So, where was I? Okay, right “Nightmare in Bridgeport” on that show A Haunting. That whole thing all started with a phone call from the leader of one para-abnormal team to another. This guy who actually had his own little ghost busting group realizes that his own childhood home, where his widowed mother still lives is haunted. He says he had some scary experiences there as a child but things were quiet until his father was at the end stages of Parkinson’s and started talking about seeing people in the house. Then the father died and the mother started being terrorized by something. He went in to do his own investigation and I guess things didn’t go so well, because he called the Liabetic to come in with his team. His team included Mary who was by this time pretty well known as a bona fide medium. Things got ugly fast. They called in the Bishop who got pushed down the stairs. Nothing worked. Apparently the Liabetic tried reading the Roman Catholic exorcism rites by himself while he sat on the couch chain smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile the demons in the house were watching them, going, “Wait, hold my beer….” After a bunch of attempts they were unable to convince anything to leave except the dude’s mom who moved out and left all her stuff there. To the best of my knowledge they still own the home but no one lives there.
Just after that things started getting really bad for Mary, financially and physically. She had to move herself and her two teenage kids in with her elderly aunt who had dementia. She couldn’t live by herself by that point, anyway, so it was either someone come to live with her or she’d have to go into a nursing home. She was Italian and the older she got the less English she used. And there was some weird stuff going on in that old farmhouse. I spent a lot of time there, but hung out mostly in the old barn behind the house, but that’s a story for another night. My (now) husband had to live there for a month of two, in the barn, and I stayed most nights there with him. My trips inside the actual house were few and far between.
I started thinking about it after a while; the fact that everywhere Mary lived there was something wrong with the house. I mean that in a spiritual sense, not necessarily a physical sense. She grew up in a house that creeped me out every time I drove by it and that was even before I met her. The house that she lived in with her husband had some kind of weird stuff going on (the former owner murdered his wife in what became the playroom. With an axe), then there was a little rental house in Devon and more spooky stuff there, and then finally the aunt’s house. I was never in that house before Mary and the kids moved in so I don’t know what it was like before. I can only say that it had its moments of being genuinely terrifying after. It occurred to me much later that it might not be that Mary kept choosing houses with bad spirits in them, but that those spirits might just have been attached to her. I really came to believe that after she passed just about two weeks ago. I went up to Boone to be with her (now grown) kids the day she passed. I stayed for the night since I live two hours away. I slept in her room. And there they were. I closed the door, changed into my jammies and lay down. No sooner was I in that bed than I felt them in the room with me. I paid them no attention other than telling them, “Not tonight”. I said a prayer and went to sleep. Two days later her daughter told me she’d seen shadows in the home. They’d plagued Mary her whole life and now they’re kinda homeless, looking for someone else to glom onto.
I related this to a couple of friends the other night while we were out at dinner. One friend commented that she’d probably have nightmares from the conversation. I sometimes forget that there are people out there who don’t have these kinds of daily experiences. As Bill Murray in Ghostbusters II said, “You’re scaring the straights!”
I still can’t believe how dumb we were. How amusing we must have been to those demons, who are actually fallen angels. Satan took a whole third of the heavenly host with him when he was cast out. They mus have had a few good laughs at us out in those cemeteries, or in people’s homes waving sage at them.
The beginnings all seemed so harmless; using Angel Cards to get answers to questions on health and love and money. Using Divining Rods to see if there were any spirits in a house and where exactly they were. The Bible says a lot about not doing these kinds of things. There’s no gray area about it. But we invented a grey area for ourselves to justify what we were doing. The woman who led the first ghost hunting group we were in together is also deceased now. She called herself an exorcist, and she used a Ouija board. I believe it was a rather drawn-out cancer at a pretty young age just a couple of years ago. As for the Tarot and Angel cards…. who do you think is on the other end of that communication if God said not to consult witches, sorcerers or diviners? It’s not God’s holy angels that are passing along information to the people reading those cards. The angels that stayed in heaven with God are not going to rebel against his Word like that. So then….. who?
Oh yeah, stay tuned, more to come….
Tracy Petry 