by Gary Jansen
I finished When Ghosts Speak a few days after Grace and Charlie came home from the hospital. I had expected to read the rantings of some over-the-top guru who went ghostbusting with a vacuum cleaner and a Ouija board, but it wasn’t like that at all. Mary Ann, a married mother of two and a devoted Catholic who lived outside Cleveland, Ohio, sounded perfectly sane. More sane than I had felt in recent months. She had a no-nonsense approach to the supernatural and spoke in down-to-earth language about topics that could otherwise rocket into the stratosphere. Reading Mary Ann’s book was like sitting at a kitchen table and eating cookies and drinking milk with your mom. Ghosts, or as she called them, earthbound spirits, were real. For her there was no question about that. She could see them the way she saw living people. Most of them were rather ordinary. Yes, they could move things or cause sounds to happen—sometimes they could cause temperatures to drop in a room—but they couldn’t fly around or float through windows, couldn’t predict the future or cast spells and most of the time they couldn’t hurt you.
An earthbound spirit’s personality was really determined by how the dead person had lived his life. If he was a kind person when he was alive, he was probably kind, albeit a bit disoriented, dead. If he was a jerk, well, most of the time dying didn’t change that and you’d have a jerky ghost hanging around sometimes causing trouble. Most people who died went to the other side, wherever that was. The ones that stayed behind either had unfinished business with the living or were lost and needed someone to show them the way to what she called the white light (these were usually people who were terrible with directions in real life . . . kidding). Okay, the white light stuff sounded a little woo-woo to me, but God had been described as light for centuries, so why not? Maybe some souls just needed a little guidance to show them where they needed to go.
Maybe that’s what was going on in our house. Maybe a ghost was like a fly.
Have you ever opened your car door and unwittingly let in a giant horsefly? You start up the ignition, pull out of your driveway, and soon thereafter you hear a buzzing and see something quickly fly in front of you and then disappear. It then circles and bumps into the driver’s-side window and falls down, crawls on the door handle, and then flies again, this time wedging itself where the windshield meets the dashboard. It crawls around now, maybe moves a remnant of a child’s thrown french fry, shakes up a bit of dust, and flies again. It can see the outside, but there is no way out. Then you open the window and the horsefly takes off and you never see it again.
Could it be that ghosts were like trapped flies and all they needed was someone to open a window for them?
I STILL HAD Mary Ann’s phone number on a Post-it note in my wallet. I decided that I wanted to make the call after all, so one night I talked it over with Grace, who asked me why I wanted to do this. I asked if she had still been seeing shadows, and she admitted she had, but she believed that it was probably just a symptom from her pregnancy.
“And Eddie is still not wanting to go into his room?”
“He’s anxious about the baby, that’s all.”
“And the toys?”
“We already went over this.”
“What about the time we heard the glass break in the living room?”
“Well, I’ll give you that one. I got nothing for that.”
“See?”
I asked her what the big deal was, and it took her a moment before she said that her grandmother had told her never to fool around with this sort of thing. If there was something in the house and it wasn’t bothering anyone, just leave it alone.
“But it’s bothering me,” I had said. “And it’s bothering Eddie.”
“We don’t know it’s bothering Eddie. He’s just a little boy and he doesn’t want to be alone.”
“But he won’t even go in the room with us.”
She said nothing. She was tired and, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have approached her with this so soon after she had given birth, but I needed to do something and not just read books.
“I just want to do this.”
“Doesn’t it go against being Catholic if you make this call?”
She had me there.
In the famous Witch of Endor story in the first book of Samuel in the Old Testament, Saul, the first king of the Hebrews, is in a very precarious situation. He is about to have his ass handed to him by the Philistines. He prays to God and, getting no answer, decides to visit a medium and trick her into conjuring the prophet Samuel, who had recently died. It was against Jewish law to conjure the dead, and the penalty was stoning.
When Saul saw the camp of the Philistines, he was dismayed and lost heart completely.
He therefore consulted the LORD; but the LORD gave no answer, whether in dreams or by the Urim or through prophets.
Then Saul said to his servants, “Find me a woman who is a medium, to whom I can go to seek counsel through her.” His servants answered him, “There is a woman in Endor who is a medium.”
So he disguised himself, putting on other clothes, and set out with two companions. They came to the woman by night, and Saul said to her, “Tell my fortune through a ghost; conjure up for me the one I ask you to.”
But the woman answered him, “You are surely aware of what Saul has done, in driving the mediums and fortune-tellers out of the land. Why, then, are you laying snares for my life, to have me killed?”
But Saul swore to her by the LORD, “As the LORD lives, you shall incur no blame for this.”
Then the woman asked him, “Whom do you want me to conjure up?” and he answered, “Samuel.”
When the woman saw Samuel, she shrieked at the top of her voice and said to Saul, “Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!”
But the king said to her, “Have no fear. What do you see?” The woman answered Saul, “I see a preternatural being rising from the earth.”
“What does he look like?” asked Saul. And she replied, “It is an old man who is rising, clothed in a mantle.” Saul knew that it was Samuel, and so he bowed face to the ground in homage.
Samuel then said to Saul, “Why do you disturb me by conjuring me up?” Saul replied, “I am in great straits, for the Philistines are waging war against me and God has abandoned me. Since he no longer answers me through prophets or in dreams, I have called you to tell me what I should do.”
To this Samuel said, “But why do you ask me, if the LORD has abandoned you and is with your neighbor?
The LORD has done to you what he foretold through me: he has torn the kingdom from your grasp and has given it to your neighbor David.
Because you disobeyed the LORD’s directive and would not carry out his fierce anger against Amalek, the LORD has done this to you today.
Moreover, the LORD will deliver Israel, and you as well, into the clutches of the Philistines. By tomorrow you and your sons will be with me, and the LORD will have delivered the army of Israel into the hands of the Philistines.”
Immediately Saul fell full length on the ground, for he was badly shaken by Samuel’s message (1 Samuel 28:5-20).
Things didn’t turn out too well for Saul after that, and though stoning has gone out of fashion in most of the world, throughout Church history consulting a medium to invoke the dead was seen as a grievous sin.
Why is conjuring so bad? Well, for starters, if a person believes in God, then that person needs to put complete trust in God. Contacting a psychic to find out about the future means that you’re anxious in some way about the future, which is a completely normal emotion. But ultimately God doesn’t want you to worry about such things. God will provide, and your wanting to know what’s going to happen tomorrow indicates doubt.
Second, it can be dangerous. As Pope Paul VI said, we know very little about the spirit world. It’s not that the Church denies the existence of an invisible world, it just warns against getting involved in any of it for the simple reason there is no rule book. No one knows how an unseen world works. Nor do people have any idea of what they ar
e getting themselves involved in, which is why it’s a no-no to play with a Ouija board.
Imagine for a moment that you sign up for an online dating service. You log in and over the course of a few weeks you begin to meet some people. Most of them seem too strange or boring for you, but then one person really seems to stand out. That person is good-looking and funny and has a lot in common with you. When you chat online, you have a great time, and unlike some of the other weirdos you’ve talked to in the past, this person leaves you alone. Gives you space. He or she isn’t a stalker and isn’t constantly bombarding you with e-mails asking how you are or forwarding you chain letters. Soon, you begin to feel at ease and share some of your innermost thoughts. You begin to really open up to the person on the other side of cyberspace.
After a couple of months your friend suggests it’s about time the two of you meet. You agree. You’re excited to finally see this person face-to-face, this person to whom you’re really attracted and who has, in a very short time, etched a place in your heart. So you agree to meet at a restaurant for dinner somewhere. The night finally arrives. You get all dressed up. You can’t wait and all day you’re buzzing around in anticipation. As you’re getting out of the car you notice a frightening individual walking toward you. This person introduces him- or herself as your friend, even though he or she doesn’t look anything like the person you’ve seen in pictures or in your imagination. This person then takes out a sledgehammer, smashes you in the head, drags your body into a car, drives away, and buries you in a basement somewhere in Canada.
Kind of like that.
Same applies for conjuring spirits. The truth is, you can never know for sure exactly who or what you are talking to. You may think the spirit that you encounter is kindhearted and benign, or even angelic, but you just never know.
I SAT THERE for a moment and rolled Grace’s question around in my head: Doesn’t it go against being Catholic if you make this call?
No, I reasoned. I wasn’t conjuring a spirit. The ghost was already here and if anything, it was conjuring me in its weird little ghost world. I just wanted confirmation it was here. I wasn’t going to etch a pentagram into the floor to call it forth and ask for its assistance in ruling the world. All I wanted to know is what it wanted and to get it the hell out of here.
“Don’t worry about that,” I had said to her. “Plus, have you heard some of the language that has come out of my mouth in recent years? I think those things trump this.”
“Good point,” she had said. She paused for a moment. Charlie, who had been sleeping in his crib in the dining room began crying. “Fine,” she had said. “Go ahead.”
The following day I called Mary Ann and left a message on her answering machine. I gave her my name, mentioned Peggy, and told her that I was the editor at QPB and that we were excited to be offering her book in paperback to members in the upcoming months. Then I asked her if she wouldn’t mind calling me back because I thought I had a ghost in my house (I couldn’t believe I said that to someone I didn’t even know). I then hung up and waited for her to ring me back.
IN HIS BOOK Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven but Never Dreamed of Asking!, Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College, well-respected theologian, and one of only a few people in recent years to talk about things that go bump in the night from a Catholic perspective, writes that there are three types of ghosts:
First, the most familiar kind: the sad ones, the wispy ones. They seem to be working out some unfinished earthly business or suffering some purgatorial purification until released from their earthly business. . . .
Second there are the malicious and deceptive spirits—and since they are deceptive, they hardly ever appear malicious. These are probably the ones who respond to conjuring at séances. They probably come from Hell. . . .
Third, there are the bright, happy spirits of dead friends and family, especially spouses, who appear unbidden, at God’s will, not ours, with messages of hope and love.
While I was sure Kreeft knew what he was talking about, wouldn’t a spirit from hell not be a ghost at all, but a demon? At one time, ghosts would have been human, and a human couldn’t become an angel because an angel was a totally different species. The way a cat could never become a dog, and a supermodel could never become an angel no matter what Victoria’s Secret said. Were there really damned human souls, and could they wreak havoc in our material world?
Moreover, Kreeft left off his list the poltergeist, or noisy spirit, like the one Father Herbert Thurston wrote about in his book Ghosts and Poltergeists. He defined a poltergeist as a “racketing spirit, which in almost all cases remains invisible but which manifests its presence by throwing things about, knocking fire irons together and creating an uproar, in the course of which the human spectators are occasionally hit by flying objects, but as a rule suffer no serious injury.”
And then there seemed to be ghosts that suffered some type of tragedy and didn’t know they were dead, or didn’t want to move on to the next stage of life after death.
As I waited for Mary Ann to call, I thought about which type of spirit might be in our house. Was it sad, angry, demonic, or some kind of poltergeist in training? I tried to put the idea out of my head and did so by praying the Rosary, asking God and the Blessed Mother for protection if it was necessary.
A couple of days had passed and we hadn’t heard from Mary Ann. Peggy had said she had a waiting list, but in the last forty-eight hours I had started to get cold feet. There hadn’t been much activity in the house since the baby came home. Maybe Grace had been right. If there was something here, it hadn’t harmed us—certainly, it had been disturbing, at least to me, and possibly to Eddie too, but maybe it was because we just didn’t understand what was going on. I began to feel sorry for it, without knowing what it was.
On the third night, the phone rang and an Ohio number showed up on caller ID. I grabbed the phone and a pen and paper to take notes and, without knowing why, ran upstairs to Eddie’s room, which I hadn’t entered during the past couple of weeks. I rested myself near my son’s dresser and clicked the phone to talk.
“Is this Gary?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Mary Ann Winkowski, how are you?”
She had a wonderful, warm Midwestern accent and instantly, any sense of trepidation that I had felt over the last few days melted away. With just a few little words I felt like I had known this woman my entire life.
We talked for five minutes about her book and how much I liked it. She said she was so happy with the responses she had received from so many people. She had been nervous about how it would be received, but she had gotten dozens of letters telling her how much the book had helped, and was glad she had written it. She was so sweet and genuine and I could have talked with her for hours, but we eventually got down to business.
She explained to me that she had the ability to determine if there was a ghost in a house by either being there in person or by listening over the phone, but the call needed to be made from a landline. Cell phones didn’t work for whatever reason. And since she was nearly five hundred miles away, she was going to give me a phone reading.
I told her I was ready. I had revealed almost nothing about myself. All she knew was my name, where I worked, and my phone number (which was unlisted and my address wasn’t available on the Internet or in the white pages). There was silence on the phone for a few seconds, and then she started asking me questions.
“Is there a yellow room in your house?”
“Yes.”
“And that room has no closets, correct?”
“Right.”
“And does a child live in that room?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s your son, right?”
“Right.”
She paused for a minute. I was impressed, especially about nailing the color of the room and the fact that it didn’t have a closet.
“Okay, now, who’s Maryanne?”
�
�Well, that’s you.”
“No, there’s another Maryanne.”
“Oh,” I had said, “that’s my sister.”
“Did she get hurt in that room?”
“Oh my God, she did. She accidently fell and cut her wrist on something sharp when she was a kid. I was a Boy Scout at the time and I butterflied the wound. To this day, she says I saved her life.”
“Who’s Merrick?”2
I paused for a minute and thought. I didn’t know any Merrick at all. “I don’t know,” I said. “You mean a person? A person named Merrick?”
“I think so,” she said. “That’s not coming through clearly, but I’m really getting Merrick.”
“Are you sure it’s a person?” I asked. “There’s a town named Merrick about six miles from my house.”
“I don’t know,” Mary Ann said. “I’m just picking up Merrick. I feel like it’s a name, but I could be wrong.”
She paused again and then asked, “Your house is over a hundred years old, right?”
“Yes.”
“And is there a glass box in the downstairs near a big picture window in the front of your house?”
“Well, as a matter of fact there is a glass box by the window,” I said. “Wow, you’re good.”
“I know,” she laughed before continuing. “It’s a tall box, with glass on three sides, right?
“Well, yes it is. You have access to some military satellite or something? My wife keeps these special plates in the box. She loves those plates.”
There was silence over the phone and Mary Ann was murmuring softly to herself.
“So, what do you think?” I finally asked.
“Well,” she said in a long way, resting on the double l at the end of the word. “You have a couple of things going on in your house,” Mary Ann had replied.
