Jump Girl

by Salicrow

  My first experience with gallery-style communication came when the owners of Kaiboo, a little shop I frequented in Berlin, New Hampshire, decided to put on a larger psychic fair. One of the owners asked me if I could do a spirit gallery as part of the fair, and I replied, “Yes, I can do that,” before I thought about the fact that I had never done one before. I had never stood up in front of a crowd and determined which spirits went with which person; nor had I ever chosen whose spirits were important enough to communicate with and whose must wait.

  On my way to Kaiboo’s psychic fair, I was keenly aware of the fact that I had agreed to stand up in front of a large group of people and speak to the dead. I began discussing this with my spirits, and I was surprised when a spirit showed up who I had not heard from in years. His death had come at his own hand, and I had not spoken to him since high school. He had not been ready until now.

  His name was Scott, and his life had been a wild one. He was highly charismatic and a bit of a whore. His outward charm had shielded his true nature. Most people didn’t see the fucked-up, damaged person who struggled with alcoholism and used sex addictively. I saw how he had hurt other people and himself. His death didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that he gotten out of “time out” so quickly.

  “Time out” is what I call the space where the dead go initially when they need to review the actions of their lives. People who are responsible for their own death often end up there for a while. The length of time they spend there depends on them. It is not a place of punishment but of healing. The spirits of people who have killed themselves, overdosed, or been murdered all go into time out for a while to adjust to the heavy emotions surrounding their deaths. I had been advised not to communicate with people who had been placed in time out. I initially thought it was for my own safety—that they would attach themselves to me—but I later realized that the precaution was for the spirits’ sake.

  I was impressed that Scott was there talking to me. He had a lot to apologize for—not to me, but to someone else very dear to me. I had seen what kind of asshole he could be in life, and now I was listening to his apologies. They were sincere, and I did pass them on later, but communicating with Scott gave something to me as well. That’s probably why my other spirits let him through.

  The gallery in Berlin held about fifty people. I had been worrying that no one would come through in the crowd and that I would be standing up there on stage, holding a microphone, and the spirits would simply not show up.

  Scott put me at ease. His presence reminded me to focus on what I was: a healer. As I listened to Scott plead his case for forgiveness, I realized I had nothing to worry about. Plenty of spirits were eagerly waiting for their opportunity to connect with the ones they had loved and the ones they had wronged.

  When I stepped onto the stage, I was calm. I carried out the same practice I had done at every séance since the beginning. I asked the crowd to close their eyes and take a few deep breaths as I visualized white light surrounding the room. I called my guide, and I welcomed the spirits in the room and asked that they come through with love and clarity.

  My number one rule when choosing to communicate with spirits is that they come through with love. Any spirit choosing to come for reasons of revenge or discontent is not welcome. I do communicate with troubled spirits, but not in the same way. I usually clean up the mess they’re making of things.

  The beginning and the ending of every spirit communication session is a ritual I do the same way every time. I am connecting to all the times I have done this ritual before and all the times I will do it in the future. By creating sacred space, I am taking part in something deep and powerful. It is not entertainment, and the ritual makes that clear. I have never really wanted to get into the televised ghost-hunting business. The work I do is to bring healing into people’s lives.

  I settled on choosing the spirits that appeared the “loudest.” This didn’t necessarily mean they literally were the loudest; it meant they were the most noticeable. They might be the visibly brightest, poking me in the third eye; they might be jumping up and down behind their living loved one; or they might literally be the loudest. Usually I know which spirits to choose before I even open the circle. When I scan over the crowd of living guests, I can tell whose spirits will speak that night. The early ones, the spirits who approach me before the gallery even begins, are also often the older souls who have learned a thing or two about communicating with the living.

  The first person I called upon was easy. She was an elderly lady, and her deceased husband was standing directly behind her, shifting his image between that of an eighty-year-old man and that of a forty-five-year-old. When spirits shift their image like that, I can feel their vanity. They liked to be good-looking. My dad likes his thirties the best.

  I brought the elderly lady up on stage to speak with her husband. This allows everyone to see clearly and makes the session inclusive. His messages were clear, and she began crying.

  The second person was not as easy. I approached a woman wearing a yellow coat near the back of the room. A man standing directly behind her appeared to be in his early fifties. He had a mustache and a kind smile, and his hand lay gently on her shoulder.

  When I look through my eyes peripherally, a spirit appears like a shadowy projection. I can tell where they are in the room, along with their general height, weight, and style of clothing. I can also tell how intimately they are connected with the living by their position. If the spirit stands close to the living with their arms draped around the person, I know they were intimate. From this guy’s body language and the way he interacted with the woman in the yellow coat, I knew they were close, more like good friends than lovers or family.

  I said, “You have a man standing behind you. He has dark hair and a mustache, and he’s telling me he is a close friend of yours.”

  She stared at me blankly, then looked around at the people sitting on both sides of her as if I must be talking to someone else. “Me?” she said. “I haven’t lost any friends.”

  The spirit was persistent, speaking to me in my mind, telling me that he was indeed connected to the lady in the yellow coat. “He is saying that he died recently, and he is showing me blackness in his body, which I perceive to be cancer.”

  Still she looked blank and insisted that she had not lost any close friends and knew no one who had died of cancer. I was dumbfounded and asked if anyone in that part of the room had lost a friend to cancer, a man in his early fifties with dark hair and a mustache.

  The room remained silent. I was confused and frustrated. I was talking to a spirit, that part was clear. I worried that perhaps I was picking up on a passerby spirit that belonged to the building or the cleaning lady who worked there. But the crazy part was that the spirit kept insisting he was there for the lady in the yellow jacket.

  I tried one more time. “Are you sure that you have not lost a friend to cancer lately? He is insisting he is here for you.”

  As she shook her head “No” again, her friend who was sitting next to her poked her in the ribs and said, “Yes, you have!”

  This was my first experience of psychic amnesia. During spirit communication, people can occasionally draw a blank. I attribute this to stage fright and see it as no different from forgetting how to put letters together when you’re standing in front of a crowd at a spelling bee.

  After her friend reminded her, she recalled that her best friend’s husband had died a few months earlier from cancer. They had spent a lot of time together as married couples. As she made her way up onto the stage, he continued to give her information, memories of him, that she would recognize. He then focused on his communication at hand, which involved getting a message to his wife. He spent the next ten minutes talking about his wife and giving his friend messages to carry back to her. Spirits are opportunistic and resourceful, much like the living, and some more so than others. The amount of energy spirit will expend to make contact with the living amazes me. He co
uldn’t see his wife, but I lit up her friend, so that’s where he went.

  55

  Spirit GPS

  As with people, I like some spirits better than others, but I see them as equals. Like us, they are all kinds of fucked up and all kinds of wise.

  The spirits who make up my tribe—Adam, Grammy Brown, Dad, Peter, Damin, and John—are all part of my casual life. I can talk to them without creating sacred space; there is no pomp and circumstance needed for their arrival. We joke with each other, hang out, listen to music, and talk about nothing. I regularly share offerings of marijuana and occasionally tobacco with them, inviting them to sit with me in my space and enjoy the libations.

  I once went Yule shopping with Adam in Littleton. He was in rare form and started playing around the counters in a store named Chutters, home to the world’s longest candy counter, according to Guinness World Records. As I shopped for candy for Santa, Adam would pop out from behind shelves and announce loudly, “I’m a spy. No one can see me but you. I can go anywhere in the store I want, and no one will stop me.”

  During the same shopping expedition, I was buying last-minute things for my kids and ended up at Wal-Mart. I really hate Wal-Mart. I rarely go there, and when I do I generally want to leave as soon as possible. It’s the energy, the lighting, the beeping of the registers, the subliminal messages to purchase more hidden in the damn beeping. It’s a war zone. There were no parking spots in sight, and people were circling the lot like vultures. I began cursing, because when I get behind the wheel I become a pirate with Tourette’s syndrome. It’s a guilty pleasure.

  As I sat swearing in my car, I said, “Adam, go find me a parking space.” He began instructing me to turn down one of the aisles in the parking lot. I could see that it was full, and I said, “What the fuck! There is no parking space there.” Just then a woman got into her car and began backing out, and the space was mine. I ate crow on that one.

  My guide John also helped me locate the house of a client in the town of Whitefield. I drove past the turn he told me to take, and it turned out that he was right and I was wrong. Even though I could see her house from the road I stayed on, her driveway was off the other road. My relationship with the spirit world is kind of weird to think of, but history is filled with spirit navigators and spirit spies. While traveling within a sixty-mile radius of Lyndonville over the years, I have been on many back roads and have lost GPS service in rural places. In these moments I rely on spirits.

  Some spirits will hitch a ride with me to their house, joining me in my Jeep about twenty or thirty minutes before I get to my destination. I think they probably do this because they enjoy the act of riding in a car, and there’s something dignified about arriving at their own séance in the medium’s car. I don’t talk to them when they show up like this. They can ride with me, but I make it clear through my actions that I am not ready to talk yet.

  One of the times this occurred was in Vershire, Vermont. The father of the household had passed, and his wife and daughters were devastated. He was a great communicator, loved back roads, hopped in my jeep, and showed me a shortcut.

  I have also found my GPS to be affected by spirit. It has taken me over small mountains and deep into national parks, and in all of these cases I end up exactly where I need to be, even if it’s not where I intended to be. I credit this to spirits’ ability to manipulate digital devices and my own ability to be fluid with reality.

  56

  Phone Calls from the Dead

  Some things are easier for spirits to manipulate than others, like butterflies and small birds. These creatures are always stepping between the world of the living and the dead, between being physical and ethereal, so they are good allies for the dead. Because of their hive mentality and short lives, they can be moved and directed, allowing the energy of the spirit to be felt by the living.

  I have also experienced and heard of spirits who like to play with children’s toys, the kind that light up or make noise. They also play with TV remote controls. The dead often manipulate simple electrical devices to get the attention of the living.

  Spirits also love music. They are big fans of the radio, and they like to utilize the memories stirred up by the emotions that come to the fore when we hear certain songs. I always tell people that spirits do not so much make the DJ play their song; it’s more like they step in when the song is playing. When a song they feel connected to is on the radio, they push their energy at their living, hoping that the strong emotions stirred up by the music will help the living to open up and feel their beloved dead.

  There was one time when, after I finished a séance, the woman who had scheduled it with me spoke up and said she’d heard about me by receiving a message on her phone. The message, however, was not intended for her but for some other person. The woman leaving the message was calling to tell a friend how she had recently been to see me for spirit communication and how amazing it had been.

  As I began telling her how cool that was, she said, “There’s more. The next day, I got another message. This too was intended for someone else. In fact, it was intended for the woman who had unintentionally left a message on my phone the previous day. It was her friend, calling her back.” The second woman left a return message similar to the first, replying that she, too, had been to see me and had been amazed by the experience.

  The client standing before me was there with her family because one of her spirits had interfered with her phone, allowing it to pick up on not one but two messages that spoke of spirit communication. I can’t help but assume that there is a collaboration of spirits who take part in such actions. Surely the spirits of the women who left the phone messages had figured out how to share information with the spirit of my client.

  I still don’t have a road map or detailed chart telling me all the ins and outs of the spirit world, and I still jump into waters way over my head. Yet I always seem to make my way to the surface with a bit more knowledge than I had before making my ungainly splash.

  57

  Family Reunion Guest

  My work brings me into a deep relationship with death, and I spend more time thinking about death than most people. Death is part of my everyday life. I cannot remember a day since the November Incident that I have not been in contact with at least one spirit. Far from leaving me jaded, these experiences have brought me to a place where I feel deep respect for death and dying and see them for the great teachers they are.

  You cannot hide from death. It comes for each and every one of us, and it removes the bullshit that shellacs our life. It strips away the pretense of everyday life and leaves us vulnerable and real.

  I like death for these reasons. I like the reliability of knowing, without a doubt, that I will die someday, just like everyone else in the world. In fact, death is the single most trustworthy thing there is. I also love the sincerity of death. I love how it makes us step into our true, defenseless self and how it makes us look at who we really are, without our armor.

  Many of my clients, including whole families, set appointments with me once or twice a year to gather with their beloved dead. I am the translator that allows Grandma and Uncle Joe to come for a visit. I have met with entire clans: great-grandchildren, aunts, uncles, and old-timers.

  One of my favorite family gatherings took place with a group of backcountry Vermonters in Corinth. The mother of the family was the first person for whom I had done spirit communication, both while she was living and after she passed. This family loves hunting and fishing, and at least half the family is deeply involved in stock-car racing. These hobbies and lifestyle choices are totally different from mine, but through the voice of spirit, we are very much alike. We believe in life after death, and we yearn for a connection with our dead. They have had many séances and larger gallery-type gatherings to which most of the family are invited, sometimes twenty people at a time.

  On the night in question I had been passing messages for a while, and the family was relaxed and enjoying thei
r time with their loved ones in spirit. All of a sudden, one of the living cousins, a woman in her late forties or early fifties, asked me if I could find out what her dead cousin had dared her to do. I began to say that her request was very specific and he might not remember. Just then I vividly saw an image in my head. I looked up at the woman and said, “Did he dare you to jump in the shit pit?”

  The whole family started laughing. That was indeed what her cousin had dared her to do as a young preteen girl, and she had done it! She had jumped straight into the manure pit at her grandparent’s farm, sinking deep into the shit.

  Later in that same gathering, another story surfaced. There was an old man in his late seventies whose adult children sat around him like an armored guard. I knew he had not come to reminisce with the cousins; he had come because his heart was heavy, and he was missing someone. Halfway through the session, when the family had already experienced both laughter and tears, the spirit he was waiting for came through. It was his wife, who had been dead for more than thirty years.

  She talked briefly about her death and about their life together, how much they loved one another, and some other simple things. She then began showing me the home that had been theirs together; in fact, it was still theirs together. She showed me that her sweater was still hanging on the end of the bedpost, just where she had left it before passing. She showed me that her lipstick, hairbrush, perfume, and lotions were all standing neatly around the bathroom sink, just like she had left them.

  I spoke softly and kindly to him as I passed on this information. I knew I was revealing a secret that only a few in his family knew. He dusted and cleaned but always put his wife’s things back where they belonged, where she had left them. To some this might seem like he was fucked up or broken, but I believe that he and others like him who build shrines to their beloved dead, keep their rooms intact, and sign holiday cards with their names are just people who have loved so deeply and so powerfully that part of them steps out of the living and into that space in between where they still feel the loves they have lost. I know adult children who cook their mother’s favorite recipes and a husband who eats Almond Joy candy bars because his wife loved them.