In honor of Halloween, I decided to deal with the ghosts in my own house this week. I have known the house was haunted since before we moved in last spring, but the resident ghosts stuck to the third floor and didn’t cause mischief, so dealing with them was easy to put off. That said, it did bother me that there was an old lady ghost at the high front window, looking down at us every time we pulled in the driveway.
So, armed with my keen intellect and a pad of paper, I went up to the third floor. To set the scene……our house was built in 1885 and the third floor is in desperate need of a gut-it-to-the-studs renovation (photo provided). It looks like the setting for the climax of a Stephen King novel — crumbling plaster, 1800’s wallpaper peeling and falling off the walls, curtains at the windows that haven’t been washed since the 1950’s, scraps of incredibly old linoleum covering the floors. There are two big bedrooms (with closets!), but I can’t imagine anyone alive agreeing to sleep up there. We use one of the rooms for storage and the other for nothing.
The internet is a weird and wonderful thing, and this past week it connected me with a man who lives halfway around the world and is struggling with the death of his mother. I am about to do a reading for him, even though there is a language barrier — I only speak English and his deceased mother only speaks a regional dialect of her country. Everyone but me is concerned about this. I am not concerned because language is only one way to communicate, and is not the preferred way for spirits of the dead.
My husband is a hospital chaplain and told of a man in the intensive care unit (ICU) who was dying of stomach cancer. The man had been fighting the cancer for several years, and was brought to the brink of death much faster than anyone anticipated. He had a wife and grown children, and the wife was angry — angry that he was dying and losing the fight. She wanted to be married to a winner, did not want to talk about death, did not want to make plans for when he died, did not like what the doctors were telling her, and dealt with this by refusing to visit her husband.
I’m not sure what I believed about demons before I met one. As a Psychic Medium, I probably should have read up on them and contemplated their existence, but aside from their portrayal in movies and the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” I really didn’t think about them at all. But I think about them now.