We’ve all heard the stories of ghosts and goblins that some people like to save for after midnight drinking parties or camping trips in the woods. So I thought I would talk briefly about helpful ghosts. The kind and well-meaning ones that you can find in houses and public buildings everywhere, if you aren’t being a scaredy-cat and looking for the chain-rattling, poltergeist activity that is so often played-up on television.

Many buildings or sites of land have ghosts of the deceased attached to them. Some of them are defensive and don’t want to share but many of them actually like having people live there and share an affinity with them. Here are a few instances that I have personal knowledge of…

The Tender Pet-Lover

I lived with my Mom and her ex-husband when I was a teenager and we had this apartment that was full of ghosts. Mostly they were just curious. There was the weird cowboy-looking guy in the basement who liked to hand tools to you when you were fixing something. Then there was the little boy who just liked to watch you and play hide-in-the-shadows. And the last ghost was an adult male. He was the one that we saw the most. He seemed to care immensely about the people in the place and about the other spirits. My Mom was very attached to her pets and one morning awoke to find this particular ghost hovering above her bed. He simply said, “It’s okay. He’s okay now.” She had, of course, no idea what he was talking about. She thought it weird and then got up to go about her day. It was a couple hours later that she discovered one of her pets had died in the night. Then she understood that this ghost had come to comfort her, because he knew that she would be upset by her pet passing away. Because he cared.

The Ethereal Librarian

There was a university that I took classes at during my undergraduate studies, one of the oldest in the United States. Amongst the spiritual and ghosty-hunting crowd it was known to have a very strong ghost skulking about its library. Well, it must have been a librarian, because whenever you walked into this place and began walking about you would just instinctively be drawn to or get lost and find yourself miraculously in front of the section of books that housed the topic you’d come there to find. It happened without fail to me at least five times and to several other open-minded people that went into that building as well. You didn’t even have to be looking for anything, the ghost would somehow help you end up in a section of books that would appeal directly to your own interests. Very neat and helpful, and the university didn’t have to pay for this extra librarian. Cool.

Money Hoarding Ghosts

My grandmother and grandfather live an old farmhouse that was built by a friend of theirs in the 1940’s. After he passed away they bought the house. Now my grandparents are farmers and as you probably know, that’s not a very lucrative business unless you are Monsanto. So they have had financial issues off and on over the years. When my grandmother would get very stressed-out about these problems she would always have this dream where their old friend was in an upstairs attic room and he would ask her to follow him. he would walk her into the basement and point like a mad-man towards a specific part of the back wall of the basement. Now you have to realize that this man had passed away with a lot of money that his family fought about for years because they couldn’t locate a lot of it. Each of them probably thought that one of the other family members wasn’t telling something that they knew. Since this guy built the house, lock, stock and barrel, he was probably trying to tell my grandmother where he put t he money. For whatever reason, probably because our family treated her like she was crazed, my grandmother never looked behind that foundation stone. Years later they remodeled the upstairs attic room where his ghost used to hang out and no one has seen him since. :(

Ghost as Fire Alarm

My roommate and I currently live in a duplex that we share with our landlords. The house has been in their family for over a hundred years and their grandparents once lived here, before it was cut into a duplex. While the landlords were on vacation over the winter, we had an interesting occurrence. It was about midnight and I had just tucked into bed for the night. As I was falling asleep, in the twilight place between awake and asleep, I had a vision that startled me. I was laying in a bed in the corner of the room and all of a sudden it was like an old man appeared right in front of me, he opened his eyes and stared right into mine. His eyes were all bugged out like he was shocked himself and then he opened his mouth and let out an extremely loud and deep gasp. It startled me just enough to wake me up and when I woke up I realized that there was a strange smell in the apartment. It smelled like electrical fire to me and I had my roommate go around the apartment and check for anything weird. We both immediately realized that there was a haziness in the air near to the doors that go over to the other side of the house.

There were no fire alarms going off but this ghost was standing behind me now, his energy pressing on mine because of how upset he was and I know nasty burning smell when I smell it. We wanted to get over into their place to check for a source, so we immediately called the landlords on their cell. Once we had their permission to use the key and go in, we started walking through all the rooms in the house and could both immediately sense that all of the spirits that reside over there were running around freaked out. We both had one or two run right through us. They were making it hard for us to figure out what was going on. I settled on one room that seemed to have the strongest smell. I sat down and asked the spirits to tell me where the smell was coming from. The old man I had seen earlier said “It’s not here. It’s in the walls. Or it’s under the house. You have to protect the house.”

Thinking there might be an electrical fire in the walls I opted for caution at this point and called the fire department. The showed up in about 4 minutes and after a couple hours of complete mayhem it turned out that the heating system in the basement had arced-out and cause a smoldering electrical problem in its own regulator or some such thing. The fire department told us to call the heating company ASAP and get them to come out and replace several elements of the system. We stayed up until about 5 am waiting for everything to be replaced and only after the repairman came did the spirit activity calm back down. Once the spirits were no longer anxious, we finally went to bed. I woke up late the next afternoon still exhausted but feeling pretty good to know that the spirits here love this house as much as we do, and that there were extra “eyes” looking out for its welfare.

Not all ghosts or spirits are bad spookies, most of them have the same interests as you. They truly have a genuine interest in your continued happiness and the safety of your home. You don’t have to seek out interaction with them if you don’t wish to, but you certainly don’t need to jump to the conclusion that they are all in need of banishment or exorcism either.

Happy haunting! ;)

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