The Ghost Photographer

by Julie Rieger

  Okay, so never mind that I actually happen to live in a Southern California suburban house, or that life imitates art—an expression that will soon become a massive understatement in my world. At the time all I want to understand was this: What exactly is a portal?

  According to Supernatural Magazine, a portal is “a doorway in the physical world that allows free access to and from the spirit world. The existence of a portal can rely on a vortex of energy to sustain it.” Magnetic, spiritual, and other unknown sources like gravitational anomalies can create “powerful eddies that manifest a spiral of energy which can be positive or negative in nature.”

  Some paranormal specialists believe that portals occur near large bodies of water (hello, swimming pool), because water has a tendency to absorb energy from an emotionally charged event. Everyone knows that water can conduct electricity, so it stands to reason that it might also “charge” spirits and ghosts to manifest in the physical world. It can also charge the life out of us humans, which is why you’ll immediately fry like a drumstick if you’re hit by lightning when you’re in a pool or the ocean. And never mind what happens if you drop your hair dryer in the sink when it’s plugged into your wall socket.

  Now, there’s a difference between a poltergeist and a ghost. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a ghost is “a disembodied soul; especially the soul of a dead person believed to be an inhabitant of the unseen world or to appear to the living in bodily likeness.” Simple enough. When these “disembodied souls” stick around to protect and guide us, not haunt us, they become our guardian angels.

  Poltergeists, on the other hand, are pissy bitches. They’re angry about some transgression and they’re coming back to give you shit by creating physical disturbances: breaking objects, knocking on doors or walls, even making things levitate. People have been baffled by their presence for centuries; scientists have tried to explain them away as a manifestation of everything from seismic activity, ball lightning, and underground water movement to electromagnetic fields, unusual air currents, and regular old hallucinations. Parapsychologists, those folks who dedicate their life to this, consider them disembodied low-level spirits associated with the natural elements of fire, air, water, and earth.

  Any way you look at portals, psychics and mediums are careful when they’re messing around with them. They always recite protection prayers to make sure that they’re carefully opened and securely closed, because apparently they can be left open for hundreds of years, especially if dipshits—I mean inexperienced mere mortals—open them by accident. And that’s why I jump into action when Brenda clarifies that opening a spirit portal is like putting out a welcome mat for dark spirits as well as friendly ones. In other words, if you open one, you’d better close it, too.

  “Protect yourself and your space,” she says. “Always protect your space. Follow my house-clearing instructions word by word.” (See instructions in appendix one, “Protect Your Space.”) In no time, I become a house-clearing devotee.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Holy Smoke!

  The so-called dead are still alive. Our friends are still with us. They guide and strengthen us when owing to absence of proper conditions they cannot make their presence known.

  —ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

  Now about those ghosts: I’m sure they’re here, and I’m not half so alarmed at meeting up with any of them as I am at having to meet the live nuts I have to see every day.

  —BESS TRUMAN

  Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.

  —ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Now let’s be clear: House clearing and housecleaning are not the same thing. I haven’t done a load of laundry since 1993, and I’ve never washed a window in my life. (For the record, I do wash dishes.) House clearing involves using various ancient healing tools to free a house or space of negative energy, whether that energy comes from emotional trauma experienced in that space or from errant ghosts and dark energies that have hitchhiked their way into a place for whatever reason.

  There are some basic tools involved in house clearing: Black tourmaline has been used since time immemorial to protect people and spaces from dark energy. I buy that by the truckload from my Nepalese source and put it in key areas of a house: near doors, halls, corners, shelves, and bedside tables.

  Smudge sticks generate healing smoke and snuff out any bad shit. They’re composed of dried herbs—sage, lavender, sweet grass, lemongrass, etc.—tied with string. I carry a candle in case the smudge stick goes out and a feather to ritualistically fan the smoke around a room. I use a turkey feather, but you can use a fan or thick piece of paper. I also use a shell to pick up any ashes from the burning smudge stick because its connection to water rounds out the elements: fire from the burning smudge stick, air from the fanning, and earth from the herbs.

  I’m thrilled to buy and burn mountains of sage, by the way, because I like to burn stuff. First off, I was born in the month of August, so I’m a Leo, one of the four fire signs. My love of fire wasn’t up to me; I was born this way. This love occasionally got the best of me when I was a kid: for example, I almost burned down a subdivision in my small Oklahoma town when I didn’t listen to my mom.

  I’m equally thrilled to buy and burn pounds of palo santo sticks as part of my house-clearing arsenal. Palo santo literally means “holy wood.” Like sage, it’s been used forever by South American healers and shamans for its medicinal and therapeutic healing powers: It spiritually purifies, clears energy, and heals. (Don’t ask me why or how. Maybe it has something to do with its rich supply of phytochemicals and antioxidants.) I have bowls filled to the brim with palo santo sticks and give it away in zippered bags. (Some people give cookies. I give holy wood.)

  The world can’t have enough palo santo. The world can’t get enough holy smoke, for that matter.

  When you read about house clearing, you probably associate it with ghost hunting and think of the same thing I do: ectoplasmic proton packs and possibly the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. One of these items sounds rather delicious. Who doesn’t like a s’more, right? But in all seriousness, ghost hunting is big business, with numerous sites that sell all kinds of gear. My favorite is the BooBuddy Jr., an EMF-triggered (electromagnetic field) stuffed bear that detects changes in energy and even comes with its own carrying case for another eighteen bucks. (I’m a sucker for a good custom carrying case. Hats off to the folks who thought of this and bothered to follow through with their dream.)

  If I were a real ghost hunter, I’d not only have a BooBuddy, I’d also have an EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) wrist recorder, laser grid scope, spirit box (so ghosts can talk to you), and a ghost rover cam. Oh, and a thermal camera. You can’t be a ghost hunter without a thermal camera. However, I do not possess any such clever items for my ghost hunting, and I don’t really consider myself a ghost hunter, either. I did once purchase a thermal ghost pad on Amazon. It’s almost the size of a sheet of paper and is supposed to turn colors if a ghost touches it. All I got was a paw print of our very living seventy-five-pound yellow Lab.

  Fully geared up with my house-clearing arsenal, I start a ritual of burning sage and palo santo in my backyard every night. Not once has a single firefighter come pounding at my door to inquire about the giant plume of fragrant smoke perpetually drifting off the hills from our place. (Imagine my surprise, though, if one did show up and I simply said: Hello, dear firefighter. No worries, I’m just smoking out ghosts. On second thought, this is LA, so said firefighter would probably just roll his eyes and say: Okay, lady, whatever.)

  One day I find a great new smudge pot, an oil-burning device that’s used in certain spiritual rituals to cleanse the energy in a space. (They were originally used to prevent frost on fruit trees.) I walk the perimeter of our property, always with Homer by my side. After a big round of smudging that night, I have so much sage left in my pot that I need to sit down and wait while it bur
ns itself out. While waiting, naturally I get bored, so I start randomly taking pictures of the smoke with my cell phone. And that’s when I learn that smoke is to spirits what light is to invisible ink, because I suddenly see in my shots various ghost images that resemble the spirit woman in the “bird stain” shot.

  What is it about smoke?

  In Ghosts Among Us, renowned medium James Van Praagh writes briefly about spirits that make contact with us through photography. “I have seen many photographs showing white orbs or what look like wisps of smoke around figures in a photo,” he writes. “Many people think their photos have been ruined. However, I believe that somehow ghosts have impressed a portion of their energy on the electromagnetic energy of the photograph.”

  Van Praagh could just as well have said that the electromagnetic energy of ghosts somehow impresses itself around smoke. No one knows for sure how or why, but somehow they seem able to pull smoke around their energetic bodies in order to make themselves visible. One thing is for sure: Smoke has always been considered a sacred element. “Since the dawn of time we’ve been fascinated by smoke,” writes spiritual healer and author Jenny Smedley in an article titled “Sacred Smoke & Symbolism of Smoke in Different Traditions” on the website Holisticshop.co.uk. “It seems to symbolize our constant striving to reach the heavens, or the beings that might dwell there. Since man first turned his eyes skyward, smoke has been used as a conduit for prayers, seen as the souls of the dead rising into heaven, for energy shifting and even communication.”

  The “beings that might dwell there”?

  Smedley cites the Vikings, Aboriginals, Native Americans, Taoists, and of course Christians and the Catholic Church for their use of smoke in sacred rituals. For millennia, when “primitive cultures burned their dead,” they saw in the rising smoke “the material manifestation of the soul’s journey.” Smoke is clearly a medium of detecting energy (and ghosts do have energy) much in the way that crystal balls, pendulums, and other divination tools can detect energy. This is a form of scrying, by the way—the practice of seeing messages or images through various mediums, be it a crystal ball, a reflective surface, or smoke.

  Pretty soon I’m taking hundreds of ghost photos in smoke with my iPhone, and sure enough, there is something in virtually every picture—and more than just one image. At first I see outlines. I see them shooting out of the pool and on top of the umbrella in our yard. I see one thing that looks like an ape sitting on one of our lounge chairs. Sometimes things appear as colors—purple and green—that aren’t visible when I’m taking the picture. I see these colors and outlines everywhere, even through our fence, as if something were peering at me through the slats. I nearly drive patient Suzanne crazy because I won’t let her sleep; I lie in bed every night examining photographs, asking what she sees. She never sees what I do; she always sees angels. (I might have left her alone if she’d agreed with my initial assessment of a particular ghost in a photo.)

  Anyhow, I don’t know who or what these ghosts are, but I clearly must have activated a big-ass portal, because more humanlike images appear: I catch a ghost that looks like he’d had the crap beat out of his face. When I first see him, I feel a sense of deep despair. I find a sweet-looking couple in my sage pot: Each one is resting their head on the other. (He has a long face and she has a rounder face with what looks like curly hair.) I call the photo Death Is for Quitters. I also catch a “pirate” with a horizontal knife tip under his nose. God knows what his story is. It’s almost like the neighborhood spirits got to a fork in the road, and instead of going right to the local Whole Foods, took a left and ended up at the lesbians’ house.

  But then, after a while, a strange thing happens: I start to capture not just human-looking entities; I start to capture, well, creatures.

  Remember how some quantum physicists have speculated that hyperspace could be regarded as an afterlife or a heaven? Well, now I’m really wondering if that hyperspace isn’t in my backyard, because the most unusual and fantastic-looking entities are starting to show up. In addition to photographing lots of animals (lions, tigers, bears, and a rat), I also capture a row of dancing chickens in one image. Yes, dancing chickens, dancing ghost chickens. In fact, the dancing chickens have an audience, or as I like to call them, “the dancing chicken club.” One of them looks like Stewie from Family Guy, another like a Keystone Kop. I start to capture entities that look like fairies, elves, the Muppets, princesses, princes, centaurs, dragons, and things that are hard to identify but that fascinate me. They look familiar—but not. Some look like they are looking at me, like really seeing me.

  A few have lights for eyes, like a creature I call “King Frog.” (His eyes look like lights and mesmerize me. He also has a club or scepter, because he’s a king, after all.) Other entities just pop their heads out of the smoke. One photo shows a man with a full head of hair, a stick body, and two flipper feet. I call him “Wolfman.”

  I also start to see entities in the swimming pool. The pool activity is insane. I shit you not. These entities or creatures look more magical than scary. I saw a prince and princess atop a mythical centaur-looking figure with a face of an old wise man who looks like a wizard.

  It is undeniably strange to see so many of these creatures in my photographs, and rationalizing what might be happening just doesn’t pan out. I’m still stuck on how much they look like they stepped out of a fairy tale. They’re so fantastic looking that I simply call them “fantasticals,” even though some of them look like familiar elves and gnomes, which might not be as wild as you think. Ever since we humans have recorded our history on stone tablets and papyrus, people have seen and documented the presence of mystical “little people,” be they Menehunes in Hawaii, aluxes in Central America, trolls and gnomes in northern Europe, or elves in Iceland. Many cultures believe that these tiny earth-spirit creatures and protectors of our planet actually exist in our dimension and are simply difficult to perceive with our limited senses. Like poltergeists (only a whole lot friendlier), these supernatural creatures often make themselves known when we are dicking around with our environment and messing with sacred sites.

  Elves are such a big part of Icelandic culture, by the way, that the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration actually builds highways with sacred sites in mind and has a standard five-page reply for the press. It states, among other things, that it “cannot be denied that belief in the supernatural is occasionally the reason for local concerns. . . . We value the heritage of our ancestors, and if oral tradition passed on from one generation to the other tells us that a certain location is cursed, or that supernatural beings inhabit a certain rock, then this must be considered a cultural treasure.”

  Did you get that, folks? Elves are a cultural treasure in Iceland.

  An Atlantic article titled “Why So Many Icelanders Still Believe in Invisible Elves” suggests that people in Iceland believe modern humans have become disconnected from “the inner life of the earth,” as one Icelander is quoted. “When elves act out,” she said, “they are doing more than just protecting their homes, they are reminding people of a lost relationship. They’re . . . protectors of nature, like we humans should be. We’ve just forgotten.”

  Ain’t that the truth?

  Obviously we’ve “just forgotten” a lot of stuff. Clearly Icelanders and other cultures that revere earth spirits have a purer relationship to nature than we do. We’re the ones, us New Worlders, who’ve forgotten about our relationship to Mother Earth, aka Gaia, our true home.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  House Clearing Like a Hooker

  When I was a little kid, I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there, and a mummy. When they were all hassling him, this guy who bought the house—I can’t believe I remember this—said to them, “Who’s paying the mortgage on this haunted house?” I thought that was really funny.

  —MINDY KALING

  I start offering my house-clearing services to anyone rem
otely interested in them. I’m an equal-opportunity house clearer and carry my protection arsenal wherever I go: smudge sticks, feather fan tool, black tourmaline. With my tendency to blurt, I come right out with it: “Hi! I’m learning how to clear houses. Do you want your house cleared?”

  Who’s going to say no to that? Nobody.

  Soon enough, I’m putting hundreds of miles on my car driving all over Southern California. I clear big and small houses; condos and RVs; hotels and motels; offices and corridors.

  Once I’m in a space, I always start at the bottom or lowest level and work my way up. I sit down on the floor, light my candle, and take three deep breaths, allowing my thoughts to clear and my inner/energetic body to expand with each breath. I set my intention, light my smudge stick with my candle, let it burn about thirty seconds, and gently blow out the flame. Then with the smoke trail I “trace” the seams of each room like I’m using a stick of incense. I go from the floor-to-wall seams, up all seams to the ceiling, using my feather tool to send smoke up along them. I also smudge the seams of windows, doorways (of rooms and closets), bookshelves, and mirrors. Waving my smudge stick or using the fan, I make the infinity sign, because it’s a perfectly balanced symbol that represents empowerment; I outline the sign with my smudge stick on staircases, over mirrors, and over drains (sinks, toilets, showers, bathtubs, washing machines, dishwasher) the same way. This symbol is particularly helpful in corners under furniture, or any place else energy feels “stuck.”