Читать книгу Ghosthunting Southern California - Sally Richards - Страница 11

Introduction

What Came Before, What Comes After

I WAS BORN INTO A REALM that many cannot see. My earliest memories were before I was a toddler, seeing my parents reach down in the playpen for me, halos of brightly colored light swirling around them and my grandmothers holding me closely in their arms. And always, the silent women behind them whom I didn’t know but whose warm smiles comforted me. I would see them from time to time when my grandmothers weren’t visiting; as I became older, they became more scarce. I didn’t know those women’s names, and no one ever seemed to know whom I was speaking about when I referenced them. Soon they became only outlines of beings filled with less bright lights—my mother says I called them falling stars. I would most often see the starlights, as I later began to call them, walking with people, guiding them on their way and away from harm. Everyone had at least one of these beings, though older people’s were more of an opaque shade and barely visible.

For some reason, when I was five, I became curious about our young newspaper boy, interacting with him at every opportunity. He was ten and as reliable as jeweled clockwork when he dropped off the weekly paper. He always rolled his bike up to the porch to toss me the paper to catch. He’d kill a few minutes of time telling me some silly joke that would leave me roaring with laughter and running off to tell it to someone else. He was kind. One day I asked him where his being was, and he gave me a puzzled look. I tried to explain that all things had a starlight looking over them. Even the dogs and cats had a little sparkle that followed—even my turtle and the horned toads in my reptile zoo. I told him of the dark shade that floated along behind his bike. He shrugged and gave me an odd look that older kids do when younger ones babble incoherently. He waved goodbye with a quirky smile and a nod, and that was the last time I saw him … alive.

The next week he didn’t come, and that Saturday a funeral cortege drove slowly by, the long line of cars blazing with headlights against the foggy coastal sky. The black car in the lead held my curiosity. I’d never seen a car with curtains before; it seemed to me the perfect mobile dollhouse. I looked hard to see who was inside, a mystery that clearly needed explaining. I asked my father what it all meant. He hesitated and told me a car had hit our newspaper boy and killed him, and he took the opportunity to impress upon me some rules about bike safety, as I’d just gotten my training wheels off. Having been so young and having never known death, I asked him what killed meant. He looked at me, his face twisted in puzzlement, trying to put together the right words that would leave me unscathed until I really needed to know. He told me our paperboy would be sleeping for a very, very long time. Nothing like this had ever occurred. I was really confused.

Over the days that followed, I pestered him to take me to find the paperboy so I could wake him from his enchanted sleep of killed. My father told me he was at the cemetery. In Monterey, California, there is a cemetery next to Dennis the Menace Park. One day he took me to the park to play and I sounded out the words on the sign nearby—San Carlos Cemetery. I begged him to take me inside. He hesitated, but I began to tear up and got a very disappointed look on my face, then crossed my arms in defiance. He knew he would have a fight on his hands, so he took the high road and said, “Okay.” Off we went, me skipping speedily away from him in a pastel dress, my Keds leaping and my pigtails flying behind me. I now imagine my father trying to think of a way to explain the whole sleeping thing as we traveled toward Death’s gates.

I’m sure my father thought he had an out, as we hadn’t known the newspaper boy’s name and in the huge cemetery it would have been like finding a needle in a haystack. So that might have been the end of the story, except it wasn’t. It was just the start. I looked down the rows of old tombstones, overwhelmed by the possibilities of which one could be his marker over the subterranean place he lay in his slumber of killed. I wondered how he was breathing since there was no air underground; we had no time to lose. We had to get him out quickly! I remembered the frantic state in which I began looking for some kind of clue for his location. I suddenly looked up and saw a brief glimpse of a boy in a familiar baseball cap dodge behind a tree. It was him, and he wasn’t sleeping at all, or underground. As we hadn’t even brought shovels, I was flooded with relief.

I broke into a run, stumbling over the uneven ground. I skinned my knees, each time I fell catching myself just in time to keep from landing flat on my face on the old earthquake-damaged cement curbs. After what seemed like a million close calls and ignoring my father’s shouts to slow down, I arrived at the tree. Looking down, I touched the etched words in a ground marker warm with sunshine. I traced what I felt was surely his name. My father, out of breath, caught up with me and looked at the marker. He was pale as the words came slowly from his mouth, “How did you find it?”

“He was here, at the tree. He’s playing hide-and-seek,” I explained, “This killed sleep is wrong, Daddy. He was here; he’s not sleeping at all.” I looked around, trying to offer my father some proof the boy was still among us—as I thought someone should tell his mother—but found nothing.

My life got stranger and stranger. As happens with most children, I stopped seeing auras when everyone else said they didn’t exist. But I continued to see other things, things that became harder and harder to explain. We moved to Hawaii, and I became well versed in the local lore and the spirits of the islands that are always present and acknowledged by the locals. I was surrounded by people who saw what I saw and kids who wouldn’t go down jungle paths because of an ancestral war that happened there hundreds of years before. Kids who respected the dead because the dead weren’t so dead after all.

When I was eight, I cut school and drowned while surfing. After I was done fighting the undertow, I surrendered to having the most amazing, peaceful experience, which I would later liken to what Einstein said about what death must feel like—all of the body’s atoms exploding into the universe and becoming part of everything else. More recently the experience was described by Steve Jobs’s last words on his deathbed: “Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow!” Oh, wow! indeed.

I was dead when a sailor dragged me out of the surf, pumped the salt water out of my lungs, and brought me back, bringing forth a trail of expletives even he couldn’t fathom coming from the small girl whom he had awakened from what I now call The Perfect Sleep.

My father was in special ops, and after his seven tours in Vietnam, my family moved back to the mainland (the Silicon Valley, in this case). I learned to wear shoes and jeans; one experience wearing a traditional mu‘umu‘u to school with trendy Silicon Valley kids was all it took for me to learn new dress codes and to take the flowers out of my hair. The new kids I met didn’t have mythology, or a common background. I’d gone from the happiest place on earth to some pretty harsh realities—not only were these kids kind of mean, but they knew nothing of the spirit world except fear.

Life changed as my parents became engineers, and I found new friends—and they were nothing like my old friends. My best friend, Deedee Gates, was a trippy chick the same age as I was, who knew all about life after death, could light candles in her house without getting into trouble, and turned me on to her mom’s metaphysical library, which I voraciously devoured over a summer. She disappeared just as quickly as she’d appeared in my life and moved away to points unknown, but not before leaving a major impact and introducing me to the great mystic Sybil Leek. I was soon leading ghost tours through the abandoned Victorian houses surrounded by tract-housing developments that seemed to spring up overnight in the rich soil of old Santa Clara Valley fruit orchards. The grand old homes were earmarked for demolition to make way for more tract housing.

I told the groups of kids on the tours about the people who once lived in the houses and the current spirits that inhabited them, often conducting séances that would bring about unexplained rappings from the walls and ceilings. Kids were frightened and ready to jump at any unexplained sound—including the police we’d often have to outrun for trespassing, which only added to the infamy and popularity of the tours. Charging for the tours over many summers, I saved enough to purchase a 1969 Ford Mustang on my sixteenth birthday.

Off to college, where I had little time for anything else but work and school, and then off to life and career. Although I was happy in my positions as investigative journalist, author, managing editor, technologist, and startup consultant (and many other career experiences), I still found myself wanting more. I took a job to do a company turnaround in Vegas and one lonely evening lit a candle that the candle-maker had wrapped with a label reading LOVE. A week later, my old high school sweetheart living in another state came to find me. It was then I surrendered my heart, moved back to California, and connected with my haunted roots.

The next year, I drove to BookExpo America in New York City. On the way, I ran into pre-Katrina weather from Florida to Texas, where I was hit by lightning. This, only a few days before I was expected home and then to get back on a plane to cover the story of Lily Dale, New York, the city inhabited by mediums who talk with the dead. The lightning strike has left me with health concerns. I had to remove all the metal from my teeth because the strike had made any food on a metal utensil taste like aluminum foil, and it also did a job on my optic nerves—but, in the end, I’m okay. Exhausted and fragile, I flew out on schedule, reached Lily Dale, and began receiving messages from my old dead friend, Paul, who was contacting everyone around me with his name and detailed descriptions of himself, his job, and our friendship. He gave them all messages to tell me he was still a physicist on the Other Side and was still working hard. Working hard on what? I still don’t know.

Sure, I was a believer when I left Lily Dale. A believer in what I’d already known since the not-so-dead newspaper boy led me to his grave.

Months later, my husband and I created our miracle baby—the baby whom no less than five doctors told my husband and me would be impossible to conceive. Sometimes lightning, and whatever else that doesn’t kill you, does make you stronger … and sometimes may even help to get you pregnant. Now we have a wonderful child who fills our hearts and who feels the presence of her long-dead great-grandmothers and her grandfather around her and is quite reassured by their guidance.

After the baby came, I began taking classes in Spiritualism (a belief system that asserts ghosts are among the living 24/7 and that anyone has the means to contact them) for mediumship annually at Lily Dale and at Harmony Grove, a Spiritualist camp community in San Diego; both more than a century old. I finally learned how to decipher all that had come before. I started a paranormal-investigation group on Meetup called Ghosts Happen (meetup.com/ghostshappen). I chose the cream of the crop from the members and created Roadside Paranormal, a group dedicated to investigating locations where disturbing events have taken place and victims still do not rest in peace (such as home and workplace homicides, suicides, and accident scenes). We pass on information from spirits to friends and family that may give entities, and ultimately their friends and family, closure. My group uses state-of-the-art science to document the data we find. We also test new types of equipment to determine whether they’re valid and to help make them standards in the industry if they are.

Having investigated in many other states and around the world, I’ve documented proof of energy beyond the death of the body in places such as the assassination site of John Lennon, Civil War battlefields, and European World War II battle locations, the ancient graveyards of Southeast Asia, and even the underground catacombs of Paris. I’ve concluded that no matter where you go, spirit energy and paranormal activity fall into the same categories—active, imprint, and intelligent. And I bet if you’re reading this book that you’ve had an experience with at least one of these forms of energy—why else would you be so drawn to the topic?

When we feel the energy in a place that’s reportedly haunted, it’s often something we can’t put a finger on, but it’s like a sign planted into the ground that states, Something happened here, and it’s not going away anytime soon. It’s the kind of energy that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up and take notice, and causes what I call chicken skin to crawl up your spine and down your arms. You know the feeling—when someone walks over your grave. The mind, body, and our innate senses—our intuition—know when we’ve come across it. Don’t discount intuition: sometimes it’s the only thing keeping you from becoming part of the spirit world.

Normally, people will drive an extra mile to avoid the haunted, abandoned house that’s been for sale since a family was murdered there. The living can just feel someone—or something—watching them through the crack in the dusty curtains if they have to drive by. Not everyone avoids these kinds of energy-pit locations. Some seek them out looking for proof of a life beyond death, whether that be ghosts, demons, inert energy (the soul), or parallel universes in the form of vortexes. My team seeks it out—we feel it, we explore it, we document it, and we compile proof to convince others that energy beyond death exists. A point comes when no further proof is needed to convince ourselves, but rather we are ready present the proof to others and start them on their own journeys.

So, why are people compelled to search for existence of The Beyond? I suppose it’s because we all have one thing in common—one day we will all find the truth. Is it more comforting to find out beforehand? Will it convince us to live in the here and now? Is it fear? Or, are we just curious by nature with our mortality staring us in the face from the moment we learn to reason. Whatever your reason, you’re here now. My job from this moment on is to give you the straight-up accounts of some of the truth I have encountered, narratives that may set you on your own paranormal trek to look for your own truths about what happens in The End. Not the end of this book, but rather the mother of all The Ends—the end of you, of me, of life as we know it. We are creatures of habit. We don’t even like the thought of our daily routine being canceled by inconvenience, let alone death. There’s one question you have to ask yourself before reading this book: Do you really want to know? If your answer is Yes, then this book will end the world as you know it.

So after all that, if you’re still compelled to find out what lies beyond the veil, I can only guess it’s because of a personal experience you’ve had; something you’ve seen or heard but cannot explain even after rolling it over in your mind a couple thousand times. Maybe you’re even losing sleep over it. This book has more than thirty locations where you may be able to find the kind of energy you can work with to pursue your ongoing paranormal learning experiences.

As you read this, a couple of your own places probably come to mind. For many people, their own homes have become rife with the kind of energy prime for investigation, but not necessarily because their homes are truly haunted, but rather because they themselves have begun drawing this type of energy to themselves. Believe me, people can be more haunted than any castle. If you’re looking for locations but can’t get to the ones listed in this book, the case studies contained here can be used as a primer for investigation skills, as they are filled with practical advice on technique, tools, and advice—it’s all here. The rest will come intuitively.

Ghosthunting Southern California was created from the most compelling investigations of publicly accessible locations (some infamous for being haunted, others making their first appearance) I’ve found in Southern California. I’ve gone to these locations with my team and others to find out the history, the characters involved (both past and present), and why on earth someone would leave that wonderful Perfect Sleep that I found when I drowned only to hang out to contact—and sometimes terrify—those left behind. I discuss the equipment used, the evidence found, and the best times to seek places out (it’s not very often in the dead of night)—and provide a detailed description of the investigation with interviews of those involved. Though the firsthand accounts in this book may prompt you to sleep with the night-light on, I hope you instead choose to flip the light switches off and endeavor to find out what lies in the murky darkness beyond.

Take my hand, and free-fall into a place you’ve never wanted to go to but can’t stop thinking about as soon as you hear the tree branches scratching on the window on a still night, when the floorboards bend under weight in a house where only you reside … or so you thought. Push yourself to analyze each chapter and its relevance to your own path, as there are connections all around us. You just need to continue searching for the truth and the dots will begin to connect. Be cautious, be open-minded but skeptical, and above all go into this as a learning experience, and you won’t be disappointed. I wish you luck on your journey to touch the Other Side, and I trust that you’ll find what you’re looking for.

I won’t leave the porch light on for you … it’s for your own good.

Enjoy the journey,

Sally Richards

Los Angeles, July 2012