Field Guide to the Spirit World by Susan B. Martinez

Author:Susan B. Martinez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Occult
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2019-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Undeveloped mediums are the sport of lower spirits.

VINCENT CRAPANZANO, CASE STUDIES IN SPIRIT POSSESSION

Nightmares and hauntings may have a shared history; they may be two sides of the same coin. Consider the compelling story of Jan Bartell, a psychic of the second type: her nightmares were exacerbated by her own undeveloped psychism. A negative medium, Jan had the “gift” but denied it, preferring a “common sense” approach. Yet from the looks of her full-length, posthumous, autobiography, Spindrift, it may have killed her! An actress, Jan had taken a Victorian townhouse apartment (next door to Mark Twain’s old digs) in Greenwich Village, New York. Here, her sleep was disturbed by dreams of her own funeral and of wraiths that materialized out of the walls, sticking her with sharp glass and smothering her with sickly clouds “rank with decay” (echoes of Poe’s “moldy graves” or the ghostly stench at Bill A.’s place). Jan’s landlord admitted they had actually found a body in the walls, during renovations—“apparently a murder victim.”

On some nights, unearthly rappings kept Jan awake. There was “ghost cold” in the apartment, apported grapes, “fussy movements” of undetermined origin, vibrating moans that changed into the sound of “horrible strangulated gurglings”; there were footsteps, perfume (a lady ghost), orbs, odd noises, an ear-splitting crash (though nothing broke), a phantom woman in white, a spirit-cat. Her own cat would freeze, straining “to follow the progress of something”; then, a small table moved on its own about 18 inches across the room.

Desperate for relief, the still-skeptical Jan went to a psychic, as a last resort. The woman told her not only was there a presence—“some earthbound spirit”—in her apartment, but that she, Jan, was “a sensitive . . . [both] clairvoyant and clairaudient. . . . You, Mrs. Bartell, are a medium!” Jan was shocked. “So what kind of medium does that make me?” she asked sarcastically. “An undeveloped one,” the woman told her. “Obviously, your psychic faculties are operating without any conscious sense of direction. But conscious or not, they are operating.”*43

Some lingering negative force was using Jan. The editor’s postscript to her book reads: “Jan Bryant Bartell finished the writing of Spindrift in March of 1973. After delays in the typing—as one typist after another fell ill [emphasis added]—she delivered the completed manuscript to the publisher on May 14. . . . On June 18, Jan died at home. . . . The coroner’s report listed the cause of death as a heart attack”*44 (Bartell 1974, 28–29, 54, 158, 175, 101, 163, 178, 237).

More recently, the ghostly nightmare was reported by the popular medium James van Praagh. When he was a youth in a Catholic boarding school, his nightmares (seeing a boy being hanged in the presence of a priest) were not his alone: “Soon other kids had similar weird dreams about . . . a priest, a man, a noose, and a small child.” The objectivity of the grisly dream was eventually proven when a town historian came forth with the history of the old building that housed the boys.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.