Returning Home...

This lady has been pretty excited lately, and now quite nostalgic sitting here reminiscing. My stepmother just officially moved off of our family farm as of last Friday. The travel into town and the regular yard work was beginning to be too much for her, so she decided to buy a little house in town. This means that...until my husband and I are able to move up permanently...this will become a 'vacation' home of sorts for my sister, myself and our families.

It's been 10yrs, on May 31, since Dad's been gone and we've been patiently waiting for our stepmother to make the decision to move off to reclaim our birthright...as he always called it.

My grandparents building their first home
on this land they broke themselves by hand.

We've always known it was coming and we looked so forward to it all of these years, but I have to admit that I am now truly understanding the meaning of the word bittersweet. As I fantasize about renovating our childhood farmhouse for us to eventually move into, faint memories drift back into my conscious mind. Will I be able to sit at the kitchen table, like I did so many times before, and gaze longingly out the window...waiting for the image of my father to stroll into the yard from the hay field?

The farm, as we knew it. This photo was taken from the spot
where Grandma & Grandpa's original log home was built.

Will I be able to walk around the corner of the house and not tear up to the memory of the beautiful yellow and pink rose bushes, long since removed, that my mother so lovingly tended to until her death in 1979? That will definitely take some getting used to....seeing the ghosts from our past everywhere we look.

Our little family, beside one of
Mom's rose bushes. 1977 

Dad wished to be scattered over the 'home half' section of land, but our stepmother preferred that he be interred in the small country cemetery about 3 miles up the road. Because he often said in life "What happens at funerals and cemeteries should be up to those left behind, not the dead....they shouldn't really care what happens to them after they're dead!", we compromised. My sister and I, with our kids in tow, scattered half of his ashes in the 4 corners of the 'home half'', at the foot of the Saskatoon bushes he'd planted with our stepmother alongside the fence line between the 2 quarter sections, and among his herd of purebred Red Angus cattle. *smiles* During his final two weeks on this plane, his dying wish was that we pick him up out of his hospital bed and drive him in the gator among his herd...one last time. Since it was a wish made while he was very high on morphine, the hospital thought it best that he stay where he was at. So, my sister and I felt it was quite fitting to spread some of his ashes among the herd after he'd finally passed. As we stood back and admired the scene, we couldn't help but laugh when we realized the cattle were grazing the grass we'd scattered him on! LOL So, at least we can say he has lived on through his herd! ;D

Some of Dad's herd, taken the year he passed away. April 2003

Yes, bittersweet is a good word to describe these feelings, but at least I know that whenever I want to talk to Dad...or my Mom or grandparents for that matter...I just have to walk over to the treeline and pick Saskatoons with him. Maybe I'll also try my hand at growing some roses myself this summer. :D

Ghost Story #4 - "Mediums Among Us"

This story is one I recently related to a young woman (my friend's daughter in law) who was asking about reliable psychics in a local Facebook group we belong to. She lost her mom when she was young, like I did, so I hoped to help ease her mind about the afterlife with my experience. I'm sharing it here as well for anyone else who might be interested. Enjoy...

I honestly don't think you'll ever find a real, practising medium who goes into trance to communicate in real life, Mel. They are EXTREMELY rare and seldom charge for their services. Most 'gifted' psychics just sense, hear or see fleeting information from 'the other side' and try to interpret it to you as best they can...mind you, the vast majority in this arena are frauds. I've ever only met one true psychic who charged for her services in my lifetime, and she's been gone now for about 15yrs. 

I'd like to tell you about a profound experience I had and I hope it can help ease your mind a little about the after life in some way. I don't tell this story often, and usually only to close friends and relatives, but I feel moved to share it with you. I personally know one authentic medium, she's a lifelong friend of mine, but she doesn't like to practise because the process terrifies her. 

When I was 16, a small group of friends and I had a seance in my basement for fun, trying to contact my Mom...who'd been gone for 8yrs at that time. We were all staring into the candle flame and I was asking her to make her presence known by tapping on the wall beside me. After about 20 min of nothing happening, one friend noticed that whenever I'd ask for a knock, my best friend, Sarah (not her real name ;D) who was sitting to his left, would tap her right thumb on his hand. We started teasing her and asking what she was doing...she just completely ignored us and kept staring into the flame. We broke the circle, laughing and thinking it was all BS, but she was genuinely confused, she thought we hadn't started the seance yet. Once we realized that she wasn't joking around, we became very curious and wanted to see what was happening to her, so we convinced her to let us try again. 

We started communicating with my Mom right away through Sarah's thumb-tapping. After about 45 min of answering random yes/no questions, one tap for yes- twice for no, we were shocked when she started to whisper the answers instead. As time went on, her voice grew louder until we were having a normal conversation with her. I was physically talking to my dead mother...in REAL time....it was absolutely INSANE!! 

For the next couple of hours, she told me so many interesting things. Things I didn't know about my great grandmother, about my grandfather who'd died in 1966, about my great uncle...all information that I was able to later verify with my Grandma. There is no way, whatsoever, that Sarah could ever have even guessed about these things. We'd only known each other for a year at that time and she'd seen a picture of my Mom maybe a few times, let alone had ever known anything about her or her family, things I didn't even know! 

She was also able to tell me things about the future, but she said she was only able to know information about 2-3yrs or so ahead. She told me that I would meet a boy with a D name...'Darren' or 'Darryl'...who will be driving a red car and will 'sweep you off your feet'. Then in true Mom-fashion, she gave me SHIT, very sternly saying that if we weren't careful, we were going to get pregnant way too YOUNG with her granddaughter! I remember laughing it off and telling her that it was crazy because I was still a virgin and hadn't even had a real boyfriend yet. LOL 

We talked for a little more, then she said “I'm going to go now to give your friend a rest. Rhonda, I love you and your sister...don't ever doubt that I'm always here.” I had a complete melt down...just burst into tears! Then we broke the circle off and when Sarah 'came back', she just sat there completely stunned and scared, looking at the mess I was in. When we told her that about 4hrs had passed and the spirit of my Mom had taken over her, she completely freaked out and never wanted to do it again. Though quite disappointed, I respected that. I seriously don't know if I'd ever be able to do it myself....that would be scary as hell! I'll tell you this though, it's been 25yrs and I'm still always searching for more evidence of the afterlife and have had contact with many spirits since, but absolutely NOTHING has ever come close to this in all those years. The mere fact that Sarah refused to ever try it again has stayed with me all this time...it tells me undeniably that she wasn't making it up...if she was looking for attention, she would have wanted to keep doing it more and more often. Instead it terrified her, and evidently made me keep searching for more! 

No one can tell you whether it's real or not until you experience it yourself. Everyone's a skeptic until it happens to them. I know just how fortunate I was to have had this experience and whenever doubt sinks into my mind, I always fall back to this memory that I have never been able to explain, but know with absolute certainty was REAL. We don't know what happens when we die, but with our scientific community, especially in quantum physics, on the brink of discovering the possible existence of things like multiverses, we just can't deny the probability of the survival of our spiritual consciousness as well, can we? Oh, and as a footnote, I met my husband Darren just before my 18th birthday. He drove a 1986 burgundy Firebird...and...we got pregnant with our daughter within a few months of meeting each other! LOL ;D

Pagan Blog Project - E is for Earth

Working with and admiring the earth is absolutely a pagan thing. Whether using it as a representation of the element itself in ritual or worshiping the Earth as a whole, these practices are undeniably pagan. I've come to refer to myself as a pantheist witch, as I don't follow a particular god or goddess and believe that we are all a working part of the divine, but if there was any that would even come close to swaying my religious conviction, it would be Gaia...our Mother Earth!

Ghost Story #3 - "Moving Into Our New Townhouse"

This was by far the most paranormally active home we've ever lived in. Even on the initial tour, we should have guessed that there was more to it than the all new, wall to wall carpeting, fresh paint and great rental incentives. The lady showing us the place even eluded to the fact that the last tenants hurriedly packed everything up and left without telling anyone they were leaving. We'd just assumed it was because they were bad tenants and skipped out on their rent. After our three years living there, we often wonder if there might have been other extenuating circumstances that made them flee instead.

For the first few weeks after we moved in, in the summer of 1997, I was unemployed and spent most of my time at home alone when I wasn't at interviews and such. There were a few incidents I experienced back then that started to make me wonder if I was really alone or not. We were lucky enough to have a recreation complex in our little community that I quickly made a habit of visiting every morning after everyone was off for the day. I loved being able to swim every morning and having grown up on a small farm, I was quite naive and would simply leave the door to our home unlocked for the hour I was gone. The first couple of days were uneventful, but on the third day I was surprised to discover that I was locked out! A little flustered, I turned around and sat down on the front step to think about my situation...had I actually locked it this time, by accident? How was I going to get in? After a few minutes, I got up and tried the doorknob again out of instinct...and it opened! I was quite surprised, it didn't feel stiff to me...was I imagining the whole thing? I just went on with my day unpacking and didn't think much of it....until the next morning when I came back to a locked door AGAIN!!

This time it was really locked, I wasn't mistaking it as I tried several times and it was definitely locked. So, panicking about being locked out for the day, I went across the street to the convenience store and called my husband at work. Of course, being the voice of reason, he told me it would make more sense for me to go to the admin office to ask someone to help me than it would for him to drive all the way across the city to unlock it for me! LOL I was calmed down now and as I walked back I decided to drop my swim bag off on our porch step before making my way back to the rec centre. Something told me to give the door one last try before I went to get help...and the fricken thing opened right up!! I was STUNNED!!!

As morning turned into afternoon, my sense of thankfulness of not being locked out anymore gradually turned into uneasiness. I began to feel like someone...or something...was watching my every move. No matter what room I was in, I found myself frequently looking around to see if someone had walked in on me.   After a while I decided to take a break and watch a talk show in the living room with a coffee. While I was intently watching the show, I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye coming from the front hall. As I turned my head to see what it was, my heart stopped dead in my chest as I saw the telephone cord swinging rather quickly hanging down from the stand. I had been sitting there for at least 20 minutes, I know it wasn't because I would have brushed past it.  We didn't have any pets and I looked around to see that the windows in the living room and dining room were both still closed. Nothing could have made the cord swing like that and it's movement didn't start to slow down until I got up to walk over to it. There was no doubt in my mind afterwards that I definitely wasn't alone!

This was just the beginning of our paranormal adventure in this house and until I was called to go to work, I found many reasons to be out of the house during the day from that moment on! :S

Ghost Story #2 - "Mommy...MOMMY!!!"

During the three years we spent in Edmonton, Alberta, from 1997-2000, we lived in a town house on the west side of the city. This particular story I'm about to share definitely wasn't the only paranormal occurrence in that home, but for me, it was the scariest and subsequently the most memorable!

I was working at Imperial Oil at the time and we participated in a program that was called 'Earned Day Off' which meant we worked an extra 15 minutes a day to get one Friday off every month. It was great...it meant that with regular long weekends included, we were guaranteed two long weekends a month! This incident took place on one of those EDOs while I was by myself at home.

After sending my husband to work and getting my daughter fed and off to school by 8:30am, I went back upstairs to relax in bed with my book and a huge mug of coffee before trying to motivate myself to take on the day of cleaning I had planned. As I lay propped up on my pillows, I could hear the sounds of life outside my window dwindling down to just the singing of a few birds. We lived in a cul de sac of sorts in a gated community, so there wasn't a lot of traffic even during the busier times of day. It was almost 9:30am, so it was very quiet, void of the sounds of children's chatter and their parents' vehicles as they drove off to work.

Suddenly, there was this booming sound of someone pounding on the front door and the repeated ringing of the doorbell at the same time! My initial feeling was fear and the thought of someone trying to break in that froze me to my bed. For a few seconds, I quietly waited for it to stop and for 'whoever' it was to just go away. Instead, the screaming of a terrified, possibly hurt child was added to the frenzy. "Mommy!! Mommy!! Please!! Hurry Mommy!" Instinctively, I whipped the covers off of me and jumped out of bed faster than I have EVER moved before, ran down the stairs, two or more at a time terrified of what I was going to be opening the door to.

The front door was just a few steps to the right of the bottom of the stairs. As I hit the bottom, I spun round to the right and as soon as I had the deadbolt unlocked and my hand was on the doorknob, it all stopped. I flung the door open, jumped out onto the step, then ran down to the sidewalk.....there was NO ONE there...ANYWHERE!!! My heart felt like it was literally pounding in my throat...I was expecting to find my daughter covered in blood on our doorstep! I was beyond terrified...but there was absolutely NOBODY anywhere around...either in their vehicles, walking by or on their front steps. I quickly walked down both ways on the sidewalk, looking for this hurt child until I realized I was walking around the neighborhood in my night gown and bare feet...like a crazy woman! I came back up and sat on my front steps for almost 20 minutes, just to be sure that no one was wandering around hurt...and to try to somehow process what had just happened.

Needless to say, I was pretty damn shaken for the rest of the day, but I had no clue that this type of thing was going to become a normal occurrence during our short time living in that building.

Ghosts, ghosts everywhere! (Amalgamating my 2 blogs into one)

For as long as I can remember, I've always been able to hear, feel and at times see spirits around me. The most common way that they choose to appear to me is through sound....which is spooky enough...I'm so glad I don't have to see them often, too! Some schools of thought believe that once you are open to receiving paranormal activity/messages, you sort of become a beacon to those in the spirit realm. Your energy 'vibrates' at a level that they can sense and they tend to flock to you.

Over the years, I've accumulated so many personal ghost stories that I've heard time and time again that I should sit down and write a book. Well, I'm an INFP (Meyers-Briggs personality type) and although we tend to make excellent authors because of our creativity and attention to detail, it would likely take over 10 years just to write a single book due to our incredible procrastinating skills! Blogging, on the other hand, isn't a huge commitment...I could submit stories here and there whenever I feel like it.

So... welcome to the 'ghost story' portion of this blog. I've decided to streamline my bloggings so I'll only be using this one for both topics. ;D These ghost stories are from all of my 42 and a half years on this earth, in no particular order, just as they come to mind. Enjoy!

Ghost Story #1 - Haunted Nursing Home

I wrote this up for a local ghost hunting group asking for ghost stories from our area over a year and a half ago...I haven't been at the Lodge for 3yrs now. Hope you enjoy! :D

I've been working at the Lodge, beside the hospital, for the last year and a half. I started on Night Shift for the first 8-9 months then went to days. At night, we definitely experienced a number of incidents that we couldn't explain. Things would happen during the day as well, but they aren't as noticeable because of the noise of ‘living’. *smile*

A very common occurrence usually happened just after the evening shift would leave…about midnight…and my coworker, Amy, and I were still sitting in our staff room. We’d be chatting away then one of us would hear the sound of a teaspoon clanging in a coffee cup, like someone was stirring their coffee, in the dining room next door. When we went in to see who was up, no one was ever there…or even in the surrounding hallways. We always took that to mean we’d better get to work! LOL

Something else that happened often on night shift was the sound of slamming doors in the old section of the Lodge. Our senior staff would tell us that it was ‘Fred’ the boiler system in the basement starting up, but on MANY occasions, Amy and I would test that theory…as soon as we heard the ‘slam’ we’d listen carefully by the stairway to hear if the boiler system would kick in. I’d say at least half the time it wasn't ‘Fred’! 

We've all had individual experiences as well. Usually one of us would stay in the kitchen to bake and the other would go around the rest of the Lodge cleaning. I was dusting down by the shuffleboard area one night…at about 3:30 am. All of a sudden I could hear a couple of female voices, chatting and laughing. I couldn't make out what they were saying, they were quite muffled. I just assumed that someone had left a TV on in their room, so I listened at the door of all the surrounding rooms, but there was no noise coming from any of them. I was so unnerved by that incident that I wore my MP3 player every night after that so I wouldn't hear anything like that again! 

There was another time, within a week of this experience, that Amy was doing our 2 hour 'check' walk around the Lodge. She came back to tell me that while she was rounding the corner at the shuffleboard area, she looked up just as she was walking through a mist. She said it completely caught her off guard because she had her head down, singing away to her iPod. It reminded her of walking through fog. She was freaked right out when I told her about what happened to me at that spot! We also had one young girl who worked on nights who said she saw the silouette of a woman sitting in the chair once in that area. I never would have believed her that easily if we hadn't had experiences there ourselves....and we never told ANYONE about it! It was frowned upon by management for staff to tell 'ghost stories', they didn't want us scaring their new staff! ;D

Another time when I was working by myself during the Norwalk Virus outbreak in Mar 2008, I was baking muffins at the rear of the kitchen. I was listening to my headphones so I didn't pay much attention to my surroundings. I turned around to get something from the fridge and stopped dead in my tracks….the kitchen door was CLOSED!! I was completely stunned! The door was always held open with a wooden wedge…I’d never seen it close on its own…and I was the only one in the building that was awake! Needless to say that was a LONG night…

Amy and I were talking about our experiences one time during a coffee break we took with one of our residents who was always up at 4am, he looked at us and asked “You believe in ghosts?” I thought he was just gonna make fun of us, but then he said “I've seen two since I moved in here. I haven’t told anyone because I figured they’d just think I was crazy!” Surprisingly, he told us that he saw a woman with a child at the end his hallway….by the shuffleboard! Leo’s a very friendly man, so he said he’d walked about half way down to greet her when she and her lil boy just disappeared! Another time, Leo said that when he first moved in, he'd met a lady just outside his room after breakfast who he thought was another resident he hadn't met yet. He's a real ladies' man, lol, so he invited her into his suite for coffee. He closed the door behind them and started chatting away while he was filling the kettle with water. He said he turned around and she was GONE! The only people he ever told that story to was us! He said he didn't wanna look like a nutcase, being so new. Amy and I started working there at about the same time he moved in...in Feb'08. Curious about this, we looked back in the resident records to find that there was a woman who had just passed away in the room next to him the month before. The strangest part of this tale is that rumblings among the staff blamed our manager's lack of management skills for this woman's death. When I was being interviewed for the job, it was -38C outside and they were having a lot of problems with the heating system in the new area of the building. Some of the evening staff told me that this lady's room was always freezing, to the point of ice building up on the walls around her bed. She died from pneumonia just before my first week. :-(

After I had moved to days, we lost one of our favorite old guys to cancer. He was such a trouble maker...when we were on nights, he'd always try to spook us because he knew about our ghostly chats and thought it was hilarious to scare us at 3 or 4am when we never expected him to be up. I had taken over the head cook position and had been cooking for a while before that day when our housekeeper found him in his room as she went to call him for lunch. We were quite upset by the news, we all loved him! For the next 3 days...just before lunch, very weird things started to happen in the kitchen. The freezer and fridge doors closed on me when I was the only one there, serving utensils would go missing just as we were in a rush to serve, and on the third day, in front of myself and the dining room staff, a steel pot lifted up off the pot rack on the island and dropped with this huge BANG onto the counter! The hooks face upward so it wasn't possible for it to have fallen off by itself! Haha...the entire dining room when dead silent, then I heard one of the ladies at the first table say to the lady next to her "Did you see that?! Nobody touched that pot!" I'm so glad the residents saw it too...I felt like I was starting to go nuts or something! That was Mel's final performance...he got EVERYONE'S attention with that one, he was happy and didn't need to scare us anymore! 

Just last week, one of our residents claimed that some paramedics walked into her room at 4am. She was startled and got out of bed to greet them. The taller of the men asked her if she had called 911. She said she hadn't and they asked her if she was in room 230. She told them that 230 was across the hall, and closed the door behind them as they left her room. In the morning she asked us if the night shift workers had let the paramedics into her locked room…we told her that there were no paramedics called that night. She was very concerned that people other than staff might have access to the master keys to the building. We told her there was no way anyone could even come into the alarmed outer doors, let alone into their rooms without our knowledge. We managed to convince her that it was just a dream. It wasn't until later that afternoon that we realized room 230 was the room that a new resident had fallen in a couple months ago and had died in the hospital the following week. It was around 4:30am when the paramedics left with her! That room has been empty since then.

Pagan Blog Project - D is for Divination

Divination. This practice seems to be almost as attached to the word 'witchcraft' as 'witchcraft' is attached to the word 'Wicca'. You know what I mean. They say that most witches practice divination, but not all diviners are witches...just like most Wiccans practice witchcraft, but not all witches are Wiccan....and vice versa....but really, who are 'they' anyway?

The point is this...when one thinks of divination, the occult automatically comes to mind. Many of us were drawn into this realm as preteens by the beckoning of an ouija board planchette at a slumber party or the sultry temptation of the Lovers card in our older sister's secret tarot deck. The potential of unlocking some of life's mysteries has always been a fascination of mankind and a staple in the pagan world for centuries. I still have my very first Ryder-Waite deck from when I was probably 12 or 13yrs old and now at 42, I'm excited to be currently breaking in the newest addition to my collection...The Erotic Tarot by Manara....YUM!! Surprisingly enough, after 24yrs together, my husband has taken a sudden interest in tarot now, too.  LOL ;D

Pagan Blog Project - C is for Curiosity

Author Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion. Photo: Reuters

Paganism can be an awesome launching pad, especially for children and teens, from which to explore what religion, faith and spirituality really means to the average person. There is little restrictive dogma resulting in confined thought processes when it comes to general paganism, unless one eventually feels called to follow one of the more structured traditions that fall under this same umbrella. Even then, new practitioners are rarely, if ever, bullied into believing what their mentors believe in or 'suffer eternal damnation'. Pagans encourage curiosity in everyone which is a wonderful thing since it nurtures free thinking in all and wards off conformity & control.

Pagan Blog Project: B is for Balance

**Ok, so I see keeping up with this project is already proving to be a challenge for me. LOL I think I'll just do one post every 2wks on each letter instead of the 2 posts on each letter...and hope for the best! ;D**

Of all the things I've learned following this path, the most important would have to be recognizing the need for balance in all things. Whether we're talking about life and death, light and shadow, positive and negative, masculine and feminine, or even in working with the pH levels in our garden soil to grow our herbs, fruits and vegetables...balance is always the key to success.

The conceptual polarity of the divine itself is what drew me to a pagan path to begin with. The rest of the world seemed completely out of balance without the feminine divine!