The Open Door Policy

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Good afternoon, on a cold, creepy and blustery winter day here near Melbourne in Australia. I am watching the breeze blowing my curtain around. The window is shut, but a flying rock, many years ago, made a small hole in the bottom corner .. and I like to have breeze in the spaces I am in, cold or not.

That curtain is a strange thing .. it moves by itself. Sometimes its all the way open, and sometimes, like now, its almost shut. And its not me, or members of my living household, who are moving it about - oh no, to move the dear thing you have to climb up on my desk, take hold of the curtain rail and pray it doesn't fall down in your hands when you try and shift the curtain along .. so it tends to stay wherever it ends up. LOL

I wanted to talk to folks about 'the open door policy'. Cute name, not so helpful problem. It's about not letting ghosts in your house, or your energy, since I have people both painfully haunted and wearing attachments we cannot shift. Why does it happen .. I can explain that .. what we can't explain is why we can't shift them.

When I was growing up the 'church' taught 'do not play in the occult'. I thought they were crazy .. what's harmful about tarots etc .. still of that opinion, but two things that I know are trouble in the making are ouijas, and being haunted. One can lead to the other, and where the ouija is concerned .. it can lead to much worse .. but its not a topic for today .. so where was I? Oh yes ...

I know it can be fun to have doors move by themselves, have voices whispering just beyond your hearing, have taps and knocks, and things move .. except knives being thrown of course, which does happen ... people thrive on the fascination of the unseen. They 'must' ghost hunt. It begins as an entertaining experience, and ends up an obsession .. and why? Because we fear death .. well, I don't, but lots of people do .. and 'need' to know for certain what happens after we die. But I'll tell you now, the ghosts don't know folks .. because their 'world' is a tiny bubble of repeating patterns that has NOTHING to do with what really happens when we leave these bodies and pass into healing.

Ghosts .. a ghost is the spirit of a person who has died, who has not crossed over - gone through the veil - down the tunnel - found his or her loved ones - returned to God - gone to Nirvana .. or whatever else way you want to describe it. No, a ghost is a mass of confused emotion, heading for furiously angry, who is starving for something they do not know where to find .. but there are touches of it, and glimpses of it, in the energy of living people .. so they feed on the living, and the living suffer because of it. Oh yes, Fred .. that means you. You think ghosts are fun .. I know they are trouble waiting to happen. You love the cupboard door opening when no one is there .. used to scare the hell out of me as a kid. Doesn't now, but if a cupboard door opens without a reason I'll be checking the house and making sure whomever it is is going into healing quick smart. So they tend to stay closed.

Ghosts .. there are no neutral ghosts. There is no such thing as a ghost just 'hanging around' that isn't feeding from the living. And here is where the trouble starts .. because people want the fun without having to pay for it .. and you don't change that attitude when you are dead. We all love freebies, and until we pass into Healing, we will accept handouts whenever they are offered .. and a living person who lets a ghost hang around the house longer than the 10 minutes it takes to recognise them and get them into healing, is giving the ghost a freebie of their energy.

Why is this a problem .. because they do not take the excess energy we produce every day. No, they take our core energy, our soul energy, if you like. And the more you lose of that, as its slow to replenish, the sicker a living person can become .. mind, body and spirit. Mental illness can be one of the symptoms of perpetual hauntings, schizoprenia comes in two forms .. the voices in your head could be your over active ego, or they could be entities attaching to your energy. We can remove the latter, but can't do much about the former .. but there is medication nowadays .. thank goodness.

Life force energy powers everything we do, and we need all of our own. We were not designed to give that away .. or worse, have it taken .. because it is stolen from us in haunting situations ... who has ever had a ghost walk through them, and come away tired, drained and very, very cold. Oh heck yeah .. I can hear the guy, a few months ago, who couldn't wait to meet a demon 'just for the experience'. I pray for him, that he never will. I feel the same way about ghosts. We don't need this to happen. We shouldn't be looking for it .. and yet we do.

I admit to being a hypocrit, but only because I actually know how to protect myself psychicly. I help out in a couple of Investigation groups from time to time. It's fun to visit a haunted house and watch people's reactions to the odd things that happen .. like the glass that went in big circles on the table .. and I love orb photos .. but I go to those groups because I also know how to protect the people in them .. so that they can go home safely after the experience .. not 'wearing' anyone. So there is method in my madness .. but how about yours?

The open door policy is what some people have on their homes, when they invite in ghosts, when they don't protect themselves before going into haunted locations, when they allow ghosts to hang around, after they know they are haunted. It's like a sign that the gypsies, and 'travellers in Australia, used to leave on the fence of a house where the living folk were prepared to feed them, in exchange for work, or not. Once the door is 'open' its very hard to close. And if a person is in two minds about ghosts, like the neutral ghost person, ghosts will take advantage of that double-mindedness and keep on dropping in, disrupting the family, stealing their energy, and making the sane insane, the sick sicker and the depressed even more depressed. And we call that fun?

The open door policy also applies to our energy. Some people invite ghosts into their energy for a chat. They 'like the company' of a voice in their heads that is not their own. They might have done this when they were very young, or it might have been thrust upon them in a moment of weakness, but the more willing they are for it to happen, and the longer it remains, the harder it is to UNDO what has been done. In a metaphysical sense, a symbol has been drawn on the fencepost of their energy (the aura) that allows access to anything .. and I mean anything .. that happens to be floating around. And then they come searching out people like me, trying to get help for the problems they have created .. and get upset when we cannot problem solve for them .. because something inside them wants the situation to remain the way it is .. otherwise change would happen.

How can I say that!!!!!! They are not responsible for what is happening. It is being done TO them, not by them .. and yet ... who was it that invited the ghost in in the first place, or the first ghost, and now they are inhabited by many? I have heard this story many times over the years, and my answer is always the same. Change. You have to change. You have to change your energy, make your aura uninhabitable. Deal with the issues that invited the ghosts in in the first place. Release them. Love yourself, love God/Spirit. Ask for help. Stop saying yes when you should be saying no. Don't tell me you 'can't' because can't means 'I won't try'. Yes, its going to be hard, it takes time, energy and work. There are no freebies here. Everything happens for a reason .. its not just a bunch of words hung together, its the truth. Learn the reason, release the patterns, and let the negative stuff go.

What's the other solution. Learn from other people's mistakes and don't get into situations like this in the first place.

I have been in this industry for over 20 years and talking about ghosts, demons and hauntings for more than that time. Some people will never be haunted, and some people will never escape it .. it all comes down to us. We choose our reality. And we can choose to change.

In Love & Peace
Ama

Ghost Tours - Edinburgh, Monte Cristo - Junee, Walhalla

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Ok, ok, yes I know I've been away for a long time. Life intervenes and the writer's urge, for blogs anyway, dries up. It frustrates me too.

At the moment I am cooking tomatoes. We have too many. We have far too many. Tom planted somewhere near 20 bushes. It was a momentary insanity on his part. Now I 'suffer' (think dramatic Greek style gesture .. hehe), and make tomato sauce, relish .. well my mother made the relish, and its delicious. And so we are eating lots of tomatoes.

Lovely weather for it.

What does this have to do with ghost tours? Really nothing - except the relish was made while Tom and I were away on our last one .. his first with me, my third, or maybe fourth? Hmm...

Ghost tours.

The disadvantage of being a ghost buster is that ghosts generally stay away from me, unless some tiny part of themselves wants to be rescued. I don't know why I go on ghost tours. After years of questioning myself, and my strange gifts, I have come to the conclusion that I don't sense 'spirits' (non lost souls), but put me anywhere near a lost one .. and I know all about them.

Going back in my mind over the last four ghost tours (I'm sure there's a 5th but can't remember where) .. the first was at Monte Cristo, Junee NSW, the second and third were in Edinburgh, Scotland, the current one was last weekend. We went to Walhalla (pronounced Wall-halla, much to my disappointment .. given that I love norse mythology).

In Edinburgh http://www.mercattours.com/ghost-tours.asp I had the strange experience of sensing lost souls as we all first entered the catacombs beneath the city .. doesn't it sound dramatic .. what it was most was dusty. The guide did a good, if overdramatic job, of telling us the history of the place, and gruesome it is, and telling us 'what might happen'. What did happen was 'nothing much'. A sense of presence in the first area, a couple of scared living people in the second, a sense of someone nasty in the main area - umm.. ok, so I sent angels after him. I doubt he'll have troubled anyone since. And then a wild desire to run quickly out of the place .. everyone else had that, as if we had worn out our welcome by hanging around .. I just climbed up the stairs at the end of the catacombs .. puffing a bit .. and was glad to be out in the daylight .. well night light actually. Aha! I have remembered the other tour .. it was also in Edinburgh .. and that's the last you'll hear of it here, because it was pretty hopeless, far too commercial and .. dumb.

And then I remembered another .. so that makes five tours .. the other was also with Mercat (link above), and went to Greyfrairs cemetary, but they no longer have it listed on the site. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Kirkyard It is definitely haunted. I was strongly drawn over to the Covenanter's section of the cemetary, where ghost tours are now banned. It seems that 'bloody' George McKenzie likes to kick, bite and scratch people. When I started wandering in that direction the guide called me back in a hurry, but did not tell me why, and I didn't find out until after I got home.

Back to the fun ... Junee. I liked Monte Cristo http://www.montecristo.com.au/, a two storey country house near Wagga Wagga (Australia for those overseas), and as a place to visit I heartily recommend it. I had driven eleven hours to stay overnight in the house. The owners offered dinner and a tour near midnight. All very exciting. :-) What happened? Hmm.. well I arrived at the house in the afternoon and had a good wander around, read some of the literature, looked at lots of photos of orbs .. not much else (was this 2005?) .. settled into my room eventually, and looked forward to the night. I had a good chat to the owners. They were very helpful and friendly. They provided a great roast dinner, and then the fun began. A group of about 20 of us wandered around the house being filled in on the various ghosts that resided there, including a haunted bed. In the front sitting room I felt a hand brush over my hair, very spooky. But that was it. No ghosts leaping out of the woodwork, no scarey voices or noises, no conversations in other rooms just heard by any of us. Sigh!

And so about 1.00am I went to bed, and worried myself silly about waking up and 'really' seeing a ghost for at least the next hour. Given that I had driven 11 hours to be there, and stayed up way past my bedtime, I was pretty tired and grouchy by the time I did get to sleep.

So when did the spooks decide to visit ... the bed was cosy, and not the haunted one, so I finally got to sleep .. and then the lightest of touches, twice, down my spine .. and both times I told the ghosts to buzz off because I was too tired. I kicked myself in the morning about it .. but I do not do well without good sleep. Definitely a place worth visiting again.

And now Walhalla. I went expecting to have a good walk in the dark with lanterns, and to hear a few ghost stories. The guide, Jacquie, did a very good job. Thank you. She filled us in on all the lighter details, and the hauntings there are light. I am not sure if they intended it that way, but the town, while a mining town, does Not have any truly negative energy, nor nasty ghosts hanging around. And that is great! But not so great for me, who doesn't see spirits easily. Hmmm... So the few touches of spooks in this town was the old man with whiskers (a miner I think) staying in the cottage with us, he 'appeared to be ' pacing the verandah while Tom took a nap, and the strong sense of the mischief of children (they were playing on a thin path up near the 'incline shaft' - something their parents would not have been happy about) - and the looming presence that Tom felt behind him, that I usually never sense because it is not negative at all, just bossy sometimes. And those two were on the night tour, our verandah visitor was mid afternoon.

There was only one truly negative spot on the walk, and that was to the left of the old school, now the environmental centre. I don't know what was built there before, I intend to find out eventually.

And the next ghost tour will be ... Williamstown I think. We have an invitation from Jacquie who runs them there.