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.

When we arrived, he was busy checking in some guests to the bed and breakfast (yes, you can actually sleep in the old jail!), so we had a chance to get set up to film. I didn’t run into any ghosts while we were there, which surprised me really. I did however, get overwhelmed by residual energy on a few occasions.

Shortly after we arrived, I walked back into the deepest part of the jail and as I approached the last cell, my throat began to tighten at an alarming rate, which triggered a coughing fit (as I was recovering from a recent bout of bronchitis) and had to step outside for a moment to get it under control.

Later on, we were shown a shadowbox containing a hood used during the last public hanging. Suddenly, the throat tightening experience made a little more sense to me.

While walking around, I whipped out my flip camera for my own documentation. Here’s a bit of the inside of the building that I filmed:

The last place the owner took us was in the cellar. I had already mentioned to the crew that just the thought of this area caused butterflies in my stomach in a nervous way. I didn’t know what this area was used for, but the energy was intense. I manned up and headed down the stairs. He proceeded to show us the area used as the “hole” for inmates. The space where they were kept has no more than two foot of vertical clearance, so obviously, they were contained in a horizontal position and closed in the area with no light and very little space. The left over imprint of anger, fear and sadness was beginning to physically affect me.

First, the headache, then chest tightening, followed eventually by some sharp stomach pains. This is the point at which I bailed out of there before the filming in that area was complete. I had experienced enough of this particular energy.

The empathic nature of this “gift” at times makes me wonder why it is referred to as a “gift”.

Moving on to the next project: The Spirits of Bourbon Country

This is an exciting project for me as I’ve been asked to write for this documentary series coming up on the many spirits hanging out in Bardstown, Kentucky. This weekend was our first trip there for filming interviews and the overall landscape of Bourbon Country.

The first location we went to was a house from the 1700’s that has been beautifully restored. As you can imagine, the home is rich with history and some of it’s former occupants have chosen to remain in the home. The cellar was particularly thick with spirits as it has a great deal of slave history. I hadn’t been down there more than five minutes before two of the occupants approached me for help as they no longer wanted to remain in the cellar that had held them captive for so many years during their lifetime and continued to do so even after their death. I happily assisted in setting them free and hope to return to help any others that want to leave the space they find themselves confined to presently.

We will be visiting the Jailer’s Inn later this week, but got the opportunity to walk through the building this weekend and snap some pictures while there.

The Pioneer Cemetery was also a stop on the list. I found myself moving quickly through the cemetery. I felt like a magnet being pulled in several directions at once and wanted to cover every inch of it. Which wasn’t so hard, as it’s a relatively small group of graves. Most are damaged and almost all are illegible after a couple hundred years of being exposed to the elements.

Here’s a few still shots of the weekend to hold you over until the documentary is available for viewing:

The second group headed over and our group walked back over to hunt for Julia again. We got all settled in for another EVP session in the sitting room outside the second floor kitchen. Several minutes into the session, I felt compelled to jump up and run back over to the pharmacy. I was about half way there, out of breath from running and wet from the rain, when I finally wondered why in the world I was going over there! I had no idea what my plan was or even what compelled me, but my legs were following the orders of the compulsion and I soon approached the back door in the alley and found the door locked.

Standing in the rain, I found myself wondering what to do now. I didn’t have a key, and I knew the group would be upstairs and there was no way they would hear me knocking. But I went for it anyway. After three very strong knocks on the door, the door knob turned, the door flew open and I found myself being trampled by three very upset women, one crying hysterically, while another was shouting back inside the building, “You have to stay here! You cannot come with us! You are not welcome with us!”

They were seemingly unaware of my presence, so I went inside the building to find a someone calmer to ask to explain the situation here.

Here’s the account I got from the people that were in the room as the events unfolded:

The entire group (consisting of 4 guests, a tour guide and one investigator) took the stairs and settled in to begin investigating. It was only moments before one of the guests felt a distinct hand rub down her face. After questioning everyone in the room, and no one had touched her face, she became frightened and asked out loud to not be touched again.

Moments later, she felt the back of her knees hit causing her legs to buckle underneath her. As I’m sure her fear heightened (feeding the energy in the room), she felt a sharp hit to the back of her right shoulder. She then describes a watery feeling dripping from her nose (much like the earlier investigators eyes in the same location of the floor) which she assumed was a nose bleed and decided to exit the second floor as quickly as possible.

By the time she left the building, she was an emotional wreck from her experience of being “attacked”. We checked her over and found her nose was not bleeding, but her right arm was. She had a significant scratch on the inside of her arm. We documented the evidence of the attack and myself, a tour guide, an investigator and one of the calmer witnesses headed back over there to see if we could find any logical explanation for her wound.

Maybe she ran into something in her hurry out of the building? Besides just being able to debunk the scratch as a paranormal event, I felt like if we could at least give this frightened woman one piece of logical information, she would be able to calm down a bit.

Prayers of protection were said before we headed back up the stairs.

The entire time we were searching for something…anything…she could have injured herself on in her hurry out, all I could hear was malicious laughing in my head. I’m assuming sent to me by the perpetrator. He was clearly entertained by the hysteria of the guests and our attempts at explanation.

We were unable to find a source for her scratch, but convinced her that it could have easily been a fingernail of one of the other women running along side her out the building. It made her feel a little better to have this as a possibility. Judging by the laughter, I’m inclined to believe that was not the case though. But I’m glad the possibility gave her some peace about the situation.

I had already decided to heed the warning of our guest psychic that evening and not return to the pharmacy. This experience just solidified that commitment to myself.

We decided after all the excitement at the starting location, to split up into two groups and take half of us over to the old pharmacy to see what evidence we could collect over there while the other half spent some more time investigating the first location.

I’ve spent a great deal of time on the second floor of the pharmacy with a spirit that has become somewhat of a friend…well, as much as a ghost can be your friend. It’s not like we’re chatting over drinks on the weekends, but there’s definitely a connection there. And because of this connection, I was asked to go first, along with a PROOV investigator, our guest psychic, a tour guide and 2 of our guests.

The six of us walked over and I was anxious to have my perceptions of this place validated by another medium. On one hand, I was hoping the aggressive spirit would be absent tonight (as he gave us quite a scare last time we were upstairs), but it would also be good to see what an additional medium would pick up that I couldn’t. So, I was open to either situation presenting itself.

As we walked in, I did my usual procedure of walking to the bottom of the stairs to announce our presence and as usual, he walked up the stairs and we heard him walk across the floor on the second floor. I’m not sure why this has become the routine, but it has.

We entered the second floor and our guest psychic immediately picked up the friendly spirit and described him exactly as I see him. The aggressive entity was MIA, but the friendly gentlemen told our guest all about him.

Ah, validation…

While we were chatting about our impressions and comparing notes, the PROOV investigator was walking the floor with the night shot and digital recorder. He entered a room that I have never been in up there and immediately described a scared feeling accompanied by watery eyes. As he was describing the situation to his digital recorder, the recorder shut itself off…not uncommon up there. Our guest psychic entered the room and described something “crouching down” as to remain hidden. I had never encountered a hider up there, so I had no input and chose not to enter the room.

The three of us went back downstairs to send the remaining three up to investigate. The guests we had were a couple, and were amateur ghost hunters themselves, so they were knowledgeable with the routine. She hit the bottom of the stairs and decided to not go up there. Wise choice, we found out later on.

After to talking to the other medium for a bit, he asked me to go back up there and enter the back room and see what my take on it was since he was unable to get any sort of reading on what seemed so hellbent on hiding from us.

I reluctantly took the stairs and grabbed the two people already up there to be my security blankets of sorts. I immediately sensed something to my lower left. Yet, could not get a feel, no matter how much I tuned in, to what it was. Male, female, animal…I had no idea. My Ghost Radar was running and the readings matched those of the K2 meter in the room every time.

The tour guide started to ask questions to see if talking would bring this hidden entity forth so I could gather any additional information. The Ghost Radar actually spelled the name of our town while she was talking…”la grange’…very strange. Explain that Ghost Radar naysayers!

All of the sudden, it felt like I was hit in each temple on my head with an ice pick. I almost dropped to the floor from the sharp and sudden pain. I shouted for it to stop, and it did. But the residual pain was reverberating in my brain.

Time to bail.

Back downstairs, I was told by my fellow psychic that I needed to be very careful if I chose to return to this location because next time it would be much worse. And it was specific to me, not who I was with. Needless to say, I will not be returning to the second floor of the pharmacy.

We gathered up our stuff and on the way out the door, he said, “I’m glad I’m not in the next group coming in.” And then he went home. He didn’t even get the chance to see just how right on he was with that statement…(next post, I promise…)

This evening did not go that way.

The first stop was a second floor bedroom that a tour taker on an earlier tour claimed to have seen “something” in, so we set up shop there first. We had the usual cameras, digital voice recorders, temperature gauges and EMF detectors. Plus me and our guest psychic (who, btw, has been so accurate before that I have wanted to scream to him to get outta my head!)

In this room, we all experienced sudden and drastic temperature shifts (backed up by the temp gauges), one woman was touched on her face (she described it as light, like walking into a thick cobweb, but she was not moving), the K2 was lighting up on request while untouched on a table…you know, the usual stuff.

I was also letting my Ghost Radar run, as was another iPhone user (a guest). There were a few things there that were unexplainable. For instance, at one point, hers said the word ’split’ as mine was spelling g-o…h-o-m-e followed by it spelling ‘go’ many times in a row. This was the first time that crazy mess of letters spewing forth did anything intelligible.

I, of course, had the digital recorder running. While we didn’t capture any EVP, here’s a little of what went on in the room while we were taking measurements as we were experiencing the phenomena:

At one point, my Ghost Radar began shooting the letters ‘JC’ across the screen for roughly 10 minutes before I finally realized that these are the initials of the ghost believed to reside in this building. When I acknowledged the initials, it stopped immediately. As if that wasn’t strange enough, the other Ghost Radar running in the room spelled ‘j-u-l-i-e’. Um…that’s freakishly close to ‘Julia” and the timing was just a little to perfect to be coincidence.

I don’t believe in coincidence anyway, so…

Later in the evening, we did capture an unexplained knocking sound in a different room. Keep in mind, it was raining and a bit windy, but the sound was on command and happened several other times at moments it was asked to provide a noise. Here’s one clip of audio of the knock and I’ll let you decide for yourself:

We then decided to split up and a few of us head over to the old Pharmacy. This is when the night really picked up….(yes, it’s coming!)

But I splurged the ninety-nine cents and was prepared to be entertained by another iPhone game.

I got way more than I bargained for.

Within the first couple of hours after downloading and firing it up, I was already getting some pretty astounding results. But before I tell you some of my experiences, let me explain a little more about Ghost Radar. I will preface this by saying I have no idea how this thing could possibly work. But after my results, I’m thinking there’s something to it.

Supposedly, it measures energy changes and detects where these are and just how strong they are as well as indicated by color coding (blue=slight change, green=slightly stronger, yellow=strong, red=very strong). It also will say aloud words that could be spoken by entities around you. I will add a side note here that 75% of what the app says makes no sense to me and seems to be a completely random assortment of words. As I said before though, when the results are right on, they are creepily right on.

It also has a bunch of numbers all over the screen that mean nothing to me, as well as a section in the bottom right hand corner that spews letters, also seemingly randomly. I didn’t realize until later how these letters could be useful.

Here’s a few pics with explanations of what you’re looking at in the caption:

As promised, here’s a few things this app has done while I have been using it:

Within the first couple of hours it had been chatting away (nothing of meaning to me). While in the kitchen, I noticed it said “mice”. Um, OK, there’s another random word for ya…then my husband appears holding his brand new fancy earbuds that had been chewed up by mice (the tiny teeth marks were the tell). An eyebrow was raised, but I still wasn’t convinced.

Over the next several days, though, it said “fuel” as I was pulling into a gas station, said “Mexico” and “citizen” while eating at a Mexican restaurant, has said my first name as well as my maiden name (now that was just creepy), spelled my initials several times, said “wait” as I was becoming impatient in a line, and while my 3 year old was trying to convince it to say his name it said “foot” and seconds later he fell due to the phone charger cord being wrapped around his foot.

Seriously.

This is not every instance of it’s creepiness, but you get the idea.

I was not planning on actually using this as a tool on this past weekends paranormal investigation, but it turned out to be pretty amazing during that evening as well. So, for those of you who noticed my lack of audioboo and twitter updates, now you know it was due to my iPhone being occupied by another app. As well as an incredibly fast paced and exciting hunt. And with no wi-fi near, it is tricky to keep posting.

I’ll make it up by blogging as many details as I can possibly remember.