Intruders: Boggart of Shatton

I am quite fond of Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog.  You just never know what the individual who writes this blog will dig out of some obscure archive or newspaper clipping.  In the link above, Beachcombing discusses at length one of the unsavory denizens of the Otherworld.

While “demons” seem to be a very popular explanation for aggressive hauntings and other hostile paranormal events, this story takes us back to a time, not too long ago, when the people of the British Isles recognized that they co-habited the land with a number of unseen races.  Such was the respect and/or fear that the people held these other races in that they would not even utter their names for fear of drawing unwanted attention.  To them, “The Gentry”, “The Good People”, “Them Ones” and other such races were as real as their neighbors down the lane and were not to be trifled with.

The explanation of the origins of the faerie, as we now make bold to call them, were varied.  W Y Evans-Wentz, in his masterful work The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries outlines a number of different origin theories and I direct the reader to that excellent book if you are interested.  In the end, though, Evans-Wentz decided that the faerie did indeed exist and that they were residents of the Celtic Otherworld who still seemed to have the power to cross into our world from time to time.  The faerie races, as outlined in the aforementioned book and in Katherine Briggs’ An Encyclopedia of Fairies were multitudinous and many of the faerie held no love for humans.  As we see in Beachcombing’s story above, one of those races was the boggarts, a faerie that often made itself appear as a black dog (not to be confused with the phantom black dogs of British lore) that led travelers astray or, in this case, barred their way.

The boggart did not simply lead travelers off the path though.  Most often, the sojourner found him or herself in mortal peril since the boggart would often lead the victim into swamps and marshes where it would be quite easy for a mis-step to end the journey in a boggy death by drowning.  Why the boggart, in the instance cited above, prevented the walker from taking his usual route is anyone’s guess.  This might not have been a boggart but instead a true Black Dog, an Otherworld species associated with death but also known to protect travelers on occasion.  It might also be that this was a boggart, that the route diversion was intended to get the traveler into a fix and that the boggart’s plan simply did not pan out that night.  Or, perhaps, Beachcombing is correct and the witness simply had one pint too many and suffered a temporal lobe disturbance :-).

My point is simply this.  These days when you hear the word Faerie or Fairy, the first image that enters most people’s mind is Tinker Bell.  Human beings have a tendency to disempower that which they fear (look at what we have done to the mighty angels, as another example).  Our wishing that the faerie were powerless little pixies with magic dust and a star-tipped wand does not make it so, however.  While “them ones” have retreated from this plane in the face of modern technology, they still have the power to walk this world and even cause physical effects.  While it is possible to have good relations with some of these beings, it bears repeating that some of them have been identified throughout time as inimical to the human race.  The boggart and his ilk are certainly on the list of beings that I would classify as Intruders.

Ritual Sacrifice?

In my never ending search of the Web for items of interest to my readers I came across this disturbing article.

While there is something sinister going on here, I seriously doubt that it has anything to do with “occult rituals and animal sacrifice”. As with most of these tantalizing features, we are not told a whole lot about the incidents – only that a number of dogs have disappeared and that some of them have now turned up dead. Additional details include the fact that some of the recovered canines had their jaws bound and teeth filed down (we are not told how they died) and that one of the animals, a German Shepherd, was found with its skull crushed, covered in a purple cloth.

I would like to focus on this last example since it seems to me that anyone intent on abusing or killing a dog would want to ensure that he or she did not get bitten in the process thus the duct taping of the jaws. The teeth filing could have been an additional safety measure or it might have been a form of torture, we are not given enough details to know. What we are told is that one of the animals recovered was “found draped in a purple cloth, it’s head crushed with a rock”.

The forms of spirit evocation are almost endless and, if this were a singular occurrence or one that happened on a particular time schedule, I might be more likely to buy into the occult ritual theory. It seems to me that there are a couple of aspects of this case that militate against that theory though.

First, the sheer number of animals that has gone missing in a short period of time. Any group or individual working ritual sacrifice (other than the known ACR’s that use animals in their rituals) is likely to be quite secretive since this sort of work falls well outside the cultural norm and involves the risk of involvement with law enforcement. The group (for the sake of argument) would not want to draw attention to themselves so making 40 dogs disappear in a short period of time would be counter productive to their purposes. One or two animals might disappear during a time period that these people saw as significant and I suspect that they would go to great lengths to keep their actions secret since that is part of the mystique and perceived power of involvement in such an organization. I doubt that these folks, if they existed, would take the chance of picking all their victims up in one location but would have a tendency to spread their pickings out over a wide area to escape notice.

Additionally, the one example we are given of an animal that might have been a ritual sacrifice is questionable. While the purple cloth draped over the canine is certainly ritualistic, the nature of the death might or might not be. If you look at the traditions that use animal sacrifice, from the descriptions of sacrifices made in the Bible to modern ritual slaying of animals in some forms of the ACR’s, there is a distinct commonality. Blood. In order for the sacrifice to be excepted by whatever spirit it is being offered to, one must release the animal’s life by releasing its blood. There are far more efficient ways of doing this than crushing an animal’s skull. Such an act, to me, wreaks of poorly restrained violent tendencies and not the discipline of mind required for real occult work (even occult work of a darker nature). I do not dismiss the possibility of the occult entirely but I feel that it is highly unlikely.

Some, if not most, serial killers are known for their ritualistic behavior; they tend to develop a method of slaying through practice and then seldom deviate from that method unless outside circumstances interrupt their ritual or unless they perceive a need to change the method in order to elude law enforcement. If that happens they are likely to be thrown off their stride and have to find another victim so that they can do the killing “right”. One of the commenters to this blog post noted that this sounded like a “serial killer in training” and I am inclined to agree. My suspicion would be that this is an individual who is seeking to perfect their method before they move on to human game. In my opinion, law enforcement should be focusing their efforts on finding this predator before he turns to human victims. Unfortunately, telling the public to be on the lookout for a potential serial killer is liable to produce panic and vigilante behavior; it is far easier to wave the red herring of occult sacrifice to keep the public on edge and observant.

Thinking About EMF

While I am primarily interested in the application of magical philosophy and skills to cryptozoology and the paranormal, I do not assume that everything that goes bump in the night is necessarily a haunting caused by an astral/etheric entity. Some hauntings are indeed caused by ghosts (however you want to define them – more on that later), some seeming hauntings are simply the misinterpretation of natural phenomenon and yet others may be the result of mental illness, stress or other emotional/psychological disturbances on the part of the percipient/s. Another theory that has been bandied about by both paranormal researchers and skeptics is the idea that electromagnetic fields (EMF) may be a cause of some seemingly paranormal instances.

The theory, proffered by Dr. Michael Persinger, among others, is that EMF, especially low frequency EMF may actually produce hallucinations in the temporal lobe of the brain based on the cultural expectations of the individual. Thus some people might see ghostly apparitions while others might see UFO’s and space aliens. In addition, Persinger tried to prove, through the use of what came to be called the God Helmet, that stimulating the temporal lobe of the brain with a weak magnetic field causes an individual to sense an “ethereal presence” in the room. In other words, EMF fields might actually account for some or all of the experiences of the mystics throughout the ages.

The so-called skeptics love this theory since it gives them a very neat way to wrap up any episode that they can not explain and dispose of it by saying “it’s just EMF”. In order to do that, however, according to the scientific method, one has to be able to replicate the experiment. Not once, or twice, but on multiple occasions. That has not been the case with Dr. Persinger’s work and, though he has defended his experiments and theories, his hypothesis about EMF has yet to be established by the conventions of science . . . something that the so-called skeptics seem eager to overlook.

The human brain, like our whole body, is a marvelous piece of equipment. While I personally have no belief that my consciousness resides there, the brain is an outstanding organic computer system that processes amounts of data in each moment that boggle the mind (if you will pardon the pun). Given the complex chain of interwoven neurochemical and neuroelectric processes that keep the brain working, it is entirely possible that, in certain times and places, certain stimuli may cause a malfunction in the brain and produce phenomenon that are extremely real to the witness. We know, for example, that temporal lobe epilepsy can produce a variety of sensations that can easily be mistaken for paranormal episodes – feelings of being out of body, for example, or experiences that involve the full range of senses and leave the epileptic convinced that they have seen, heard, touched or tasted something that was not actually there.

Is it possible that, in some instances, abnormally high levels of EMF are causing witnesses to experience things that are only happening in their minds? Certainly. The trouble comes when the skeptics get hold of this information and use it as a sort of universal field theory of the paranormal. Anytime, one proposes the idea that all instances of a phenomenon are caused by X, whatever X happens to be, then the bar of evidence is raised very high. Looking at the difficulties that other scientists have had replicating Persinger’s experiments, I think it is safe to say that the EMF theory does not even come close to clearing that high bar of evidence.

EMF certainly plays a role in the paranormal. I recall a high school science teacher, a former employee of NASA who had fallen victim to the budget cuts after the moon missions, telling the story of going with a colleague to investigate a haunting, supposedly at the behest of the local archdiocese. Things seemed pretty normal in the old house until the EMF meter that they had with them spiked and then flat lined. “As though someone had opened a door,” my teacher said. The room grew icy cold and, in all honesty, neither scientist stayed around to see what would happen. If you have watched any of the many ghost shows on TV, EMF meters are standard ghost hunting equipment these days and provide a lot of dramatic footage as their lights light up or their needles fluctuate in the supposed presence of the unseen.

With EMF, as with so many other things, we are faced with a continuum. On one end we find the skeptics, quite willing to attribute all paranormal phenomenon that they can not give another explanation for to EMF; on the other end, we have the folks who completely disregard this very real force and assume that everything is a spirit. As always, I urge you to fall into the mid-realm as you look at cases. Be a true skeptic, one who suspends judgement about a situation until the evidence is in.

The Pigeon Hole Syndrome

Location -London, England
Date -April 1994
Time -early morning
Anthony Wilson had just woken up in his parent’s settee (he was going to work while his sister and her husband had the spare room). He switched off the alarm clock went to the toilet and then lay back down on the settee for an extra five minutes. He went to grab a cigarette when through the now open door a strange apparition sort of stumbled into the room, looked left and then it slowly turned its head toward him. He described the “creature” as very tall (about 6’6” to 7’ tall) two dimensional sort of “dogman”. It had height and width, and most curious of all, its body shape was in angles—a man’s body but with a large dog/wolf’s head. The creature stared straight at the witness, and then started to walk toward where he was lying, but it moved in a clockwork sort of way. When it stopped and leaned toward the witness that’s when he managed to let out a huge shout. That seemed to unnerve it and it took several steps back and disappeared out the door where it came from.
Source: Your True Tales—October 2005
Type: E -When an entity or humanoid is seen alone, without related UFO activity (Example: bedroom visitation)

I discovered this little tidbit while web browsing some time back. I believe that it comes from one of the UFOlogy journals online but I have lost the reference. Still, it is another interesting example of how perception plays a large role in how a sighting is reported and to whom. In this case, rather than assuming that the creature was demonic or a part of the Nephilim, this witness had an odd experience and, apparently, given the footnote, reported it to a UFO researcher.

Now, I am not a strong believer in the “aliens from outer space” theory of UFO origins. My thinking is that any civilization advanced enough to be able to travel the vast distances between stars is not going to have much interest in a race of beings that have barely crawled out of the primordial slime in geological terms and they certainly are not going to be interested in abducting people, poking and prodding them and then releasing them with their memories only partly wiped. Again, if a civilization this advanced did decide that they needed more information on our species, they would have scanning technology that would make the clumsy abduction scenarios totally unnecessary and, should they need a specimen or three, I am sure they could manage it without dragging people out of bed in the middle of the night and scaring hell out of them.

But this is not a post on aliens and their tech. It is a post about an individual who had an experience of high strangeness and then had it categorized as the appearance of an “alien” without several very important questions being answered.

First of all, are we even sure that the witness was awake at the time of this unusual sighting? The witness clearly indicates that he had just awakened and was still lying on the settee when the sighting occurred. This being sounds a lot like something that would spring out at me in those moments between sleep and wakefulness and those visions are sometimes frighteningly real to me. I would be far more eager to accept this explanation than I would to embrace the idea that this was some sort of space alien.

Even granting that the witness was fully conscious, we have to look at other details of this brief story. I can think of several scenarios that might play in this situation:

• Was this witness a regular smoker? Did he actually light the cigarette he reached for? If so, what was his age and physical condition? Might this gentleman have experienced a transient ischemic attack (a mini stroke) as the result of the constriction of blood vessels when nicotine hit his system. That could certainly produce some interesting hallucinatory effects.
• We also have no history on the witness. Any history of mental illness in the family? Might this be a schizophrenic manifestation? Any history of drug use especially of the hallucinogenic sort?
• Could the sighting be attributed to the Persinger effect i.e. sources of electromagnetic radiation that might induce hallucinations?
• What do we know about this home? Had there been any previous paranormal events in the house? Any history of haunting or strange events in the area? This sighting happened in England, a place renowned for its ghost population, Black Dogs, Big Cats and other cryptids and paranormal phenomenon. This could easily have been one of England’s famous hauntings with a really bizarre twist.
• Did the witness or anyone associated with the witness practice any of the magical arts? I’ve talked at some length about the possibility of thought forms manifesting and this two dimensional being sounds a lot like the sort of half done manifestation that an inexperienced practitioner might produce.
• Does the home sit on a ley line? Could the sighting have been the result of one of these mysterious currents of earth energy effecting the witness’ perceptions.

I could continue but I am sure the reader gets the idea. This is a fascinating account of something that the witness could not explain and felt strongly enough about to report. It happens that, in this case, the witness saw something that resembled one of my favorite “monsters”, thus my interest. I think that, as investigators and researchers, or even simply as people interested in these phenomenon, we need to do a better of job of approaching witnesses with an open mind and not a set of preconceived notions that allow us to slot witnesses into a category and move on to the next encounter.

First Impressions

Have you ever noticed how often the story of a haunting victim starts with something like, “I walked into that place and I just knew there was something not right about it . . . “?

Police officers and security personnel hear much the same thing when they interview crime victims. Gavin De Becker in his book The Gift of Fear makes a strong case that many violent crimes could be averted if people simply listened to that still small voice within that tells them something is wrong. De Becker maintains that this gift of fear is the result of the brain subconsciously processing a mass of sensory stimuli, noting that something is not as it should be and sending a signal (fear or apprehension) to alert the person.

In magical thought, each of us is connected to the Universal Energy Field. This connection is often personified and invoked (called upon) as the Holy Guardian Angel, the Agathodaimon, the Inner Guide, the Personal Genius, the Spiritual Assistant, etc. Regardless of what you call it, magic teaches that there is some part of you that is a part of “God” (for want of a better word) and that you have access to a whole lot more information than you know. Personally, I think that the Inner Guide works in cahoots with your subconscious to try to get things through your thick, rationalizing skull.

Here’s how I think it works. Let’s say that you are walking down a city street late at night. Maybe you have had a couple of beers. You are feeling pretty mellow and making your way home, thinking about the great band you were listening to at the bar, your nice warm bed, the attractive person of the opposite sex that gave you their phone number and all the other minutiae that runs through our monkey minds all the time. While your conscious mind is taken up with all this musing, your subconscious is sifting through the mass of sensory data with which you are bombarded at almost every moment. Although you do not really notice, the street is alive with sights and smells and sounds. The wind is blowing down the street toward you and you could feel it on your face if you stopped to notice.

Two things trigger the subconscious in this case. The wind blowing in your face is carrying the noxious tang of anxiety laced sweat and the very faint sound of a metallic click. Your Inner Guide kicks you – it knows that the smell is the scent of a junkie in need of a fix and that the click is likely the sound of a weapon being readied – and suddenly you slow your pace, look around and wonder why the hair is standing up at the back of your neck. If you are smart and have been listening to your self defense teacher, you go on the alert and perhaps even change your route but, if you are like most people, you rationalize your apprehension as “nothing” and walk right into the mugger.

The same thing happens in the case of a haunted house, particularly one that is home to a hostile entity of one sort or the other. You walk into the house and your conscious mind sees the beautiful oak cabinets in the kitchen and the berber carpet in the living area and begins placing your furniture, hanging new window furnishings and wondering how to keep the dog from digging up the back yard. Your subconscious, though, is registering the difference in temperature from one room to another that can not be accounted for by the HVAC system, the shadow moving in the basement though your conscious mind missed it and the smell of decay in the attic that you put down to a dead mouse that needs to be removed. Your Inner Guide, of course, knows that there is something nasty in this home and again kicks you with the fear response, about the only way that it can get you to listen. Again, if you are like most people, you ignore that inner disquiet and buy the wonderful house that is available at a bargain basement price, putting it all down to soft housing market.

Now please don’t think that I wander around in a perpetual state of alertness, looking for danger, both physical and spiritual, under every rock. What I am trying to get across is something that I learned from my martial arts teachers a long time ago: you ignore that little voice in your head that tells you there is something wrong at your own peril.

In daily life, responding to that inner voice is pretty easy. We can alter a route, avoid a person, divert into a public area, stop and talk to a police officer on the beat or any of a dozen other responses to keep ourselves safe. With a paranormal threat though, we are on shakier ground. We might know that there is something wrong with a house but then we have to decide what to do about it. It is one thing to buy a house knowing that it has some residual energies or even a mischievous intelligent spirit or two and quite another thing to purchase a place with a spirit in it that has staked a claim and wants to run you off or that just plain hates humans. Often, it is hard to tell the difference until you have been in the situation for a while since even Negatives often start out with fairly low key activity and then escalate.

My main thrust in this article is please do not disregard the gift of fear. If you are house hunting and something seems “off” to you, even if the place itself is perfect and you can not put a rational reason to the feeling, start asking questions. Most states do not require a seller to disclose any deaths in a house, even homicides, or any alleged paranormal activity. If you are really committed to a particular property, find out all you can about it. Go to the local courthouse or hall of records and do a title search. Enlist a local historian to help you research the location and its surrounds. Talk to any local paranormal investigation teams and see if they have any information on your property. If you are comfortable doing so, you might go to a couple of reputable psychics in the area and have them do a remote reading. If they both “ping” on something, especially if they feel it is hostile, extreme caution is advised.

This might seem like an awful lot of bother to buy a house but consider what happens to people who ignore that inner voice. Sometimes, the haunting is something they can learn to live with or can even be resolved with outside help. Many times, the occupants of the home can negotiate with intelligent spirits and set limits on what activity is alright and what is not. Then there are the other type of hauntings, the ones that scare the crap out of the house’s occupants and leave emotional and even physical scars or worse. As with the mugging scenario above, I would encourage you to listen to your Inner Guide and go elsewhere. For most people, it is simply not worth the pain to do battle with a really nasty haunting.

Monster Hunting Tip

As I have indicated before, I occasionally watch episodes of the ghost hunting shows. I am not going to comment about the willingness, in my view, of some of these folks to assign supernatural meaning to the most mundane causes while they are wandering through a house. Whatever floats their boat is fine with me although I have some serious reservations about how much help these people are actually giving their clients. But, I digress . . .

In a couple of the episodes that I have watched, whatever team the show follows goes out into a wooded area around the subject home and is alarmed by various sounds and movements that they hear while tramping around. Now, I do not know anything about these people’s background but I am going to guess that they are all city kids. Further, I suspect that I could take them camping and scare the holy bejeesus out of them at will since they obviously have no idea that there are live animals out amongst the trees of even the most densely populated urban areas.

When you stomp through an animal’s habitat, talking out loud to the “spirits” you think are there and swinging a lantern, things are going to move around you. Also, unlike the interior of a home, there will be random breezes that move branches and leaves and these sounds can be pretty spooky if you have your mind set in that direction. Something growling in the woods is more likely to be a coyote upset by your team disturbing a late night snack than a malevolent spirit intent on doing you harm and that rustling you hear in the brush is just as likely to be a deer escaping your presence as ‘something’ out to get you.

I used to live in the forests of Western New York and I speak from experience when I say that birds, in particular, can make some of the strangest noises. Someone unaccustomed to those sounds would be likely to run indoors when they heard them at night. We had an owl in the area that made a sound that you could have easily mistaken for one of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Scared the dickens out of my stepson the first time he heard this critter and it took us a while to figure out what it was.

Not long ago, around the apartment where I used to live, I heard a mysterious sound that sounded like the strangled barking of a dog. I kept my eyes open while walking around the complex to see if I could figure out what was making the sound. As it turned out, this strange call was coming from a crow. Now, I lived amongst crows in NY and I had never heard one make that sound so this was a new one on me. Despite what some would have you believe, even someone with wilderness experience can be stumped about what they are seeing or hearing in the wild.

My point in all this? If you happen to be going out looking for the things that go bump in the night, it is imperative that you do so with a calm and objective mind. Yes, there are plenty of interesting phenomena out there to investigate but there are also plenty of things that can give you a start. Not all of them are ghosts, spirits, Bigfoot, Manwolf or any of the other things you might be out looking for.

In my view, the mundane explanations can be as interesting as anything paranormal. If you doubt my word, spend some time on an ornithology site listening to the calls of various nocturnal birds. You just might find yourself developing an interest in birds and other creatures of the night that have nothing to do with “spooks”.

Demonologists?

Many people outside the esoteric world do not know the name of W.E. Butler. The author of several books on the occult, Butler is probably best known as having been the first director of studies for Servants of the Light (SOL), a “modern day Western Mystery School which teaches the esoteric sciences through correspondence” (from the Servants of the Light website). Butler was a student of the better known Dion Fortune (Violet Firth) and spent over 50 years studying and teaching the esoteric sciences as well as serving as a priest in the Liberal Catholic Church. Like Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, who succeeded him as director of studies for SOL, Butler is known for his direct style, lucid explanations and wit.

I am currently re-reading one of his classic books, Lords of Light: The Path of Initiation in the Western Mysteries, where I found a discussion of exorcism that I think might be interesting to my readers. This book is actually a series of lectures given by Butler to a magical group that he worked with very late in his life. In the text, Butler says:

If anyone asks you to exorcise something or some place, don’t rush in too quickly. Find out what kind of job you are up against. I suppose I’ve carried out five hundred or so exorcisms, but I’ve never taken them on lightheartedly. These powers – powers of darkness, if you like – are very real and they can affect you disastrously. It’s all very well to say, “Now I know how to do this,” and, in all the glory of your ignorance, you begin exorcising something that has a lot of teeth to it. And when you get bitten, you don’t like it at all . . . “

Butler goes on to describe a case of exorcism that backfired and then says, “Don’t forget this: Good intentions pave the way to Hell; in themselves, they do not protect you from trouble”. Finally, Butler returns to the topic in the question and answer section of the chapter and makes the strong point that only a person who can confidently get out of their own way and allow the power of the Divine to flow through them should even attempt an exorcism. All this from a man who, by his own account, performed over 500 exorcisms of one type or the other (not necessarily “demons”) in his life.

If I had to boil Butler’s advice down to a single word, it would have to be humility. And this is not a trait that I see a lot of in the paranormal community. What I see is people who, with considerable hubris, put themselves out there as “demonologists” able to help people with negative entities of all sorts. I have to ask, for myself and for all the folks out there who need help, what makes these people think they are qualified to deal with a negative spiritual manifestation? What education do they have for this type of work? How did they get called into the work? In the cases of people who appear to be working within a religious tradition, who ordained them and to what level? In the case of alleged magical practitioners/occult experts, what group or individual did they study with, for how long and to what level of initiation? In both cases, who did they apprentice with to learn exorcism?

Sadly, the answer to most of these questions is that the person read some books, perhaps talked to some people, maybe “apprenticed” with some other unqualified demonologist and then hung out their shingle so that they could get some of the attention too. Somehow or the other, being a demonologist has become “hip”. I am sure that there are a lot of cultural reasons for this but, frankly, I don’t care. What I do care about is that, more and more ill prepared people are attempting exorcism when they haven’t even the discernment to tell what sort of entity they are dealing with.

Exorcism of any type is not simple wand waving. You do not simply say the words and make everything better. You have to have a good feel for what you are dealing with and not simply assume that any hostile being is a demon. When you walk onto a negative entity’s home ground, you need to have the attitude of a sport fisherman – you are going to hook something big and it is going to put up a fight. You had better be in it for the long haul because, unlike fishing, if the line breaks the fish is going to come after you with everything he’s got. As Butler says above, “when you get bitten, you -won’t- like it at all . . . ” From my perspective, getting bitten can mean anything from physical injury to the incursion that some call possession.

My point here is straightforward. Some people truly are called to this type of work and, with the proper training they can be a great help to those who are afflicted. If you truly feel that you have the calling to work in this type of scenario, then ask yourself one question: why? If it has anything to do with the cool factor or the attention you might garner or the books you might be able to write, you are going to get yourself or someone else hurt. If, like the famous Lakota medicine man Frank Fools Crow, you want to develop yourself into an “eagle bone whistle”, an instrument through which the Divine (in whatever way you see it) can work in these situations, then ask the Divine within you to bring you to a teacher. And may the Light go with you.

Come to the Crossroads

A while back, I finally had the opportunity to read Linda Godfrey’s latest book, The Michigan Dogman, and thoroughly enjoyed it. As you might expect, if you have been reading this blog for a while, I took some notes along the way so that I could share some thoughts with you. For this post, I would direct the reader who happens to have this book to p. 52.

Godfrey has just finished describing an incident in which a manwolf was reported off the exit ramp of a highway. She goes on to say:

This very odd cluster of sightings reminds me of an incident from Hunting the American Werewolf, where three young women saw what they thought was an abandoned dog on a ramp to Interstate 94 in Brookfield, Wisconsin in December, 2000 . . . These incidents make me wonder whether off-on ramps are the new version of traditional crossroad, which have long been known in almost every culture as the haunts of malign spirits. Author and researcher Paul Devereaux wrote in his book, Haunted Land, that “as well as deities, all the supernatural creatures of the night were associated with crossroads.”  He added that “crossroads were special haunts of the travelling spirits of ecstatic witches and werewolves . . . “

In magical thought,crossroads are traditionally one of the places that can be between the worlds, since they are neither here not there. This is particularly true at certain times of the day and night, and certain times of the year. Some magical practitioners, especially those who work in Southern Conjure and Hoodoo, make extensive use of crossroads for their workings. There are a lot of very accomplished magicians doing this type of magic and with very good results.

As I pointed out in my post entitled The NeverNever, part 2, for better or for worse, the information age has given knowledge that was previously confined to relatively small groups out to a massive audience. At the same time, individuals are not being trained as they were traditionally but are often cobbling together their magical practices from disparate sources or simply looking up something that looks like it might work online and “going for it”. Many of these sources, whether they are derived from Hoodoo, neo-paganism, shamanism, Voudoun or any of a score of other possible traditions, are going to have practices that occur at crossroads. The crossroad is probably the most easily accessible “in between” spot for most modern spell slingers. Take into account the following thoughts:

1) crossroads are inherently magical, “in between” places.

2) magical practitioners of varying stripes and levels of experience and power are making use of crossroads for their work.

3) Many of these practitioners are not accomplished at their craft and do not know basic magical etiquette such as the idea of closing any doors you have opened before you leave a spot, dismissing spirits that have been summoned or, at the least, inviting them to come with you rather than hanging around where they were summoned.

Again, as I discussed in more detail in The NeverNever, part 2, you can see how, very easily, this can result in the sort of window or portal opportunity that many paranormal authors have discussed in their books. If you leave a door open long enough, something may come through and those somethings can vary in the degree of their manifestation from invisible to quite solid, perhaps even physical, depending on the entity and its level of congruence in our world (does it have a readily available form or must it develop one), the amount of energy available for manifestation (a group working vs. a single person ritual, for instance) and other variables up to and including the types of incense used in the spell or ritual. The portal or window does not even have to be at the on-off ramp in question; a being that had manifested in this reality might tend to “hang out” at spots it was familiar with i.e. other crossroads or a modern equivalent, the highway ramps mentioned above.

In the case of the Wisconsin Manwolf listed above, given that, according to Ms. Godfrey, these incidents tend to occur in conjunction with the many Native American mound structures in that area, I suspect that the mounds are already areas of “weakness” in the veil between the worlds through which these beings are manifesting. Any additional magical working in the area only enhances the thinness of the veil and increases the likelihood of a Manwolf sighting since this seems to be the type of creature that lives directly on the other side of the veil in that area or it may be, as Ms. Godfrey has theorized, that these beings are relic guardians of the mounds.

Chupacabras

Yes, yes, I know this cryptid has been done to death but, after spotting this link on one of the blogs that I follow, I had a sudden thought that I wanted to follow up on. Before I begin though, let’s note that I am not referring to the rash of mangy coyotes that have been called by this name in Texas and other parts of the U.S. but to the seriously creepy, alien looking cryptid that has haunted Puerto Rico and other parts of Latin America.

According to Wikipedia, the most common description of this creature is:

a reptile-like creature, appearing to have leathery or scaly greenish-gray skin and sharp spines or quills running down its back.[39] This form stands approximately 3 to 4 feet (1 to 1.2 m) high, and stands and hops in a similar fashion to a kangaroo.[40] In at least one sighting, the creature was reported to hop 20 feet (6 m). This variety is said to have a dog or panther-like nose and face, a forked tongue, and large fangs. It is said to hiss and screech when alarmed, as well as leave behind a sulfuric stench.[40] When it screeches, some reports assert that the chupacabras’ eyes glow an unusual red which gives the witnesses nausea.

Theories about the chupacabras have run rampant ever since the creature first appeared in Puerto Rico in 1995. This strange being has been attributed to everything from a mass hallucination brought on by the movie “Species” to a type of alien incursion to the result of a genetics experiment escaped from a secret facility deep in the heart of the Puerto Rican rain forest. I think that, indirectly at least, the presence of a secret government lab in El Yunque, the dense Puerto Rican rain forest, contributed to the birth of the chupacabras.

Let’s explore this thought more deeply. So called skeptic Benjamin Radford theorized that one of the primary witness statements of the original chupacabras “flap” was influenced by the fact that the witness had seen the movie “Species” and had described the creature that she allegedly saw in terms similar to the creature Sil in the movie. While Radford’s devotion to debunking has provided us with a jumping off place for this discussion, I think there is far more to these cases than a sort of mass hysteria triggered by a movie.

Honestly, if I were going to look for the genesis of the chupacabras in fiction, I would have to go back to Dean Koontz’s 1987 best selling thriller, Watchers. In that book, an ex-Delta Force operative and his wife are pursued by a monster dubbed the Outsider, a creature genetically created from a baboon that was bred to be a sort of super soldier. Of course, the experiment, which also produced a golden retriever with near human intelligence, goes horribly wrong, since the Outsider is mentally unstable and determined to hunt down and kill the dog (and anything else that gets in its way). When I first read a description of the chupacabras and the theory that it was the result of genetic experiments being carried out in the rain forest of Puerto Rico, I instantly flashed on this book and its hunched, fearsome villain.

Now, am I am proposing that the Outsider or perhaps the alien Sil has come to life and is haunting Latin America? Perhaps. One of the basic tenets of magic is that thoughts have a reality on the astral plane. Most of the time, our thoughts remain on the astral but, in the hands of a skilled ritualist, a thought can actually be “ensouled” and brought onto this plane. In most instances, these thought forms are not visible and are only granted “life” for a specific period of time and for a specific function before they are dissolved. In some circumstances though, for example when a magician wants to defend a certain area, the thought form may come into visible form. Janet and Stuart Farrar record such an instance in The Witches Bible Compleat when their coven set out to create a thought form to prevent the killing of seals on a certain island. Witnesses attested to seeing a figure similar to the one that the coven had meditated on, wandering the island.

That is all well and good, you say, but where is the ritualist in this case and why would they create something like the chupacabras to terrify innocent villagers? I think that it is quite possible for human beings to create a thought form without recourse to ritual. In this case what you need is a solid image that resonates with a lot of people and really stays with them and that image has to have a lot of emotional impact. For this event, since at least 1987, there existed in the popular culture a short, hunchbacked being, with little to no hair and a terrifying, predatory appearance. The horrible creature has a back story (creation in a government genetics lab) that resonates with the instinctive distrust that many people feel toward the government (particularly strong in a place like Puerto Rico where there is a strong movement toward separation from the US and distrust toward the US government). Take a monster existing in popular culture (a strong channel for the energy) and then add the impetus of a movie like “Species” and you have the ingredients for creating a powerful thought form and the energy (fear and anger/distrust) to pull it through into manifestation.

One of the things about the chupacabras that has frustrated investigators is that the beast never seems to be described the same way twice. Following the idea of the chupacabras as an uncontrolled manifest thought form, this makes sense since the being is going to continue to morph each time it moves into this world, with new features being added on and others being deleted as the public perception of the “monster” changes. I would not be surprised if there is not a mangy coyote variant of the thought form out there given the press here in the US.

As with all things, the truth of the chupacabras is going to lie along a continuum. While I doubt there is a genetic mutant wandering the forest of Latin America, I expect that some reports are the result of overactive imaginations and some sightings are known animals that have been misidentified. I do not doubt, though, that some of the sightings are the result of a manifest thought form that seems to be feeding itself on the blood of livestock.

Getting Help: Medicine Person

As I have mentioned before, I do not have standard TV in the house. All my viewing of paranormal shows is done online. Recently, I discovered a show on Netflix called The Haunted. In Season 2, Episode 6, entitled “Land of Misery”, we encounter a situation that I think serves as a perfect lead in to a discussion I have been wanting to have on this blog, namely, the issue of where to seek qualified help if you need it. These Getting Help posts will be ongoing as the blog goes along.

As I noted in my original Getting Help post, many people do not seek any sort of real assistance when they are faced with paranormal incidents that are beyond their capacity to live with. Much of the reason for this is the nagging question: who will believe me? This is often followed quickly by another question: even if they do believe me, who can help me?

In “Land of Misery”, The Haunted follows its usual formula. A family with animals moves into a new house. The animals begin to act strangely and the people in the house begin to have experiences that they can not explain. At this point though, the episode diverges from the formula somewhat in that, over a period of time, several animals on the property die of a stroke and one of the witnesses suffers a cerebral hemorrhage as well.

Surprisingly, the incident that drives the family to look for help is not the mother’s stroke but the death of her beloved horse, again of a stroke. Interestingly, the family ends up contacting a group known as the Native American Ghost Society, a group of paranormal investigators who also happen to be indigenous people. Long story short, one of the team seems to be sensitive to spirit energies and has a number of encounters in the family’s house and barn. Further research shows that the house in question is located on land that was disputed between two tribes and the leader of the paranormal group develops the theory that the house is victim to a prosperity curse thrown by one tribe against the other. The team leader pulls in a local medicine man to work with the spirits of that land and remove the curse. According to the show, this work was successful, at least in the short term.

I enjoyed this show because it stepped outside of the box and looked at the haunting as something more than just the activity of spirits in a location. Instead, this episode really looked at the history of the house and showed us the trail of death and financial hardship that was wound into the spirit of the land. Something drastic really needed to be done to help these people (assuming, of course, that the show was factual) and this paranormal team called in the expert from their culture: a medicine man.

Tribal cultures are a lot less hinky about accepting that there is a problem with spirits and, for thousands of years, they have had a subset of people in their midst whose job it was to deal with the spirits. These folks have a lot of names throughout the different tribes of the world so I am going to use the more generic term medicine person for these individuals. I have chosen not to use the more common nomenclature, shaman, because that word has become a catch phrase amongst a certain sector of the New Age who really have no idea what it means to give ones life in service to the tribe. And that, my good readers, is what a medicine person does. He or she does not go out and decide that he or she is going to become a medicine person. These people are either picked out by someone who is recognized as fulfilling this function in the tribe or the spirits choose them, often through a healing crisis which they barely survive. Once the new medicine person is recognized, he or she begins a grueling apprenticeship in which they learn the very unconventional skills of their “trade” – things like spirit communication and negotiation, journeying into the other realms, what might be termed exorcism, healing practices, ceremonial work and much more.

Again, this is not a position that any tribal member would want to fill. The medicine person, while respected, often lives on the margins of the tribal society and frequently has to fulfill commitments to the spirits that make their behavior seem odd to the others. The medicine person is really required to give their life to the tribe; they are expected to be “on call” for “doctoring” and other functions whenever they are needed. No vacations, no office hours and no afternoon breaks to play golf.

The people in this episode of The Haunted were fortunate that they “happened” to invite a group of Native people to evaluate their haunting. If you find yourself in a situation where you believe that there are hostile forces at work in your home or on your land, there are far worse people to have in your corner than a medicine person. Now, please understand that I am talking about a Native person who is recognized by other Natives as a medicine person; not some white guy with an abalone shell and some sage who has taken a weekend course and thinks he is a “shaman”.

A medicine person is basically a spirit advocate. He or she is quite capable of discerning what spirits are on the site, having discourse with those spirits and basically negotiating a treaty for you that will prevent further hostile action (as long as you abide by the terms of the deal). In extreme cases, the medicine person has access to helpers that will help him or her chase the entities from the site.

It is not easy to find a real medicine person, even if you are Native, but, if you can find one who is willing to help you, you have found a valuable ally and one of the few types of practitioners that I can recommend unreservedly for assistance with a haunting or other paranormal hostility.