Do Dead People Walk Their Dogs? (19 page)

I’ve had so
many experiences where I’ve left my body and have traveled in energy form and it’s not always controlled by any means, I don’t always know where I’m going. One of my favorites was just before John and I were making a trip to Germany. We’d never been before and were really looking forward to it. I was in bed and I was dreaming that I was soaring over a very large body of water. But then I suddenly realized that I wasn’t dreaming, I was out of my body, in energy form—it’s a completely different experience than dreaming, but since I’d been sleeping it took me a moment to understand what was happening. I was traveling at very high speed parallel to, and only inches above, the water. I said, “Oh, no! Water!” Someone (I don’t know who) was with me and they said, “Concetta, don’t worry. It’s not the ocean.” I have a fear of the ocean. I have no idea why—maybe a past-life thing. My companion pointed and I looked up and saw a road running alongside the water, so I then knew it was a river. Then I looked to the right and saw an old eighteenth-century village, with a very different type of house than anything I’d seen before, and also a number of ruins. As I soared along, taking all this in, I was thinking to myself, “John and I would love to visit that!” and my companion said to me, “We’ll bring you back.” I didn’t know what they meant.

Three weeks later, John and I flew in to Frankfurt, a very large city, to begin our German vacation. We planned to see as much as we could of the country, but didn’t have a set itinerary. We got a car and John took over, picking out a route for us, and off we went. Within a week’s time, we found ourselves driving on a road along the Rhine River—this river is vast; it is so wide, 300 ships go down it every day. Suddenly I recognized the scenery—it was exactly the same as what I’d seen a few weeks earlier when I was traveling out of my body, but I hadn’t known where I was. Now here were beautiful ruined castles, broken walls poking up out of the ground, some others maintained in better condition, sprinkled among villages that looked exactly like what I’d seen. Whoever it was who said, “We’ll bring you back,” had kept their word.

Yes, I do
think anyone can do it. Maybe not “at will,” but under certain circumstances. Most people have had the experience of being partially awake and trying to move, and it’s like you can’t; you’re paralyzed. Or you will try to scream, but it’s suppressed; no sound comes out or maybe just a bare squeak. This is because the soul has been out of the body and hasn’t yet completely rejoined it, so the directions you are mentally giving yourself to move aren’t reaching your physical limbs, even though your subconscious is trying to get it going. Many people will get panicky and try to force the body to respond, and eventually it does. However, if you want to travel out of body, it’s precisely at this kind of time that you just need to relax, and rather than trying to force the
body
to move, tell yourself consciously that you want to get
out
of your body. You’ll feel and see yourself rising out of the body. You never need to worry about getting back in—we remain connected to our bodies with sort of an energy umbilical cord, just like an astronaut stays connected to his or her vehicle while walking in space. The main thing is not to panic because the emotion of fear is what reels us back in before we’re ready to stop sightseeing. Believe me, it’s happened to me many times! For some reason, I think my brother Harold likes to mess with me when I’m out of my body. He’s got a weird sense of humor. One time I was traveling out of my body and I saw my dad and Harold. Harold looked young, with dark hair, as if it were years ago. He said to me, “We’ll be seeing you soon.” It totally freaked me out! What did he mean by that? Then my father was smiling. He said, “Not really that soon.”

Actually, that’s an
interesting question because I’m always saying that people fear what they don’t know, but when I think about it, that’s not the whole story, since some people are really intrigued by what they don’t know. I guess it boils down to different strokes for different folks. Some people just aren’t comfortable knowing that they are sharing space with ghosts. I was reminiscing with Brian, an old client of mine, who came to one of my book signings. He’s had several readings from me; he was among the first to come to my home for a reading, a long while ago when I was just getting started. Our house then was nothing but a tiny little box that John was in the process of enlarging. When John built the foyer, the first thing he did was frame it in before he knocked out the wall, so basically there was this “box” surrounding an existing window where the front door would be, and we had to go in and out of the backdoor until that part was done. Brian arrived with his girlfriend. I was doing my readings in the dining room at that time, and I’d shown Brian’s girlfriend to the living room to wait for him so he could have the privacy he wanted for his reading. Unfortunately, she turned out to be a little bit of a “Nervous Nellie.” We’d just gotten started when she came into the dining room very upset. She said she saw someone waving in the front window. Well, nobody could possibly have been outside that window, because the entire thing was framed in with no door, so I knew the person waving was a dead guy. I tried to tell her it was no big deal, but she was upset. She said, “Brian, I don’t want to stay! I want to go home right now!” Just then we heard a big noise in the living room, like someone had tipped over a big wall of books. Of course when we checked, there was nothing out of place. The noise was to get Brian’s attention. His uncle who had died of AIDS and who really loved this boy just wanted him to know he was there. Brian was delighted. His girlfriend—not so much.

Another one of my clients told me that when her mother died, she had not had very much that was worth keeping, and in any case, there really wasn’t much that my client needed. But her mother had loved to cook so she thought she’d keep her mother’s pots and pans to remember her by. One day, she had to run out to the store for something. It was just a quick trip and she had been back a short time when her sixteen-year-old daughter came downstairs. “Why were you banging on the pots and pans?” she asked. “I was going to come down and ask you before, but then it stopped.” My client said, “Honey, what pots and pans? I was out just now.” Her daughter was so freaked out, but my client realized it must have been her mother just trying to get a little attention. She went into the kitchen and said, very calmly, “Mother, please don’t do that again, you’re frightening your granddaughter.” I thought this was terrific—people are really starting to get it. We can just talk to the spirits of our loved ones. It’s normal. Still, I realize it’s upsetting for those who have a ways to go in accepting this.

Not “frightened” in
the sense of really terrified. But with dead guys it’s not just the “fear factor,” there’s also the “startle factor.” Not everybody sees ghosts everyday, and I’ll jump a mile when I’m surprised by something, trust me. My nerves are just as bad as anyone else’s. Like the time I was out of my body taking a little astral spin and I saw my brother’s face getting closer and closer to me. It really startled me because I wasn’t expecting to see him, and I just zipped right back into my body. I regretted it, because I would have loved to know what he wanted to tell me, but it was a mental reflex. And then with ghosts there’s also the “weirdly annoying factor.” I lived at home until I got married, when I was thirty. I have never lived alone, and I know I never could. It would be horrible for me. I’m honestly not afraid of spirits. But that said, there are a lot of weird things that go on around me all the time—lights going on and off, water going on, anytime I’d be home alone. If I didn’t have another person living with me so I could get my bearings, someone to ground me, I think I’d go nuts.

Just to give you some idea, one thing I remember was one night when I was living at home and I was going to take a shower before bed. I took my pajamas to the bathroom and sat them on the chair, took my shower, toweled off, and started to get dressed in my pj’s. Only problem was, the top was missing. I knew for sure that I had both top and bottom when I went into the bathroom, so I figured someone was having fun with me, but still it was annoying. I had no idea where I’d find the top. I covered up with a towel and went back to my bedroom. I looked around for a while but didn’t see anything. I was headed back toward the bathroom and I saw my pajama top hanging from the doorknob on the outside of the bathroom. I had just opened and closed that door to go to my bedroom; I know the top hadn’t been there then. If I were going to hang my top on the doorknob—for whatever reason—I would have hung it on the inside, not the outside of the door. I
know
I didn’t do this. I didn’t really get the joke, but I know
somebody
thought it was funny.

One day I had been working in my office and I got up and was going to go downstairs. I was in the upstairs hall that leads to the stairway. The TV was on in the TV room so there was some noise in the house, but then, right behind my head I heard a tiny little ringing—clear as a bell, no pun intended! I looked toward the stairs. On the wall that runs down the stairs we have a few masks—they are Italian, but were given to me by a friend in Mexico. One of the masks is a harlequin—like a joker—and it caught my eye as I was hearing this little bell sound. I turned around, but there was nothing there. I went back to my office and saw that this little doll that I keep hanging in the window—it wears a little jester hat with a tiny bell on the point of the hat—was sitting on the floor. The bell is really small, so it doesn’t ring very loud. Even if the bell had rung when the doll fell, it would not have made such a persistent ringing sound, and I never could have heard it all the way from my office to the stairway—especially with the TV on. I knew it was a dead guy, thinking he was being funny, to ring this bell behind my head.

It probably goes without saying that there are a lot of spirits hanging around my office, since that is where the living come to connect with them. So there are a lot of things that happen there or right around there. One time I was straightening out the magazines I have on a decorative pressed-tin table in my waiting room. Behind me I heard a really loud BOOM! I just about jumped out of my skin—I thought a picture in some heavy frame must have fallen off the wall. I turned around and…nothing. Not a thing. It’s amazing what they are able to do energetically to create a big noise like that. I have no idea how they do it.

Another time, I heard this woman laughing really loudly in my hallway. Oh. My. God. I was so completely freaked out. I knew it was a spirit, but at the same time, the sound of it was so crazy and eerie! No, living alone would never work for me. Once, when I was twenty-five, I thought, I really should move out of my parents’ house. I was determined. I went out and found a nice apartment, rented it, and set about making it just the way I’d like it. I put in new carpet, and I bought new furniture to make it really nice. I kept that apartment nine months, paying the rent, without ever moving into it.
I couldn’t.
I finally let it go, sold the furniture, and just stayed where I was.

Not really, because
I’m in the frame of mind where I’m expecting someone, and I’m not sure who, so I’m really in a state of anticipation. It’s usually when I’m not thinking about it that I get surprised—just makes sense, right? In any case, when I’m doing a reading, it’s more like I’m getting a thought, and any visual is more like a dream sequence or like pictographs on a cave wall, like the Anasazi did in New Mexico. If I say, “It’s someone who was a flute player,” it’s because I see an image of someone holding a thing that looks like a flute he’s blowing into. I’m busy assembling a puzzle and they are trying to communicate something specific—they’re not playing games in that moment.

Most of my
ghost experiences have not been too dramatic, considering that I talk with the Dead on a regular basis. But if you don’t have my background, even a “mild” ghost could be a little much, I suppose. I’ve heard some crazy ghost stories in my time, but one of the weirdest was the story of my friend’s house. She’s Italian, first generation here. Her parents moved from Italy, bringing all seven of their kids with them, and they were completely broke when they got here. Luckily, they found a super-cheap house they could rent. Even though it wasn’t very big for nine people, they signed a lease and moved in. Right away they begin to notice strange stuff, noises and things. But pretty quickly it went from a little strange to really crazy. (They found out why the house was so cheap!) They’d see a woman sitting on the end of the bed; their pajamas would go missing and they’d find them neatly folded on the sofa, nowhere near where they’d been left. One time my friend’s father searched the house high and low until he found his tool box sitting smack in the middle of the basement floor—impossible, since he’d never taken it down there; he always left it next to the front door so he could grab it and go when he went to work. As anyone could imagine, this was pretty spooky for the family, but they didn’t have the money to move. One day they heard banging in the kitchen and they ran to see what was happening, only to find that all the cupboard doors were opening and closing on their own, and
still
they didn’t feel they could leave the house, even though it really was getting pretty terrifying. Finally, the last straw: the family was sitting together in the living room, all the kids hunkered down on the couch, and all of a sudden, the couch literally rises up off the floor! It levitates to about a foot off the floor—with all the children still sitting on it—and then comes slamming down with a BOOM! The whole family was scared out of its wits, and finally realized that no matter how difficult it would be to find a new place, no matter the cost, they had to get out of there. They later found out that a woman had committed suicide in that house. All I can say is, thank God they were renting!