Miami Premonitions

One week ago, a friend of mine who is one of the top gemstone jewelry designers in the country, called me up on the phone. Her voice sounded odd, compressed. I asked if she was okay.

She said, "I'm fine. How are your kids?"

"Oh, they're fine," I said. "Why?"

"Well, I don't really know. I was just...er... worried."

"Well, my husband and I are leaving for Miami in two days, on Wednesday, and the kids are staying home by themselves."

"Really? Maybe that's why I was concerned," she said. "I got one of those feelings and it wouldn't go away, so I knew I had to call you and let you know."

"Oh," I said suddenly appreciating her anxious-sounding voice. Now I was actually a bit worried myself. This friend had once told her husband not to take an airplane flight because she got one of those "feelings." She fought with him for two days until he finally relented and made a reservation on a different flight. As it turned out, the flight he was supposed to have originally taken ended up in a crash and everyone on board died. So when my friend has a "feeling" I pay attention even when it doesn't "make sense." Now since I am not a fan of flying, I began to get very nervous that her bad feeling related to our plane reservations.

"No I don't think so," she said, "It seems to have more to do with the kids, but I'm not really sure. Just make sure you have someone watching over the kids while you are gone."

"It sounds to me," I said, "judging from your tone of voice that on the scale of good (1) to bad (10) this has an ominous feeling of about a seven, is that right?"

"Yes."

Long story short, I made arrangements with two neighbors who are mothers/friends, to call in and keep an eye on the kids while we were gone. Just in case.

Meantime, I taught my regular psychic development workshop in NYC. During one of our exercises doing a bit of remote viewing, one of my students said, rather incongruously and unrelated to the exercise, that he "saw" Miami, and "heard" a song "Meet me in Miami" and "saw" something that looked like a fish aquarium with the water slowly draining out of it behind the glass.

I think I looked at him slightly cross-eyed and said, "Well, I am going to Miami the day after tomorrow. I certainly hope you are not telling me that my plane is going to crash in the ocean! Because I already got someone else's premonition that there is a potential problem."

He said, "No, no, I'm not getting a scary feeling - just kind of gentle."

We flew to Miami and the flight went without a hitch. Actually it was almost enjoyable. We had a fabulous time dining, drinking, partying. I began to think my tuned-in friends may all have been way off the mark and just plain wrong.

However, during a cocktail party Friday night, a friend of mine told me she had been invited by the wife of someone who was a business acquaintance of her husband's to go to Miami's aquarium as a day trip - and would she had told the woman she would have to ask me first because otherwise she would not go! Of course I said yes. It was fate! What was odd was that my friend's husband said he had just met these people one hour earlier. He was stunned when I told him about my student's prediction.

Score one - for my psychic workshop student's clairvoyance. I didn't even know that Miami had an aquarium! In fact it was in Key Biscayne and we had to drive 45 minutes to get there! The aquarium trip was fun and there were no disasters. I breathed a big sigh of relief. Perhaps my other friend was just plain wrong this time. Nothing even remotely bad had happened.

However, Saturday evening I spoke with my son on the phone. He was home by himself while his big sister was out babysitting. He told me he was just coming home and it was extremely blustery and windy out. He heard a huge crackling explosion and noise and jumped inside the house. There was no power. He was very frightened and ended up spending the night with one of the neighbor/moms I had called. I found out the next day that my daughter had been unable to come home that night because our street was blocked off by the police. A huge tree in our neighbor's house had crashed down across the street and all power was cut off due to the electrical lines being severed. My daughter slept at a friend's house one hour away since it was 1:00 am and she couldn't call anyone nearby.

Score one for my jewelry-designer friend! Now I understood why her premonition feeling was "ominous" and yet not totally catastrophic. It was a good thing I took her seriously and arranged with my friends to look after my kids in advance.

But there was still one slightly ominous piece left. Sunday morning I also learned that the high winds that my friend (with whom my son was staying) equated to a French mistral - something just shy of a hurricane - were still gusting in New Jersey. The last thing I ever want to do is fly in turbulence. Yet our flight was scheduled to arrive mid-afternoon in Newark, New Jersey. I told my husband, as we sat in the airport, that I wanted to cancel my flight and sleep one more night in Miami - I was very scared. He said, "Go ahead, but I have to be in New York City tomorrow and I don't have a choice."

Before I knew it they called our flight for boarding. I knew all the other flights were booked and I found myself, against my will, joining the line for boarding the aircraft.

The flight was fine until we got to New Jersey. I knew something was odd. The terraine was not familiar indicating an unusual airport approach. The cloud formations indicated that there were not high winds above 5,000 feet which meant, to me, that the wind was closer to the ground. Sure enough, we made some very sharp, strange banks with the airplane and started coming down at a very high speed toward the runway. As we were about to land our plane was hit by sudden low wind sheer and it smashed us down to the runway. The wings began to wobble up and down out of the control. The pilot immediately aborted the landing and pulled us straight up back into the sky. We flew around in the turbulent air and then attempted a second landing. This time it worked - even though we hit the runway very hard. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, thanked God, and then thanked the pilot. My husband, who is in the airplane business, said it was the worst landing he had ever experienced...

So, I thank all my friends and students for being so insightful. Their intuitions were totally correct. Thank goodness they were brave enough to report their "unverifiable" intuitions.

Seeing is Believing

I recently joined the New Jersey Ghost Investigations team as their psychic medium. I finally had the occasion to go out on my first investigation with the team. I have been on plenty of other investigations with other teams around the country and in Wales, and have my own little stash of what has now become in recent years fairly standard ghost-hunting equipment. When you go out with a team as a medium, you are also relying heavily on your personal sensory and mental equipment to pick up information about spirits.

In all of my various investigations, I have been privy to all kinds of bizarre and seemingly "impossible" events. I have been virtually lifted off the ground by the scruff of my neck by a spirit that I later found out was an angry security guard standing outside a judge's chambers when I apparently ventured too close to the judge's door. I have felt sudden cold spots and cool breezes signaling the presence of spirits. I have smelled odors that appeared and disappeared in impossible sequences in response to spirit communication that were without a tangible, physical or logical source. I have heard them in many ways including footsteps, muffled body movements, canon fire, tapping and so on. I have certainly been able to obtain information about spirits which came without any underlying logical or rational foundation, simply by tuning my "imagination" in the right direction.

However, I have always been somewhat aggravated by the fact that while I am a very visual person, and can "see" spirits with my internal third eye, I have not been able to "see" them with my physical eyes. Many people can and do see spirits - most often in the form of apparitions and shadow figures. I have never quite understood why I have not been able to do this. I assumed that it was due to a subconscious fear and desire not to see. It is helpful to pay attention to old adages such as "Be careful what you wish for" - particularly when it comes to seeing ghosts. I often wondered whether I could truly handle the emotional fear of seeing a ghost. What if they appeared all bloody and disgusting as in death? What if they came to my bedroom and crawled into bed with me? Not unusual, since I have heard several personal stories to this effect. What if I couldn't handle the visual impact? What then? I think all these fears stopped me from "seeing" with my eyes. This, of course, implicitly assumes that ghosts can indeed be "seen" with one's physical eyes.

I am no longer an apparition-virgin! Our team visited a very old haunted firehouse in New Jersey. A fireman committed suicide at this firehouse and apparently was actually seen years later by one of his fellow firefighters in the mirror of the firetruck as it was parked inside the garage. The firefighters who work there to this day are so spooked by the eerie feeling that pervades this old building that they race to see who can be the second-to-last to leave the building at night. No one dares to stay there by themselves. True, the place has a strange feeling. I felt as if I were being followed as I walked around.

During the course of the night, this poor spirit was extremely active in communicating with our group. He not only responded to questions with appropriate, immediate knocking noises, but you could also hear his footsteps in the firetruck garage while no one was there, and he actually threw three plastic spoons from the kitchen counter into an adjoining hallway upon request by our team member! There was no one near the counter or in the hallway at the time. There were plenty of witnesses to the flying spoons - myself included. Once, while we all gathered to examine the spoon on the floor, this elusive ghost decided to throw a brochure from the table behind us, and threw it about five feet away onto the ground. We all heard it - and there was no one in the room and no currents of air that might have caused it. It was clearly deliberate.

However, the crowning moment came while I stood in the little hallway with my team member and one other woman. We were facing a little dark hallway where the restrooms were located. My team member said, "Do either of you see a mirror in that bathroom?" We both said yes. And as we looked at the mirror, which reflected some light from a kitchen window behind us, we saw a black figure, head and shoulders, moving in the mirror. We all moved slightly just to see if any one of us was reflecting in the mirror - but we weren't. This black figure seemed to float up and down a couple of times, very gently as if he (it was clearly a young man) were slowly bending his knees and standing up. Then he turned his face so we could clearly see his profile. Then he turned back and looked at us directly.

As he was moving around, I (being skeptical by nature) kept the corner of my eye on the other two women to see if they moved in tandem with this black figure. But they didn't - not only that, but one was too short to be visible in the mirror and the other was located to the side of a wall not within the reflection range. Nor could anyone have walked in front of the kitchen window outside because this figure took up the entire space in the mirror - not just the window area. One of the other team members heard us exclaiming about this figure. He stood behind me and the four of us watching this silent black figure moving around in the mirror. Then the figure slowly moved to the left and out of the frame of the mirror - like a bad pantomime. Then, as if goofing on us, he snuck back in again from the left. All this time - and it lasted for several minutes - we were all talking about what we saw.

This spirit was not vague and undefined or wispy as one often hears about. No. This spirit was very well defined. He was obviously male and obviously relatively young. To the others he appeared to be wearing a strange black cape around his head and shoulders. To me, he seemed to have a particularly bad mullet haircut with long hair reaching his shoulders. He clearly wanted us to see him. He obviously wanted to play with us by his demeanor.

How did I feel while watching my first ghost apparition? Strangely normal. I was not frightened or disturbed. I was merely fascinated. This spirit gave us the luxury of time to look around and try to debunk him while he was moving around. That is what was extraordinary. Four witnesses saw him with their physcial eyes and could not debunk what they saw!

Even for "believers" in the supernatural, it is one thing to trust that spirits exist and something else entirely when you can see them with your physical eyes...

The Learning Curve

Recently I launched my psychic development workshop classes in NYC, upstate NY and NJ. I have been astounded to see the level of interest in this kind of work. I never expected so many people to sign up - and with an amazing range of diverse backgrounds. I think I have been particularly fascinated by the various reasons why people choose to enter into this field.

I was very surprised to get some students who have been practicing professional psychic mediums for decades! They seem to be looking to broaden the range of work they can do with their existing skills. In other words, they are looking for additional practical applications like psychic detective work, healing skills, medical intuitive work, mediumship, and so on - in additional to simple psychic reading skills. Other professional psychics are seeking a place where they can practice the skills they know already. They are looking for fresh faces and new willing subjects from whom they can get immediate feedback. Working in a workshop setting forces you to push your own envelope by doing new types of exercises and, at the same time, allows you to get immediate feedback from your sitter and gives you the leeway to make learning mistakes without being in the position of being a paid psychic medium expected to deliver the goods.

I have other students who lean toward the healing arts - whether it be psychotherapy, CranialSacral work, polarity work, birthing techniques, nursing, or massage. This group of people, while they do not normally consider themselves "psychics" per se, often find themselves thrown into the field of energy work quite unexpectedly. They often bump up against "uncanny" knowledge during the course of their work and then are really confused about where it came from or how it can be useful. These students quickly learn that working in the field of healing involves working with other people's energy fields or "auras," and as a result, will often involve a transfer of actual data or information without the usual channels such as language or intellectual understanding. It seems that for most of these students, the experience of bumping into the psychic realm is at once spooky but also thrilling. It often feels like it is intimately linked with one's "calling" as a healer and the student feels compelled to pursue it further.

Still other students come to my workshops because they have had very intense experiences with the psychic or paranomal world. These can be extraordinarily frightening - no matter what age they happen to you! I have know many powerful grown men - who claim to be pragmatic and skeptical - who simply will not touch this field with a ten-foot pole because it frightens them to death. Imagine what it must feel like for a young child! The intensity of these experiences is only magnified when no one around you, including your own parents, siblings, relatives and friends, can understand or empathize with your weird experience. So, not only is the experience itself extremely frightening sometimes, but when no one else understands or is too scared of even exploring it with you, you begin to suffer from extreme isolation. Many people retreat deeply into their own personal emotional cocoon. These students come to my workshops either to "turn on" if they have been shut down or ignored over a lifetime, or to "turn off" these experiences if they have become uncontrollable and disruptive. Some students come in order to learn how to "toggle" that switch so they can control these experiences.

The group of students I most wish to entice into this field, however, are those who work in strictly intellectual professions - like lawyers, accountants, clerks, sales people, physicians, entrepreneurs, professors, and so on. These people are the least likely to decide to join such a workshop because they are convinced that it is a bunch of "woo woo." Every bit of knowledge they have ever acquired and apply toward their given profession has been channeled through their brain in a logical, sequential, consecutive, intellectual format. That entire system of data acquisition is based upon a single premise - that all valid information relies upon logical premises. They have no experience and have never tried to seriously obtain any experience with any other method. So, for them, no other system could possibly be valid. Unfortunately, what they fail to realize is that psychic intuition, once fully appreciated by the brain, can activate valid information at a much more efficient and faster rate than standard logical information.

Once I trained myself in this field, I was shocked to discover that my skills as a lawyer and business entrepreneur were vastly improved. It just didn't make sense to me. But then again, nothing in this field "makes sense."

SeaWorld's Killer Whale - Guilty of Murder?

Last week I returned home with my family from a vacation in Orlando, Florida. It was the first time my kids had ever been to Disney World, Universal Studios, SeaWorld and all the other theme parks crammed into that town. It was exhausting, and rather cold by Florida's standards, but alot of fun.

We had an amazing opportunity to swim with the dolphins at Discovery Cove. We got into the water with them, flanked by two trainers and a photography crew, and were able to pet the thick, rubbery skin of a grandmother dolphin named Jenny and even hold onto her dorsal fin and flipper as she carried us, one by one, across the tiny bay. We fed her raw fish and at one point were able to kiss her (she was a willing participant) on the mouth! I felt compelled to try and communicate with her in such an intimate act, and so I made little "kissing noises" when I pecked her on the lips. She immediately responded by "talking" with that delightful dolphin chatter. It turned out our trainer had her degree in behavioral psychology and animal behavior. I asked her how she could tell how a dolphin was feeling.

She said, "You just know. You can often tell by the body language."

"So, how do you know when a dolphin is angry or upset?" I asked.

"You look at the way they are swimming, or if they jerk away from you, or don't want to perform. You just know."

Sounded alot like intuition to me!

After spending time swimming with the dolphins, we trooped over the SeaWorld and saw the famous killer whale - or orca - show in Shamu Stadium. I insisted on sitting way up front in the giant stadium where I spotted some strangely empty rows of seats. They were about four rows up and located directly in front of the platform where I knew these giant black-and-white dolphins would slide up and rest their bodies. There were little disturbing signs in each row saying "Soak Zone" and we did not have rain ponchos. But we were reassured by a young woman with a camera who sat down in front of us and told us she had been to the 4:00 o'clock show and no one had gotten splashed or wet. So we decided to stay.

The show was an extravaganza - replete with loud, booming music, roving multi-colored spotlights, and a giant sectional video screen showing closeups of the action. Shamu and the other orcas were herded into the huge illuminated pool of water and we watched with delight as these ocean giants leaped in the air, hopped up onto the platform only ten feet away from us, and "cuddled" with their "adoring" trainers. We all snapped photos of this staged love fest. Several of the trainers gave small speeches over the microphones about the good that this show was doing by bringing these creatures from the wild to human awareness and helping us to understand them. They explained it was really a good thing they were doing for the species. At the very end of the show, sure enough, Shamu came within yards of us, slapped his giant tail in the water, and everybody sitting in the Soak Zone got soaked!

Four days later, we learned on the news, back in New Jersey, that the senior trainer at the park, Dawn Brancheau, had been dragged by her pony tail under the water in the mouth of a 12,300 lb. male orca as horrified spectators watched helplessly. We had watched her stand only a few feet in front of us just a few days earlier...

As a psychic medium, I wondered - in retrospect - if I could scan my memories of her image and see the "aura" of a person who was going to be dead in only a few days. Many psychics "see" varying degrees of black, grey or muddy-looking energetic auras around people who are sick or about to die. It is a clear indication, to me at least, that the human body exists energetically in many time zones. "Seeing" an aura is often not an affair of the "eyes" but rather the mind. I have been able to "see" auras which I could accurately interpret as health issues for a person when I literally "saw" nothing with my eyes. Since I wasn't paying particular attention to Dawn at the show, it is hard to make such a determination, but I believe I remember her as being very serious and tense. Maybe it was just her nature or maybe it was her soul in preparation for a traumatic death.

Last night, we had a dinner party with two other couples. The topic of the Sea World tragedy came up and one woman announced that the orca should be put to death for having misbehaved. I was shocked and couldn't understand why the obvious option was not simply to release the animal back into its wild, native habitat where it would not bother anyone at all.

She said, "There's an expression that once a dog tastes blood, it should be killed because it can never go back."

The other guest chimed in, "My sister had a cat who started misbehaving for no reason at all. It started pooping and peeing all over the house. My sister was in the middle of a divorce and too busy to spend time with the cat, so she had it put down. Cats can be so viscious that way, you know? She got another cat later, the cat did the same thing and started pooping all over the house, so she had that one put down too! Now she has another cat!"

I began to think I was living in a different universe. My guests, perfectly sensitive and intelligent human beings, seemed to feel that any form of animal "misbehavior" was reasonably punishable by death. "Misbehavior" could range from the accidental killing of a human being to pooping on the rug. How do we know for sure that Dawn's pony tail didn't get accidentally stuck in the teeth of the orca and that the animal didn't then try to fling the foreign object out of its mouth by trashing it (and the rest of poor Dawn's body) in the water? After all, an orca doesn't have fingers like us to do the job!

It occurred to me that if we humans only took the time and energy to intuit or empathize with another living creature, forced into living in slavery and captivity, unable to speak our language to complain, defend or free themselves - then we might think twice about killing everything that simply has 1) an emotion, 2) makes a mistake, or 3) doesn't understand our commands. These are all very "human" traits which we are willing to accept in other humans beings but apparently not animals.

Post Script to Ghost Encounters

After I wrote the previous blog "Ghost Encounters," a friend of mine emailed me and said, "Wouldn't it have been funny if you connected with the spirit of Jeb Stuart while you were staying in the Jeb Stuart room at that inn?" I thought about that and suddenly realized that I had assumed (for no obvious reason) that the ghostly presence that appeared about 5 feet from my bed had, in fact, been Jeb Stuart. I don't know why. I just felt that way.

So, I decided to research Jeb Stuart. I was vaguely aware that he had been a Confederate officer who stayed at the inn but I had no clue what he looked like. So I looked up his photo on the internet. Sure enough, in all his photos he appears much as I described this male spirit: angular jaw, medium height, stocky, middle-aged, wearing a long coat and boots. Apparently, he had a flamboyant side and enjoyed wearing his military uniform. Furthermore, I learned that he had died of a gunshot wound in battle in Richmond. He was shot in the stomach and died from bleeding intestines. Suddenly, my image of a nurse spirit that I described as part of my experience as a lay in bed imagining that she was tending to a wound in my stomach, made perfect sense. Apparently, I connected with Jeb Stuart's death...

Ghost Encounters

I will be leading a paranormal investigation at a reputedly haunted tavern near Gettysburg for the Northeastern Paranormal convention's annual Phenomenology 102 in a couple of months (see www.intuitivision.com for details). I thought I would stop by the inn on my way to Pittsburgh where my daughter had a college interview. I figured I could get a better "sense" of the inn by spending the night there.

Jim the bartender agreed to stay extra late and wait for us to arrive at the inn at 10pm, long after the kitchen and other facilities had closed. We arrived and he showed us our room, the Jeb Stuart room, on the second floor, and showed us how to lock the front door of the inn if we needed to go out. The inn seemed very quiet. As it turned out, there were only two other people spending the night in this 10,000 square foot inn - a young couple who briefly said hello. Jim said they had the room next to ours. He also told us that most cell phones don't seem to work in the inn, so there was a white phone in the salon which we could use if we needed to call out. I asked him if any employees stayed at the inn during the night. He said no, no one. So it was just the four of us in this huge inn. Then he wished us a pleasant stay, and left through the front door.

My daughter and I walked up the stairs our room. My daughter, who is a heavy sleeper, went to sleep almost immediately. I, on the other hand, am a very light sleeper and sleep like an Indian with one ear always alert to the environment. I lay awake in bed listening to all the sounds of the room. I was making a mental catalogue of the noises so that I would be able to recognize any noise that was not "normal." The hot water pipes made a big racket - they sounded like someone playing a comb and that was followed by a series of tapping, thumping, clanking and so on. Then it would stop and there was total silence until the furnace fired up again. There was a lot of traffic, mostly trucks, rumbling through underneath our windows. This created alot of noise and cast many moving shadows against the walls until about 2 or 3 am when it became very, very silent in the room.

Seven times during the course of the evening while I was awake, I heard a bizarre noise come from the area of the side window. It had the loud, unpleasant, squeaky, grating quality of someone rubbing a window pane with Windex. I really didn't know what could cause such a bizarre noise but decided to chalk it up to the possibility that a large tree branch might be scratching the outside of the window. (Of course, when I looked out the window the next morning there was no tree!).

I also heard vague movements coming from the area of the fireplace. They didn't exactly sound like small-footed animals skittering around. They seemed more muffled, larger, and slow- moving. But I decided to attribute these noises to possible wild animals trapped inside the walls or birds living in the chimney.

I finally fell asleep around 3 am, confident that I had heard the full repertoire of possible noises in the room. Suddenly, I was awoken out of my sleep by a very loud noise of a floorboard creaking 5 feet from my bed. My entire body flushed with instant goosebumps and my heart began racing - it was a disgusting feeling. The air had the charged atmosphere I have come to associate with the presence of spirits - it was at once electric yet muggy and thick. I opened my eyes and looked at the space from where the sound had emanated. There was nothing. But I "felt" the presence of a male spirit staring at me. I knew that the sound of the floorboard was not the ordinary settling noises of the foundation of an older home. It was the sound of weight moving on a floorboard. I was completely panicked. I lay awake in my bed and didn't move for a very long time. As I listened intently in the dark, I heard what sounded like more muffled footsteps, but lighter, near the fireplace. They "felt" like a different person from the other noise.

I realized I had no other option than to try and fall back to sleep. And so I did.

A few hours later, I was once again abruptly awoken from my sleep. This time someone was knocking on my door. They knocked gently three times. I was completely petrified. I knew that no one else was in the inn and that no employees had entered the building. I also knew that the couple sleeping next door were sound asleep and had not left their bedroom. I immediately knew that if anyone was knocking on my door - there were unequivocally supernatural. My heart felt like it was beating out of my chest and I prayed that the knocking sounds were only some ambient noise that I had incorporated into my dreams. But the "person" knocked on my door again - three times - and paused, as if waiting for my response. I could hear the floorboards creak in front of my door as if they had shifted their weight. I was terrified now because it was "real" and not my dream. They knocked again, this time a bit louder, as if annoyed. Then waited. Then there were four loud knocks at the door. It was like a real-life horror movie. I prayed to God that they would not come in the room - a silly thought, since the room already seemed to be inhabited! The clock said it was 5:27 am.

Finally, after what seemed like a very long time, I fell back to sleep. In my sleep, I still had awareness of the employees finally entering through the front door downstairs and walking around performing their duties. I heard my neighbor's door open as they walked downstairs for breakfast which was served starting at 8am.

When I woke up at about 9:15 am, I decided to use my K-2 EMF meter to get a baseline reading of my room to see if it registered any high levels of electromagnetic fields which might have accounted for my feelings of paranoia or dread. My meter consistently showed a "normal" reading (a green light registering between 0 to 1.5 millGauss) all around the perimeter of the room including my bed.

Now the strange thing was that when I moved the meter to the door, it suddenly registered a much higher electromagnetic field (a yellow light registering between 2.5 to 10 milliGauss which is considered a mid-level magnetic field). As I walked from the door to the spot about 5 feet from my bed where I had sensed the presence of a spirit, the meter remained on yellow. Then as I walked directly to the fireplace where I had sensed another presence, it still remained on yellow. But the weird thing was that if I raised the meter higher than about 6 feet or lower than about 2 feet, it went back to green. It was as if I was standing in a free-floating "cloud" of an electromagnetic field. It was not being influenced by possible fields emitted from wires or pipes normally found in the walls, floor or ceiling. It was as if I had just created connect-the-dots with the three paranormal experiences I had had during the night. It seemed to confirm, in a very bizarre way, my feelings of the presence of ghosts.

As a medium, I have trained myself to be much less skeptical and much more free-associative. I will give you my completely unverifiable psychic impressions. I felt that the first spirit presence was a man standing near the bed - middle aged, angular jaw, a little stocky, wearing a long overcoat and boots. The presence near the fireplace also seemed to be a male, perhaps slightly younger, wearing a light-colored waistcoat and slimmer. The presence at the door who had knocked seemed to be a woman. It occured to me later that perhaps if this was a residual haunt (where the ghost only engages in repetitive behavior and does not intelligently interact), then perhaps it was this woman's job to wake up the man in this room at 5:30 am so he could go to work. I also felt that someone or something might have been touching my feet (although I dismissed this on the assumption that perhaps my daughter was slightly moving her feet under the sheets). I also "felt" pressure on my abdomen and "imagined" that a female spirit of a nurse was tending to my "wounds" as I lay imobilized on a stretcher. Not a far stretch of the imagination since the inn had served as a battlefield hospital during the Civil War...

At any rate, the housekeeper confirmed the next morning that she and various guests had experienced several ghostly encounters at the inn - although no one had ever reported anything unusual in the Jeb Stuart room.

The Skeptic's Religion

Skepticism is nothing more than a belief system. Skepticism is the belief that there is one inherent Truth about a single Reality. (Sounds a bit like Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religions already!) This Truth can be accessed by examining scientifically tested facts which, when they fall within a logical, rational and repeatable system of other tested facts, constitute what a Skeptic would comfortably call "reality." In other words, something is only "real" if it makes sense within a system of other things that also make sense.

So, then, why is skepticism a belief system?

Because it presupposes and is based upon an entire pyramid of other facts and beliefs about those facts. This provides a pre-existing context for every new or unusual event confronting the skeptic. So, for example, let's suppose the skeptic, like, say, The Amazing Randi (the well-known magician, avowed skeptic, and psychic-basher who claims full responsibility for the alleged debunking of Israeli spoon-bender Uri Geller) watches someone bend a spoon by merely stroking it gently on the stem of the spoon. The spoon slowly begins to look like it is melting and forms a bent hump at the top of the stem. The skeptic already has a belief system intact about why this spoon is bending without any apparent force.

First, the skeptic believes there is no Force in the universe capable of achieving this virtual melting of metal unless it falls into a certain number of categories such as heat or pressure.

Second, the skeptic believes he is already fully familiar with all possible Forces in the universe.

Third, the skeptic subscribes to an old adage used primarily in the scientific community known as "Occam's Razor" which basically means that if we have a choice between explaining a phenomenon in terms of known facts and principles versus a brand new, unproven theory, then we should accept the former and not the latter explanation.

Fourth, the skeptic is convinced that if he can reproduce the same result (a bent spoon) by means of trickery or magic, that constitutes proof-positive that any time a spoon is EVER bent without the help of traditional physics (heat, pressure, optical illusion, etc.), then it must have been achieved by magic and nothing else.

The problem with the Skeptic's Religion is that, like any other belief system or religion, it must rely upon several leaps of faith.

First, the skeptic wrongly assumes he is already familiar with all possible Forces in the universe and knows all possible outcomes based upon cause and effect. This is false. As human beings, we limited by the machinery of our brains. We are consciously aware of those things with which our brain already feels comfortable, since they have been previously identified and catalogued by the brain. This is a neurological limitation. We do not permit ourselves to experience those things we cannot understand. Moreover, cutting-edge physics is now approaching its much-cherished Theory of Everything which unifies all of the known forces of the universe within a single system by virtue of explaining the universe as having eleven dimensions. Different forces are possible within different dimensions. Conversely, not all forces exist within every dimension. The human body, as our only receptor, is trapped within a 3-dimensional world. What are the implications of this? That there exist Forces in the universe which we are incapable of experiencing by virtue of being stuck in our 3-dimensional world. Thus, the skeptic cannot scientifically "believe" that he is fully familiar with all the Forces of the universe and thus understands all cause and effect.

Second, most skeptics make the mistake of twisting the Occam's Razor rule from meaning that the preferred explanation of an event is the ONLY explanation. That represents a kind of religious fanatism as we often see with Christian or Muslim religious zealots who willingly twist the literal words of the Bible or the Koran to suit their purposes. Magic is a single explanation for a phenomenon - but in terms of pure logic we cannot infer it is the only explanation. We BELIEVE it is the only explanation.

I had occasion to travel to London and met with Uri Geller. He bent several spoons in front of me and for my children. He is an absolutely charming but deeply enigmatic man. Before I visited him, I met with a friend of mine who is a magician. I begged him to break the magician's code of secrecy and show me several ways to bend a spoon using magic. He finally agreed. I learned several ways it can be done. Most such tricks are not really visible to the naked eye unless you know what to anticipate. I also have very talented psychic friends who claim to be able to bend spoons without touching them - defying all known rules of physics. I have tried many times myself but have never been able to bend a spoon in this fashion.

When I watched Uri bend a spoon as we stood in his kitchen, he stroked the stem lightly near the oven top. I kept my eyes trained on the hard-metal spoon like an eagle. I did not look away even for a split second. I was immediately concerned that I might be witnessing an optical illusion like the kid's trick of waving a pencil up and down until it appears to become wobbly and bend. But the spoon actually seemed to be slightly bent - and not in any of the ways shown to me by my magician-friend. However, whether intentionally or not, Uri removed the spoon from my sight for a split milisecond. It was so fast that it probably would not normally register in one's conscious awareness but I was paying extreme attention.

To this day, I cannot say with certainty whether the spoon bent by itself or not. Uri seemed quite proud of it. He wanted me to believe he had psychically manipulated the elemental particles of the spoon. I did not have a belief-agenda when I met him and so I was not emotionally invested in remaining a skeptic or a believer. I just wanted to see this feat with my own eyes.

Consequently, I must keep this strange spoon-bending event forever in an unsolved category in my mind - which feels very uncomfortable on an intellectual level. Most people cannot tolerate ambiguity since it makes us feel powerless. Least of all, skeptics...