Besides the footsteps, bangs, and opening doors, we also experienced electrical anomalies in the house. One evening in the late 1980s, after dinner my younger daughter M decided to go fetch her homework from her room. Our border collie Minnie, who usually followed her around the house, however, balked at going up to the second floor with her, and M had an uneasy feeling as well. She went upstairs, turned on the light in her room and hastened in to grab her homework when poof! the overhead light turned off, leaving M in the dark. Frightened, M ran right out and down the stairs and breathlessly told me about the light turning off on its own. I was so sure that the bulb had burned out that I took a new one upstairs. But when I flipped the switch, the light turned on. The switch had moved from on to off by itself. M, validated, gave me an I-told-you-so look.
One night, my daughter Ceridwen awoke in the wee hours. Through the open door of her bedroom she saw that a light was flickering off and on in the hallway, as if the electrical connection was faulty or the bulb was malfunctioning. She turned over and went back to sleep. Only until later that night, when she was walking down the dark hallway to the bathroom, did it occur to her that the power to the fixture had been disconnected and the bulb removed.
Not just lights turned on by themselves. In January of 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. The crew's family members watching the Challenger rise into the sky and the hundreds of thousands of people watching on TV were stunned and horrified when it blew up right before their eyes. Throughout that day and the next week the TV networks played the video of the disaster over and over again. I found the media's obsession with this horrific event upsetting and avoided watching the news.
Two nights after the disaster, about an hour after I had gone to bed, all of a sudden, from Ceridwen's room came the sound of a newscast blaring. I got out of bed and looked into Ceridwen's room. There, on her little portable TV, was the CNN video of the explosion! Ceridwen was sitting up in bed staring at the TV screen. Obviously, she hadn't turned it on. We speculated about how it could have come on, but couldn't determine a cause. In the end, I pulled the plug on the TV and went back to bed. Fortunately, no other disturbances occurred that night, nor did the TV ever turn on by itself again. (Two decades later there were other electrical shenanigans in that room, but that's for another post.)
One day in 1990, Ceridwen and a few friends were hanging out in the dining room when the overhead chandelier began turning sporadically off and on. The friends knew about Frank, and indeed a couple of them had heard Frank walking around when they came to take care of the pets. Naturally, they and Ceridwen blamed Frank for the light flickering, but for practical reasons, I needed to find out if the cause was physical.
Over the next week, the dining room light turned off and on several times, and I decided to call Northern States Power to check out the connection to the electrical box. A guy came out, examined it, and declared that the connection was good. So I called an electrician to see if he could find the problem. He came and checked the house wiring, but could find nothing wrong. In desperation, I turned to a psychic medium.
Her name was Judith Dale, and she worked out of Sunsight Books at Lake and Lyndale. The three of us greeted her at the door as she arrived carrying a large piece of crystal. I had, and still have reservations about most self-proclaimed psychics, but Judith came highly recommended, so I developed a wait-and-see attitude. I got far more than I anticipated from the outcome of her visit.
Judith began by walking through the parlors and kitchen to the back door, holding the crystal before her. She went to the electrical box, and saying nothing, reversed course and went up the front stairs. I waited expectantly to see if she'd mention Frank, but she didn't. Instead, she stopped in the front bedroom, Ceridwen's room. She said that she felt a strong negative energy in the room--not an active haunting, but something residual. Judith said that the room had been a "discipline" room for children and that their emotions still pervaded the room.
Young Ceridwen in her first bedroom, the small room over the foyer.
Judith asked Ceridwen if she had any experiences of this energy. I was flabbergasted when Ceridwen told her that as a pre-school child, she had sometimes seen a boy and girl in the room when we first moved into the house. This revelation took me aback because I remembered Ceridwen talking about seeing "Girl and Boy", never realizing that they were not imaginary playmates, but full-bodied, full-color apparitions. Recently, Ceridwen told me that she vividly remembers what they both looked like, a boy around six and his slightly older sister. She not only saw them in her room, but in other parts of the house, most frequently on the third floor.
As M and I stood out in the hallway at the door to the room watching, Judith laid her hands on Ceridwen and uttered words to release the spiritual energy trapped there. As she concluded the ritual with a blessing, a most extraordinary thing occurred: M and I felt a blast of energy pour through the door, almost like an electrical charge. As the wave of energy rushed past us, the overhead light in the room turned on for one beat, then went off. The wave only lasted a moment, and was gone. After that, a deep sense of peace settled around us, an unforgettable sensation.
We accompanied Judith to the front door. The experience of the cleansing had been so intense, I had almost forgotten about Frank and the light.
"What about the problem with the light?" I asked.
"Oh, that," Judith replied. "There's a loose connection to the electrical box. Call NSP to come and fix it."
Thunderstruck, I told her that someone had come and found nothing amiss.
"Call them back," she said, "and insist that they send someone out again. Don't take no for an answer."
I called NSP. They resisted my pleas to send a second person, but finally gave in when I told them that an electrician could find nothing wrong with the house wiring. I did not mention Judith.
Anyway, they did send a second technician who, as Judith predicted, found a loose connection and repaired it.
In the end, Judith's visit fixed two energy problems: the loose wire and Girl and Boy. And Frank, in this case, was acquitted.
* * *
A word about psychic mediums: I am very skeptical of the claims of most psychics. You see them investigating on ghost-hunting programs, and they are never at a loss for "impressions"--which of course, can't be verified objectively. Worse yet, I encountered a storefront psychic in New York City whose main goal was to do a cashectomy on her clients, a common objective of commercial "psychics." Scary.
Nevertheless, in my collecting of ghost stories, I came across three Twin Cities psychic mediums who proved to be the Real Thing: Judith Dale, Echo Bodine, and Eve Olson.
Although I have never met Echo, a half dozen people told me fascinating stories of her readings. In a blog post, I've recounted one story of her visit to an 1890's house in the Healy Block Historical District:
'Shortly after Dan acquired the house, he invited celebrated psychic Echo Bodine in for a tour. She told him that the lower floors had residual hauntings, but nothing active. On the other hand, on the third floor “lived” a little boy ghost, an intelligent haunting. Echo told Dan that the boy had said to her, “Dan doesn’t see me, but Newton does.” This freaked out Dan because Newton was his cat’s name–and the psychic didn’t know that.'
The late Eve Olson was a Spiritualist minister from England who lived in St. Paul in the 1980s. As a minister, she did not charge for readings, although she would accept donations to the church. One evening I brought several of my neighbors to her house for a reading. When she asked, "Is there a [man's name] here?", a man with that name dutifully identified himself.
She told him that an older man in soiled overalls wearing a straw hat was sending him greetings. "He's smiling, holding up his right hand, showing that the index finger is missing."
The man blanched. "That's my Uncle Jack!" he said. "He was a farmer who had lost a finger in a corn picker. He died several years ago."
We were amazed. None present besides myself had met Eve until that evening, and she knew nothing about any of them.
Go figure.
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