Cold

I woke up last night because I needed another blanket -- it's THAT cold. It's unsually cold even for Canada and these here parts.

But it's still not the kind of cold that I can feel when there's a ghost around. That particular kind of cold seems to be coming from my own body, freezing everything it touches around me. That's really difficult to articulate, actually.

As very young adults, my brother and I used to chat on the phone just about every night. He was dealing with an issue that he couldn't discuss with anyone: Our paternal grandmother would visit him quite regularly. He would be asleep in the dark and then a lamp would turn itself on and wake him up; he'd see my grandmother sitting on his bed or standing at the end of it.

(That wasn't really a problem for him; I think he was having trouble dealing with the fact that she had told him their visits would soon stop. But he wanted to know more about where she was, what she was doing and what she was able to do in her, uh, state.)

One night, he told me that she would come visit me and asked if I was ready because she would be there that night. As we were talking on the phone, my body grew colder and I could barely stand. I could hardly hold the phone.

I remember standing in the upstairs hallway and looking at my parents' room -- they were asleep, stretched out trying to stay cool in a heat wave. The outdoor temperature was in the 90s but I was shivering and feeling weak. My brother asked if she was there and I had to say, "Yeh, she's here."

I had been in the presence of ghosts many times before but this was the first -- and not the last -- time that I had been in this way affected.

Selective Scare-dy Cat

So, in the previous post, I mentioned that I was generally unafraid of out-of-the-ordinary events.

Today, I'm thinking about the fact that I've seen objects levitate, balls of light, apparitions, ghosts; and, daily, I have ghosts in my dreams, ghosts asking for help, precognitions, premonitions of catastrophes, and accurate feelings of foreboding.

Through the years, I've seen a key melt in the lock of an intensely hot door on the other side of which there was no fire and no heat. I've watched a hanging plant swing back and forth so violently that I thought the hook would be yanked out of the ceiling (no wind, no windows, nobody home). I've had a ghost wake me up and thereby save me and my husband from being burnt in a fire. I've held a remote control while a television flipped through channels on its own. I've tried to shut off a television that came on by itself only to discover that it was in the 'off' position. Ditto a wall-switch-operated ceiling fan. I've even had banging on the walls, and footsteps on the stairs, that was so loud that nobody in the house could sleep.

These are only a few of the events of I've experienced. Clearly, I'm no stranger to the 'paranormal'.

Yet, I still need Scully to stay in the same room with me if I'm watching a frightening movie! That's right. I couldn't watch The Sixth Sense without dear Mr. Ghostiegurl himself being there holding my hand all those years ago. He was recently there beside me -- reading -- while I watched The Uninvited and I STILL had nightmares. And just a few moments ago, I aborted a solo attempt to watch another scary film . . .

Freaky Friday I

The basement was the worst part of our old house. It was old; the stone sweated. The floors were cold and bare and the only time we used this part of the house was to do laundry.

Personally, if I needed to get clothes, I would run down, race to the dryer, and get back upstairs as quickly as I could.

My sister -- six years younger than I -- had a different attitude. While she found it a creepy place, her friends wanted to play there and she ended up spending a lot more time in the basement than I ever would.

(When we first moved in, as I've explained, there were many paranormal events. I remember, especially in the early years, that my stepfather and mother would wake us up with their conversations. They heard loud, heavy footsteps starting at the bottom of the stairs and going all the way to the top, just outside the master bedroom. I heard them, too, but, more often than this, I heard my parents talking about the sound.)

One night, I woke up because -- two floors beneath! -- I heard sounds coming from the basement. It sounded like heavy wood hitting concrete or stone. As my parents and I sat and listened, we heard chop, chop, chopping sounds followed immediately by a hollow-sounding thud (wood on stone). This happened over and over and over.

My mother and I ventured -- on tiptoes, for some reason -- down to the kitchen and approached the basement entrance. The sounds stopped. This happened several times.

When I look back, I shake my head and I think how fortunate I am that other people experienced these events at the same time as I did . . .

I grew up with 'em . . .

We gave my younger daughter a very large, wooden, Victorian-style dollhouse. It's as tall as she is. The girls love it.

It reminds me of our old family home. We knew the house was haunted -- all of us -- the day that we moved in. At first, we heard footsteps that would wake us all up in the middle of the night. Eventually, it transpired that each of us heard the patter, and the laughter, of children on the front porch and on the stairs in the foyer. Over time, we were able to put names to the, er, faces via the city's registry.

Anyway, the most striking aspect of the children's presence was that it could be heard -- at exactly the same volume -- no matter where a person was in the house. It could even be heard above the din of televisions and stereos.

I heard running, as did the others, and the incredibly faint strains of "Ring Around the Roses."

Frankly, I was still more than a little frightened by the idea of disclosing my experiences to the rest of the family even though we all knew that the others knew about the running on the porch.

One shadowy afternoon, my mother was napping in her room and I was in mine. I heard her call me.

"Yeh, Mum?"

"Will you turn off the TV for me?" My mother didn't open her eyes.

"Oh, you don't want it on anymore?"

"I didn't want it on in the first place. It just came on again." This had been going on since my grandmother had died a few weeks before.

As I was talking to her and turning off the television, I asked her if she'd heard anyone.

"You mean the children singing?"

"Yes!" I was excited. I was relieved. This was good. "What song do YOU hear?"

"Ring Around the Roses."

My sister had heard it, too. And so began the dialogue that, for so many years, nurtured my intuition and perception.

Ridding My Home of Books

Scully has asked me to kindly go through our 10,000 books and, well, get rid of some that I don't want or won't read or won't read again, etc.

Fair enough. We either need to get a bigger house or pare down our collection. I've definitely set some boundaries. There are books with which I will never part; books that are no longer in print or books that had such a limited print run that you can barely find them on the Internet.

I'm thinking of old Hans Holzer, Ed & Lorraine Newman, Edgar Cayce tomes . . . To mention only a few among hundreds of names. Over the years, I've tried different book databases and different methods of tracking my acquisitions but, really, haven't succeeded very well. I think I will use this blog to help keep me organized. Why not? I'm working on a running list of titles in the area of supernatural/paranormal/psychic phenomena and will post a link.

I'm reminded of the first time that we (my family-of-origin and I) walked through our new home in the early 1980s. As I kind of 'spaced out' looking around, taking everything in, I heard my mother mentioning to someone that many families had lived in the house but most had left pretty quickly.

I opened the closet door of the upstairs hallway. There, on the shelf, was a copy of the bible. Had people been afraid? Was this an age-old custom of moving home? And, now I wonder, did I keep the bible?

I'm Back!

For unknown reasons, I've had difficulties posting to this blog: getting logged in, losing data, etc.

But, everything seems OK at the moment.

An interesting anecdote:

My sister, alone at my mother's house last week, heard loud, booming footsteps coming up the stairs on the porch behind her and these were followed by a loud bang on the screen door. When she went to investigate immediately, she found nothing and nobody there: There had been no descending footsteps.

So, the ghosts on the porch are still there. I used to hear them all the time but now, when I go to my mother's house, I rarely hear anything.

My sister also told me that my maternal grandmother visits her regularly. She actually rarely visits ME. She and my sister shared a closer relationship than my grandmother and I had.

I can feel things slowing down for me: not in terms of reading-volume overall but in the sense that June is my family vacation time and I might have accidentally on purpose scheduled fewer readings in the weeks leading up to it.

I generally do more readings per day than I would like to do and I have shuffled the majority of requests off to July.

I've been gardening with my husband lately because 'tis the season. I'm a bit overwhelmed by the amount of gardening that needs to be done. Last year, I had a small baby and I didn't do much gardening at all. The gardens lay barren, practically. Now my baby is a little girl and I've been able to do more work around the 12-or-so gardens.

Though I'm plodding away out there during spare moments, I'm well aware that I'm ignoring what I normally consider to be the spiritual benefits of working the earth and in nurturing seeds to seedlings to mature plants: the biological connection to the earth, engaging in an activity that connects me to the generations before me.

My readings tomorrow are all back-to-back and this will give me more spare time in the middle of the day.