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

I’ve mentioned before that I live in an extremely haunted house. You may think either a house is haunted or it isn’t. Not so! I’ve lived in a few haunted houses in my day, and this house is extremely haunted.

Here’s how the truth unraveled:

When I looked at the house before deciding to purchase it, the realtor seemed reluctant to even take me to the dilapidated second floor, referring to it as an “attic”. Yet it had a large sitting room and two bedrooms. It was in a bad state of disrepair though, and the vibe wasn’t so pleasant. I assumed it was the water damaged ceiling and walls falling down that was causing it the icky feeling. It was an icky space. I thought this would be a good project and fixing it up would make all the bad vibes feel so much better.

Wrong.

The renter that was living in the downstairs at the time said she had a friend that wouldn’t go up there again because she had a “bad feeling” about what was up there. I still managed to convince myself it was just the decrepit state of affairs up there causing that feeling. You'd think that I, of all people, could differentiate.

I bought the house and started moving in. It was my first home purchase. I was on my own.

The first week I lived here, I maybe should have stopped unpacking, repacked and moved on. I chose to stay and it has been an adventure, to say the least, ever since.

At first, the experiences were relatively benign and I hadn’t actually seen any ghosts, just the remnants of their activities.
For instance, I would come home from work to find every single light on in the house. That’s including the “attic” and basement/cellar. Two places I never visited. On a few other occasions, I’d come home to find, in January mind you, every window in the house wide open, again, including the “attic”. On these occasions, I did call the local police department to come to check things out. After all, I was a young girl living alone. Of course, nothing ever turned up. I did have an alarm system installed as a precaution though. And frequently, the motion sensors in the system would go off. Even after the alarm company testing and replacing things, could never find a reason for the alarms. I eventually just had it disconnected.

At this point, I was pretty certain about what was going on here.

Then the whistling started. Oh my god, the incessant whistling! I could hear someone walking from room to room, day in and day out, whistling. For weeks, maybe months, it drove me crazy.

Really? No one hears that? Come on! Seriously, someone else has to hear that!

You may remember, at this point, I was terrified to talk to them, so I just took it as long as I could. Then one day, I just broke. I screamed out loud, “SHUT UP!”.

It stopped. Silence.

Aaahhh….It was just that easy. Why did I wait so long to do that?

You know I love a little validation, so here it is: A coworker of mine at the time was talking about her aunt and uncle’s house from her childhood. Then she stopped and looked at me and stated that they used to live in the house I live in now. Really? Then I became interested. She was saying that her aunt and uncle loved to have all the kids over and her uncle would usually just pace while watching over them and whistle little tunes the entire time.

I told her he still did.

It wasn’t long after that when I had my first sighting of those who I am sharing this house with. And things only get more peculiar from there…

Growing up, and even into my early adulthood, I don't ever remember asking myself, "Why am I here? What's my purpose? What's the meaning of Life?". Just never really came up for me. I've never been a dreamer. I never had aspirations. Just never has been my nature. I didn't dream of my wedding day like most little girls. Or a big fancy house to live in. Or what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was asked the question, I'm sure, when I was 7 years old or thereabouts, and probably gave a placating answer with a cute 7 year old smile. But things just are how they are for me. At least that's how it always was. Now I'm starting to wonder.

I feel like I made it through some obstacles and came out standing up and holding on to my belief structure, or lack there of, really. I come from a family densely populated with Christians. Every corner you look in, you'll find them. And not even the hypocritical Easter once a year variety. I'm talking the every Sunday No-Matter-What kind of Christians.

As a free-thinking adult, I am quite grateful to my mother for not forcing the religion down my throat. I was allowed to pick where and when I went to church. I never felt forced. If you ask my momma though, she'll say she "failed me" in that regard, which makes me sad because it's one of the things I'm so appreciative of. So, throughout my adolescence I did attend a Methodist church (I am now a recovering Methodist). I'm looking around and everyone else seemed to be getting something I just wasn't getting. I'm a determined person, so if there was a bible study, I was there. If there was a choir to sing in, I was there. If there was a mission trip to take, yup, I was there. After a while, I felt like I had as much information as I needed to gather. Then I looked around and just thought,

"Really? You people are buying this?".

And that was pretty much the end of that. I just don't buy it. Believe what you want to believe. Really. It's fine with me. I encourage you to find your own personal truth. I'm not a real faith-based gal. I need some tangible proof, folks. Some man on a pulpit reading me things from the perspective of some other man I have no connection with didn't sit well with me. He's telling me I just have to take his word for it and it won't be proven until I'm dead? I personally believe that the reason a lot of the ghosts hanging around are doing so because they believed in the judgment they would face at the time of their death and are simply scared to death (pardon the pun) to continue on their journey. It never sounded like something I wanted to do.

Like I said, that was pretty much the end of that for me.

The point is, I didn't cave. I was strong enough to make the decision based on the information provided to me and stand by it. There has to be purpose for that, right? Otherwise, I'd be sitting in a pew with my Nanny on Sundays. Nothing would make her happier. But I feel like that is not included in my purpose. I have other things to do with my spiritual energies.

Then I look back over the past few years and I notice that things seemed to fall into place for me to accept and develop this ability. I moved into a haunted house, possibly, the most haunted house ever. Seriously, it's crazy over here. (I'll be telling you some more about that later on). I began to meet some like-minded, or at least open-minded people that allowed me to open up about this little by little. My son came along and became the "why" that tipped the scales. The pieces just fell into place in a way that the Universe might as well have been screaming directions/suggestions/intentions at me at the top of her lungs. I guess I'm dense. I'm on the right road now though. Got it, Universe! Got it.

There must be a purpose, right?

Now the questions come...

Why am I here?

Why can I do the things I can do?

Why this place? This time? These people?

And as time goes on, I keep running into other little side abilities I have (another story for another time...it's coming...I promise). Every time I bump into one of those additional abilities, it just creates more questions. This cannot be a random thing. I do not believe in a god, but I do believe in a spirit and a soul and things most people cannot see. I can see them. It's all the proof I need.

What am I supposed to do with this?

What is my purpose?

That's the question I'm determined to answer. It may take the rest of my life, but I'm pretty tenacious. Stick with me on my journey. There's always room for one more. Maybe we can help each other along the way.