Contacting me (or any psychic medium, really) is not customarily a first-line response to weird stuff happening in a person’s house, nor is it something done in the early days of grief after the loss of a loved one. No, contacting me is an act of last resort, after every other possible explanation for the weirdness has been investigated, or after an unbearable, unresolvable grief has been endured for months or years. Contacting me, quite honestly, sounds crazy, is difficult to justify, and requires high levels of exasperation. One has to be pushed to the brink to even consider it.
I get that. And I actually appreciate it. For me, it means that I don’t get drawn into situations better served by an electrician or by a long conversation with other grieving relatives. And for a client, it means they come ready to consider alternatives.
Such was the case recently when I was contacted about doing a ghost busting by a man I will call Andrew. He had endured 15 years of arguments with no basis, sleep disturbances, angry outbursts without provocation, and a general malaise settling on anyone who spent any length of time in their house. He was fed up with sleepless nights, weird little “house tremors” that shifted artwork off-kilter, and house problems having no real explanation (like why the flashing kept coming off one area of his roof, despite being nailed down in fifty-hundred-million places). After hearing about me from a trusted friend, he emailed.
The pictures he sent were compelling. His house appeared to me to be filled with smoke and fog, plus a group of very volatile, angry, aggressive ghosts. The house was sealed up tight, except for the side door of their basement walk-out, which appeared to be the site of a spectral Battle Royale. Bloodied and bent, that door looked to my psychic eye like it belonged in a horror movie.
Andrew and I talked, scheduled the ghost busting, and I got to work.
The group of ghosts numbered six — four adults and two children. Only one of the ghosts, a man named Tom, emerged from the fog to speak. In life, Tom was the stablemaster for a farmer, and he showed me a white farmhouse with a small barn. Andrew knew the house immediately, as it had been torn down to make way for his neighborhood. And yes, that’s how the ghosts wound up in his house — displaced by development.
Slowly, the story of the ghosts’ lives and deaths emerged. Tom said he felt privileged to be a full-time stablemaster, caring for and breeding large draft horses, which the farmer sold after Tom trained them to a plow. The farmer he worked for was a good man, with a wife who died in childbirth along with their third child. As he said this, Tom cleared more of the fog and revealed the rest of the group — two housemaids, the farmer’s two children, and Tom’s sister, Dora Leigh.
Tom said an epidemic swept through the area, and the farmer’s children fell ill. I felt reasonably certain that it was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, based on how the ghosts were dressed, but whatever and whenever it was, people were dying like crazy. The farmer had hired a housemaid after his wife’s death, and hired her younger sister as well, when the children got sick. And then he packed his bags and left. Shocking as this seemed to me, Tom said that people who could afford it were doing that, to avoid getting sick themselves.
After their father left, both of the children grew grievously ill and died. And then the housemaid sisters got sick and also died. Tom was visibly upset, and confessed that he was “sweet on” the older sister, and had hoped to marry her.
Out of the blue, a seventh spirit appeared — a big, angry man named John who I could see pounding on the side of the house near the bloodied door. The more forcefully he struck, the more terrified the group inside became. It was clear to me that he was after Dora Leigh, but I couldn’t see why. Closer examination revealed a past life connection between them, a connection that ended with John in that life feeling wronged, and coming into this life seeking vengeance. His whole spirit was fiery, consumed with rage.
I spoke to Dora Leigh, telling her that she needed to go to John, to confront him, and to work towards resolution. She absolutely, under no circumstances, intended to do that. She was as afraid of John in death as she had been in life. I pressed the issue. I pointed out that she was already dead, that he couldn’t make her “more dead,” and that as spirits, they were equal in power. I tried to stress the importance of not carrying this animosity into yet another lifetime. Work it out now!
She was terrified, but went to confront him. I was with her, saw the fight start fair with each side speaking their truth, and left them going at it like a pair of rabid raccoons.
When I came back to the group in the house, Tom told me Dora Leigh’s story. John had stalked her, threatened her, and raped her. Tom tried to protect her and keep her safe, but failed. After Tom learned she was pregnant, he confronted John. They fought, John fell, hit his head, and died. While not exactly murder, Tom felt responsible, as he had meant the man harm.
Dora Leigh carried the baby to term and then died in childbirth.
After so much loss in such rapid succession, Tom was a man at loose ends. The farmer never came back, so Tom sold the horses and livestock, closed up the house, and left to join other men headed to a “skirmish” to the east. I expected him to tell me that he died in battle, but no. He was hanged. After the skirmish, he was brought up on charges, and put to death. He didn’t know that his actions were a hangable offense, but was clear that he did do those things. “Yes ma’am, I did.”
In death, Tom came back to the farm, gathered “his women,” and worked to keep them safe. Part of that work involved becoming a powerful ghost, to be able to fight and keep John out of the house and away from Dora Leigh. I knew immediately what that meant.
When spirits remain in an un-ascended, Earth-bound state for an extended period of time (beyond a year or so), their energy begins to degrade and they need to “feed.” They do this by absorbing or ingesting the energy that we living humans give off. Because we give off the most energy — big bursts of it — when angry or afraid, old ghosts become adept at doing things to stir dissent and to scare the bejeezus out of us.
A ghost that is vengeful and raging (like John) burns through a lot of energy, so becomes what I call “a heavy feeder.” And any other ghost trying to defend themselves against such a rage-filled ghost would need to do the same to have the power to succeed.
I confronted Tom about this. He confessed that yes, they had been stirring up a lot of trouble for the family living in the house. And he said that they had been eating their dreams.
YOU WERE WHAT?!?
That’s right, the ghosts were eating the family’s dreams. I had never heard of such a thing. Ghosts in your house means you are bombarded by disrupted and disruptive energy all the time, which makes it hard to sleep well. But eating dreams? That is next-level stuff.
I had A LOT of questions. Did the people get to finish having the dream first? What did sucking a dream out do to them? Does a ghost doing that deprive a person of REM sleep? How do I know if a ghost is EATING MY DREAMS for God’s sake? Tom did not answer, choosing instead to show me the process: ghost stands at the side of a bed with a sleeping person in it, waiting for the energy of a dream to drift up, and then sucks that energy right out.
I was horrified. It looked like Harry Potter attacked by Dementors.
Tom gave a shrug of his shoulders and said, “Energy is energy.” He led me to believe that their dream eating came about by chance, not as a result of some top-secret ghost training event. He said it was, “Like the phrase, ‘if you see something, say something,’ only ‘if you see energy, eat energy’.” He was so blasé about it, I was speechless. And determined to ascend them out of Andrew’s house. Enough already!
I checked back on the pair outside, discovered them talking (progress!), and invited them in. The children needed to confront their father about his leaving, so he showed up (yet another un-ascended spirit), followed by his wife (ascended), who he needed to apologize to. All the spirits were working on all the things that had them stuck, and I delivered my “get ready to ascend” speech. I told them that they needed to do four things: 1. unburden themselves of any baggage laid on them by someone else; 2. take responsibility for their own life and death, including all choices made and not made; 3. learn whatever lessons this life taught them so they wouldn’t have to learn them over and over again; and 4. forgive themselves for being human, and make peace with their life and their death. They did this at different speeds, and one-by-one were ready to ascend. I opened a portal, ascended them, and then checked in with Andrew, my living, breathing client.
Andrew was as gobsmacked as me by the whole dream eating thing, and grateful to have them gone. But mostly he was amazed by how quickly he went from feeling angry, desperate, and hostile towards the ghosts for all they had put his family through, to feeling sympathetic to their plight. He couldn’t get over how human they were. In all the years leading up to this, I think he built up in his mind that his house was infested with demons and monsters.
His final thoughts were of how empty and quiet his house felt once the ghosts were gone. And of how he wished he hadn’t waited so long to seek help from someone like me.