The Psychic and the Poltergeist: A Halloween Tale

angel-with-a-tear(This is an excerpt from my latest book Confessions of a Reluctant Psychic, which is currently a work-in-progress.)

My first encounter, with a spirit that hadn’t crossed over yet, happened over a decade ago.  I had already been aware of my psychic gifts for fifteen years or so, and I had honed my craft through meditation, divine guidance, and reading anything and everything I could get my hands on about communing with those who have crossed over.  Still, most of my training came on the job, as it does for most psychics.  You simply learn as you go.  Although, I’d already done readings for thousands of people, up until that memorable moment, I had always communed with souls who had completely transitioned to the other side.

Yes, I’d heard of ghostly encounters and I’d read about poltergeists, apparitions, phantoms, and disincarnate spirits who haven’t crossed over.  Sure, I’d seen plenty of movies depicting these beings: Poltergeist, Ghost, Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, and Casper, to name a few, and yet, I’d never experienced this phenomenon firsthand.  Even though I’m a psychic, I’m a great skeptic. My mantra is: I have to see it or witness it to believe it.  So I was on the fence as to whether this whole ghostly-thing was real or just a hoax.

Before I tell you how I first encountered an earthbound spirit, let’s clarify why a spirit might be reluctant to cross over.   There are many different reasons for a spirit to avoid going to the light and listed below are just a few of them.

1) Sometimes spirits hover around the earth plane, reluctant to let go because they’re afraid to hear their life review and to face the consequences of their less-than-stellar behaviors.  Yup, karma’s a bitch! This type of spirit knows that they’ve done really bad things – murders, rapes, crimes against humanity, and other violent and destructive acts.  Point blank – it makes perfect sense why they’d be in no hurry to meet their maker.  Some of these spirits can be quite brazen, making themselves known to others as they scurry about the earth haunting and taunting us with their tricks – throwing things, moving things, manifesting, and just generally scaring the hell out of any humans that can sense them or who have witnessed their chicanery. These are malevolent spirits.  The kind Halloween horror movies exploit, and these spirits are sometimes referred to as poltergeists, which is a German word meaning noisy ghosts.  You might wonder why these beings are allowed to roam the earth and frighten others?  Freewill: We live in a freewill universe and if these beings want to wander the earth from now until doomsday, well…it’s their choice.

2) Other spirits reluctant to crossover, might have been relatively good people, but they may have done some things that they’re not proud of, and their own judgments of what they’ve done keep them earthbound.  A lot of these harsh self-judgments are derived from their religious beliefs and from their upbringing. These are benevolent spirits.

3) Still other beings may have died so suddenly or so unexpectedly that they don’t realize that they’re dead, and they’re frightened and confused. They wander around the earth plane in search of someone…anyone… who can see, hear, or sense them and who can shed some light on their predicament.  Although they’re benevolent spirits, they can scare the hell out of me, just because, as an empath, I sense how frightened they are. Once I ascertain that these are just lost souls who need to understand what’s happened to them, I can usually get them to go to the light by telepathically communing to them the fact that they have died.  At this point, a deceased loved one usually comes on the scene to help escort them to the other side.

4) If a person dies from an overdose or if he or she is heavily medicated at the time of death, this person may just think that they’re stuck in a bad dream or are having a bad trip.  They usually just need validation that they’ve died and then they quickly find their way to the other side.

5) Other beings know full well that they’ve died, but they’re reluctant to leave their loved ones behind, and they hang around anxious to get a message to them.Sometimes they just want their loved ones to know that they’re all right.  Other times, they realize that they’ve left too much undone – there’s no will, or they’ve left their finances in a mess.  Sometimes they just want to say that they’re sorry or to simply say goodbye.

6) Good people can become earthbound because their souls are troubled.  While they were on earth, they never wanted to cause anyone any pain, but now that they’re gone, they’re in agony as they watch their loved ones crying and mourning for them.  These loving spirits just want those left behind to know that they’re OK. They also want to tell their loved ones to get on with their lives, and that they can best honor those who have died by being happy and productive.

To have a better understanding of what if feels like to be existing in this in-between state, where you are neither here nor there, I want you to think about or remember a time when you may have had a dream where you felt like you couldn’t wake up and you were terrified. You just kept on trying to wake up, but no matter how hard you tried, it just didn’t happen.  These dreams seem to last forever, but when you finally did wake up you, felt totally relieved to be out of that horrifying state.  If this has ever happened to you, then you have a pretty good idea what these beings are experiencing.

The first ghostly spirit I encountered was that of a teenage girl, who didn’t want to go to the other side for many of the reasons I listed above.  (All the names and places have been changed to protect my clients’ privacy.)

I was living alone at the time, and I was doing a phone reading for a new client, when I began to sense a presence in my living room.  It always strikes me that it’s a little funny that the dead come into my living room, but this time, I wasn’t amused, because I felt an overwhelming sense of fear surge through me.  This was highly irregular for me, because I’d never felt frightened doing a reading before.  Halfway through the reading, I had to stop and ask my client, “Who’s the young woman, that you know, who just died in a car crash?  She had a head injury.”

My client answered, “ I don’t know anyone like that.”

I tried to let it go and continued with her reading, but suddenly I felt even more frightened.  If this woman really didn’t know this girl, then why the hell was she hanging around here?  I sensed that the being, or whatever the hell this thing was in my apartment, was frightened.  I calmed down a bit, knowing that I was empathically feeling her fear, and that this spirit was not trying to terrify or terrorize me — she was just searching for some answers.

Again I asked,  “Are you sure you don’t know a teenage girl who died in a car crash recently?”

Again, she answered, “No.”

Telepathically, this young girl conveyed this message, “She’s full of shit.  She knows who I am.  We work together.  My mom works there, too.  Tell her this is Donna’s daughter.”

I then asked her, “Do you work with a woman, Donna, who recently lost her daughter in a car crash?”

“Yes, but I don’t want to waste my reading talking about that kid.  I didn’t even like her.  She was always lying about everything, and she never did her work.  She was always calling in sick, and when she finally did get her ass into the store, she was lazy as all hell.”

I thought, Wow, this client obviously doesn’t believe in making a saint out of the dead!

“But your reading is over now,” I said, “and I really need you to cooperate.  This girl is showing me that she has bandages around her head.  She’s figuring out that she died, but she wants to know if her best friend died in the car crash as well?”

“As far as I know, Alison was alone in the car when she died.”

I felt the spirit of this girl lighten up.  She was totally relieved that her friend hadn’t died along with her. She began to feel at ease, and I felt better, just knowing her name was Alison.  We were making progress here, I thought.

“Would you mind delivering a message to Donna? Alison wants her here.  Believe me, this whole thing is making me nervous.  I never solicit clients, because that’s a violation of freewill.  People are supposed to come to me.  Tell her that I can’t charge her for this reading.  It will be my gift to her, but her daughter is claiming that she will haunt me and drive me crazy for the rest of my life, if I don’t speak with her mother.”

My client reluctantly agreed to deliver the message to her co-worker saying, “Alison was a bitch.  I have no doubt she’d drive you crazy until she got her way!”

After hanging up with my client, I began to telepathically commune with Alison.  I told her that she would have to cross over and go to God now, and that she would be better able to communicate to her mother, if she did so.  She agreed, but asked if she could stay with me until I went to sleep, and then she’d go willingly. She let me know that she loved to watch television and she asked me if I would put the television on.  I agreed and then she began acting like any typical teenager, saying things like, “You only have basic cable.  There’s nothing on basic cable.  Your neighbor has HBO.  She’s watching Six Feet Under.  That’s my favorite show.  I’m going over there to watch it with her.”

“Oh, no you’re not.  My neighbor has enough problems without you wrecking havoc in her apartment.  You stay put and watch a re-run of Friends.”

A few hours later, I told her that I was going to sleep, and she’d have to cross over.  I also told her that her grandmother would be coming for her and would help her transition to the other side.

“Which grandmother?”  Alison wanted to know.

“Your mother’s mother.”

“Good,” my father’s mother was a bitch and she would yell at me the whole way back to God!”

I was starting to get a kick out of this ghostly teenager.  She was funny as hell, as most spirits are.

Then she let me know how terrified she was to go to God.  I reassured her that God was good.  “Teenagers, especially ones who make stupid mistakes, are God’s favorites.  I’m afraid that if you don’t get a brief life review and learn the consequences of not telling the truth when you get an opportunity to deliver messages from the other side, that you’ll face some heavy karmic ramifications for that behavior.  You owe it to your mother and to yourself to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, while you have the chance.”

When I woke up the next morning, a stuffed angel doll, one that had one tear running down her face, had fallen off my bookshelf. I took that as a sign that Alison had gone to the other side, accompanied by her maternal grandmother and angels, and that the tear signified that she was sad to leave the earth plane.

A few moments later, her mother called me and said that she could come to see me the following evening.

I didn’t sense or feel Alison until her mom arrived.  But this Alison, the one who had crossed over, even briefly, was very different from the frightened spirit that had landed on my doorstep forty-eight hours earlier. She was calm, peaceful, and let me know that she was grateful to have transitioned.

The first thing Donna said was, “I was stunned to hear from my co-worker how Alison came through during her reading and named my name and stated that she had some messages for me.”

“Yes, she was very insistent that you come here.”

During the course of the reading, certain things came to light, including verification that Six Feet Under was Alison’s favorite show.  Donna confided to me how she had been at odds with her daughter for quite some time before her death.  “I always told her, ‘Please, just live to tell.’”

Donna was quite angry at her daughter and expressed this numerous times throughout the reading. The toxicology report hadn’t come in yet, but she felt certain that Alison had been drinking the night of the accident.  It took a while to get Alison to admit the truth, but eventually she admitted that she had been drunk when she cracked up the car.

Donna cried when she said,  “Two months ago, Alison came to my bedroom in the middle of the night to tell me about a terrifying dream she had in which she was driving drunk and got killed in a car accident.  She swore that she was going to stop drinking, and she did for a few weeks, but then she started binge drinking again.  I’m afraid my daughter was the kind of kid that always had to learn the hard way.”

Toward the end of our session, Alison claimed that she was going to bring her mom a Soul Mate.

Donna laughed and then stated, “I’ve given up on love.”

When Donna was about to leave, she insisted that she had to pay me for my time.

“No, I can’t take your money, and besides, Alison claims that she will pay me.”

“Really?”  Donna laughed again.  “How’s she going to do that?”

I said, “The dead have their ways.

About a year later, I got a call from a booking agent, Kevin, telling me that a department store in the mall was looking for a psychic to do Tarot card readings for a Customer Appreciation Day event.

In all honesty, I had forgotten that this was the store where Alison and her mom worked, and I was taken aback when I walked into the event and saw my booking agent there, talking to Donna.

“You two know each other?”  I asked.

“Yes,” Donna said.  “Kevin’s wife is my best friend.”

“Donna, did you get this gig for me?” I asked.

“No,” she answered. “I had no idea about any of this until just now.”

I started laughing.  “Well, Alison said that she was going to find a way to pay me, and obviously she did!  I have to believe she had her hand in all this.”

A moment later, Donna said, “And you won’t believe this…I’m in love.  I met him about two months after my daughter died.”

“The Soul Mate…she said that she was going to bring you a Soul Mate!”

Donna hugged me for a long time and then thanked me.  “I don’t know how I would have gotten through this year without you delivering all those messages to me from my daughter.”

“It does make losing someone just a little bit easier,” I said, “to truly know that death ends a life, but not the relationship with that person.”

And there you have it.  How I learned that disincarnate spirits truly exist.

Confessions of a Reluctant Psychic: Documenting this experience by writing it down and even talking about this stuff publicly, still makes me uneasy…even after all these years.  Had I not been there, witnessed it, seen it for myself, and having had this experience and thousands of others just like it validated by third party individuals, I probably would think that all this mediumship stuff was just wishful thinking, delusions, or just a bunch of malarkey.

 

Cindi Sansone-Braff, the Romance Whisperer, talks with the dead to show you how to live well and love better.  She is an award-winning playwright and has a BFA in theatre from the University of Connecticut.  She is the author of Grant Me a Higher Love and Why Good People Can’t Leave Bad Relationships. Visit her web site at: https://www.grantmeahigherlove.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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