Do ghost tours harm the paranormal field?

Posted by Jessica Jewett 12 Comments »

Original post on June 16, 2011.

A few years ago when I went to Gettysburg for the first time, I saw a folding board advertisement outside of an old house on Steinwehr Avenue spouting Gettysburg Ghost Tours. I had heard of ghost tours before but I had never seen such a thing in person. At the time, I remember that it struck me as odd because the building had Halloween decorations all over it and the whole thing seemed cheap and exploitative to me. Someone told me there were other tours on Baltimore Street that were operated by Mark Nesbitt, a former Gettysburg National Park ranger turned author of the Ghosts of Gettysburg books. I think there are twelve of those books in the series now. I have always had mixed feelings about Mark Nesbitt and what these books and tours represent but I was on my way to somewhere on Baltimore Street that afternoon. I soon forgot about the Gettysburg Ghost Tours.

Late that night, my friends and I were walking to a Civil War reenactment ball and we happened upon one of these ghost tours in progress. Costumed interpreters lead groups of tourists by lantern on walking tours talking about all of the hauntings and apparitions along the way. Of course, it’s all for a fee. I watched it for a minute while the tourists watched me too (it’s kind of hard to miss me in a Civil War ballgown). Something about these tours really rubbed me the wrong way and I left not long afterward. There was an element of a circus freak show to it.

Step right up, folks! Pay a few dollars and see the ghost of a dead soldier!

I don’t know. Maybe I was a little too overprotective of the thousands of spirits still lingering around Gettysburg and I was being too cynical. I do understand that most of Gettysburg’s local economy is based on tourism and television shows describing the ghost stories have really piqued the interest of people everywhere. It’s natural that people with an entrepreneurial spirit would find ways to cash in on that public interest. I just chalked it up to the nature of the tourism beast and let it go.

Since that initial introduction to ghost tours, however, I have watched them spread all over the world like a plague. It’s gotten so out of hand that I can’t seem to look at ghost stories in any city online without sorting through dozens of advertisements for this or that ghost tour, all claiming to be the best in that city. In fact, the straw that broke this blogger’s back was trying to look for notoriously haunted places in Boston since my readers like the research but all I found were pages and pages of different ghost tours in the city. It has become a full-fledged commercial machine. Anyone with a centralized historical location can throw a shingle on their door, buy a lantern and offer tourists ghost tours of their area. People eat this stuff up like candy. I’m seeing it everywhere I go when I travel as time passes.

Step right up, folks, indeed.

It all seems very harmless, but from my vantage as a medium, I can’t help but wonder why people are missing the fact that it is all completely exploitative of the spirits that are the subjects of these tours. Once a person dies, they almost cease to be human. They lose value as something to be honored, respected and protected. There is indeed an element of a zoo exhibit or a circus freak show about the way the living treat the dead. Sometimes I want to say, “Would you be happy with people paying a tour guide in hopes of seeing the ghost of your mother, father, or grandparents?” I’m guessing most of the time the answer would be a resounding no. What is the difference between the recently dead and, say, a soldier that has been dead since 1863? Has that soldier lost enough humanity that it makes it acceptable to go on a tour hoping for the thrill of seeing his spooky apparition? These questions bother me quite a bit. In my case, I find it intolerable that people try to lure out my former husband, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, in Gettysburg like he’s a dog performing tricks to give ghost hunting tourists their money’s worth. Just an example. I find it all very seedy and dishonorable to the memory of the men who were killed so that this country might live. It’s not just Gettysburg though. It’s every ghost tour in every city exploiting the souls of people who lived very normal lives and deserve respect in death.

Although ghost tours are showing themselves to be good for local economies, I don’t see much value in the field of paranormal research. Those of us in the field are never going to be taken seriously as long as there is this element of circus freak show involved. The same could be said for some “paranormal investigators” out there who treat it more like a social club than a research endeavor. Note: I said some, not all. The serious lack of respect for the dead and the circumstances of life and death is becoming worse as “ghost hunting” becomes a bigger fad. I have seen it with my own two eyes. The scientific research is extremely important when it is explained beforehand to the entities but science only goes so far. Science is not helping the trapped souls find their peace. There is an element of selfishness in all areas of paranormal interest in that most people seem to not care about the spirits anymore once the evidence is collected or the trill has been achieved. If I was stuck somewhere, I would want help.

In my work as a medium, I have several guidelines about the way I deal with spirits. I never conjure, summon, or hold seances. I find those practices to be dangerous and disrespectful. To me, conjuring, summoning, and seances are no different than the act of making kissy noises to bring your dog to you and then find yourself shocked when the dog bites you. I simply open my senses at the beginning of a session and whomever is meant to come through will do so. When I have to ask for signs of a presence, I explain why – that we are trying to find out if they are there and if they need help. My goal in paranormal investigation is to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, and that encompasses scientific evidence collection, assisting people in communication with loved ones, and assisting spirits in finding peace. In none of my three goals is there room for ghost tours or poorly conducted ghosts hunts for the cheap thrill of getting scared or having fun. Ghost tours don’t fit into my moral compass. If that makes me an old fuddy duddy, then so be it.

Update on October 29, 2012.

I was just going through my old blogs today and found this one. I got curious and searched ghost tours again to see if the epidemic is still spreading out there. Like the plagues of old, ghost tours are still raging on strong not only in America but in the United Kingdom and Australia as well. There weren’t so many ghost tours across the pond the last time I looked over a year ago. I’d like to say I’m surprised but I’m not.

For the most part, I still feel that the majority of ghost tours are exploitative of the honored dead and are harmful to paranormal research in that they draw people to the field who have no experience and then present themselves as experts. However, I have noticed a slight shift in the ghost tour industry of late. Several friends of mine have inserted themselves into those jobs in order to ensure that things are presented responsibly. I have one friend in Ohio who is both a historian and a medium who works in her local historical society and now also works with a ghost tour near her too. Someone like her who really does know what she’s doing has great potential to lead tourists through such tours in a manner both respectful to the dead and educational and entertaining for the tourists. I have another friend who is also very well-versed in history and paranormal research who may be joining one of the ghost tours in Charleston. These people helped me realize by their example that it’s not necessarily the ghost tour industry that I find so upsetting – it’s the inexperienced tour guides doing it either for the wrong reasons or simply because they don’t know any better. The solution appears to be not totally ending ghost tours but getting knowledgeable  experienced tour guides hired who are both educated in local history and paranormal research.

I am a woman of action. Next year, I plan to see if Oakland Cemetery by my house will have me as a tour guide for next year’s Halloween ghost tours. People with local knowledge and experience in paranormal things should be reaching out in the community to help tourists understand the truth.

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Disabilities and Psychic Abilities

Posted by Jessica Jewett 6 Comments »

A lot of people keep asking me about my theories concerning the connection between disabilities and psychic abilities.  I have talked about it at length in different places but never in a concentrated place like my blog where I can direct people when they ask me about it.  So here I am to explain it!  I don’t think this blog will be very long because it’s pretty straightforward but here we go….

My beliefs on this matter are very simple.  I believe that there is a connection between displaying natural psychic abilities and having some kind of disability whether it is physical or developmental.  (As an aside, the proper terms are physical disability and developmental disability.  Saying crippled or retarded are not at all acceptable.)  I started noticing the connection when I was rather young in school.  When I realized what it meant to be someone with psychic/intuitive/mediumistic abilities, I was somewhere around middle school, I think, and I was automatically put into special ed classes for one period a day just by virtue of being in a wheelchair.  Mainstreaming people with disabilities in school permanently is a whole other issue that I will probably talk about it another blog at some point.  But anyway, some of the other kids in the special ed classes sometimes talked about sensing presences that they couldn’t see or hearing mysterious sounds or knowing information before it happened.  Basic intuitive abilities, really.  Outside of the special ed classes, the other kids almost never talk about those things.  In fact, outside of the special ed classes, talking openly about intuitive abilities was almost always met with ridicule and bullying.  I made the mistake when I was very young of telling a few friends about the things I saw or experienced and it resulted in bullying that made me silent about it until I was well into high school almost ready to graduate.

I never gave it much thought, the question of why people with disabilities of any type were more prone to having spiritual experiences than “normal” people.  I don’t like the term normal because it implies that people like me are abnormal and I don’t think that’s right but there is no other way to compare and contrast people with disabilities and not with disabilities right now.  My mother made a friend with a professional psychic when I was in my sophomore year of high school and that woman made the suggestion to me that people with disabilities are actually very advanced souls and it’s natural to make the connection that advanced souls would be more connected to the other side.  She used people with Down Syndrome as her example, specifically naming them as being very advanced souls.  She also indicated that such people are on their last lives and will not reincarnate anymore because they have finished everything they need to learn and they’ve used their last life to teach people around them.  That was my first exposure to a theory about why people with disabilities are naturally more connected to spirituality than others.  Specifically in the areas of developmental disabilities, I have noticed that people with various forms of autism tend to displaying natural mediumistic abilities.  Several friends of mine who have children with autism also report their children having significant and legitimate encounters with spirit entities and displaying precognitive knowledge.

In my case, I don’t have any developmental disabilities whatsoever but I am technically a quadriplegic so that makes me fall into the physical disability category.  That gets a little hairier as far as fitting into the theory of why disabilities and spiritual abilities seem to be so connected.  When I was writing my book about reincarnation, I really had to address that issue because I knew other people were going to ask me about it.  That meant I had to ask a lot of very difficult questions, which is what should happen when anyone is writing a book about spirituality in any form.  It actually occurred to me when I was watching that movie Ray about Ray Charles, who was blind.  I don’t remember the exact scene or anything but the the actor playing Ray referenced the fact that because he was blind, the rest of his senses were heightened.  He was talking to a woman and told her that there was a hummingbird outside or something of that nature and she looked and found the hummingbird even though she hadn’t noticed it.  He noticed it because he could hear it.  His other senses were extremely heightened because one of his senses didn’t work properly anymore.

Most people probably don’t even realize it when they look at people with physical disabilities but we are extremely confined and many of us have some senses denied that other people take for granted.  Some of us don’t have a sense of touch at all (I do have full sensation).  Some of us are very limited in our mobility, which means we can’t just get up and go into the next room when we hear people talking.  It doesn’t matter what sense is taken away.  The other senses are going to go into overdrive to make up for the loss.  It’s not anything that happens because we intended to – it’s just the body’s natural way of coping and surviving.  Since I was very limited in where I could go and what I could do when I was younger before I had a wheelchair, I got very good at listening to everything going on around me, even in other parts of the house.  I knew where everybody was in the house, and I knew what they were doing, and most of the time, I knew about every conversation that happened under my roof even if I didn’t witness it firsthand.  Being so limited and mobility forces a person to be still and quiet much more in their lives than the average person.  That’s usually the first lesson in developing psychic abilities – be still, listen, etc.  It’s the beginning of meditation.  So people like me who are not as physically active as everyone else naturally developed the beginning stages of meditation without realizing what it was.  And as the other senses became heightened, so did extrasensory perception.  It happened for me at an extremely young age.  I started having experiences with the other side and spirit entities when I was a toddler even though I didn’t understand the terms “afterlife” or “ghost”.

In the simplest terms possible, it just comes down to being denied one or more senses and the other senses jump into overdrive to make up for the loss.  People don’t typically think of psychic abilities as another sense.  The tend to put it on a pedestal like it’s special, so special that only a few people actually have it.  I kind of disagree with that.  I think it’s just something everybody has but most people ignore and never develop.  Extrasensory ability is no different than a sense of touch or sense of smell or sense of sight.

For those of you who regularly watched Paranormal State, they often did experiments with sensory deprivation in order to open themselves up to encounters with entities.  It’s basically the same principle.  If you deny yourself certain senses, the rest of them will try to make up for the loss, and that’s really what’s happening to people with disabilities.  It may be true that people with this abilities are more evolved spiritually than the average population but I truthfully don’t know for sure.  I believe it but I can’t prove it.  It’s much more accepted to believe that sensory deprivation in any form will lead to the remaining senses becoming heightened, including extrasensory ability.  So if you have people in your life who are disabled in any form, my advice is not to question them too much if they claim to have spiritual experiences.  They’re probably telling the truth.

What are your theories?

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Healing your spiritual safe space

Posted by Jessica Jewett No Comments »

This is the third blog in the “spiritual safe space” series. In order to do the exercises in this blog, you first need to practice the exercises in the previous two blogs: creating your spiritual safe space and defending your spiritual safe space. Practice and discipline are of the utmost importance when it comes to learning meditation and visualization exercises and implementing them into your daily routines.

Many people are wholly unaware that when the body is suffering, the soul can do a lot to help it through the healing process. Although many things cannot be healed by faith alone, you can combine spirit and science quite easily. The things I’m going to teach you here are exercises that I have developed for myself over the last nineteen years (yes, I am only thirty and have been doing it that long). I began learning about non-medicated pain management from a nurse in the Shriner’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, when I was 6-years-old and I developed my own routines based off of her fundamental help. Exercises like these are especially helpful if you’re like me and have gone through addiction to narcotic painkillers and you cannot take them anymore or you’re hesitant to depend on them so much. I’m not advertising these exercises as a magic cure all. I am saying that you can be proactive in controlling your own pain and illness. Every doctor I’ve ever worked with agrees that healing the body is just as much about your mental constitution as it is your physical constitution.

So let’s get to it. Just as we did with every other exercise, we begin by getting into a comfortable position and focusing on our breathing. It doesn’t matter where or what position, just as long as your body is able to relax to a degree. First you want to begin by closing your eyes and taking slow, deep breaths. I’m an anxious person by nature, so this step takes me longer than others. There is no time limit. Focus on your breathing. Let yourself experience the rhythm of breath in your body, how it fills your limbs with life, and feel your lungs filling and deflating with each breath. As you feel your body beginning to relax, take further deep breaths. Each breath pulls you further under a warm blanket of comfort and further into your spiritual self. The noise of the tangible world fades away with each breath. You sink away from the physical and emerge into the spiritual safe space that you built for yourself. You should be very familiar and comfortable with this space by now. It’s yours. You’re safe and nothing can touch you here without your permission.

The breathing exercise that I was taught as a 6-year-old going through multiple surgeries is like this: take in a slow, deep breath and count to five, hold it for three to five seconds, and then exhale slowly like blowing through a straw as you count to three. Repeat as necessary. This is called square breathing. It’s an exercise often taught to people who suffer from panic attacks but I also find that it’s helpful in coping with intense pain because the rhythm forces your brain and body to slow down and relax. If you can’t get into full on meditation, this is a good quick fix that will help as well.

When you’re in your spiritual safe space, create a moving source of water for this visualization. If you’re indoors, create a sink, shower or bathtub. If you’re outdoors, create a river, stream or waterfall. This is going to be used to wash away the substance causing your body harm. Think of the place on your body that is causing you pain or illness. Just for today’s example, we’re going to use my kidneys because they haven’t been functioning well lately and I need some tests soon. I’m visualizing my kidneys in my body. I’m giving the pain and illness a face – something I can fight – and it looks like black sludge invading the organs. Whatever causes me pain at any given time is represented by black sludge. You can choose any other negative representation of pain or illness that you want as long as it registers in your mind as being negative and unwanted. Now you want to visualize your hands in the source of running water. Think about pushing the black sludge through your body, through your arms, your hands, and release it through your fingertips. The pain, the illness, the suffering is being expelled from your body under your own control. It’s leaving your body and going into the current of water or the circling the drain. Take time to feel relief from your symptoms and announce your intentions to the universe: “This pain and illness will not dictate my life. I heal my own energy and I heal my own body. This pain and illness is expelled from my body and not allowed to invade me again.” Once the black sludge is gone, cleanse your hands and arms in the water. You should look clean. Remember how it feels to be relaxed and carry it with you.

Aside from the physical pain, sometimes there are illnesses that suck the life out of us. These can be energy related illnesses like chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or things of that nature. I’m anemic due to iron deficiency from prolonged use of over the counter drugs like ibuprofen, which causes fatigue, an inability to concentrate, grumpiness, etc. The fatigue brought on by anemia was very intense for a while before I was diagnosed – I could easily sleep eighteen hours per day – so I learned and developed an exercise to help boost my energy at different times in my day.

If your spiritual safe space is indoors, you’ll need to step through that door in your room and go outside for this one. Don’t create a vast outdoor space. Keep everything very contained. A little courtyard with grass, dirt, leaves, flowers and trees will be enough. If your space is already outdoors, make sure you’re facing a tree. Feel your bare feet on the cool, damp grass. Feel the dirt beneath the grass. Become very aware of the earth and the cycle of life. Now as you look at the tree, visualize the roots pushing through the earth drinking up nutrients and water from the soil, going up through the trunk into the branches and into the tiniest leaves. Energy from the earth is given to that tree to keep it alive and flourishing. Once you understand earth energy, return your focus to your bare feet on the grass and visualize that energy coming into you from your toes up through your legs into your torso, your arms and your head, like that tree. Inhale and draw more energy into your body. Inhale again. And again. Give yourself enough energy from the earth to continue moving along throughout your day. This is also an exercise that you can do in the physical world if you have the opportunity to go outside for a barefoot walk.

Just like before, when you feel a greater sense of peace, you will notice a sensation of being lighter as well. You may begin to return to the physical world at this point. Use the same method we talked about in the last blog. Coming out of it is the opposite of going into it. Focus on your breathing again and with each exhale, feel yourself rising up to the physical world. Start to hear the sounds around you, become aware of where you’re sitting, etc. Sometimes it can take a little longer to reconnect with the physical world, sort of like waking up from a long nap, so let your body re-acclimate slowly. Move around where you’re sitting, stretch your arms and legs, and so forth. You’ll feel more relaxed after you’re finished.

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