A Poltergeist Punch Up - Part I

As I stated in an earlier piece of writing, I rarely in all my investigations into ghosts encounter anything that gives me cause to believe I am dealing with a form of sentient energy. I have in the past and so I suppose it was only to be a matter of time till something travelling the Nephelum raised its “head” and gave me a challenge. That challenge came towards the end of April this year (2018) and though I was not left with any “pancakes” neither was I left with any doubt about what I had been facing.

For the first time in 20 years I went “toe to toe” with a poltergeist. An event that was horrifying for my client but strangely fun for me. When I say “fun” I mean like cowboys find eight seconds on a bull “fun” or how people parachuting out of an airplane find that “fun”. The “fun” that seems unwise and dangerous but “facing the challenge is a reward” kind of fun.

Because certain aspects of the haunting are tied to the client’s personal lives, I feel they should be granted anonymity. That and for other reasons, like public ridicule, I have given the client and the man she lives with other names. The background of the case will make my reasons obvious.

As financially rewarding it would be to, in the words of Darth Vader, “join the Dark Side” and charge the rates the psychic community would like me to, I consistently refuse. If I did I would be allowing, if not actual evil to continue, people to live in fear purely because of their addictions or economic conditions. The trouble is, and I can confirm this from testimony from actual clients that help in eliminating that fear can get expensive. In Edmonton, it appears the minimum an advertising psychic will charge, just to investigate a potential haunting, is around one hundred bucks. The average seems to be around $200 to $300 though one female psychic did go out and investigate for $50.

After this “nice and pleasant woman” informed the clients that it would cost them an additional $250 to get rid of the “Evil Entity”, these financially poor people called on me. I guess the psychic’s initial presence must have scared the “ghosty” away. By the time I showed up there was no ghost but there was an old squeaky house with bad drafts built on shale deposits among other things. For $40 spent at Home Hardware I made all the ghostly activities disappear.

I’m a wizard, or at least that is what I call myself, so events and situations others might find horrifying though disturbing, don’t unhinge me as much. Of course that shoe can go on the other foot too. Some clients have lives where they face violence and criminal activity daily and these things would probably terrify your regular ghost hunter, psychic or anyone used to only the paranormal sort of dangers.

Then again, I have been a criminal and had a gun in my face more than once so maybe that is why I am willing to help these people. I mean spiritually aware people like psychics are willing to work for next to nothing when necessary, right? I’m sure they are.

Just as sure as I am that Donald Trump is going to “buy” mea Russian wife and Scarlet Johansson is coming by tonight to give me a blow-job.

To be honest I blew it on my first call to the site of the haunting. I had read the client’s cards, Tammy, before and knew she lived with someone called Bill.

A part of the assumption that led to my screw up was that Bill, even though he had experienced some of the ghostly activities refused to believe something was wrong. Things flying off of tables, knocking at the door when no-one was there and the TV going on and off mysteriously did not register with him. I should have paid more attention to the described actions of her cat, Puddles than Bill’s belief.

In any event, Bill did not want me to come over and in fact demanded she have no guests for any reason when he was out of town at work. I would have to do this “ghost busting” when he was not there. His reluctance of belief had me predisposed to the entire thing being Tammy’s imagination. His being a jerk did not enter the equation either.

This meant the sole client was Tammy. She is a thirty-something who was living with a sixty-something in a very unhealthy relationship. She is a woman of little education and skill and Bill, a tradesman for an oil company, wants her as his girlfriend. Throw in drug addiction, recovery, petty theft and a few other societal ills and you are looking at a whirlpool of emotional disaster. An environment that is the perfect breeding ground for negative energy and the things that feed off it. So when I showed up in the day and simply cleansed all the negative energy from the place I made a rookie mistake.

Negative energy is a feeding frenzy for hungry dark things prowling the Nephelum. All the sexual frustration and anger on the part of the male and the resentment from the woman, who does pay rent,  was like blood in the water for sharks to entities that cause trouble. Also I am not psychic so I should have spent some more time using simple spells and energy manipulation to check what was really happening. I would hate to think I was slacking off because I wasn’t getting paid more than a pack of smokes.

The house was a one bedroom bungalow with a partially finished basement in Edmonton’s Boyle McCaully neighbourhood; an area with a violent and crime ridden reputation.  I should have done some checking on the house and what history it had just knowing that. As it was I did a few simple meditative energy flow exercises.

I breathed in, allowing all the energy and things attached to it to fill my lungs and body. Upon breathing out I sent those same tendrils of oxygenated energy to reconnect with everything I had drawn them away from. I sensed dark and chaotic energy strike me and after a several more breaths and opening my senses, both physical and magickal, to the energy, I determined the strongest repository of this “dark emotion” was in the bedroom. I felt the resentment, sexual frustration and all the petty jealousy that was harboured in that room and knew more about Bill and Tammy’s living arrangement than I wanted to.

Perhaps it was that knowledge that kept me from dwelling into the forces at work more intently. I had same sort of living arrangements at one point with young women needing a roof and respite from the boreal forest that Edmonton was surrounded by. Of course as a criminal I offered other benefits to these young ladies: a bit of prestige, access to drugs among other things, so that a few would actually fight for this type of arrangement. It was still wrong and I was aware of that enough to feel guilt over those past circumstances so maybe that also caused my quick and erred assessment.

Also and it was quite possible as well that the entity, which I later would discover had some intelligence, used that guilt to influence my decision and thus hide itself. It had been awhile, like I said and being out of practice is no excuse when you know how tricky these things can be.

Business had been slow in the divination department, my bread and butter for supplies and I was down to my last sage wand. I considered whether it would be worth using it.  Amazed at my sudden feelings of being stingy, I cast such selfish and unclean thoughts from my mind and tore open the packaging of the white sage “stick”(Yes, such things have a market justifying commercialization). I grabbed my brazier, a small bronze triangular concaved dish covered in Hebrew letters for YHWH, Kabbalistic images and astrological symbols, and went into the bedroom.

I lit one end of the sage wand with a lighter and began drawing out all the negative energy in the room, placing it in the ashes of the wand I was catching in the brazier. I cast a small containment spell around the brazier calling upon King Solomon’s Shade (not his ghost but the residual magickal force he has left in this plane of reality). I had become, in essence, a meta-physical vacuum cleaner, sucking up dark force and placing it in my “ethereal dust bag” of ash and bronze. I encountered some resistance that should have clued me in that this was more than just the dark energy of two unhappy people but ignored it.

At one point feeling weary, I did what few psychics will do, I pulled some of the dark energy into myself to use against some of the “rough spots”. This can be dangerous if you don’t know who you are or what you’re doing. The darkness entered me with all the seductive power it uses to corrupt psychics and other mages. Doing this is why it is dangerous. The effect is not painful or emotionally destructive. It. Just. Feels.  Great!

A shit eating grin, a sneer of satisfaction crossed my face and I began to enjoy the extra power. That’s where the danger lies, this was why pricks like Crowley and LeVey became what they were. He may have been a fictional sorcerer but Darth Vader is right about the power of the Dark Side of the Force. It is sweetly alluring.

With the extra power I made quick work of the rest of the upper floor, living room, kitchen, hallway and bathroom. Probably too quick. Having drawn in the extra power for my own use by being lazy and wanting a quick departure, I had given the entity a way into my subconscious. Forget what I wrote earlier, this thing was influencing me but I had forgotten on my own any of the safe guards I had always employed in the past. The fault still rests on my shoulders.

To her credit Tammy had asked me to “vacuum” the basement as well but with my dark energy influenced arrogance, dismissed her wish. I tookthe white sage stub and the bronze metal ash tray outside. Throwing by force of will, whatever remnants of energy I had sucked into myself in to the ashes, I said a prayer and asked for the Trinity to take back what they had created and cleanse it, then tossing the ashes into the wind.

I felt both empty and tired immediately. I took my payment of a pack of smokes and told her to call me if anything seemed odd in the next week.

When I got home, my friend, roommate and after all the girls who have filled my life, the only woman I completely trust outside of my mother, gave me shit. It was her same old argument I heard every time I go do something like this. “But Dave, how can you believe you can control or have power over these things? Why would God give you the ability to fight evil spirits? Look at your life Dave and what you’ve done. You are going to Hell.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know but I doubt that if I am Hell-bound just quitting this stuff is gonna save my soul. Besides, someone has to stand up against the dark.” It was an argument we have had many times over and I love her for it. She truly cares for the welfare of my soul. Besides, this time she was partially right, this thing had bested me. It had pulled a tactical withdrawal worthy of Hitler’s forces in Russia.

When I sat down to log the event in a quick 300 word paragraph I saw the holes in my actions, the mistakes in my little spell casting enterprise. I was not surprised when Tammy called and said the “ghost” had returned. I booked a future appointment to the bungalow. I told her this visit would be more investigative than the last as I began to apologize for making mistakes.

Before logging off line as we were messaging I asked her “how does the bedroom feel?”

“Puddles goes in there now. It’s the rest of the house and the basement that is the problem.” So whatever was there didn’t yet have the strength to reclaim all ‘its territory’. “One more thing” she messaged me, “Bill went online and a 48 year old man was stabbed to death by someone about 20 years ago. He showed me the story online.”

“Let me guess” I typed back, “the killer was a young woman.”

“How did you know?” Tammy replied, “She was 22.” “Never mind,” I responded, cursing myself for not checking for such a thing earlier, after all I knew the neighbourhood had a violent history. “I will explain later.” and logged off.

I felt like an idiot. A dumb fucking rookie! If this thing had been an extremely powerful entity I could have unleashed all sorts of havoc if not doing what my roommate feared. Losing my soul or becoming possessed. I was going to have to go back but this time “loaded for bear”

“I am getting the tale of the tape this time.” I thought to myself, “Get ready for Round Two you non-corporeal bastard.”

I wish I had been as confident as I sounded to myself. I had just realized how rusty I had become. The next time I could afford no mistakes.