Spiritual Underpinnings
I had joined the Episcopal church in Lebanon around 1978. I had been Roman Catholic, but my wife at the time, Linda, was reared Presbyterian. This Episcopal church was our compromise—all the pomp and ceremony of the Catholics for me, but no uncomfortable trips to confession for her. Later when I married Sheila, she also joined the Episcopal church. After my final divorce, from Balinda, Britt and I joined another Episcopal church in our new community within metro Nashville.
After my staph infection brush with the Grim Reaper, we became very involved in the church, attending regularly. I even took a position on the parish council and became close friends with the priest and his wife. Brittany had been baptized as a baby at the Episcopal church in Lebanon, and I had McCartney baptized at our new church when he was five.
But my interest in the paranormal never subsided. I continued to read books and was particularly taken with the works of the “sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce, the psychic Ruth Montgomery, and the Bridey Murphy reincarnation story.
By now Nashville had become the home of several paranormal/occult bookstores. One Saturday afternoon, while perusing the latest offerings, I saw a notice tacked by the cash register advertising a class in Wicca that would be offered at the shop. All I knew about Wicca at the time had been gleaned from TV and a recent movie with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman called Practical Magic. I asked the young woman at the cash register about the class, and it turned out she was the teacher. She explained the proposed curricula and gave me a brief outline of what she intended to teach. She said the course wasn’t designed to convert anyone to Wicca or any Pagan religion, but rather was intended purely for informational purposes. She’d lay the facts out and allow the students to draw their own conclusions. I was fascinated and signed up for the course.
Brittany and I continued to attend the Episcopal church, and I didn’t see my newfound interest in Wicca as a conflict. I simply found the idea of this nature-based religion intriguing and wanted to learn as much about it as possible. I read a few books on Wicca, and occasionally Brittany had questions about the course I’d answer. I learned quite a bit and developed a soft spot in my heart for the nature-based Pagan religions.
The course even required me to try a few of the Wiccan rituals honoring the Goddess (and a male god figure more like a mischievous Pan than the Bible’s vengeful Yahweh) at the time of the full moon. I genuinely felt a spiritual surge in the process, but I believe that God is God no matter what you call him/her and no matter the method of reverence.
Brittany, now about fourteen, was intrigued by the notion of Wicca—more, I think, because she found it inviting that practitioners cast spells to modify their everyday realities, rather than that she had any real interest in a nature-based explanation of the cosmos. But I believe that any personal exploration into one’s spiritual side is a good thing as long as it brings one closer to God in some way.
A Ghost in the Cemetery
In 1999, I learned that my childhood housekeeper/nanny had passed away. Maggie had come to be a part of my family when I was five years old. She was a large, robust, jovial African American woman who was hired to keep house and watch me while my mother worked as the bookkeeper for my father’s real estate/construction company. I was an only child, and it seemed that 75 percent of the time Maggie and I were the household. She had no formal education past grammar school, but was extremely intelligent, witty, and gregarious.
Maggie worked for my family for eleven years, finally leaving when I was sixteen after my father died and the money dried up. She had been a major influence on my upbringing and played a huge role in shaping me into the man I became. Many years later, her death would have a profound effect on me—probably even more so because I didn’t learn of it for several months after she died. Granted, we hadn’t remained close after she quit working for us—but my mom and I still went to her house and visited with her on occasion. I even took Brittany, and later McCartney, to meet Maggie—but these visits would have been after Maggie had gotten along in years. They never knew the Maggie I grew up with.
By the time I learned of Maggie’s passing, all I could do was go to visit her grave. She was buried in a national military cemetery in Nashville because her last husband had been a soldier in World War II. I stood at her grave remembering how much she had meant to me and shed more than a few tears for the woman who had been as important to me at one time as my own mother. Then I started walking back to the car parked nearby.
When I got back to my ’89 Sterling sedan, I was startled to see a little old lady sitting in the backseat. I had quick memory flashes of the ghost I had seen standing at the foot of my bed eight or nine years earlier. I could see her in great detail, but I could also see right through her. This wasn’t Maggie. In my car sat an elderly white woman with gray hair wearing one of those pillbox hats that had been popular back in the sixties. She was dressed in her Sunday best. She was very thin, almost tiny, prim and proper, sitting there bolt-upright, and looking at me from inside the glass as if to say, “Well, let’s go. I’m ready to leave.” Just like the other time I had seen an apparition, there was absolutely nothing scary about it. At that moment, it just seemed perfectly natural. I shook my head as if to tell her I wasn’t accepting riders and she’d have to stay in the cemetery—and when I did that, she was gone in a flash.
I told the kids about my brush with this Miss Daisy, and naturally they were fascinated—just as they were with my ghost stories about the Bell Witch and my other personal paranormal run-ins with the unseen. Both kids were always interested in these relatively spooky tales, but the paranormal really did not play any kind of major part in our lives until Brittany was fifteen. Then suddenly one night without warning, the paranormal came back into my life with a vengeance. At the risk of sounding cliché, life would inalterably change for all of us, especially Brittany.
Everything in the Prison
During the spring of 1999, I directed a play called Everything in the Garden for a local community theatre company. The theatre group rehearsed and produced their shows in a facility called the Nashville Music Institute, which had an auditorium and numerous rehearsal rooms where classes in various musical instruments were taught during the day. The building itself was quite old and was one of the oldest brick structures in Nashville—dating back to the early 1800s. The building was originally built to be the Tennessee State Prison.
Brittany frequently went to rehearsals with me and helped out later with the actual production, assisting with makeup and backstage work during performances. The cast and crew of any theatrical production often becomes very close, almost like family, during rehearsals and the actual production. No one is getting paid, but everyone is having fun. Brittany fit right in and was very popular with everyone involved in the show. She was fourteen and attending a public high school devoted to the visual and performing arts. One of the cast members was a teenaged girl about Brittany’s age and they became quick friends.
As with any building that old, the Nashville Music Institute came complete with its own ghost stories. The daytime music staff talked of doors opening and closing by themselves, unexplained noises, and sightings of supposed apparitions of prisoners and their guards. I took all that with a grain of salt, noticing that the music teachers telling these tales seemed to be seriously enjoying the wide-eyed responses they’d get from our actors—particularly those two teenaged girls.
The institute was a three-story building, seemingly rambling off in all directions, especially if you’re alone in the dark trying to find a light switch. It wasn’t unusual for actors to wander off and get lost. One evening during a dress rehearsal, the actors were sitting in the communal dressing room putting on their makeup. Somebody brought up the topic of the ghosts the music teachers had told us about. I was only half listening, because I was just passing through on my way to make sure all the props were set on the backstage prop table. I made my way to the backstage area and busied myself with the millions of things a director has to do before the curtain can go up.
Maybe fifteen minutes later, one of the stagehands rushed up to tell me that something was wrong with Brittany. She was hysterical because of something she’d seen upstairs. However by the time I got to her, the reported hysteria had subsided. But she did run up to me and hug me like she was afraid I’d disappear if she didn’t.
I tried to calm Brittany down and make as little of the incident as possible in order to keep everyone else calm—with curtain in less than half an hour we didn’t need any added stress.
Trembling, Brittany told me she had gone upstairs alone to the top floor and wandered around in the empty rooms. Entering one near the back of the building, she’d seen a man seated in a chair wearing a judge’s gown holding a knife. In his lap rested a severed, bloody head. He looked at her and then pointed his knife at her, motioning for her to come closer. Obviously that was all the freak show she needed, so she turned on her heels and rushed back through the rooms and downstairs.
She begged me to go up for myself and investigate. So I turned the production over to my assistant and headed upstairs to see for myself. But I found nothing other than classrooms and confusing halls. The electricity was on and all the switches worked, so I made my way back to the room where Britt had supposedly seen the apparition. I was a bit apprehensive, but frankly more concerned with my production than seeing specters.
Having seen a couple of ghosts myself, I didn’t doubt her. By this time, I was convinced that she could see spirits. Aside from the lady she kept seeing as a toddler in our old Victorian house, she had occasionally reported other non-threatening sightings. The two ghosts I had seen also seemed quite benign. But Brittany’s latest sighting didn’t sound like Casper the friendly ghost. He seemed to be a ghoulish judge with a knife and was cradling a victim’s head in his lap.
As I rumbled through the classrooms, I was thinking that if Brittany really had seen an apparition, it was probably just toying with her mind—projecting itself as whatever it thought would scare her. So no judge with a bloody knife was lurking about waiting to pounce on me. Since I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, I went back downstairs. By the time I got to the makeup room, Brittany was helping an actor put her makeup on and chattering about the upcoming show. I took her aside and told her that I hadn’t found anything but was careful to say that I did not doubt that she had. I gently reprimanded her for going into an area we’d been told not to and told her not to wander off in the building alone again. She was more interested in getting back to work with makeup than talking to me about spooks—so we all returned our concentration to the show.
After the curtain went down that evening and the cast and crew went out to a restaurant, the conversation inevitably returned to Brittany’s encounter with the judge. In fact, this particular cast’s interests often turned to the paranormal (no doubt because of all the ghost stories surrounding where we were producing our play). Of course, I always responded with stories about Patience Worth and the Ouija board whenever the topic went otherworldly.
Directing Everything in the Garden at the Nashville Music Institute came at the same time I was taking that course in Wicca—so I was overtly interested with anything and everything in the spiritual realm. The incidents in the old prison building had also caused Brittany, most everyone in my cast and crew, and myself to want some answers to our paranormal questions.
Legends of ghosts in the music institute were on everyone’s mind with my cast and crew. If we weren’t talking about the play itself, the conversation inevitably drifted to the haunted building we were in—and the paranormal in general.
A young married couple working in the play mentioned they felt their home was having paranormal activity and asked if I knew of a psychic who could help. I recommended my friend Laurel, and she agreed to do a house cleansing.
So the next Sunday afternoon, Laurel, Brittany, and I met the couple at their modern-style, board and batten home outside of Nashville.
This would be the first time Brittany would work with Laurel to remove spirits from places where they shouldn’t be. By this time I knew that Brittany had abilities to perceive those in astral dimensions, and I was delighted and appreciative to have someone like Laurel help her understand and sculpt her talents.
Laurel’s mother had been a sensitive too and helped ease her into experiencing the metaphysical world. She said it could be “a freaky world if you didn’t understand what all these new sensations were.” So I was delighted that Laurel was willing to be there for Britt during what could be a confusing time.
The house cleansing, however, proved to be relatively uneventful. But Britt at least had a chance to see Laurel in action.