by Julie Rieger
CHAPTER NINE
Poltergeistish
They’re here . . .
—CAROL ANNE, POLTERGEIST
I can’t get that New York experience out of my mind; how Brenda held a space for that guy’s fugitive spirit, how she saved his life. And then not long after I’m back in Los Angeles, a strange thing happens: It’s a Sunday evening, around 10 p.m. I’m snuggled up in bed trying to shed the anticipated Monday morning angst.
“Baby?” Suzanne asks curtly from the bathroom. “Did you touch this when you left here?”
“I haven’t been in there, honey, what are you talking about?” I roll out of bed and shuffle to the bathroom. Suzanne is silent, pointing to a hook between two mirrors where I hang my necklaces and pendulum. I immediately know what’s wrong: My pendulum is swinging forcefully back and forth like it has its own little internal engine.
“Go,” I say to my lovely wife. “I’ll take care of this.” I’m a big talker, but have no idea what I’m going to do—at least not right now. I do know, however—I just know—that we have an uninvited guest from the spirit world in our bathroom. I also know that this guest is not here to be of service to us. I feel it. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it was waiting until Suzanne was alone before it made its shitty little self known through the pendulum, because Suzanne is sensitive to these things. She is pure light, and darkness, as I now know, is often attracted to the light.
I instinctively grab my pendulum off the hook, hold it over my palm, and ask it to give me a yes. Normally it should turn clockwise in a circular motion. It does not. It hovers over my palm and shakes like a meth addict looking for a hit.
I grab a bag of sacred Native American sage, light just one leaf, and swing the pendulum through the smoke, talking the entire time in very clear terms. Here’s what I say:
Whatever you are, wherever you came from, if you are not here for the highest good of my family or me, get the fuck out of here. You cannot stay. And when you leave, you are not to touch a hair of one of my dogs or cats. You are to leave my property. You are to leave my people, my place, my things. I wish no harm to you. Find the light and get the fuck out of here.
And just like that, my pendulum stops and our uninvited invisible guest is gone.
I ask my pendulum again to give me a yes. It circles clockwise. I then ask for a no, and it circles counterclockwise. Finally I ask: “Was that entity malevolent?” It circles clockwise. I stand there in my bathroom and, for the first time, feel a sense of power that I’d never experienced before.
“You’re being tested, my elf,” Brenda replies when I tell her what happened the next day. Tested for what, exactly?
Shortly after that experience, Suzanne and I go to a psychic fair at the Crystal Matrix because, let’s face it, who doesn’t love a psychic fair? I sign us up for different tarot and psychic readings. Mine is with a beautiful and effervescent psychic named Roxane Romero, who’s got long blond hair (yeah, like Goldilocks) and wears sparkly jewelry that matches her sparkly eyes. One look at Roxane just makes you feel happy.
Roxane is already talking as she closes the door behind me, but not to me. Presumably she’s talking to spirits—who knows? I’ve learned never to judge a psychic’s methods. Then she sits down, still yammering, and grabs one of her many stacks of tarot cards.
“I don’t know why,” she says before even cutting the cards, “but I’m supposed to tell you something today that you don’t know about yourself. Something that will change you.” She pauses for a moment, then proceeds to say: “Unlike your wife, who is light and airy, you are more dark and earthy.”
Dark and earthy?
“What I mean by that is that you draw upon the energy of the earth.”
Got it.
“You have the power to control a thousand horses,” she adds.
“With all due respect, Roxane,” I reply, “I can’t get my yellow Lab to come to me when I call his name. How on Earth could I control a thousand horses?”
“You haven’t found your calling,” she clarifies. “You’re not serving humanity the way you should—and you have not healed yourself yet. You must heal yourself first. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself becoming physically ill on a regular basis.”
This strikes an immediate chord. I’ve dealt with a slew of strange illnesses my whole life. Just prior to my reading with Roxane, in fact, I’d had tubes in my ears for nine months from a severe ear infection that normally only kids get. The only tubes I want in my life should be filled with toothpaste. And though in my youth my mind and body lived in two different neighborhoods, you’d have to be living on a rogue planet not to understand the power of the mind on the body’s well-being.
“Our minds influence the key activity of the brain,” writes author/philosopher Deepak Chopra, “which then influences everything: perception, cognition, thoughts and feelings, personal relationships; they’re all a projection of you.” If that sounds too mystical, he goes on in to clarify in The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life that “every significant vital sign—body temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption, hormone level, brain activity, and so on—alters the moment you decide to do anything . . . decisions are signals telling your body, mind, and environment to move in a certain direction.”
Author/healer/woman extraordinaire Louise Hay simplified that whole idea in much of her work, boiling it down to this mantra you might want to adopt as your own: “I do not fix my problems. I fix my thinking. Then problems fix themselves.”
It’s hard to break patterns and change your mind-set in one moment, but that’s pretty much what happened to me. In the midst of my overwhelming grief, Brenda had blown my mind open. When people grieve, writes medium Concetta Bertoldi in Inside the Other Side, they become seekers “even if they weren’t seekers before. Even though it’s painful, grief can create such an opening in the heart that it allows for truly revolutionary evolution and growth.”
When Roxane told me that I have powers, I knew that she wasn’t talking about magic card tricks. I realize now that I experienced a taste of those powers in my bathroom that night. I had already become a seeker, and because I’d committed to the quest more powers were coming my way. And so when Roxane made it clear that my life would be rather unfun if I don’t heal myself and use my powers to heal others, I believed her. I don’t want my life to end up unfun. I love fun.
Just before our session is over and I’m getting up to leave, Roxane stops me. “Your soul is screaming at you,” she insists. “Listen to it.”
CHAPTER TEN
Holy Shit, I Activated a Portal. Wait: What’s a Portal?
Have you ever looked at something and it’s crazy, and then you looked at it in another way and it’s not crazy at all?. . . Don’t be scared. Just don’t be scared.
—ROY NEARY, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
Quantum physics has a lot to do with quantifying invisible energy. No one has figured out exactly what black holes are, for example, but few scientists doubt their existence, even though we can’t see them with the naked eye. In describing dark energy, an article on the science blog Live Science tells us that “astrophysicists have proposed an invisible agent that counteracts gravity by pushing space-time apart” and describes the possibility of “infinitely large ‘quilted universes’ ” and “cosmic patches exactly the same as ours (containing someone exactly like you).”
If your identical twin floating in an intergalactic “cosmic patch” isn’t incredible enough, consider this: Quantum physics has gone so far into the cosmic wilderness that some quantum physicists like Hans-Peter Dürr and Amit Goswani speculate that behind the material world there is a hyperspace that can be regarded as an afterlife or a heaven.
This bears repeating, my friends: Behind the material world there is a hyperspace that can be regarded as an afterlife or a heaven. And I think that hyperspace might be my backyard.
So picture this: It’s the spring of 2014. I come home from work one da
y to find that Suzanne has installed a few new bird feeders in our backyard. Our house is located on a corner lot in the hills of Sherman Oaks with a view of the San Fernando Valley from the backyard. The outer perimeter of our lot is covered in ivy (what lurks in that ivy is spookier to me than any ghosts); its focal point is a freeform-shaped swimming pool surrounded by cement and a wooden fence. Not a blade of grass to be found.
We now have around eight bird feeders in our yard that usually attract finches, hummingbirds, blue jays, doves, chickadees, grosbeaks, sparrows, and an occasional hawk. But for some strange reason back then we’d gone through weeks of total feeder vacancy. That’s when Suzanne said to me, “Honey, conjure me up some birds.”
Suzanne is convinced that I have powers, and now she wants birds.
I’m told by my spiritual posse to trust my instincts, and my instincts tell me to soak clear crystal points in animal spirit oil blend (yup), then lay them in a pattern by each bird feeder. I can’t explain why. Really, I can’t. It’s why they are called “instincts” and not “instructions.” I also can’t explain what’s in that animal spirit oil, either, though I will tell you that I found it on Etsy (yup again).
I love Etsy, by the way. It’s a digital version of a western trading post. Back in the day those trading posts used to be roughly twenty miles away from one another—twenty miles being as far as a man could run or ride his horse in one day, get what he needed, and make it back home. Thankfully, these days I don’t need a horse. I can just sit my ass down in front of my computer and look for stuff. And who knew that you could find magic potions there? (You can also find cane toad leather coin purses and hand-knit socks for your chair legs. Go figure.)
Within days we go from having only a few bird visitors to having so many flocks of them that their chirping can be heard from the bottom of our neighborhood hill.
Success! Suzanne wanted birds, Suzanne got her birds.
The next few weeks are a whirlwind. After a business trip to New York I meet Suzanne in Cincinnati, then we head to New Orleans for a quick visit to celebrate Easter. We love New Orleans; it has such a beautiful and complicated soul. Normally we let our hair down there, which is code for drinking heavily, staying out incredibly late, and stumbling back to the hotel. This trip is far tamer. No strip clubs. No drag shows. No last calls. I’m far more interested in dropping pennies wherever we go and hitting up Suzanne for extras. (I’ve been doing this ever since I heard the story of a friend’s father who dropped pennies from Heaven everywhere he went.) That weekend in New Orleans I must have dropped at least fifty of them, and at least another five bucks in silver coins. I get a little carried away, but I love the idea of offering good luck to complete strangers and suggesting that a loved one or an angel is looking over them. It just feels right.
Our flight arrives back in LA on Easter night. It’s nice to be home again; I’d missed our little beasts: three dogs and two cats. Every time we pull into the driveway, the barking brigade greets us. Never fails. Homer, the yellow Lab, is my baby. Suzanne got him for me after our studio released Marley & Me. I’d never had a dog before. (The German shepherd that sunk its teeth into the back of my five-year-old head was the reason for the delay.) Peggy is the replacement for Suzanne’s dog, Punky, who was killed by a coyote one Christmas Day. And Rebel, our mini Maltese, is small and in charge.
Then there are the felines: Booger is one of the greatest cats ever to walk the earth. He loves all. Weirdly, people who are allergic to cats are not allergic to Booger and they all want to take him home. Then there’s Tiny Pants, our asocial cat who’s so fat that his two-toned paws make him look like he’s wearing (you guessed it) really tiny pants.
After our animal greeting we settle in: check the mail, take the bags back to the bedroom, grab a bottle of water. And that’s when I see this crazy fucking thing in our kitchen: a giant bird imprint on the window. Like nothing we’ve ever seen, it looks like a bird slammed into our window going fifty miles per hour. We can see every detail: head, body, wingspan, and feathers; even its beak.
How could a bird have crashed into our kitchen window and left that kind of imprint, we wonder. And where did its body go? Did it have anything to do with the conjuring of birds I’d done weeks earlier?
I take a picture of it with my iPhone and then, as usual, I reach out to Brenda. I text her the photo of what I now call the “bird stain” and the text messaging begins the next morning:
Me: A bird didn’t see the window. No remains, though. Crazy, huh? Good weekend? Xoxo.
Brenda: Enlarge the photo. See the face in the glass in the center upper left?
Me: The face of the bird?
Me (again): Ah . . . to the left the bird face?
Me (again, clearly text bombing her): I see something in the purple. Like a woman.
In fact, I see the spooky spectral figure of a cloaked woman with a pointy chin and a slightly tormented expression.
Me: OMG. It looks kinda spooky. Who is that? Or what is that? What the hell, witchy-poo?
Brenda: It’s your spook message! Definitely cool.
Me: Ah come on.
I look back at the window, then back down at the image on my phone. That spectral image is as clear as day, even though the pic was shot at night: A spirit is clearly hovering there—wherever “there” really is—as if it were waiting to be seen. How long has this invisible houseguest been hanging around? Is it really possible that I conjured up some ghosts along with Suzanne’s birds?
“Birds are messengers,” Brenda tells me much later. Clearly, this bird had a message.
Ghost or spirit photography has been around since the invention of the camera. The most famous ghost pic—or one of the earliest, at least—was of a bunch of adorable winged fairies dancing around two young cousins in the English countryside in 1917 called the Cottingley Fairies. They caught the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known as the creator of our beloved Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was a serious spiritualist who was fascinated with the paranormal and regularly consulted mediums and psychics. He was also a founding member of the Hampshire Society for Psychical Research in 1889 and involved with similar organizations, including the Ghost Club in London.
Those Cottingley Fairies ghost photographs were quickly proved to be fakes, which isn’t a surprise. We humans love to fake things, from boobs to news. Ever since those fairies, however, people have been taking countless ghost photographs, some of which you’ll see again and again on the Internet. There’s the seriously freaky Amityville Horror Ghost pic that inspired the movie, and the Brown Lady, who’s said to be the spirit of Lady Dorothy on a staircase. (Lady Dorothy was locked in a closet by her husband and left to die after she discovered his infidelity. I’d haunt that fucker, too, if I were in her spirit shoes.) The list goes on: There’s Lord Combermere’s ghost from 1891, the FAF officer Freddy Jackson from 1919, the Backseat Driver from 1959, the Tulip Staircase ghost, the so-called Corroboree Rock Spirit, and the Colonial Park Cemetery ghost.
If you dig online you’ll find these pics and all kinds of fleeting images caught on trail cameras in night forests, unexplained faces of strangers in rooms where no one was present, outlines of people standing, hovering, staring, or otherwise making their baffling astral presence known only after a photo was developed. Some of these photos are fakes that have been explained away as double exposures, lens flares, or, more recently, Photoshop, but others persist as unexplained mysteries.
All that said, when I take my first ghost photograph I am seriously spooked. I am not a “ghost hunter,” nor do I aspire to be one. The only reason I’m not running around the neighborhood with my hair on fire screaming, Lock your door, hide your kids, we’ve got ghosts! at that moment is because of Brenda. That magical woman, my psychic Sherpa, can navigate the unseen world better than any human can navigate the physical world.
Still, at first I don’t tell anyone what’s going on because I figure they’ll think I’m batshit crazy. But every night I go into my back
yard and try to capture pics of spooky wildlife like some sort of gonzo National Geographic photojournalist trying to spot a snow leopard. Whatever I see, I take a photo of it: my dog, the swimming pool, potted plants, empty rooms, every corner of every space—even selfies. I’m literally moonlighting in moonlight every night, periodically checking my sanity with Brenda.
Brenda assures me that it’s not that unusual to capture spirit entities on film or clearly see them where others see nothing. “It’s not a big deal if you have eyes to see,” she says, “but not everyone does have eyes to see.” When I ask her why that spirit might have shown up in the photo with the bird stain, she suggests that I might have somehow activated a portal. (She also wondered why the fuck I was soaking crystals in animal spirit oil that I bought on Etsy.)
Naturally I inquire: “What is this said portal you speak of? The only portal I know of is Yahoo. Surely you’re not talking about the Internet.”
“You know, my little elf,” she replies, “a portal is an opening to the Other Side, like when you use a Ouija board—don’t ever do that; they’re bad—or like the ones in the movie Poltergeist.” (Apparently, Ouija boards can invite dark energy into a room.)
Uh, did she just say “poltergeist”? I’m just a tad flabbergasted, because little did Brenda know (or maybe she “knew” in her psychic way) that at that very moment my studio team was in the early stages of developing the marketing pitch for the remake of the original Poltergeist.
Here’s a brief summary for those of you who haven’t seen Poltergeist: A nice, “normal” American family is living in a generic Southern California suburban house that they eventually find out was built on a cemetery. Their young daughter, Carol Anne, discovers a portal in her closet and gets abducted by a poltergeist. Things rapidly go to hell—kinda literally. Turns out they not only have a poltergeist in their house, they have a whole Rotary Club of ghosts lingering around from a “sphere of consciousness” that’s identified by a medium. (Talk about bringing your property value down.) Things go from bad to worse when their son, Robbie, is attacked by a clown doll in his bedroom in what’s gone down as number 80 in Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments. (Like I’ve always said: Never trust a clown.)