Echo

Awesome…just got an email from a scientist studying paranormal activity. I had explained to him something that I believe to be true about places that are “haunted” and wanted him to tell me what the most widespread theories are, and he told me that my beliefs pretty much hit the nail on the head, which made me feel really validated. There’s so much random non-empirical knowledge that I was born with that I don’t talk to people about because I have no way to prove things, but it feels good when I find out that something I’ve always believed to be true is a conclusion/theory that has been reached by others.

Anyway, here’s the thing that I’ve started to become more open about.

That house my family moved into when I was in 4th grade and everything went downhill…from the very first day we moved in, I felt that the guest room was haunted. That room was supposed to be mine and they moved all my stuff into it and everything. But I had a really bad feeling about it so I ended up sleeping on the floor in the room across the hall and my parents had to move all my stuff over to the other room when I refused to live there. I’ve always avoided that room and the closet especially scared me. Around that time, my brother started having seizures at night and wet his bed consistently. My parents were constantly arguing, sometimes near-violently and I became extremely withdrawn and moody. I also started waking up with nightmares in the middle of the night, where the air was crackling with static (I thought they were aliens talking to each other) and it felt really crowded in the room and I would be scared shitless.

I need to stop here and explain something. I’ve always been extremely sensitive. You know how they say that if someone is blind, their other senses will over-compensate…so for instance, they will have an amazing sense of hearing or smell? I know people always make fun of me because I can’t hear, and my sense of sight and smell aren’t great either. But I’m very sensitive to energy. The wavelength/type that I’m most sensitive to is negative energy, or the places that hurt. Empathically, I can feel out pain in other people, even if it’s extremely repressed. Sometimes, if I concentrate or if they have a strong need to have it weeded out, I can tell pretty specifically what the pain is. Other times, it just feels like someone is directing a lot of static into me and I feel it (it translates to noise or pressure in my head). Have you ever left a TV on, maybe on Video 1 because you were watching a DVD, and even though there’s nothing on the screen, you walk by the room and you know that the TV is on because there’s static in the air? It feels like that. Some places, things, people have higher energy and I can feel that static. The same way I feel that someone has left a TV or CD player on or the way the room fills with static the split second before the phone rings.

This residue energy is the reason why I don’t like places that are old, I don’t like vintage clothing stores (these places are LOUD with energy!!!!!!!!), I don’t like to wear other people’s clothes or be around people who have very negative people around them. Everything is very loud and it gets very distracting for me and tiring for me to block it all out.

So this house…the energy is centered around the guest room. It’s a very high energy room. But it has negative energy that isn’t always on high, but when it is, it’s scary.

I used to try to toughen myself up by locking myself in the closet of that room with the lights off, and learn to relax despite being in the epicenter of this negative energy. I still remember those experiences as the scariest of my life and I really don’t think anything will ever scare me more. But it also made me realize that these things (the energy) can’t hurt me and there’s a peace to that.

So here’s the story. The script I’m writing is called The House and it’s about a woman who ends up returning to the house in which she was killed in a past life, but she doesn’t know that history. But the thing about this house is that it’s not haunted by “ghosts,” per se, but the house, like our minds, conjures up the traumatic instance over and over again and the only way it can get relief, is for her to break out of her own internal cycle of torture. So the house has maintained the burned emotional imprint of a trauma that happened within its walls. I had originally written the script as though it were haunted but that never felt accurate so I’ve been sitting on this story for a long time. But one night last week, I went into my weird “zone,” which is when I’m pretty much asleep but somehow I’m not so I have access to certain information. This time, I called my mother because I had a message for my mother (which I’ll exclude because it’s personal). I’ve never talked to her about being afraid of the guest room but I told her that the house was haunted. But not by people ghosts but by a bad thing that happened in the room. She said that no one could have died in that house because it had only been built 4 years before we moved in. I asked her about the family that lived there before us and if there was a little girl, a little girl who is very afraid and then at night something bad happens. She couldn’t remember so I told her that there was a little girl who lived in that room and she is very scared and now the house continues to be scared for her.

When I woke up the next day, I realized that houses can be haunted not just by the spirits of those who have passed on, but by negative energy left by a traumatic event (like a rape or a beating or anything in which someone exudes a great deal of emotion, splattering the walls with it, if you will). Thus, how I realized the way my script needed to go to be truthful. Like when people fight in a room and you walk in, you can feel it still there even if those people have left and you didn’t even see them. I think that when we go through something horrible in which we are very angry or scared, we give off energy that is absorbed by our environment. Kind of like, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it, did it really fall? Well, yes. Because the forest saw it. And if it screamed in agony when it fell, the forest heard it as well, and maybe it scared the forest, even if by “scared,” I mean, the forest absorved the tree’s fear/pain and made it it’s own. Can we absorb energy the way we absorb sunlight? I think we do.

I think something bad happened in that room once. And all I’m saying is that I’m extremely passionate about issues regarding children and inappropriate sexual behaviors which is unusual because there’s nothing in my history that has shown that anything has happened to me. I also think that when a place holds negative energy like that which hasn’t been resolved, it will affect those who inhabit that space. I have said time and time again that when I first walked into the office of the tutoring company that I worked with, that it had really bad energy. It SCREAMED. And through good times and bad, I was always extremely anxious to the point of having a panic attack whenever I was in there. I still can’t figure out if it had to do with something that had happened there, the people or the dynamics of the people, and I really tried to figure it out like a mystery, even though I didn’t like to be in there (like when I used to make myself sit in that closet in the dark). But I know that it vibrates with that bad energy, and when finally I quit, I was so relieved about never having to go in there again. And even though I still need to return my materials, the one thing I refuse to do is step foot into that office, even if George is the only one there and I like George.

Have you ever watched The House of Yes? That is a great movie. You can almost feel how, so many bad things happened in that house, that the house almost has a negative energy of its own that helps perpetuate t
he negative things that happen between the people. Maybe if people changed locations, they would have an easier time resolving their negative cycles. Same concepts as feng shui, I guess. That an environment brings its own energy that can affect people. It may not necessarily have to do with the arrangement of things affecting destiny or whatever which sounds pretty sketchy, but maybe like, if you have a cluttered bedroom, you won’t feel as good…if you live in a place cluttered with negative energy, you’ll start feeling negatively and will start acting negatively and thus, perpetuating bad things in your own life. And changing your environment (ie living somewhere else) might be enough to help you get back to feeling good.