Ghosts: A-Haunting We Will Go
by Charles McGuigan 10.2021
Cover graphic by Doug Dobey
As earth tilts ever farther from the sun and the days become shorter and darkness gobbles up ever more light, the veil between the physical and the spiritual becomes gossamer thin so that the living and the dead are separated by no more than a membrane of stretched cobwebs. Or, at least that’s what my ancestors—the Celts—believed, as did virtually every other human culture that ever inhabited the globe.
About the time Christianity spread to the hinterlands, Pope Gregory III wisely moved the festival honoring saints and martyrs from May 13 to November 1, giving birth to All Saints Day, and of course the night preceding it—All Hallows Eve, which in time became Halloween. Rather than trying to eradicate bred-in-the-bone pagan beliefs, the Church embraced them. They even observed these feast days in the same manner that Samhain had been celebrated from time in memorial with giant bonfires, parades, and plain folk masquerading as saints and angels, as devils and demons.
On Halloween and the short days and the long nights that follow it, we all seem more open to the existence of the supernatural. When the mortal coil has been reduced to a worm pudding or an urn of dusted kitty litter, something still remains, for embers of the living glow well beyond the grave.
As a matter of fact, about 60 percent of people worldwide claim to have had at least one ghostly encounter. One in three people insist they have either lived or stayed in a house they felt was haunted. And there are those among us who see ghosts quite regularly.
A couple weeks before Halloween I met with two women who have seen ghosts on more than one occasion. One generally sees orbs; the other sees vapors.
Our story—or at least one of them—begins more than thirty years ago out in Goochland County. Sandy had just lost a dear friend in a drowning accident. Throughout the summer Sandy thought about her friend, and then, on one particularly warm afternoon as she meditated about her deceased contemporary, she asked if there was some way she could meet with her again. Almost instantly a deep chill fell on the room; it had become so frigid Sandy’s breath fogged the air, and she was terrified.
“No, no I can’t do it,” Sandy yelled. “Please don’t come.” And as she finished the second sentence, the chill left the air, and the warmth of summer returned.
Sandy and I are talking about this long ago time as if it just happened yesterday. “It was an atmospheric change,” she says. “I was open to it.”
And that wasn’t the first time Sandy had encountered a ghost, a spirit, an otherworldly presence.
“I think that for me it just seems normal,” she says. “I think that any time that there is, as wild as it sounds, a spirit nearby I sense it just like I do a person in their physical state. So I think I’ve always been in tune to that and as a result of that I think I have been allowed to see things and hear things and experience things that involve people from the spiritual world.”
When I suggest it’s a gift, Sandy shakes her head. “I don’t know that I would call it a gift,” she says. “I think that anybody can sense spirits, if they’re open to it.”
Sandy invites me to think of early childhood. ”When we’re very young we see things,” she says. “Some people call them imaginary friends. And I think that as we get older we’re told, ‘That’s just a pretend friend, there’s really nobody there.’ And I think that you lose that ability because you start believing that it’s not acceptable. And I think people that are in tune with it as adults think that it’s not only acceptable but it’s real and there’s no reason to turn it off. So I think that everybody can, I just don’t think that they allow it to happen.”
One of her earliest experiences with ghosts occurred when she was twelve years old. Sandy was in her bedroom alone while her parents were in the living room. She sensed that there was somebody there with her, but there was no one in the room with her. Yet the room changed, the temperature dropped, the air seemed different.
The following week, her cousin spent the night with Sandy in the same bedroom. As they were sitting in bed talking, Sandy’s cousin sat bolt upright.
“Oh my gosh, what is this?” she asked.
“You feel it, too?”
“Yes, what is it?”
Just like before there had been a sort of atmospheric change.
“I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s a ghost,” Sandy said. “I think something’s here, I think the home is haunted.”
Over the course of her life, Sandy has encountered more than twenty spirits in one form or other. “There have been so many instances, and sometimes I just feel a presence,” she says. “Other times they just look like a white vapor, like steam and it’s typically large like a person. Most of the time they’re not scary, they’re just there. Charles, I’ve had some in my own home, but they’ve been not menacing at all, maybe even warm and welcoming.”
That wasn’t the case more than thirty years ago not long after Sandy had met the ghost of her friend who had drowned. Sandy was in her early twenties at the time, just starting off, and she was looking for a place to live in on her own. She saw a classified ad placed by another young woman who was seeking roommates. Sandy contacted the woman, met with her for an interview, and was one of four roommates the young woman selected. It was a gorgeous place, and spacious, an old, well-built clapboard on Hermitage Road in Richmond’s Northside.
“And the home was plenty big for all of us,” says Sandy.
But almost from the moment they moved in, something about the place seemed creepy. “This was just a few nights after we got there,” Sandy remembers. “We were in the living room and our dogs all ran to this one spot and just started growling and barking and going crazy as if there was something there that they didn’t like. And we just kind of laughed it off.”
A couple nights later, Sandy’s good friend Hannah dropped by for a visit. She had a friend in tow, another young woman whom Sandy had never met. When she greeted them at the door, Hannah entered, but her friend stepped back from the threshold and shuddered.
“I can’t go in there,” she said.
“What’s going on?” asked Hannah.
“I’m out of here,” her friend said, and with that she headed back to her car.
Sandy was stunned and a little hurt. Hannah said, “I’ll be right back.” She joined her friend at the car. Hannah’s arms were folded across her chest as the pair spoke. A few minutes later Hannah returned to the house and had a talk with Sandy.
“Okay, so she said that she used to be a devil worshipper,” Hannah told Sandy about her friend. “And she says your house is black and evil inside and she cannot chance going into that home.”
Not long after that, another event would occur that would convince Sandy and her roommates that it was time to move out. One night at about ten o’clock three of the young women were hanging out in the kitchen; the other two were out of town.
The young women felt safe in the house and had not bothered locking the front door. As they talked among themselves, they heard the front door open. They all looked at one another, and each said, at the same time: “Are you expecting anybody?” And each one of them shook her head.
“We were all a little freaked out by this point so we all got something, a knife, a bottle, to arm ourselves with,” Sandy tells me. “So as we walked in there we heard whatever it was walking up the steps, and we yelled out, ‘Who’s there?’”
There was no response, so the trio started climbing the stairs all the while screaming, “WHO IS IT?” But no one answered.
They checked every room and made their way along the hall to the rear of the house to the stairwell that led to the kitchen. They descended the staircase together, closely knit, and then entered Sandy’s bedroom which was right off the kitchen. They wanted to get out of the house and there was an exterior door in Sandy’s room. As they left the kitchen, the door to the staircase was suddenly flung open and then slammed with force against the wall. But there was no one there.
“We heard someone walk over in front of where we were and they emitted this unintelligible sound,” says Sandy. “It was somewhere between a man and an animal in pain. It was terrifying. We slammed the door closed as quickly as we could and then we turned around and ran out the back door.”
As they were running to a neighbor’s house, Sandy and one of her roommates froze and stared through the kitchen windows. It was unlike anything Sandy had ever seen before. Every cabinet door along with the refrigerator door and the oven door was opening and closing, over and over again. There was a clang and a clatter, and it would not stop.
“Every single thing in that kitchen that could move was moving,” Sandy recalls. “And that’s when I decided, it’s time to move.”
It took time to get out, though, and before they did, Sandy would experience one of the most frightening moments in her life. She was sleeping in her darkened room when footsteps roused her. She reached over to the nightstand by her bed and turned on the table lamp. She quickly looked around the room, and seeing nothing, took a deep breath and put out the light. The footsteps started again, and they were right next to her bed. She reached out again, but knocked the lamp onto the floor. Glass shattered and she felt something settle down on her mattress.
“And that’s the only time in my life that anything’s tried to communicate with me,” says Sandy. “It was like a man’s voice, but garbled. I was sitting there, tears were streaming down my face, and I said, ‘I don’t know what you want. I can’t understand you and you’re terrifying me.’”
Sandy grabbed her pet poodle, jumped off the end of the bed and made a beeline to one of her roommate’s room. Unbeknownst to Sandy, this roommate had a male guest sleeping with her that night. But that didn’t deter her.
“I jumped into her bed right between them and said, ‘I don’t care what you think or what you say, I’m staying here tonight,’” says Sandy. “And as soon as I lay down the blinds flew off the window from across the room and landed just behind us and fell down on the bed. That was terrifying. It was the only time I’ve ever really felt threatened by a spirit.”
The very night after Sandy vacated the haunted house on Hermitage, she had another brush with the spirit world. “I needed a place to stay so I went to my cousin’s house,” Sandy says. “I was on her couch in the living room and I was getting ready to go to sleep and I looked up and there was this white vapor by the stairs. And I said to myself, ‘I leave a crazy haunted home and now I see something here, too. This makes no sense.’”
Sandy ran to her cousin’s bedroom and got her up.
“You didn’t tell me there’s something here,” Sandy said.
Her cousin rubbed her eyes. “Oh no,” she said. “You saw it?”
“Yes I saw it.”
Her cousin assured her that this spirit was benign. “She said it had never bothered her but she knew it was there,” Sandy remembers. “Every now and then it would hide something, which ghosts love to do. Or it would move something, or it would do something else to show its presence. That was on Hanover Avenue in the Museum District.
Just several blocks away from that house in the museum district, I enter the home of woman who lives on Stuart Avenue. Like Sandy, she has seen her share of ghosts.
We sit in the living room of Beth’s elegantly restored row home. Sunlight streams into the room, and her dog, Sport, once he’s sniffed me out, moves to a pool of light next to the fireplace and curls into himself.
This is the exact spot where, six years ago, Beth met an apparition who stood inches away from where I’m sitting.
Beth had just recently moved into the house. That early spring evening she was in the rear of her home in the small room on the other side of the kitchen. She tapped away at the keyboard of her computer, and in the background she could hear the former president on CNN saying something that was absolutely asinine about the size of his genitalia. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but it wouldn’t be the last time. That’s when her dog, who was in the living room, erupted in a frenzy of growling and barking. She made her way to the living room. Sport was barking uncontrollably, running in tight circles on the living room floor.
“What is wrong?” she asked, cradling Sport in her lap as she lowered herself down on the couch. She was stroking her pet, reassuring him that everything was okay. And then she looked up, and her eyes widened as she stared into the dining room.
“I could see it plain as day walking past me, and Sport bolted after it,” Beth says. “When I saw it walk past me, the first thing I thought was that I was having a frontal brain lobe stroke or something. I thought I was seeing things. I was freaked out.”
When I ask Beth what she had seen, she says, “It was a gentleman in a tweed sports jacket. It was brown, and he was balding,” then points to a spot right next to me, “And he just walked through there. It was solid but I could see through it.”
The next day, after a restless night, she remembered two security cameras, one in the living and the other on the front porch.
“And so I thought, I can look at the video camera,” Beth tells me. Though the camera did not catch an image of the apparition it did record another anomaly which confirmed what Beth had seen.
“I could see a white orb dropping from the ceiling in front of the video camera, right where you’re sitting,” she says. “And outside there was a white orb that came down, too. And all I could think was, ‘Oh my gosh, my house is haunted.’”
Beth then describes the translucent globes that appeared out of nowhere. “They were sparkly white orbs and you could definitely see them drop,” she says. And try as she might, she could not calm her dog down. “He wouldn’t quit barking. He was just going crazy, and I was thinking that thing is still in here.”
Shortly after this visitation, Beth decided to contact the monsignor at nearby St. Benedict Catholic Church. “I made sure I got the top dog, I didn’t want to talk to just a priest,” she says. “When he got on the phone I said, ‘I need you to come and help get a ghost out of my house. I just moved in, and I’m not leaving this house.’”
As good as his word, he dropped by the next afternoon. “So he came with his holy water and blessed each entrance to my home,” says Beth. “And then he walked through each room, said a prayer, and sprinkled each room with holy water.”
But when he left, Beth could still feel an unsettling presence and her dog continued to bark. “That’s when I just knew it was still in here,” she says. “He didn’t get it out. It did not want to leave.”
Beth, on the other hand, did want to leave. So the next day she called a friend of hers who’s a realtor. “Would you come look at my house and tell me how much you could get for it?” she asked her. “So my realtor friend came over and she told me what I could get for the house.”
Her realtor friend tried to dissuade her. “Beth, you love this house, you just moved in, you don’t want to sell it,” she said.
Beth told her about the apparition and the constant fear she was feeling. “You can’t tell anybody I ever told you about this,” she said. Her realtor nodded and then said this, “I’ve got the girl for you that can help you.”
“Are you kidding?” Beth said.
“Nope,” said the realtor. “She will get it out. I have sold homes that actually have ghosts in them, and I’ve called this girl and she’s gotten them out.”
Beth took the woman’s number and called. This woman, who calls herself a psychic, removes spirits with the help of angels. And in Beth’s case she was able to do it over the phone. “She asked for herself and me to be put in a divine sacred space and then she was able to talk to angels,” according to Beth. “She cleared my house and she told me it was a gentleman that had just died somewhere in the neighborhood and he was just walking around and he didn’t believe that he could go to heaven.”
The same woman would help Beth again, with a particularly troubling presence. At that time she was clearing out a storage unit she had on the Outer Banks. "I unlocked the storage and something scared the dickens out of me,” says Beth. “I was scared to death. I felt something beside me, something big and creepy.” Although she couldn’t see it with her eyes, she envisioned it in her mind.
“Do you remember the Gossamer from Bugs Bunny with a big head?” she says. “He looked like that.”
She called the woman who had removed the spirit from her home in the Museum District. “She blessed the space and got rid of it,” Beth says. “And she described it just as I saw it with my minds eyes. She told me it looked like a Swamp Monster kind of thing. She said it was a ghoul or something like that. Her description hit it right on the mark.”
Like Sandy, Beth has encountered spirits of one kind or other on numerous occasions. As a matter, the woman who summons angels to rid a home of spirits thought Beth had something of a gift. “She said I could learn because I have some of that ability,” Beth says. “I said, ‘I don’t want to learn, I don’t want to fool with them’ I would rather not see or know ghosts.’”
But she does, particularly when she is in a certain frame of mind. “I’m always in this extreme place of peace, and for some reason that’s when something happens,” says Beth. “I have to be in this complete calm place, and happy and peaceful. That’s when I see things. It might be when I’m open.”
She remembers an incident that occurred about twenty-five years ago. It was the first time she had ever received a full body massage, and she had never been more relaxed. She was in a state of euphoria when she left the massage therapist’s office, and the sensation lasted. That afternoon, as her children got off the school bus, both of them glowed with a shiny blue light. And that evening as the family ate at a local Italian restaurant she saw the owner in a way she had never seen him before. “I could see into him and knew what a good man he was,” Beth says.
But it was late that night that something would change Beth forever. “I had this dream that there was someone looking at me and they were in a cloud and that’s when something told me, open your eyes,” she says. “I sat up in the bed and I was looking around and the entire room was white. I was still in this perfect place of peace, but when I realized this was not of this world, I totally freaked and I felt it go over my head, it brushed my hair back and I could feel it dissipate all around me. It was all around me. I got down on my knees and turned on the light and said, ‘Oh my God what was that.’ It was white and it was moving and you could see through it. It was like. It was more like a fog.”
From then on, Beth would see things that others could not, feel thing that others could not sense. “The door had been opened and I never have been able to shut it again,” she says. “When that door’s open I still see things. I had an awakening, or an enlightenment.”
Beth strokes her dog between his ears. She looks over at me, and beyond me. “I don’t like to see them,” she says. “And I don’t like to feel them. I’d rather just go on with life.”