I just wanted to take some time to thank all of the amazing guests of CT Haunted History Tours in 2015.  I can't say enough what a pleasure it was driving with you through the history and haunted places of Connecticut.  You all added much to the experience and taught me a few things along the way. A few of you even scared me, which is saying alot at this point, honestly! It's always a good sign when you can give goosebumps to the lady leading the tour, lol.

A special thanks to those of you who added anecdotes and stories of Fairfield Hills. My stories from this amazing haunted location are few and far between, and so it is quite exciting to hear what your friends and relatives (and sometimes you!) experienced there. If any of you are comfortable putting me in touch with those people so that I may get first hand accounts, I would be forever grateful!

I hope you'll keep tabs on CT Haunted History Tours this year. I'm hoping to add a few more options for tours, including that blasted South Haunted History Tour, which has seemed impossible to get to. Any suggestions or thoughts you may have about the locations best to visit on this tour would be most welcome as I live in Fairfield, and what research I've done has not yet turned up many places. I am specifically looking for stories, legends or haunted locations in the following: Greenwich, Stamford, Darien, Rowayton, New Canaan, Wilton, Norwalk, Ridgefield, Redding,  and maybe even Westport. Any first hand accounts or leads on places we could potentially even go into (what an amazing thought!) are also most welcome.

In addition to haunted tours, I'm hoping to expand into the realm of the living (can you imagine?) with Connecticut Vineyard Tours, Connecticut Brewery Tours, as well as good old fashioned American History Tours of Connecticut. I will keep you updated as to these changes as they come about.

Again thank you so much for sharing your stories with me. It's so wonderful to hear how you all have had the otherside touch your lives in some capacity, for good or bad! (Hopefully more good, though). I've said it before and I'll say it again: I do believe that there is much about this world that we don't understand and I am humbled and grateful for what I've experienced and am most grateful for the people who have made all of those experiences so much more fantastic.

May the light protect and guide you in the new year! Happy 2016!

Is fear itself...

Or is that accurate?

It's hard to know with the way media treats spirits and ghostly visitors.  Often, we only really see one perspective of how interactions with the dead can go (think Paranormal Activity, The Haunting in Connecticut, etc.) 

That's why I like movies like Hocus Pocus so much.  Benign spirits are much more the norm than poltergeists or things with evil intent.

Most cultures, dating back centuries, have some sort of relationship with what we term "ghosts."  In Egypt, and Greece, for example, these spirits were said to have unfinished business.  That's why it was so important that a deceased person receive a proper burial and all of the rites.  

The first written ghost story we have comes from Pliny the Younger, written sometimes between 50 AD and 100 AD.  It's a wonderful story, and we talk about it on the tour.  The original version of the first written ghost story can be found here.  

In the story, a Roman philosopher goes to Athens to purchase a home to find that the home is haunted.  He waits up at night for the ghost and, when it beckons to him, follows it through the house.  When the ghost disappears, this philosopher places an X on the ground, and the following day, has worked come to dig in that space.  Unsurprisingly, they find a body.  The body is laid to rest in the proper fashion, and the philosopher goes on about his life without bother.

So, sometimes I wonder whether or not ghosts are in fact really all that scary.  When I think about the experiences I have had - lights turning on, feelings of unwelcome, and etc. - Nothing was outright threatening.  I don't really believe that spirits enjoy being a circus attraction, and more or less, want to be left in peace.  Otherwise, I believe they need help to move on, as in the story above.

In many ancient cultures, ghosts weren't things to be feared, but were things to be helped.  It was a grave situation (no pun intended) when a spirit didn't find it's way to the afterlife.  

This is the attitude I take on the tour.  I think that a spirit's attachments from their life can sometimes cause unwillingness to leave in death.  If they had a child, or a loved one they feared leaving, if they felt like they had left something undone, or if they felt they had done something wrong and needing to make amends - all of these things may be reasons why a spirit stays on after death. 

So, in my work I make it a goal to always be respectful and to help where possible the spirits that are open to moving on, while simultaneously keeping myself protected from entities that do have more sinister motives.

There's a wonderful story about this from the Cosmic Society's Donna Kent in which she helps out a man named Mr. Peet move on to the afterlife.  If you want more information, I suggest looking up her book, Ghosts of Southwestern Connecticut.

The thing I remember is waking up in bed and not being able to move.  That was alarming in and of itself.  Sleep paralysis wasn't anything I'd ever experienced before and was ignorant of at the time.  As my mind fought for consciousness, I became aware of a struggle happening.  It seemed like a wrestling match was occurring.  I felt scared and attacked, held down and gasping for breath.  I had been meditating the previous two days for almost 12 hours a day.  As I sat up in bed shaking from what felt like, for lack of another explanation, a psychic attack, I wondered if I had somehow left myself open and vulnerable from the transformational experience of marathon meditation.

That was in 2010.  I mentally thanked whatever being came to my aid, and freed me from the thing keeping me mentally and physically held down.  Was it my own self that was the champion?  Was it my own self that was the assailant?  I really couldn't say at the time.  I remember walking into my living room where my then roommate was sitting with her sister and trying to tell them what had happened.  They looked at me like I had two heads and insisted that I just must have been very tired.  We changed the subject.

I asked my yoga mentor and teacher about the experience and she said just to shake it off and try to move past it.  Psychic attacks weren't something that we were going to talk about, either, despite the many discussions about different dimensions of existence, spirits, guides, and angels that were ongoing during our teacher training course.  I remember feeling disappointed.  Why wouldn't she give me insight or advice into what happened?  I felt like she knew something but she wasn't telling me, but perhaps she just didn't really know what to say.

The subject was left unexplained and forgotten for years.

Then I met Janice Corsano (of www.miylana.com).  All of the sudden we were delving, quite literally into very deep harbored fears and anxieties.  She helped me uncover beliefs about myself that I had been holding onto and proving over and over.  Beliefs like I am not good enough, I don't know what I'm doing, no one cares about me; the list goes on.  Through this "de-programming", I began to see the falseness of these supposed truths, began to see how many times a day I was doing really positive things, was being responded to with caring and kindness, was being invited to join others in community and friendship.  It was eye opening.  Still, while exploring these basic issues and getting to the bottom of neurosis, I held on to a dark sense of anger, frustration with the world, and cynicism, especially towards matters of faith.  I was bitter and wanted proof that was not coming.

I expressed this frustration during one of the classes I attended on Spiritual Empowerment that Janice teaches.  I couldn't allow myself to believe that there was more to see beyond the eye, couldn't help but feel that to hope for more was delusional.  I didn't want others to think that I believed in fairy tales.  Fairy tales were only for children, I thought, and those ignorant of science and naive as to the way the world works. 

But I was feeling extremely alone despite the work I had been doing to expand and grow.  Janice responded that we are never, truly, alone, but it can certainly feel that way.  We talked about the idea that our angels and guides are always with us.  The idea brought tears to my eyes.  I, who had been feeling so alone and isolated for such a long time, couldn't help but imagine how nice it would be to realize I wasn't actually alone.

It stuck with me into the next day.  While driving, I forewent listening to my audiobook, and instead I began to shyly ponder the possibility of there actually being something akin to a guardian angel with me at all times.  It was just as I considered this that the stereo system suddenly came to life and the speakers began to play the sounds of my audiobook.  I was astounded.  Was it a fluke?  It felt too synchronistic for that to be the case.  Stereos don't just turn on by themselves, and the timing felt significant.  I took it as a sign, and began to revise my beliefs.  This is how I met my guardian angel who I call Radio.

 I had once been someone whose greatest ambition in life was to help deliver people back to their spirits.  Somewhere along the way, I lost my belief, had felt abandoned by God/universe/source, felt naive and taken advantage of, and so had abandoned my faith. Now the embers of my belief in something else were rekindled although I stalwartly refuse to put a name to what that is.  It is a personal belief of mine that we are not truly capable of comprehending the universe and its workings at this time.  

It wasn't long after my re-acquaintance with Radio, though, as it surely must be a re-acquaintance, that I began to have scary dreams.  I believe, now, that I was becoming more sensitive and that I had succeeded in raising my vibration such that things that were holding me back were coming to light.  

A particularly vivid dream left me certain that there was something antagonistic around me.

The dream involved several friends at a party.  I remember there was a beautiful blond woman there with wavy hair.  A friend approached her and asked if she would do the "thing where we disappear."  I watched in fascination as they sat across from each other in a crossed legged meditation and instantly disappeared.  

When they had both returned, I approached the beautiful young woman and asked if she could help me do it too.  I assumed the position and watched through slit eyelids as my body disappeared around me.

When I opened my eyes again, still in the dream, I was sitting across a wooden table from Janice in an upstairs bare room. The bright, vivid sunlight fell across the bare wooden floors and cast shadows onto the white walls.

I looked again and saw that Janice had transformed into a man.  The man went to the window and began to climb out, hanging from the sill and yelling in excitement and glee.  Concerned, I approached the window and nervously requested he come back in.  He made to start climbing back inside when he slipped.  In a rush, I grabbed him.  As soon as I took hold of his wrist; his face transformed, becoming blueish- his ears extended, and his lips curved into a triumphant grin.  No longer falling, and he held on tightly.  Almost weightless, he climbed back in through the window up my arms.  He pushed me back into the wall and lifted me off the ground.  I raised my fingers in the sign of the cross yelling that infamous chant of the movies, "The power of Christ compels you" over and again until, dropped unceremoniously; I landed awake and scared, once again, in my bed.  A sharp pain stabbed me in-between the shoulder blades such that my chest rose up in an arc from the bed.  I was exhausted and shaking from the vividness of the dream and the ache in my back.

I asked Janice.  In a departure from the past, Janice surprisingly said something to the effect of "Oh, that.  Yes there are beings that feed off of sensitive people and try to keep them in a lower vibration."  She said this like it was as common as getting a splinter.  We would deal with it, she assured me.

Surprisingly, when the day to deal with it came, a scheduling conflict kept us from doing whatever thing it is that Janice did for the particular problem of night terrors and feelings of psychic attack.  I had been in a funk all day, feeling apprehensive and angry at Janice for some unknown reason.  As soon as we realized the scheduling conflict, this feeling lifted.  I mentioned it to Janice and she said that that was not uncommon.  They try to find excuses and reasons to not be removed..

We rescheduled to the end of the week.  The night before the day, I had another dream.  In this one I was laying prone in a void, and a heart in the shape of a bird was being dragged away from me.   It was disturbing and I woke up with the greatest sadness.  

I barely made it to Janice's before I was crying.  I felt hopeless.  It was so different than the way I had been feeling recently.  As soon as I got there, Janice rallied me and we hopped into action.

Janice sat with me and led me into a meditative state.  She led me through a landscape to a room filled with my high white light angels, guides, and loved ones.  A handsome young man smiled and approached me as I entered the room, and I was delighted to recognize the personified "Radio."

We looked and found three beings attached to me.  The first was a blue humanoid with pointy ears and wings.  The second was a woman with a bonnet and an apron.  The third was a bird.  We started with the blue thing.  Janice had me ask him his name, and he said something that made no sense to me, then smiled and said just to call him Bob.  Bob had been with me for a long time.  During the course of the hypnosis, we found that Bob had been fighting for his life, trying to scare me back into my negative ways so that he would not have to leave me.  He had begun to feel sort of protective of me.  Bob, I recognized from the first two of my dreams, first in the one where he protected me from another entity assailant, and the second, where he tried to scare me into a lower vibration.  Janice gave Bob the option of moving on, and learning more about the higher energies.  She said that when an entity has been with you during a transformational period, it raises their vibration as well as yours.  Bob was ready to leave the lower realms and discover what the white light was about.

The second we approached was the woman.  Here was someone I recognized from yet another dream.  I had had a dream of children with blue eyes and blond hair playing hide and seek in the woods when I used to live in the East Village of NYC.    When I woke up, there was a pale spirit in the shape of a woman standing at the foot of my bed.  My roommate remembers me waking her with a drawn out "NO! Go away!" This was not something I had ever really thought about, passing it off as another bad dream.

This woman's spirit had been around for awhile.  She had stayed on for her kids, but didn't realize how much time had passed.  She was ready to move on, and she entered the white light easily and greeted her family.

The last we approached was the bird.  Gently, Janice asked me if it was really a bird that we saw.  I realized that no, it wasn't a bird, and watched as it transformed itself into a little boy with canvas shorts and a collared shirt.  He was scared and didn't know what had happened.  He had died, he said, but he wasn't sure how.  He was looking for his parents.  It was heartbreaking.  He had come to me, just the night before, because he saw that I was nice to children, he said (I work as a nanny), and he thought that I might be able to help him.  We approached the light with him, and encouraged him as he entered it and reunited with his family.

Having finished the removals, I lifted out of the hypnotic state to the feelings of exhaustion and elation.  My body felt somehow lighter, and I became aware of energy circulating in areas that I hadn't really been aware of before.  The pain between my shoulder blades, which had been chronic for years, especially when I would meditate, was gone.  

Since this time, I have had to do this process a couple more times.  Particularly sensitive, apparently, to taking on extra energies, I have found myself waking with odd pains that feel alien and shifting radiating energy that seems to come and go.  I have repeated the process both alone and with Janice's help.  Despite this, my critical mind can't help but try to find rational explanations for my experience.

Sometimes I think that your mind just makes things real.  Whether or not these energies existed, they existed in my head.  Perhaps they are just names and faces I've given to my own neurosis and the ritual of removing them is just a process that I happen to need in my therapy and growth.  The mind is very powerful, and the placebo effect not ineffective.  If you believe it will heal you, often, it will.

I find solace that the way other cultures looks at mental illness could be representative of the process I describe above.  Hearing voices, schizophrenia, depression, etc. in shamanistic medicine are referred to as the birth of a healer, and are recognized as spiritual crisis.  People who are beset by these issues are given treatment but are also heralded as a voice of the spirits. This article about shamanistic views on mental illness resonated with me.

How different would our world be if mental illness was treated as a spiritual crisis, which to my mind it undoubtedly is?  You can alter your chemistry to feel it less, but shouldn't we be looking at the underlying cause of the fear, depression, anxiety, ADHD, OCD, neurosis, etc.?  I know that talk therapy does some of this, but perhaps, this idea of energy attaching to us isn't as far fetched as people think, and maybe, just maybe, recognizing and releasing the "demons" we have harbored is a way to allow our minds closure that it isn't getting another way.

Either way you look at it, as a metaphor or a reality, I have found great use to this wisdom.  I personally think that there is much to the universe that we don't understand, as I've said, and have felt enough and seen enough now to be humbled as to the likelihood of my figuring it out.  I am not really concerned with being right, but very interested in doing whatever it is that helps myself and others to feel better, take control of our lives, and move closer to being who we want.  I am happy to say that beliefs and faith aside, I'm much more comfortable in my skin than I have been for a long while.  For that, I can thank Janice Corsano for being a constant source of nonjudgemental support.  After all, it's kind of a crazy world!  There just might be something to crazy ideas.