On Seeing Ghosts and Spirits

I thought I would start this post with a ridiculous, spelling-impaired meme, which for some reason makes me chortle like a schoolboy telling a fart joke every time I see it.

I thought I'd also include this meme featuring a man who hasn't actually been a school boy since 1971, but he plays one onstage, and I'd bet a month's salary that he's prone to telling fart jokes and also chortling about them.

His brother, who hasn't been a schoolboy since something like 1969, is prone to either chortling at or rolling his eyes in response to said fart jokes. At least he was before he was stricken with the worst sort of ailment: the kind that robs a person of their cognitive abilities.

But this isn't what I came here to talk about.

I came here to talk about seeing ghosts.

For someone who believes that the personality survives the death of the physical body, I actually have not seen very many ghosts during my time on this planet, and I have never seen with my eyes the spirits that I have formed the strongest relationships with. 

My great grandfather saw spirits. He also knew when people were about to die. He was extremely psychic. He wasn't afraid of ghosts. He knew they couldn't harm him and weren't likely to try to do so. 

My great grandfather didn't fear death. In spite of my belief in spirits and some sort of afterlife, I always feared death until I came to the point in my life where I was just so sick of everything going wrong that I pretty much feel like I'd welcome it.

Here's the thing about me and seeing spirits.

Many people will write off someone like me, who has a psychological dysfunction, as simply hallucinating.

The fact of the matter is, I don't hallucinate unless I'm extremely sleep deprived or taking some sort of powerful medication. I don't like to take the sorts of medications which tend to make a person hallucinate (prescription pain killers), so unless I've just had some sort of surgery or a bad accident, I'm not going to have those in my system. I do not take any sort of prescription psych medication. I take a low dose of Lithium, which is legally obtainable in many vitamin stores or online, and I take 5 HTP. Neither of these causes hallucinations.

Others might write off my viewing of spirits as being part and parcel of a mood fluctuation. The fact is, at the times I have seen spirits, I have been euthymic. I may question the validity of my interactions with spirits during hypomanic periods, but I have never seen a spirit while hypomanic. I tend to have trouble communicating with spirits when depressed, and I have never seen a spirit during a depressive state.

I was in a half-waking state when I saw the spirit of my kitten who had been hit by a car hiding under my dresser, so one might write this off as an excitable child "seeing shadows." The room was pretty dark, however, and my kitten was a tortoise shell cat. Her fur was mostly black. Her name was Rose. She didn't mean to frighten me. She just wanted to see me again.

The first human spirit I saw was the spirit of a thirty-five year old man who had died of leukemia. He was the father of a boy that my brother and I would babysit for. I was fourteen years old when this man died, sixteen when I saw him again.

The ways people would be prone to writing this sighting off would be as follows:

A vision manifested by grief

The seer (me) has a psychiatric dysfunction

The seer (me) was a teenager who was prone to using mind-altering substances

It was an illusion seen out of the corner of the seer's eye

The seer has an overactive imagination

The so called "seer" is lying

There are those who will believe that one of the above is still the case, but I will refute each of the above. The story remains anecdotal as I have no way of going back in time with a camera capable of taking a photograph of a ghost.

I liked this person and was saddened by his death. I didn't have an extremely close relationship with him. I didn't deeply grieve his passing.

As I said previously, I have never seen a spirit while in either a hypomanic or depressive state. I was euthymic, in a balanced emotional state.

I had not been using mind-altering substances on that particular day. The "mind-altering substance" I used most often was, as it happens, beer. My tippling and toking happened on weekends and it never happened while I was babysitting. I was sober.

This spirit was not seen out of the corner of my eye. I looked right at him, straight on, face to face. He also made a fair bit of noise before I saw him. I think that he was trying to get my attention.

My overactive imagination causes me to write melodramatic stories and to be paranoid, to read things that aren't there into situations and actions rather than to see things that aren't there.

Believe what you will. I'm not lying, at least not deliberately. It is my belief that I actually did see the spirit of a person who had passed over two years previously. What would I have to gain by making up such a story? This is the sort of thing that I tend not to tell people, because most people tend to think that I'm either "crazy" or "looking for attention." I tell the story here so that others who have experienced such phenomena know that they aren't alone.

This spirit was a conscious apparition rather than a "tape loop" manifestation, aka the sort of "ghost" that performs repeated actions. The spirits that most people see in haunted places are energy left behind rather than actual personalities.

Working in a retirement community at night for ten years, I saw a couple of "tape loop" manifestations. One was an elderly woman strolling down a hallway with her walker. I'm sure that is a shocker to those reading this account! 

The other was not the spirit of a dead person but was either an energy ghost or an astral projection. It was the spectral manifestation of a living dog. The person who held the job prior to me used to bring her little dog with her. Pets were welcomed in this place, and this dog was just revisiting his old stomping ground. He frisked off down the hall, filled with joy.

In both of these situations I was euthymic. I did see the woman while waking up after having dozed off on the infamously uncomfortable short couch in the waiting area. She was "real" enough that I was afraid she might tell my supervisor that she'd seen me sleeping. However, as she walked down the hallway, she suddenly disappeared. The likelihood is that she wasn't a conscious apparition but rather an energy memory and wasn't aware of my presence at all.

The penguin that I saw in the hallway one night was a manifestation of severe sleep deprivation. I knew that's what it was when I was looking at it. It didn't bother me, but I knew that I needed to insist that my supervisor stop scheduling me every other night and allow me to actually have two nights off in a row so I could rest.

I have never seen with my eyes any of the spirits with whom I've formed strong emotional bonds. They are a different classification of spirit. They can be written off as my being mentally ill, emotionally needy, having too much imagination and so on, and most people probably do write them off that way. Those who write them off for these reasons may be correct. I choose to believe that they are not correct, and I share my story in case by chance I might be able to help someone who has experienced the same thing. 

Since I rarely receive comments of any sort on my writing, I don't know if I'm helping anybody or not. I keep writing because this is the sort of thing that I would have liked to read when I felt like I was going crazy, to let me know that there was a possibility that I wasn't crazy and that I wasn't alone. Maybe I'm only shouting into an empty room and hearing the echo of my own voice. I continue to share this lonely and misunderstood voice on the off chance that this isn't the case.

~Cie~

A Visit from my Best Friend

I will always love you, Buddy

I miss that face so much. I miss his soft fur and the unconditional love he gave me. Seeing this picture makes me cry.

A couple of days ago, I saw him when I woke up. The time when one is just waking can be prime time for glimpsing spirits. I've had this happen a few times.

These glimpses are always brief. I normally don't see spirits, I only sense them. However, on this occasion, I saw Lafayette clearly. It wasn't a "corner of the eye" sighting, and it wasn't in a place where I would normally have seen him.

I stay at my son's apartment on the nights I have to work because it's about a half hour closer to the home of the patient I work with at this time. I was sleeping on the couch. When I was at that point between sleeping and waking, I saw Lafayette. He was kneading the clothes at the end of the couch (yeah, don't judge) and the pink comforter with hearts that he always loved so much, the one I haven't been able to bring home because it reminds me too much of him. (I do my laundry at my son's place.)

His butt was facing me--typical Lafayette. When most adult cats sit with or on a person, they face the person. Not Lafayette. He was a big kitten, "big" being comparative. He was a small cat. He spent 8 months of the first year of his life living in a kennel at the shelter. Although the people there were kind to him, he really wasn't properly socialized. This is why fostering animals is so important.

If I wasn't lying down, Lafayette would always insist that I lie down. Then he would park himself on my chest and turn his butt to my face. He was trying to situate himself on my shoulder, the way kittens do when the Human is lying down. He was too big to accomplish this properly, so I ended up seeing his back side all the time. I always had to pull a cover over my chest, because he would knead exuberantly. He would also turn himself over, literally, nudging his nose against my hand and falling over, all the while purring loudly.

The day I lost him, part of me died. It was truly one of the worst days of my life. I wished that I would die with him. I didn't want to live without him.

Lafayette has shown me a few times that he's still with me. I just miss being able to pet him. I miss my little buddy and I always will.

Lafayette's ashes are in a little display cabinet at my son's apartment. My son, a Brony, made a little crate to rest the velvet bag holding the container of ashes in. He put some straw in the crate and surrounded the container of ashes with tiny "My Little Pony" figures to look after Lafayette.

My son is high functioning autistic and sometimes has trouble expressing affection. He is not a "touchy feely" person. However, it is fallacy that people with autism are incapable of feeling love. My son has a very kind heart, and he expresses it in gestures such as this. I was so touched and so grateful for his creating this little shrine for me.

I've since included various other stuffed animals and items to tell Lafayette I love him and am thinking of him. There is also an envelope containing a clipping of Lafayette's fur, which I took after the vet released him from his suffering. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but a cat's temperature is normally in the low 100's. Lafayette's had dropped to 95 (Fahrenheit.)

I also put my figurine of Malcolm Young in the display case. I know this will seem strange, but Malcolm was a kind person who made a lot of difference to me even though I never met him in this life. His body is still here, but he's no longer in it. I sensed that he wanted me to do this, and so I did. Perhaps it's simply that this place is my shrine for things that I care about which are lost to this world.

Then again, maybe this lonely and misunderstood spirit is looking after the spirit of my little cat until I can be with him again. Like I said, I don't claim to know anything. That's the frustrating part of being a living person dealing with spirits. You really can't ever KNOW until the time comes.

H.P. Lovecraft was very fond of cats, and so he penned "The Cats of Ulthar."

I like to think that someplace like Ulthar exists. If it does, I imagine that Mr. Lovecraft spends a lot of his time there.

H.P. Lovecraft was an atheist, but I sometimes think his dream stories revealed more about his experiences behind the walls of sleep than he admitted. Again, I don't know. I am only speculating.

I hope that perhaps Mr. Lovecraft, Mr. Young and Lafayette are providing each other with comfort and companionship in the world beyond the veil. All of them were misfits in a way.

Lafayette was an unwanted feral kitten, brought to the shelter with other members of the colony when he was just a month old. Of course at eight months, he and his half sister or cousin were adopted by Yours Truly, and he was showered with love for the rest of his life. I only wish he and I could have grown old together.

Nonetheless, he really was never a "normal" cat. He was a quirky little oddball, and I loved that about him.

H.P. Lovecraft always felt like an outsider. His mother was a very disturbed person who told him as a child that he was a monster. He was a sickly child who spent much of his youth locked away from the outside world.

In spite of the fact that he eventually performed for arenas full of people, Malcolm Young was painfully shy and had issues with depression and addiction. He successfully went through rehab for alcohol in 1985. Unfortunately, he was always a heavy smoker.

In any case, the idea that three otherwise lost souls who touched my heart might be able to have a bond of friendship with one another in the world beyond the wall of sleep gives me something of comfort.

I really haven't felt able to write freely in quite some time, so if the reader feels this rambling tangent has gone far off the rails...tough shit. I didn't write it for you.

In any case, I want to thank my best friend for coming to visit me. I'm sure there are other times when he is there with me but I don't sense him. I always love you, Lafayette. You will always be my best little buddy.

~Cie~