I saw from the picture of the house (not the haunted hotel pictured here) that I was in for a challenge, and I must say that I wasn’t disappointed in that regard. The owner of the house, a wonderful woman named Claudia, was one of two winners in my Most Haunted House Contest, and last week I set about ridding her house of a ghostly nuisance named Mary. But right from the start, Mary was a pesky lot of trouble.
When I do a ghost busting, I use my ability to remote view, and I send my psychic sight through the phone line and into the person’s house. To spirits in the house, it appears as though my face just “pops through;” to me, it is like I extend my energy out as far as I can reach. I don’t understand the mechanics of how it works, but remote viewing allows me to communicate with the spirits in a house directly, as I can see and hear them and their energy, and they can see and hear me.
For us living people, though, I use the phone. And I need permission to remote view, as a home’s privacy is like a force field that my sight cannot penetrate. Claudia gave her permission, but I still couldn’t get in, as Mary the ghost had sealed the house. I tried several different things, but it took Claudia physically opening the doors to the outside for me to get through. I scanned and found Mary in the kitchen, puttering about, and ignoring me. Claudia and I took turns asking questions, and eventually we got Mary to talk.
Mary came to the area as a young bride in 1832, having just married a man named Homer. Two years her senior, Homer owned a cattle farm and the two of them worked the fields and cared for the animals until their deaths, with Homer passing some years before Mary. After Mary’s death (around the turn of the last century), their farmhouse was torn down and the farm was subdivided for housing. When asked why she chose to haunt Claudia’s house, Mary said, “It was the best.”
Claudia agreed, although to be fair, Claudia is partial to the house because she grew up there. She moved in when she was four, moved out as a young adult, and moved back in after her divorce, to care for her aging mother. As Claudia talked, I became aware of ghostly modifications that Mary made to the house over the years, and saw nearly every wall overlaid with panels that I would describe as “old-timey” and clearly more to Mary’s liking and antiquated tastes. Her spectral energy was everywhere in the house, and stood in contrast to and in conflict with Claudia’s energy and modern life. Mary also had a disapproving air about her, and made clear her disappointment that the house wasn’t decorated with pink rosebud wallpaper, and that Claudia did not live like “a proper lady,” whatever that meant. I have never seen a house so completely overrun by such an antagonistic ghost, and I told Claudia so.
Claudia confessed that she hadn’t been able to sleep in any of the bedrooms of the house for quite some time. Embarrassed by this, and by being relegated to sleeping on the couch like some errant teenager, she sheepishly asked if I thought Mary might have something to do with this. OF COURSE SHE DID. Ghost energy is very unsettling. With Mary laying claim to every room and overrunning every surface in the house, I was surprised that Claudia could even sleep on the couch.
There was a tremendous amount of friction in the energy of the house, and a reluctance on Mary’s part to tell her story and to reveal the real reason she was still Earth-bound. She was very invested in staying, and knew that I was committed to getting her gone. She shared some things, tho: that she and Homer were very happy together and had one child, a daughter named Lizzy, who died when she was 10 or 12 years old. We asked how Lizzy died, and Mary said, “The fevers got her.”
But none of the things Mary told us had any bearing on the guilt I could see in her energy. Eventually, a brief but lucky flash of something led me straight to the heart of the matter, and I asked, “Tell me about your other baby, about your boy.”
Shocked and angry that I knew, but wanting to speak of him, Mary reluctantly told the story. First, she showed me their family: her, pregnant and ecstatic to be having another child; Lizzy, about five years old and glowing like a ray of sunshine; Homer, deliriously happy and looking upon them with adoration. And then she showed me the baby, a boy they named Matthew, born healthy and happy. “Perfect,” she said. And then he just died. No illness, no injury, no nothing. She felt incredibly guilty and responsible, and was convinced that either she ran into something while she was pregnant and, “Knocked him on the head,” or her milk was bad and she poisoned him by breastfeeding. She felt that she was a bad person and had done a bad thing. “And you don’t get to go to heaven when you’ve done something like that.”
Clearly, this was the reason she was still here. Claudia and I commenced her re-education, and talked about SIDS. Mary had a hard time with this, with the idea that she was blameless. She never got pregnant again after Matthew’s birth and death, and she felt that was confirmation that she was bad and unworthy, and couldn’t be trusted with more babies. We talked more, and slowly — very slowly — she started to come around.
I asked if she wanted to see her husband, daughter, and son again; I asked if she was tired of hanging around and haunting; I asked if she could forgive herself for something she didn’t do.
Apparently she did, she was, and she could, because the next thing I knew she was making her way through the house, removing all the ghostly panels she had installed. She carried a magical Mary Poppins bag and stuffed the wall-sized panels into it. And as she did this, she had a growing awareness of the impact her presence had had on Claudia, and was surprised and sorry. Once the panels were down, her guilt was gone and I could see that she was ready to ascend.
Good-byes said, I opened a portal for her and up she went, exclaiming, “Oh my gosh!” Her husband, Homer, was there to greet her, as was her daughter, although the daughter appeared in a different form, as she has had subsequent lives. As I closed the portal, I said, “Go find your son,” and off they went.
As for Claudia, I told her that her house desperately needed a Do-It-Yourself House Cleansing, to clear out the residual ghost energy, and that her house was going to feel weird until that was completed. But all Claudia could think about was taking her son out for a “Ding Dong the Bitch is Gone” celebration dinner, and sleeping in her own bed again.