Hard to believe that this will be my fifth Halloween post: every year I think that I can't possibly have a new strange story to share, and every year, something drops into my lap. And then every year, I remember that I have other, related, stories to share; nearly too many to put into one post. I'll begin with the incident that led to this year's theme being "Messages from the Other Side":
We had our usual party on Christmas Eve of last year, and as usual, my brother Kyler and his family came along. Knowing that I'm open-minded to stories of the strange, my sister-in-law, Christine, said she had a good one for me. Apparently, one of her clients had given her a gift certificate for an "Aura Reading", and with a shrug, Christine decided to put it to use. She made an appointment with a woman in Hamilton, and at the arranged hour, rang the bell of the woman's midcentury brick rowhouse.
Christine had no idea what to expect, but assuming that the woman would attempt to use the tricks of sham mediums – making broad guesses and then following her target's body language – Christine decided to remain impassive; give away nothing if she could help it. As soon as she entered the foyer, the youngish woman (obviously a mother from the kids' things about the house) said, "I can see by your aura that you're closing yourself off. You're highly intelligent, and that makes you skeptical – which I totally understand – but if you want to get anything out of this experience, you may want to open yourself up to it." Christine smiled and nodded noncommittally; isn't that exactly what a sham would say? Attempt to flatter her mark into susceptibility?
The woman led Christine into her dining room, where she had a pot of tea steeping, and invited Christine to sit. As she poured out the homebrew – some mix of familiar-sounding herbs that she listed as she served – the woman explained her process: not only could she see and interpret Christine's own aura (providing a system check for Christine herself), but this process allowed her to communicate with people "on the other side". As a matter of fact, she said, there was an older gentleman sitting right behind Christine, waiting to make contact. Christine remained cool, nodding noncommittally.
Although Christine had been devastated to lose her Grandpa Sully a couple of years earlier, when the woman suggested that this man might be a relative who had recently passed, Christine shrugged and said, "Could be." The woman described a trailer in the woods that the man was showing her, saying that he thought it was a place Christine enjoyed visiting. She again shrugged and said, "Could be", but as she said to me later: just because her grandparents had a trailer in the woods that she enjoyed visiting her entire life, that wasn't proof to her, "So many retired people have holiday trailers that that could just be a good guess". My grandparents didn't have trailers; I don't know anyone with a trailer in the woods; yet, if this didn't feel like "proof" of anything to Christine, it wasn't proof of anything.
The woman then asked if they had enjoyed campfires at the trailer and Christine was emphatic with her, "No." The woman explained that the man was showing her wood, insisting it was important, and Christine countered that campfires were just not a significant part of her experience at the trailer. The woman seemed confused, but let that idea go. She then said that the man recognised the necklace Christine was wearing, but although it had indeed been recently passed down to her from her grandmother, Christine assumed that could be another lucky guess; she nodded blankly.
The woman then began to pass on everything this man was telling her: that he knows he was difficult to deal with in the end; that he had been hard on Christine's grandmother – snapping at all of her final efforts to make him comfortable; he had specific messages for his daughters; wanted everyone to know that he was proud of them and grateful for the love they had shown him. The hour was up before long, and although Christine was touched by the content of all of these messages, she didn't really think that anything that was said proved contact with her dead grandfather: isn't dying always hard? Wouldn't anyone send messages of love from the other side? But as she drove home, going over everything in her memory, a bolt of recognition jolted through her: when she was growing up, Christine and her grandfather were always building things together; they were always cutting wood and gluing and nailing it together, with Christine decorating the end products with folk painting (I have several of their projects around here that they made for me and my girls over the years): no other image could have been more meaningful to her as a message from the other side than that of her Grandpa with wood, and the Aura Reader may have simply misinterpreted what he was showing her. Up to that point, Christine wasn't even sure that she was going to tell her mother about the experience – why cheapen grief with tawdry flim-flammery? – but she suddenly began to wonder, "What if that was my Grandpa and he asked me to pass on those messages? Wouldn't I have a duty to follow through?"
When she got home, Christine did call her mother, and as she laid out the whole story, her Mum experienced her own personalised jolts of recognition, and by the end, they were both in tears. Christine's mother asked if she could relay the story to her own mother – the snapped at, still grieving widow – and that was apparently another meaningful, tear-filled experience. Christine told me that for Christmas, she had decided to get her Mum a gift certificate for her own Aura Reading with the woman in Hamilton. I kind of wish she had gotten me one, too.
This seems to be the spot to share two slightly related stories: Another sister-in-law, Laura, lost her Dad to cancer far too early; when Laura was in her thirties and her children were still preschoolers. Whenever his condition would take scary dips, Laura would drive the six hours from here to his hospital bedside in Ottawa, and because of this vigilance, she was present when her Dad suddenly passed. This occurred on a snowy winter's night, and as she drove with her devastated family through the countryside afterwards toward their rural childhood home, Laura looked out into a large field, and illuminated by a suddenly spotlight-bright moon, the entire family saw a magnificent stag standing regal and stock-still, and each of them knew that this was a message from their Dad: He was fine and at rest and they were suddenly all at peace in their grief as well.
And sometimes these messages are more urgent: My friend Delight told me that once when she was driving, she was stopped in the left lane of a busy four lane street, waiting to turn left. She had her toddler, Haley, strapped into the rear right seat and was impatiently waiting for traffic to ease up, and as she crept forward, turning her wheels left in anticipation of making the turn, she heard the voice of a dead friend inside her head – someone who had died in a car accident himself – insisting, "You know you should leave your wheels straight when waiting to make a left turn so that if you get rear-ended, you won't be pushed into oncoming traffic." No sooner did Delight straighten out her wheels than she was rear-ended, and more-or-less just safely knocked forward. Delight 100% believes that her dead friend communicated with her just in time from the other side; that he probably saved Haley's life if not also her own.
I haven't personally made many attempts to communicate with "the other side", but as I have written about before, when I was quite young, I had a friend who had a Ouija Board. This was in the Seventies, and Becky's parents were definitely hippies – her Mom was a big, gregarious lady who wore flowy gypsy dresses; her Dad was skinny with a fringed leather vest, Lennon-glasses, and a horseshoe moustache. They lived outside our small town, in an even smaller lakeside community, and their house was essentially a winterised cottage; a cosy cabin right out of a fairy tale. Becky's Mom would playfully read tarot cards, which I found interesting (if not very mystical), and Becky and her sister kept the Ouija Board in their shared bedroom. They said that they used it all the time – that they were in frequent contact with a spirit named Joe – and although I tried it with them, I don't remember Joe saying anything interesting to us. And besides: I couldn't be sure that it wasn't just Becky and her sister moving the planchette on purpose; interesting, if not very mystical; probably flim-flammery.
Coincidentally, it was just this summer that Dave told a story I hadn't heard before: When he was in high school, he and his friend Anna once tried using a Ouija Board. Dave has always been a
Now, to circle back, while Christine was telling me her story, my brother Kyler was sighing and rolling his eyes; he petulantly turned up the volume on the TV he was watching to show his displeasure with Christine having been moved by, and now sharing, her Aura Reading story. Which is weird, because this is the brother of mine who lived in what my family believes to have been a haunted house after I moved out. Kyler himself was singled out for particular abuse from the other side, and now he didn't believe in it? Once when we were young and our parents were out, Kyler and I watched The Exorcist together; and we got very, very frightened by it; Kyler slept on the floor of my room for a few nights after – and while I may have pretended I was doing him some kindness, I was happy he was there; we were both terrified of being possessed by a pea soup-spewing demon. Some time after that, and probably after my experience with Becky's Ouija Board, our parents were out and I asked Kyler if he wanted to make a homemade Ouija Board with me. I have no idea where I heard these instructions, but we drew all the letters of the alphabet on squares of paper, wrote out "yes" and "no" as well, and laid them out in a big circle on the kitchen table. We then took a glass of water, and after the two of us took turns drinking it dry, we flipped the glass over into the middle of the letters and began. I don't remember our first question (probably something like, "Is anyone there?"), but I precisely remember the glass moving smoothly on its skim of residual water beneath our light touch – first looking like it was going to go one way, and then another, and as I stood above the display, holding my breath and hoping/dreading an actual response, the glass suddenly flew out from under my fingertips and went shooting across the room and shattered against the sink. Kyler and I both accused each other of trying to scare the other and throwing that glass on purpose. As Kyler stomped off indignantly, I remember cleaning up the evidence by myself; discarding the glass shards, tearing the letters up into teeny tiny unrecognisable pieces.
Years later I reminded Kyler of this incident, and while I told him that I've always known he was moving that glass around, that he threw it across the room on purpose to freak me out, he not only didn't admit to it, Kyler swore that he had no memory of the event at all. I'll never forget it, and he has this amazing memory, so that is weird to me.
And to tie it all together: After watching movies like The Exorcist and Poltergeist or reading books like Carrie, I learned that (in fiction anyway) pubescent youths (and especially young girls) can act as conduits for negative energies. I've always been the kind of person who can simultaneously hold two contrary thoughts in my mind – I know this isn't real, but what if just being aware of it makes it happen to me? – and I scared myself often as I was growing up, wondering if it was possible to become possessed by forces I didn't even believe in. When people started whispering about what was supposed to happen if you chanted "Bloody Mary" into a mirror, I despaired that I now had this knowledge; never willingly tested what I knew couldn't possibly be true; would lay in bed with my eyes squeezed shut, hoping that no gruesome apparition would be summoned by the refrain (Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary) looping silently in my brain against my desperate will. I eventually learned (from "true" accounts on shows like Celebrity Ghost Stories) that Ouija Boards are said to be used by malevolent spirits to cross over from the other side; that this combination of pubescent youth and untrained portal-opening can unleash monsters. And it's sold in toy stores. I won't have one in my house. Bizarrely, Kennedy found a Ouija Board squirrelled away in one of her grandparents' closets while decluttering their house for sale this summer – Granny tried to insist that Kennedy bring it home with her "to play with", but she nervously threw it in the Dumpster instead. Kennedy has watched enough Celebrity Ghost Stories to know better, too; you just don't play with portals, even if you don't believe in them. (I asked Mallory the other day if she has ever used a Ouija Board and she said, "No. Why would I? There is zero upside." That's my girl.)
And yet...is there really anything sinister about going for tea at a young mother's home and having her tell you that your grandfather loved you and is proud of you? I am still the kind of person who can simultaneously hold two contrary thoughts in my mind – I don't really believe that mediums relay messages from the other side, but it's pretty cool that Christine received such messages – and I wouldn't be opposed to having a chat with an Aura Reader myself.
Happy Halloween!
Strange stories from previous years:
Halloween I
Halloween II
Halloween III
Halloween IV
