Page 4 of Shadowing My Dreams
Beatrice
“Beatrice Cummings?” I held up a death certificate. Sometimes, they could see the here and now, and other times, they couldn’t. Since I had seen Beatrice moving small objects around in the house, I assumed that she could. I had to do a lot of research to find who I thought they might be. “You and your husband Daniel built this house in nineteen-twenty-nine after you moved here from New Jersey. He passed away fifteen years later, but you lived here for another twenty years. You died of natural causes in nineteen-forty-nine at the age of fifty-three.”
Died? I… I remember going to bed last night.
I tried to connect with her without letting her completely in. I had been taken over once before, and I never wanted that to happen again. This spirit was not violent or evil – she was just confused. I wished I could understand how or why this happened. But no one knew for sure.
“See what I know, Beatrice. You passed away in your sleep almost seventy-five years ago. You’ve been living the last day of your life over and over, but you don’t have to stay there. You can move on and cross over to the next realm. This is not the place for you any longer. See what the world now is, Beatrice. See what I know.”
I opened my mind up and pushed my thoughts outward. It was a trick I had learned when I was a child, and one that had served me well. I protected myself now much more than I ever had. But sometimes to communicate, the walls had to brought down for the spirits to know the truth.
What is this… This is not what I know.
Her energy came together, and for a brief moment, she stood before me. Beatrice had been trapped in her loop—doing the same actions she completed on her very last day of living for toolong. Now, as she shimmered into view and all of her swirling soul entered this plane of existence, she looked around and knew that what I said was true.
The look on her face broke my heart.
“I do not know this place.” Her face broke into grief, but there were no tears for her to cry. The dead did not have the substance of the living. “It is true? Daniel? I could have been with Daniel.”
“You still can be, Beatrice. He is waiting for you on the other side.”
“Heaven?”
“Only the dead know. It remains the last true mystery, even to me.”
“How do I… Oh,” she whispered and looked up. What they saw, I had no idea. But the look of calm and peace on her face gave me hope in the afterlife. Souls were real, so why not all of the other stuff we desired to be true? Her form shimmered once again, and I could see her essence fade and float away.
The light. That’s what some called it. I once had a ghost who saw a bridge, and that has made me scratch my head for quite some time. Whatever it was – I hoped that those lost souls I helped found the peace they deserved. The same peace that one day I knew I would also see.
Death was the inevitable outcome for everyone.
I reached out once again with what many psychics called their third eye – I had named mine Barbra. I was a fan and super gay, so, of course, it was named for a diva. Nothing but silence – the way it should be in a house that was clean of the past.
Ghosts usually fall into a few categories. None of this was science because science hadn’t been able to prove that whatwe psychics could see was even true. Some called what we could do a gift – others a curse. For me, it lay in between like many of the spirits I saw in my day-to-day life. This world was filthy with spirits. It was sad. The world was a confusing place – butwhat happened after death was riddled with inconsistencies. I had yet to discover a real cause for the affliction of these spirits. Whatever trapped them here remained an unknown.
Oh, the categories!
I usually get ravenous after communicating with a spirit, and it makes my mind wander. All I want is a medium rare steak and a vat of potatoes.
Most ghosts are just echoes of a moment during their previous life. This was what was happening to Beatrice. She only saw the house as she knew it. Her energy passed through the other people living here without her knowledge. She didn’t coexist – she lived trapped within this box of her past life. Ghost hunters liked to call these residual hauntings. There was nothing residual about Beatrice, though. That was her complete spirit or essence that was here. She just didn’t know what had happened or that she was repeating the same day for almost seven decades.
Ghost Hunters usually have this wrong. Their residual hauntings are usually much more than that – but sadder. In all my time of communicating with spirits, I’ve only seen one true residual haunting. There was nothing I could do because it was just a figment of reality – a small leftover piece of soul that the deceased could never have back. Most were memories of trauma that they left behind when they passed on. It was probably better for them that way.
The hauntings that were trickier and scarier were the cases where the ghosts knew exactly what they were doing. Ghost hunters called these intelligent hauntings. The spirit did not choose to leave when its time came. Their soul was not always trapped – sometimes, it was just a choice. They never wanted to leave, and I had never been able to truly solve any of those client's problems. The ghost had free will and usually stayed too long in this plane to ever be able to cross over. At least, that’swhat I thought. They were angrier and lashed out with reason and forethought.
Hey, at least Beatrice hadn’t turned out to be a demon. I don’t do that. Not anymore.
I walked out of the room where I had found her essence and opened my mind once again.
Nothing. This house was free of the dead.
“Is it over?” The young man stood from the couch and looked as if he were about to get sick.
“Yes,” I sighed. “She is gone. She didn’t even know that you were here, Billy. She didn’t know that she was dead and had been reliving her last day over and over.”
“Jesus, that’s sad,” Billy wrung his hands. “Sorry, I was so nervous and worried that I’d have to find another rental. Do you know how much a house that’s not rent-controlled costs in this place?”
“That I do,” I smirked, unsurprised that he didn’t actually care about the spirit I helped to cross over. Most clients rarely did. People, as a blanket statement, only actually cared about themselves and their own problems. “Speaking of rent…”
