The Ghost Photographer

by Julie Rieger

  “He said, ‘Tell her that my name is Ron.’ ”

  I freeze. I literally freeze. Every cell in my body feels like it’s bristled. I can deal with ghosts and aliens, but there is only one word that is still a trigger for me. And that word is “Ron.”

  “Hello? Are you still on the line?” Alex asks. “So why would he say, ‘Tell her that my name is Ron’?”

  For the answer to that question, dear reader, we have to travel back in time to a sunny day in 1982 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve just become runner-up in the state golf championship and am in a state of bliss. It doesn’t matter that I lost. I am twelve years old and just set a record for the youngest ever to finish runner-up. And I am quite a vision, too: Nike tennis shoes, shaggy hair, brandishing a three iron from the tee box. I’m a misfit among the proper golfers, and it’s this misfit’s day to shine. Local television stations and the Tulsa World newspaper interview me.

  After the interviewing hoopla is over, Mom and I head toward our wood-paneled station wagon. We’re joined by Ron, my stepfather: tall, chunky, dark hair, big-ass sideburns, and reeking of Aramis men’s cologne.

  When we get to the car, Mom decides that she wants to visit the ladies’ room before we start our ninety-minute journey back home. With a giant smile on my face I put my clubs in the car, change shoes, then hop into the backseat. Ron proceeds to get in the passenger side of the car. Then all of a sudden he turns around and backhands me so hard across the face that I slump over like I got hit by a frying pan.

  “Why did you tell that reporter your dad’s name was Tom Rieger?” he asks.

  “Because it is,” I reply.

  “I have had to put up with you all these years; the least you could do is give me some credit,” he shoots back.

  I just lie there in the backseat, alone with my abuser, feeling scared and strangely guilty. This moment of glory, one of the greatest moments of celebration in my young life, is suddenly killed. Darkness has irrevocably extinguished the light.

  Mom comes back from the clubhouse and hops in, so proud of her daughter. She proclaims that we stop somewhere special for lunch and celebrate. To which I reply: “It’s okay, Mom, we can just go home.”

  I don’t feel much like celebrating. I won’t feel much like celebrating for many, many years to come.

  Why didn’t I tell my mom about Ron, my abuser? Why didn’t I tell her about the horrors I suffered for years under the hands of this asshole? I’ve been asking myself that very question for an awfully long time. The answers can—and do—fill countless books on the psychology of abuse. They’re also a familiar part of an ongoing tale about male dominance that’s been part of our culture for millennia and still makes headlines today. (My #MeToo moment happened decades ago.) But here’s the short version: In my twelve-year-old mind, I thought that if I told my mom about Ron, he would kill me or my mom—or both of us.

  You’re probably wondering where my mom was during his abuse. Well, she was often on the road for work traveling around Oklahoma and Kansas. That’s when my abuser would strike. Sitting in the kitchen one night when Mom was away, he ordered me to move the television set where he could see it better from the living room. I did as he wished, with an attitude. This pissed him off, so he picked up the glass saltshaker, threw it at me, and hit me smack-dab between my eyes. He was a good shot, too. I still have the scar on my forehead.

  Another time we were unpacking my grandmother’s shell art (sounds hideous, but it was cool) when I stubbed my toe on a wood frame—and that SOB laughed at me. Under my breath I whispered “asshole.” He heard me and ended up chasing me into my bedroom. The (not) funny thing is that I knew exactly what to do: I knew that if I dove facedown onto my bed, he’d only have access to my back and I could protect my face and vital organs. The bruises he inflicted on my body remained for a good two weeks.

  This kind of abuse, large and small, went on for years. However, there was one beating that hurt the most and lodged itself deep into my psyche, and it wasn’t even physical. It didn’t happen on a holiday or a birthday. Just a day when I stayed home from school with a sinus infection.

  It’s dinnertime and Ron says, “Julie, get your fat ass up out of that chair and set the table.”

  I stare at him for a brief moment, planning my next move. Then I proceed to get my fat ass up out of the chair and set the dinner table. There are four of us in the household—Mom; Ron; my brother, Tom; and myself. I set the table for three.

  The next move is probably the most pivotal and courageous move I’ve ever made in my life: After setting that table, I turn around, walk out of the kitchen, and head out of the house toward the street. I have no plan, just pain. I stand at the end of our driveway, look both ways, then decide to walk left toward the railroad tracks and make my way to my friend Reese’s house.

  Ten steps into my great escape, I hear my mom yelling. My mom doesn’t yell. She keeps her cool all the time; she is always in charge. I can’t make out what she is yelling about, but I keep walking. Clearly she’s aware of the exchange that happened in the kitchen.

  I’m scared to death, though there has always been a part of me that is warriorlike. I’m never a bully. I hate bullies. I always have and still do stand up for those being bullied. I guess you could say that I bully the bullies. I can thank Ron for that. In that moment decades ago, I ponder marching back into the house to apologize for being disrespectful.

  But I don’t.

  I keep walking.

  I make it about four houses down when I hear a door slam and a car engine start. Oh shit, I think. It’s Mom. I know the sound of that blue 1981 Toyota hatchback anywhere.

  She pulls up next to me and waves me into the car. I get in, begrudgingly. I don’t look at her out of fear and disgust for her having married Ron. She drives over the railroad tracks to a shitty suburb in our shitty town. Everything feels shitty in that moment. Fifteen minutes into the drive, it dawns on me where she’s going: toward the batting cages.

  Once we get there, Mom hands me a bat and a stack of quarters for the automatic pitching machine. Then she sits on a bench, just watching me. I can’t begin to imagine what’s going through her head. About an hour goes by, during which I hit each consecutive ball harder, imagining that it’s Ron’s head. Finally I’m tired (remember I have a sinus infection) and out of quarters. We get back into the car and head home.

  Not a word is spoken from the time she motioned me into the car to when we return home. I look around as we walk into the house.

  “Where’s Ron?” I ask.

  “He’s gone,” she replies matter-of-factly.

  Later I figure out that at the batting cages she was not only giving me an opportunity to vent, she was stalling me long enough for Ron to pack his crap and get out of the house.

  I didn’t see Ron again after that night until twenty-eight years later, at my mom’s memorial. I realize now that what I did that night was save myself. I took a stand in order to survive. I didn’t tell my mom the full breadth of the abuse I suffered from Ron, either, until years after that fateful night. I internalized the abuse for so very long. Ron became code for my weakness, which took me years to work through. The word “Ron” became my kryptonite, the one thing in this world that emotionally could bring me to my knees.

  Now here’s this “hat man” or “shadow person” communicating with Alex and using “Ron” as a foil to prevent me from helping him. How incredibly clever. Whatever this force is—I want to call it the Devil, pure evil—it seems able to draw on people’s personal history to scare them. This deep, dark Debbie Downer of the universe isn’t channeling Ron (and Ron is still alive as I write this, by the way). No, it’s using Ron as a way to obliterate me and distance me from Alex. It had somehow “entered our dimension,” as Hufford put it, and “slipped into our side.”

  Why, though? Why would this entity want to push me from Alex? Here’s my short answer: There are dark forces out there in the invisible ecosystem, and they’re drawn to people not
because those people are dark themselves, but because, on the contrary, these people are light. And the only thing that can dispel darkness is the light. As inspirational speaker Iyanla Vanzant once put it: “And perhaps you thought, ‘Because I’m doing so much spiritual work, I’m only going to attract angels.’ No! The more spiritual work you do, the more darkness you attract. Because the light don’t need more light. The darkness needs light! The light doesn’t need more light.”

  I firmly believe that this dark force wanted me away from its prey: Alex. It didn’t want a lesbian ghost photographer/medium messing around in its turf. It wanted to find my weakest point and bring me down—but that wasn’t going to happen.

  This was the moment I came to understand in a visceral way that we humans have spiritual power over disembodied spirits precisely because we inhabit bodies. This was when I also understood that this is our essential power, and it can protect us.

  I can’t diagram this out to Alex on the phone, of course, so my conversation with him is brief. I explain that Ron was my stepfather and that the word “asshole” was a nice way of describing him. “Your hat man guy was trying to mess with me through you,” I explain. “I knew it the very second you said his name; I felt it throughout my entire body. If there’s one word that has the ability to provoke me, it’s the name Ron.”

  “But why would it be trying to get to you through me?” Alex very earnestly asks.

  “Because it knows. The hat man guy knows that I’m trying to help you get rid of it, and it doesn’t want to leave.”

  “But how does it know?” Alex persists.

  “They know everything, Alex.”

  To date, Alex hasn’t seen the hat man again. “The Devil is afraid of me!” I said, laughing, the last time we spoke about this crazy event.

  Alex nodded with a “no shit” look on his face. “I don’t think I’ll see him ever again,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

  Guess what? Alex most likely will never see the hat man again; he’s protected now. He understands the importance of having spiritual rituals and asserting his human dominance.

  This act of protecting ourselves and warding off dark spirits, by the way, is as old as Job. As Duff wrote in her book, “Most cultures provide practices—prayers, amulets, locks, or communal sleeping arrangements—to ward off visitations in the borderland between waking and sleeping, for the nearness of sleep dismantles our daytime defenses, and renders us naked and vulnerable.”

  In addition to evoking God and other higher powers, some cultures even suggest telling these spirits where they can go shove it. According to Hufford, a person on the island of Fiji waking up from sleep paralysis “is often asked to immediately curse or chase the spirit of the dead relative, which sometimes involves literally speaking to the spirit and telling him or her to go away or using expletives.”

  How do you say fuck off in Fijian?

  Here’s the deal: We don’t have to be “naked and vulnerable,” but we are all indeed connected—we’re connected to the light and to the dark, because we’re part of the invisible ecosystem whether we believe it or not.

  An article on Lifetrainings.com called “The New Science: We Are Made of Energy, Not Matter” describes the world of quantum physics; how we’re made of atoms, and how atoms are made of energy waves. When atoms collide, it’s not their “matter” that meets. “What [quantum physicists] see is that when two atomic waves meet, they either meet in synch, creating a constructive or harmonious effect, or they meet out of synch, creating a destructive effect in which they annul each other.”

  The same thing happens with people and spirits because we, too, are all created of atomic energy waves. And “because it is impossible to separate waves, the new science says . . . [that] we are all connected—our waves are always meeting and getting entangled in each other.” It’s from this “entanglement” that we can feel good or bad vibes; that we’re “magnetically attracted” to someone or instantly repulsed.

  Either way you slice this cosmic pie, there’s no denying that we’re all invisibly “entangled” in good and bad ways. When it’s bad, it can be very, very bad. But when it’s good, well, it can be as good as a damn Pop-Tart.

  And I mean that literally.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Pop-Tarts

  An invisible thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, and circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle but it will never break.

  —ANCIENT CHINESE PROVERB

  Not long after my mom dies, I have dinner with the brilliant Theresa Caputo, aka the Long Island Medium. She’s in town for a small dinner hosted by TLC as part of their upfront presentation to the advertising community. I’m invited because the TLC folks knew how much I love her show. Needless to say, I’m ecstatic to meet her.

  Suzanne and I arrive early at the fancy Italian restaurant in Santa Monica and watch Theresa arrive outside as guests start to roll in. To my surprise, as soon as she walks through the door she comes right up to me, chewing the side of her lip. “Hi, I’m Theresa,” she says, extending her hand for a proper lady handshake.

  I grab her hand. “I’m Julie,” I politely reply. “So nice to meet you.”

  “So, Julie, did you recently lose your mom?”

  “I did, yes.” I should be surprised by her greeting, but, hey, this is the Long Island Medium I’m talking to.

  “Let me tell you something,” she continues. “You mom’s been bugging me since we pulled up out front. She’s a funny one, your mom. The first thing she said was, ‘My daughter is so excited to meet you.’ Then she went on to tell me that you can do what I do.”

  “She said what?” I think I’m actually turning red with embarrassment.

  “Your mom told me and is telling me again right now that you can do what I do.”

  “Oh, good grief. My mother was the best mom on the planet, Theresa, and she thought I could do anything. One time when I was just fifteen years old she told me that I could do anything a man can do—even better. So I think she’s just a proud momma and still thinks that.”

  “You may be surprised one day, Julie,” Theresa says.

  Well, yeah, I was surprised one day—and I’m still surprised. Theresa Caputo is extraordinarily talented and I’m not nearly in her league, but I am starting to cultivate my own psychic gifts. When my mom passed away, of course, I thought that I’d lost a connection to unconditional love, faith, God, any sense of joy. I thought that I’d live forever with a sense of meaninglessness and profound grief. But I got it all wrong. In the end I gained not only an even greater connection to these things, I was able to transform grief into healing while harnessing superpowers that I never knew existed.

  I also found peace with the grief of my own life: being an abused kid, having to deal with the challenge of coming out again and again and again—because you never just come out once. Every encounter brings with it the challenge of intuiting how open or closed a person might be. It’s a constant dance and struggle.

  To say that this path through grief was unorthodox is an understatement. I started with the Holy Ghost and ended up with real ghosts, spirit entities, etheric creatures, aliens, and dancing fucking chickens.

  You may not believe any of this, or you may only believe parts of it. I wouldn’t have believed it had I read this book ten years ago. When something deeply challenges our belief systems, we usually write it off as false because the alternative is to open the door to chaos.

  Well, I swung the door wide open to chaos and gained an all-access pass to the universe. Some might consider this experience grounded in faith or truth; I just call it fact. Faith is knowing that something exists without any proof. Truth, on the other hand, is a mix of facts, faith, and illusion. A fact, however, is undeniable. And when a fact disrupts our truth, we either deny it or tango with chaos.

  It’s a fact that I can now talk to my mom and to other ghosts. I’m in constant touch with my guides and can see, smell, hear, and feel things t
hat belong to the Other Side. I’m not saying that this whole process was easy, either. The old adage “no pain, no gain” is true. But pain and grief are part of life; they’re a catalyst for growth. Brenda and my spiritual posse brought that point home and helped me perceive the world not in black and white but in Technicolor. Eventually the light made its way into darkness precisely because I had suspended my own disbelief and judgments and embraced chaos. I kept my heart and mind open and wrangled with the extraordinary. Once that all happened, I could really believe.

  There are the stories in our lives that make us wonder how, when, and where we are all connected. Where do ideas come from? How and why do they come to us? I love the movie Avatar for the overall narrative premise that we’re all connected: the energy of the trees, people, animals, water, and deceased loved ones.

  Sometimes, in fact, we’re connected in the oddest little ways. It’s almost as if the universe has a sense of humor. This point comes home to me one day when, feeling like I was run over by a truck, I pay a visit Dr. Szeftel, my ear, nose, and throat specialist.

  “Julie, I need you to lie down,” Dr. Szeftel says.

  I follow his order without question (which is proof right there that I’m really sick).

  “Does your neck hurt?” he asks.

  “No,” I respond.

  “Shoulders?”

  “No.”

  “Bend your knee, please.”

  “What are you checking her for?” Suzanne pipes in.

  “Viral meningitis. I’ve known her too long, Susan”—everyone screws up Suzanne’s name—“and she’s not right,” he replies. Then he releases another round of rapid-fire questions and I respond to each:

  Do you have any rashes? No.

  Headaches? Yes.

  Herpes? No.

  Are you sleeping? Yes.