• 24Mar

    Have you ever seen a ghost?

    I don’t remember seeing ghosts as a child, although I suspect the invisible friend that my mother said I had was probably a spirit.  They usually are.  Children are so fresh from heaven at the beginning of their incarnation that they can see the universe in its multiple dimensions.  I believe it’s only when they are indoctrinated into society’s established beliefs about reality that it’s harder to see past their five senses.

    So, it wasn’t unusual that I didn’t experience the paranormal in my formative years, which made it all the more surprising when unexplainable things began happening to me at the age of 37.  At that time in my life I was experiencing the dark night of the soul.  To process the deep pain of a broken heart, I turned inward because nothing outside myself could really help me cope with the anguish.  But, as I did this through meditation, stillness, and prayer, I began to notice some strange things happening.

    For example, my alarm clock started going off in the middle of the night at exactly 4:44 a.m., volume blaring, blasting me out of peaceful sleep and causing an adrenaline rush that lasted for hours afterward.  Of course, I didn’t think this was paranormal; I thought it was a faulty alarm clock.  So, I unplugged the darn thing.  But, imagine my shock when it went off again the next night without being plugged into the electrical outlet.  Still, I explained it away, believing that the radio had some kind of internal battery back-up.  Well, I got a new alarm clock, and it didn’t happen again.  However, other odd things began to occur.

    I had created a meditation space in my bedroom, in the center of the floor, underneath the ceiling fan, which had never worked since I moved into the house several years earlier.  Then, one day during meditation, when I couldn’t quiet my mind because of overwhelming fear and indecision, the fan started spinning.  I thought this was very strange, since several electricians had looked at the fan’s wiring, and no one could tell me why it wasn’t operable.  I had just given up on it ever working.  But, on that particular day, when I was so scattered in my energy and pleading for God’s guidance, the fan started working.  The coincidence wasn’t lost on me.   I immediately thought that this was a sign from God letting me know that I wasn’t as alone as I was feeling.  And, this calmed my out-of-control emotions.

    However, several days later, when I felt someone sit on the end of my bed in the middle of the night, calmness wasn’t the feeling I experienced.

    When I felt the sensation of someone sitting on my bed, I fully expected that it was one of my daughters.  So, I sat up to see if they had a bad dream or needed a glass of water.  But, much to my dismay, no one was there.  However, there was a depression on the bed as if someone WAS sitting there.  I was terrified!  I couldn’t imagine that God or an angel would do something that would scare me.  So, I concluded that it must be some kind of negative entity.  Perhaps, I had even attracted it because of my trepidation.

    This scared me so much that the next day I called my friend Jennifer Baltz, who is a gifted psychic, and what she said eased my mind.

    Jennifer said the fan spinning was my maternal grandmother, Anna, trying to get my attention.  She explained that my grandmother could see and feel my agony and just wanted to let me know that she was there to offer love and support—I could picture her loving eyes and gentle smile, and I swear I felt her hand on my shoulder.

    Then, Jennifer explained the sensation of someone sitting on my bed.  She said it was my maternal great, great grandfather, who is one of my guardian angels.  He, too, had sensed my sadness and just wanted to “scoop me into his arms and tell me how much I was loved.”  This was a relief, and I told great, great Grandpa Friday that it was all right for him to sit on my bed.  For many months he did, and one night I thought I saw him dressed in overalls and a red flannel shirt, with kind eyes and the tanned skin of a farmer.

    Jennifer also mentioned my alarm going off at 4:44am.  She said that repeatedly seeing a series of 4s means “the angels are surrounding you and reassuring you of their love and help.” How spot on, I thought, because I had been calling upon my spirit guides and guardian angels for assistance.

    So, this was my first exposure to the paranormal, and it proved to be a very positive experience, once I understood that it was communication of support from loved ones.   I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I asked for more communication.  But, I should have been more specific about what I asked.

    It was some years after that experience that I went through a divorce, and my daughters and I moved into a new house.  Nothing was out of the ordinary for the first year, but after that, life in our house became much more interesting.

    While trying to fall asleep, we would hear cats running up and down the stairs.  We knew what that sounded like, since we had two beautiful cats who loved doing that.  But, our cats only came into the house occasionally and always slept outdoors.  At first, I thought that one of my daughters let the cats in by accident, so I would get up to put them out, so their fur and dander wouldn’t provoke an asthma attack in my youngest daughter.  But, I would always find our cats outside.  So, what had we heard?  I couldn’t explain it and could only shrug away my bewilderment.

    Then, one random evening, my oldest daughter was standing in the family room with her back toward the stairs. She was telling me a story, and I was laughing, when suddenly a white, misty shape of an old woman, whose face was wracked with pain, swooped down the stairs staring at me. Her face looked similar to the Scream mask worn at Halloween—really!  I didn’t want to alarm my daughter, so I acted like nothing happened; but, believe me, this took monumental effort, since the hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up, and I was scared out of my mind.

    I had never seen a ghost before. It was like an intruder in my home, and my Mama Bear instincts suddenly surged to the surface.  I mean, if it had spooked me that much, how would my children react?  I could never allow whatever that was to make my children feel afraid in their own home. So, I decided that I would call Jennifer the next day.  But, before morning came, the old woman again made her presence known.

    Just as I had fallen into a deep sleep, I heard the most blood-curdling, spine-tingling, heartbreaking wail.  With one leap I was down the hall to check on my girls, but found they were fast asleep.  I went downstairs thinking that maybe the television was on, but it wasn’t.  I thought maybe it was the cats fighting outside; but, no, they were in their bunk beds on the porch as quiet as could be.  I walked back to my room trying to figure out what in the world could have made such a horrifying noise.  I imagined that if someone told me that my children were dead I would wail like that, but that didn’t help me explain it.

    When morning came, I didn’t waste a moment calling Jennifer.

    She said that countless disembodied spirits walk the earth all the time.  Since they are in a different dimension, we can’t see them, but they can clearly see us.  These disembodied spirits are those who chose not to go into the light after death, sometimes because they were confused or afraid of judgment or had unfinished business with loved ones–just like on the show Ghost Whisperer. Jennifer said that the ghost I saw on the stairs was one of those disembodied spirits.

    Her name was Sharon (which coincidentally is my legal name), and she had two daughters.  When her children were about the ages of my children, they died tragically in a fire.  Sharon tried to rescue them, but had failed. She spent the rest of her life in a semi-catatonic state full of grief and went into self-imposed isolation with only her cats to keep her company.   Several decades passed, and Sharon finally died from old age.  However, upon her death, when she saw the light and recognized it as God, she didn’t feel worthy to cross over.  She believed, because she had let her children down in the worst possible way by not protecting them, that she didn’t deserve to go to heaven.  And, she has been walking the earth ever since as a disembodied spirit, reliving her pain over and over again.

    Jennifer explained that one night while Sharon was mindlessly wandering the earth, she happened to pass our house.  She felt love radiating from it and came in with her cats.  She heard our laughter and saw my two precious daughters, and it reminded her of the life she had with her daughters.  Later that night she cried out in pain, not only from her guilt, but also the realization that she would be eternally separated from her children. That was the wailing I heard.  The story broke my heart.

    Jennifer suggested that I talk to Sharon and tell her that her children didn’t blame her; that, in fact, they were waiting to welcome her to the other side.  So, on the occasions when I heard her cats running on my stairs, I would sit there and talk to her.  Soon, my daughters and I stopped hearing the cat ghosts, and I thought that Sharon must have crossed over to the other side to reunite with her beloved children.

    I was truly grateful to be able to help her in some way, if, in fact, I did.  And, I thought that would be the end of our communication with the dead.  But, it wasn’t.

    A few years after my divorce, I decided to remarry, and Matthew joined our family.  One night he was awakened by someone calling his name.  He heard a woman calling slowly, “Matt. . ..Matt.”  The voice was longing and sad and eerie, and Matthew was startled.  He saw that I was asleep and thought it might be one of the girls, so he checked on them and they, too, were deep asleep.  He heard his name being called again and followed the sound downstairs.  He saw nothing.  After a while, he didn’t hear anything more.  Because his mother had recently died, he thought it might be her, and he wondered if she was all right, was she lost, did she need his help?

    Knowing that he couldn’t go back to sleep after such an experience, he lay on the sofa and began watching television.  Eventually, he dozed off.  When he awoke at a loud sound on TV, he slowly opened his eyes and, much to his alarm, there was a man sitting across the room on the fireplace hearth.

    Now, let me explain, Matthew is a fearless man, but he told me that he was scared silly, especially since the man looked absolutely real, and he thought there was an intruder in the house.   He said the man was in period dress—maybe that of the 1800s.  He was wearing a brown suit and a tall hat, which he tipped when he realized that Matthew saw him.  Matthew said he stared at the man, while his brain tried to register what he was seeing.  Then, the man just faded away.

    Because Matthew was so disturbed about the female calling his name, believing it might be his mother, I decided to call Jennifer to see if she could provide an explanation.  Thankfully, she could.

    She said that the woman whose voice Matthew heard had been married to the man Matthew saw; and, they lived in the 1800s on the property, where our house now stands.  Jennifer explained that the woman was deeply in love with a man, who left her after she became pregnant out of wedlock.  Another man, who had always loved the woman from afar, suggested that they marry, so she would not be shunned by society, and he promised to love her and to love her child as his own.  She agreed, although she emphatically stated upfront that her heart would always belong to her one and only true love—the man who had abandoned her.

    Well, the couple stayed married for a very long time. As predicted, she never fell in love with her husband, but her husband fell more deeply in love with his wife as the years went by.  In old age, the woman became sick and senile.  On her deathbed, in a state of delirium, she called out to the man who had left her.  His name was Matt.

    The husband died several years after his wife, but saw when he crossed over that she wasn’t in the heavenly realms.  He learned that she still walked the earth as a disembodied spirit, still in a state of mental confusion, looking for her true love.  So, he came back to earth as a spirit with the intent of explaining to his beloved wife that the man she was looking for was in the afterlife and that she’d have to go into the light to find him.  But, the task hadn’t been easy, as the woman was in a state of terrible confusion.  She didn’t even understand that her body had died and that she was in spirit form.  So, her husband remained with her, trying to catch her in fleeting moments of lucidity, trying to convince her to cross over into the light.

    I couldn’t help but feel emotional, while listening to Jennifer tell this story of unrequited love.  The husband so adored his wife that he delayed his heavenly homecoming until he could help her find the way back to her estranged lover.

    So, like I had talked to Sharon, I talked to this woman, too, telling her that her loved ones awaited her arrival on the other side of the light.  Matthew continued to hear his named called in the middle of the night, but never saw the man again.  After a while, though, he didn’t hear his named being called, and we wondered if they had crossed over into the light.  Matthew and I amusingly pondered whether this would be the end to our ghost adventures.  We quickly learned that, no, it wasn’t.

    Just like Matthew and I had, my oldest daughter began having more visual paranormal experiences.  She awoke one night to see a Native American boy, about the age of 8, sitting at the end of her bed.  She blinked her eyes thinking that she was seeing things, and when she opened them again, he was gone.  She wasn’t frightened, but the lack of an explanation bothered her.  She’s a critical thinker, and it didn’t make sense to her analytical mind.   It wasn’t long, though, before he came back.

    It was when she had a friend over to our house.  She was playing on the computer, while the friend sat on the bed.  Suddenly, the friend saw the little Indian boy fall out of the ceiling landing right behind the computer chair.  He smiled at the friend, as though he was playing some kind of prank, and then got up and ran right through the wall.  Needless to say, the friend was scared speechless.  My daughter looked at her because she had jumped up from the bed and saw that every bit of color had drained out of her face.  The friend asked if she had seen what happened, but my daughter hadn’t.  However, the description of the boy was quite familiar, and she explained to her friend that he had been around before.

    These experiences cemented my daughter’s interest in ghosts, spirits, and the unexplainable.  So, as an experiment one night, we sat on my bed with a tape recorder in an effort to record EVPs—electronic voice phenomena—something we had seen on a TV show about ghosts.   We asked, “Is there anyone here with us?”  We didn’t hear anything, but when we listened to the tape, we clearly heard an answer, “Pieter.”
    It’s strange, but when I heard the name, I visualized this spelling in my mind, which is the Dutch spelling.  I thought this ghostly voice might belong to a Dutchman because my daughters have a Dutch father, and maybe it was a relative.  Of course, we were blown away by this recorded evidence of something else being in the room with us, but we were a little disappointed when none of our other questions were answered.  Still, it was an amazing experience, although we haven’t tried recording EVPs again and sort of forgot about Pieter. Then, one night he appeared to me.

    I was asleep and don’t know what woke me up, but I sensed my husband wasn’t in bed.  So, I turned to look at the other side of the bed and saw that he was standing between the bed and the window.  I turned back over while asking, “What’s wrong?”  When I didn’t get an answer, I turned around again.  This time, I could see that the opaque shadow, which looked very much like my husband’s muscular physique, wasn’t him.  It’s not that I recognized that the body was different.  It was that I telepathically heard, “It’s just Pieter, making sure that everything is all right.”

    It’s hard to imagine, but at that moment I wasn’t the least bit frightened.  I felt like I had been wrapped in a warm blanket of love, and there was no doubt about what I was hearing in my mind.  So, I said “thank you” and just turned over and went back to sleep.  It was a lovely experience and difficult to explain because it’s counter-intuitive, especially after seeing the white, misty ghost.  Sadly, though, I haven’t seen Pieter since.

    However, I have seen and heard others.  I frequently hear children whisper, “Mama,” in my ear—yes, it’s very disconcerting.  And, even after Sharon left, I still heard cats on the stairs.  I don’t know if they were hers—maybe they didn’t cross over with her—I just don’t know.  But, I feel them jump on my bed and meow loudly in my ear, startling me in the middle of the night.   Once, I even heard a cat under my bed, clawing on the carpet like cats like to do, and meowing in an eerie way.  I was sure that one of my cats was under the bed.  So, I got up, turned on the light, looked under the bed and there was nothing there.  By this time, it wasn’t alarming to hear cats and children, but when my bed started shaking, that was a different story.

    It wasn’t shaking like Excorcist-shaking; it was more like intense vibrating, but it scared the beegeebies out of me.  It has happened half a dozen times, but it never happens when my husband is in bed, just when I am all alone.  I told a friend about my experiences, and she suggested that I call upon Archangel Michael saying, “Please escort all spirits and entities, who are not my guardians, guides or loved ones, to where they need to be.”  I tried this the next time it happened, and the shaking immediately stopped.  What was it?  I don’t know.  Were they impish ghosts or malevolent spirits—I have no idea.  But, knowing that I could call upon the archangels for help allowed me to feel in control of what was happening to me and eliminated my fear.   I shared this remedy with my youngest daughter, who was having experiences of her own.

    One night she awoke, not really knowing why.  At the moment she opened her eyes, she saw a female ghost come through one wall of her room and glide out through another.  She was so scared that she couldn’t move or even call out my name.  So, she pulled her dog closer to her and pulled the sheets over her head.  That’s when I told her about asking Archangel Michael for help.
    The experienced bothered her for quite a bit, and she told me that she thought it might have been her grandmother–my mother.  However, she didn’t think that Mimi would scare her, so that was why she remained unsettled about it.  So, I called Jennifer, again, asking for the identification of this ghost who had scared my child.

    Jennifer was immediately able to identify the visitor.  It was Matthew’s sister, Kathy, who had died several years earlier.  Coincidentally, Kathy had been on Matthew’s mind, as he was preparing himself as much as possible to accept the imminent passing of his other sister, Karen.

    Jennifer said that Kathy was checking in on her family, especially at this time.  She told Jennifer that she frequently hung out in my oldest daughter’s room, since it was empty now that she was in college and said that she had been in the house many times before, and no one had seen her.  So, she was surprised and saddened to know that she had scared my daughter.   She asked Jennifer to get the message to my daughter that she wouldn’t come into her room again.  And, she hasn’t, as far as we know.

    I don’t know if my daughter has seen anything more—she hasn’t told me so.  But, I still see spirits from time to time.  Just the other night I awoke to a feeling that someone was in my bedroom.  I opened my eyes and saw the cutest boy.  He was probably about 12 years old and had red curly hair and freckles.  There was a girl with him, too, and I had the feeling she was an older sister.  He said to her, “Oh, let’s see who this is,” while he peered into my face.  The sister said, “No, let’s go.”  Then, I whispered, “You know I can you see you, right?”  At that, the sister pulled hard on his sleeve, and they just vanished..

    I didn’t even feel afraid and found the encounter rather amusing.  I also found it pleasing when one leisurely Saturday afternoon, when I was taking a nap.  I felt a tap on my shoulder, opened my eyes and saw my brother, who had passed away a year earlier.  I said, “Hey, what are you doing here?!”  And, he said, “I just came to say hi.”  Then, he winked, waved and walked through the wall of my closet.  It made me very happy to see him, especially since his life leading up to his passing had been so sad.  I could see that he was at peace, as his face radiated the kind of innocence he possessed as a child.  He was beautiful!

    These encounters are much more fascinating now that I understand what is happening—that these spirits co-exist in our reality, and they delight in being seen and heard.  Now that my oldest daughter is in college and my youngest is dating age, Matthew and I enjoy the quiet evenings at home, but we are not always alone.

    Sometimes, while we are downstairs watching TV or having dinner, it sounds like there’s a party upstairs.  We hear running from one side of the second floor to the other.  Loud bangs sometimes make us jump and even get the dogs excited.  We sure don’t know who it is, but we leave them alone to have their fun and just laugh at the craziness of it all.
    But, one day, the noises upstairs caught me off-guard.  I had come home sick from work.  I made myself a cup of tea, wrapped myself in a blanket on the sofa and turned on the TV.  Suddenly, I heard heavy footsteps walking around on the second floor.  At first, I thought it was my husband, but I quickly remembered that he was at work.  I panicked and ran out into the back yard with my cell phone.  I called Matthew and told him that I thought someone was in the house.  He asked if the dogs had heard the walking, but if they had, they didn’t stir from their cozy places on the rug.  So, I went back into the house, asked the dogs to follow me and I looked into every nook and cranny—NOTHING!  What had I heard?  Who knows, but I quickly prayed to Archangel Michael.

    All this spirit activity is quite fascinating to me and my family, and we often times wonder why we are experiencing it.  What I gather from my spiritual sources, is that the veil between this world and the spirit world is thinning, allowing us to see spirits, angels and elementals, such as fairies and nature devas.  This thinning of the veil is happening because the frequency of the planet is rising, due to the devotion of multitudes of people praying for and believing in the possibility of peace and love prevailing on the planet.

    In essence, because of the rise in frequency to the higher energies of unconditional love, compassion and brotherhood, we are beginning to leave the density of the third dimension and rising into the lightness of the fourth dimension.  And, people who are sensitives—those who have always known that there is something beyond what our five senses tell us—are experiencing contact with the fourth dimension sooner rather than later.

    It sure is a mysterious world that we live in, and life sure is interesting.  I would really like to know if you have seen a ghost or had an experience with the paranormal. Have you?  Tell me what you think.