Possible Explanation
Laurel told us back in 2001 that the house was not haunted—Brittany was. She was attracting spirits, both good and bad, like moths to a flame. Just to double check on the haunted house theory, I researched the history of the property the condo is built on and found there was never anything else here. The land had been part of a horse farm.
But about a month after Renee’s cleansing, I was approached with another possible solution to the spiritual turmoil that had occurred here.
I had become friends with a Liberal Catholic bishop (which is not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, and does allow women to be ordained), and although I rarely bring up the story about Brittany’s possession with anyone, I somehow felt that I could ask Carol about it. After hearing a condensed version of the story you’ve just read, Bishop Carol said that she had no doubt that paranormal activities do take place, including demonic possessions. She then confessed, “I don’t tell just everyone this, but I’m psychic.” She asked me to tell her about the condo we live in, saying she was “getting a bad feeling about the land.” I replied with a summary of the dead end I’d come up against trying to research the property. “Looks like it was nothing but farmland and horses.”
However, the bishop said she was getting “a very strong and compelling feeling that all this wasn’t caused by your daughter. It’s the land. Something’s wrong with the land.” She said that the problem goes back centuries to the Native Americans.
“There was a curse, or maybe something spiritually protective put on it,” she explained. “It’s hallowed ground. People may be buried there. I get the feeling that no one should ever live there.”
That would explain quite a bit. The first thing coming to mind, of course, is my vanquished Native American spirit Waya. Maybe Waya was protecting something here sacred to his people. Tracy also told us she had seen ghosts in her condo on numerous occasions. When I first moved in twenty-four years ago, Dianne, the lady living next door then, mentioned that she thought her condo was haunted. She’d seen spirits and swore that small objects often turned up in places other than where she put them. Brittany became friends with her daughter, Marlo, who also described seeing “misty figures or spirits” upstairs on the landing.
Britt says that when she’d stay at her mom’s house when she was young, she’d occasionally see spirits, but nothing to the extent that she did here in the condo. And, when she was married and living with Kevin, she still occasionally saw apparitions—but that nothing ever felt as threatening to her as it did here.
If the bishop is right and my condo sits on a sacred (or cursed) Native American site, then we may have been dealing with elemental spirits who protect and manipulate the forces of nature. They figure prominently in nature-based Pagan religions in their many forms, including the European Celts, African, and Norse religions, and Native American shamanism.
They are “chaotic spirits,” in that they do not differentiate between our concept of good and evil.
Therefore, if the old condo here is sitting on top of sacred Native American grounds guarded by one or more elementals, you can’t help but wonder if our paranormal shenanigans over the years (and even the possession itself) could be attributed to one or more elementals.
Another similarity that comes to mind is the nineteenth-century haunting of the Bell Witch. Many who’ve researched that case have concluded that the spirit, Kate, was an elemental summoned to guard the land by Native Americans. Kate displayed both kind and cruel characteristics. She tortured the daughter, Betsy Bell, and is even said to have murdered the patriarch of the Bell family, John. Nevertheless, the spirit often showed kindness, especially to the mother, Lucy. Many who claim to have heard Kate actually speak attested to her wry sense of humor.
If the entity we came to know as Spence was actually our demon (as Renee and the voodoo shaman Hans believe), he displayed striking similarities to the Bell Witch in many ways. If Spence was a chaotic elemental spirit, it would explain his cruel possession of Brittany—as juxtaposed to his outwardly good-natured sense of humor and friendly personality. Maybe Spence had us fooled for nearly two decades into thinking he was some kind of guardian angel for Brittany. But if Spence was the demonic or elemental entity that possessed Britt when she was fifteen, his evil side far overshadowed his witty repartee.
I don’t believe Spence would have ever entered our lives if our use of my old Ouija board hadn’t opened a portal to his dimension. But evil entities can be prevented from using the board as a portal, and the Ouija board can be an effective way to communicate with positive human entities no longer in physical form. However, the sessions must be properly protected beforehand and properly closed at the end.
And perhaps I was warned of all this. In one Ouija board session twenty years before Brittany ever touched one, an entity told me to guard “the wee one.” Those twenty years might have seemed a very long time to me, but to some demonic entity (possibly Spence?) it was but a cosmic breath in quantum time. Did this demonic entity lay in wait until just the right moment to pounce on Brittany when she started playing with the Ouija board? I sincerely wish I knew.
It is difficult to believe that anyone as affable and seemingly good-natured as Spence could have been a demon, but they say that psychopaths often display a persona of affable humor and good will—just before they stab you in the back.