Learning From Ghosts

I’ve shared a lot of my paranormal experiences here already, so if you missed them, please scroll down. Those are the biggest ones so far.

Anyhow, what I want to post about this time is a particular ghost I met in college. Being a theatrical lighting technician, I spent a lot of hours alone in darkened theaters. Because I worked in the Lighting & Sound shop, I had keys to various parts of the building that I’d need to get into in order to do my job. There were three theaters and I designed lighting for shows in all three.

Being a lighting designer means that when rehearsal is done at 11PM it’s your time to program the show over the night hours. The stage needs to be dark and it was best to work alone. I could get the show programmed faster without distraction that way even if the show needed more than one night to get done.

Usually, the light board was set up in the middle of the audience until opening night, but sometimes, I did all the programming from the light booth even though the sightlines weren’t the best up there.

Now imagine being the only person in the whole building…and being locked in. Sure, I didn’t have the only key, but whenever I thought I heard someone else, I investigated. Darkened theaters are dangerous and I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Whenever someone would come on stage (sometimes the costumers worked late, too), I always brought up enough light for them to see whatever they needed until they were done and back out of the theater. Common courtesy.

Okay, during my time in this particular theater building, I’d heard a lot of different ghost stories–one night, myself and another lighting technician even got into a very long and interesting conversation focused solely on how creepy that darn place was around 3AM–but I never physically experienced anything major the whole time I was there.

Psychically…well…that’s a different story.

To my knowledge, every time something unexplainable happened, it got blamed on a particular ghost. Apparently, the guy had committed suicide on stage in the 70s. I posted a little about him earlier.

I did not, however, post what I learned from him. The most important part of his haunting of that building. Just the other night, I was talking about him with my husband and he found it fascinating, so here I am posting about it.

The very moment I set foot on the property, I could feel the ghost. As I walked closer to the building, he got stronger and stronger. Once inside the building, he got overwhelming.

Unless I acknowledged his presence.

Yeah. If I looked at him and said hello, he left me alone.

Once I figured that out, it seemed so absurd, but I tested my theory the next few days when I’d go there and sure enough. No matter where I sensed his presence, if I acknowledged him, he’d leave me alone. Whether I was outside the building or all the way in and down the hallway. The moment I said hello, he would fade.

So, I asked around to see if anyone knew more about his legend. Apparently, in life, he felt invisible. Had no friends, no one noticed him.

I guess that was all a million times worse in death.

He wasn’t mean, though. Just quiet. He wanted to be an actor, but that wasn’t going so well and he had very low self-esteem–which also didn’t help much. I don’t recall the particular incident that sent him over the edge to suicide, but still. Poor guy was stuck there even more invisible in death than he had been in life.

I really felt for him, then. And never failed to greet him each day. Of course, if I didn’t or was a little slow on the greeting, he’d be the most annoying person anyone could ever meet.

Imagine a two or three year-old under your feet, constantly jabbering to you, even singing something like “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” (…starting somewhere around infinity) and doing cartwheels and hopping and skipping and making faces at you and shouting on either side of you. “Do you see me? Hello? I’m here. Hello? Can you see me? Why aren’t you seeing me? Say something. Please, say something. I’m right here. Just say hello, please. I’m not leaving until I know you know I’m here. Where are you going? Hello? Hello? Hello? I’m here. Hello?”

Freakin’ unimaginably annoying…(but only if you’re sensitive.)

And then the moment I said hello, he backed away, satisfied, even pleased.

Day after day, I experimented with him. If I was walking in alone, I’d take the time to either ask how he’s been or tell him what I was going to be doing that day and to come visit me later on or whatever. As our ‘relationship’ progressed, I was able to tune him in more clearly, but never crystal clear. My ability just isn’t that detailed all the time. I do the best with what I’ve got, but it’s far from perfect.

He’d laugh at me on days when I really couldn’t understand what he was trying to say. He’d usually say something like, “You’re not having a good day with me today, huh? That’s okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.” And then he’d fade away.

Whenever I saw him in my psychic sight, he was mostly a head and torso with legs only to just above the knee. For some reason, I rarely get arms past the elbows and legs past the knees in my psychic sight. Faces also don’t always appear and when they do are somewhat vague…as though only there for showing emotion rather than what the person actually looked like.

Sometimes, he was just a cloud of energy that I recognized as his without needing to see him at all. Like he learned that I’d know he was there whether or not he looked like a person.

I haven’t been back to see him in about eight years. I wonder if he’d greet me the moment I set foot on the property or if he’s even still around. Perhaps someday I’ll go visit him and find out. Consider that a reason for an update to this post.

I am still trying to piece together my theories on person-shaped entities versus those whom I sense as energy clouds. The ones who appear person-shaped when I first meet them, but then fade into cloud shapes tend to be the most sentient. Strangely, the ones whom I see fully (with legs below the knee and arms below the elbow) tend to be non-sentient or residual. The ones whom I sense as clouds when I first meet them are usually a lot weaker than the ones who appear person-shaped at first and sometimes I can’t tune into them at all other than simply recognizing their presence.

I don’t know what any of that means, but given my experiences and ability, I plan to piece more of it together so that I might understand it and help others understand as well. Like, is there really a correlation between the shapes entities take on or has it just been coincidence all this time? It’s not like my sight is crystal clear. It may just be the way my brain processes each event that gives the shape. I don’t know, but I hope to find out so that I can use that knowledge.

That’s another thing… I know that just because I sense something or get an image, voice or emotion from something, doesn’t mean it’s concrete. Just because I think the ghost is trying to shake my hand doesn’t mean he’s not trying to bite it or yank it off my arm or even something else entirely which has nothing to do with my hand. I honestly don’t know what the ghost is trying to do, but I do know what is being projected.

Just like when I ‘danced’ with “James”. For all I know, he could’ve been trying to throw me out the window, yet I felt like he was laughing and dancing with me. I sensed him and his movements and what he was saying, but I fully accept that I could’ve been totally wrong. The difference is that I also ‘felt’ I was correct in what I was sensing, so I went with it. At no time did I sense danger, so I interacted with him.

But really, for all I know, that icky thing in the storage room could have been him, too. He could’ve killed himself in the storage room or been a murder victim in there and didn’t want me to sense that residual energy. It’s not like I ever got a clear answer on how and when he died. There were contradictions on that topic. There are just so many possibilities and not many ways to check my answers. Therein lies the issues of credibility and scientific collection of paranormal evidence.

Which has always had me wondering whether if everyone was sensitive, would there still be the quandary of the existence of the paranormal. And wouldn’t that also deem that which is now considered paranormal…normal? And would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

In the mean time, all I can do is just go with what I feel and hope for the best.

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