This is common for me and my kids. We call them “The Mimickers”.

The first time this happened to me, I was sure I was going crazy. It was Valentine’s Day when I was in my freshman year of college. I had prepared a heart-shaped pizza for my boyfriend and as it was coming out of the oven, I heard him call for me from the bottom of the apartment stairs letting me know he was home. Perfect timing I thought, as I had just pulled the pizza from the oven. I yelled a hello back and waited.

And waited.

Nothing. I went to the stairs to find the door still closed and locked. He arrived several minutes later and I decided to not say anything to him about hearing him arrive earlier. I actually thought I was hallucinating and knew he would think the same. In all my dealings with spirits up to that point, none had ever attempted (and succeeded) tricking me in this way.

Nowadays, I generally ignore this attempt at trickery. My older son has also grown accustomed and learned to ignore it. But every now and then, they get us. There have been times one of the kids will get up and run to the stairs and when I ask what they’re doing, they’ll say, “Daddy’s yelling for me!”. I then remind them that Daddy is at work.

Sometimes, they will come to me and say, “What?”. When I look at them quizzically, I’ll be told that they heard me yelling for them.

Usually it’s just a word or two and most often our names. There’s never any sort of response or conversation if I yell back. But one day, they got me good.

It was a morning my husband was heading to work and I knew he wasn’t feeling well. But he toughed it out and got up and headed into work anyway. Still laying in bed, I heard him leave and the car drive off. About 30 minutes later (still laying in my bed), I heard the front door open and close. Then I heard my husband’s keys jingle as he hung them on hook by the front door where he always does. He then proceeded to the bathroom, followed by some shuffling in the kitchen. I assumed he had decided to call into work and come back home to bed. I listened as the stairs creaked when he walked up them. Then his office door opened and shut. I figured I see him back in bed any time now…so I waited.

And waited.

Eventually I decided to get up out of bed and check on him in his office, only to find he wasn’t in there. Or anywhere else in the house for that matter. Even though the routine of sound was exactly what he normally does upon returning home. I assumed he had left to go back to work and I just missed that part. Maybe I dozed off?

Later that morning I called him at work to see how he was feeling and to ask what he forgot and had to come back to the house for that morning. He seemed genuinely confused. “I didn’t come back to the house.”, he says.

Oh.

Then I knew what had happened. He was quite alarmed as he was convinced someone had been in the house. I did manage to convince him that no one had been in the house, and he calmed down a bit.

Recently, I spoke with a woman on a blogtalkradio show who has had similar experiences, only instead of auditory trickery, it’s visual. She and her children have seen her “husband” about the house when he’s not home. She says he never talks, just as mine never show themselves.

I’m not sure why they do this. I’ve never felt threatened by this activity, sometimes annoyed, but never threatened. So I suppose it’s just something I’ll continue to experience…

Our next show is scheduled for Thursday July 29, 2010 at 2:00 PM. We will be discussing our experiences during filming at The Jailer’s Inn in Bardstown, KY. If you have had any experiences during a stay at this location, or just have a question please give us a call while we’re on the air. Visit the show page for all the details.

If you are unable to join us live, you can still share your experiences or ask your questions by calling our Spirits of Bourbon Country Hotline. Leave us a message and we’ll answer your question or play your story on the air during the live show.

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Ever have one of those days where you just feel “off“?

I was having one of those days. It didn’t help that it was a thousand degrees outside and I got lost driving downtown with no air conditioning in the car. So, when I arrived, I was not only frazzled from the disorientation, but soaked in sweat. Great.

I did what I could to straighten myself out (and dry off a bit) before going in.

I just couldn’t ‘connect’ as much as I wanted to. I could feel energy changes from room to room, but just couldn’t pinpoint the who/what/where/why’s of the situation. At the very least, I could verify that this poor girl wasn’t crazy. There was something going on in this house.

Ugh. I hate the feeling that I’m being useless…

I did what I could to send this spirit on it’s way. Usually when the process is complete I feel a level of certainty. This time, all I could think was that I hope it worked…

Relief did come for me, though, when a few days ago my friend received and email from the father stating that his daughter was once again sleeping in her bedroom with the lights off and door shut. He also said they had no unusual experiences since our visit and thanked us for “whatever it was” we did.

Whew…

I walked into a large mansion, possibly a castle. I didn’t see the exterior, just the large double doors opening and welcoming me to walk through them. So I did. As I stepped inside, I found myself perplexed about where I was and exactly what I was doing there. But the draw to keep moving forward was strong. Somehow, I knew I needed to be there.

I found myself taking detailed mental notes of my surroundings looking for some clue as to the purpose of my presence here. I noticed right away in the foyer that the only light in this structure was the sunlight creeping in through the windows. I felt directed to move into a room on the right where I found a dining hall of royal proportions. Looking up, the ceiling was at least three stories high. The windows were narrow and in excess of twenty feet high. Looking straight ahead of me, I saw a lengthy dining table with many prodigious wooden chairs. Just past the table was a vast fireplace with ornate carvings in the wood all around. And a single adorned chair with a crimson red cushion, seeming out of place next to the empty fireplace. An enormous mirror was hanging above. In fact, there were several mirrors hanging about the room as I looked around.

I began to feel nervous. Still wondering why I was here. And why I was alone. Then I realized that I could only look to my right side. Whenever I looked to my left, everything faded away into pitch black. This was incredibly disconcerting to me and elevated my level of anxiety. I felt hobbled in some way and felt the need to continuously turn to my right as to be aware of my surroundings at all times. I’m sure I looked quite silly spinning about the room.

I stopped circling myself when I became aware of a team, of what looked like moving men, coming in from the opposite side of the room. They were wearing uniforms of some sort, including gloves and carrying an over-sized mirror toward me. Yet not one of them seemed aware of my presence. I watched them intently as they, with great focus, moved toward me and eventually placed the mirror on the floor next to me, leaning it against the wall. When their mission was accomplished, they walked past me, without one bit of acknowledgement, and proceeded out the door I entered.

I was suddenly very interested in this mirror placed beside me. It seemed like a normal mirror. Enormous, but normal. It was not decorated like everything else in the room. In fact, it had no frame at all. Just a giant piece of reflective glass. Why was it placed here? For me?

I reached out to touch it and when I did, I was startled to find my hand went right through it. The “glass” rippled like water. I pulled my hand out and the mirror returned to it’s original state. I looked down at my hands to find I couldn’t see them. Almost instinctively, I held them up to my right side, because I figured I could see everything else only to the right, maybe this would rememdy the disappearing hands…turns out the only way I could view my hands was on the other side of the mirror. I was baffled by this and transfered my hands in and out of the mirror, expecting at some point when I pulled them out, I would be able to see them again. Never happened.

This would have gone on indefinitely I suppose, but my attention was attracted by something else across the room. In that single adorned chair with the red cushion by the fireplace, there was now a woman lounging with her legs thrown over the side and her head resting on her hand across the other. I stared at her for a few moments taking all the mental notes I could. She was about as different from me as you can get. She was a black woman, perhaps ten years younger than myself dressed in a pink professional skirt suit with a pillbox hat to complete the look. Perhaps the outfit was to let me know she was from the early 1960′s. I mean, if she showed up naked or in a flowing white robe, I’d have no cues to place her, eh?

I suspect she was aware of my note taking and when she felt I had had ample time to process the details, she locked eyes with me. Suddenly, she was standing in front of me. She didn’t arrive there by standard means, mind you, but didn’t just appear there either. She rapidly floated over to me. Seriously, it was a fraction of a second.

We were then standing eye to eye. Then I realized who she was.

She was me.

Or I was her. Huh?

Who’s experience was this? Did she show up for me, or did I show up for her?

Wait…it hit me. We were the same. There was suddenly no difference between the two of us. There was no longer two of us. When the revelation hit me, the room around us began to spin like something from The Matrix. For a brief moment, we shared a consciousness.

No words were spoken. The moment was over. I woke up.

I still have many questions surrounding this encounter. Such as, why? What did I take away from this experience? Did I give her something? Why that moment in my journey, this time around, was I given the opportunity to come face to face with myself on a completely different journey? Am I supposed to do something with this?

There is one thing I carry with me from this experience:

The certainty of my soul living life more than once was solidified for me that evening while my body slept and my soul had one of it’s many adventures.

I had a feeling we’d have an interesting evening, because right off the bat, I heard footsteps above us on the empty second floor. The upstairs has also had several reports ranging from odd, unexplainable sounds to full bodied apparitions.

There were four of us there on the team to investigate, so we broke up into pairs to begin the investigation. I went to the second floor with one team member while the other two headed to the basement.

The ghost that lingers upstairs is not shy and was easy for me to find. We played a game of chase with him as our EMF meters would display strange readings from spot to spot as we walked around. I found myself prone to giggling fits. I believe I was empathically picking up his enjoyment of us chasing him around.

Then I had an idea. Let’s play hide-n-seek. We’ll hide, you come find us. We explained the game to him and invited him to play along. Then we went and hid behind some tables stored in a room upstairs. I have to admit, it almost felt silly to have two adults “hiding” from a ghost in hopes to get some evidence that he was, indeed, an intelligent haunt.

But I felt less silly when we got what we were hoping for.

I said to my fellow investigator, “I think he found us. Take a reading by my left arm.”

Of course we had taken baseline readings in the room and knew that the high reading to my left was not there before. I scooted a bit to my right, and the high reading followed. I even stood up and moved across the room. He followed, as indicated by the EMF reading and my own sensitivities. I felt him leave the room, and sure enough, the readings dropped back down to a normal level.

Later in the evening, the other team went upstairs before concluding the investigation and asked if he wanted to play hide-n-seek again. This is when we caught one amazing EVP. Here’s a little preface to what you’re about to hear:

I was in an upstairs dining with my fellow investigator while the other two were a room over. We were close enough to one another to hear each other with a normal speaking volume.  You’ll here a voice (who we believe to be the spirit we were playing hide-n-seek with) say “No. The door here” followed by the voice in the background of another male investigator. You’re just going to have to take my word for it, because I was in the room and no one on our team said these words aloud. We believe he was letting us know where he was hiding. Take a listen:

First stop: The Chapeze House

Chris McGill filming as we entered The Chapeze House

You may remember me mentioning this location before. This is where the basement was full of slaves that had been buried down there and still felt imprisoned, even after their death. Last time I was overwhelmed by the energy, but went in better prepared for this trip. I was able to help a few more spirits during an emotional cross over. Which I am grateful for, but there are still many more spirits there…

Next stop: The Old Talbott Tavern

Setting up equipment in the basement of The Old Talbott Tavern

We headed to the basement first for investigating. During the time we spent down there we had many personal experiences, such as sensations of being touched, camera straps moving on their own, etc. We were also utilizing some new equipment that spirits can supposedly ‘speak’ through. While I’m skeptical of this type of equipment in general (yet still open-minded), it did spit out a slew of names and words that are significant to the location….hmmm.  Moving on to the second floor, we captured several anomalies with our digital cameras as well as the night shot. Definitely worth the watch when the documentary is released…

Last stop: The Jailer’s Inn

Angel attached to original timber in the 1819 room, previously a prison cell.

The first trip to the Jailer’s Inn was relatively uneventful for me as far as it goes, with the exception of some residual energy I picked up. This time was much different. I was drawn to a room upstairs, specifically to an area of the room near the bathroom. We were told afterward that evidence has been captured previously of an entity walking through that particular area of the wall. We then investigated other areas of the second floor before packing up to head to the first floor. I felt a pull into a room at the base of the stairs where I found the spirit of a large man hanging about. He was extraordinarily aware of the current surroundings and the situation he was in. He requested help to move on, and I was happy to oblige.

We packed up and headed back home with lots of work ahead of us. Hours of footage including FLIR thermal cam and night shot recordings. It was a memorable weekend and I’m a little sad that the filming is complete and we won’t be returning any time soon. At the same time, I’m also excited to get it wrapped up and get this documentary out for all to see!

Done for the weekend!

Jamie, Chris & Patti

What’s new, right? They seem to be drawn to me wherever I go, but especially like to take up space here with me at home.

This woman was a bit different than the rest. She wasn’t just passing through. She stared at me expectantly. As if I knew what she wanted. I attempted helping her cross over, but she quite stubbornly refused that help. So, I ignored her.

She didn’t go away.

I saw her day in and day out. An average height, very thin woman with stringy brown hair all pulled up. She looked tired and worn. I’m assuming she worked hard during her life, or maybe whatever was causing her sadness is what was causing her appearance to seem so ragged. How was I supposed to know? She wouldn’t converse with me on any level.

I tried to get any information out of her that I could. Here’s all I got:

1) Her name was Miranda.

2) She was very sad.

She hung around for months. Every now and then, I’d check in with her to see if she was ready to let me know what it was exactly that she wanted from me.

No go. She kept her arms crossed, looked down her nose at me and seemed to be peeved that I hadn’t already completed the task that she so clearly thought I should have by now.

Eventually, her sorrow became too much for me to be around any longer. It was draining. I needed help with this one.

I contacted my friend, Kathy (who is a psychic-medium) to see if she’d be willing to do a reading for me to see exactly what it is that Miranda needed…because I needed her to go. I mean, I could have just told her to get the heck out of my house, but I sensed she had nowhere else to turn. I truly did want to help her, not just be rid of her and her draining sadness.

Now, Kathy doesn’t typically deal with the earthbound folks that I’m so used to, but she was glad to help any way that she could.

Basically, I told her that I had a woman named Miranda that I wanted to help out and asked if she could connect to her and gain some more information than I had been able to. She sent me back a detailed reading, and I knew she had contacted the same Miranda that had been so persistent. Here’s a little bit of the first part of the reading, in Kathy’s words:

I sense that she is earthbound and very, very sad; so much crying, worry, distress and mourning (perhaps over a son – clutching, grasping at you).

The other side of her is firm, upright and self-controlled.

She seems to be saying, “Jamie can help me with this” as she buttons her lip, she doesn’t want to tell me what it is! (She is sly too!)

Right away, I knew by Kathy sensing her sadness and that she said she was tight-lipped with her as well, that we were both connected to the same woman in need. So I continued reading with interest and with hope that more information was forthcoming…

She says, “I want him back” (my son).

She is also afraid of being dead and she looks at me accusingly (for the kind of work I do ie. mediumship).

Maybe the reason she was so hesitant to communicate with me is that her belief system during her life was against mediumship?

I see her with brown hair wearing an apron. She is a farm wife (with a scrawny, scraggly presence), quite worn, when in actuality she is only in her thirties!

Just as I saw her…brown hair, thin and worn. Yup, we’re definitely on the same page here…

I get a vision of a beautiful field, green and full of wildlife. I also see a toddler “and then I lost him” (she says) “and all is black. Where is he”? (Jamie can help).

“Yes, she (Jamie) know him (she says this slyly) – she knows everyone” (the dead, I believe?) “Jamie loves him”.

The part where Miranda says “she knows everyone” made me giggle a bit, because there are days that I do feel like I know all of the dead! Or at least they’ve all been through here at some point! Obviously, this is an exaggeration, but at times it is like I have a ghostly revolving door.

It’s like she fell into blackness when all of this happened with her son and she never woke up. She wants her ‘real self’ back – the self with a son and she wants me to tell you, Jamie “that if I can see him, I’ll go”.

No wonder this woman was so sad. As a parent, this tugged at my heart, and I was determined to stop ignoring Miranda and put forth every effort to reconnect her with her son so she would cross over.

This is where it gets tricky for me. I don’t do ‘readings’ and rarely am able to connect with those crossed over, at least on purpose. But I knew I had to. After failing to connect with her son, once again, I called on Kathy to connect to him, explain the situation and send him my way. And that’s exactly what happened.

I called to him to help take his mother to the Other Side. He indeed showed up, as well as a slew of others she seemed to know and trust. She then went easily with her son.

I was glad to see her go, but mostly, I was glad to see her reunited with her son and happy. I haven’t seen or heard anything from Miranda since then. The sadness I felt in my house lifted when she moved on.

For more information about Kathy, or to purchase a reading, visit her at http://kathycrabbe.com.

I went into this location with my “crew” hat on, camera in hand, as opposed to my “medium” hat. However, seems that I chose the wrong hat to wear that day. This became evident as soon as we entered the dining room that was the original tavern.

There I encountered the spirits of three curious kids; a blonde girl in a pink dress with two boys close behind her. The little girl seemed to be the ringleader. They kept a close eye on what we were up to. Later on, I talked to the owner about my impressions and was told that these kids, but especially the blonde girl, were the most frequently sighted spirits. Many guests from all over the establishment have reported seeing her, or feeling like a child was jumping on their bed while trying to sleep at night. They seemed to be right at home. The owner also told me that the original owner of the building had many children, some that had died at the location. Maybe that’s who these three kids are. We have an investigation scheduled at the end of the month, so maybe I can get more information from them then.

Then we tackled the second floor. The first room I went into, I immediately asked “What’s with the bathroom door?” Come to find out many occupants of this room complain of the bathroom door opening and closing on it’s own throughout their stay. Upon entering the bedroom of this room, I got a stabbing pain to the back of my head that was so intense I had to leave the room. At first I believed I was attacked for some reason, but later on found out from the owner, that in that particular room a man had attacked and killed his mistress by some form of head injury. At this point I realized that it wasn’t an attack so much as an empathic pain left over from the tragic event.

After taking a small break on a couch in the upstairs sitting room, an employee brought keys to unlock the infamous Jesse James room, where Jesse himself spent many evenings. Still on the couch, I told them to go to the window on the left. Of course, I was asked “why?’, but I truly didn’t know. The information just popped in my head and flew out of my mouth before I had time to process it. When I entered the room, all the information I could attain was that something happened in that area. Upon asking the owner, she told us that many times since she’s been there, the window on the left will be found on the ground, unbroken, as if someone had gently set it on the ground. This is a very old and large window, so it is guaranteed that if it fell, it would have broken.

The final room upstairs I walked through was thick with nervous energy. I found myself pacing and speaking quickly. Even when I tried to stand still, my knees shook until I started doing laps around the room again. I didn’t pick up any particular spirit, but instead felt residual energy of someone waiting for a decision of some sort to be made, probably regarding a legal matter. Later on, an employee told us that at some point Lincoln and his family had stayed there while waiting for a land dispute to be resolved by a local judge in Nelson County. I wonder if I was picking up the energy left over from that particular event? I suppose I’ll never know for sure, but the parallel is at the very least, quite interesting to me.

The entire time we were there, though, I was drawn to the basement. I had actually had dreams of it before we went. The basement was somewhere most employees refused to go alone. And after going down there and experiencing the energy myself, I understood why. The first room of the basement was overwhelmingly “busy”. I became flustered with all the back and forth of the spirits. Unfortunately, the owner didn’t know for sure what this area was used for, but assumes because it had two fireplaces probably used for stoves, that it was the slaves’ kitchen.

As I walked back through to the back of the basement, the energy changed quite a bit. The phrase repeating in my head was “I want out”. After spotting the shackles used to keep the slaves, I understood what that was all about.

We spent the rest of the afternoon interviewing any employees of the tavern that had a story to share. And there were plenty of stories! It was so interesting to hear the experiences first hand from people who experience this type of activity on a daily basis. Most of them said that they didn’t believe in ghosts at all until they took a job at the Old Talbott Tavern.

Release of the Spirits of Bourbon Country DVD will be coming Fall of 2010.

We sometimes have trouble with him being scared before bed and wanting to come downstairs with us, so I asked him if the show would scare him and keep him awake, because we were not going to allow him downstairs after bedtime.

His quoted reply:

“Mom, ghosts are not scary. They’re just dead people. And people aren’t scary. Except bad guys. But bad guy ghosts are very uncommon and rare.

(pause for thought)

And famous singer ghosts are as well. That’s why I’m not scared of ghosts. Can I unpause the show now, Mom?”

We, indeed, unpaused the show and began to watch. In this particular episode they were using a replica of a gun to ‘lure’ the ghost, which we both found amusing.

He then says to me:

“Mom, they’re lying to that ghost! Don’t they know you can’t trick a ghost?”

Apparently, not.

“Lying is bad. They should not be lying to that ghost.”

The things that this kid says never cease to amaze me.