Not all spirits are out for revenge. Sometimes they just want justice. Take the case of a woman named Claire Becker, murdered by her lover, who was a crooked cop in Baltimore. We had to do a little more interacting with the local PD than is usually our preference, mostly because they thought we were serial killers.
Until one of the Baltimore cops, Diana Ballard, saw the ghost of Claire Becker. That bought us enough slack so that we could do some investigating and discover that Claire’s murderer was Ballard’s partner.
Awkward.
The way it all came together was that we figured out that Claire wasn’t a vengeful spirit—she’d had plenty of chances to off all of us by then. She was a death omen, a spirit that appears to people to warn them of their doom—which in this case meant warn everyone involved that Ballard’s partner, Peter Sheridan, was gunning for them.
Some death omens are quiet. They don’t all howl like your proverbial banshee. An apparition of an individual can signal that person’s death. The Germanic doppelgänger, the Scandinavian vardogr, the Icelandic fylgja, the Finnish etiäinen, they’re all manifestations of bilocation: the phenomenon of appearing in two places at once. Sometimes bilocation is the result of distress; the etiäinen generally appears when a shaman or someone in extreme circumstances is reaching out to the person with whom they share the closest emotional relationship. It’s not a big step from there to a death omen. Most apparitions of doubles foreshadow death in one way or another. Sometimes the apparition appears suffering the wounds that the person will die of, but more often the plain fact of the apparition is enough to signal that death is near.
Sometimes a death apparition appears to warn other people, like in Claire Becker’s case. We got the message just in time, as it turned out, and Diana settled things with Officer Sheridan before she could meet an untimely death.
In other cases, spirits are summoned, usually accidentally, often by people they loved, and the spirits just do what they think people want them to do. The problem is that they pick up on all the wrong signals, and one thing about spirits is that they kind of lose track of whatever moral compass they might have had in real life. We worked a real strange case not too long ago in which the spirit was a pastor who was causing problems (read: killing people) because in the spirit world it was no longer able to distinguish right from wrong. Spirits just understand desire.
So what we had to do was talk to it. In other words, perform a séance.
Now when we say séance, we don’t mean the circle around a table where some John Edward type fishes around for clues about what his audience might want to hear. There are real rituals for contacting the dead in most religious traditions, and we’ve learned a few of them. The one we used to contact the dead pastor came from a primitive Christian rite. We found this version of it in Dad’s journal:
On a clean altar cloth inscribed with the symbols as above, place a small bowl filled with fresh herbs. Around the perimeter of the cloth, place black and white candles, alternating and equal in number. When all of the candles are lit, recite the following:
AMATE SPIRITUS OBSCURE, TE QUAERIMUS. TE ORAMUS, NOBISCUM COLLOQUERE, APUD NOS CIRCITA.
At the finish of the incantation, pinch a tiny amount of frankincense, sandalwood, or cinnamon powder over one of the candle flames.
We chose that one because we were working in a Christian framework that time. You want voodoo? We’ve got voodoo, too. Winchester and Sons is a full-service outfit.