and often just interesting or even mildly funny), I didn’t give them too much thought.
Electronic Voice Phenomena
on My Eighties Answering Machine
One Sunday afternoon a couple of years after Brittany left home, I was sitting at my computer writing my weekly theatre review. There was no one in the condo but me. (After Brittany got married, my mom moved back to her apartment full time, only dropping by for the occasional visit.)
The phone rang, and my old eighties answering machine picked up the call. The messages usually sound crystal clear, but this one was almost overpowered by background static. Just above the static I could hear a tiny voice say, “Hello, hello? Why can’t anyone hear me? I’m talking and I’m talking, so why doesn’t anyone hear me?” The voice actually sounded a bit like Brittany, so I leaned over and picked up the receiver.
“Brittany, is that you?” I responded. “Is something wrong?”
The voice that answered me sounded far away, lost and desperate. I could tell now that it definitely wasn’t Brittany.
“Where are you?” it asked. “Where did you go? Why can’t anyone hear me? I don’t know where I am.”
“Who is this? Hello? Are you sure you have the right number?” I asked.
“Hello, hello, please answer me,” it pleaded. “Someone, anyone … are you there?”
“Brittany, is that you? What’s wrong?” Then the line just went dead. Not like the person on the other side had hung up, but just suddenly not there.
I was more than a little rattled by this odd call from someone with a voice so similar to Britt’s—someone who was obviously lost and in a great deal of distress. I dialed Brittany’s home number. It rang quite a long time, but she eventually picked up and answered with a deeply sleepy voice. She said she and Kevin were taking a nap. They’d been up very late the night before and had been asleep when I called. I told her about the call I’d just gotten, but she didn’t know anything about it. It obviously hadn’t been her.
Was this an example of an EVP (electronic voice phenomena) coming through my phone and answering machine? Of course, I have no evidence whatsoever to back that up—but that was frankly the impression I got. I’ve heard of EVPs coming through over shortwave radios and even just regular radios. But I never hear of anyone picking up an EVP over an old phone’s answering machine. I kept the message on my machine for months, playing it for Brittany and a few others. But the power went out one night in a storm and it (along with all my other messages) was lost. My fault. I knew that the first time we had a power failure, it would be lost. I kept meaning to record it onto a tape player, so I’d have a backup—but of course I didn’t. But if I had to bet on what I thought that tiny voice was, so lost and so alone, I’d put my money on an EVP from the other side.
Gee, If They Could Just Be Taught to Clean House
During the five years Brittany was married to Kevin, she had numerous jobs, including being a caregiver for the elderly, working as a clerk in several retail stores, and working as a housekeeper for several maid services.
After Britt got married and my mom moved out, I’d hire one of those maid services to come in and get the house more or less presentable. Since Britt had been working for a maid service, it seemed like a good idea to pay her to clean my place up. I get a clean house, and she earns a few bucks. Win-win.
At the time, I was directing a play I had written called Otto about a real-life Holocaust survivor and spent most of my nights in rehearsal. In the midst of rehearsing a scene, I got a frantic call from her on my cell phone.
“I was at your place cleaning up, but weird things started happening,” she said. “I had to get out of there. I’m sorry. I got part of the house cleaned up, but I just can’t go back with nobody there.”
She said that after she had cleaned the upstairs, she went down to the kitchen to evaluate what needed to be done there. The cleaning supplies she needed for this were out in her car, so she went out to get them. When she came back, all the kitchen cabinet doors had been flung wide open, and the six kitchen chairs were stacked at several odd angles atop the table. Not having to be told twice that someone or something didn’t want her to upset the sanctity of my home by cleaning it, Brittany grabbed her cleaning supplies and made a quick retreat back to her car. She didn’t pull over to call me until she was several blocks away.
“I didn’t even want to be sitting in the parking lot,” she said. “Something was in there, and I didn’t know whether it could come out and get me.”
Brittany needed the money, so even a skeptic would have to admit that she wouldn’t leave before the job was done.
Since holding rehearsals was my responsibility, I couldn’t leave twenty-five actors standing around scratching their heads while I rushed off to play ghostbusters. So I went back to work and resumed rehearsing. I told my co-director and good friend, Rodney Pickle, what had happened. He’s a very religious/spiritual man and didn’t doubt me for a second. He had known Brittany for several years and had even acted with her in a play I wrote. He knew she was credible and not crazy. He listened attentively when I told him what she’d just relayed to me, and then told me a couple of ghost stories that had happened to him over the years.
After we finished rehearsals that evening, I drove home. If this had happened eight or ten years earlier, I would have had to deal with the fear factor as I unlocked the door and went into a dark house that I knew had been the sight of paranormal activity just a few hours before. However, I was just mad. Some interdimensional beastie had once again disrupted my life, scared the wits out of my daughter, prevented her from making some extra money, and even had the audacity to touch my things.
But as I turned the doorknob and stepped in, I remembered something Laurel had told me years earlier. Exhibiting anger is not the most effective reaction when dealing with the beasties. These beings feed on anger the same way they do fear. Anger and fear just make them stronger. Laurel also used to say that they hate being laughed at—just as most bullies do.
But once in the kitchen, I could see what had spooked Brittany. Sure enough, the chairs were all stacked on the kitchen table, with some upside down, some right side up, some at odd angles. Chair legs were resting on the seats of other chairs (often in precarious positions)—and the doors and drawers to all the kitchen cabinets were wide open.
Remembering what Laurel had said, I decided to make a joke out of the whole thing. “Very clever! Great job of redecorating the kitchen,” I mocked. “But why can’t you learn how to do something useful like wash the dishes or do housework? Don’t you think it’s about time you earned your keep around here?”
I was genuinely more angry than scared. I had missed the chance to have my house cleaned, and Brittany had missed out on earning a little extra money merely because some screwball spirit had decided to play a prank. After years of being hassled by formless entities, I had about reached the end of my patience. That night I went to bed the same as usual, as if nothing had happened. But sometime during the night, the TV in my bedroom came on by itself. I woke up and said:
“Will you just stop it? I have things to do tomorrow, even if you don’t! I’d like to get a little sleep!” I’ve had insomnia since I was a teenager, so sleep is precious to me. I am never amused at anything, even a wacky spirit, that causes me to lose sleep more than I do all on my own. Luckily, I was somehow actually able to go back to sleep that night.
Rodney asked me the next night at rehearsal what I had found at home. When I told him about the devastation in the kitchen and the TV turning itself on, he said if it were him he’d just move. But by then, I’d become used to things bumping and thumping in the night.
Traveling Teddy
Then there was the case of the nomadic teddy bear. Somewhere along the way, I had given Brittany a very small (eight inches), white teddy bear with a red ribbon around its neck for Valentine’s Day. After she got married and left home, I kept finding Brittany’s little white teddy at various locations throughout the house. I was living there alone, so I knew I hadn’t moved it—and if the cats had moved it in a game of “swat the fluffy,” it would have shown up on the floor flopped over on its side (or worse). But I would find the little bear neatly placed first on one bookshelf and then another. Sometimes it would make a guest appearance on my desk. Occasionally, it would materialize on the kitchen table. But it was always sitting straight up, as if it had been put on display. That went on, sporadically, for about a year. I wondered if it might be the spirit of a child who just liked playing with the teddy bear. After a year of finding the stuffed toy on first one shelf, bookcase, table, or counter and then the other, I got a bit tired of the game and put the teddy bear in a drawer. Frankly, things were starting to get a little creepy. I felt like I was playing with a child I couldn’t see. Apparently, this spirit didn’t have the ability to get it out of a drawer, so this particular phenomenon never happened again. I never did really figure out the rhyme or reason to it.
Adventures in Electricity
My little invisible friends also seemed to like to manipulate electrical gizmos, e.g., radios, TVs, and occasionally the can opener. Hearing the can opener open an invisible can while you’re trying to eat dinner can be more than a bit unsettling. But after everything we’d been through, I took these minor irritations with a grain of salt—and usually just fashioned some kind of wisecrack about it.
The TV turning itself on in the middle of the night got to be a fairly common occurrence after Brittany got married. Not really scary, but extremely irritating.
I often wondered if the spirit found my lack of any frantic reaction to its pranks a bit frustrating. It had gotten used to scaring Brittany with these parlor tricks, and I’m sure it took some kind of perverse pleasure in that. But with me making jokes about its paranormal antics, I probably had a very unfulfilled spirit lurking about.
Showering with Casper
I always listen to the radio when I’m in the shower and getting ready for the day. One morning, I cranked up the radio, selected a political talk show on the Public Broadcasting Service network, climbed into the tub and pulled the curtain. The water was soothing, and the reception on the radio was crystal clear. The announcer was discussing the president’s recent State of the Union address with commentary by some local political science college professor.
Then the perfectly clear radio reception turned to static. This, in and of itself, is not that unusual. Irritating, but not the end of the world. I listened to the static for a few seconds, debating whether I should get out of the tub and adjust the selector knob (not a pleasant alternative considering the January cold), or just finish my shower and endure the static. Still had to wash my hair, so maybe more static than I could stand—especially considering how loud the radio was. Decisions, decisions.
But then the lights went out. With the static still grinding on my every nerve, I couldn’t very well blame my light deficiency on a power outage. Static takes juice, too.
Then it occurred to me that my resident spirit might have caused this. Assuming my electrical spirit was manipulating the current, I said out loud:
“Very funny. Static, that’s great. Alright. But you have to listen to it too. Dumbass!”
I figured all the reverberations and shrill audio frequencies had to be as unpleasant for Casper as they were for me. Fine, but also—I couldn’t see to finish the shower.
“Alright, Casper, you may like the darkness, but I like to be able to see the soap!”
Then things got even more interesting. The lights suddenly came back on and a new listening alternative presented itself when the radio switched stations all by itself. The station had gone from the world of PBS talk to the above-described static. Now it re-tuned itself to the local jazz station—from 90.3 to 88. Instead of wisecracking political remarks, the broadcast pendulum had swung to total audio-fuzz, and then to Billie Holiday singing “God Bless the Child.” I have a pretty old-fashioned stereo/radio: AM/FM, DVD, two separate speakers. Nothing fancy. No remote anything—nothing I could have accomplished from inside the shower.
There was no one else in the condo. Just me. The radio is jumping stations like crazy; the lights go out; the radio is still crazy; and then the lights come back on. This particular combination of audio fits-and-starts, complete with a light show, had never happened before in the fourteen years I’d lived here. It seemed something more was going on here than personal hygiene. Static was one thing, because the station might have slipped by itself (I suppose—I really don’t know anything about how radio works). But there I stood, listening to Billie Holiday and belting out her song, clear as a bell. I briefly considered running out into the parking lot dripping wet. But instead, I decided to sing along with her—washing my hair, singing “God Bless the Child” and wondering what the hell was coming next.
Billie finished her song, and then the jazz station started playing a modern jazz number I’d never heard before. Apparently Casper wasn’t too fond of this little ditty. Then the station switched back to my original selection, the political talk show. The political pundits were back, my hair was washed, I was squeaky clean, and Casper had once again had a chance to stretch his/her static electrical muscles.
Not a bad shower, all things considered. But I much prefer showering alone.
Waya
Early one morning around two a.m., I was awakened by a clattering noise downstairs that sounded kind of like pans banging together. I heard it with my ears, but it also seemed to be inside my head. But whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t a normal sound that should be coming from my kitchen at two a.m.
I jumped up and went downstairs. Looking back, I realize I should have been more cautious. What if it had been a burglar? But my mind doesn’t think like that. I’m the least paranoid person you’ll ever meet.
When I got to the kitchen, I did not see a pile of pans the cats had knocked out of the cabinets. There were no pans or dishes or anything else that was out of place.
What I did see, though, was more than a bit unnerving. The image only lasted for maybe ten or fifteen seconds, but standing in front of the sink looking back at me was what appeared to be a bare-chested, extremely tall, Native American man with long hair and some kind of colorful headdress. He was holding something that looked like a thick wooden drumstick. I was not scared. My reaction was reminiscent of the time I had seen the spirit of a woman in forties’ clothing at the foot of my bed, or when I had seen the spirit of the old lady in a pillbox hat in the cemetery. Like them, this one appeared transparent—totally fleshed out in three-dimensional detail, but you could see right through him. He had black hair, brown eyes, and some kind of colorful design painted on his chest. Something about the look in his eyes reminded me of a wolf—calculating yet wary, as if planning its next three moves in advance. He looked back at me and nodded slowly, as if to say, “Ah, so you see me. Good then.”
And then he was gone. Was that him beating the stainless steel metal sink with that drumstick creating a sound like pans clanking together? Maybe. But regardless of his purpose, he sure got my attention. And I had the feeling that just letting me know he was around was the gist of his visit.
He did not, in any way, look like he meant me harm—nor did I feel threatened. But I couldn’t help but shake my head when he disappeared. It was, I think, some kind of primal reaction—maybe as an instinctual attempt to hit the delete button in my brain, i.e., “that couldn’t possibly have happened, could it?” But it did, and I was left with much to think about.
I went back to bed and tried to go to sleep, but restful slumber wasn’t in the hand of cards I’d been dealt that night. It wasn’t that I was afraid he’d come back. It was wonderment that such a thing had actually occurred.
After this spectral incident, any time something paranormal happened (or even if it just seemed like it might be paranormal), I attributed it to Waya, which is Cherokee for “wolf.” The Cherokee tribe is indigenous to our area. Sometimes giving things a name makes them seem more normal.
I never felt threatened by Waya, but after telling Brittany about his visit, she said she’d been seeing a tall man in the kitchen for years that had scared her. I’m not sure that was Waya, though. What she described sounded more like a tall, black shadow.
Interestingly, I would learn a number of years later who the spirit might be and why he was haunting my condo.
Paranormal Tampering with My Work Schedule
I have worked for the same newspaper now for twenty-four years. The Nashville PRIDE is a weekly, which means there is a production night—a once a week mad scramble to prepare the paper for the printing press. Often this involves working all day and all night. For fifteen years or so, I worked downtown with everyone else. For the last nine years, I’ve worked at home even on production night, emailing my copy editing in to the managing editor.
But it wasn’t always like that. Back in the day when I worked downtown on production night, we stayed up all night, putting the finishing touches on news stories and getting the layout done. Many have been the work night/days when I’d meet the bus taking children to school on my way home the next morning.
On one such production night in 2008 as I sat at my desk editing copy, the managing editor, Geraldine Heath, beeped me on the phone saying I had a call from Brittany’s husband. It was Kevin, and he was frantic. He said Brittany was “acting out of her head, talking in weird voices, and threatening to hurt herself.”
“She doesn’t even act like she’s Brittany,” he exclaimed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her. What am I supposed to do? I had to take a knife away from her.”
Brittany was pretty strong anyway, but Kevin said that she was displaying strength now that he didn’t know she had. He wasn’t sure he could control her much longer. He asked if he should call 911 or maybe take her to the emergency room. From past experience, I knew that hospitals and emergency rooms had no lasting help to offer for what was wrong with Brittany.
In all those years of working for the paper, I had never asked to leave before my work was finished on production night. However, I went to the managing editor’s office and did just that. Of course, I couldn’t tell Geraldine that I was afraid my daughter might be possessed by demons again—so I told her that Brittany was having seizures and her husband didn’t know what to do. Geraldine knew that Britt had been under the care of a psychiatrist since she was fifteen and had been in and out of psych ward a number of times. She had known Brittany since she was five years old and genuinely cared about my daughter. I told her that I had seen Britt have these seizures before and knew what to do, asking her if I could leave early and take care of her. Geraldine was an empathetic and gracious person and she was obviously concerned.
“Of course, you can go take care of your baby,” Geraldine said. “You tell my girl to get better and that I love her.”
I asked to have the rest of my work emailed to me so I could finish it at home.
“You just go take care of my girl and don’t worry about this place,” she said.
I rushed out to my car and drove the twenty miles to Brittany and Kevin’s.
I had been dreading this phone call for many years following the possession. Britt had been subject to severe depression, lack of self-esteem, mood swings, and sometimes near-violent behavior resulting in ongoing psychiatric care. On a few occasions, brief hospitalization resulted. She had difficulties at school, necessitating her mother and I having to go talk with teachers and school officials on numerous occasions.
Before the possession, she was just a happy-go-lucky kid who was generally the life of the party wherever she went. After one of her brief, two-week stays in a juvenile psych ward following a bout of severe depression, she started cutting herself whenever the stress would get too severe to endure. Often she has gone for eight or ten months, even a couple of years, without resorting to the cutting—but regardless of the medications she’s been put on, sometimes the cutting just happens. Of all the repercussions from the possession, the cutting is the toughest for me to process. Whenever the cutting occurs, this is when I’d most like to get my hands firmly around the throat of the demon (or whatever body part controls its tether to existence) and squeeze the life out of it.
Finally, after fifteen years of inaccurate diagnoses, we’ve found a psychiatrist who understands the cause of the problem. Dr. Elizabeth Baxter has been astute enough to realize that Brittany is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the possession when she was fifteen. She has adjusted the treatment accordingly, and the positive results have been little short of amazing.
When I arrived at their townhouse, Kevin met me at my car.
“She’s calmed down now,” he said, obviously out of breath. “She was talking in some crazy voice, saying things that sounded like they might have been from the Bible, but I really couldn’t understand most of it. She was pacing all over the floor, wringing her hands. I tried to get her to just sit down and talk to me, but she threatened to cut herself with a knife if I got any closer.”
At that point he had never actually seen her try to harm herself, but he knew her history, had seen the scars, and therefore feared for her safety.
Kevin said she must have grabbed a small butcher knife when she passed through the kitchen, then hid it in her pocket. He was so upset, he wasn’t totally sure of what had just happened. He continued to fill me in as we quickly walked up the front porch stairs and went into the house. When he called me at the paper, she was standing in the kitchen with the knife poised to slice her own arm open. He said that when he told Britt (or whoever was inside her manipulating her control levers) that I’d be there soon, Britt passed out and crumpled to the floor. He held her until she came to and then helped her to the sofa.
When I walked in, Brittany was quietly sitting there. She was staring out into space with a wide-eyed, apprehensive expression. I sat down next to her, put my arm around her, and gave her a hug. With that she started crying and speaking so quickly that between the wailing and machine-gun-speed verbiage, I could barely understand her.
“Slow down, slow down,” I pleaded. “You’ve got to stop crying, because I can’t understand you. Just tell me what happened. What got this started?”
“I don’t know,” she blubbered, barely coherent. “We were just talking, and I guess I blacked out. It was like when they [the demons] had me before. They put me in a little room all alone. It was pitch dark, and I couldn’t talk. They told me that I was going to die. I was so scared, Daddy. I could hear Kevin talking to me, but I couldn’t talk back. Then I heard him say that you were coming. When I came to, Kevin was holding me and we were on the kitchen floor.”
Since everything seemed to have pretty much resolved itself by the time I’d arrived, I told Britt and Kevin I’d be heading on home and to call me if there were further problems. Britt was relatively okay, considering, but a bit shaky. She asked if they could follow me back to my house for a cup of coffee. I told her I had to finish my work up on the computer, but they were welcomed to come and hang out while I worked. After we got back to my place and everyone had a cup of coffee and was settled down in the living room, I sat down at my computer nearby them and started back to work.
I could hear Kevin and Brittany chatting about something, but I wasn’t paying them any attention. Then everything became quiet.
“Bill. Hey, Bill!” I heard Kevin say in an urgent and much louder voice. He paused. “She’s doing it again.”
As my eyes looked up from the computer, I saw Brittany begin to slip off the sofa to the floor on her knees. The expression on her face changed from casual to intensely purposeful. Her eyes stared straight ahead like lasers burning a hole in the wall behind me. I bolted up from my desk and strode the twelve feet or so to her, but she continued to stare straight ahead. Not looking at either Kevin or me, she started speaking in a voice that wasn’t her own. We could not even vaguely understand her. Kevin and I were both by her side on the floor and holding her within a split second, but she paid neither of us any attention. It was beginning to look like the night was far from over as we listened to her rambling and gibbering on in earnest in some tongue all her own.
I did not recognize her verbalizations as any language with which I was familiar. But my main concern at the time was to avoid another episode of possession, so I didn’t waste time ruminating about the accent/language.
I can only say that it sounded like an actual language and not the apparent gibberish you might hear when someone is supposed to be “speaking in tongues.” The sounds coming from Brittany had a measured cadence with intonations and genuine expression. Of course, I wish now I had recorded this unidentified language, but at the time I was too preoccupied with Brittany’s safety.
I quickly did my best to style my own homemade cleansing based on Laurel’s example. I basically gave the same Unity-based sermon used in the hitchhiking demon episode, and it worked. Brittany snapped out of that one rather quickly—but before she had much more than a chance to say hello to us, our Irish friend Spence popped in.
Although Brittany had told Kevin the entire story of the possession, the exorcisms, and the resultant problems—he had never actually seen his wife channel Spence before. I started to introduce him, but Spence good-naturedly cut me short.
“I know who he is, Bill. Don’t you remember it’s my job to keep an eye on her? I’m always with her,” Spence said heartily, making a grand gesture putting Britt’s arm around Kevin’s shoulder.
The first thing that crossed my mind was, “Why then, if you’re always with her, do you let her get into trouble? Why do you let her become so depressed that she cuts herself sometimes?” Though that’s what I wanted to say, I didn’t. I guess I assumed that guardian angels can’t make us do anything.
“I can’t stay long, you understand,” Spence said as we helped Brittany to her feet. “But I’d consider it a kindness if I could take a quick look inside the refrigerator?”
“Sure, help yourself,” I replied. “I’d join you, but I have work to do.” I actually felt very much reassured now that Spence had made an appearance. I still felt like he’d protect Brittany just as he had on the night of the exorcism.
Brittany/Spence and Kevin went into the kitchen as I sat back down to my computer and went back to work. As I plucked at the keyboard, I could hear Kevin’s shy and hesitating responses to Spence’s broad prodding and laughter. I could hear the fridge open and close a few times, chairs pulling up to the table, and Kevin trying to tell Spence he really didn’t want another helping of whatever they were eating. After about forty-five minutes, I got up and told Spence he’d have to be saying his farewells. Kevin and I both had places to be tomorrow and needed to get some sleep. Time to let Brittany come back. You could tell he was disappointed and would have been happy to keep it up all night—but he somewhat reluctantly told Kevin what a pleasure it was to finally meet him and then bid us adieu. As usual, when Spence left, Britt’s head flopped over to the side. Her eyes opened wide and she looked around as if she wasn’t sure where she was.
“What did he eat this time?” Brittany asked, shaking her head.
Kevin replied that it was some concoction of corn flakes, sugar, butter, and milk.
“I hate it when he does that,” she said. “I’m trying to lose weight!”
Since everything had returned to a more or less equal footing (well, for my family, anyway), I told the kids I needed to finish my work but to call me if anything further happened. They returned home and left me to finish my work. I called Geraldine the next day to make sure they’d received everything okay.
“How’s my girl?” she asked.
“Oh, everything’s fine now,” I replied truthfully. “It was just a mild seizure. The doctor said her new meds might cause that at first,” I fibbed. Geraldine was one of my favorite people in the whole world, and I felt comfortable divulging many of our problems to her. She knew a lot of what had happened, but there were certain things I just couldn’t share. And I was pretty sure that telling her about Brittany’s so-called guardian angel would be stretching the borders of my personal credibility just a bit too far.
From that point forward, I have done all my work for the newspaper at home. Aside from the obvious advantages, this arrangement has also left me available in case my services are needed for any further negative paranormal events.
Angel on Her Shoulder
After Brittany’s marriage collapsed in 2010 and she moved back in with me, I discovered that she had developed an alcohol and drug problem during her marriage to Kevin. However, in 2008 I was basically clueless as to any such problem. I mention this because it may help explain why Brittany was at a friend’s house drinking around four a.m. with Kevin still at the post office where he worked the night shift. Another factor to consider is that ever since the possession, Britt has been more than just a little apprehensive of being alone—so being married to a guy who had to leave you home alone at night might have been a train wreck waiting to happen.
Britt was at a friend’s where she and a group of girls had been having a girls’ night out. She was drunk but was in the process of trying to sober up. Her cell phone rang, and Kevin asked her when she was coming home. He had gotten off work a bit early and arrived to find an empty house. (I would learn later it was quite common for him to find Britt absent when he came home around sunup.)
Brittany told Kevin she would be leaving soon and should be home in a few minutes. Her friend only lived six or seven miles away. She got into her 2003 Honda Civic and began the short trek home. There was almost no traffic that time of the morning. Brittany has said that by then she wasn’t feeling the effects of the alcohol anymore. I imagine her thoughts were more focused on just how she was going to explain this to Kevin than closely watching the road. The sun was coming up, and weather conditions were dry. Britt’s was the only car on the road. She was traveling along a straight stretch, so had no reason to turn the wheel.
Britt said it felt like something took control of the steering wheel from her—a force stronger than she was turning the wheel far to the right. That’s the last thing she remembers until she came to, penned in, unable to move, in the wrecked and crumpled Honda. The car had gone off the road and was tipped slightly on its side in the ditch. Then she felt a searing pain shooting from her right ankle. (Coincidentally, she was recuperating from having broken her left ankle a few months earlier after having fallen off a porch—also a result of her drinking problem). Steam was rising from the hood of the car, and not knowing if that was a sign of danger or not, she sensed she should get out of the vehicle. But the door wouldn’t open. Totally trapped, she reached into her purse for her phone—but it was nowhere to be found.
Alone, cold, and wretchedly despondent, Brittany sat there in the tilted and crushed Honda and cried. Then she heard the most soothing and reassuring voice.
“It’s alright, baby. Everything’s going to be okay. I’ve called the police and they should be here in just a minute.” She opened her eyes and saw an African American woman in her early forties standing by the driver’s window, reassuring Britt that an ambulance was on the way.
The tall and solidly built woman asked if Britt was hurt anywhere.
“I need to get out, but I’m wedged in and I think I hurt my ankle,” Brittany managed to share before a volley of tears overcame her. The woman looked at Britt’s feet and noticed the brace she was still wearing on her left ankle. “That one already looks bad, honey.”
“No, the other ankle,” she said.
But Brittany said the woman was so reassuring and so compassionate, she was immediately put at ease—regardless of the seemingly hopeless situation.
“Is there anyone you need to call?” the woman asked. Brittany said she wanted to call her mother but couldn’t find her cell phone. Her benefactor looked into the car and saw the cell phone in the back seat where it had flown during the wreck. The woman reached in, got the phone and handed it to Britt who was shaking so badly she couldn’t even dial her mother’s number. The kind woman took the phone and keyed in the numbers as Britt dictated. Still asleep, Sheila blearily answered the phone. Brittany exploded into an avalanche of tearful verbiage, and according to Sheila could not be even a little bit understood. Britt’s Good Samaritan took the phone and explained to Sheila what had happened, as Britt continued to blubber in the background.
“She told me that Brittany had been in a car wreck but was okay,” Sheila said later. “She said she would stay with Brittany until the ambulance arrived.” Sheila said the woman handed the phone back to Brittany, and Sheila stayed on the line and listened to her as she cried in the few more minutes it took the police to arrive.
After the police pulled up, Brittany handed the phone to an officer who talked to Sheila, telling her the extent of the accident. He said they had put Britt into an ambulance, and for Sheila to meet them at the hospital a couple of miles away.
Sheila wanted to thank the woman who’d stopped for being such an enormous help, so she asked the officer if she could speak to her again. The officer seemed confused.
“Ma’am, when we got here there was nobody here but your daughter,” he said.
“But she stopped and helped,” Sheila replied, also confused. “She said she was the one who called the accident in and that she would stay with Brittany until the police and ambulance arrived.”
“I don’t know what to say, ma’am,” the officer said. “Apparently, someone who was just passing by called the wreck in from his or her vehicle. There was no one on the scene when we got here.”
Later that day, Sheila called the police station where they verified what the officer had told her. A passerby who had not stopped had called it in. Brittany was alone in the wrecked car when the police arrived.
Sheila was solidly convinced that our benefactor was an angel sent to save Brittany. When Sheila told me about her theory that our benefactor was an angel, I think I just smiled, went along with it, and humored her.
I do know that angels in the Judeo-Christian Bible serve two purposes: (1) as emissaries from God to deliver messages to mankind, and (2) as God’s warriors, for example: all the smiting going on in Sodom and Gomorrah. New Age thinkers often equate angels with spirit guides, and that could have very well been her purpose. The facts are that an African American woman rescued Brittany from a serious automobile accident. She talked to Sheila on the phone, and apparently was the one to anonymously call the police. However she disappeared before the police arrived—having said she would remain until the ambulance arrived.
It does seem that such a Good Samaritan would stand there with Brittany until she was out of the car safely and in the ambulance—maybe even stick around long enough to give a report to the police. But there was not a trace of Britt’s Good Samaritan.
Frankly, I didn’t give this episode much thought one way or the other until several years later when Brittany was looking through some old photographs I had. After my mom died, I was left to go through boxes upon boxes of loose photos.
One day Brittany came over, as I was sorting through photos, bent over me and said, “That’s my angel.”
“What? Angel, what angel?” I asked, totally out of sync with her thought processes of the moment.
“When I had the wreck and broke my other ankle,” she said excitedly. “That’s the angel who waited with me till the police came.”
She was talking about a small group of pictures I had of our housekeeper/nanny Maggie from the fifties and sixties. Maggie was my favorite person when I was growing up. She wasn’t just a housekeeper to me. She was a playmate, a confidante, and a best friend—always there with a wise laugh to solve the biggest problems perplexing a little kid. After my father died, when I was sixteen, my mom had to let Maggie go. We just didn’t have the money to pay her. But for eleven years, she was probably the single most important person in my life.
Britt was adamant about Maggie being the actual angel who had saved her when she totaled her Honda. How could she be so sure? She had only met Maggie once when she was eleven or twelve when I took McCartney and her to visit Maggie at her home in Springfield, Tennessee, and Maggie passed away a few years later. Did Britt’s subconscious somehow remember Maggie’s face and superimpose it on an imaginary entity her mind created as she lay semiconscious after the wreck? The Maggie Britt met was an elderly woman. The angel was middle-aged and about the same age as the Maggie in the photos I had. Britt had never seen those photos before.
Unless we’re all crazy, Brittany’s angel sure appears to be the spirit of Maggie manifesting the way she would have looked in early middle age. I don’t believe that when good people die they become angels; angels are separate entities created by God for totally different purposes. But I can accept the premise that Maggie’s spirit is one of Britt’s guides.
I also can’t shake the notion that the accident might have been caused by negative entities still lingering in Britt’s psyche. She still asserts that just before the accident, she lost control of the car. The wheel was pulled hard in the opposite direction she was trying to steer. Would it be that far-fetched to think that a demonic entity might attempt murder by automobile?
The Teleporting Wheelchair
My mother, “Mima” to the kids, was in remarkably good shape for her age when most of these things were going on. After Brittany got married in 2005, Mima spent the majority of her time at her apartment. She did have a scare with a case of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The doctor felt like she was too old for chemotherapy; however, after a round of radiation treatments, she was declared to be in remission and cancer-free. She didn’t let any of this slow her down much. She still drove and even took herself to most of her radiation treatments.
But during the winter of her eighty-fifth year, she came down with pneumonia. It took her down fast and hard. At first, she just thought she had a cold. But after a week in bed, it was apparent more was going on. I’d been trying to get her to go to the doctor since she first got sick, but she didn’t like doctors. She didn’t trust them and thought they charged too much. She was determined to stick it out and get better on her own. But she kept getting worse, so one day I just announced that it was time to go to the doctor. She weakly protested, but by then was not strong enough to resist much.
She stayed almost a month in the hospital, and then had to go to a nursing home to get physical therapy. After lying in bed so long, her legs didn’t want to hold her up anymore. After another month of physical therapy, she finally got to where she could walk with a walker for brief distances—but had to carry around an oxygen tank wherever she went.
When she left the nursing/rehab center, I took her back to her apartment to live. She could never walk without the walker or drive her car again. Although she would have liked to return home with me, I couldn’t take her back to my condo. There was simply no way we could get her and the walker up the steep steps to my front door—let alone up and down the stairs to get to a bedroom or take a shower.
Mima slowly got better and shed that cumbersome oxygen tank after several more months. But the walker forced her to live full time in her apartment from then on. Since she couldn’t drive, once a week I’d go fetch her groceries, and I took her to her doctor once a month. For these excursions, we got a folding wheelchair.
I’d stop in and have dinner with her every week or two. She’d make spaghetti for me or maybe falafels, and then we’d sit and talk about current events. After a couple more years, she could no longer cook, so I’d bring dinner.
Then in September of 2010, around ten p.m., she fell out of her wheelchair and couldn’t get up. She was too weak to crawl to the phone and didn’t have a cell phone. Luckily, she lived in a retirement center and the other residents were always checking up on each other. Someone in the hallway heard Mima calling for help and rescued her. An ambulance arrived and took her to the hospital.
It was production night at the newspaper, and I was working. I had a cell phone and she had the number, but she didn’t have anyone call. I guess Mima knew I’d be busy and didn’t want to bother me. After we’d finished around dawn, I was so tired I didn’t even check the messages on my machine (when I’m working I turn the ringer off). When I got up around noon, I discovered a message from St. Thomas Hospital telling me my mother had fallen and was a patient there. She was stable, but I should call. I called the hospital, got her room number, and rushed down there.
She was exhausted and heavily sedated. I chastised her for not calling me, but that was a little like giving a speech to the mailbox. The doctors were very concerned with her general weakness and particularly the weakness in her legs. Plus, there was significant pain in her legs. During the next few days, they ran many tests. They determined her cancer had come back. It was centered in her legs and spreading rapidly. I asked what treatments were available and how the prognosis looked. The very kind and compassionate oncologist just said they were going to make her as comfortable as possible, but she probably only had another month or so to live. She was put under hospice care, and everyone prepared for the worst.
However, Mima was a tough old gal and started feeling better. After a month in the hospital, her doctor recommended transferring her to a nursing facility. We moved her to a nursing home about eight miles from my home. Sheila, Brittany, and I would go see her every evening. Although she’d seemed to be getting stronger, after a couple more weeks the improvements started to reverse. The pain was getting much worse, but thank God for morphine.
Mima died on November 7, 2010, at the age of eight-nine, two months shy of turning ninety.
We donated a lot of Mima’s things to Goodwill, but I thought it would be a nice gesture to give her wheelchair to the Presbyterian church Sheila had been attending for the past few years. I called the minister, who was eager receive the donation. He said they had several church members who could benefit from its use.
When I loaded the wheelchair into my car, I realized one of the footrests was missing. I went back in and looked in the closet where it had been stored. The footrest wasn’t anywhere in sight, and I’d already made an appointment with the church secretary to meet her and deliver the wheelchair. I decided to go ahead and take it to the church and come back and find the footrest later.
I spent the rest of that day and the next ransacking the house looking for that footrest. I looked under everything, in every closet and drawer. It was nowhere to be found. I thought that maybe it had gotten lost in the move or fallen off the moving truck. But then I remembered putting the entire device back together once I got home and sitting in it as I went through some of her things. Both footrests had made the trip. It had to be there somewhere.
I continued to look for it in my spare time throughout the following week. Nothing. It seemed to simply have vanished into thin air. There aren’t that many places it could have hidden in my one-thousand-square-foot condo, and I covered those thousand square feet with a fine-toothed comb. It wasn’t there.
During this time, I was living alone. There was no one else in the house who could have moved it. I even cast accusing looks at the cats, but the footrest was made mostly of steel and probably weighed twelve to fifteen pounds. I’ve never seen a cat that could bat around twelve to fifteen pounds of steel. I even considered a group effort, with the five of them pooling their furry resources. But the theory of a grand feline group heist didn’t make sense. It had disappeared into the ether.
Defeated, I called the pastor and told him I couldn’t find the footrest and expressed my deepest apologies. He was very gracious about it and said he was sure the church could buy a replacement.
The next morning, I got up and went downstairs to get my first cup of coffee. The front door is directly in front of the bottom of the staircase. There’s a very small foyer, and then you turn left to go into the living room. Sitting in front of the door was the footrest. How did it get there? Who or what put it there? There was no one who could have moved it from wherever it had been hiding and put it out there in plain view. It couldn’t have been there the whole time. Someone would have tripped over it coming in or out of the door.
Did some spirit teleport it there to help me out? Did Waya, the Native American spirit, take pity on me after seeing me tear the house apart looking for the footrest and put it there? Did Mima’s spirit put it there, so it could be reunited with the rest of her wheelchair? I guess this little episode will just have to remain a mystery. Regardless, I called the minister and told him I’d found the missing footrest and took it to the church the next day.