What Creeps in the Night

    When I moved here to Charleston SC in 1995, there were many stories of haunts and haints. Some were called ghost stories and others were said to be local legend bore of the various cultures that colonized this area in the late 1600's.  To this day, we still tell these legends, in the early years they were passed down through generations by the family elders, the patriarchs and matriarchs who felt this to be important information. As a ghost tour guide, I tell these legends on ghost tours to those who come to hear. Until last night I believed these to be legend and though I have been off from giving tours due to an injury, a haint found its way to me.
   In the Lowcountry a "haint" is the Gullah word roughly translated as a ghost or a haunting. Some are rather specific like Boo-Hags or Plat Eyes, yet others can be more illusive in how they approach you.
   I laid down early as I felt sleepy quickly as if the sandman had blown slumber dust into my eyes.
For a time I fell into a deep sleep then something unusual, for me, began to happen; I started dreaming, at first it is me laying in bed; but then there a sense something is in my room. A darkened figure of a cloud shaped based churning like a tornado with the appearance of a head and shoulders. Whirling in circles around me as if waiting for me to fall asleep so it could enter my dreams. Soon I'm drifting to sleep, dreaming of this entity entering and removing me from me.
    After waking the first time, a second encounter attempt it made. My consciousness drifted to sleep again and began dreaming. This time it was of my dog getting up on the bed to sleep, with a chain around his neck. In the dream I reach down to pet him and he disappears while this chain wraps around my arm. This dream is in such vivid color and clarity I wake up still experiencing the feelings of a chain around my wrist. So vividly that I looked and while looking at my arm it was still there, circling me.
     With each dreaming, a waking to consciousness came to find that what was happening in the dream is still happening to me. A combat of wills ensued, this entity insisting on feeding on me wasn't prepared for my faith. Each time I came to be aware of it s decent into my consciousness, prayer saved me from an uncertain fate.  Though prayer kept this thing at bay, it only left after a very loud bellowing howl pierced the night just before sunrise. It left, it just left as if something had called it back, like a well trained dog.

   

Working in the Spirit

     Since before religion there has been this spiritual battle of good and evil that has been and still is in the back round of the larger picture of life. Lately I have been doing some soul searching of my own for the commonly contemplated cliche' question " What is the meaning of life?". More to the point what is the meaning of my life. It was the wisdom gained through this contemplation with a little help from signs. You know the ones, when you look up to the heavens because you are in need of divine intervention, with the utterance  " could you give me a sign" as if asking the Lord for vision when suffering temporary spiritual blindness of direction. Receiving those signs mostly because I watch for them.
   I tend to pray a great deal as well as meditate, this is where much of my readings beginnings come from. This is my ability to open myself as merely a vessel to the Holy Spirit; in turn I work within the spirit. You see, over the years giving readings, I have said things to people that I have no other explanation as to how I know. This also helps me to assist spirits that have remained for whatever reason that they have. To some what I do is extremely needed at the time they request me.
    The spirit is the key, for this is what lives eternal and I am not just talking about the Holy spirit; I am speaking of the spirit that is us as well. We are born, we live our lives according to what we do given the world around us; because once a spirit becomes embodied then it is subject to free will and temptation. In this stage of our beings becoming we are able to live our lives doing what is fair, honest, loyal, loving, charitable, humble and chaste, traits of the light of the Holy spirit. Embodied a spirit is also capable of cheating, lying, stealing, lusting, murder, disloyalty, bullying.
    After disembodiment is an entirely different story and this is also where I come in. When the spirit passes from embodiment to disembodiment a journey to the next step of living is to begin. One, that by speaking with spirits, is riddled with complications for some just as their embodied life once was. After death of the flesh is final it is still possible to rectify that which keeps thee from moving on.
   Some spirits need to convey good byes left unspoken, some want to apologize for actions done in the embodied life. Others are frightened and want prayer for reassurance that what was foretold to them is real and not just a story. For those spirits, it is to know that a pious life of righteousness was not embodied by them in vain, their life had meaning. Yet there are others that have no interest in leaving, life embodied was hell on earth and they intend to impose there misery upon the living embodiment of humanity. These are the spirits that are the most troubling for they are always the ones the the living embodied persons want removed because they fear them and what they represent.
    Investigators embark to explain with devices that which defies explanation. This is done with a variety of equipment and set ups to lure a result; but are the instruments picking up the actual spirit or merely the reaction to the spirits presence, Newtons laws " every action has equal reaction" like a pebble in a pond creating a ripple that spreads the water's surface until the initial inertia is exhausted.
    What has become clear is it is in the embodied life we expose our spirit to many temptations some that will influence our well beings far beyond the grave.