Ghosthunting Southern California. Sally Richards
broke into a run, stumbling over the uneven ground. I skinned my knees, each time I fell catching myself just in time to keep from landing flat on my face on the old earthquake-damaged cement curbs. After what seemed like a million close calls and ignoring my father’s shouts to slow down, I arrived at the tree. Looking down, I touched the etched words in a ground marker warm with sunshine. I traced what I felt was surely his name. My father, out of breath, caught up with me and looked at the marker. He was pale as the words came slowly from his mouth, “How did you find it?”
“He was here, at the tree. He’s playing hide-and-seek,” I explained, “This killed sleep is wrong, Daddy. He was here; he’s not sleeping at all.” I looked around, trying to offer my father some proof the boy was still among us—as I thought someone should tell his mother—but found nothing.
My life got stranger and stranger. As happens with most children, I stopped seeing auras when everyone else said they didn’t exist. But I continued to see other things, things that became harder and harder to explain. We moved to Hawaii, and I became well versed in the local lore and the spirits of the islands that are always present and acknowledged by the locals. I was surrounded by people who saw what I saw and kids who wouldn’t go down jungle paths because of an ancestral war that happened there hundreds of years before. Kids who respected the dead because the dead weren’t so dead after all.
When I was eight, I cut school and drowned while surfing. After I was done fighting the undertow, I surrendered to having the most amazing, peaceful experience, which I would later liken to what Einstein said about what death must feel like—all of the body’s atoms exploding into the universe and becoming part of everything else. More recently the experience was described by Steve Jobs’s last words on his deathbed: “Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow!” Oh, wow! indeed.
I was dead when a sailor dragged me out of the surf, pumped the salt water out of my lungs, and brought me back, bringing forth a trail of expletives even he couldn’t fathom coming from the small girl whom he had awakened from what I now call The Perfect Sleep.
My father was in special ops, and after his seven tours in Vietnam, my family moved back to the mainland (the Silicon Valley, in this case). I learned to wear shoes and jeans; one experience wearing a traditional mu‘umu‘u to school with trendy Silicon Valley kids was all it took for me to learn new dress codes and to take the flowers out of my hair. The new kids I met didn’t have mythology, or a common background. I’d gone from the happiest place on earth to some pretty harsh realities—not only were these kids kind of mean, but they knew nothing of the spirit world except fear.
Life changed as my parents became engineers, and I found new friends—and they were nothing like my old friends. My best friend, Deedee Gates, was a trippy chick the same age as I was, who knew all about life after death, could light candles in her house without getting into trouble, and turned me on to her mom’s metaphysical library, which I voraciously devoured over a summer. She disappeared just as quickly as she’d appeared in my life and moved away to points unknown, but not before leaving a major impact and introducing me to the great mystic Sybil Leek. I was soon leading ghost tours through the abandoned Victorian houses surrounded by tract-housing developments that seemed to spring up overnight in the rich soil of old Santa Clara Valley fruit orchards. The grand old homes were earmarked for demolition to make way for more tract housing.
I told the groups of kids on the tours about the people who once lived in the houses and the current spirits that inhabited them, often conducting séances that would bring about unexplained rappings from the walls and ceilings. Kids were frightened and ready to jump at any unexplained sound—including the police we’d often have to outrun for trespassing, which only added to the infamy and popularity of the tours. Charging for the tours over many summers, I saved enough to purchase a 1969 Ford Mustang on my sixteenth birthday.
Off to college, where I had little time for anything else but work and school, and then off to life and career. Although I was happy in my positions as investigative journalist, author, managing editor, technologist, and startup consultant (and many other career experiences), I still found myself wanting more. I took a job to do a company turnaround in Vegas and one lonely evening lit a candle that the candle-maker had wrapped with a label reading LOVE. A week later, my old high school sweetheart living in another state came to find me. It was then I surrendered my heart, moved back to California, and connected with my haunted roots.
The next year, I drove to BookExpo America in New York City. On the way, I ran into pre-Katrina weather from Florida to Texas, where I was hit by lightning. This, only a few days before I was expected home and then to get back on a plane to cover the story of Lily Dale, New York, the city inhabited by mediums who talk with the dead. The lightning strike has left me with health concerns. I had to remove all the metal from my teeth because the strike had made any food on a metal utensil taste like aluminum foil, and it also did a job on my optic nerves—but, in the end, I’m okay. Exhausted and fragile, I flew out on schedule, reached Lily Dale, and began receiving messages from my old dead friend, Paul, who was contacting everyone around me with his name and detailed descriptions of himself, his job, and our friendship. He gave them all messages to tell me he was still a physicist on the Other Side and was still working hard. Working hard on what? I still don’t know.
Sure, I was a believer when I left Lily Dale. A believer in what I’d already known since the not-so-dead newspaper boy led me to his grave.
Months later, my husband and I created our miracle baby—the baby whom no less than five doctors told my husband and me would be impossible to conceive. Sometimes lightning, and whatever else that doesn’t kill you, does make you stronger … and sometimes may even help to get you pregnant. Now we have a wonderful child who fills our hearts and who feels the presence of her long-dead great-grandmothers and her grandfather around her and is quite reassured by their guidance.
After the baby came, I began taking classes in Spiritualism (a belief system that asserts ghosts are among the living 24/7 and that anyone has the means to contact them) for mediumship annually at Lily Dale and at Harmony Grove, a Spiritualist camp community in San Diego; both more than a century old. I finally learned how to decipher all that had come before. I started a paranormal-investigation group on Meetup called Ghosts Happen (meetup.com/ghostshappen). I chose the cream of the crop from the members and created Roadside Paranormal, a group dedicated to investigating locations where disturbing events have taken place and victims still do not rest in peace (such as home and workplace homicides, suicides, and accident scenes). We pass on information from spirits to friends and family that may give entities, and ultimately their friends and family, closure. My group uses state-of-the-art science to document the data we find. We also test new types of equipment to determine whether they’re valid and to help make them standards in the industry if they are.
Having investigated in many other states and around the world, I’ve documented proof of energy beyond the death of the body in places such as the assassination site of John Lennon, Civil War battlefields, and European World War II battle locations, the ancient graveyards of Southeast Asia, and even the underground catacombs of Paris. I’ve concluded that no matter where you go, spirit energy and paranormal activity fall into the same categories—active, imprint, and intelligent. And I bet if you’re reading this book that you’ve had an experience with at least one of these forms of energy—why else would you be so drawn to the topic?
When we feel the energy in a place that’s reportedly haunted, it’s often something we can’t put a finger on, but it’s like a sign planted into the ground that states, Something happened here, and it’s not going away anytime soon. It’s the kind of energy that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up and take notice, and causes what I call chicken skin to crawl up your spine and down your arms. You know the feeling—when someone walks over your grave. The mind, body, and our innate senses—our intuition—know when we’ve come across it. Don’t discount intuition: sometimes it’s the only thing keeping you from becoming part of the spirit world.
Normally, people will drive an extra mile to avoid the haunted, abandoned house that’s been for sale since a family was murdered there. The living can just feel someone—or something—watching