Spirit Box
By 2015 my relationship with God continued to expand due to meditation and extensive reading. I was convinced I had an obligation to make the tale of Brittany’s possession public in an attempt to help others who found themselves in a similar situation.
But by that autumn, my creative juices were stymied with a bad case of writer’s block. Floundering with my own lack of inspiration, I asked God to please “point me in the right direction.” Then a few mornings later, I awoke with a pretty clear-cut plan of action.
It occurred to me to turn to Spence. I had dreamt something about Spence, but I couldn’t remember what. I felt that God was trying to tell me that Spence had something to do with an ending for the book. The Irish spirit was never at a loss for words, and he might say something that would get my creative juices flowing again.
I proposed my idea to Brittany, and she seemed to think it was a solid plan. She said she’d be willing to channel Spence to see what he had to say about a possible ending. But I wanted to have a chance to prepare and to take a more scientific approach. All my reading about paranormal investigation indicated that 1) Spence’s responses should be recorded, and 2) having several other people present would add validity to my conclusions about his suggestions.
I have a good friend from my theatre days named Gina Cheshire who is also very much into the paranormal. She lives in a breathtakingly restored, three-story, Victorian-era house whose haunted activity was the focus of an episode of a well-known paranormal reality TV series. Gina is originally from England and now works in the music industry in Nashville. She had known Brittany since she was a little girl and knew about her paranormal inclinations.
I thought Gina’s famously haunted house would be the perfect location for Brittany to channel Spence. I approached her with the idea, and she was immediately intrigued. She had a friend, Bret Oldham, who had a spirit box and was experienced in conducting and documenting paranormal investigations. Bret has authored several books about alien abductions and has been featured on the Ancient Aliens TV series.
A spirit box sweeps back and forth between radio stations, so spirits can select words with which to communicate. Invented by Dr. Konstantin Raudive in the 1940s, it was further refined by Frank Sumption in 2002, and his version is sometimes called the Frank Box.
Gina had set the event for the evening before Halloween, which was totally coincidental. But if the veil between worlds is really thinner then, hopefully we might get even more involved information.
As the time drew closer for our EVP session, Britt seemed to be growing more apprehensive. A couple of days before we were scheduled to go to Gina’s, she delivered some rather startling news.
“I don’t want to channel Spence,” she said. “Something doesn’t feel right. He’s been trying to come through a lot lately. I say no like Laurel told me I could, but he keeps trying. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t feel right. I’m starting to think that maybe Hans was right about Spence.”
I hadn’t been prepared for that one. I’d thought of Spence much as our eccentric Irish friend for sixteen years. We’d often go months or even a few years without hearing from him, but whenever Britt would channel him, it was like our humorous uncle had dropped by. If Britt was having doubts about his sincerity or that he wasn’t who he claimed to be, I would totally honor her wishes.
“I’d still like to go to Gina’s and see who else we might pick up,” Britt volunteered.
I called Gina and filled her in, asking if maybe she’d just like to call the whole thing off. She agreed we should honor Brittany’s wishes and have a spirit box session to see what other spirits might be interested in volunteering messages about the book.
Gina met us at the door of her Victorian mansion and ushered us past the wide, ornate stairway, through the parlor, into a hallway, past the dining room, and then into her kitchen fitted with modern appliances that were modified to look Victorian. It was like stepping back into 1880, with absurdly tall ceilings, ornate woodwork and moldings, period wallpaper, velvet drapes, and polished hardwood floors.
Gina’s husband, Jospeh, was sitting at the kitchen table talking to three of their friends who were interested in the paranormal, including Bret, his wife, and a school teacher named Yolanda. After polite conversation as Britt and I got to know Gina’s friends, we proceeded into the dining room where we’d be holding the spirit box session. We all sat around an enormous, cherry dining room table to meet people we couldn’t see. Gina lit a number of candles scattered about the room and then turned the lights out. I had no idea of what to expect.
Because spirit boxes work by scanning numerous radio channels, the broadcast heard is basically pure static until that rare moment when the spirit detects a word it wants to use. You hear a few words between the static, which is quite loud and more than a bit irritating. Going around the table, the others asked personal questions to which I frankly paid little attention. Finally, it got to be my turn.
“Even though I don’t have an ending yet, should I go ahead and finish the book I’m writing?” I asked my unseen friends.
There was a brief pause in the static, and then another burst of frantic static. I understood absolutely nothing, since I’m deaf in one ear.
“Well then, there’s your answer then, isn’t it?” Gina said in her Northern English accent.
“I have no idea what was just said,” I answered. “It just sounded like static. Translation?”
Everyone, including Brittany, was tremendously excited and they were all talking at once. After they had all calmed down, I gathered that they had heard a woman’s voice say something to the effect of “Finish thee the damn book.”
Had that been my old friend Patience? If so, she sounded somewhat outdone with me for even asking for direction, as well as a bit snippy.
The others asked a few more questions and seemed delighted with the answers they received. Of course, I couldn’t understand any of it.
I did receive two kernels of information out of the spirit box session. It appeared Patience thought the book was a good idea and that I should finish it. But the most important thing I garnered from all this was that for some unknown reason (at least to me), Brittany no longer trusted Spence and had refused to channel him again.
Spirit Ventriloquism
Almost a year after the paranormal incidents resulting in my exorcism using passages from Psalms, Britt was living at my house again. Rick was, thankfully, no longer in the picture.
One night I got up around three a.m. to go to the restroom, went inside, and closed the door. But then I heard Brittany’s voice just outside: “Daddy? I have to go to the bathroom.” Well, that wasn’t the first time that ever happened. So I got up, ready to hold it a little longer, opened the door—and discovered there was no one there. I opened the door to Brittany’s room, but she was sound asleep.
I don’t always have faith in my psychic feelings, but I instinctively felt I might have just been visited by a disembodied entity of some kind mimicking Brittany’s voice. This didn’t feel like anything I could blame on Waya—as much as I might have wanted to. No, the old dread I’d felt so many times before overwhelmed me, and I feared that paranormal things might be ramping up again.
A few days after this incident, Brittany told me the previous night she was sitting in her room on the computer when she heard a knock at the door. She responded with “Yeah?” and heard me say, “Can I come in?” She said, “Sure,” but then I didn’t enter. She said she thought maybe I was bringing clothes or something in and my hands were full. So she got up to let me in. There was no one there. Rather than go downstairs and tell me about this episode at the time, she went back to what she was doing and asked me about it the next morning. We just chalked it up to another spirit-powered incident. Waya seemed harmless, so I used him as the scapegoat. I didn’t want to get her upset.
I had read demons have the ability to mimic voices and was worried an entity was planning something malicious.
More Holy Water and the Kindness of a Priest
About a month later, on February 11, at about three a.m. once again, Britt was downstairs in the kitchen talking to Facebook friends on her computer. I was upstairs sound asleep. Her desk faced the wall, and behind her were the sink and kitchen cabinets. As she plucked at the keyboard, she said she heard a “creaking” sound and looked around to see all the cabinet doors and drawers wide open. She at first thought it was our kitchen ghost, Waya, messing with her.
In a firm voice she commanded, “Stop it. You can’t be here. Get out!” However, then the doors and drawers all very slowly closed as she watched. I might have taken this as a sign that Waya was acquiescing to her demands, but Brittany found the slow closing of the doors and drawers even more unsettling than hearing them all open. She was more than a little rattled and quickly turned back to her computer, telling her online friend she had to go because something weird was happening in the house. She then ran upstairs, got her shoes, and ran outside.
It was twenty-five degrees out with an inch of snow on the ground. Not even remotely dressed for inclement weather, Britt took off on her expedition while wearing pajamas, a sweater, and a pair of plastic gardening shoes. She ran about a block and a half up to the corner of the next street, stopped, and tried to figure out what to do next. She had no plan up until this point when it occurred to her that she needed holy water.
Even though it was three in the morning, she decided to walk to the nearest Catholic church—which is about half a mile from our condo. She figured no one would be there, but something told her to go.
When Britt arrived at the church, the door was locked. She knocked but there was no answer. She turned to leave and had walked about fifteen feet when a priest answered and asked if she needed help. She told him she had come to the church to get some holy water—and there was something paranormal in her house. He invited her inside where she told him the whole story of how she had been possessed fifteen years earlier. She went into as much detail as she remembered, and basically bared her soul to him.
The kindly, middle-aged priest said he usually wouldn’t have been at the church that early but was there to prepare for early morning mass. He said something told him he should get there early that day. Sheepishly, Britt confessed to him that she had been Pagan for a long time after the possession—and asked if having tarot cards or other Pagan artifacts in the house could have caused this.
He strongly cautioned her to get rid of anything Pagan, including Pagan altars, whether they were currently being used or not—because they could possibly attract negative entities or demons. He said all the individual items didn’t have to be thrown away (like the mementos that had belonged to her friend Tracy), but the altars, tarot cards, and Ouija boards needed to be trashed.
The Catholic priest gave her a jar of holy water and told her to go back home and bless the house. He said the most effective way was for us to do this ourselves. He gave her pretty specific instructions on what to do, and then asked if he could drive her home. But after all his wise advice, she said she still didn’t want to go home. The saintly priest advised her to return and face her fears head on—that God would be with her. He assured her the holy water would protect her, and he then brought her home.
I had awoken at four a.m. and saw that Britt was nowhere to be found. The front and back doors were unlocked. I called her cellphone, afraid she’d gone off with one of her old friends who’d repetitiously made a habit of getting her into trouble. But when she answered, she sounded fine. I asked where she was.
“I’m on the road coming home. There are demons in the house. I had to get out. I was scared,” she replied rather matter-of-factly. I told her to “get home right now,” not really knowing what might be going on.
She said she’d been to the Catholic church to get holy water and would be back soon. About five minutes later, she did come home and had a jar of water. Britt described the paranormal events leading up to her mad dash to the Catholic church without a coat in the snow, her talk with the priest, and the instructions he gave her to bless the house and hopefully get rid of any negative entities.
I got my Bible and we went through the whole house with her sprinkling holy water and me reading the passages from Psalms I had used a year earlier. After maybe twenty minutes of this, Britt said she felt they were all gone. But just to make sure, I took the holy water and made the sign of the cross on every door and window, intoning “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” as I did so. We got upstairs, and I blessed her room and recited the Apostles’ Creed. Then we said the Lord’s Prayer together. By then she was sleepy, and I kissed her good night. I too went to bed, reciting the Apostles’ Creed and scores of Hail Marys until I went off to sleep. I slept maybe four hours.
There were no other incidents for nearly two weeks, but then I awoke around three a.m. again one morning and pattered off to the restroom as was my usual ritual. A few seconds after I’d closed the restroom door, I heard three insistent knocks. I assumed that Brittany was on the other side of the doorway.
“Hang on, Peanut. Give me just a second,” I said. Within perhaps three seconds, I found myself standing at the open door looking out into an empty hallway. I looked into Britt’s room to find that she was sound asleep. I have no explanation for the knocking at the restroom door—definitely one I could not blame on the cats.
Things were relatively peaceful for the next few months. Hoping for the best, I prayed that the homemade cleansing we’d done with the priest’s holy water had rid the house of negative entities—and the “knock, knock, knocking” on the bathroom door was just Waya saying hi.