Well, here we are, the most wonderful time of the year again, the time when my occult interests and practices are not only not bizarre, but positively de rigeur.
I came by my paranormal interests very organically, being raised by ex-hippie parents, a former flower-child mom and a dad who dabbled in all kinds of magick in his young adulthood. Growing up, it was considered normal for my mom to play games with us kids that, looking back, were definitely tests of psychic ability; for any of us to know something was going to happen before it did; even for me to see my older sister telekinetically knocking over cereal boxes or moving a wineglass.
Horror movies, as long as they didn’t feature a bunch of nudity, were permitted to us kids from a probably-too-young age. Any fear on our part was patiently dealt with by my parents explaining how the special effects were done, or fast-forwarding to the credits and showing us that the villain was an actor, there was his name. This had the result of my sisters and I very rarely having trouble sleeping or nightmares, and being surprised during sleepovers when our friends had these issues after a slasher-movie marathon.
Every year, Halloween meant our whole house being decked out like a party-supply store, and our huge yard being filled with dummies hanging from trees, a fake guillotine (yeah, I didn’t like this one), a cloaked skeleton playing a keyboard, a huge open coffin, a spider web that got bigger every year, fake tombstones with hands clawing out of the ground around them, spooky lights and sound effects, smoke machines, and so on, even one year a fake fatal crash using a spare car. My parents went all-out, and even though I stopped trick-or-treating due to anxiety when I was 11 or 12, Halloween continued to be a time of happy memories, my least-depressed time every year.
But like I said, my family was paranormally-inclined year-round. The mood that gripped the average person in October only remained with us all the time. So, in the spirit of the season, I’ll share a few of my strongest supernaturally-oriented memories, as I in a previous entry related my tale of seeing the Green Man.
My older sister had her first child when I was still in high school, a little girl whose care I was very involved in in her early life. One day when my niece was, hmm, maybe around six months old, I and my younger sis were in the kitchen baking cookies, and we were keeping an eye on the baby, who was in her highchair eating Cheerios.
She kept making movements and sounds that made it clear she very much wanted the cookie dough we were mixing, which we laughingly told her she could not have. This made her grumpy, naturally, but we insisted. A few moments later, I suddenly moved from where I’d been standing the whole time, I don’t remember why, and then heard a crashing sound from behind me.
I whirled around, and on the floor where I’d just been standing was the big, heavy, antique barometer that always hung on the room’s far wall, way out of reach of any of us, and everyone else was rooms away. (I grew up in a big, six-bedroom house.) My sister and I stared at each other, then looked at the baby, who was now not only unfazed by the loud sound, but giggling.
“Peanut, did you throw that at AA?” I asked her, using our nicknames. Niece continued to giggle and smile in what, despite her young age, seemed a very secretive and pleased way. We of course told the rest of the family about this, who were surprised but not shocked. We all agreed that niece was just showing her psychic abilities early.
For the next story, let’s rewind time a bit, back to when I was around 14, or nearly that age. My sisters and I loved to use our parents’ Ouija boards, which they taught us how to handle safely, or as safely as one can…I guess it all depends on how you feel about the things. We especially liked when my mom would join us, because her presence often brought out a spirit I’ll call N here, who supposedly had known my parents in a long-ago previous life in ancient Mesopotamia. He was one of the few who would speak to us clearly, especially Mom, though he didn’t much like my dad, who had apparently killed him in their past life.
I was at the time dealing with having just accepted that I was, or had been, the past life that I’ve talked about on this blog, that ill-starred queen of France, but aware of my former self’s bad reputation, I hadn’t told anyone about it. Unfortunately for me, one of the things we all most asked N about was our past lives, if he knew anything about them. Usually, he didn’t tell us much about that, until one day I was using the board with just my mom. She casually, unknowingly asked N about my previous lives.
With greater clarity than usual, he unhesitatingly began to swish the planchette around the painted alphabet. M…A…R…I…
I pulled the planchette off of the board, without moving it to ‘Good-bye’ or thanking the spirit, which was a breach of the rules my parents had set. This must have surprised my mother, more so than what N had been trying to tell us. The four letters had been enough, because Mom knew I had in recent years been interested in reading about Marie Antoinette for reasons I couldn’t or wouldn’t explain.
She looked at me knowingly, and her exact phrasing I can’t remember, but she asked me if it was true. (Possibly the most important rule for Ouija in my family: do not believe anything a spirit tells you unless it’s something you already know is the truth.)
I couldn’t lie, or keep it to myself any longer. True to form for my family, she believed me at once, even said it made sense to her when she really thought about it. From then on, I slowly let the rest of my immediate family in on my secret, which at my request they have always kept for me. They are the only off-line acquaintances of mine I have ever told, and though we rarely talk about it, on the rare occasions I refer to that life, they seem to believe me about it completely.
As I said, my parents had strict rules for my sisters, and our friends whose parents permitted, when it came to using the Ouija boards. And for the most part, they ‘worked,’ nothing bad happened that we ever connected to their use. I can recall only one slightly-scary incident, which I’ll tell as my last tale.
Rewind further, to when I was no more than ten or 11. My friend I’ll call L decided to have a sleepover party for her birthday, and though her parents were not Ouija board-friendly, she begged me to bring it anyway, and I did. (I was otherwise a very good kid, respectful of authority figures, but didn’t like saying no to friends either.)
There were maybe six of us, long-time friends with each other since kindergarten, and by now, most of them knew the rules I had been taught and insisted they follow. One of those was that you had to have a cross with you, and begin each session by taking the cross in your hand and using it to cross the board, similar to how Catholics cross themselves, just over the board instead. After we did this, I put the cross on the carpet next to me, and we tried to get a spirit to talk to us.
No luck for a while, but then, movement of the planchette. This prompted the usual back and forth of “You’re pushing it!”, “I am not, you are!”, “No, she is!” When we were all finally satisfied that no one was pushing the planchette, at least as far as we could tell, we started asking questions.
I don’t remember much of what we asked or it answered, just that it was sort of menacing, talking about hell, claiming to be a demon, spelling ‘666’ a few times. Things came to a climax when it cryptically said, ‘Cross.’
I instinctively reached for the object it mentioned, that I had put down right next to me…and it was gone. As in, I got up, moved things, my friends helped me look all over the floor of the room we were in. No sign of it.
We got back on the board and asked the spirit if it had taken the cross, which it claimed it did. At this point, one of my friends started to cry and said she wanted to stop. I was a bit reluctant to end a session without a cross to use on the board to fully ‘close the portal,’ so to speak, but everyone else agreed – this was creepy, we should stop.
So we did, and I put the board away with my stuff where L’s parents wouldn’t see it. We decided to try to find something on TV to take our minds off of what happened, and started glancing around for the remote. As I was looking for it, checking a bookcase on the other side of the room, something on one of the upper shelves caught my eye. The cross, even though none of us had been in that part of the room at all. After this, my friends were not as keen to play with the Ouija board again.
So, those are some of my paranormal experiences. I hope that, should you have any yourselves, you hold them as fondly as I do mine in memory. As the Celtic year dies and begins again, I wish you a spooky holiday in the very best of ways.
My Longing Shall Gather 