The Reluctant Medium

I found this article while Tweeting (I'm a Twitter addict - follow me). I love when I find others who 'understand' where I'm coming from and share like experiences. I found a woman named Melissa Van Rossum, who I realized through reading her blog, had a similar take on the situation I have been facing for the biggest part of my life. So I thought I'd repost her article.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, I began seeing ghosts when I was four years old. I didn't know they were ghosts because their appearance was normal, and they looked and acted much like anyone else you might see in your neighborhood or on the street. It wasn't until I was a little older that I began to realize that my friends and family members couldn't see these people as I did.

At first I found it frustrating, and even a little irritating that other people couldn't interact with my 'invisible friends', as they called them. And then it was confusing to me that I seemed to be bridging two worlds.

I never considered the idea that my friends were 'ghosts'. At such a young age, I wasn't familiar with the term. My playmates were real people, with their own feelings, ideas and opinions. Most of them were kind, and my playtime with them was very interactive. Like most children I had a favorite friend and she stayed with me for several years.

I began to recognize a difference between the two types of people in my life as my Father grew increasingly impatient with my persistence and insistence over the reality of my invisible friends. When his annoyance reached a fever pitch with my discussions with people he could neither see nor sense, he would bark, "that's enough, leave it alone," and I knew I was upsetting him. So, I tried to keep my interactions with my "other friends" limited to times when my family wasn't around.

To make matters worse, my Mother took me to the doctor and asked him about this habit of mine of talking to people who weren't there, and he pulled me aside and told me to "knock it off" that I was "scaring my Mother". I vowed then and there to keep this part of me as hidden as I possibly could.

I grew up in the 70's, a time before any sort of interest about ghosts, the paranormal or psychics became as popular and accepted as it is today. And to make the situation more complicated, we lived in a small Southern town in northern Georgia and my parents were deeply religious. So, as I grew older and the invisible visitors continued on in my life, I was considered odd.

No one in my family or community was familiar with ghosts, psychic children, the idea of intuition or dis-incarnates. In fact, they simply didn't believe in any kind of psychic phenomenon at all. To them, it was all baloney. To them, these things simply didn't exist. But in my life, I wasn't afforded the luxury of that kind of unawareness.

In my religious upbringing, you lived, you died, you were judged and then you went to heaven or possibly hell. I tried to believe what I was being taught, but here I was having a very different experience from what I was told was real.

At this time in my life, I still didn't realize that these people, my invisible friends, were dead people - and there's a good reason for that. They weren't. True, they had left their bodies, all for various reasons, but their spirit lived beyond their body and they were all very much alive. Of that I've always been certain.

It wasn't until much later in my life that I realized these entities I saw and felt everywhere I went were ghosts or earthbound spirits. And it would be even a few more years before I realized their purpose in my life.

Tried as I may to stick to my religious upbringing, my experiences were flying in the face of my church lessons. So, even though I've tried to deny the existence of ghosts, yes, I'd have to say that they do indeed exist.

Ghosts come from all walks of life. They are believers, non-believers, straight, gay, old, young, male, female and from all nationalities. The only commonality they share is that they refuse to move on to the Other Side as a result of different forms of fear.

Melissa Van Rossum is an accomplished psychic, empath and author. It is her life's work to help people awaken to their dreams by showing them how to tap into their own Divine Guidance. Their Way Home shares stories of her encounters with real life ghosts who searched her out in their quest to find their way home. To learn more about Melissa and her work visit http://www.theirwayhome.com