Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf

by Christopher Balzano

  The word “djinn” is the basis of the word genie, but djinns have little to do with beautiful women trapped in lamps. In the West we recognize them from romantic legends such as The Arabian Nights, but they have been part of a strong belief system for thousands of years. While there is a kind of neutral supreme level of djinns, most seem to fall into a limbo realm. Some are helpful and can be called on in times of need; others are malicious, demon-like creatures that can cause great suffering when awakened.

  According to the mythology surrounding them, they are often trapped in objects, and people can conjure them or fall victim to them depending on the type of djinn. When used to stir up trouble, the old rule of the witches often applies: What you send out comes back to you threefold. While their traditional imprisonment is in the lamp, modern theories hold that anything can be used to contain them. When it comes to demons for sale, rings are the best buy.

  The ring with a djinn spirit attached to it.

  “On Aug. 14, 2009, Brian found a ring advertised to be haunted by a djinn/genie,” Ray Jay remembered. “He purchased it for $9.85, plus shipping, from an eBay seller. The exact name of the item, according to his PayPal account, [was] ‘Haunted Powerful Ilmu Khodam Spirit Djinn Genie’ ring.”

  “Ilmu Khodam” has many meanings to people who study magic. There is a form called conjuring, or necro-slavery, practiced by some. Where djinns are prominent, Ilmu Khodam means a way for practitioners to raise the spirit of djinn and use it to get what they want. That often means causing pain to or taking control of others. Paranormal theories say this curse or negative energy might remain after the hapless practitioner is no longer working his magic.

  “The instructions that came with the ring told the new owner to light a candle and meditate with the ring, inviting the new owner to make friends with the djinn attached to it. So Brian lit a white candle and meditated with the ring, inviting the guardian djinn to be friends.

  “The ring was made for a woman’s finger, so Brian couldn’t put it on, but he took EMF readings of the ring, took pictures of it, and conducted an EVP session with it. He got no results at all—not so much as a dust orb in a photograph. He also e-mailed the seller, asking about the previous owner of the ring, but got no response back.”

  Things did not go as the brothers planned. It’s sometimes a gamble to buy items online, but the stakes are higher when you’re shopping for the paranormal. Your new purchase might be a complete dud and you might live a long and happy life, though this is rare in the world of online ghosts. As often happens when you dabble in things you don’t understand, the supernatural had a mind of its own for the brothers.

  Not long after Brian had the ring, he experienced a run of bad luck.

  “Over the course of the next three to four weeks, Brian’s luck seemed to worsen inexplicably. Our living room TV stopped working, the communal PC, the best one in the house at that time, died, and the ‘check engine’ light in Brian’s car came on and could not be deactivated,” Ray Jay said. “On top of these things, perhaps related, perhaps not, Brian was meditating one day when an image popped into his mind of a silhouette of his hand, and it was surrounded by this red glow. It didn’t feel like a reassuring image.” The brothers were amazed by all of this unusual activity.

  Many investigators rely on new scientific methods to study the paranormal, to confirm whether or not ghosts exist. The ring rang no paranormal bells.

  “Now, when we investigate the paranormal, we rely on verifiable facts, and a random string of unfortunate events, combined with a random mental image, is clearly nowhere close to evidence of paranormal activity. To this day, Brian considers the story of his ‘haunted’ ring a non-story—not one shred of empirical data to link his ‘bad luck’ with the ring, which is too small for him to wear.”

  Not all djinns are helpful in times of need. Some are malicious demons hellbent on causing great suffering to those who unleash them, as depicted in the horror movie, Wishmaster.

  But not all supernatural activity can be explained away. When asked if Brian puts any faith in a haunted or cursed ring, Ray Jay was hesitant to answer. “He is still undecided,” he said. “Neither of us is comfortable declaring this ring to truly be ‘haunted.’ It’s a coincidental string of bad luck, coupled with a random mental image that popped up once right after he closed his eyes, when our brains always throw up random images and colors.”

  Regardless of his words, Brian’s actions lean toward superstition. “One day Brian informed me that he bought some sea salt, and I’m welcome to as much of it as I like,” Ray Jay said. “And then he tells me why he bought it. He points out that the computer, his car, the TV all happened after he received the ring. Unfortunate things happen and often happen in succession, but it just sort of seemed that they were happening a lot more lately. So Brian decided to surround the ring within a protective circle of salt (he had read that sea salt is supposed to be a better conductor for subtle energies than regular salt) and see if the bad luck stopped.

  A protective circle of sea salt surrounds the ring.

  “About a month or so later, I noticed the ring: It was still on a kitchen counter and still encircled by sea salt,” Ray Jay said. “I asked him if he now thought the misfortunes had been caused by the ring. Brian hadn’t won the lottery or anything, and at that time he was really undecided as to whether the ring had caused the string of bad luck or if it had just been coincidence. But neither of us has broken the protective circle around it, either.”

  It has been three years since the ring was surrounded by salt, and no new supernatural activity has occurred since then. The Edwards continue to study the paranormal, keeping ghosts at arm’s length, and collecting EVPs and EMF readings. The paranormal is a bit easier to understand that way. It becomes less manageable when spirits have the ability to control and influence your life. Haunted items have a habit of breaking the rules.

  For Ray Jay, the mystery of the ring might not make a good tale, mainly because it doesn’t sound like a traditional ghost story.

  “I guess you could look at it as a paranormal investigator buys a haunted ring to study, then after a really inconvenient run of bad luck, he takes off the ring and is no longer interested in studying haunted objects.”

  Rocks of Love

  Alyssa had been ill for quite some time. During hospital visits, she met another young woman named Erica, who shared the same disease. They were close in age and had so much in common they became nearly inseparable. Alyssa was heartbroken when her friend took a turn for the worse and died unexpectedly.

  One of Alyssa’s hobbies was creating beaded jewelry, which kept her mind off the physical pain of her illness and the emotional pain of her loss.

  One day not long after her friend’s death, Alyssa went into her bead drawer and found an amethyst stone, one of her favorites. It was too wide and thick to be used for jewelry, so it shouldn’t have been in the drawer. In fact, Alyssa couldn’t remember putting it there in the first place. Perfectly heart shaped, the amethyst seemed like a message of love when she needed it most.

  Soon after, whenever she was downhearted or when her illness intensified, she would find smooth heart-shaped stones in various places. One might appear in her bead drawer, like the amethyst, or under her pillow.

  Alyssa believes Erica is looking down on her and sending her these stones to remind her of the strength of their friendship, even though one of them has passed on to a place where pain and illness do not exist.

  Raphael on the Headstone

  Love can be eternal and take different forms. One of the strongest is the passion we have for our family, and through the generations, that emotion can intensify and change.

  As the family grows, the love of a grandparent also grows, due to less involvement in the day-to-day busyness of child rearing and more quality time spent with the grandkids. Someone once said a grandparent and a grandchild understand each other because they share a common foe, but it is more than that. A small sign can tr
avel the distance of years and life experience to tell one generation that another generation is still thinking about it.

  Stephany DeSantiago has loved four men in her life, and she has lived to see all of them leave her. When she was 17, her brother disappeared. Then her husband left her before their son was born and never kept in contact with his family.

  But Stephany’s two greatest loves were her father and her son, and she has buried both. She has stood at their graves and left flowers and said prayers. She leaves other mementos of love, too—or at least she used to. In death, the two boys she has never stopped loving or believing in have found each other, and she believes they talk to each other on some plane she cannot reach. Their connection doesn’t stop there. If you believe this story, they’ve exchanged a gold chain, too.

  The gold chain and Saint Raphael medal were not expensive, but Stephany’s father, Gus, thought they were a sign from heaven, so he bought them. He had been traveling by bus nearly every night to see his sick uncle in the hospital. He got off the bus one day and found a $20 bill in the street. As he bent down to pick it up, the wind blew it onto the window of a pawn shop. Like a sign from God, it landed right above a display case containing the medal of Saint Raphael, the patron saint of the sick.

  Although Gus never admitted how much the medal had cost, he said it was more than $20, but well worth the investment. His uncle got better almost immediately, and Gus felt the saint had everything to do with it.

  Gus told the story often when Stephany was a child, and she felt it was a part of the family history. “We didn’t have many stories. No one in our family was famous or had done anything too crazy. Daddy had that damn story, and I used to love it. I know he probably lied about most of it, but I didn’t care. The telling made it real, and I guess that was enough for me,” she said.

  When her son, Philip, was born in 1995, Gus’ energy multiplied. After her husband left, Stephany was forced to move in with her parents, but that suited them just fine—especially Gus. He loved Philly and gushed over him, and he doted on his daughter. The little boy sat in his grandfather’s lap for hours, listening to him tell stories and hum songs. “He would whisper to him in Portuguese, which I never learned. I don’t know what he was telling him, but Philly knew and would smile and laugh,” Stephany said. “He couldn’t even talk yet, but he could hear what [my father] was saying.

  “You know, you remember the weirdest things about someone. [Daddy] had these huge hands. I remember his smile, the chain, and his huge hands. When he picked Philly up, my little guy would disappear in Daddy’s hands. He would scoop him up and there would just be his spiky hair poking out from the top of his fingers.”

  An example of a Saint Raphael medal.

  Gus died of pneumonia in 1997. The death came fast, and no one quite knew how to deal with it. But Stephany knew Gus must be buried with his Saint Raphael medal. She was almost beside herself with frustration when the funeral director returned it to her after Gus was buried.

  “There is a policy that they can’t have jewelry on so people aren’t going to rob the graves. I just wanted him to have it, and they handed it back. I felt he couldn’t find peace without it.”

  On Gus’ birthday, about seven months after his death, Stephany went to the gravesite to place flowers near the headstone. As Philly slept in the carriage next to her, she dug a small hole and put the metal in the ground. She cried and laughed at the same time. “It was something he would have done,” she admitted.

  A week later, while finishing up homework for her nursing class, Stephany noticed something on the kitchen counter.

  “It was Raphael,” she said. “I had just cleaned the kitchen before getting to work, so I know it wasn’t there. I saw it shine in the light and picked it up. I saw that medal my whole life and I know it like I know my own face. I can’t explain it, but it was in my hand.”

  Being a spiritual person, Stephany viewed it as a sign: Her father was okay and didn’t need it any more. “He wasn’t going to be sick anymore, so maybe someone else needed it. That’s the only thing I could think of,” she said.

  She knew the medal was for her son. She placed it on his bureau that night and kissed his forehead.

  “That kid could sleep. Even as a baby he slept through the night. So I hear him up having a major conversation with someone, and I come in. It was a little after midnight, but he was sitting up in bed. He was holding the chain out in front of him and giggling. I asked him where he had gotten it, and he said Grandy gave it to him. Grandy was his name for Daddy. I asked him where Grandy was, and he pointed to the wall and said he was with Raphael. He couldn’t say the name right, so it sounded more like Ralphy L.”

  Although she was disturbed by the incident, she also felt a bit of relief. Giving the medal to Philly had been the right decision. More importantly, her father was looking after her son. If she believed the dead could help the living—and she did—there was no reason to be scared.

  She placed a stool in her son’s room the next day so he could reach the medal on the bureau whenever he wanted it. Unfortunately, the idol never worked for him. Less than six months later, Stephany was in a car accident and Philly died. To this day, she refuses to share the details of what happened, but she is able to speak of what she felt afterward.

  “I hurt so much I didn’t want to breathe. I’m a good person with a deep faith. My brother went away, and my daddy and baby died. I didn’t think I could take it,” she said.

  So she decided to give the medal to her son one last time. She took it straight to her son’s grave a week after he was buried. She dug a small hole, buried the medal, and covered it with a rose.

  “It was his. I had no one left to give it to. It got me through those weeks. I was almost obsessed with burying it. Part of me thought it would come back,” Stephany said.

  When she went to the cemetery to lay flowers on her father’s grave, the medal was hanging on the headstone.

  “I lost it. I wept so hard I almost threw up. It wasn’t sadness. I knew at that moment they were together.”

  If she was looking for a signal from the Other Side, the medal was a mixed message. She felt in her heart it was a sign, but she didn’t know what to do with it. Was it now hers to take? She thought so and carried it in her hand the whole way home. When she got back to her apartment, she placed it in an old cigar box, something she felt her father would have liked, and tucked it under her bed.

  “I would still cry,” Stephany said. “Sometimes I would open the box and hold [the medal] and think of them both. It was very comforting, but one of them, probably Daddy, thought it was too much. He wanted me to move on. I think he took it back.”

  On one particularly bad night, she reached under the bed to get the medal, and it was gone. “It was like slapping me across the face. I got it. Daddy forced me to take the training wheels off. He made me practice math. I know his way. This was him.”

  It was not like she never saw it again. Sometimes she sees the chain on their headstones when she visits the cemetery.

  “It’s not every time, and I can never tell whether it will be on Philly’s or Daddy’s [stone]. It is shining in the sunlight. I never touch it. I leave it there and know it will show up again sometime. I think of it as their little game with me and something they share.”

  Stephany has no idea where the chain goes when she isn’t there. Some things can’t be explained by science. She just leans on faith and believes in love.

  Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

  People have been gazing at their own reflections since the beginning of mankind. Imagine what it was like being the first person to bend over to get a drink from a pool of water, and to see that strange creature staring back! Over the millennia, we’ve perfected the art of staring at ourselves.

  The first manufactured mirrors came around 6000 B.C. and were made from polished obsidian, which came from volcanic lava. The silver-backed mirror—the precursor of the aluminum-backed version we use today—was per
fected in 1835 by Justus von Liebig, a German chemist who devised the process of silvering that greatly improved the use of mirrors.

  And as long as mirrors have been around, they’ve been the subject of great superstition. Mirrors have long been said to be a reflection of the soul because they can only reflect and cannot lie. They don’t reflect the person’s perception (although how the person views the reflection is, of course, subjective), but rather just what is truly there, imperfections and all. That’s why vampires and witches can’t see their reflections in a mirror—it’s believed they no longer have a soul. The vampire lost his, and the witch gave hers up willingly to the devil. That’s also why hanging a mirror near your front door eventually became commonplace—not only did it allow you to see what you looked like as you were heading out the door, it also allowed you to see if those entering your house had a soul. Imagine how awkward it was if they didn’t!

  One of the most common superstitions regarding mirrors is that breaking one will lead to seven years’ worth of bad luck. This belief likely originated with the Romans, who believed the soul renewed itself every seven years; breaking a mirror would cause a person to endure hardship until the soul could be cleansed.

  But why was a broken mirror considered so unlucky? The Romans, among many other ancient civilizations, also bought into the “reflection of the soul” theory about mirrors. In their view, a broken mirror meant the reflection of a broken soul.

  There were ways to get around the seven years of bad luck, however; the most popular way was to take all the broken pieces of the mirror and grind them into dust. Other methods involved burying the broken pieces or setting them afloat in a southward-flowing river. Did it work? Well, when dealing with superstition, it all goes back to belief; if you believe in the curse of breaking a mirror, then why not believe in the supposed reversal of the curse?